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Will HP's $200 Stream 11 Make People Forget About Chromebooks?
theodp writes With an 11.6" screen, Windows 8.1, and free Office 365 for a year, the $199.99 solid-state HP Stream 11 laptop is positioned to make people think twice about Chromebooks (add $30 for the HP Stream 13). But will it? "The HP Stream 11 is clearly both inexpensive and a great value," writes Paul Thurrott. "At just $200, it's cheap, of course. But it also features a solid-feeling construction, a bright and fun form factor, a surprisingly high-quality typing experience and a wonderful screen. This isn't a bargain bin throwaway. The Stream 11 is something special." The HP Stream Family also includes the HP Stream 7, a $99.99 Windows 8.1 Tablet that includes the Office 365 deal. By the way, at the other end of the price spectrum, HP has introduced the Sprout, which Fast Company calls a bold and weird PC that's bursting at the seams with new ideas, from 3-D scanning to augmented reality. (We mentioned the Sprout a few days ago, too; HP seems to be making some interesting moves lately, looks like they're getting on the smartwatch bandwagon, too.) If you're looking at the Stream as a cheap platform for OSes other than Windows, be cautious: one of the reviews at the Amazon page linked describes trouble getting recent Linux distributions to install.
Chromebooks are not just cheap, they are very low maintenance and easy to use. If you buy your mum a Windows laptop she will need technical support. If you buy her a Chromebook after the initial set-up you can forget about it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If people buy these simply based on price then most are likely to be disappointed. My guess is they will be marketing these towards students which is probably the best angle. Assuming they sell an acceptable number of them then only time will tell us if these keep customers happy for a reasonable amount of time. They'll need to make the upgrade to Windows 10 (and Office ?) free AND easy. They'll need to "just work" and stay that way. If these things things get easily infected with malware, spyware, or something more costly like Cryptowall then all money saved will be lost and then some. Windows has a reputation to fix and I'm just glad it isn't my job to try to fix it.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
So HP is pushing a souped up Chromebook, and a bare bones PC, along with bare bones chromebook and the usual standard formfactor laptops. Looks like HP is throwing everything on the wall and is waiting to see what sticks. It might drop the bare bones chromebook price down too. Come Christmas I would not be surprised to see same spec chrome book at 99$ or 129$
Basic selling point of Chromebook is not just the low price, it is a low maintenance streaming device, with a full keyboard and better screen. HDMI out, bluetooth keyboard, ... why would I even think of buying Roku or chromecast, or smart TV?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
lol thus why Enterprise Services is going it's own way. My division at HP is far more concerned with up-time, reliability, meeting SLA's, and 24/7/365 monitoring and troubleshooting than profit...probably stemming from the massive fine we got a few years ago from the Feds lol. Now every time I see some new product I wonder which side it is on...
But personally I think Meg's ideas are mostly working...the split puts both sides in better shape, faster reactions as a corp, and a finer tuned "vision". Of course I'm unhappy seeing some of my friends loose their jobs but that's just corporate life ESPECIALLY in IT and from what I've seen no one was "singled out" it is pretty random. Even while some divisions are laying off people others are hiring...we lost some help desk people but are adding mainframe operation techs and they get paid almost twice as much! Honestly I'd much rather see HP having more "mainframe" level activities going on than expanding contracted help desk operations but we have to leverage the capabilities we have in-office.
I think though that my location might be a "special case" since we're the site of IBM's 360 SABRE location and this system can't be "moved" easily. It's all underground, multiple bubble doors, iris scanners, password-of-the-day stuff. I work a few hundred feet away for almost two years and haven't seen the inside of it but walk around the top of it during my smoke breaks every night...yet I have worked deep inside the Cherokee Data Center for months on end so I have whatever "clearance" to be inside of it technically. Our location is quasi-government entangled and is kinda it's own entity inside of HP lol.
Awhile back, HP made the HP 2000 Laptops running low end AMD Processors and sold them at Walmarts at $279.
Piece of Crap doesn't even describe this PC. These are easily the slowest PC's I have touched in years, and it's not because of Windows 8. (Hell, I think Chrome OS Would struggle on these things.) It's the Hardware components they chose to use with them. Using Low end AMD C and E processors coupled with hard drives with embarrassing slow speed and latency times, it's built to be as cheap as possible and it shows. HP seems to have a track record with this as well, Slipping Tablet, Phone and NetBook Components in full size laptop form factors to convince Granny that she's getting more Laptop than she actually is.
I constantly get these in the shop and I tell the customers there's nothing I can do to them speed wise to make them any faster. Even if you reset them to factory (Which Amazingly removes all of the bloatware down to only essential Hardware necessary items) it's takes practically 30 minutes to boot before you can actually use it. Patching it takes about 1 full day between waiting an hour for it to actually register updates, to installing Windows 8.1, which takes 4-5 hours, and another 6-8 hours installing the Windows 8.1 patches. With just about any other laptop (short of the Toshiba's that follow this same Price model) I can go from windows 8.0 factory to fully 8.1 patched in under 3 hours.
If $279 Gets you crap like the HP 2000, I can't imagine what these $199 systems would be like, Unless MS is seriously giving HP Money each time they sell one of these.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
No. Chromebook is actually the better package for most people.
8 hrs. battery time. Boots in 8 seconds. Zero maintenance. Zero worries about backups. Zero worries about installing programms. Zero virii. Zero synching your photos, videos, audios, whatnot with your tablet and/or phone. Everything in the cloud. Drop your laptop, have it stolen, pour coffee into it - no problem. Order a new one, log on, all your stuff is there and you didn't even have to archive. While the the one is being shipped you can use your friends computer or your cellphone to do the most important stuff until it arrives. I gave my fiance a laptop (IBM Thinkpad, Ubuntu 14.04, all ready and set up) and an android tablet. She used the laptop once. The tablet she uses constantly. Just watching her is a real eye opener.
Anther Point in case:
I'm your type A slashdot computer geek and even *I* would prefer a chromebook over a windows laptop (typing this on Linux btw.)
I'm quite convinced that my next portable computer will either be an android tablet with an extra bluetooth keyboard or a chromebook - routing a chromebook with crouton and installing linux on it is quite easy, and 8 hrs battery time for 299 has a nice ring to it.
The truth is: Google is set to bring the second half of humanity online. They are basically the budget Apple. You pay significantly less with at least as much convenience, if not even more. Google takes care of you and all your computing stuff for free and in turn the may observe you 24/7. That's the basic deal and there is no upside MS can offer to that.
With MS it's pay premium, and get observed, and functionality degraded over time and virii and we want to know all your details before you can use windows unencumbred. Oh, and MS Office is a subscription now. ... Who the eff wants that? ... MS only has a chance to do that for historical reasons, and those are wearing off quickly.
No one I know would want this ugly laptop with windows on it.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca