HP Chromebook 11 Review | Hacker News Reader

HP Chromebook 11 Review

anandtech.com

59 pointsamardeep79 comments

The dreadful battery life is interesting:

"Despite using relatively power efficient hardware and being paired with a 30Wh internal battery, the Chromebook 11 barely lasted 5.4 hours in our web browsing battery life test. Local video playback was even worse at 4.8 hours."

The "web browsing battery life test" in this article is the same one as in here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7117/haswell-ult-investigation. Note how the iPad 4 gets 9.48 hours on both tests. On that test, the 11" MBA gets over 11 hours, despite having less than a 25% larger battery and using Core i5 processors. The 13" MBA gets over 14 hours, though it has an 80% larger battery (but has to drive a 30% larger screen).

This suggests that Samsung's Exynos 5 is extremely power-hungry or Chrome OS's power optimization is extremely bad.

As an aside, Apple/Intel's phenomenal battery life performance with the latest MBA signals to me the beginning of the end for ARM. If we're getting to the point where a current-generation Haswell laptop CPU is putting up light workload power draw comparable to a flagship A15 tablet chip, that's not a positive thing for ARM. Heck, even if you just compare the iPad 4 with the MBA 11", the writing seems to be on the wall. The iPad has a substantially bigger battery than the MBA, while driving a smaller (albeit more pixel-dense and power hungry) screen. And yet the MBA totally holds its own on the battery life test.

Samsung's Chromebook had about the same battery life, if not a bit bigger, and achieved that with I think half the battery size. So whatever is going on now, is probably HP or Google's fault.

Also, I think you're confusing things. Are you referring to this?

http://anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-review-1...

That shows 11 hours in "light workload". Unfortunately, starting with this year, Apple stopped giving "real" numbers for its Macbook battery life, and started giving battery life for "minimum workloads" like the whole laptop industry has done for more than a decade. The "real" battery life is closer to that "medium workload" (Haswell gave about a 50 percent boost compared to last year's Macbooks).

With medium workload, it's 9 hours, with a 50Whr battery (according to you, I didn't check), so at 30Whr, that would normalize it at around 6.7 hours. Still good, but nowhere as impressive as you made it sound at first.

I'll grant you this. The decision to use a last-gen chip in this Chromebook wasn't a very smart one, and that's probably HP's fault. Mediocre companies like HP with mediocre employees and mediocre middle management tend to be very slow about adopting new technologies in their products, which is why you never see them come out with some cutting edge tech first.

The power drain could also be from poorly optimized supporting chips/shipsets like microcontrolers, WiFi Cards, and other periphery devices.

The 13" Air has a 54Wh battery compared to the almost half capacity 30Wh battery of the ChromeBook. So that's almost half the battery life on almost half the battery capacity. Not exactly dreadful but could get better.

With Haswell Intel got the power draw at idle down to a very good level. So the major power sucker is still the screen. But given the Chromebook has a smaller screen and less powerful SoC the ChromeBook should in theory get little better battery life than it does. That one we can chalk up to the 3.4 Linux kernel that the ChromeBook is using and OS X / Safari generally always being ahead in power use department.

I think we'll see the battery life get better with the newer Haswell Chrome books when Google switches to a more recent Linux kernel.

Interesting way to twist the numbers.

To be accurate:

The Chromebook gets 38.5% of the battery life with 55.5% of the battery capacity. That's quite a bit different than the 1:1 ratio you imply, more like 0.7:1.

Put yet another way, with the MBA13's battery, the Chromebook would last 9.7 hours. With the Chromebook's batter, the MBA would last 7.8 hours.

Twist? If I had implied 1:1 - why do you think I spent the next paragraph explaining the difference? Also 0.7:1 isn't exactly dreadful - so that point stands.

"So that's almost half the battery life on almost half the battery capacity."

If that's not implying a 1:1 ratio I don't know what is.

