Chromebooks on sale at Amazon for $349 | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks on sale at Amazon for $349

amazon.com

57 pointsalmightygod77 comments

When I first saw the Chromebook, I figured it would be priced around $150, so that it was a no-brainer decision (especially with it's limitations over a normal laptop). But at $349, its still $75 more than an Acer Aspire One.

Make it $100-$150, and I'll buy it. As it stands though, its too much money and too little benefits.

To be fair as far as I can tell, there is no directly comparable Windows Acer Aspire One. All the 11.6" Acers I see run on a different chipset, and they're all only $20 cheaper than the Acer Chromebook.

When I first tried out the Chromebook, I thought the same thing about price. But I'm pretty sure Microsoft licenses Windows for these netbooks VERY cheaply, so there's not much price to be shaved by swapping out the OS.

To hit a significant price difference Chromebooks would have to skimp on the hardware compared to their Windows/Linux counterparts. The Chromebook I have already struggles with flash, so without dropping support for that completely I don't think there's much to trim off the CPU end of things. There's a little room to skimp on the HD compared to Windows, but not a ton. So basically I don't see any route other than being ad supported, rentals or some other type of Google subsidy for Chromebooks to actually become cheaper than the low end of the netbook segment.

What does Windows have to do with it? Couldn't you achieve "Chromebook-level-functionality" with a Linux model (since you'd be living out of the browser)?

I was mostly just trying to do an apples-to-apples comparison based on price. I couldn't find any Acer linux laptops that ship with linux in a quick search.

Functionality-wise, yes there's no reason you couldn't get linux on par with Chrome from a leanness standpoint by just stripping out services and booting into the browser.

They don't really need to skimp on hardware. They just need to use the inexpensive ARM chips over the expensive Intel chips. That should cut at least $100 from the retail price. I can't believe they did the same mistake as with Google TV.

The Atom N570 costs $86, so unless ARM is literally paying people to use its chips, dropping $100 seems unlikely.

I think Atom N570 needs a chipset, too (maybe it's a single chip now, but still.)

The Chromebook I have already struggles with flash

A little off topic, but I find it interesting to note that what Apple has gotten in exchange for the flak they got for not including Flash on the iPad is that they don't have any reviews like this. People consider the iPad to have good performance.

If Google had taken the same route and left out Flash, not only might they have more room to trim the CPU, it might be a better value proposition performance-wise.

The fact that Google owns the most popular flash site on the internet (YouTube), probably helped with their decision to include Flash.

I assume the chromebooks support html5 video, which youtube also supports. Apple was able to have iPhones still work with youtube without supporting flash, so Google could have found a similar workaround even without including html5 video tags.

Though the iPhone uses a YouTube app, which isn't the web. The allure of the Chromebook is that it can play the whole web, and YouTube is a big part of that. YouTube does have html5 video, but it is still in beta and isn't available for all videos. And it is opt-in.

In addition, with the focus on enterprise and education, I believe that Chromebooks had to support flash as a requirement.

Samsung Series 5 cost $334.32 to make.[1] Your price expectations are way off.

[1]http://www.thechromesource.com/with-what-it-costs-to-make-is...

To be honest I expect a chromebook to be priced similar or at the very least $200 for me to be competitive with a more powerful/portable netbook.

His expectations aren't off, the manufacturing limitations just don't meet them.

Asus is going to sell(presumably) the eee x101 running MeeGo for 200$, with decent specs for a "net oriented" computer(1 core Atom, 1GB RAM, 8GB SSD), so aren't manufacturing limitations what drive them away from that price tag. May be Google doesn't want to be identified with the somewhat crappy experience that low end hardware may deliver, just as they don't want Android to be associated with cheap smartphones, but with the iPhone competitors.

Which would be silly because their "OS" is much more limited than Windows 7, even the Starter version, and its only compelling feature would be to run on much cheaper hardware.

I figured Google would try to use their ad-powered business strategy to lower the profit margin to near-zero or negative rather than competing against netbooks. Didn't PS3 sell hardware for much lower than cost to manufacture?

These things would sell like hotcakes for $200 and Google would grow in users and advertising revenue. I was just surprised that they're selling near netbook prices considering they're limited devices and tied so tightly into Google Services. I don't see them disrupting the mobile device industry with Chromebooks unless they decide that # of users is much more important than profit per sale.

