The best Chromebook you can buy is on sale today
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AmazonThe Toshiba Chromebook 2 is our favorite Chromebook on the market, and today Amazon has marked it down to $299. That’s $30 below its usual price, and tied for the lowest it’s been on the site.
This is the 13-inch Chromebook pick in our best budget laptops guide. Relative to other Chromebooks, there isn’t much it gets wrong. Its 1080p IPS display is crisp and colorful enough to pass on notebooks more than twice as expensive; its trackpad is smooth and accurate; and its keyboard, while not the clickiest around, is backlit and well-spaced. This model runs on an Intel Celeron 3215U chip and 4GB of RAM, which is more than enough to breeze through Chrome OS.
Now, there are couple caveats here. One, it’s a Chromebook. It’s better-built and faster in operation than any Windows notebook in its price range, but it runs Chrome OS, which is still an extended web browser at its core. You can do more with a web browser today than you might think — personally, I use a Chromebook as my main computer — but if you need certain desktop apps to function, it might be worth putting up with a cheap Windows machine’s shortcomings.
Two, Toshiba is at a turning point. The Japanese firm recently announced that it was winding down production of consumer laptops in the US, and that it won’t introduce any new models outside of Japan from now on. The discount here is likely a reflection of that. That said, the company has said that it’ll honor warranties of existing laptops going forward, so on the off chance something goes haywire, you shouldn’t be out of luck.
In any case, if you can stick to casual browsing and non-heavy duty work, the Chromebook 2 is a great value. As long as it’s available, it’s worth a look.
Toshiba Chromebook 2 (2015 Edition), $299, available at Amazon.