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Comment by Kipters | Hacker News Reader

I often see price being cited as a selling point for Chromebooks, but I have never found them to be really cheap. Maybe it's a regional thing? Looking now on Amazon (.it) I can find a Pixelbook equipped with a measle i5-7Y57, 8 GB of ram and 256 GB SSD for 1999 €. That's crazy.

For that kind of money I could get a 10th gen i7 (where applicable) 16 GB ram/512 GB SSD Surface Laptop 3, Surface Pro 7 or Surface Pro X (including type cover and pen for the Pros) with money to spare.

How is this considered cheap? It's insane

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> I often see price being cited as a selling point for Chromebooks, but I have never found them to be really cheap.

Around 2014, cheap ($200) chromebooks seemed impressive compared to low end windows laptops (which didn't have SSDs, enough ram for windows, or good battery life).

After that, the cheap chromebooks completely stagnated, though (in 5 years they have only gone to slightly faster celeron processors and 4 rather than 2 gigs of ram) while cheap windows laptops have gotten much better, and as you have mentioned, the expensive chromebooks certainly aren't competitive, either. I think that somehow the idea that chromebooks are cheap seems to have remained despite the fact that it isn't true anymore.

I agree.

I recently (6-9 months ago perhaps) got a cheap one - I think it was about 150GBP new. So very cheap, but its CPU is some celeron thing that frankly sucks for modern websites with their heavy javascript payloads. If you tried to open gmail + google calendar + a google doc, it slowed down to an absolute crawl - like 5-10 wall-seconds to change tabs, things visibly redrawing on the screen etc and things slowly loaded in. It becomes incredibly frustrating to do anything web-based except perhaps read one single tab at a time - forget anything interactive. (That said, my wife has one that also has a celeron that she uses almost exclusively for netflix and it seems fine for that)

I think that the cheap celerons that the cheapest chromebooks get just are not good enough - I've had chromebooks for years and years ago those chromebooks with weak CPUs (sometimes obscure ARM ones even) were totally fine and would zip along without issues, but now the weakest celerons just do not seem to be able handle modern web UIs.

So that puts us in the sad situation where if you want to buy a chromebook, you need to consider one with a non-celeron CPU, but those then tend to be really expensive in comparison (e.g. double or triple the price of a celeron one), at which point you might as well just buy a windows one (or even a macbook air or something similar for not much more).

It is a shame - I don't know the bulk trade prices, but I am guessing that the difference between the weakest possible celeron and something less-crap like a base pentium thing is probably only like $10-15, but would make a huge difference to usability, but you just don't seem to be able to buy anything without jumping up to Intel i5s for an extra £500 etc

That's probably more directed towards the sub-$300 market, which has at least a handful of options. I've got my wife, kids, and parents all on these devices because they're cheap and easy to use.

I'd prefer spending $300 on something like a refurbished Thinkpad for myself, but realize that might not serve my family's desires.

Yep, I can see some Acer, Lenovo or HP options in that range, but all of them are equipped with Celeron N4xxx CPUs, 4 GB of ram and 64 GB eMMC, not exactly stellar...

I would consider a 500-600€ device with a decent screen, 8 GB and a (swappable?) disk to try ChromeOS out, I feel I'd be wasting money if I were to get a sub-300 one

So... you want a high end laptop? Those are available, even with ChromeOS installed. But they're not any cheaper. Hardware is hardware.

When people talk about price being an advantage for Chromebooks, they mean at the low end, where the OS can operate well on hardware that Windows doesn't tolerate, and where the windows license fees become a significant part of the selling price.

Try a comparison of devices around $300US, that's the sweet spot for ChromeOS.

That is what I paid for an Asus Netbook 1215B, delivered with Ubuntu LTS.

Right, and for basically the same reason. Fundamentally ChromeOS is just another linux distro.

Except that Linux userspace is not exposed across all variants, and updates are limited to 5 years from model launch.

is 500€ (tax included) considered high end? The first result searching for "laptop" with a 8 GB ram filter on Amazon.it is an HP 14s, with an i5-8250U, 8 GB of ram and a 256 GB ssd priced at 599€. The third result is the same but with an AMD A9, for half the price (349€).

I would buy any of them with ChromeOS at that price (I'm interested from a developer point of view, especially for the Android subsystem)

That's leaps over any Chromebook I can find, and those are real laptops that can do any workflow.

> is 500€ (tax included) considered high end?

These days it's upper middle for the U.S. I would say. For example the new top-of-the-line Dell consumer laptop, the XPS 13, starts at under $1000 (900€). When I got an XPS nearly a decade ago, it was a model they had at a considerable discount (as I recall it was an overstock situation or something) and it still cost me $1350.

