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I used an Acer Chromebook 13 (Tegra K1-based) for a couple of years, not as my primary machine, but as my only laptop. I paid $350 for it on sale, in 2014. Generally, it worked just fine. 99% of the stuff I do on a computer these days is via a web browser, so I didn't feel like I was missing too much. I also highly appreciated the light weight, fanless design and 10+ hour battery life. And the touchpad was seriously good, I'm talking Macbook-level quality, an absolute delight to use. However, it did have some performance issues. Forget having more than 10 tabs open at the same time, I had to install The Great Suspender to avoid slowdowns. Having music playing in the background from Google Play Music while simultaneously browsing other websites was impossible. Initially, it would play 1080p Youtube videos just fine, but thanks to various updates, codec changes and such, I had to force it down to 720p30 by the end, just to be able to watch videos without frame dropping. And of course I couldn't install anything on it that wasn't a Chrome plugin/app. So no Spotify client (and the current web player sucks, big time). No games. No decent video player, and the preinstalled one can't play videos with AAC sound, probably due to licensing issues. After some time, I got fed up with all of these issues, so I sold it and bought a refurb Thinkpad T420, also for around $350. It's bigger, heavier, has a worse touchpad and gets worse battery life. On the other hand, the performance is light years ahead and I can install everything I want, not just whatever can function in a browser. |