Best Buy and other retailers seems to be getting rid of their HP Chromebook 11 stock, and right now no one knows the official reason why that is happening. It could be because the HP Chromebook 11, while having great design, and a better IPS display than last year’s Samsung Chromebook, it costs $30 more, has the exact same processor (why?!), and it seems to work even worse than that Samsung Chromebook, according to many reviews.
When Google showcased the HP Chromebook 11, I thought they nailed the design, and it was so good that I thought its design definitely had some Google influence, and it wasn’t just HP making something this beautiful. However, what I thought was baffling is that they were using the same Exynos 5250 from last year, which is a dual-core Cortex A15 chip with a Mali T604 GPU.
Considering that such a chip is still pretty low-end for a laptop, it’s really surprising Google and HP weren’t trying to use the most powerful and cutting edge chip out there – something like an Exynos 5420, a Tegra 4 (like the HP Slatebook X2), or a Snapdragon 800. But what’s even more surprising is that HP somehow managed to make the performance worse compared to last year’s ARM Chromebook, even though Chrome OS should have improved performance by now. So what’s going on there? Is HP really that clueless about making laptops these days that can match a certain performance at a certain price point?
We’ll see if they can fix this quickly, because it’s not just a matter of one bad laptop, it’s a matter of ruining HP’s image for Chromebooks, and it’s also hurting the Chrome OS image a little, so Google may want to get this situation fixed soon, too, and get the HP Chromebook 11 back in stores as soon as possible.
Chromebooks aren’t exactly flying off the shelves right now, so bad PR at this point could be fatal for it. Personally, I’d much rather see Google start focusing on making Android 5.0 a serious alternative to Windows and Mac OS X anyway, but with the Chrome OS boss as the Android boss, too, now, we’ll see if there’s any conflict of interest in making that happen.