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by recuter 4589 days ago
Just a heads up:

Google is basically subsidizing Chromebooks at this point. An Acer C720 costs as much as a Kindle and is very close to some sort of price floor ($199), yet it comes with $120 worth of Drive storage (100GB @ $5 x 24 months) and some other stuff.

You can blow away ChromeOS and use these as a regular PC laptop. 1/5 the price of an 11" Macbook Air yet comparable in many ways. I feel like they are giving them away to buy market share.
3 comments
teraflop 4589 days ago
> 1/5 the price of an 11" Macbook Air yet comparable in many ways.

Comparable in some ways, yeah, but from the specs, it looks to me like there are more differences than similarities: the C270 is a bit thicker and heavier, the CPU is way slower, you get 16GB of storage instead of 128GB, 2GB of RAM instead of 4GB, the display is lackluster (according to reviews), the camera is lower resolution, there's no keyboard backlight... and so on.

That said, it's still an incredible value for the money.

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recuter 4589 days ago
You actually get 4GB of RAM on the $249 model and it takes an SD card (11" air doesn't). It is ever so slightly thicker and heavier, yes; 0.75 inches – 2.76 lbs/1.25kg vs 0.68 inches - 2.38lbs/1.08 kg.

Close enough you couldn't tell them apart in a backpack. Certainly not as well built and precious but then again you can treat it like a disposable Kindle, throw it around, even if you destroy 4 you're still ahead.

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tedmiston 4589 days ago
> the display is lackluster

This is putting it very nicely. It has low contrast, and really poor viewing angles in terms of legibility and color. It's plenty bright enough though. Now if only I could get f.lux on it...

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abrowne 4585 days ago
Have you starred this issue? https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=217173
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ceejayoz 4589 days ago
$120 of Drive storage doesn't cost Google anything near $120, though.
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recuter 4589 days ago
It costs them something and the margins Acer makes are somewhere between 2% and negative 2%, on $249 SKUs...
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brianberns 4589 days ago
It's only got a 16GB drive. You might be able to run another OS, but you won't be able to install many apps, or store much data.

Just checked: Windows requires 20GB storage for a 64-bit processor, so you couldn't even install it on this box.

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