Though they’ve only been available for purchase since June, Samsung has already decided to drop the price of its Series 5 Chromebooks. The Wi-Fi only version is now $30 less at Amazon.com, priced at $399. The 3G version is now only $449 — down from its original $499.

Acer’s Chromebook offerings remain cheaper at $349 and $429 for the Wi-Fi and 3G versions, respectively — and many comparably equipped Windows 7 netbooks remain substantially cheaper than all four. Whether or not a modest 7-10% price drop will make the Samsungs any more attractive to Amazon shoppers remains to be seen, but many bloggers are skeptical — even though the Series 5 did briefly top Amazon’s best sellers list.

Chrome OS hardware is still coming of age, of course, and it’s bound to take some time for people to warm up to the idea of a laptop with little more than a web browser on board. Once prices slide a bit lower, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if sales really take off — as was the case with another new product the general public wasn’t too hot on at first, the HP TouchPad. If Acer or Samsung can get a Chromebook model somewhere closer to the $200 mark, they’ll likely start flying off the shelves.

Update: It appears this is officially a two-week promotion for now. But we’ve seen temporary price cuts become permanent in the past.

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Lee Mathews

Computer tech, blogger, husband, father, and avid MSI U100 user.

3 replies on “Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks drop to $399 and $449 on Amazon”

  1. The Chromebook is a failed experiment for the general consumer. I’ll take any netbook and slap Linux Mint it for $200. 

  2. I’ve got the CF-48 from Google.  It’s okay, but that’s about it.  Really damn useless away from the house.

  3. “If Acer or Samsung can get a Chromebook model somewhere closer to the $200 mark, they’ll likely start flying off the shelves.”  We will, I hope, see a test of a similar hypothesis when the Asus X101 goes on sale for $199 next month.  An unboxing video from the German site newgadgets.de surfaced last week, with an English version at

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK-ODiFTKSs

    It won’t run Windows without a lot of cramming (only 8GB of storage), but it will offer closer to an ordinary $300-ish netbook experience than a Chromebook does, in that its Meego operating system will let you install and run native applications, for people (like me) who are dubious of the Chromebook idea for that reason.

    I’m hoping I can get a more “orthodox” version of Linux, say Ubuntu, to run on it without an unpleasant amount of tweaking (network interfaces, kernel parameters, /boot/grub/menu.lst, blahahahaHAHAHA!), because (per my email yesterday, Brad) I confirmed with System76 that their $385 Starling 10″ netbook is now out of production, leaving the $599 Lemur 13″ lightweight model (almost a Linux “ultrabook”) as their smallest and least expensive offering.

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