At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Lovely OLED display Surprisingly strong performance for a fanless Chromebook Loud, clear speakers Competitive battery life Cons Hard-to-read function keys AI tools feel unnecessary in everyday use Our Verdict With its eye-catching OLED screen and snappy MediaTek chip, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 is a standout midrange machine that delivers. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices I’ve used a lot of Chromebooks over the years, and most of them tend to fall into one of two categories: either very affordable and sometimes forgettable or super premium with a price tag to match. The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 wants to land somewhere in the middle. It’s got an OLED display, a brand new MediaTek chip with AI capabilities, and a design that’s sophisticated and understated.  So I spent a week using it for work and play to see if it actually holds up and I’ve got thoughts. Let’s get into it. Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Specs The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 comes in two configurations. Both include the new MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 chip and UFS storage, but the base model offers 12GB of RAM and a non-touch OLED display, while the upgraded version (the one we reviewed) bumps that up to 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It also adds touchscreen support. While the $649 starting price may seem steep, it’s a good value for what you’re getting. Most Chromebooks, for instance, come with only 8GB of RAM, and UFS storage is faster than eMMC. It’s also future proof thanks to Wi-Fi 7. But the real standout is the 14-inch 1920×1200 OLED touchscreen display. You don’t see many laptops with OLED panels (touch or not) at this price. Model number: 83MY0000US CPU: MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 GPU: Immortalis-G925 RAM: 16GB RAM Storage: 256GB UFS Display: 14-inch 1920×1200 OLED touchscreen, 16:10, DCI-P3 Ports: 2 USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-C, 1 USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A, 1 audio jack Networking: Wi-Fi 7 Dimensions: 12.37 x 8.63 x 0.62 Weight: 2.78 pounds Price: $649 After spending a week with the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, I can confidently say it’s one of the best Chromebooks I’ve used. Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Unboxing The unboxing experience can set the tone if done well. Though I’d like to see fewer packaging materials (I’m a stickler for sustainability), the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 made it clear from the start: this is a more premium device, where design and user experience matter.  The box reminded me a bit of the ones Google PixelBooks usually come in. It’s mostly white with lilac-purple borders, giving it a clean and simple look. Inside you’ll find the laptop securely tucked into place. There’s also a separate compartment containing a visual overview of the dimensions and port types.  Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Exclusive new ChromeOS AI features Ah, AI. Hello again, old friend? Nemesis?  Since the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 is the first Chromebook to feature a processor with an NPU, I had to give the new ChromeOS AI features a try. That said, I focused on features I’d actually use, starting with Live Captions. I used this feature during a meeting I was leading and found it helpful, especially when the landscapers were outside my window and the roar of their leaf blowers occasionally drowned out what my colleagues were saying. Having the words pop up on screen in real time helped me stay on track and not miss anything important. I also tried Smart Grouping, which organizes your tabs and apps for you in a virtual desktop. Again, this is one of the more useful AI features. The idea is to reduce visual clutter so you don’t have to drag things around yourself or go hunting for a tab you can’t find. Admittedly, it was kind of nice having an invisible assistant that tidied up my personal open tab chaos. The Quick Insert button, which replaces the Caps Lock key, brings up a tool that lets you drop AI-generated images into whatever you’re working on. It also offers writing suggestions, so if you want to sound more formal or shorten a sentence, you can do that with this tool. I played around with it some, but there was no place for it in my day-to-day workflow. Local AI is a cool addition, but most of the features felt more like bonuses rather than must-haves. Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Design, build quality The design is exactly the type of minimalism I gravitate towards, so it’s earning major brownie points from me. Lenovo calls the colorway “Seashell” and it’s genuinely unique—it changes slightly depending on the lighting. At first glance, it looks standard silver, which is fine, but it’s nothing unique. It wasn’t until I was looking at the lid near an open window that I noticed the gold undertone in the chassis. It’s subtle, but it’s there and it’s really beautiful. But the most interesting thing about this design is not on the top of the laptop, but on the bottom. Underneath the laptop you’ll find a 3D wave corrugated pattern, which feels nice to run your fingers along–I’m a big textures person. It looks cool, but it’s also functional: the design helps you get a better grip on the laptop. This is great, because there’s nothing quite like the horror of dropping a laptop onto the floor. The metal build quality feels strong, too. You can tell straight away that it’s made of aluminum. The screen hardly had any flex when I gave it a gentle twist and the keyboard deck didn’t creak or groan when I pressed my hands down on it. This is exactly what I expected from a Chromebook in this class and it definitely lives up to those higher standards.  Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Keyboard, touchpad The keyboard feels nice to type on for extended periods, and I found that I adjusted to it quickly. However, compared to my usual laptop, this one skews a little more to the right, which threw me off at first. While the typing experience is definitely comfortable, I had a few tiny gripes with the keys themselves. Why are the function keys (F1 to F12) so itty bitty? I mean, they’re really small compared to the other keys. Any time I used them, I had to lean forward and squint a bit to see the icons on them. I’d also occasionally fat finger them because of their size. My other gripe is that the keys themselves attract some smudges. This is minor, as it’s nothing a microfiber cloth can’t fix.  