The Best Chromebook

The $300 Toshiba Chromebook 2 has a fantastic 13.3-inch, 1080p IPS screen, a great trackpad, and a decent—if shallow—keyboard. Its ideal combination of screen size and portability makes it our pick. We recommend the configuration with an Intel Bay Trail processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a 16GB solid state drive. Its mobile processor struggles after 10 or so tabs and has about 7 hours of battery life; that’s better than most Chromebooks out there on both counts but not quite as powerful or long-lasting as the smaller Dell or the bulkier Acer. But the Toshiba is fast enough and lasts a full school or work day, and that’s enough for most people’s needs.

The $256 Dell Chromebook 11 (2014) is a great option for students or anyone that needs a small, portable, and durable machine. The Dell has excellent build quality, is fast enough to handle streaming music, large spreadsheets, and other demanding tasks, has a comfortable keyboard and responsive trackpad, and lasted about 2 hours longer than the Toshiba in our battery life tests. Our smaller pick’s biggest flaw is its 1366 x 768, 11.6-inch display; it’s small, low-resolution, terrible-quality, and has a fierce glare because of the protective glass panel.

If you want a great 15.6-inch screen, the Acer Chromebook 15 is the best choice. (We recommend the $290 model with 4GB of RAM and a 16GB solid state drive, but if it’s out of stock that link may redirect to a model with only 2 GB of RAM that you should not buy. In that case, consider the Dell or Toshiba instead, or the $350 Acer Chromebook 15 with 4 GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD.) Like the Dell, it’s fast enough for demanding browser tasks, and the Acer has a large, 1080p IPS screen, a snappy keyboard, a spacious trackpad, and about 8 hours of battery life. The  biggest drawback is that it’s huge: it weighs 4.85 pounds, nearly 2 pounds more than the Toshiba and Dell.

We weren’t able to find a comparable runner-up to the Toshiba Chromebook 2. All the other 13-inch Chromebooks out there right now are either way too slow or way too expensive. If our main pick is out of stock, we recommend waiting for a restock or considering the Dell Chromebook 11 or the Acer Chromebook 15 depending on your needs.

Table of contents

• Who should (and shouldn’t) buy a Chromebook?
• What makes a good Chromebook?
• Our pick
• Flaws but not dealbreakers
• Who else likes it?
• A more compact pick

• Super size me
• How we picked and tested
• Competition
• What to look forward to
• Care and maintenance
• Wrapping it up

Who should (and shouldn’t) buy a Chromebook?

A Chromebook looks like a laptop, costs about the same as a tablet, and runs Chrome OS, a stripped-down Linux variant that does everything Google’s Chrome browser can do and little else. It’s an inexpensive laptop, ideal for someone who spends all their computing time in a browser. This means checking email and social networks or working in Google’s app suite and juggling lots of tabs. Chromebooks are also good as a bare-bones secondary machine.

If you’re looking for a budget Windows laptop, you may want to consider a Chromebook instead. Most are inexpensive, lightweight, and low-performance, and you should expect to pay between $250 and $400 for one. That’s less than a Windows laptop with the same capabilities. However, Chromebooks have a few limitations you should know about before you decide.

Chromebooks must be connected to the internet to do most things, though there are now offline options for Gmail, Drive, and Play Movies, plus a variety of offline apps available through the Chrome Web Store.

Google encourages Chromebook users to live in the cloud by offering at least 100 GB of free Google Drive storage for two years to most Chromebook buyers, which offsets the fact that the vast majority of Chromebooks have little local storage. Most Chromebooks include 16GB or 32GB solid state drives to maximize performance, speed up boot times, and reduce costs. There isn’t much room to store files on your desktop for later, though all Chromebooks include an SD card slot and USB ports.

If you want to use your Chromebook on the go and don’t want to worry about offline sync for all your documents, you should consider tethering from your phone, using a mobile hotspot, or buying a tablet with mobile data or a laptop with a full OS and more offline capabilities instead.

If you can’t live without a certain desktop app—Photoshop, Microsoft Office, a desktop email client, etc.—then a Chromebook is not for you. For the most part, email and office software have browser-based alternatives, but if you’re unwilling or unable to switch (for work or other reasons), stick with a computer with a traditional operating system, such as OS X or Windows. In early 2014, Google announced a partnership with VMWare to bring some desktop enterprise apps to Chrome OS, so that could change in the future. However, there’s no word on what software will be available or how soon, so hold off on a Chromebook for now.

