HP Stream Laptops at Walmart. How Much Computer Do You Need in 2023?
I saw some $179 HP Stream Windows 11 craptops at Sprawl Mart yesterday.
And I was like, “Really? HP is still letting Microsoft command them to sell computers that barely work? How big is the market of people who haven’t already fallen for these?”.
16 GB of RAM is “barely enough” these days, due to software bloat, if you’re using more than several programs at once.
They sell Windows 11 systems with 4 GB!
You can barely use Linux productively with 4 these days. Much less Windows.
With Windows 11 and 4 GB, you can barely even boot the computer and load one program. These things don’t age well because they can barely handle a single use case that people are going to take them home for.
They are not comparable to Chromebooks, where Google has at least made a Linux-based OS centered around the device, planning out that it MUST work well with 4 GB RAM.
Windows always needs a new PC, and a good one, because it’s designed to force people to keep upgrading hardware when Windows “slows down”. It’s deliberate. They make Windows slower and more obese over time to “feed the pigs” over at Intel and AMD, who could otherwise not sell very much hardware.
The reason why moving over to Linux feels like you’ve turned back the clock and bought a new PC again is because there’s nobody trying to sell you a new one.
By far, the worst and most bloated thing I do on Linux, is not even the fault of Linux, it’s this trend to bigger, fatter, Web browsers for a more obnoxious Web experience. Not the fault of the base OS, which has barely increased in system requirements in more than a decade.
This HP Stream funny business cannot possibly be as successful as it was to start with.
Thanks to the “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” concept, people who bought a previous model with Windows 10, and then didn’t even have enough storage space to upgrade to a newer version of Windows 10, probably don’t fall for this trap, again.
So the business model of fooling people who have never seen an HP Stream into buying another really bad computer is almost certainly self-limiting.
Other customers who bought the Stream complained of:
Poor battery life.
HP putting the keyboard buttons on in the wrong places.
Broken screens, from the factory.
Computers that suddenly booted up to a black screen, seemingly for no reason, one day, with no obvious repair. (Common problem with Windows.)
“45 minutes to load one [Web browser] tab.”
One reviewer, on Amazon, claimed that there was static buildup and every time he went to type something, the keyboard shocked him.
One more note: Have used this on a treadmill and there is massive static electricity on every key. On other laptops there’s some static on the machine at first so you can ground yourself and then type just fine. But this one delivers a shock for every. single. key. stroke. Ouch.
-“S Larson”
Multiple complaints that even if you don’t use the C: for any user files at all, you eventually can’t install a Windows update, even if all of your files are on an SD card.
For $80 less, you can get a Raspberry Pi 4 Personal Computer.
It’s contained in a keyboard with lots of ports. You get 4 GB of RAM and an ARM CPU, you load the OS and store your user files on an SD card of your choice in size.
It runs Linux OS images that are actually made planning on the fact that the thing has 4 GB of RAM instead of being an OS that was meant for 16 GB systems that was put on the HP Stream after-the-fact.
Hell, for $50 less you could buy a Chromebook. (With support for Linux and Android applications.)
I don’t know why, exactly, Microsoft continues to get away with convincing OEMs to cheapen and denigrate their brands to pretend it has something in the same league with small computers that were made to at least work properly.
HP Stream is a clear example of Microsoft convincing other companies to fall on their sword to serve Microsoft.
If you handed me one of these HP Streams for free I might take it and see if I could shoehorn Linux on it somehow, but I would certainly not risk $179 of my own money on one given the things I have heard from people who did.
From what I’ve read on Reddit, at least some people using the HP Stream have installed Arch Linux, but they couldn’t install Grub (the bootloader), and for some reason systemd-boot (LOL) worked. Maybe HP and Microsoft can “fix that” so that word won’t get around that you can at least use a real operating system if you have one of these things.
The HP Stream is a Microsoft panic response “but they still don’t GET IT” to the Chromebook. Which is $50 cheaper, runs faster, and is Linux.
Many people who get a Stream use it… to go back to whatever Web site they bought it from and talk about all the problems they have with it that make it impossible to use.
Which is exactly what you would expect from a <$200 thing that came with Windows.
The market for new devices is limited. Largely by Linux. It’s feasted off of the legacy UNIX systems and now it kills Windows too. ⬆