Bring up Chromebooks in any online crowd, and you’re practically guaranteed to get some version of a now-stock reaction:

Pshaw! Why would anyone pay for a browser in a box?

Or maybe:

Harrumph! Isn’t Google about to get rid of those and make the whole thing a part of Android, anyway?

Or the time-tested standby:

Pish tosh! You can’t do anything on those. Get a real computer instead. (Pshaw!)

These are the sorts of misguided statements sentient creatures have been making since the earliest days of Google’s Chrome OS platform (y’know, way back in the early 1700s, when I first started writing about this stuff). A lot has changed since the Chromebook’s debut — both with the software itself and with the way we hominids use technology in general — but the stubborn old inaccurate assessments remain.

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