I liked the touchpad a lot. Not only did it feel nice and smooth, like glass, beneath my fingertips, but it also quickly registered all my taps and swipes. I adapted to it pretty instantly and I don’t think I ever accidentally triggered it with my palms.  Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Display, speakers The 14-inch 1920×1200 OLED display produces a luscious-looking picture that blew my socks off. It’s not totally unexpected, though, as OLED panels produce deeper blacks and richer colors. The Chromebook Plus 14’s OLED display also offers 100 percent DCI-P3 color accuracy, meaning more saturated colors, especially reds and greens. When I re-watched Netflix’s Titan documentary, I was impressed by the depth (ugh, sorry) of contrast in the many dark scenes—unsurprising in a documentary about a submersible. Image editors would love this screen. I’m also loving the 16:10 aspect ratio, which this Chromebook has. It’s far superior to the usual 16:9 and I’m not afraid to shout it from the rooftops. The extra vertical space makes a huge difference because you can see more of a webpage or more of a document without scrolling. This is especially useful for someone like me, who writes and edits on the daily. The 5MP RGB webcam is nice, too. I’ve got very fair skin, so I usually appear lifeless—or so pale I glow—on video, but that wasn’t the case here. I used the webcam for a work meeting and I was surprised at how warm (color temperature, not body temperature) the picture looked. It made me look more natural and not at all like some sun-starved vampire. The Dolby-certified speakers are shockingly loud and punchy. When I played Jack White’s Archbishop Harold Holmes, his edgy guitar playing sounded fantastic. I didn’t have to crank up the volume much–I could still hear the music from a room or two away. What can I say? Upward-firing speakers just sound better than the downward-firing kind. Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Connectivity I’m so glad there’s USB-C ports on ether side of the laptop (a hot-button topic here at PCWorld). They both support charging, too–this should always be the standard. Lenovo even managed to include USB-A, which is impressive given how slim and lightweight this device is at just 2.78 pounds! I always like to see more port variety, but this is fine for an everyday machine.  Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Performance The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 is one of the first Chromebooks to rock MediaTek’s new Kompanio Ultra chip. It’s built on Arm’s efficient architecture, so it can run full steam ahead without needing any fans. Under the hood, you’ve got an 8-core CPU with high-performance Cortex-X929 cores and an 11-core Immortalis-G925 GPU that can handle ray tracing. There’s also a Neural Processing Unit (or NPU) packed in there delivering 50 TOPS of AI power — the key to unlocking the special AI features I mentioned above. I definitely had high (but not unrealistic) expectations of the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14. Luckily, it met them with real aplomb. When I ran the CrXPRT benchmark, which measures how fast the machine handles everyday tasks, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 turned in a score of 199. That’s about 17 percent faster than the Asus Chromebook Plus CX34, which comes with an Intel Core i5-13335U chip and currently ranks as our top pick for Chromebooks.  I will say that it’s much faster than the Lenovo Chromebook Duet, which sports an older MediaTek Kompanio 838 chip. The Basemark Web 3.0 score of 1,151 totally crushes the Duet’s score of 502.99–a benchmark that measures overall web performance. This means it’s more than twice as fast as the Duet. That’s a big jump in performance between the two chips. The only thing that’s giving me pause is the somewhat low Speedometer 3.1 score of 25.2. That’s fine for casual and day-to-day productivity, but the machine might struggle a bit with heavy-duty multitasking. That said, the Chromebook Plus 14 felt snappy, even with a bunch of tabs open.  CrXPRT 2: 199 Speedometer 3.1: 25.2 Basemark Web 3.0: 1151 Kraken: 407.0ms Jetstream 2: 344.875 Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Gaming I had a chat with my coworker Michael Crider (you might know him!) about playing Minecraft on this device even before I got the unit. He’d been hands-on with the laptop and saw Google demo Minecraft running on it, which got us curious, especially since he struggled to run Android games on the Lenovo Chromebook Duet. So naturally, the first thing I did when I turned on the machine was load up Minecraft to see if this new MediaTek chip could run Android-based games better. Fortunately, it does! I recorded a quick video of my Minecraft session so others could see how smooth the gameplay is on this Chromebook. You can see me flying around in Creative Mode without any lag or stuttering. In the background, you’ll also hear ABBA playing, which wasn’t intentional, but who doesn’t love jamming out to Swedish pop stars while playing Minecraft? The whole thing felt casual and easy. Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Battery life Lenovo says the Chromebook Plus 14 gets around 17 hours of battery life, but I clocked it at 19 hours using CrXPRT 2’s battery benchmark. That’s a phenomenal result and one that lines up with other Arm-based machines. To be fair, that was with the screen brightness turned down. If you crank the brightness up to max, you’ll likely see a bit less, but that’s expected (as brightness always impacts the battery life). In terms of using it unplugged, I never felt like I had to sprint for an outlet stat. Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: Conclusion After spending a week with the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, I can confidently say it’s one of the best Chromebooks I’ve used. It’s fast, the design is lovely, and that OLED screen? Still can’t get over how good it looks, especially on a device under $750. Battery life is very good as well–it just keeps on chugging along. Yeah, the AI features are nice-to-have more than must-have, and the tiny function keys take some getting used to, but those are small complaints in an otherwise killer package. Lenovo crushed it. This Chromebook hits hard on performance, display, and battery life. It also just feels great to use day in and day out. If you’re shopping for a Chromebook, this one should be at the top of your list. That Editors’ Choice badge up top? It’s well-earned. Read...

Have you got your heart set on a new computing life with Linux when Windows 10 bites the dust in October? It’s a noble idea, but Linux has its downsides too. For some users those downsides may be par for course. But for others, they’ll be total dealbreakers. Here’s a list of the most common to help you make up your own mind… 1. Software and driver compatibility is lacking There’s no denying that there are compatibility limitations with Linux that you won’t see with Windows. These issues affect software but also drivers. Take software as an example. Linux forums users are often miffed that common Windows software like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite aren’t fully compatible with Linux. There are workarounds to using these programs, of course, but they require a little tinkering. Driver incompatibility issues are another common complaint, especially the lack of support by manufacturers for GPU drivers. It seems illogical but GPU drivers aren’t always installed on some Linux distros (the different distributions of the Linux OS) when you first install your system, since standard GPU drivers are closed-source. Lack of driver support can be a big letdown for gamers especially, some of whom complain about acceleration issues with Nvidia graphics cards on Linux systems. (AMD’s Radeon group is better with this.) The driver issue is also a bummer if you want to deck out your Linux PC with cool peripherals. That’s because manufacturers of peripheral devices like printers and headsets don’t always provide driver support for Linux. Linux users often have to rely on open-source drivers to get them to work, for better or for worse. MSI 2. Rolling updates to distros can cause instability issues If you’re looking for a seamless OS user experience, Linux currently isn’t it. Updates to Linux distros often cause instability and breakages in tools and extensions that Linux users rely on. That’s because of the way Linux distros are updated. Instead of having comprehensive new version releases every year or so a la Windows, which tend to be a little more thoroughly tested (but not perfect), Linux distros tend to have a lot of rolling updates that aren’t anywhere near as fine-tuned. Understandably, these bugs can cause big disruptions. One recent update for the Linux distro Ubuntu broke Gnome’s Shell extensions. Gnome is an open-source desktop environment for Linux whose updates are usually bundled as part of Ubuntu updates. In 2024 an update to Gnome 46 led to widespread breakages in third-party shell extensions including important productivity tools, which left many users without the applications they count on every day. Dominic Bayley / Foundry 3. Some triple-A games aren’t supported Some big-name developers don’t provide support for their games to run natively on Linux, which means there’s currently fewer triple-A games available to play right now than there are on Windows. ProtonDB’s website (the community website for Valve’s Proton technology, which allows Windows games to run on Linux and the Steam Deck) reports that about 70 percent of triple-A games available on Windows are currently playable on Linux. Some of those unsupported games are big names, too. The multiplayer game Fortnite, for instance, isn’t playable on Linux unless it’s being played through a cloud gaming service like GeForce Now. Admittedly, that figure is a lot better than it used to be just a few years ago, when there were only a handful of triple-A games playable on Linux. Thanks, Steam Deck! One roadblock to getting even more games on Linux is the problem Linux has with anti-cheat software. On Windows, anti-cheat software — like Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) — prevents players cheating in multiplayer games by blocking them at the grassroots file level. Yet these anti-cheat programs don’t work on Linux, which means the games either aren’t unplayable, or aren’t playable without special workarounds — and those workarounds can sometimes get you banned. There has been speculation that Microsoft is working on a fix that will mean Windows games won’t need a special workaround for kernel-level anti-cheat software on Linux, but we have yet to see it happen. Dominic Bayley / Foundry 4. Game performance isn’t guaranteed If you’re super proud of your PC’s performance in a certain triple-A game — say, Cyberpunk 2077 — that cozy experience may be upended on Linux. Why? Because it’s common for game performance to be different on Linux than it is on Windows. That’s certainly the case for Cyberpunk 2077 which some Linux gamers have said is “unplayable,” others that they get “lower FPS on Linux than they get on Windows.” Still, that’s just one game. That’s not to say every triple-A game performs poorly on Linux. In fact, it’s sometimes the case that games perform better on Linux than they do on Windows. The point is, you can’t expect like-for-like performance, so keep that in mind before switching to Linux just to play a specific game. IDG 5. Linux has a steeper learning curve Linux often requires more tinkering than Windows or MacOS for a smooth user experience. It’s subjective, and people will have their own views and experiences, but it’s true in the sense that sometimes installing software or configuring settings on Linux requires the use of a command-line interface instead of the less intimidating graphical user interface (GUI). On Windows, you have the option of typing commands at the command prompt, but it’s not mandatory — you can still do most tasks via Windows’ GUI. Some users will get a kick out of learning the old-school commands for Linux. Others, not so much, so it’s worth considering that point before making the switch. get windows 11 pro for cheap Windows 11 Pro Read...