Finally, if you’re the type of person who relies heavily on Apple’s Genius Bar tech support (for example), you won’t find the same type of hardware support for Chromebooks and may be better off with an Apple device. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you like to tinker with your operating system, Chrome OS is based on Linux and there are plenty of options to tinker or even build your own version of the operating system.

What makes a good Chromebook?

In his 2012 review of the Acer C710 Chromebook, The Verge’s David Pierce wrote, “A Chromebook is a no-frills device with a great web browser, a great keyboard and trackpad, and a long-lasting battery. It’s not a workhorse. It’s a secondary computer or a living room laptop. It should be nice to look at, and easy and reliable to use.”

For the most part we agree. The most important features in a Chromebook are good-enough performance, connectivity, screen, keyboard and trackpad, and portability. It doesn’t need to be a workhorse, but if a Chromebook gets in the way of your using the internet like a normal person, it has failed at its only job. Price is also key, because for a little more you can purchase a budget laptop running Windows.

As of April 2015, the perfect Chromebook still doesn’t exist. A few Chromebooks have come close, but each one makes at least one serious compromise. The perfect Chromebook has an Intel Broadwell processor, 4 GB of RAM, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and costs about $300. It has a 13-inch, 1920 x 1080 IPS screen, a comfortable keyboard, and a precise trackpad. It needs at least 7 hours of battery life and should weigh about 3 pounds or less. Since no such Chromebook exists, how do we pick the best one?

After testing 13 Chromebooks released since October 2012, we learned that 4 GB of RAM is crucial to stream video or music and handle a reasonable number of tabs. This spec is not open to compromise.

In the past year, Chromebook makers have gravitated toward ultra-low-voltage mobile processors like the ones found in smartphones and tablets rather than the more powerful Haswell and Broadwell Intel CPUs found in Windows and Mac laptops. These include ARM-based processors from Samsung and Nvidia as well as Intel’s ultra-low-voltage Bay Trail-M processors. They allow for thinner, fanless, more battery-efficient computers. These are all good things, but some mobile processors simply aren’t fast enough to handle streaming music and more than a handful of tabs.

No Intel Bay Trail ultra-low-voltage processor has matched or beat the performance of the Haswell Intel Celeron 2955U found in the Dell Chromebook 11 (2014) or the Broadwell Intel Celeron 3205U in the Acer Chromebook 15. But we found that the fanless Bay Trail N2840 is usable for light workloads in Chromebooks with 4GB of RAM, like the Toshiba Chromebook 2. We haven’t yet found a good Chromebook without an Intel processor.

Some Chromebooks can be configured with Core i3 processors, commonly found in budget Windows laptops and are more powerful than Celeron chips. However, we found that Celeron processors are fast enough for most people’s needs, and Core i3 processors aren’t worth the extra $100 they cost in a Chromebook.

Good connectivity is a must—without rock-solid Wi-Fi, you won’t be doing much of anything on a Chromebook. An 802.11ac Wi-Fi card is ideal, but 802.11n wireless is also good enough. Ideally, a Chromebook costs $300 or less, and it shouldn’t cost more than $400. Any more expensive and you should consider a budget laptop running Windows.

Screen type, portability, and keyboard and trackpad quality are all significant, but their order of importance depends on what you’re using the Chromebook for. For example, if you’re a student, the keyboard, trackpad, and portability—battery life, size, and weight—are more important than the screen. If you want the Chromebook for Netflix and other light browsing, then you likely care more about the screen’s size, resolution, and quality more than how portable it is.

We found that 13-inch Chromebooks are a good compromise between both worlds. They’re comfortable enough to type on and have screens big enough and good enough to enjoy movies on, but they’re still small enough to be portable.

Decent speakers and a healthy range of ports aren’t crucial, but few laptops have great speakers and most Chromebooks have the same port selection. An LTE data connection is only useful for a certain subset of users, and there isn’t a good Chromebook with mobile data right now. Most people are better off with Wi-Fi and occasional smartphone tethering.

