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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Everyone I know who actually got a cr48 just wanted a free laptop, saw the news on slickdeals or a similar site, gamed the signup process and ended up running Windows or Ubuntu on it. Meanwhile the couple of people I know (including myself) who wanted to actually try ChromeOS out in the real world to see if it makes for a suitable netbook OS got nothing but belated invitations to buy Samsung's new Chromebook.

Perhaps at least part of the reason that nobody has found the easter egg in the cr48 was that the way they were distributed was far too random to get them into the hands of people who really wanted to use and/or hack on them as ChromeOS devices.

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My girlfriend got one and she wouldn't dream of putting osx or windows on it. She wont even let me throw the jail break switch and get a proper shell. She uses it mostly when she travels because it's light and has 3g, but its never far from the couch. She had a few issues with it and reported them all as bugs, and while there was zero feedback on the bugs most of them were fixed silently soon after. The only major drawback is a lack of MS office. For anything work related she has to go back to her laptop.

I wanted to share a story about it being used as intended.

I enjoy mine as well. Before getting one last December, I had a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 running Windows 7. I gave that netbook away in April after I realized that I hadn't powered it on for months.

The latest revisions to ChromeOS have been quite nice and I find it to be very usable. It is not for everyone but I like it.

I signed up on Google, wrote 3 or 4 paragraphs about how I would use it and provide worthwhile feedback, got one (to my great surprise), and have been running it in dev mode ever since. I submit an average 10 reports a week, from 'this page breaks xxxx' to 1000 word UX narratives. I don't hack on it as much as I should, partly because I'm not too certain about what parts of the hardware are meant to be exposed.

Out of curiosity, how was the signup process gamed? (I assume you mean the request for one, not throwing it into developer mode.)

I wanted one because I have a business client who fits their target demographic quite well, but needs something shoved under their nose before they'll really consider it.

But, I don't have much of a public, google-able reputation. I figured that was why there was no "shiny" for me.

P.S. I also figured they wanted more of a technical shakedown than business, at that point. But, I'm pretty good at that.

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