Reg man confesses: I took my wife out to choose a laptop for Xmas. NOOOO

It may be a lovely orange but a Chromebook is NOT a PC

Cheap for a reason

Chromebooks are primarily content consumption

devices, not creation devices, and a

£200 laptop is not going to be

as fully featured as a £800 MacBook Air

Don’t get me wrong: Chromebooks have their place in terms of functionality and also price point, but to a lot of users, selling them one is doing them a disservice.

Chromebooks are primarily content consumption devices, not creation devices. It could be argued people hold unrealistic expectations. A £200 Chromebook is not going to be as fully featured as a £800 MacBook Air, or any proper notebook in general.

The same can be said for off-brand tablets that many people will find under their Christmas tree and expect to work just as well as a Samsung or an iPad. These devices are cheap for a reason. Sub-par devices that PC World pumps out for £199, and that last six months, will sell very well for irrational factors such as the shell’s colour.

It doesn’t matter that the CPU is some Chinese chip no-one has ever heard of, that has just enough power to drive the disastrously bad screen.

Is there a way to reconcile these two separate worlds? In reality, the answer is: no, not really. You can educate people as to the pros and cons of the technology but - at the end of the day - the heart wants what the heart desires. The fix for such a scenario is to not ask the gift’s intended recipient but to just buy it and deal with any potential fallout.

This is risking disappointment but it is also tempered against the potentially never-ending questions around "why is it so slow", and trying to explain that any laptop for under £300 is going to be a compromise in some shape or form.

On reflection, perhaps it is just easier for those of us in IT to avoid giving technology as a gift altogether. ®