Our pick

The $300 Toshiba Chromebook 2 is the best Chromebook for most people because it strikes the best balance between a great screen, portability, decent performance, and affordability without sacrificing too much in any crucial category. It also has a good keyboard and trackpad, and good-enough performance and battery life, and a just-right form factor. Our pick has a 13-inch, 1920 x 1080 IPS display, an Intel Bay Trail N2840 processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 16GB solid state drive. It’s not as speedy as the Dell Chromebook 11 (2014) or the Acer Chromebook 15, but the Toshiba Chromebook 2 has just enough processing power to use the internet like a normal person without frustrating lock ups and delays. Just don’t try to load more than 10 tabs simultaneously. 

The Toshiba Chromebook 2 has a 13.3-inch glossy IPS screen. The panel is vibrant, crisp, and not too reflective, and it has fantastic viewing angles. Colors are bright and blacks are deep and dark; the latest season of House of Cards looked great. It’s by far the best screen in a sub-$400 Chromebook. It doesn’t have a touchscreen, but that isn’t a crucial feature yet, since Chrome isn’t optimized for touch right now.

Our pick’s keyboard is a little shallow, but it’s spacious and responsive. Though the Toshiba can get a little uncomfortable after long periods of typing, we didn’t experience any dropped keystrokes or uncooperative keys in the months we’ve been using it. The trackpad works exactly as it should—it’s a huge relief to be able to say that about most laptop trackpads now—and has a somewhat gritty texture that gives excellent traction.

The 13-inch Toshiba Chromebook 2 weighs 2.95 pounds—about the same as a 13-inch MacBook Air—and measures 12.6 inches wide, 8.6 inches deep, and 0.76 inches thick. (The 13-inch MacBook Air measures 12.8 x 8.94 x 0.11-0.68 inches, so it’s thinner but a little wider and deeper.) It has dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI output, and an SD Card slot.

The speakers are good for a $300 laptop. Toshiba partnered with Skullcandy to tune the Chromebook’s dynamic range compression and equalizer settings, both for the built-in speakers and headphones. We tested the tweaked audio against a handful of other Chromebooks, and found that music sounds crisper and the bass is boosted. Our headphones expert, Lauren Dragan, points out that not everyone is going to appreciate their music being auto-tweaked, so it’s worth noting these settings also apply to external speakers connected via the audio jack and cannot be disabled.

Because the Toshiba Chromebook 2’s mobile processor is fanless, our pick is silent during use, but gets a little warmer than the other Chromebooks we tested in the middle of the underside. This warmth doesn’t make the Chromebook uncomfortable to use in your lap and it doesn’t radiate up to the keyboard, so it’s not a problem.

The Toshiba Chromebook 2 comes with a one-year manufacturer’s warranty, 100 GB of Google Drive storage, a 60-day trial of Google Play Music All Access, and 12 Gogo in-air Wi-Fi passes.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The second-gen Toshiba is the best Chromebook out there right now, but it does have a few small issues. Its mobile processor starts to struggle with workloads of more than 10 tabs, but it’s still leaps and bounds better than the early Chromebooks that struggled with a handful of tabs and had to hard refresh them on a regular basis.

However, the Toshiba’s performance is more than enough for most people who want to check email, social networks, and stream video. I’ve been using our pick as my main work machine for months, which consists of streaming music, several email accounts, large documents and spreadsheets, and tens of research tabs. The Toshiba Chromebook forces me to weed out unnecessary tabs more often than, say, an ultrabook, but I can do everything I need to. Heck, I even covered CES 2015 using our pick. 

Because of its 13-inch 1080p display and thin chassis, it doesn’t have great battery life. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 lasted 7 hours and 9 minutes on our mid-April 2015 battery life test—it’ll get you through the school or work day, and that’s enough for most people. The Dell Chromebook 11 (2014) lasted 8 hours and 51 minutes and the Acer Chromebook 15 lasted 7 hours and 57 minutes on the same test—that’s about 1:45 and 45 minutes longer than the Toshiba, respectively.

The lid is a little wobbly and can bow in the middle under pressure, but not many Chromebooks have stellar build quality. Our final complaint is that the screen doesn’t tilt far enough back to allow you to comfortably use the Toshiba Chromebook 2 in your lap. Even on a desk, I caught myself reaching up to adjust the screen further back several times a day without thinking about it.

Who else likes it?

The Verge’s David Pierce crowned it the best Chromebook in November 2014. “Toshiba pairs the great display with at least adequate companion parts across the board,” Pierce wrote, going on to say that the Toshiba Chromebook 2’s “Intel Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM aren’t perfect by any stretch — load ten tabs and watch it stutter.” He concluded that “the Chromebook 2 is worth spending a little bit more money on. It’s the best one you can buy.”

Laptop Mag’s Valentina Palladino gave the Toshiba Chromebook 2 an Editors’ Choice Award, and called it “one of the best Chromebooks money can buy.”

PCMag’s Brian Westover rated the Toshiba Chromebook 2 “Excellent” and concluded “The Toshiba CB35-B3340 Chromebook 2 is an improvement in quality over its predecessor, with a higher-resolution display, better sound quality, improved components and performance, and a smaller physical size.

A more compact pick

If you need something more compact (and with better performance and battery life than our pick) the $256 Dell Chromebook 11 (2014) is the best option. Compared to the Toshiba Chromebook 2, however, the Dell has a low-resolution, terrible-quality screen and last-generation wireless. It’s physically smaller, but thicker and barely lighter than the Toshiba.

The Dell Chromebook 11 (2014) was our longstanding pick for best Chromebook because for a long time it was the only good Chromebook. Over a year later, more good Chromebooks exist, but the Dell’s Haswell-based 1.4GHz dual-core Intel Celeron 2955U processor combined with 4 GB of RAM is still one of the best-performing combinations available.

Some Chromebooks—namely those with 2 GB of RAM and underpowered processors—can take about 15 seconds (!) to switch between tabs and sometimes need to spend at least 45 seconds hard refreshing older tabs. In our tests, the Dell had none of these problems and took in stride large numbers of tabs, complicated Google Drive documents and spreadsheets, YouTube videos, streaming music, and Netflix. It also outperformed nearly all the other Chromebooks we tested on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark test.

Like the other Chromebooks we recommend, the Dell has a 16GB SSD and comes with 100 GB of Google Drive storage for two years. Our fun-sized pick also comes with a one-year manufacturer’s warranty—though Dell sell extended warranties up to four years—and a trial of Google Play Music All Access.

The Dell Chromebook 11 has deep, comfortable keys for long typing sessions, and they don’t stick or drop any strokes. It doesn’t have a keyboard backlight, but that’s a luxury granted to only the most expensive Chromebooks right now. The trackpad is smoother than the Toshiba’s grainy surface, and as a result it’s a little less responsive for multitouch gestures. That said, two-finger scrolling, tap to click, and physical click all work well and don’t make the same cheap and hollow rattling sound that plagues many Chromebooks (but none of our picks).

Dell quotes its Chromebook’s battery life at 10 hours, and it lasted 9 hours and 27 minutes in the battery test we ran in mid-August 2014. We ran another battery test on the most recent version of Chrome OS in mid-April, 2015, and the Dell lasted 8 hours and 51 minutes¹. That’s about an hour longer than the Acer Chromebook 15, and two hours longer than our pick, the Toshiba Chromebook 2. In PC Mag’s tests, the Dell Chromebook 11 lasted for 9 hours and 8 minutes.

The Dell Chromebook weighs 2.9 pounds—imperceptibly less than the Toshiba Chromebook 2—and it measures 11.6 inches wide, 7.9 inches deep, and 0.97 inches thick—an inch narrower than the Toshiba, 0.7 inches shallower, but a quarter-inch thicker. Its small stature and long battery life make the Dell the best Chromebook to slip into a bag and take with you.

Our portable pick has two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, an SD card slot, and a Kensington lock slot. Overall, it’s a solid, well-built machine, and doesn’t feel cheap and creak or rattle under pressure.

The speakers are decent for a $300 laptop—they produce clear, crisp highs, though bass reproduction is weak at best. The Dell Chromebook 11 is capable of pumping out a lot of noise, but music gets distorted and can crackle at higher volumes.

The Dell is the most practical Chromebook: it’s inexpensive, well-made, portable, and has solid performance, a comfortable keyboard, and long battery life. However, the 11.6-inch screen is too small, low-resolution, and poor quality for some, and it has outdated 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi.

The Dell’s last-generation dual-band wireless card had no connectivity issues during our tests and it supports Bluetooth 4.0. It’s a little behind the curve, but having the latest standard (802.11ac) only matters if you have blazing fast internet speeds or are at the very edge of your router’s range. (And even then, only if you’re using a wireless-ac router.) The short version: it won’t matter much on this particular Chromebook.

