With all the choices on their way for consumers when it comes to Chromebooks for this year, we hadn’t really heard much from previous Chromebook manufacturer HP in the way of a new laptop for 2014. They have come out with a new Chromebox however and would likely enter back into the market for Chromebooks at some point, as they saw decent sales of their Chrome OS laptop from last year and stated that they were surprised at how well it had done. For one customer in Australia that goes by the YouTube name of Lachlan, the HP Chromebook 11 was the Chrome OS laptop of choice when it came to selecting something that he could use for his lightweight typing needs, yet when he ordered it he got something entirely different from what he expected.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing but rather just surprising. At first it appeared what he got was an entirely new and unannounced Chromebook model in the 11-inch size from HP, but as it turns out what he actually ended up with is just the redesigned model that HP has put out and that has actually been out there in retail already for a short time. It didn’t seem to be widely advertised which explains the matter of confusion on the buyer’s part. He stated that he was expecting the glossy white unit with other mention-able features like the IPS display and the colored accents(which most of us may remember from its initial release), yet he got something that looked more like a smaller version of the HP Chromebook 14 instead. He states that the model number for the Chromebook he purchased is different from the original one that was put out last year. The model number from the old HP Chromebook 11 is 11-1101, while the model number on the unit that Lachlan bought is 11-2001TU.
While the newly redesigned Chromebook 11 does look a little bit different from the original model, the innards are largely the same, save for the fact that Lachlan says this variant model feels heavier and seems to use a different display type. For whatever reasons, HP saw fit to redesign the HP Chromebook 11 to look more like the HP Chromebook 14 and swap out the display type. Australian retailers appear to already be carrying this newly redesigned model, so perhaps we’ll see the change out to this one in other regions soon as well. Do you like this new redesign or were you more fond of the old one?
