On 31 March 2015 at 17:18, Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote:

What makes the current Intel ones less suitable? Most of the current crop are not that expensive themselves and look to be decent performers.

The merit I'd see to ARM-based ones over Intel ones are in the area of battery consumption. Wee ARM CPUs often drink less power. (Of course, if you drop battery consumption of the CPU, you're still left with whatever the screen eats as a strict minimum...) The merit to Intel-based ones are that some software (particularly video-related stuff) cares about architecture, and mayn't have been compiled for ARM. It is of value to have something $100 cheaper, and the new ARM-based ones seem to be that. (Of course, it might turn out that the screen isn't as good, and that this is a disqualifying factor.) I'm liking my Samsung ARM-based Chromebook well enough; I'm running Debian "in behind" via the Crouton layer, which has been working fine. I'll bet that by the time I care for something more, there will be a newer model with more storage, memory, and CPU than I presently have.