The Dell Chromebook’s 11-inch 1366 x 768 LCD screen isn’t nearly as beautiful as the brilliant glossy IPS panels found in our pick and our 15-inch recommendation, the Acer Chromebook 15. The Acer and Toshiba both have brighter, crisper screens with more vibrant colors and blacker blacks. The Dell has a blue tinge and a very reflective glass-paneled screen (which is a little strange, since it’s not a touchscreen) that hampers viewing angles. It’s difficult to see the screen in bright sunlight, as is the case with nearly all Chromebooks we tested, but the Dell’s screen is visible in other lighting conditions.

During our testing, we noticed that the Dell Chromebook 11’s fan was a bit louder than the other Chromebooks we tested when the machine was taxed. The fan’s whining isn’t constant or deafening; it’s only audible in a quiet room. A little audio from streaming music, YouTube, or Netflix completely masked the noise in our tests.

In April 2014 (half a year before testing the Toshiba Chromebook 2), The Verge’s Dan Seifert called it “possibly the best Chromebook ever made” and concluded “the Dell is on a different level. It offers fast performance, exceptional battery life, a good keyboard and trackpad, and great build quality for a price under $300. The Dell is the first model that checks all the boxes of a great Chromebook — it’s not perfect in all of them, but it’s very good everywhere and that’s really all a Chromebook needs to be.”

Cherlynn Low at Laptop Mag praised the Dell Chromebook’s “pleasing, uniform aesthetic,” and concluded: “A comfortable and sturdy design, great speakers and zippy Haswell performance make the Dell Chromebook 11 a compelling laptop for students. The solid keyboard also makes this device a great option for typing notes and reports.”

PCMag’s Joel Santo Domingo found that “The Dell Chromebook 11 boots quickly. In the time it takes to open the lid and place the system on your lap or other horizontal surface, it’s ready for your login. Videos in 1080p played smoothly, and as long as our Internet connection was behaving itself, browsing sites on the laptop was trouble-free. We had no trouble watching movies from online streaming services, like Netflix, to Amazon, and Disney’s new Movies Anywhere service.”

Super size me

If you want a big 15.6-inch screen and don’t mind a bulkier, heavier computer, we recommend the $290 Acer Chromebook 15. It’s the best-performing Chromebook we’ve tested so far—barring those with i3 processors—has a spacious, 1920 x 1080 IPS screen, a comfortable keyboard, and responsive trackpad.

We recommend the configuration with a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron 3205U Broadwell processor, 4 GB  of RAM, and a 16GB SSD. (But if it’s out of stock, get the $350 Acer Chromebook 15 with 4GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD instead. Avoid the cheaper $250 model with only 2GB of RAM; that’s not enough memory to run any Chromebook well.) This version was able to handle streaming music, several large spreadsheets and documents, multiple email accounts, Slack, and tens of other tabs without issue. The Acer Chromebook 15 was even a little faster than the Dell Chromebook 11 (2014) in our benchmarks, though you’d never notice the difference in everyday use. It also has 802.11ac Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.0 that was rock-solid in our months of use.

The highlight of the Acer Chromebook 15 is its 15.6-inch display. The 1080p IPS panel has great viewing angles, bright colors, and deep blacks, and the matte screen prevents most glare. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 has superior color reproduction, but if you want a Chromebook with a large screen for watching movies, the Acer 15 your best option. 

Our super-sized pick also has a good keyboard, with decent key travel and snappy feedback. (But like all other sub-$1,000 Chromebooks, no backlighting.) The spacious trackpad feels smooth to the touch, and is accurate and responsive for all Chrome OS gestures. 

The Acer Chromebook 15 has an HDMI port, one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 port, an SD card slot, and a Kensington lock slot. It comes with a one-year manufacturer’s warranty and the same Google Goodies as our other picks: 100 GB of Google Drive storage, 60 days of Google Play Music All Access, and 12 GoGo Inflight passes.

The downside of the Acer’s stellar 15-inch screen is that it needs a big chassis. And we mean big—we nicknamed it “the white whale” during our testing. The Acer Chromebook 15 weighs 4.85 pounds and measures over 15 inches wide, 9.65 inches deep, and almost an inch thick. For some people who want a big screen and never plan to take their Chromebook anywhere, this isn’t a problem at all. But if you want a portable machine, the Acer’s size and weight is likely a dealbreaker.

