> When you spend $500 on a computer, it's not going to be very good.
Uh? The two last machines I bought were under $500 and they're working pretty well. Price and quality aren't always correlated.
Did you get an SSD for that price? Probably not.
That's the compromise that the reviews were complaining about. It's instant-on, but there is only 16G of space. Well, if you paid $100 more, then you'd have 80G of space and it'd be instant-on. Or, you could have 500GB of space, but it wouldn't be instant-on anymore.
The less something costs, the more compromises there are. That's all I'm saying.
Actually, to be precise, one of the machines was an early Eee PC, costing 300 EUR, with a 4 GB SSD. :-P
Yeah, the 901 was a nice machine. Great screen, working wifi, and very light. I "replaced it" with a newer Eee PC last year, but the newer model was more expensive, had the same CPU, was heavier, and had a much shittier screen. Worst laptop ever.
I replaced that with a Thinkpad X220, and it blows both of them away. (But it cost twice as much.)
And of course, many manufacturers don't even allow dongle-free 3G at all -- good luck getting a MBP with Sprint service.
The same goes for most of the points. Yeah, it has a shitty wifi card. Of course it does, so does nearly every laptop ever made. Yeah, it needs updates. Do you think for $500 they personally hand-inspect each device before shipping it to you, making sure it's up to date? Nope, they burn the OS image to a million hard drives 3 months before the release date.
When you spend $500 on a computer, it's not going to be very good. Chrome, Windows, or otherwise.