Are the battery life tests the same between the Air and ChromeBook? The Air review from Anandtech tests the Air for Light, Medium and Heavy Workloads (whatever that means) in which it gets 11/8.9/5.53 hours respectively. The ChromeBook test on the other hand is labelled "Web Browsing Battery Life" which to me suggests that it isn't exactly the same as the one used with Air or for that matter which one of the Light/Medium/Heavy compares closely to it.

Did you not read rayiner's link? There's a big graph labelled "Tablet Web Browsing Battery Life" with the MBA in it.

Do you happen to know if "Tablet Web Browsing Battery Life" and "Web Browsing Battery Life (WiFi)" are one and the same thing though? Tablets don't load Flash. ChromeBook does by default. The tests may still be different in unknown ways.

I bet ChromeOS is just not optimized for ARM. The original CR48 got incredible battery life (more than 10 hours), as did the Series 5 (the first for-sale Chromebook). Both of those used Atom processors. Since the majority of Chrome use is on the desktop with x86 computers, my guess is that this is the reason.

> This suggests that Samsung's Exynos 5 is extremely power-hungry or Chrome OS's power optimization is extremely bad.

I'm betting it's Chrome OS. The Nexus 10 also runs the Exynos 5, same exact chip, yet it gets 9+ hours of web browsing battery life and does it with a 2560x1600 screen.

How big is the battery on the Nexus 10?

Nexus 10: 9000 mAh HP Chromebook 11: 2300 mAh ^^ I'm betting it's this.

You can't compare battery ratings in milliamp hours unless you know that the load voltage is the same for both.

Of course you can. If you read some datasheets you'll see that's how batteries are rated.

Batteries are rated in milliamp hours at a given voltage. You can't directly compare ratings in milliamp hours without accounting for the voltage. Watt-hour ratings, in contrast, bake assumptions about the average battery voltage into the rating, and thus can be compared directly even between batteries having different voltages.

In this case, it's common sense. There is no way a Nexus 10 has a battery four times as large as an 11.6" notebook.

Nexus 10 has a 22.75Wh battery, the HP Chromebook's is 30Wh.

Chromebook has a bigger battery than the N10, not a smaller one. Probably also a factor in why the Chromebook tips the scales at 2.3lbs vs. the N10's 1.3lbs.

The article touches on open-source OS alternatives and touts ChromeOS as one of them, however its open nature is only skin deep -- the vast majority of your activities occur within the confines of Google's ecosystem (or some other closed-source ecosystem).

This is a mostly philosophical issue due to the nature of ChromeOS (everything is supposed to be run from the browser), however it shouldn't be forgotten that this device isn't nearly indicative of any consumer Linux revolution.

100% agreed. As a developer though, I'm increasingly tempted to get one of these Chromebooks and put crouton+Ubuntu on it for my dev tasks. :)

> The article touches on open-source OS alternatives and touts ChromeOS as one of them, however its open nature is only skin deep -- the vast majority of your activities occur within the confines of Google's ecosystem (or some other closed-source ecosystem).

That's up to the individual. You can exclusively use web services running on your own servers if you so choose.

Like run your own Google server so you can create an account and log in?

(I'll give you that after logging in you could probably exclusively use your own services. But that's a big exception.)

The parent was talking about open source alternatives to Chrome OS, which is Chromium OS, which doesn't require a Google account.

Can you log in to Chromium OS without a Google account? I tried it (Hexxeh build) before I got my Cr-48, and I don't remember being able to then, but that was a while ago now.

> however it shouldn't be forgotten that this device isn't nearly indicative of any consumer Linux revolution.

This either already happened (Android, TiVo, ChromeOS, SteamOS, etc...), or it's never, ever going to happen. Take your pick. Because Linux the kernel has very much already had its consumer revolution. "Linux" as in "GNU/Linux + X11 + Gnome/KDE/XFCE/Whatever" will never have a consumer revolution. It's just not going to happen, sorry. I enjoy that setup, but it's not going to get mass market appeal.