We tested the Acer Chromebook 15’s battery life in mid-April 2015 against our other two picks, and it lasted 7 hours and 57 minutes on our test. That’s an hour less than the Dell Chromebook 11, and about 45 minutes more than the Toshiba. Despite its larger screen, the Acer lasts longer than our pick because its massive chassis also gives it room for a larger battery.

The Acer’s speakers are located in two long strips on each side of the keyboard. They’re a bit ugly, and not very good; the speakers vibrate the laptop’s body and have little bass and muddy mids and lows. Of course, no $300 laptop has amazing speakers, and headphones are an easy solution.

Few Chromebooks have outstanding build quality, and the Acer’s is decent but not great. For the most part the Acer feels sturdy and its hinge tilts way back for comfortable viewing. But the screen creaks a little under pressure, and the lid is heavy enough to overpower the hinge sometimes when opening and closing it.

The Verge’s Dan Siefert called the Acer Chromebook 15 “kind of clunky, kind of chunky, pretty ugly” and “practically an anvil in the Chromebook world,” but wrote that “It’s the laptop for the average person that values price over design or portability, but also doesn’t want to put up with the lousy, frustrating experience so often associated with cheap computers.”

Cherlynn Low of Laptop Magazine concluded “If you’re looking for a simple laptop that works well, and don’t need to carry it everywhere, the Acer Chromebook 15 is a solid investment. Its large display is good for Web surfing and working on spreadsheets, and its speedy performance makes it a dependable device for productivity. The loud speakers and long-lasting battery are other pluses. I just wish the screen were brighter and more colorful. Although it has a 13-inch smaller screen and isn’t as fast, we prefer the Toshiba Chromebook 2 ($329) because its IPS display is richer.”

CNET’s Joshua Goldman wrote “The Acer Chromebook 15 is available with an excellent 15.6-inch 1080p IPS display at a budget-friendly price. Battery life is very good as is performance from the fifth-gen Intel Celeron processor,” but added “Larger size and weight make it a little less travel-friendly than other Chromebooks. The white casing gets dirty easily and it’s not the most attractive Chromebook we’ve laid eyes on.”

How we picked and tested

When we first researched this guide in early 2014, we looked at the list of every Chromebook in existence and narrowed it down to 5 promising contenders that fit our criteria. Since, we’ve tested a total of 13 Chromebooks—that’s more than half of all the models that have ever been made. Over the past year, we’ve put them all through their paces in a series of benchmarks and real life tests.

We lived with each of our Chromebook contenders for a full day of work to get a feel for the keyboard, trackpad, screen, speakers, and each machine’s real-world performance. We also tested streaming music, how many tabs each Chromebook could handle, and large Google Drive spreadsheets and text documents, paying special attention to frustrating and error-inducing input lag while typing in Google Docs. In addition, we tested Netflix and YouTube videos in both fullscreen and windowed mode.

We ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark three times on each machine and took an average of the results. We also used the Peacekeeper and Oort Online benchmarks, but have found the SunSpider benchmark to be most indicative of real-life performance. These benchmarks combined with our real-world testing highlighted the performance gap between ARM-powered Chromebooks, Intel’s mobile processors, and ones with Haswell and Broadwell-based Intel chips.

To test the battery life of each Chromebook, we used a Chromium battery test designed to emulate normal browsing behavior in combination with the Keep Awake extension to override the power settings and prevent the screen from turning off every 7-8 minutes. The Chromium battery test loads a new website every minute, scrolling down and back up the page, for the first 60 percent of the test. The next 20 percent of the test loads a Gmail tab with audio streaming in a background tab. Then, the Chromium test loads various Google Docs for the next 10 percent, and the final 10 percent of the test plays a full screen YouTube video at 480 pixels. We ran the test until each Chromebook died and recorded our findings.

Competition

The 2015 Dell Chromebook 11 comes in both touch and non-touch versions, and is more rugged than last year’s model. It’s a great choice for schools, but we think the reinforcements are overkill, plus the added bulk and weaker processor aren’t worth the tradeoff for most people.

Google announced the second generation of the Chromebook Pixel in mid-March. It has Intel’s fifth-generation Core processors, 8GB of RAM, a 2560 x 1700 display, 12 hours of battery life, two USB-C ports, and an improved keyboard and trackpad. At $1,000, it’s too expensive for most people. The first-gen Pixel was even more expensive, so that’s out too.  For that price, you should buy a laptop with a full OS, like a Windows ultrabook or a MacBook Air.

