The Economics Are Ridiculous (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-14 18:05 (#1M1) 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... Re: The Economics Are Ridiculous (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-15 11:23 (#1MM) That's my conclusion too. And actually, I'm finding ChromeOS isn't as bad as I'd suspected! Or else, they've improved it. There's even a terminal app now (obviously, some kind of framework that lets you run an applet in the browser window or something; I'm actually not sure how it works). That means something like 70% of my use cases are covered! I'd still like access to NFS, Sambas, and AFS filesystems (ie, my NAS). That's about it.
Re: The Economics Are Ridiculous (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-15 11:23 (#1MM) That's my conclusion too. And actually, I'm finding ChromeOS isn't as bad as I'd suspected! Or else, they've improved it. There's even a terminal app now (obviously, some kind of framework that lets you run an applet in the browser window or something; I'm actually not sure how it works). That means something like 70% of my use cases are covered! I'd still like access to NFS, Sambas, and AFS filesystems (ie, my NAS). That's about it.