I'm surprised that Anand didn't mention anything about the trackpad. The Verge's impression is that it's pretty terrible:

"The trackpad, on the other hand, is pretty bad. It’s sticky and plastic, and doesn’t allow your finger to glide smoothly at all; my fingers jittered around as I tried to move the cursor, and the screen jittered even worse as I tried to scroll with two fingers or pinch to zoom on the screen. It’s a frustrating change from the smooth, responsive Chromebook Pixel, which got all this right — and had a touchscreen too, just in case. Of course, the Pixel is also six times the price."

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/10/4822576/hp-chromebook-11-...

yeah, i was looking for his take on this. if it's anything like The Verge's account, it's a dealbreaker.

He did make one comment in the summary:

"and even the clickpad isn’t as bad as it is on far more expensive PCs."

Not sure what to read into that.

"Google is particularly proud of the lack of any visible vents, screws or speakers."

"Google uses the bottom plate as a heat spreader with a bit of thermal interface material making direct contact to the Exynos 5250 SoC."

"It used to be that you’d have to spend tons of money to get a notebook with a good keyboard, Google seems devoted to fixing that."

Interesting how a search for "HP" results in almost no hits in the article text. The quotes above suggest that Google designed the device and HP was nothing more than a dumb OEM. While they've certainly stumbled big time in recent years, I'd still expect their hardware design / manufacturing knowledge to dwarf Google's.

I agree on paper. That said, most google-ish hardware has been up to a pretty decent standard. Their brand on a piece of hardware means more to me than HP's.

This is going to sound like one of those self-entitled tech employee tweets, but I wish there was a button I could push that would just remove mention of laptops with less than 1920x1080 resolution from my view of the internet.

To me, there are two interesting ends of the spectrum. The high end (eg new MBPr) and the low end.

Those are where the future comes from.

This HP Chromebook 11 seems very similar to the Samsung Chromebook in specs. Both use Exynos 5250, 11" screen etc.

The Acer C7 Chromebook (Celeron) was much better performing. Running some javascript graphics, it seemed at least twice as fast to me. But it weighed 50% more (~1.5kg).

However, the new Acer C720 Chromebook is down to ~1kg, and it's even faster, using a Haswell CPU (22nm). http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/acers-c720-chromebook... And google claims 8.5 hours http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebooks.htm... (cf 6 hours claimed for the HP Chromebook 11.)

Acer C720 at $249: 11.6" matte 1366×768 screen, 16GB SSD, 4GB RAM, dual-band 802.11n, Haswell-based Celeron 2955U 1.4GHz dual-core CPU.

HP Chromebook 11 at $279: 11.6" IPS 1366 x 768, Samsung Exynos 5250 dual-core Cortex A15 1.7GHz + ARM Mali-T604 GPU, dual-band 802.11n, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 16GB SSD.

Acer chromebook is more attractive by spec.

I'm really confused by the battery life. My Samsung ARM Chromebook last a really long time with only intermittent charging at home. It's also perfectly usable for SSH access to my dedicated server and works well on wifi with my phone and hotspot. I would hope that Google is improving battery life on their flagship devices, not reducing it, perception is everything. I also hope that they keep an ARM model and don't let Intel's marketing dollars overwhelm their partners, while not delivering a comparable battery life experience. I look forward to replacing this with a quad-core processor with AArch64 support, and hopefully KVM.

I'm intrigued by using Chrome OS, but the choices of Chromebooks is pretty sparse. You either have the ultra-high-end of the Chromebook Pixel that costs as much as a Macbook Air 13", or you have the ultra cheap and cheap-feeling low end.

Why can't we get a mid-range one, with a decent keyboard, decent IPS screen (doesn't have to be touch-screen), long battery life with Haswell chip and USB 3. Yes yes...we can just buy a laptop and run Chrome on it, but it's not the same. No ultra-fast boot-ups, no security inherent in Chrome OS itself etc.

