Delightful OLED screen. A touchpad on a budget laptop that isn’t miserable. Great performance and long-lasting battery life. Tons of RAM for a Chromebook. Interesting AI features to try. Excellent build quality.
TIRED
Limited ports. Hard to open.
Chromebooks needed a wake-up call. The huge advances made by Windows laptops over the last year in battery life, efficiency, value, and AI features have made similarly priced Chromebooks look rudimentary.
Well, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 is the answer. It’s easily the best Chromebook ever made. From the OLED screen to the premium build, there’s never been a Chromebook this high-end, despite the affordable starting price of $650. It’s time to start taking Chromebooks seriously again.
Not Your Typical Chromebook
Photograph: Luke Larsen
There’s never been a Chromebook quite like the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14. The closest I can think of is the elegant HP Dragonfly Chromebook, which preceded the “Chromebook Plus” designation and led the way in high-end Chromebooks. The Lenovo takes this a step forward in all sorts of ways.
The silver chassis isn’t remarkable, but the all-aluminum build is every bit as sturdy and premium-feeling as a Windows counterpart. There’s no flex in every part of the laptop, including the keyboard and the lid. The bottom cover is plastic but has a grippy, ridged pattern, reminiscent of the old Google Pixelbook Go. It’s not the thinnest Chromebook in the world (that’d be the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus), but at 0.62 inches thick, it’s portable enough to carry around without bother. For reference, it’s around the same thickness as a MacBook Pro.
As I mention in almost every review of a cheap laptop and Chromebook, there are two main points laptop manufacturers always compromise on: the touchpad and the display. These are two areas where it’s difficult to tell the quality from a spec sheet. Well, I’m happy to report that the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 has a fantastic OLED panel and a responsive touchpad. Dragging my finger across the surface, it feels brilliantly smooth, as do two-finger swipes and gestures. The click isn’t overly loud—just right. I wish I could say that about every other $650 laptop I’ve tested.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
The keyboard is a joy to use, too. It’s clicky and responsive, with a short but punchy feel. The layout is similar to most Chromebooks, and this one has a fingerprint reader off to the side, so you don't have to keep typing in passwords or pins.
This isn’t the first OLED screen on a Chromebook, but it might be the best I’ve seen so far. The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus has a nice OLED panel on a larger 15.6-inch screen—this Lenovo has the same resolution screen (1920 x 1200), but it looks sharper on the smaller display. It also gets brighter than any Chromebook I’ve tested, which tends to be a downside of OLED. I measured it at 358 nits of brightness, plenty bright enough to fight off glare or reflections. Unlike cheaper Windows laptops like the Asus Vivobook 14, the Chromebook Plus 14 has accurate and vibrant colors. Laptops around $650 often use panels with poor color coverage, resulting in an overly green screen with distorted colors. Not here. It has a noticeably warmer tint, like many OLED laptops.
While not a 2-in-1 laptop, my review configuration came with a touchscreen, although that's not included in the $650 base model. Unfortunately, the hinge is wound up tight, so despite the lip for your finger, it requires two hands to open. Ports are pretty minimal. The left side has one USB-C and one USB-A, while the right has one USB-C and a headphone jack. That’s it. I appreciate that Lenovo split up the USB-C ports so that you can charge the device from either side, but one more USB-C port or HDMI would have been helpful.
Performance and Battery Life to Match
Photograph: Luke Larsen
There’s only one CPU option for this laptop. That’s because rather than use a typical Chromebook chip with only two performance cores (like the Intel Celeron N4500 or Core 3 100U), it uses a new ARM chip made by MediaTek, the Kompanio Ultra 910. Without getting into all the details, this is a highly efficient ARM chip in the vein of Qualcomm or Apple’s latest entries, except made explicitly for Chromebooks.
Amazingly, the base configuration has 12 GB of RAM. That’s not quite as much as the 16 GB you get in some Snapdragon X-powered Windows laptops like the forthcoming HP Omnibook 5 16—but for ChromeOS, it’s more than enough. Meanwhile, the base configuration comes with 128 GB of storage, and the upgraded model has a 256-GB solid state drive.
Performance is solid. Speedometer is a benchmark that tests performance in the browser, which is important for ChromeOS since it's all built around the Chrome browser. The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 was around three times faster than the Celeron N4500, as tested in the Asus Chromebook CX15, and around half the speed of the Apple M4 in a MacBook Air. I also tested a couple of heavier Android games like Diablo: Immortal and PUBG Mobile, which played well with settings maxed out. That’s not surprising, but it shows that this chip can handle almost anything you throw at it. Like most ARM-powered laptops, the Chromebook Plus 14 is just as fast on battery as it is while plugged in.
Google and Lenovo are also touting the AI capabilities of this device, as the MediaTek chip is capable of 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS), a standard met by nearly all of its Windows and Mac competitors. Because of that, the Chromebook Plus 14 has a few exclusive on-device AI features you won’t find in other Chromebooks. One of the most useful is Smart Grouping, which can identify the various apps and tabs you have open and group them intelligently into separate desktops. It’s pretty handy. Less interesting to me is Quick Insert, which gives you unnecessarily easy access to AI-generated images. Beyond that, it also has the selection of AI features that come with all Chromebook Plus laptops, such as the helpful Continue Where I Left Off.
The efficiency of the Kompanio Ultra 910 shines bright in battery life tests, too. It has a 60-watt-hour battery, resulting in some impressive runtime. Lenovo and Google claim it’s the longest-lasting Chromebook ever, and it’s the best I’ve tested, lasting 16 hours in a video playback test. It might not last as long as the MacBook Air M4 or laptops like the Asus Zenbook S 16, powered by Intel’s latest Core Ultra Series 2 chips, but it’s in the ballpark. That’s important because before the recent surge in ARM-powered laptops (like the modern MacBooks), Chromebooks were known for battery life. That was largely due to how lightweight ChromeOS was to run. It’s nice to see Chromebooks are back in the running.
Value Where It Counts
Photograph: Luke Larsen
The Chromebook Plus 14 has one other trick up its sleeve. Unlike the janky speakers featured in nearly every Chromebook, this Lenovo has a quad-speaker setup and is the first to use Dolby Atmos. These are surprisingly good speakers—almost as good as the 13-inch MacBook Air’s audio, providing a well-rounded sound that even features hints of bass. They're the best speakers on a laptop of this price.
Many of my points have been couched in the context of the price, and there’s a reason for that. At $650 for the base configuration or $100 more to up the RAM and storage (and add the touchscreen), the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 is hitting a price that Windows laptops have struggled to address. There are contenders, but the Chromebook Plus 14 makes a case for Chromebooks at this price, offering several features and overall build quality that you won’t find in competitors. If you’re willing to embrace ChromeOS, this is simply the best the ecosystem has to offer.
Correction: Our original review indicated that the device included a micro SD card slot for storage expansion, which it does not.
Luke Larsen is a product writer and reviewer at WIRED, covering laptops, PCs, Macs, monitors, and the wider PC peripheral ecosystem. He’s been reporting on tech for over a decade, previously at Digital Trends as the senior editor in computing, where he spent seven years leading the publication’s daily coverage. ... Read More
