HP is fucking insane.
I clicked the link to check out the laptops. I modified the default selection to be Business Class rather than Consumer laptops. For shits & giggles I selected the very last laptop in the list & chose to customize it.
Giving it Ubuntu subtracts a nice chunk of change. Reducing the screen to the minimum reduces it even farther. No WiFi+BT drops it some more. No fingerprint reader, no VPro, no WLAN, all drop the price. Bumping up the ram to a full 16 gigs & going for the 128gig SSD brings it up a bit.
For a laptop with no additional software, no WiFi/BT/WLAN/biometrics/VPro/"TouchPont" remote control, the lowest grade screen available, and no other frills, the price was STILL over Two Thousand.
HP's smoking scrotum sweat if they think that's a bargain, and the price goes !UP! from there if you put Windows back on it!?!?
HP's fucking insane...
So I went back to the original W10 Laptops page. Sure there's some seemingly inexpensive models in the Four Hundred bucks range, but they're all AMD CPU's, 4 gigs of ram, and piss poor specs.
In order to get a 5th generation Intel i5 & 8 gigs of ram, be prepared to visit the land of One Thousand dollars or more, and that's the *base* price.
I know you get what you pay for, but FFS that's not going to go over well with all the parents doing "Back To School" shopping for the kids; if your choice is a thousand bucks for an HP with Win10 or Two Hundred for a Chromebook, that expensive HP is gonna gather dust.
*Sigh*
Yeah, I know, it's an article about Win10 laptops offered by HP so I shouldn't be talking about their Chromebooks, but it just makes my head hurt how a "bargain" laptop starts at over a thousand dollars in HP's version of Reality.
Hell, if Bargain = $1K+ then Apple products are merely "Low Cost" and that 32gig 5th gen i7 quad core 3GHz with the 1Tb SSD is enough to start looking like it might take all of a month of Junior's allowance to afford!
*Disgusted cat barfing noises*