You have to take this in stride. As an example, have you ever bought a laptop with a built-in WWAN card? Lots of hassle and custom software to "activate" your device. Activating my Thinkpad X220 took nearly two hours on the phone with Sprint, because they were convinced that there was no way a Thinkpad could use Sprint. Only Dell. And of course there was no interface like "log into your Sprint online account to activate this thing". Nope, "call some random people that know nothing about computers and maybe you'll get it to work." Wonderful user experience, and that's with Windows 7 from Microsoft right there. (I erased Windows after this step, of course.)
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.
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.
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.