[trsohmers]

Indeed it is.

This is a horrible time to buy this... Assuming Samsung's new Series 3 ARM Chromebook (Rumored Exynos 5420... "Eight core" CPU+Mali T628) keeps the same price this year ($250), then HP's model is left in the dust. No one should be buying a new Nexus 4, 10, or Chromebook until mid november if they want to have a cutting edge device.

[ZeroGravitas]

A ChromeOS changelog from a Samsung employee referred to the Exynos 5420:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...

"This adds Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling support for exynos5420 and this also adds the Adaptive supply volatge support for exynos5420."

Which points towards future devices using them.

[joezydeco]

Thanks for confirming. I'm a little boggled why HP would roll out an identical product an entire year after the fact, unless HP is just that messed up internally.

[lnanek2]

There are whole companies that exist entirely on their enterprise sales. So selling their own branded laptop to their clients makes sense even if it is a year behind Samsung.

Honestly, working for a business that buys enterprise devices, 1 year behind is stunningly good. Buying business Android devices with a bar code scanner there's something like a 7 year product life cycle so you get some stunningly old hardware, for example.

[ja27]

With a few exceptions, our local school district only buys HP, so this could finally open up Chromebooks for our schools.

[nfoz]

Do you remember the HP touchpad fiasco? :)

[trsohmers]

In some ways I wish Mark Hurd remained HPs CEO. I think they could have really competed with webOS in the long run (be a good 3rd/4th place, making sure the Apple and Google are actually innovating and not becoming a duopoly). Then again, we would never have had the fire sale, and I would never have had the pleasure of working on the Android port to the Touchpad.

I wish they kept Apotheker a bit longer... He had the real potential to be a bigger laughing stock of the technology circle than Ballmer.

[nfoz]

I reeeeally liked webOS.

This whole industry has always suffered from lack of viable competition. There never seems to be enough market to support third players, where we're lucky enough to even have 2 market leaders. sigh...

maybe that's true of other industries as well..

[peregrine]

First thing I checked was the CPU/Memory. Definitely waiting till the updated version comes out.

Only benefit I see with this model is that its an IPS display. We'll see what Samsung or Google produces this November.