I'm thinking of buying a Chromebook. My main use for it is to replace an old Asus Eee PC that runs Windows 7 and that I have sitting next to the sofa which I use for looking things up when watching TV or for watching/reading game walkthroughs when I'm gaming. I'm pretty sure that just about any Chromebook could easily handle this job as it's not very demanding.

But then I learnt that you can run Linux on modern Chromebooks and I thought it might be handy if I could do basic web development on my Chromebook, not so much for when I'm at home (I've got a nice Linux set-up on my Intel NUC for that) but maybe if I'm travelling and needed to update a client's website quickly. So being able to run a LAMP stack and my favourite editor (Visual Studio Code) would be nice. The little research I've done suggests that this is certainly possible, but that generally 8GB of RAM is recommended and preferably an Intel processor rather than ARM (preferably Core i3 or i5 rather than Celeron).

So I started looking to see what Chromebook models are available in NZ and I must say I was very underwhelmed at the range. PB Tech have 63 Chromebooks on their website but only 11 are in stock, and of those 11 only 1 has 8GB; an HP Chromebook 14 G5 Delux for $1253 and which can only be sold to limited liability companies, local councils, government departments and schools!

So where do people buy their Chromebooks from? Is it better to buy on Amazon rather than a local store?

I was hoping to spend somewhere in the region of $600 - $700 but maybe this isn't realistic for what I want and I should forget about doing any dev work on it and just go for a basic model.