The Acer C720-2844 and C720P with 4GB of RAM both have performance on par with the Dell Chromebook 11 (2014). Unfortunately, the the 4GB versions of both models are difficult (if not impossible) to track down, and the C720 feels like a netbook cobbled together from the second-best features of all the other Chromebooks we tested.

We don’t recommend the cheaper Acer C720 with only 2 GB of RAM. In our tests we found that the extra memory made a huge difference in ordinary web browsing, and the RAM on the Acer C720 is soldered in so it’s not possible to buy the 2GB Acer and upgrade it yourself. We don’t recommend any 2GB versions of the Acer C720P for the same reason.

At $480, the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 11e Chromebook is too expensive. In our testing, we found that the 11e Yoga has a solid keyboard and trackpad, and is one of the most rugged Chromebooks to date. But it’s heavier, slower, and has about three hours less battery life than the Dell Chromebook 11.

The ThinkPad 11e Chromebook without the 360-degree Yoga hinge has a matte, non-touch screen and the same specs as the Yoga model, but costs $100 less. It’s still $80 more expensive and has worse performance than our picks, so we don’t recommend it.

The Acer Chromebook 13 has a 13-inch 1080p screen, and it comes in a few configurations: a $300 model with 2 GB of RAM and a 16GB solid state drive, and a pricier $380 model with 4 GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD. All configs have an Nvidia Tegra K1 processor. We tested the 2GB config and found that, even though its keyboard is deeper than our pick’s, the Acer is larger, heavier, and its screen can’t compete with the Toshiba’s IPS panel. The 2GB RAM model is too slow for us to recommend, and we don’t think it’s worth $380 for the 4GB model when you can get the Toshiba with 4GB RAM for $300.

The Toshiba Chromebook was the first 13-inch Chromebook, and its Intel Celeron 2955U processor made it the best one for a while in spite of its low-resolution screen. The new Toshiba Chromebook 2 is lighter, has a brilliant 1920×1080 IPS screen, and isn’t too slow for us to recommend, so we’ve replaced our old pick with the newest model.

The Samsung Chromebook 2 (October 2014) has a new Intel Bay Trail N2840 processor, and is a huge performance improvement over its predecessor—which, to be fair, was released a full two years ago in October 2012. We love its deep, responsive keyboard and comfortable, cupped keys, but can’t recommend any Chromebook with only 2GB of RAM.

The HP Chromebook 14 (October 2013) has a 14-inch screen and weighs more than 4 pounds, while the 13-inch Toshiba Chromebook 2 weighs less than three. The HP Chromebook 14 has spectacular battery life–measuring 9 hours and 3 minutes on our battery test–but its low-res, washed-out 1366×768 LED screen and significant bulk put it behind our other picks. Now that you can get the the Acer Chromebook 15 with a 15-inch 1080p IPS screen, there’s no reason to buy the old HP Chromebook 14.

Both the Asus C200 and C300 run Intel’s Bay Trail mobile processors and have 2GB of RAM; the only difference between the two models is size. We tested the 13-inch C300 ourselves, and found that the processor and RAM are too slow for us to recommend. We experienced significant lag switching between tabs when only five were open, and saw typing lag in a Google Doc while simultaneously streaming music. In the Sunspider benchmark, the C300 was closer to the old Samsung Series 3 and HP Chromebook 11 than the Dell Chromebook 11 (2014), and it certainly felt like it during our everyday use.

The Samsung Series 3 Chromebook and the HP 11 Chromebook both rely on the same Samsung Exynos ARM processor that’s painfully slow to load new tabs, YouTube videos, and Google Docs. They can’t handle more than a few tabs without locking up for a few seconds, and 12 tabs freezes both machines completely. The Samsung Series 3 had the worst real-world performance out of all the models we tested. It’s also the oldest, dating back to late 2012, and has been replaced by a newer, faster model as of October 2014. We used to recommend the HP 11 Chromebook for its LTE connection, but it’s too slow to keep recommending.

We eliminated a number of Chromebooks that have been discontinued or replaced by newer, better, models. We also dismissed any that are way too expensive and others that have inadequate specs based on our experience with other models with the same internals.

