Good-bye Chromebooks – Acer's new Windows 10 notebooks just killed you

Tldr: "I don't understand the appeal of Chromebooks or ChromeOS, everyone loves Windows!"

They want me to run an infinitely misconfigurable copy of windows directly on hardware too slow for virtualization? Uh, no. Android tablets are much more likely to move into chromebook's position. With the gradual merger of APIs and store contents, I don't think that will take away much from my netbook experience.

Given the specs, I would be very interested if I could separate an RTU onto a virtual machine on a desktop and then install something else on the laptop. But even a minimized Linux with a very small VM may be sluggish and would quickly cost me more time than just finding a way to install chromium OS directly on something.

Also, I hope this doesn't signal another campaign to sabotage netbook RAM capacity in vendor designs just to push another budget license no one can actually use.

This doesn't make sense. If $200 Windows laptops were as nice to use as Chromebooks, they'd cannibalize mid-range windows machines rather than ChromeOS devices (and would be bad for OEMs' margins).

I value the simplicity, speed, security, responsiveness and convenience of my Chromebook, not just the low price tag, and I'd be stunned if these new budget Windows machines offered any of those things.

Windows 10 is notably sluggish on my much-higher-specced (better processor, 6GB vs. 2GB RAM) notebook (designed for and sold with Windows 8) -- also, coincidentally, from Acer.

It might impair Chromebook expansion because market perception of "comes with Windows" = "more capable", but I suspect anyone who would even be considering a Chromebook (that is, someone who doesn't need desktop Office, etc.) would be much better served by a Chromebook than by these.

This sounds just like the already released hp streams, except with slower processors (stream has 2.16Ghz, article says Acer will have 1.6Ghz). I understand Acer may be a more desirable brand, but the stream computers have been out since 2014. Granted, they are Windows 8.1, but they have a Windows 10 upgrade.