When we reviewed Acer's $199 C7 Chromebook, we didn't think it was perfect, but we were willing to overlook many minor flaws in the face of its $199 asking price. Today, Slashgear unearthed an upgraded model—there's an Acer product page that lists a $299 version of the C7 with a larger battery, 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB, and a 500GB hard drive instead of a 320GB model.
Of these three upgraded specs, there's only one that really impacts the core features of a Chromebook: the battery. Indeed, the four-ish hour battery life was one of the worst things about the C7, and this boosted model promises about six hours instead. However, neither the RAM nor the hard drive will really benefit Chrome OS, which is mostly happy with 2GB of RAM and doesn't require more than a few gigabytes of disk space. Add this to the fact that the $199 C7 is extremely easy to open up and upgrade yourself and it makes even less sense, though doing so will void the laptop's warranty.
The upgraded model seems to nullify the key selling point of the C7: it takes something that is most notable for being the cheapest Chromebook Google sells and makes it the third cheapest Chromebook Google sells, after both the $199 model and Samsung's $249 ARM Chromebook. It might be useful if you'd like to install an alternate OS like ChrUbuntu without voiding your warranty by opening the $199 model up to upgrade it, but otherwise our recommendation is to stick to the cheap one.
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