HP Announces All-Metal Chromebook 13: Thinner Than MacBook Pro, Costs $800 Less

On Thursday, HP unveiled a new Chromebook 13. Designed in collaboration with Google, the Chromebook 13 sports an all-metal body and is merely 13mm thick while weighing 1.29kg. It sports a 13-inch display with 3200x1800 pixels resolution and is powered by Intel's sixth-gen Core M processor, which comes coupled with up to 16GB of RAM. There's a USB Type-C port as well, and the company is also promising up to 11.5 hours of battery life on a single charge. The retail price of the HP Chromebook starts at $499, and will launch in the US later this month.

Comments

Re:Apples and Persimmons

[drinkypoo]

They ought to give it to me for free for being willing to even consider carrying something with an HP logo on it around in public. If it doesn't completely suck, I might be willing to say so. So far, everything I've had from HP since the Kayaks has been hot garbage, and their support has been as well. The support experience is actually the primary reason I won't even consider anything from HP. Never again.

Misleading Trash Article

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA

"Entry-level models will likely have lesser specs: the laptop can be configured with a 1920 x 1080 pixel display, 4GB or 8GB of RAM, and processor options including Pentium 4405Y, Core M3, and Core M5 processor."

That's the entry-level model that costs $800 less, not the one you're advertising, you fucking shill.

Re:Chromebook?

[greenfruitsalad]

i do not like limitations of ChromeOS but it is currently the ONLY way to get a haswell/broadwell/skylake laptop with linux with proper power management. i've yet to see a non-chromeos laptop that can enter a state lower than PC3 (package state, not core).

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux...

so I, for one, am interested in this new chromebook. i currently have a haswell chromebook with crouton installed and i have never experienced such battery life with a linux machine before (not even on dell sputnik). it's a crappy cheap machine but i'm finding myself using it almost exclusively these days. it's the first computer i can leave the house with while leaving the charger at home.

Re:Apples and Persimmons

[AmiMoJo]

It looks pretty good for the money. You can of course run other operating systems on it. Linux, certainly, maybe even Windows. As a Linux machine it's pretty cheap for the spec.

If anything it seems way over-speced for a Chromebook. Since Android is Linux based it should be well supported for people wanting to run Linux.

Re:USB-C port

[markus]

I believe, with the exception of the printer, the answer is yes to all of your questions.

And if your printer was built in the last couple of years, there is a good chance it supports Google Cloudprint, allowing you to print to it any time your Chromebook is connected to the network. No need for any wires.

If you have an older printer, you'll need a helper application to run on another computer though. So, yes, that's a little awkward but it is a problem that will go away over time, as hardware gets updated.

Re:Apples and Persimmons

[Shoten]

And an HP.

The dirty little secret of the laptop industry is that the big-name laptop brands - Dell, HP, Apple, Toshiba, etc. - do not actually make laptops. They're made by Taiwanese companies called ODMs - Original Design Manufacturers. They're like OEMs, except they also design the product. The brand name just slaps it in one of their boxes before re-shipping it to you. About the only thing the brand name tells you is what type of warranty service to expect. The entire industry is very secretive about this, and makes it nearly impossible to tell which ODM actually made each particular model laptop (most brands use multiple ODMs).

The Macbooks are made by Quanta (they're the only ODM Apple is currently using for their laptops; the old plastic Macbooks were made by Asus/Pegatron). Quanta also happens to make most of HP's laptops. This is why all those "laptop reliability reports" which break it down by brand name are bunk.

True...and not true.

The implication of your post is that an HP is not really an HP, but something entirely designed, sourced, and built by another company but with HP's name on it. This is not the case. HP buys components from other companies, and other companies often do the manufacturing...but the design of the laptop, its specifications, and essentially everything that determines how good it is are entirely HP's doing. The same is (clearly) true of Apple. The fact that the manufacturing is outsourced isn't really germane; you'll never have an Apple and HP computer that, side-by-side, are entirely interchangeable.

Disclaimer: I used to work for HP. Please don't hold it against me...

Re:Shill much?

[Solandri]

The new Skylake Core M processors are actually better than a mobile i5 (they have 4MB cache like an i7, vs the 3MB of the i5). They just throttle more aggressively when hitting thermal limits because the manufacturer has put in a smaller cooling system. It's why you see them beating i5 laptops on certain benchmarks, while losing badly to them in others. If the benchmark is short, the Core M doesn't thermal throttle, and the larger cache gives it an edge. If the benchmark is long, the Core M throttles and is loses. (This wasn't true of the Broadwell Core M - those would only turbo boost on a single core. But the Skylake Core M will turbo on both cores just like an i5 or i7.)

I'm wondering if some manufacturer will notice this, and stick a Core M in their laptop with a regular-sized cooler, to effectively give you a "cheap i7" (only difference between the mobile dual core i7 and i5 is 4MB vs 3MB cache).

The major distinguishing features of the MBP are:

• Calibrated 100% sRGB screen. Lots of other laptops have screens which hit 100% sRGB or close, a few even cover 100% Adobe RGB. But if you don't do graphics, photo, or video work, you're not gonna notice the difference between a 100% sRGB screen and a 80% sRGB screen (pretty much all IPS-type displays can hit at least 80%). 100% Adobe RGB OTOH is very noticeable (think of the AMOLED screens on Samsung phones), and it's sad that we went backwards from NTSC (roughly the same color gamut as Adobe RGB) in the CRT days, to sRGB as a standard on flat panels. The MBPs are one of the few laptops whose screens are calibrated at the factory. But anybody doing color-critical work will own their own colorimeter and do their own calibration, rather than rely on a generic color profile.
• Iris graphics. This is just Apple's way of bypassing a design flaw in the Macbooks. They don't have vent holes, so the insides get really toasty. No the metal chassis does not help heat transfer because there's a layer of insulating air between the hot parts and the chassis. When you combine a heat insulator with a conductor, the insulator wins. A better solution is to use vent holes to remove the heated air and replace it with cool air. The lack of vents on the MBPs means a discrete GPU is out of the question, forcing Apple to resort to other means to improve 3D graphics performance.
• PCIe SSDs. While these can exceed the SATA 3 limits, they only do so for sequential read/writes. That makes the extra speed only really useful for certain tasks. The vast majority of computing tasks are bound by the 4k read/write speeds, which are still around 30-70 MB/s unqueued for the best SSDs - well under the SATA 3 limit. Video editing is one of the few tasks which benefits from the higher sequential read/write speeds (which admittedly many MBPs are used for). But if you're not doing that sort of thing, about the only time you'll see the extra speed of the PCIe SSD is if you're copying movie files to/from an external PCIe SSD. Otherwise its performance will be indistinguishable from a regular SATA 3 SSD.

The MBPs are extremely good tools for the intended audience, and I recommend them in a heartbeat for anyone in those fields (graphics artists, photographers, videographers). But for anyone else, you're wasting a lot of money on features which won't benefit you in any way.

Re:Apples and Persimmons

[macs4all]

The Macbooks are made by Quanta (they're the only ODM Apple is currently using for their laptops; the old plastic Macbooks were made by Asus/Pegatron).

Sorry, no.

No doubt that Quanta does lots of ODM work for those generic Wintel laptops; but Apple laptops are designed by Apple, period; have been for years.

Quanta is simply a Contract MANUFACTURER used by Apple to BUILD MacBooks. Has been for years.

Same thing for Asus/Pegatron. Contract MANUFACTURER Only.

You apparently don't understand the difference between DESIGN and MANUFACTURING. I can find NO reference to Apple using either of those companies for anything other than Contract MANUFACTURING, not DESIGN work.

Prove me wrong.