New Chromebooks and Chromebit stick start at $100
Google and its partners are preparing a flood of new hardware to sway consumers away from cheap Windows laptops. Chromebooks from HiSense and Haier go on sale today for just $150 each. You also might consider the Asus Chromebit that will cost less than $100. The Chromebit looks very similar to the Chromecast, but runs a full Chrome-OS instance, on-a-stick, ready to plug into any monitor. "Think of a school lab, all the peripherals, but stuck to a desktop. Now you can replace that." The secret behind these low-cost devices is the RK3288, a very inexpensive quad-core Cortex-A12 ARM architecture processor, which was launched in mid-2014 from Rockchip, a Chinese chip maker that's little known outside of industry circles. Because the chip can draw as little as 3 watts of power, the Chromebooks based on it are designed without fans, and can last all day on a single charge. You also get 2GB of storage, and a 16GB SSD in all 3 devices.
With fewer than 25 million Chromebook sales last year (opposed to more than 302 million PC sales), Google still has work to do. And thus today's announcement. Google and its partners are lowering prices further while chasing the one commodity laptop users value most: battery life.
From the point of the school, the maintenance and systems admin burden of running a computer lab this way is hugely more efficient and inexpensive than a lab full of, say, Win10 desktops that need basically full-time administration. This hardware might put a dent in the futures of projects like Edubuntu, which reconfigs desktop hardware into thin clients. That's unfortunate. But it will have a powerful impact on schools that will stop buying Windows desktops, and that in turn will affect how many kids coming out of schools thinking that "computer = windows."
As for keyboard quality you are absolutely right - these guys aren't focused on hardware quality. My HP Chromebook has a chiclet keyboard, and I'm not a fan of it (it's no worse than any other modern HP laptop though). If you want a good keyboard, buy a Chromebox and stick whatever USB you like into it - even a Model M! For me, despite the ubiquity of laptops, this is the advantage of a 'desktop computer' no matter which OS it happens to be running: the peripherals I want/need/love, from trackballs to fancy ergo keyboards etc.