If you’ve been considering purchasing a Chromebook, now might be a good time: the fourth generation of HP Chromebooks are here, and they look pretty nice.
For $279 HP offers a 14-inch Chromebook with 4GB of RAM and a 1.83GHz Intel Celeron processor. The full-HD display (1,920 x 1,080) comes with in-plane switching (IPS), so it’s got a wide viewing angle. It’s one of the cheaper Chromebooks to offer these features.
There’s no mention of the new laptop on HP’s page as of this writing, but Best Buy is offering them right now in silver and sky blue colors. There’s also a similar laptop with 2GB of RAM for $249, but for only $30 more it’s probably worth getting the 4GB model.
The hard drive, at 16 GB, isn’t huge, but on-board storage is never a key feature of a Chromebook, which are meant to be used almost entirely with the cloud. If you need more local storage there’s a USB 3.0 port, so you could supplement that with an external drive if you wanted to. There’s 3 USB ports in all.
With HDMI, you can connect your Chromebook to a TV or modern display, and a VGA port means your older monitors will work too if you want another desktop.
The Celeron processor doesn’t run too hot, meaning this Chromebook doesn’t have a fan, so it’ll be nice and quite.
ChromeOS, an operating system that offer access to the Web an not a lot more, is divisive among power users who miss their desktop applications and games. But in the past few years the OS has made strides, particularly in the education market, for being easy to use and administer.
Recent announcements suggest ChromeOS and Android will eventually merge, meaning future updates could bring Android to Chromebooks, but Google hasn’t been totally clear on this yet — they backpedaled after the issue got press.
If you want an even cheaper version of this laptop, you can get a smaller screen: the 11.6-inch model with 2GB of memory sells for $199. It’s pretty small, but for some people portability is more important than display size anyway.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.