Before I graduated I worked in the electronics dept of a supermarket chain and we had Samsung series 3 chromebooks -flying- off the shelf at £229, and for good

Before I graduated I worked in the electronics dept of a supermarket chain and we had Samsung series 3 chromebooks -flying- off the shelf at £229, and for good reason. Their target market is non-tech-savvy teenagers and university students who only ever use/need to use SaaS (but don't know it). They want something stylish but functional. If somebody in that market asks you to demonstrate it, they will buy it over 90% of the time in my experience (granted, not a particularly scientific trial, but there you have it.) Why? Three main reasons. (i) Price - the next cheapest laptop will tend to start at 279, 299, and it will have some crappy Celeron chip in it. You can start looking at paying 120 more for something with even slightly comparable speed. Then MS office costs at least 79 quid, and that's only for a year's subscription. 120 quid if you want a permanent activation. Then you will probably be pushed to sell them Norton AV for 25 quid also (due to my strong moral principles(!) I never actually pushed this sale - the store I worked at were probably quite happy to see the back of me) (ii) Ease of use - Google docs + Drive offline is an excellent product, you can do just about anything that the casual education or light productivity user will really easy. No confusing ribbon interface or being overloaded with options. (iii) Quality - supported by a known brand (Samsung), with fast flash memory, a fast ARM processor and a nice anti-glare IPS display. You will get none of those things in any of the Windows models we sold (all under £500, granted) The author of the article, Gabe Knuth, is a full-time tech pro with 12 years experience in application virtualisation on MS and Citrix platforms, according to his profile on the site. So he will find absolutely nothing for him on a Chromebook unless he is a heavy tablet user who desperately misses the keyboard. He is -obviously- not in the target market. But not being able to even -imagine- the target market is just silliness, because the Chromebook is a good product.