Google has lifted the lid on a brand new Chromebook that it claims is the “most advanced” Chrome-flavoured laptop ever released. Chromebooks run ChromeOS, a Google-built operating system that can only run Google-made apps.
But the new computer is not Google branded. Instead, we have the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, a seemingly very powerful new Chromebook Google said it has made in tight collaboration with Lenovo and chip manufacturer MediaTek. It costs from £599 and goes on sale soon.
That might disappoint Google fans who yearn for another Pixelbook branded laptop. Google has not released one of its own Chromebooks bearing that name since the Pixelbook Go in 2020, the sublime Pixelbook from 2017 a distant memory.
But the new Lenovo machine looks impressive, and is the first Chromebook to run on an ARM chip, a power-efficient alternative to those made by Intel often used in cheaper Chromebooks.
“The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 is powered by the all new MediaTek Kompanio Ultra processor, the strongest ever ARM chip in a Chromebook. Its blazing fast AI NPU with up to 50 TOPS can effortlessly handle any AI task thrown at it,” John Maletis, Vice President, ChromeOS said in a press release.
NPU and TOPS stand for neural processing unit and total operations per second respectively. The NPU is the hardware brain of the Chromebook that helps to run AI tools, and the more TOPS it can push out, the better.
Forrest Smith, group product manager for Chrome OS told me running Gemini AI on the new Chromebook is 32 percent faster and 44 percent more efficient than on older hardware.
Continuing with its big push into AI, Google is also touting the Chromebook’s new Gemini-branded software tools. These include Select to search, a laptop version of Circle to search that has recently come to modern Android phones. You invoke the tool with a long press on an icon using the Chromebook Plus 14’s touchscreen, then touch and drag to select a section of your screen. This then searches the web for images or information, and in a demo Google showed me it can give you possible actions from the context of what is selected.
The screen is a 14-inch 2K OLED, though you have to pay £699 for the touchscreen version. This price is still very competitive for the specs you get, which add in at least 12GB RAM, and up to 256GB storage. The machine is also fanless, with Google claiming it’s not needed.
Perhaps best of all – if accurate in reality – is the claim the Chromebook can last for up to 17 hours on a charge. That’s long enough to stream all four John Wick movies and then some, something Smith said he’s tested more than once.
The laptop comes with the Caps Lock key doubling up also as a Quick Insert key. Tap it, and Google’s AI will scan your whole screen to give suggested actions based on what you’re doing. It can also now generate images in this mode.
Exclusively for this device also comes smart grouping (see above image), which uses AI to recommend ways to organise your many open Chrome browser tabs and documents into “logical groups based on current tasks”. I didn’t see a live demo of this, but if it works it could be very helpful. The AI allegedly can group everything quickly into new, separate desktops to help you visualise different topics.
The new Chromebook will also be the first to have image editing built into its native Gallery app, allowing you to remove backgrounds, make stickers and do other edits. This is similar to the Magic Editor that is built into the Google Photos smartphone app.