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

Apples and Persimmons

[wkwilley2]

It ought to cost 800 dollar less, it's a Chromebook.

And an HP.

Chromebook?

[Iamthecheese]

Can I ask the reason, with that much power, not to include a real OS? Also it's disingenuous to name high specs, then say "starting at $lowprice", and THEN say the low specs that go with the low price. That smells like slashvertising.

Re:Chromebook?

[LWATCDR]

Odds are you will see a Windows version of the same machine. I just hope you can put Linux on this one or the Windows version... Oh and that the touchpad does not suck.

Re:Chromebook?

[youngatheart]

If you're asking, you aren't going to like the answer, but I'll try anyway.

Like many /.'ers I do support for family. Guess which laptops and computers get screwed up? Windows of course. If I don't want to have to fix stuff on a regular basis, I rule Windows out immediately. Macs seem a bit pricey but I could get over that, the problem I have is that typically people find it hard to use at first, which for some of my family translates to forever. (One of the people I support gets quite upset if Internet Explorer isn't on the page he left it on.)

You know what doesn't get screwed up? Chromebooks. I can hand one to a nine year old niece or to her grandmother and they'll be able to do everything they want and it won't be messed up when they hand it back. We have two that we keep on hand for just that sort of purpose. They're both cheap and a few years old, and they still keep up with all that their target audience asks of them.

At this price though, this wouldn't be for my niece or her grandmother. This would be a Chromebook for me. I'm a veteran of OSs ranging from Xenix to Microsoft Server 2012, so I feel comfortable with pretty much whatever. About the only question that matters to me when I pick an OS for my own use is how much effort it will require.

In years past, I would compile my own custom kernel and tweak optimizations for all the software I ran which made me a big fan of Gentoo and FreeBSD, and I'd spend hours tweaking Blackbox. These days? I take the easy and fast route for most things. My current desktop dual boots Windows 10 and Mint and most of my servers run CentOS. If I'm working, I'm either on a remote command line or in a remote desktop, so what good does Windows or Linux or Mac on the laptop do for me? The only thing I ask of my local computer most of the time is that it render web pages well and not give me grief over streaming videos when I'm taking downtime.

So this is a tempting laptop for me. It would do everything I need in a snappy fashion, including running video on my real displays and take zero maintenance. That's what makes Chromebooks most appealing, they don't take effort. Plus, with this higher level of hardware, if I ever decided I needed something else, I'd just put Linux or BSD on it and it'd be as good for the money as most of the alternatives I might have purchased.

Shill much?

[swimboy]

Comparing this to a MacBook Pro is like comparing a Chevy Spark to a BMW 7-series. The MacBook Pro is Apple's big-boy-pants laptop with a real i5 or i7 processor, and a real OS. This has a Core m processor and ChromeOS. Not even close to the same thing, and nobody who'd be happy with one would even consider the other.