| I agree. I recently (6-9 months ago perhaps) got a cheap one - I think it was about 150GBP new. So very cheap, but its CPU is some celeron thing that frankly sucks for modern websites with their heavy javascript payloads. If you tried to open gmail + google calendar + a google doc, it slowed down to an absolute crawl - like 5-10 wall-seconds to change tabs, things visibly redrawing on the screen etc and things slowly loaded in. It becomes incredibly frustrating to do anything web-based except perhaps read one single tab at a time - forget anything interactive. (That said, my wife has one that also has a celeron that she uses almost exclusively for netflix and it seems fine for that) I think that the cheap celerons that the cheapest chromebooks get just are not good enough - I've had chromebooks for years and years ago those chromebooks with weak CPUs (sometimes obscure ARM ones even) were totally fine and would zip along without issues, but now the weakest celerons just do not seem to be able handle modern web UIs. So that puts us in the sad situation where if you want to buy a chromebook, you need to consider one with a non-celeron CPU, but those then tend to be really expensive in comparison (e.g. double or triple the price of a celeron one), at which point you might as well just buy a windows one (or even a macbook air or something similar for not much more). It is a shame - I don't know the bulk trade prices, but I am guessing that the difference between the weakest possible celeron and something less-crap like a base pentium thing is probably only like $10-15, but would make a huge difference to usability, but you just don't seem to be able to buy anything without jumping up to Intel i5s for an extra £500 etc |