HP’s Dragonfly Chromebook is the most exciting Chromebook I’ve seen in a while. The device, which blends high-end specifications with premium hardware design, was announced at CES Back in January. and now, HP finally revealed the price of this thing: A consumer version of the Dragonfly Chromebook is expected to ship this summer, and it’ll cost — get ready — $1149.
Well, that’s not as bad as it could have been. The Dragonfly Foundation Model Listed with an MSRP of $2,165 as of this writing, it’s the highest starting price I’ve heard for a Chromebook. However, $1,149…a lot of money.
For this exorbitant price, This Dragonfly device will include all kinds of advanced features. It will be the first Chromebook with the Intel vPro platform, a staple in high-end business PCs. It also has the world’s first capacitive touchpad on a Chromebook, a screen option that can go up to 1,000 nits of massive brightness, an HDMI port, and 12th-generation Intel processors. Current generation Intel chips often don’t make it to Chromebooks that fast after their release.
Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Yoga ChromebookAnother time a company tried to add a Chromebook option to its premium line of business, it started at $909 at the time of release (and I thought that was pretty high). on time). Other companies have experimented with high-end Chromebooks. Samsung did a great job and very red $999 deviceand Google’s convertible Pixelbook (also $999) Pioneering devices at the time of its issuance. Both devices only stopped at the $1,000 mark, but we still didn’t see any of the excellent value for the price tags after our testing.
Also keep in mind that the base price of the Dragonfly is $1,149. HP tells me that this base model will have a Core i3-1215U, 8GB of memory, 128GB of storage, and a QHD+ touchscreen (maximum is 400 nits, not 1,000). That’s way too expensive for those specs, even on a Chromebook. And I imagine many people shopping in the Dragonfly price range would probably want more.
This puts the Dragonfly Chromebook in a slightly strange space. On the other hand, there aren’t a lot of competing options for high-end Chromebooks. On the other hand, you can buy a well-built Windows laptop with similar specifications at this price. High-end business laptops, in general, are not good deals. It tends to be an arena where manufacturers can really show off the engineering they can do as they target customers with limitless pockets.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t Chrome OS enthusiasts who would like it on something like the HP Specter or that there aren’t any benefits Google’s OS can claim on Microsoft systems. But for Chrome OS to become popular in C-suite, good hardware will not be enough; Chrome OS should be able to match the software support Windows currently offers. If the Dragonfly Chromebook is as good as it sounds, Chrome OS will need to live up to the plate, and how well it does that could hint at the future of premium commercial Chromebooks as a class.
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