I rarely see working (as in usable, encrypted and not total rip-offs) hotspots in Germany. Anywhere.

Not in Cologne (~1 million) nor Dortmund/Bochum (part of the 'Ruhrgebiet' metropolitan area, which Wikipedia estimates includes about 12 million people).

Guess not a first-world country?

We're probably on the same side: I would NEVER go for a Chromebook. Always online is stupid. Mobile sucks on trains here, so forget about data on the move. Hotspots don't exist. There are still lots of places that I visit that have little to no usable data connectivity.

I have no clue what the Chromebook is for, but it would be a giant failure in my circles and my environment.

In the third world, internet access is more common than you think... My wife's family gets more reliable internet and wireless coverage than they do electricity or plumbing. When I went down there, you could go to a textile shop or open air market and I'd pick up open WiFi hotspots..m

Not to mention that "first-world country where ubiquitous internet access via wifi hotspots has been implemented" doesn't particularly describe, say, the US very well. The picture painted to try to make these contrasts tends to itself stand in contrast to the picture that is real life.

Not that the over-arching sentiment of "you shouldn't take the existence of an always-available network connection for granted" is a bad one. It's just that saying, basically, "These devices aren't suitable everywhere; consider market segments that may be less mature than the big, contemporary Western one you're most familiar with, for example" is a little bit of a weird and not terribly convincing way to express it.

In support of this, in my SO's city in Brazil there's many more public wifi places than anywhere in the Netherlands.

And this is probably not the device for them.

The whole point of a netbook (which is really what a Chromebook is, with the tainted name dropped) is something that has most of its functionality on the web rather than a local device.

Never understood why "netbook" became a bad word. I loved mine; it was sturdy and simple and cheap and I never worried about throwing it in a bag and taking it wherever I was going. My mindset was "so what if it gets trashed, it only cost $250, I'll buy another one!" - but in fact my one netbook lasted five years, and by then the category had disappeared. That one Eee pc outlasted two macbooks!

I think part of it was that there were so many horribly specced Windows devices sold. As in, the specs were not good enough to handle the OS. 2GB, a single core first gen Atom, and a 5200RPM drive is painful to use even Windows 7 on.

Had one of those machines for work. Even after a fresh install, the lag was positively infuriating.

Ah, that makes sense. My Eee came with an SSD, and I installed Linux the day it arrived. I can see how it would have been a different experience with Windows and old-school hard drives.

It honestly wasn't awful. I used an MSI Wind U100 for several years - I actually used it for school until June last year. I gradually transitioned OS's - WinXP, OSX, then Ubuntu 11.04. Ran all of them like a champ, video playback was the only sticking point.