Rave reviews for $280 Lenovo Chromebook Duet

For school purposes I’d be a trifle nervous about this one; unless you really like tablets or have to have maximum portability.

At least in my experience with Surface Pro tablet devices(where the detachable keyboards run ~$150, so can’t just plead being painfully price constrained); removable, less-than-entirely-rigid keyboards are garbage. Not quite as bad as onscreen touch keyboards, or those hideous flexible silicone ones; but it takes a fairly awful laptop to have a worse fixed keyboard than a tablet with detachable keyboard.

In the same vein, those cover/stand things are really irritating if you don’t have a flat, hard, reasonably roomy surface to work with; the thing will just flop over, since all the weight is right behind the screen. Laptops, by contrast, typically have much more of the weight in the base and hinges that can keep the screen at a chosen angle even if they are in your lap, half-perched on some precarious piece of furniture or the like.

In this case you also don’t get a few USB ports: it’s 1x USB-C and like it. That’s fixable, there are little hubs that will turn 1x USB-C into a few USB type As and possibly one or two other widgets(SD slot, NIC, etc.); but does anyone like dongles?

Chromebooks in general I’m more positive on for your use case: if you do run into a need to run some win32 software you have a problem; but between web apps that are targeted at Chrome anyway and some ability to run Android stuff you are covered for most purposes that don’t revolve around a fairly specific set of tools(and if you are one of those affected you probably already know that).

In exchange for being less versatile than Windows, a Chromebook of given price will typically be snappier about what it does do that the Windows counterpart doing the same thing(Chrome will eat all your memory either way; but there’s way less OS under Chrome on a Chromebook). It also features delightfully quick updates(notably unlike cheap windows devices; a win10 feature update on eMMC isn’t a pretty picture) and is nigh-impossible to screw up, short of hardware damage. Plus, since the ChromeOS team is totally different from the Android side, it enjoys relatively long supported lifespans and fast security updates without meddling vendors screwing things up.

I speak as someone who hates tablets and “2 in 1”/convertible devices, so take it with a grain of salt; but while I could definitely see ChromeOS suiting your needs; I’d only consider this specific device if it was as a backup to a real computer. Minimal ports, significant compromises to the keyboard in an attempt to be more tablet-y; standard laptop-type Chromebooks available for very similar money.

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