Google’s New Chromebooks Are Like Little MacBook Welfares
By John Brownlee (11:31 am, May. 11, 2011)
The one-two punch of the
iPad and the new 11.6-inch
MacBook Air have basically killed netbooks off, but Google doesn’t seem to be paying attention: they’ve just announced the first two commercial netbooks running the new Chrome OS. Christened ‘Chromebooks,’ they’re like little
MacBook Welfares.
On sale starting June 15th through Amazon and Best Buy, the first two Chrome netbooks will be from Acer and Samsung. Google’s been making a point of downplaying processor, hard drive and RAM specs for Chrome OS, since the entire idea of Chrome is doing everything in the cloud.
As such, the distinction between the two netbooks is their slightly varying sizes (the Acer is 11.6 inches, the Samsung 12.1), battery life (6.5 hours on the Acer,
8 hours on the Samsung), style and price.
Otherwise, both netbooks are roughly identical, and have obviously taken some cues from the
MacBook Air, including their 12-inch sizes, their ubiquitous solid state drives, their slim form factors and their lack of an optical drive.
Both netbooks with come with 3G as an option. The Acer is the cheaper of the two, starting at just $ 349, while the Samsung will cost you a little more, with
prices starting at $ 429 and costing $ 499 for the 3G version.
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John Brownlee has written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Berlin with a charming girlfriend against whom he is currently enjoying a thirteen game cribbage winning streak, and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov’s most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.
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Google’s New Chromebooks Are Like Little MacBook Welfares 
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