As far as I can tell, low-end, mid-end, and high-end laptops are not only more powerful than the laptops of 10 years ago, they're also considerably cheaper at each level. I can't say for ultra-high-end laptops, I'm sure you still can spend $2500 on a laptop if you want, but even the MacBook Pro starts at only $1300 these days.

it's confusing when you write that XPS 13 starts at $1000 (900€), because in USA you're used to write prices without tax and in Europe we're used to write prices including Tax, which you have to pay when you're buying it as a consumer, at the time of purchase.

So let's look at the actual prices: In the US XPS 13 9380 starts at i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD for $949 listed price. In Europe the same configuration starts at around 1200€, but they are also lower configurations (i3, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD) priced at €949, just so that they can list a lower "starting" price, even though that configuration is almost unusable.

I'd consider 500€ the starting point for something that won't break down in an year here, upper middle would be around 700-800€. Keep in mind € prices most of the time include taxes (22% in my case), so...

The most demanding application on my laptop, by a wide margin, is Chrome.

The only thing close is Windows Search Indexer, which is a buggy piece of junk that spins CPU all day doing nothing

A typical windows laptop has a DRAM footprint (mostly because of the AV scanners that everything has installed) rather higher than a ChromeOS box, even with the browser running. And the storage requirements aren't even in the same ballpark: something like 40GB for a routine OEM windows install vs. 6-7G for the ChromeOS boot image (last time I checked, anyway). Add to that the fact that most of the chrome apps are optimized to store to the cloud instead of relying on local disk, and the chrome box can skimp on memory and storage (e.g. a $8 64G eMMC chip instead of a $60 256G SATA or M.2 drive) in ways that windows can't.

Used business workstation desktops are a friggin' steal right now, if you don't need the portability. Like if you want to do the old-school shared "family computer" situation. Or just want one really powerful machine for your home server junk, rather than a stack of (way more expensive for similar total memory & performance) Raspberry Pis.

Intel's mobile chip prices are insane. The current "recommended customer price" for i5-7Y57 is $280. The i7-7Y75 processor price is $395 (only difference is a couple hundred MHz).

Compare the Macbook Air and the pricing isn't too bad. The air has 1 gen newer CPU (basically a refresh) and thunderbolt 3 instead of usb-c along with an extra inch of screen (pixelbook could add almost 1.5 inches if they shrunk the bezels).

With 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD, the list price of the two is the same ($1700 in the USA). Pixelbook also gives you a touchscreen (with good pen support), better keyboard, and (IMO) better trackpad while shaving off a massive third of a pound. Pixelbook is also completely silent.

Surface Pro X with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD is $1800 and weighs almost exactly the same as the pixelbook once you add a keyboard. It includes a crappy Qualcomm 8cx processor.

Surface pro 7 with same specs is $1900 and around the same weight. It does include a G-series processor, but it's probably adjusted from the normal 15w TDP to a 12w TDP to save power (lowering actual base clock from 1.3 to 1.0GHz).

Cheapest Surface Laptop 3 with same specs I can find is Best Buy for $2000 for the 13-inch model. It weighs a touch more than the air, but once again, the G-series processor is a bit faster overall.

Pixelbook isn't cheap, but neither is the hardware or build quality. You can often find them on sale for much less though. $500-600 for the i3 version is very common. I picked up my i5 version on sale for $650 (marked down from $1300).

I checked the prices for the Surfaces on the official store before posting, the most expensive one was the Pro X + cover + pen at 1998,99 € (others were in the 1930-1960 range).

But my point was the same as yours: same price, better hardware, good screens + build quality and a capable OS instead of a full screen browser and mobile apps

I knew what I was getting into with my Pixelbook when I bought one in 2015, they are a lot more than every other Chromebook. But I thought it would be fun, and the $900 was less than I'd spend on some of my other devices.

All I would say is that thing still still runs and looks like it did the day I bought it. It's a solid device that runs everything through the usb-c port (which was still new back then). The specs are overboard for what a Chromebook needs. But like most things, I guess it just comes down to what you use it for.

Now that it has a built-in Linux support, I could do things that might push it. I was surprised when it got Crostini support, you run the Linux apps inside the Chrome OS and not some buggy sandbox.

Linux apps run inside a sandbox, as shown at Google IO 2019.

Yeah, I guess I used sandbox incorrectly, the apps are still running in a sandbox. What I meant was before Crostini, you had to load xfce in a shell or dual boot into it. Now the Linux apps run inside the Chrome OS. You also don't have to boot into a developer mode, or anything like that.

