[lllr_finger]

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.

[shantly]

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.

[Kipters]

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

[ajross]

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.

[gowld]

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

[ajross]

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.

[Kipters]

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.

[bscphil]

> 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.

[black3r]

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.

[Kipters]

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...

[pjmlp]

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

[ajross]

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

[pjmlp]

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