I kinda like my Lenovo Chromebook.
Me too–and normally I can’t stand Lenovo laptop designs. Their Chromebook engineers obviously don’t go anywhere near the Thinkpad crew.
I bought a pair the N21 Chromebooks from here last Spring. They looked like they had barely been touched by the school district that traded them in (or whatever their history was). They’re still running pretty strong… they bog down a bit on graphic-intensive Google Slides presentations, but chew through everything else I throw at them.
I’m pretty tempted to grab an N22 or two today at this price.
Nope, guys, avoid this one as well, for the same reasons as the Dell and HP. Even though this will still receive OS updates for over another year and it has the minimum of 4 GB of RAM, the CPU is terrible.
N22 Chromebook is EoL on Jun 2022
@atomizer, I appreciate your input but for Google Classroom work and a 7th grader, I don’t see how I can go wrong with one of these. I don’t want to put a lot of money into something that might get dropped off the bed or spilled upon. I’ll be in for one after I read some more comments if anyone has anything more to add.
I had an older Acer from several years back with only 2MB and it worked OK. I could definitely feel the sluggishness but it was acceptable for the kids’ schoolwork. I’m hoping this will be much better with the 4MB
What specifically is “terrible” about it? I’ve used an N21 almost daily for eight months now, and it regularly has a half-dozen tabs or more open at once (usually Google Docs and Slides).
What exactly would someone do with a sub-$100 Chromebook that these won’t accomplish?
Correct, that’s on the product listing as well; I was pasting from previous comments but “over another year” is still accurate.
For an “as cheap as possible” device for young kids that you don’t care about if it’s literally destroyed, sure, go for it. As a computer for an adult to use for actual productivity, however, which is where my comments are coming from, I recommend against this level of hardware specifically due to the lack of performance that you mentioned you noticed with that old Acer.
The CPU is a very low-performance Atom-based Celeron. It’s only slightly newer than the N28x0 CPUs in the other Chromebooks in this sale. I’ve used a LOT of Chromebooks and a lot of different hardware configurations, and I’m telling you based on my own experience that these CPUs offer the worst performance you can get. The Core-based Celerons (e.g. Haswell, Broadwell, etc., with a “-U” suffix) are better choices, like in the Acer C720 (if that one weren’t out of support.)
Don’t get me wrong, the nice thing about ChromeOS is that it basically does everything the same on every device, but the performance and thus the experience is widely variable. As in my previous reply, sure, buy this one as a cheap, throwaway device, but you can have a much better device for yourself for not much money at all (<$500.)