I own a Series 5 chromebook. It's hands down the worst machine I've ever owned. I really wanted to like it, too. My issue is that I tried to use it for stuff like reddit, youtube, and whatnot, and because it has no swap space it would just kill background tabs once I had more than 3 or so open. Basically it's a machine built for browsing the web, but because of the way I (and possibly others) use the web it's not useful for that purpose.
I have to put in a good word for the Samsung here. My wife's MacBook finally died, so she got a ChromeBook as a stop-gap, but in reality, it's really all she needs for basic surfing, Google Docs/Drive and watching CBS streaming (for stuff not on Hulu/Roku/NetFlix).
It's cheap, adequately quick, easy to use and has all-day battery life, and charges up at night with the iPad and iPhone used by my toddler.
I'll grant you that if you only do one thing at a time, it works all right. I just tend to jump around a lot -- I use Tree Style Tab for Firefox just to figure out how I got somewhere -- and the Chromebook is a really bad machine for that purpose.
I doubt the Chromebook was ever designed for people like us. We demand far more from our technology and multitask in ways the average user simply doesn't. My Android tablet is nice, but I can't even open up 10+ new tabs at once on a whim and let them all load in the background without it dying.
And forget having them all loaded where I left them when I next return to Chrome.
A friend of mine once put it that if you're the kind of person that thinks a Chromebook is neat, you're not the target market for a Chromebook. I think you and he are both right. The only reason I even attempted it is because I damaged my Series 9 so much that it wouldn't start, so for a few months I just used what I had.
