How to make your own Chromebook

I hate to be negative, especially given how coveted CR-48s are/were, but after about a week of getting mine I just had to put Ubuntu on it. Yeah, I spend 70% of my time in the browser, but I just can't give up that other 30% (dev stuff). It's not really worth having a laptop for me without a decent text editor/full ssh capabilities.<p>It might serve the masses well, but my point is if you're the type of person who would make your own you're probably better off not doing so.

<i>and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering.</i><p>I think the low-ball hardware is very deliberate. If Google can prove this level of hardware can work just fine for it's purpose, it disrupts the market further. For $700+ you could definitely get better hardware than what is available on the iPad or iPad 2, but you certainly pay more for that device, don't you?

&#62; and to top it off, you'll have a spare Windows 7 license that you can give to your mom<p>I'm pretty sure it won't work that way (legally). That license is very unlikely to be transferable for use on any machine other than the one it was bought with.

I think the price difference <i>may</i> be accountable for in the specs. Most of today's netbooks come with spinning drives, and an SSD upgrade would cost $50-$100 more.

Will they get the battery life? The boot time? If they can, I'd be interested in going this route.

But then you don't get the 100MB "free" 3G data plan from Verizon.

Best trying to do your Apple I