I imagine if Google weren't effectively subsidizing ChromeOS machines (by not charging for ChromeOS, and instead hoping you'll spend more time on their web properties and ads), most of these machines would cost a bit more.

All the things you mentioned cost money. There are psychological barriers (marketing speak: price points) where people make different decisions.

For example, $500 is a magic point where something stops being either affordable/inexpensive/casual expense (depending on your financial situation) and becomes unaffordable/expensive/notable.

The average price for a Windows 8 laptop last Q4 was ~$430... so at $280 they're about $150 under that. I suspect that if you start getting close to that $430 mark you lose some of the willingness of consumers to try something other than Windows.

HP is also releasing a slightly higher class 14" with Haswell. I think you probably want something in the $500-$800 range though, and yes that's currently underserved. Chromebooks were originally designed to be cheap and disposable but there now seems to be more of a demand for better quality machines and no one's yet stepped up to fill that void.

HP really killed it with this notebook, but I can't help think that it would be even better with Bay Trail. Running crouton w/ Gnome 3 on native x86 when I need it and Chrome OS when I don't is extremely appealing to me as a Linux user and developer.

I find a lack of Ethernet port slightly if not very disturbing. For a device which requires an internet connection most if not all of the time, why is the only connectivity module wireless access?

Because you can probably buy a USB ethernet adaptor, and hardly anyone uses wired ethernet with a laptop anymore - that's why lots of other laptops have dropped it. Ethernet is a relatively large connector and the port itself can be hard to integrate into current laptop form factors.

do you plug your phone in?

If it had Ethernet-like connectivity, yes.

Because everyone uses WIFI.

Do you have an ethernet port in every room of your house? And you actually plug in your laptop every time you sit down in each room of your house?

Do you plug into ethernet at the coffee shop? Airport? Friend's house? Library? Doctor's office?

No, neither do I. That's why it doesn't have an ethernet port, just like your smartphone doesn't have one.

When given the chance, I plug in an Ethernet port (I always carry an end-to-end Ethernet cable with my laptop). This is because it is faster, safer and a lot more stable than Internet over the air.

If you're on a decently setup wifi network, this isn't true for practical purposes. The connection from your house to your ISP is going to be effectively your bottleneck 99% of the time.

Nevertheless I still prefer a cabled connection. Wifi is a whole new attack vector because you have data packets floating through air. They might be encrypted, but that doesn't mean they can't be decrypted by untrusted parties.

I hope it's not indicative of a trend among laptop manufacturers. Apple removed Ethernet ports from their MacBook Pro Retina, ostensibly to reduce form factor, but also rendering it useless if you're in a place without good wifi,and only ethernet - exactly like my current workplace.

The chromebook really doesn't appeal to me as a concept. The only attractive thing I find about them is their cheap price and the fact that they tend to have good quality hardware for that price.

I could see missing the ethernet port on a MacBook Pro - it wouldn't be unusual to pull files from the LAN that are 100's of MB in size.

But you're not going to do that on a Chromeboook.

Google throws in 3 free years of 1TB storage on Google Drive with every Chromebook Pixel. There must be a reason they think people need that much online storage.

Calling a MacBook Pro Retina useless without wifi is a little harsh, the Thunderbolt and USB ethernet adapters work perfectly (as well as the ethernet ports in the Apple displays).

I used to live on my Dell Mini 9, until it died of crappy netbook hardware (now I use a work Toshiba I've also beaten the crap out of). How easy are these things to Xubuntu?

You don't need to install Xubuntu; you just run XFCE on top of Ubuntu in a chroot environment with crouton and you have a full Linux desktop at your fingertips.

That definitely counts!

So no _real_ Linux? As in on a direct HD partition without chroot?

