Chromebooks have been in a really weird place for the past few years, and its future is extremely uncertain. Front and center of it all is the current flagbearer for ChromeOS, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14. After using it for the past couple of months, it’s a fine laptop, but one that sits in limbo.
The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 is the “flagship” of the current era of Chromebooks, serving as the machine that ushers in the new MediaTek Kompanio Ultra chipset. Unveiled earlier this year, it has a reasonably compelling package to offer with at least 12GB of RAM (my review unit had 16GB) and 14-inch OLED display. It also features top-firing speakers, 17-hour battery life, and just enough ports — 2x USB-C, 1x USB-A, and a headphone jack.
Over the past few months since this machine launched, I’ve been using it off and on as an at-home machine, and it’s a reasonably solid little laptop.
As per usual with Lenovo, the keyboard is perhaps the biggest hardware highlight. The spacing, key travel, and flex all add up to be a delight to type on. The trackpad is big and the screen is bright enough even to be used in all but the sunniest of days. It being an OLED panel is great, but also feels unnecessarily over the top for a product category where every dollar matters. I’m always in favor of having a fingerprint sensor on a Chromebook, and this one works perfectly well. The speakers are also a legitimate surprise. They’re not the best I’ve tried, but they’ve got a surprising amount of range and depth to the audio, certainly better than most Chromebooks I’ve tried, even ones at a higher price point than this.
The hardware as a whole is, well, fine. The laptop is built from an aluminum chassis that weighs in at 2.58lbs, but you’d probably not guess that from the finish. It’s not particularly premium-feeling by any means. It’s fine. The closest comparison I can make is to Google’s Pixelbook Go. The wavy bottom of the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 is so reminiscent of that, and the package as a whole really makes for a good sequel to that laptop.
All of that hardware is really just here to showcase the current state of ChromeOS and that new MediaTek chip inside.
Speaking first to the chipset, I’m not super impressed. With the strides we’ve seen in ARM-based laptop chips over the past couple of years, I was hoping for more here. Kompanio Ultra is capable of basic work, but I don’t think I’ve had a single session using this laptop where I didn’t run into a tab freezing up or lag of some kind. Even relatively light workloads seem to occasionally lead to the laptop not being able to keep up. That really shouldn’t be the case for a machine with 16GB of RAM. I don’t want MediaTek to throw in the towel here, as I want Chromebooks to have their own Snapdragon X Elite…
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