The low end of the Chromebook market is well-served, partly because Chromebooks do best in the cash-strapped education market and because the simplicity (and limitations) of ChromeOS are a better fit for budget hardware. For people who want something high-end, there’s always the $999 Chromebook Pixel, but that leaves a big space in between for people who want to make something that looks and feels nice but doesn’t cost a ton.
Certainly, there have been efforts. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 had a gorgeous 1080p IPS screen but a relatively weak Intel CPU. Dell’s Chromebook 13 is solidly mid-range, though the best features (including a 1080p screen, faster chips, and more RAM) are reserved for the higher-end models. And now there’s the HP Chromebook 13, which is merely a decent Chromebook at its $499 starting price but a full-on Chromebook Pixel competitor if you’re willing to pay more.
At $499, you get a 13.3-inch 1080p screen, a Skylake-based 1.5GHz Pentium 4405Y (which despite its name is a relative to the low-power Core M), 4GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, and a 1080p screen, which isn’t bad for the price. A Core M-derived Pentium is still going to deliver stronger performance (particularly in the single-threaded CPU and the graphics departments) than the Atom-derived Celerons and Pentiums that ship in many low-end Chromebooks.
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