You can baremetal a full Ubuntu install, but chroot is easier and lets you preserve some niceties of Chrome OS (fastboot, easy interface when you don't need full Linux, etc...).

It's preference. If you want to run Linux straight, you can install Chrubuntu in a pinch, but crouton is much easier.

I find the limitation of Ubuntu very uncomfortable. With most computers you can boot an ISO of any OS without major hassle but those Chromebooks really limit your movement span.

So it's an entry level computer, probably not targeted towards us but more an e-mail and google machine for our grandparents. Which is fine.

Serious question though: Can it print?

yes. Google Cloud Print: http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/

This looks way better than I had in mind. Thanks!

For me, something like Google Cloud Print is awesome. For my mom, it doesn't cut it. She bought the $250 Chromebook and is constantly complaining that she can't print her documents and wants to get a new laptop. She doesn't want to purchase a cloud-ready printer because she already owns a printer, and she doesn't have another computer to leave on and connected to her printer (which is the alternative).

Hmm ... seems like raspberry pi can make a lot of sense in that case. You put the printer behind it. Is it possible?

Great idea! Turns out it's possible: http://www.howtogeek.com/169566/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-i...

Google's done a good job here, obviously. This seems like a remarkably solid piece of hardware, especially at <$300 from a software company. These things are selling. but..

..Right now, if you launch a revolutionizing gadget category its hard not to get compared and contrasted to Apple. There some hard to define (but I'll try) things that Apple is good at in a way that so few companies are.

Apple are so much better at "concepts." Take "apps" as an example. An App is a very clearly defined thing in iOS land. It comes from the app store. It lives on your homescreen. You load data into it via itunes (this part is kinda sucky). When you click it, it's open. When you close it it's closed. There are no shortcuts and no invisible system apps that don't have an icon. The icon is the app. You remove it and the app is gone. If you see two icons, you have two apps. Solid concept (metaphor, whatever). Apple are absolutely anal about this. They will forgo functionality in order to protect the concept. Android/Google, are willing to break the app concept in order to add functionality. That means your new music app can play your music and it can have a nifty widget. It also mean that your Aunt can no longer tell you what apps she has. Pros and Cons.

Chrome, is built from an assumption that a web browser in a box will be all you need by 2013. Turns out it's not. Some things are easier or nicer to do in an app. More importantly, allowing users to install apps doesn't necessarily mean toolbar-mallware-windows chaos on Aunt Jennie's computer. Now that iOS and Android solved that problem, not allowing apps seem silly and restrictive, even for Aunt Jennie. Problem. Luckily Google is not Apple and they can bend the chrome concept (it's a browser).

"You can finally run applications offline and outside of a browser window.. .. list of offline applications is woefully short at this point"

So anyway, apps. What is a Chrome OS app? Is it a website that uses some chrome OS extra goodies? Is it just a shortcut to a websapp?

I google Chrome OS app to see this woefully short list. I get here: https://www.google.ie/intl/en/chrome/webstore/apps-gtd.html.

"Chrome Apps For Your Desktop"

My OSX desktop?.. inside the chrome browser? is my Chromebook my desktop?

click around - LAUNCH YOUR APPS : "Chrome Apps have a new Home" - picture of a chromebook. Looks promising. Most of the other links seem to be for Chrome-the-browser though. A few for chrome-the-thing-that-plugs-into-your-TV-I-think.

"You will need Google Chrome to install most apps"

WTF is "Chrome" anyway? Here's a confusing concept. It feels more like a department than a product line. How is a Chromecast app related to a Chromebook app or a Chrome OS app? What does it have to do with the play store? How do I find out if there is a Chrome OS viber app? What do I google?

Another place where Apple is clean is use cases. If you look at magazine-brochures for computer stores the Dells, Acers & Lentos are inconveniently categorized into "recommended for" groups or somesuch. Recommended for email, students, games. The computers don't cooperate and I can imagine the conversation before printing these things. "Just Say it's like the Acer aspire V3-551 but AMD." Apple's line up categorizes itself.

