I've never been a fan of Clamp's work. I watched episodes of Cardcaptors as a kid because I was waiting for Pokemon to come on, and what I had read of Xxxholic made me bored. I had heard favorable things about Chobits, so I wanted to give it a fair chance. While it's good in some places, there are places where it really falters.
One of the better parts, I believe, of the story is Hideki. Since he's from the countryside and hardly ever goes to the inner city, he knows very little about technology. This way he acts as a proxy for the reader, who also may not know the specifics about the technology of this story's universe. He also adds a humanizing aspect to the story and is a very relatable character, even if he has his stupid moments like when he can't recognize what a map is.
One of the problems that I had is that the story doesn't go far enough. Some parts of the plot skim the relationships people have with persocoms, usually of the romantic kind. However, we see very little else of the kinds of people that would have persocoms. The beginning of the story has Hideki find Chi in the trash, so maybe this is how people would treat theirs if they didn't work right or just didn't want them anymore. I don't like when a series gets too negative, but I think this series could have used a little more pessimism to even out how saccharine it feels at times, and not in the "charming kids cartoon" kind of way. We only see the positives but rarely, if never, see the negatives.
It also felt really heavy handed at times. The story is interspersed with this children's book talking about how "one of them" tries to find "the one for them and only them" among the humans; it's pretty obvious what the story's talking about. It was charming at first, but then it happened so often it just became vapid. Yes, we get what the story's talking about, now stop reiterating what you told us five chapters ago, which also reiterated what was said five chapters ago. That's to say nothing of when people start to go into a diatribe of their inner thoughts. What they say in a few pages could have been summarized into a few panels. It just makes the story drag, and I read the manga as an omnibus so it felt like it was taking forever. It becomes especially bad near the end of the story.
I'm kind of glad I got to read this. Now I don't have to worry about when I'm going to read it and can focus on stories I want to read. Though I didn't like it in particular, that doesn't mean someone else won't either. It's not a bad series, I just think it's kind of directionless. It tries to be profound but comes across as shallow. It tries to be a romance when the romance is far less interesting than everything else. As an addendum, the two government persicoms Dita and Zima could have been removed from the story entirely and nothing of value would have been lost.