Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

This is a bad thing for the industry. Every time someone buys a junky $300 laptop filled with bloatware from HP, Dell, eMachines, etc. they are going to have a mediocre experience at best. Then they buy a $200 tablet from Amazon or Google, a $300 iPad Mini or a $500 iPad that while all of those devices should be less powerful, they deliver a MUCH BETTER end user experience.

HP, Dell, Lenovo need to stop selling the bottom of the barrel hardware with bottom of the barrel Windows experiences. The end business result is they are working really hard to sell a zero margin product only to watch Intel and Microsoft turn a tidy profit.

If HP, Dell, and Lenovo want to stay in the game long term, they need to stop catering to the low end.

View on HN

I got an HP Chromebook, and it was amazing. Smooth interface. Slim. Light. Fast. It was only $300. Only thing preloaded was a 100gb Google Drives offer, which isn't bad.

Great as a side-laptop for personal reading / email.

Who says it needs to run Windows and bloatware?

The HP Chromebook 14 (14" 1080p) is $299, and the Acer C270 Chromebook (11.6" 720p) is $249; both of them are Haswell-based.

Not 1080p, unfortunately. And only 2gb ram on the WiFi only versions.

Today. That won't be true next year.

I never cease to be amazed at how people judge things by what's out right now, rather than where the puck will be tomorrow.

Will it be? Screens in low end laptops are not changing so far. It's the same abysmal resolution for quite a while now. The higher end (> $800) are getting better now finally.

Well it opens up the opportunity with supplying school systems with a far cheaper solution. I have seen far too many stories where systems wanted to or did go out and buy the Apple products at far greater prices. The story is always the same, the software was more mature, greater emphasis on education.

Well if open source supporters ever wanted the perfect market its education. Books are going to be gone, it will be an education system of tablets and the like, where are the big projects to put down an open source solution? (admittedly I haven't found any that stood out but I may be looking in the wrong places)

I'm sure it's a bad data point, but I bought an HP 2000-240CA in 2011 and it's been the best laptop I've ever had. It's been apart and back together a few times for regular maintenance (wore the keyboard out and just recently the fan was caked with dust). I like that it's a beater and goes with me everywhere.

Simple and cheap at $340 new in 2011.

I use it for web development and playing older or indie games.

You wore out the keyboard in only two years, and you're willing to call it the best laptop you've ever had? You must have quite the collection of laptop repair horror stories.

Hah! What I meant was that it's a beater laptop that I've banged around and carried everywhere with me. And it's always worked. It's so low cost that I didn't give replacing the keyboard and taking it apart to dust the fan a second thought.

It's the difference between driving a Ferrari and worrying about a minor scratch and driving a station wagon through a muddy road.

Of course a $500 ipad will do better than a $300 laptop.

$200 tablets arentr very satisfying either. Web browsers can't do nearly as much as a cheap laptop can.

I'm reading this on my $200 nexus 7, and I feel quite satisfied, thank you.

While the article said about "holiday PC lineup", is the upcoming machines confirmed for Windows machines?

Since it said Haswell-based with touchscreens, they're almost definitely talking about Windows. Android/ChromeOS tablets don't need that kind of power (and they won't pay Intel's premium where it'd be wasted). The "Ultrabook" moniker is also controlled by Intel which requires a touchscreen to use that label.

Pretty much all the major PC makers have new laptops they announced at trade shows in July/Aug/Sept that they've been holding back until November. They'll be shipping with Windows 8.1 which they couldn't do if they put them on shelves in the summer.

> Android/ChromeOS tablets don't need that kind of power (and they won't pay Intel's premium where it'd be wasted).

Wouldn't be so sure. Acer has a Haswell Chromebook out already, and if Intel really wants to stave off ARM, they'll come down...

And while Chromebooks work with low powered CPUs, they're better with a faster CPU. WebGL is getting real, Google already has Nacl in the browser (examples are 'From Dust', 'Bastion'), and as web apps become more 'native-like', the extra power will be appreciated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com