A chromebook is a good 'secondary' machine. It's also *almost" everything Aunt Genie needs (she needs Skype and the kobo bookstore) which is great. She can get an Acer for Skype and the kobo bookstore. It isn't a hub. So if you want to download stuff from my camera and put it on your iphone, it's a tricky situation.

I suspect that if Apple are considering entering into this market with an iOS powered netbook or similar, they are wrestling with the question of where this fits. Is it a hub that can replace OSX for some people or is it a secondary device that expects you to have a hub someplace else. iOS devices are getting more independent of their hubs, so maybe time will moot that problem.

I don't mean to single out Google. They built a great product. They are looking to solve the problems of the 50% of home users who can't handle windows and hate computers and will always buy the cheapest option. Apps came out of nowhere. Most companies are just as bad at this stuff.

Marketing requires a surprising level of discipline.

>its hard not to get compared and contrasted to Apple.

You make some great points, especially when drawing a comparison with Apple.

However, I believe that most users purchasing these devices are coming over from Windows. When you compare the ease of use of ChromeOS/Android to Apple, it may be second-rate, but the Google systems are miles ahead of the unintuitiveness of the Windows (95/98/XP/7) experience for the average user.

I purchased the Samsung Chromebook for my girlfriend on a whim. I was skeptical, but it's a great device. Far less maintenance than her Windows lappy, and far cheaper than an Apple device. That's a big niche.

I agree. Im glad ggogle are tackling this. MS has got a combination of innovators dilemma and a core culture of serving office workers that makes it hard fr them to output a good modern home user OS. Apple don't do cheap. So, go google.

I just wish they learned more lessons from Apple.

The original point of Chromebooks was to be a cheap and disposable thin clients primarily for businesses and schools. That's still their primary purpose, but they've shown to be more popular with home consumers than original anticipated.

Google isn't bending Chrome OS from it's vision at all. The only thing they've really changed about them (from a big-picture perspective) is that they were originally planned to be netbook sized (in order to be cheap) but that fad died and you can now build notebook sized computers for the same price, so all Chromebooks are notebook size now.

So it's worth to buy this computer as a ssh webdev machine?

Doesn't sound like it given the battery life. Except for short coding sessions it sounds like you would be tethered to a nearby power source, and if that's the case why not use a more full featured machine?

Seriously, i'm trying pretty hard to imagine which use cases this device makes any sense. It seems to have a lot of the same limitations that turned consumers away from the original "netbook" devices (underpowered, poor battery performance, awkward form factor, etc)

Having handled one, it's a lot nicer than the netbooks are. The performance is pretty good, the form factor is much more comfortable in terms of screen size and keyboard size, and the build quality is pretty high. While I wouldn't use one myself (because I want Photoshop / Lightroom), it seems like a great device as school / homework laptop for a grade schooler, for example, or the grandparents use case.

Just want to check your email and browse some web pages with zero hassle? This is perfect for that.

Probably not, the previous Samsung 250 Chromebook had serious troubles with having multiple tabs open and having a smooth typing speed over ssh.

I considered the same and will pass.

- battery life

- the like-usb-but-not-really charger is the biggest disappointment for me

- performance sounds horrible (What, cannot even watch a YT video?)

What is wrong with the charger? The review doesn't appear to mention it. Can it not get enough current through to charge in a timely manner or something?

No, the charger is fine.. For your laptop.

You cannot really charge your laptop with any other USB charger, nor can you use the (quite powerful) bundled charger to power anything else with more than 0.9A.

It's a gimmick. That they used a USB connector is largely useless due to the above: The charger coming with the device isn't really useful for anything but the laptop, the laptop cannot really be charged with your existing USB chargers. That's the source of my disappointment.

why would anyone want to buy a chromebook? Price point?

To give to a relative and NOT do tech support...

People who buy a tablet, but want a keyboard.

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