Chromebooks are very successful in the kinds of market where a facility needs to buy them by the thousands for staff/faculty. Schools, for example. They use all the Google platform apps Docs, workplace Gmail sheets etc. all integrated, kept on the cloud so that a device that falls in a river has not lost a shred of data. They’re able to be locked down with admin policies and bottom line is the cost per unit is very low. And you get the great feeling of the people who are in charge of all this being entirely clueless that every fucking byte of data is being harvested and analyzed, aggregated, and monetized.

Same, my mom is 72 and uses one. It's a life saver for her because it's so strait forward.

Because android means ARM, and I want there to be more mobile ARM devices that can run regular ol' Linux. Currently there aren't very many of those that aren't either Apple (and therefore mostly useless because Apple tries hard to make sure Linux doesn't run very well on their hardware) or otherwise pretty expensive. Who knows, maybe these turn out to be good low cost ARM Linux machines. Though I won't be holding my breath.

The first one was really excellent (except for the os). 4:3 ratio screen, backlit keys when it was kind of rare still, solid aluminum body still light, cool charging indicator.

Might have gone somewhere but they decided to kill support for it, like, three years later. Three years for a $2,500.00 laptop is a big FY to the buyers.

Still, as a piece of hardware, pretty neat. But that was then. I think they were still not evil back then.

Yep - I have one. It isn't bad, though eventually I need to get it off chromeos and running a 'proper' system.

It does use passive cooling, so the cpu is basically on fire constantly. And having it shutdown isn't really shutdown, so every time I go to poke it, I need to recharge it to like 5% before it has enough juice to boot.