Google doesn't price these Chromebooks, they only price their business/education rental program. I don't know why it's hard for people to believe that Samsung and Acer have control over their own products.

I wonder, how obnoxious and intrusive would the ads have to be before they earn back $150+ of revenue? Not sure I'd sign on to that.

Manufacturers price consoles below cost because most of the revenue will come from game sales (which they license rights to)... getting a chunk of $60 transactions is much more lucrative than trying to monetize with ads.

Sure, but I think the OP is right that the pricing makes it pretty unattractive given its limited benefits.

I could see $200-250. It's basically a big netbook with most of the ports and storage removed.

Better to just buy a largish netbook (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220...) and install Chrome OS on it. (http://moreinews.com/google-chrome-os-review-notebook-tablet...)

The sacrifices needed to make it $100-$150 would result in you not buying it. Like crummy screens and slow processors.

Don't buy one. I got the Samsung Series 5 3g Chromebook a month ago, and I definitely regret buying even at its low price point. The OS is still very unstable and not performant. The speakers are very bad (but I wouldn't watch video or listen to music anyway - YouTube/Pandora/Turntable.fm tend to crash quite a bit). The screen is not that great. The only upside is the long battery life but you're better off spending a couple hundred more and getting an Air.

A couple hundred dollars more? A MacBook Air is $650 more expensive than the price listed on Amazon. For that price you could buy almost 3 Chromebooks.

The Samsung Series 5 3g is $500, the cheapest Macbook Air is $835. So, a little more than a couple hundred dollars more, but a lot less than $650 more (even the cheapest Chromebook at $350 would be tops $485 less).

The cheapest MacBook Air is indeed $999:

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...

Perhaps you saw an older model that's on clearance.

The model I saw was here:

http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MacBook-MC505LL-11-6-Inch-Laptop...

Which could very well be the 2010 model. That being said, the OP never mentioned getting "the latest and greatest" Macbook Air, only a Macbook Air.

Yes, that model is no longer being manufactured. If you weren't wanting to compare what a new computer costs, this already silly argument becomes even sillier.

To be fair, they are both "new" computers -- IE not refurbished or used. My point was the intent of the OP could have been what he found on Amazon from the respective retailers -- in which case the price point was much closer to what he mentioned than to the price point shoota mentioned. I never meant to imply that we should compare a new Chromebook to a 2008 Model (or a used one, a refurbished one, or one being sold from a illegitimate retailer), which it does seem like it comes across as I reread my comment.

Its a stupid argument to begin with on my part, but I felt it was worth a meager defense.

The Macbook Air starts at $999 according to http://www.apple.com/macbookair/. Looking at the cheapest Chromebook vs. cheapest Macbook Air it is $650. I'm not considering educational pricing here.

This was the model I was referring to: http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MacBook-MC505LL-11-6-Inch-Laptop...

Which is being sold from Apple on Amazon. I do not know if it is the latest one, but given the OP's original statement, was it ever implied that it was the latest one he was referring to?

Macbook Air also doesn't have 3G, does it?

I bought the refurbished iPad 1 I'm typing this on for $370 from the Apple website.

This post is referring to the Acer.

it won't matter. The OS is the issue, not the machine. I have a Cr-48 that has the same issues as above, in ChromeOS. In Ubuntu Classic, it's almost dreamy (the two extremely notable exceptions are having to reboot to take advantage of the 3g, which only ChromeOS can seem to start, and the trackpad, which I have no answer for.)

> It just works.

Can we stop saying this please?

> "Your apps, documents, and settings are stored safely in the cloud."

Until Google deletes your account for no specific reason and refuses to give it back (this has happened to more than one person)

> Millions of apps.

[citation needed]

> Friends let friends login.

Every OS ever has had this feature. It's called "Users"

>Gets faster over time.

What does this mean? That you designed it to be inefficient so you can speed it up and gather favor from your users? That you just stopped optimizing halfway through and pegged it 1.0?

If by no specific reason you mean "blatant violation of AdSense terms of service," then yes.

I agree with you 100%, especially on the "It just works" point, but you're wrong on the "friends let friends login" thing. As far as i know, no other OS allows me to log into someone else's computer and get the exact same experience i have on my own, and vice versa.

I've always wanted it to work this way. Even just a few years ago, I'd never imagine this would be accomplished by using a browser-based operating system.

> Until Google deletes your account for no specific reason and refuses to give it back (this has happened to more than one person)

Google can delete my Facebook account? My Office Web Apps account? How do they manage this?

