I bought my dad an HP Chromebook 14 on Woot. Then they showed up on Woot again a month or two later and I got one for my wife. I haven’t changed my opinion of Google (no privacy) and still lean toward Apple and Microsoft products. My dad has a gmail account and so does my wife. Google already has lots of info about those accounts, so I figure we aren’t giving up much more info as long as we don’t add apps with bad permissions hopefully we’ll be ok.
The big advantage to me is support. Set it and forget it. Auto update. No support calls for updates.
Pros
- Fast for the money, at least in our experience with the HP Chromebook 14
- Open, wake, and go is very fast
- For email and web browsing only users (my dad) it is tough to beat for ease of use
- Pretty secure design for browsing with sandboxing and auto-updates
- 200 MB free monthly T-mobile data on HP deal (still available via some outlets and at HP)
- Not enamored with Google Docs due to experience with formatting issues, but the HP 14 works great with Microsoft Office Online and autosaves to OneDrive
- Extra Google Drive storage included, at least for a while (2 years?)
Cons
- My concerns about privacy with Google
- Security if you count Google’s access as insecurity
- Not for the thousands of new and legacy Windows applications
Had I known about the upcoming HP Stream notebooks coming soon, maybe I’d have waited, but so far so good.
