Chromebook killer?
Acer on Tuesday announced a pair of "online-oriented" Aspire One Cloudbooks. You can think of them as Chromebooks for Windows users, at least in terms of price and hardware. Or you can view them as modern day netbooks for the Windows 10 era of computing.
No matter how you slice it, these inexpensive laptops could boost the adoption rate of Windows 10, assuming they're a hit with customers. Alternately, they could carve out a niche following in the education sector, which would still boost Windows 10's adoption rate (just not as much) with the added bonus (for Microsoft) of bumping Google's competing Chromebook platform out of the market.
Acer's Cloudbooks could also flop. Either way, we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves, so let's reverse course a little bit and look at the hardware and features.
There are three models. The first, and least expensive, is the Cloudbook 11 (A01-131-C7DW) available this month from Microsoft. It runs $170 and features an 11.6-inch HD (1366x768) display, Intel Celeron N3050 dual-core processor, Intel HD Graphics supporting DirectX 12, 2GB of DDR3L memory, 16GB of internal storage, HD audio (two stereo speakers), USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports (one each), HDMI output, headphone/speaker/line-out jack, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, SD card reader, 640x480 webcam, and of course Windows 10 Home.
There's a second model (AO1-131-C1G9) with twice as much storage (32GB) for $190, and it too will be available from Microsoft this month, though a bigger upgrade is the Cloudbook 14 (AO1-431-C8G8).
The Cloudbook 14 will be available at Walmart in October for $200. It will sport the same specs as the $190, but with a 14-inch display and a 3-cell battery instead of a 2-cell.
All three will come with a one-year subscription to Office 365 Personal and up to 1TB of OneDrive storage.
None of this may seem all that exciting for power users, but then again, enthusiasts don't represent the target audience here. The appeal is the low price tag for a laptop that runs Windows. Like Chromebooks, these could be viable options for little Johnny returning to school or as a second (or third) PC for lightweight computing on the go.
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From maximumpc
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