This morning I found an email ad in my inbox for a $99 Lenovo Thinkpad notebook. As you may know, Thinkpads have been my longtime favorite for the styling, longevity and amazing keyboard. So of course this ad piqued my curiosity so I clicked on it. As I read the specs, my excitement was replaced with disappointment. First I noticed that it had an Intel Celeron CPU which isn’t the worst thing in the world; it’s low powered, sure, but it may be just right for some applications. Then I noticed 2GB of RAM: What computer made in the last 10 years has 2GB of RAM? It just got worse and worse: 16GM SSD storage: there is no way that is a practical amount of storage for Windows. So when I looked up the OS, I discovered it was ChromeOS. Ah ha! It was starting to make sense now. And even more so when I read that it was refurbished, but not by Lenovo, but by some mysterious 3rd party, who likely removed the other 2GB of RAM.
But even with 2GB of RAM, ChromeOS would be very under powered. I think watching a single YouTube video would slow this notebook to a crawl. $99 of hard earned money could be spent elsewhere. So I searched for an affordable Chromebook and found this:
Lenovo 14″ IdeaPad N42-20 Chromebook, Intel N3060 Dual-Core, 16GB eMMC SSD, 4GB DDR3, 14-in Display, 802.11ac, Bluetooth, ChromeOS … $212.94. (Amazon)
Sure, the IdeaPad is Lenovo’s budget line of notebooks and not quite as nice as the Thinkpad line but I’m impressed with the value the Ideapad delivers. The Intel Dual-Core Pentium is so similar to the Celeron line that I’m not sure why Intel bothers to differentiate them. 16GB of storage is as close to zero as you can get in an SSD drive but you don’t need much with ChromeOS because everything you do is cloud-based (i.e., Google G-Suite, Office 365). But this notebook has Bluetooth and 802.11ac wifi which means that it will support high-speed wireless up to 1.3Gbps. Plus you get a nice, large 14in, 1366 x 768 display. Somehow Lenovo packed all this into a package lighter than 2.5lbs.
Chromebooks aren’t my thing because I need more power than that which they can provide but ChromeOS is a perfectly affordable solution as long as you keep in mind that you will be 100% cloud and don’t expect to install any regular desktop apps like Mcrosoft Office or Quickbooks. Chromebooks have a wealth of Chrome browser extensions, web apps and Chrome apps to choose from. For just north of $200, this notebook is definitely something to consider. Lenovo 14″ IdeaPad Chromebook.