Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. If Chrome OS didn't start out with an inferiority complex living in the shadow of the massive adoption of its cousin Android, and with Eric Schmidt dismissing the hardware that would run it as cheap and interchangeable, the hardware companies that were early to adopt it didn't help matters. Chrome OS arrived on devices that weren't priced competitively against then-popular netbooks. Since then, though, the Chrome hardware story has been on a steady upswing. Thanks to Acer, Chromebooks broke the $200 price
