No, Google specifies that’s only for new items.
I feel chromebooks have a much larger audience. I’ve been IT for many years and I’m visualizing more and more environments so all that’s needed is a web browser and a VPN. Clients love the lower cost, the disposable nature of Chromebooks and the uncomplicated aspect of not needing IT to do all the BS, and just concentrate on the backend systems.
It’s a gamble. I got the 1 TB with mine from the December 16 Woot. I think it depends on whether it was previously redeemed for that machine.
I got all the offers too (got the initial 100mb & then jumped on the 1TB when I heard about it).
Maybe factory-refurbs resets it to get all offers, unlike buying used from another source??
I picked up one of these for my wife during the December Woot offering. (She loves it).
I gave it to her Christmas morning, but just got around to doing the T-Mobile thing last night since she has kept it home and in our wifi. I wanted to activate the mobile data last night so that HP or T-mobile could not change their mind on me!
I do not know if it would have been simpler if I had set it up on initial start-up, but it did take a call to T-Mobile to activate the SIM card. The SIM card came in a credit card sized card and I needed to “punch” out the smaller SIM card (not hard at all) and put it in the side of chromebook. Online instructions said that it would automatically become live once I disabled the wifi, but it did not. So I called T-Mobile. They transferred me to a far away land and the gentleman had NO idea what a chromebook was. He kept talking about my mobile number and eventually I realized that I did need a “phone number” to be my account number, so I let him go ahead. I needed the IEIN number from the underside of the Chromebook (small black sticker), and the number off the 5x7 inch paper that came with the Chromebook announcing the free data. Unfortunately, nothing clearly stated all this. Fortunately, it did all come in a plastic bag and I had not thrown it out by mistake!
After T-Mobile activated the FREE DATA PASS FOR LIFE (which I would recommend you call it), it still took about 20 minutes to activate. Well, I also restarted the chromebook, so I am not sure if it was the time or the restart.
Then using the new “phone number”, I created a T-Mobile account at My T-Mobile. When the mobile data started, there was an apparent automatic refresh of what my wife had on the computer (she did have many Chrome tabs and one tab with Google Docs open). The refresh (or something with the mobile data startup) had used 13MB of her 200MB. We’ll see if that was just some start-up fluke. For sure, the 200MB is for quick, emergency or intermittent usage, not a replacement for WIFI.
Bottom line, mobile data setup was a little frustrating, but if I had:
- Asked for my “Free Data Pass For Life” for my laptop,
- Knew where to look for the IEIN and
- Knew where to look for the Activation number (on the 5X7 paper), AND
- If I knew that having a “phone number” was not a sign that he was misunderstanding me, a mildly annoying call (I stayed calm and they stayed calm, so no real worries) would have been even easier.
If it tells you anything, I bought one of these for myself in the Woot Off earlier. It really is fast with the 4GB Ram and the Chrome OS. With Dropbox integration into Office Online in early 2015, I could see myself using this little guy quite a lot. Cheers and good luck with T-Mobile.
Service manual: