To be fair as far as I can tell, there is no directly comparable Windows Acer Aspire One. All the 11.6" Acers I see run on a different chipset, and they're all only $20 cheaper than the Acer Chromebook.
When I first tried out the Chromebook, I thought the same thing about price. But I'm pretty sure Microsoft licenses Windows for these netbooks VERY cheaply, so there's not much price to be shaved by swapping out the OS.
To hit a significant price difference Chromebooks would have to skimp on the hardware compared to their Windows/Linux counterparts. The Chromebook I have already struggles with flash, so without dropping support for that completely I don't think there's much to trim off the CPU end of things. There's a little room to skimp on the HD compared to Windows, but not a ton. So basically I don't see any route other than being ad supported, rentals or some other type of Google subsidy for Chromebooks to actually become cheaper than the low end of the netbook segment.
The Chromebook I have already struggles with flash
A little off topic, but I find it interesting to note that what Apple has gotten in exchange for the flak they got for not including Flash on the iPad is that they don't have any reviews like this. People consider the iPad to have good performance.
If Google had taken the same route and left out Flash, not only might they have more room to trim the CPU, it might be a better value proposition performance-wise.
I assume the chromebooks support html5 video, which youtube also supports. Apple was able to have iPhones still work with youtube without supporting flash, so Google could have found a similar workaround even without including html5 video tags.
Though the iPhone uses a YouTube app, which isn't the web. The allure of the Chromebook is that it can play the whole web, and YouTube is a big part of that. YouTube does have html5 video, but it is still in beta and isn't available for all videos. And it is opt-in.
In addition, with the focus on enterprise and education, I believe that Chromebooks had to support flash as a requirement.
They don't really need to skimp on hardware. They just need to use the inexpensive ARM chips over the expensive Intel chips. That should cut at least $100 from the retail price. I can't believe they did the same mistake as with Google TV.
What does Windows have to do with it? Couldn't you achieve "Chromebook-level-functionality" with a Linux model (since you'd be living out of the browser)?
I was mostly just trying to do an apples-to-apples comparison based on price. I couldn't find any Acer linux laptops that ship with linux in a quick search.
Functionality-wise, yes there's no reason you couldn't get linux on par with Chrome from a leanness standpoint by just stripping out services and booting into the browser.
When I first tried out the Chromebook, I thought the same thing about price. But I'm pretty sure Microsoft licenses Windows for these netbooks VERY cheaply, so there's not much price to be shaved by swapping out the OS.
To hit a significant price difference Chromebooks would have to skimp on the hardware compared to their Windows/Linux counterparts. The Chromebook I have already struggles with flash, so without dropping support for that completely I don't think there's much to trim off the CPU end of things. There's a little room to skimp on the HD compared to Windows, but not a ton. So basically I don't see any route other than being ad supported, rentals or some other type of Google subsidy for Chromebooks to actually become cheaper than the low end of the netbook segment.