There hasn’t been a lot of activity on the smart speaker front lately, so we were fascinated to hear about these three new battery-powered Bluetooth/Wi-Fi speakers from Ikarao. Ikarao Break X1 The top-of-the-line Ikarao Break X1 boasts a 13.3-inch Android tablet that can be rotated 180 degrees to either side. The screen can display music videos or song lyrics karaoke sessions. You can connect the speaker to a big-screen TV using its HDMI port. The Break X1 ($700) looks to be a beast of a speaker, measuring 23.5 x 15 x 13.5 inches (WxDxH) and featuring 460 watts of amplification (note that Ikarao cites peak power, not watts RMS, so take that spec with a grain of salt). The amp drives a pair of 2.6-inch tweeters, with 80 watts going to a 6.5-inch onboard subwoofer. Ikarao The speaker comes with two super-cardioidal microphones (super-cardioidal means the mic rejects sound that’s not coming from directly in front of the mic, a common design for vocal mics) with batteries that are recharged when the mics are stored inside the speaker cabinet. The speaker can operate on a tabletop, or there’s a threaded mount on the bottom of the speaker’s cabinet so you can mount it to a tripod. A carry strap is also included to make the 13.2-pound speaker easier to haul around. In addition to its HDMI port, the Break X1 also has an aux-in port that you can plug a guitar in as well as aux-out to feed another amp or powered speaker. In addition to online sources, the speaker can play music stored on a USB thumb drive or a microSD card. The Ikarao Break X1 is available now at Amazon. Ikarao Break X2 Ikarao If the Break X1 is beyond your budget, you might consider the Ikarao Break X2 ($479.99). It has a smaller rotating display (10.1 inches) and a smaller amplifier that sends 300 watts of peak power to a pair of 1.2-inch tweeters and a pair of 4-inch woofers. The speaker comes with a pair of battery-powered microphones that can be docked inside the cabinet for recharging. The Break X2 has similar inputs and output (specifically, USB, AUX In/Out, HDMI, and Bluetooth V5.4), and it also has a microSD card slot. The speaker  measures 8.3 x 11.8 x 10.58 inches (HxWxD) and weighs 13.2 pounds. The Ikarao Break 2 is available now at Amazon. The Shell S1 ($370) is Ikarao’s third new Karaoke smart speaker. Its amplifier sends 20 watts each to a pair of 1-inch silk dome tweeters and 50 watts each to a pair of 3.5-inch woofers. It has the same 10.1-inch display as the Break X2, dual battery-powered mics, and most of the same I/O ports (the exception being the Shell 1 has a USB port for music playback, but no microSD card slot). It’s also now available at Amazon. Ikarao Karaoke software included All three of the new Ikarao smart karaoke speakers come with a six-month subscription to Karafun, an app and online catalog of karaoke music with sing-along lyrics that can be shown on the display or output to the respective speaker’s HDMI port. This news is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart speakers. The app, which runs on the speaker’s Android tablet, can also customize the key and the tempo of any song in Karafun’s catalog. If you know your karaoke session will be offline—on a camping trip, for example—you can download the songs you want to play to the speaker itself and operate it in offline mode. before you. And when no one is in the mood to sync, you can play an online music trivia quiz game. A subscription to Karafun Premium costs $9.99 per month. We’re expecting to receive a review sample of the Ikarao Break X1 and will post a thorough hands-on review when we do. You can read more about Ikarao’s speaker lineup at Ikarao.com. Read...

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