HP’s New Chromebook ⇥ theverge.com

Dan Seifert of the Verge:

At an event in New York City this morning, Google announced the new HP Chromebook 11. The Chromebook 11 is a low-cost Chrome OS laptop, with an 11-inch, 1366 x 768 pixel IPS display and Chromebook Pixel inspired design. The new laptop, which Google is selling for $279, is available to order from Google Play, Best Buy, Amazon, and direct from HP today.

I sort of get the idea behind the Chromebook: we are all pretty much living in our browsers these days, so a cheap, tossabout kind of notebook which only runs a browser, and therefore can have a tiny amount of internal storage and a low-power processor kind of makes sense.

But for most people, “pretty much” living in a browser means a small portion of that time is spent with desktop-class applications which can’t be replicated on the web. There is no web equivalent of iPhoto, for example, which is extremely popular and regularly-used. You can’t keep a photo or music library on the machine because of its limited storage.

For some people, though, this makes sense: if you had a desktop computer at home, you could chuck this in your bag to take notes in class on Google Docs. It’s a cheap, stripped-down computer which, oddly enough, has a feature I really want in my MacBook Air: an IPS display. It’s built for people who use a full complement of cloud-based services, and are okay with the limitation of being able to use nothing but.

Though, if the Chromebook is supposed to be a line of cheap computers, what was the point of the $1,300 Chromebook Pixel?