That was a bad call from Acer to use an HDD, regardless of how much storage it really has. It's a Chromebook. Another bad call for both is that they used a crippled Intel Celeron with terrible GPU graphics (remember you need the GPU for video acceleration, as well as other stuff), and it made the machine more expensive and with poorer battery life, instead of a brand new ARM CPU and GPU, like Samsung did.

That's a ludicrous statement. Let's remember that this machine is $50 cheaper than the vaporware Samsung ARM ChromeBook. And they clearly did everything possible to hit $200. It seems pretty hard to argue that they could have made it cheaper by using another CPU.

There was no plausible ARM SOC that Acer could have used 3 months ago (Exynos 5 is clearly not available in any kind of quantities, no other A15s are shipping even on paper, and anything else would be too slow).

Now, as for the HDD, they were clearly optimizing for a $200 pricepoint. If doing a HDD instead of an SSD was what it takes to get there, clearly that's what they had to do. Or are you suggesting that trying to make a $200 ChromeBook at all was a bad call? Because I have to strongly disagree there -- the main original complaints about ChromeBooks were that they were expensive and had incredibly crappy CPUs. This device took care of both those things. That seems totally worthwhile, even if there were other compromises in there.

(Now, this HP on the other hand looks like a completely unjustifiable device.)

>Let's remember that this machine is $50 cheaper than the vaporware Samsung ARM ChromeBook.

In what way is the Samsung ARM ChromeBook "vaporware"? It seems to be available: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-XE303C12-A01US-Chromebook-Wi-F...

More importantly it's owned by millions including me.

There doesn't seem to be much benefit to the ARM over the "crippled Intel Celeron" so far:

http://gigaom.com/2012/10/22/intel-v-arm-the-chromebook-perf...

Anandtech didn't seem to find much benefit from an SSD (they actually opened the Acer up and put in one they had lying around).

I'd link but the site seems down for me at the moment.

I don't think the SSD _can_ make up the difference. ChromeOS is a cloud OS once you boot there isn't much hitting of the disk at all.

Well, "once you boot up" is the key phrase here. One of the greatest things about CrOS is how fast it boots up and how fast it comes out of a sleep state. ISTM that SSD is important for these.