> Every OS ever has had this feature. It's called "Users"

No other OS saves OS settings and apps in the cloud, to my knowledge.

> What does this mean? That you designed it to be inefficient so you can speed it up and gather favor from your users? That you just stopped optimizing halfway through and pegged it 1.0?

They are talking about the auto-update feature.

Google can delete my Facebook account? My Office Web Apps account? How do they manage this?

If Google deletes your Google/GMail account, can you still login to your Chromebook?

You don't need to login at all.

Nice. For some reason I thought you needed a Google account to use it. Now that I know you don't that's a plus. Not enough of a plus, but it's one less thing to worry about.

It's a plus, but is it a Google plus? /rimshot

> Google can delete my Facebook account? My Office Web Apps account? How do they manage this?

You don't use your Facebook account to log into a Chromebook.

It is probably a safe bet to assume the parent knows this.

What does this mean? That you designed it to be inefficient so you can speed it up and gather favor from your users? That you just stopped optimizing halfway through and pegged it 1.0?

Are you a programmer? The idea that there is a finish line for optimizing a program (beyond "This seems fast enough") is weird, and not the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from anyone who's ever done it. You do just have to stop at some point and release. Otherwise you'll keep improving things until the heat death of the universe.

IIRC, the Chrome team has a zero-tolerance policy on performance regressions. Since it auto-updates, it should get faster over time.

What I meant was "We know there's tons of things we can still optimize, but we're just gonna release now anyways."

Again, that's just how software goes. I'm sure anyone who has released software could give you a laundry list of things he would have liked to have done, but didn't have time. Should they slide the release a year or two so they have time to feel better about how well it's optimized for speed? Generally, no.

At any rate, unless the software has been around for many decades and the best minds in computer science have failed to improve upon it, you can generally feel confident that there are tons of things you can still optimize.

What is wrong with "It just works"? I have found that there are very few pieces of software out there (especially operating systems) that truly "just work" out of the box. Most software requires at least some setup, customization, and a period of futzing-around before a user becomes proficient at its use. Chrome OS does one thing, and it claims to do it very well. Until most software is incredibly easy to use, I think "it just works" is a very appropriate advertisement.

Every modern operating system that I'm aware of gains performance increases through software updates. That does not mean that every company that creates operating systems purposely makes their operating system slower to gain favor over time.

> > Friends let friends login.

> Every OS ever has had this feature. It's called "Users"

Uh, not iphones/pads (iOS)... so yes that is a big deal

Engineers think in features

Customers think in benefits

"men are from mars women are from venus" "apples and oranges"

The price is astronomical. I can turn my EeePC into a homemade chromebook with $0 and I paid much less for that years ago. I would assume that you could strip the chromebook down to $150-200 precisely because the hardware specs required for a glorified browser ought to be considerably lower than for running a full-fledged OS. Perhaps I'll have to wait for some Tegra chromebook to get the price/perf figure to a more sensitive level: even the latest smartphones should be able to match the requirements for a chromebook.

I think Google's strategy for ChomeOS is all wrong. Nobody wants low powered laptops without a proper OS. As soon as the iPad blew up the netbook market Google should have retargeted ChomeOS as a tablet OS. A lightweight (zero-weight) OS is perfectly suited for a tablet. I use an iPad almost exclusively for browsing the net and checking email and I bet I'm not the only one. A Chrometablet with some decent specs and maybe some hardware WebGL support might even open a whole new online gaming market.

If they sell this at $49 with a 2-year data plan contract - would rock! Two reasons:

1 - This is a brick if you don't have internet.

2 - This is a brick if you can't use it on road. People have internet at homes.

So consistent always on internet with a very low buy-in cost would probably be better, imo. I mean, this thing needs to sell as a complete experience.

$350 should be the max pricing point for a higher quality Chromebook, not the starting point. The starting point should be like $200. They should also make them only with ARM chips to cut the cost significantly. Ideally, it should be like $200 wi-fi only with Tegra 2 (or other dual core ARM chip) and $350 for a better built one with 4G and Tegra 3 (or similar).

They've been on sale for over 10 days now. I don't see them flying off the shelf.