Acer has announced new configurations of its C720 Chromebook with more powerful Intel i3 processors and 4 GB of RAM. However, both cost $380, $50 more than the Acer C720P with 4 GB RAM and a 1.4GHz dual-core Intel Celeron 2955U processor and $80 more than the Dell Chromebook 11 (2014). We didn’t encounter any performance issues with the C720’s original Celeron processor, so we don’t think it’s worth the cost to upgrade to the more powerful processor in this case.

The Acer C740 can be configured with an Intel Broadwell-based Celeron or Core i3 processor and up to 4 GB of RAM, but unfortunately it’s education-focused only and not readily available for normal people to buy. The C740 also has a low-resolution, 1366 x 768 screen and is more expensive than the Dell Chromebook 11 (2014).

Lenovo’s touchscreen N20p Chromebook is only available with 2 GB of RAM so we can’t recommend it. The N20, which has a traditional laptop form factor, doesn’t appear to be available for purchase.

Samsung’s 11-inch and 13-inch Chromebook 2 looked promising with 4 GB RAM, and we were impressed by the keyboard, trackpad, and overall design on both. The 1920×1080 screen on the 13-inch model is bright and crisp. However, The Verge’s review confirmed our concerns about the underpowered ARM-based Exynos 5 Octa processor in both Chromebooks, and deemed both models “too slow to really get anything done.” The Verge’s David Pierce wrote, “Even loading three tabs at the same time seemed to strain this unflinching unitasker of a machine.” He concluded, “I can’t imagine ever recommending a Chromebook without an Intel processor,” and, for the moment, we can’t either.

The HP Chromebook 11 has been refreshed with the Intel Celeron N2830 Bay Trail-M processor—the same one we tested and found way too slow for ordinary web browsing tasks in the Asus C300—and it does not have an IPS screen or an LTE option. The HP Chromebook 14 has also been refreshed, but the only model we can find with a 1920 x 1080 screen and 4 GB of RAM costs $440. Too expensive!

What to look forward to

Intel’s (poorly-named) next generation of mobile processors, Braswell, is expected to show up in Chromebooks in the coming months. Braswell is designed to replace last generation’s mobile Bay Trail-M processors, but we won’t know how the new generation stacks up against Bay Trail-M or if these CPUs can compete with Broadwell until we’ve tested them ourselves.

Several Chromebooks were announced in late March, and the Asus Chromebook Flip looks the most promising. The $250 Flip has a screen that can flip over into a tablet form factor. It’s an interesting idea, but we don’t think it will be useful on a Chromebook until more Android apps are ported. We’re also skeptical of the ARM-based Rockchip 3288 processor, so we’ll want to test it ourselves. The Flip will be available some time in the next six to eight weeks. The new Hisense and Haier budget Chromebooks are even cheaper than the Flip–just $150 each–but we expect poor performance from the ARM processor and 2 GB of RAM.

Google announced at its I/O developer conference in June 2014 that it will be bringing Android apps to Chrome OS in the future, and in September the first batch of Android apps came to Chrome OS. On March 31st, 2015, Google opened the app runtime for Chrome to Android developers, which means we should be seeing lots more Android apps ported to Chrome OS very soon. When more popular apps are available, touchscreens may become an important feature for Chromebooks, but we’re still not quite there yet.

Google also announced a few other new features at last year’s I/O: users will be able to log in to their Chromebooks if they have a phone running Android L (the upcoming version of Android), and Chromebooks will provide call, text, and low battery notifications from your phone. Google also has plans to replace the App Launcher in the lower left corner of Chrome OS with something similar to Google Now on Android.

We’ll keep this piece updated with our assessment of the latest Chromebooks as they’re released.

Care and maintenance

Traditional operating systems like Windows and OS X automatically check for software updates, but usually require permission to download and install them. Instead, Chrome OS automatically checks for, downloads, and installs system updates every time you turn the Chromebook on to ensure you’re running the most secure version of the OS with the latest features. There are no anti-virus definitions to update, no drivers to stay on top of, and no update settings to configure.

Wrapping it up

The $300 Toshiba Chromebook 2 offers the best balance between performance, portability, and screen quality of all the Chromebooks we’ve tested. For better performance and more portability, we recommend the Dell Chromebook 11 (2014), but it has a low-resolution, low-quality screen. If you want a giant screen and don’t mind a nearly-five-pound Chromebook, get the Acer Chromebook 15.