Great Chromebook for the money.
R. Kaufmann (Oct 11, 2017)
on Amazon
This is a small notebook. (See pictures comparing it to a 15" MacBook Pro and a Samsung S8+ phone.) I'm carefully reviewing the hardware here, not Chromebooks in general. But: know the tradeoffs compared to Windows or Mac notebooks. With Chromebooks you will get low cost, great security, ease of management, and secure cloud backups of everything you do, but lose access to many apps, not have tons of local storage, and be a bit "different" than most everyone you work with. Having said that, the world is heading this direction. IMHO a simplified device such as this can grow up to have access to all the apps anyone would want, and will become mainstream.OK, to the hardware. It's great for what it is. Yes, the screen is small (and the bezels are big by modern standards). But the keyboard is fantastic, the CPU is fast, it has *enough* storage to keep enough music and pictures for when you're not attached to the internet; I even downloaded a few Netflix programs to watch on a plane flight. The wifi works well. Bluetooth is great. It has ports! As a MacBook sufferer, I can tell you life with only USB-C stinks. This notebook has USB-3.1, USB-C and a micro-SD slot. Woah!The Google apps (docs, slides, sheets, etc.) work flawlessly. Same with the "simplified" versions of Microsoft Office and Adobe Lightroom. If you're a power user of Office, or the Adobe Creative Suite, this is NOT the machine for you (yet)! (Update: since I wrote the review, Adobe launched the new Lightroom CC that works across mobile and desktop apps... "yet" may be changing faster than expected: this may become a great machine for Creative Suite apps sooner rather than later.)Bottom line: for the price it's a fantastic machine to access cloud services. If the app ecosystem is there for your needs, you'll enjoy a great user experience. Yes, more money can get you better hardware, or a more general purpose operating system. But for something that is incredibly easy to manage, excellent value for money, and JUST WORKS, you can't go wrong.Full disclosure: I work for a sister company of a company that makes notebooks (including chrome books). I have no relationship with those folks, and am writing this review as an individual.
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