Of all the Black Friday Chromebook deals you’ll see today, these are the three I’d recommend: one for the budget shopper, a midrange Chromebook for most people, and the best premium option for anyone shopping for a Chromebook Plus.
I’ve put together PCWorld’s list of the best Black Friday Chromebook deals for several years now, so I’m familiar with what retailers offer and what they try and hide behind a curtain. Right now, these are my three best Black Friday Chromebook deals: the $149 Lenovo Slim 3 (53% off), the $249 Lenovo Flex 3 (48% off), and the $299 Asus 2-in-1 Chromebook Plus (40% off). Here’s why.
Budget Chromebooks can be bundles of compromises, and there’s no avoiding that the Slim 3 offers just 4GB of RAM, which we normally try to avoid. But virtually all budget Chromebooks do the same, and in our review of the Slim 3 it performed surprisingly well. Battery life was fantastic at 16 hours, the 14-inch 1080p screen was excellent, and the audio was good, too. This is a budget Chromebook with an unfamiliar Mediatek Kompanio 520 processor, but it’s the best of the bunch.
Midrange Chromebooks are what I generally recommend to friends and family: 8GB of RAM, a large 1080p screen, and a processor that can hold up. The Pentium Silver is a quad-core chip, while most Chromebooks are powered by slower, less-capable dual-core chips. Lenovo’s Flex 3 offers a nice, roomy 15.6-inch screen and 8GB of RAM as well as a 360-degree hinge for Android apps. It even has a dedicated number pad. It looks a little plasticy, but it was a killer back-to-school deal and it still is.
Customers love the Asus 14-inch Chromebook Plus, the name given to Google’s premium Chromebook classification. With a Ryzen 7000 chip inside it, it’s going to be fast enough to play Roblox as well as classwork. It also has 8GB of memory, a roomy 128GB SSD, and a 14-inch 1080p display, at a price that’s just $50 more than the midrange Flex 3.
Again, you’re going to find better deals on paper. But with these three Chromebooks, I think you’re going to walk away happy with what you’ve bought — and what you’ve saved during Black Friday.
