Don't buy one. I got the Samsung Series 5 3g Chromebook a month ago, and I definitely regret buying even at its low price point. The OS is still very unstable and not performant. The speakers are very bad (but I wouldn't watch video or listen to music anyway - YouTube/Pandora/Turntable.fm tend to crash quite a bit). The screen is not that great. The only upside is the long battery life but you're better off spending a couple hundred more and getting an Air.
A couple hundred dollars more? A MacBook Air is $650 more expensive than the price listed on Amazon. For that price you could buy almost 3 Chromebooks.
The Samsung Series 5 3g is $500, the cheapest Macbook Air is $835. So, a little more than a couple hundred dollars more, but a lot less than $650 more (even the cheapest Chromebook at $350 would be tops $485 less).
Yes, that model is no longer being manufactured. If you weren't wanting to compare what a new computer costs, this already silly argument becomes even sillier.
To be fair, they are both "new" computers -- IE not refurbished or used. My point was the intent of the OP could have been what he found on Amazon from the respective retailers -- in which case the price point was much closer to what he mentioned than to the price point shoota mentioned. I never meant to imply that we should compare a new Chromebook to a 2008 Model (or a used one, a refurbished one, or one being sold from a illegitimate retailer), which it does seem like it comes across as I reread my comment.
Its a stupid argument to begin with on my part, but I felt it was worth a meager defense.
The Macbook Air starts at $999 according to http://www.apple.com/macbookair/. Looking at the cheapest Chromebook vs. cheapest Macbook Air it is $650. I'm not considering educational pricing here.
Which is being sold from Apple on Amazon. I do not know if it is the latest one, but given the OP's original statement, was it ever implied that it was the latest one he was referring to?
it won't matter. The OS is the issue, not the machine. I have a Cr-48 that has the same issues as above, in ChromeOS. In Ubuntu Classic, it's almost dreamy (the two extremely notable exceptions are having to reboot to take advantage of the 3g, which only ChromeOS can seem to start, and the trackpad, which I have no answer for.)
