Story

They practically forced me to buy a Chromebook for a relative, because speed and size were criteria. The Haswell Chromebooks are $250 or less. A comparably performing "regular" notebook in that form factor costs at LEAST $500 and probably has worse battery life. (I compared CPU benchmarks of all available sub-4-pounders.)

Yes, I suppose one pays back the difference in the price of fealty to the Google "ecosystem" that then owns everything you do on the machine, but for a casual user (who would have ended up on GMail anyway) it's a hard bargain to resist...