You won't see much difference with high-end hardware because the OS license is a smaller percentage of the total.

The big price differences are on low end hardware where the greater resource requirements of Windows make it uncompetitive.

I use a Chromebook as my daily driver, and I'm happy to spend on good hardware. For my needs, Chrome OS is far superior to Windows and Mac. Hard to beat the security, Linux integration and battery life.

That’s a pixelbook, the MacBook Pro of chromebooks. Like others have said, you can get a new chrome book for <$150.

For me the selling point of Chromebooks is that it's a stateless computer, so not much can go wrong.

Also updates are really smooth: done in the background, just have to do a quick reboot and you're done.

Since I migrated my mother to a Chromebook, she no longer breaks anything and I no longer have to do tech support.

> For me the selling point of Chromebooks is that it's a stateless computer, so not much can go wrong.

Do you really think that's the case?

> Also updates are really smooth: done in the background, just have to do a quick reboot and you're done.

How are there updates if it's stateless?

State here is about user data / apps.

All your data and applications are on the cloud. So if you loose or break your Chromebook, just buy a new one, and all your work is already there.

You know, all those same things are true of a lightweight XFCE or Mate Linux desktop. They've been true for over a decade now.

Incidentally, I put Xubuntu on my grandma's computer for a few years.

How is Xubuntu in any way stateless? It has a full local filesystem with a package manager and everything, lots of ways it can be messed up, no?

It's stateless the same way Chrome OS is: you put a systemd-timer on sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade, and you only use the web browser and libreoffice.

ChromeOS also has a package manager and a full local filesystem, you just don't see it. Don't touch it on and XFCE debian derivative and it's the exact same.

If you look at the high end, you'll find premium devices for premium prices.

If you look at the low end, you'll find devices starting from ~$200.

Last month, I bought a Chromebook (new in box) for $100 through Amazon. Granted, it just got its final update, so it was sitting on some warehose shelf for years. I'll use it until the OS crumps, then wipe it and put Debian on it. Just like I used to do with cheap Windows netbooks.

I'm using ChromeOS on Macbook Pro Retina 2015 and on Thinkpad x230 as a spare for just everything.

Thinkpad x230 is 10 years old and it's current market price is below $100, I think. Or you can get it for free from a friendly company admin. Except for screen estate (compared to Retina) x230 is everything I need. It still has in it another 5 more years or so.

So ChromeOS could be cheap and performant at the same time. Chromebooks are different story - never found one with price to performance/quality ratio that suits my wallet.

PS. I disagree that ChromeOS has stalled out. Can't wait till February for version 80.

How does it run on the x230? With which specs? Android and Linux subsystems are working?

https://www.neverware.com/freedownload

Thanks.

Looks like my old MacBook Air (model 6,2) is not supported, but its 11" variant (6,1) is. I'll give it a try when I return home from the holidays.

Don't worry about supported by Neverware. Mine Mac Pro also isn't supported last time I checked. But it works flawlessly.

I just found it curious that they would officially support the 11" and not the 13"

That just means that Neverware tested CloudReady on 11" but not 13". Similarly, the Mac Pro isn't officially supported because Neverware decided, quite rightly, that few people are going to run Chrome OS on a high-end Apple desktop.

Android isn't working on Neverware. Linux (crostini containers) and crosh both work.

x230 is some old i5, 100GB SSD and some RAM. Battery is still OK and getting replacement battery for Thinkpad is no hassle.

It works all right and the keyboard is a dream.

Damn, the Android side is the thing I'm interested the most (for dev purposes, not as an user)

The Pixelbook is/was a Chromebook with top of the line hardware. (IMO the best convertible notebook) and never was sold with cheap price in mind.

I bought my i5/8g/128g variant for <$700 USD.

You can definitely find a Chromebook for ~$200 USD.

I've seen some models in the $200-400 USD range, occasionally they have a sale, but their specs are pretty awful, even by smartphone standards. I don't think I've seen a pixelbook priced at 1999 €, I wonder if that's higher due to cost of tax/tariff/import?

I can see the seller is from the UK, according to hocuspocus it's one of the countries where it's officially sold. I'd expect some markup from them, maybe higher shipping fees, but since it's still within the EU there shouldn't be anything else. I forgot to mention that in Italy prices already include taxes, so 1999€ is exactly how much I would pay.

I’ve seen Pixel phones sold on Amazon UK and shipped to EU countries where Google doesn’t officially sell them at almost 2x markup.

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