Man I can get a refurbished gaming laptop for less than this goes for plus there are ultrabooks and and cheaper laptops for basic computing for the average user.

You know that "app store" in Chrome? It's pretty much the same thing. It's very limited, hardly any developer truly support it, and there aren't too much open source tools to develop properly for ChromeOS. If you run everything HTML5 ot Java, then Chromebooks are fine. I work for the Public School system in Toledo, my title is IT Developer. Pretty much I'm leading the district in ChromeOS and Google services(I couldn't be called an Administrator though because in our contract Administrator is reserved for NT based managers. BOO). Chromebook have a place in schools and the enterprise field who utilizes Google services. PARRC testing is done on Chromebooks in elementary, Jr High, and Highschool. Dedicated native applications for Google's office apps, and unlike Windows managing them takes almost no effort. You just require another ChromeOS device, any linux box with the right packages for ChromeOS deployment, or ChromeOS deployment tools in Windows/Mac. They accept active directory, domain functions, and even cloud based network storage with ease. Like I said, simple to manage. They're cheap too. 😀 We spend about $184.67 per Chromebook we buy from Dell, where as Windows laptop we spend about close to $673.72. Eventually we plan on moving to ChromeOS because of its simplicity. We will still have Windows machines, but majority of our office, teacher, and student computers will be ChromeOS based. We've played with dual booting Windows and Chrome OS on some Chromebooks, Dell Chromebooks give you access to load multiple OS's on one drive as does the Pixel but the Lenovo brand Chromebooks and ChromeBox does not. We did run into the problem that storage space is not even close to being enough for dual booting, and also it's hell getting into these Chromebook's to upgrade them and then we lose warranty support from Dell when we do that. So not worth it.

$184.67 per Chromebook sounds ok, Id consider one for that price just to play about with, and yea for schools and such they have a place, can't really see any use for them in the home when you have a PC too

Can you not just wipe it and install Linux? what's the purpose of ChromeOS anyway?

$184.67 per Chromebook sounds ok, Id consider one for that price just to play about with, and yea for schools and such they have a place, can't really see any use for them in the home when you have a PC too

We're public so we're tax exempt. Even more so we get discounts for being a place of education.

Can you not just wipe it and install Linux? what's the purpose of ChromeOS anyway?

They're simple. Simple to power up, update, support, use, setup, deactivate, and reactivate. Really it's Google's push into the enterprise world. Linux is not easy to manage, or cheap at that matter. Windows can be annoying to manage because they're so many steps to it and so many addons, and is very expensive. Plus, the second you wipe the restore partition of the Chromebook you lose all your warranty.

We're public so we're tax exempt. Even more so we get discounts for being a place of education.

Next time I'm in Ohio.... 😀

I can get the education discount if I bought one for personal use, but I'm not a public service so I'd have to pay taxes. 😀

haha, Ive never even been out of the UK in 36 years, so... lol

Haven't been to the UK ever. 😀 Want to sometime! I really do like Chrome OS from an office point of view, Google drive works great, sheets are great, documents work just as well as Office from Microsoft, and I can get them from any computer with a network. Even better is to the general public, it's free.

If you like cold, rain and clouds, it's a great place to visit lol I think my most disliked part of computing is Office, be it MS or Google docs etc, just find it so tedious, Im much more into the OS and Hardware side of things

Can you not just wipe it and install Linux? what's the purpose of ChromeOS anyway?

Some you can..... The purpose of ChromeOS....is for Google to collect even more data about users than they already do...