Comment 1PK Re: The Economics Are Ridiculous

Story

The Year of the Chromebook

Preview

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: 1)

by songofthepogo@pipedot.org on 2014-05-17 20:52 (#1PK)

This thread just cost us $230. The spousal unit teaches online courses in the summer and would like to untether from his desk. He's got a tablet, but it's not sufficient to the task. We have an old netbook, but ... netbook. He's got a laptop, but it's long in the tooth and short on battery life. He's been eyeballing the MacBook Air 11, but it's pricy and hasn't updated adequately in a very long time. If one is going to spend that many $$, one wants a bit more in terms of screen, power, storage ... all of it.

Realizing all that, he was at the point of deciding whether to spend $$$ on a prior-gen MBP 13, or wait to see what possible updates might be on the horizon for the MBAs, when this thread got started. I poked around, found the Acer C720, looked into whether slapping elementary OS on it was a thing (it is), and floated the idea to him: "So ... it's kinda like the netbook of today, but better and more useable ... you could think about maybe this for $230? It wouldn't be an MBP, but it'd be ... it'd be $230." Sold. It arrives Tuesday. I can't wait to get my grubby, little fingers all over it.

A few questions, though, assuming anyone is still looking at this days-old thread:
  • Anyone have the C720 with elementary OS?
  • Anyone have above, but with C720P and, if so, is the touch screen well-supported and worth it?
  • Anything else I should've told the spousal unit to consider before he squeezed the trigger on the purchase (not too late to change the order), e.g. is 2GB RAM sufficient?

Junk Status

Not marked as junk