I've been thinking about buying a 12.1" Samsung Series 5 3G or a 12.5" Lenovo X220 or an 11.6" Macbook Air or an 11.6" Samsung Series 9. If I could get emacs on a terminal, with ssh access I would be sold on the Chromebook. Does anyone know if ssh + emacs + term is possible? (w/ the same battery usage - i.e. I don't want to bother with installing Linux if I can only get <2 hours of mobile use).

I don't know about the latest revisions, but the CR-48 had a terminal that was basically only useful for SSH. So if you have a dev box setup somewhere that you can SSH to, it makes an okay dev environment (for someone who uses emacs or vi).

Chrome OS has a weird non-standard ssh, but I wouldn't think there's any problem ssh'ing into a remote machine where you have emacs running. Having emacs running locally probably wouldn't be possible though.

Imagine you have a chromebook, and imagine Google deleted your account, now do you have a very expensive paper-weight? (or is there some salvation?). I see some opportunity for two ideas: 1. insurance against the event that a company will delete your account. 2. a backup-for-orig-company.com (browser plug-in? desktop-background-app?), that backs up (and keeps track of) everything you do with company X - so you can retrieve it all someday if the need be.

At least for the CR-48's, you could flip the dev switch and wipe them, or install Ubuntu. I had to use the dev-switch to get a terminal.. Web online just doesn't cut it when you need to SSH to your servers ;)

Wow, that seems a little pricey for what is offered. I would think they would be able to use an "off the shelf" netbook that already costs ~300 dollars, without Windows, and sell it for ~200. Windows accounts for a nice chunk of the price of a netbook, does it not? I know they don't pay store prices for Windows, but I'm sure they are still paying a decent amount. Does anyone have an insight in to how much Windows adds to the price of netbook hardware?

From what I understand Windows volume licensing cost is around $30-$40 per copy depending on who the hardware vendor is.

According to this article http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/06/microsoft-curr... which is a bit dated it seems like the cost of windows could be as low as $15-30.

Netbooks are priced what they are because of their component parts. The 2 Chromebooks released so far are the size of a normal notebook/laptop. The parts are similar (except for the processor) to that of a notebook, which explains the price. The Series 5 cost $334.32 to make.[1]

[1]http://www.thechromesource.com/with-what-it-costs-to-make-is...

I've been using a Samsung Series 5 for a couple weeks (I have the 3G model which is priced at $499).

After having tried this out, there's no way I would call it worth $499. Maybe I'm just spoiled from my MacBook Air but the Series 5 is heavy and has a cheap/plasticky feel to it. The trackpad has responsiveness problems and in general just feels funny to use. All in all it gives off kind of a "toy computer" impression which is unfortunate.

I too struggle with the price of Chromebooks. I do love my CR48 but expected price to be around $200 considering the OS is very limited.

Chromebooks are like bigger and worse netbooks. Great at doing nothing but still not the cheapest!

Is the main market for chrome books (a) people who want to install Linux and other OSes on them and (b) people who do not want the hassle of adminning a traditional OS?

If it's secure, easy to use and browses "the Facebook" I could see giving them to a relative and saivng a fair amount of tech support time. Granted an iPad fills the same nitch but it costs twice as much.

The iPad is only $150 more. A great conditioned used 1st gen iPad you can get for $50 more. I'll take a 1st gen ipad over this Chromebook easy.

It depends on whether you want a keyboard, too, or not. A keyboard costs extra money for iPad, and it's not a very elegant solution either. I'd much prefer an Asus Transformer if I were to choose a tablet over a Chromebook.

the theoretical market for chromebooks is people who only want a computer for facebook and email and want to buy something simple and cheap.

in practice, i think the market is just nerds who want to play with a chromebook because it's new and cool. i appreciate what google is trying to do with chromeOS, and i think it's a good idea, but they have failed miserably at marketing it to non-techies.

In terms of providing simple email, web use and facebook, the Chromebook may be out-performed by most modern mobile phones.

And numerous modern mobile phones actually cost more than a Chromebook (especially unsubsidized by cell phone contract).

for general, non-mobile use, a 3.5-4" screen does not outperform a 12" screen.

The biggest Chromebook advantage, in my opinion, is that it never slows down because you never change the software in any meaningful way. For the average person who bloats their computer over time until it isn't usable, that is huge.

Unfortunately adware/malware Chrome extensions already exist. Granted removing that is much easier than removing some nasty software installed on a traditional OS, but the type of user that's not savvy enough to avoid malware wouldn't know how to remove a Chrome extension :\

Reply on news.ycombinator.com