Hot on the heels of Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, Google is rolling out updates to ChromeOS and a new flagship laptop to showcase them: the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14. Designed to help take advantage of AI software like Gemini and NotebookLM, the new Chromebook Plus has some impressive specs for a $650 laptop.
Not just dirt-cheap and simple devices for the absolute basics, there are Chromebooks among some of the best laptops currently available. I don’t doubt that when I get done testing this new Lenovo, it’ll join them.
About the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14
Lenovo’s latest Chromebook Plus looks and feels like a premium laptop, but it’ll start at only $650 when it arrives in late June. Spending an extra $100 gets you more RAM, twice the storage and a touchscreen. Google says it’s the first Chromebook Plus to run on an Arm chip and the first ever to use the MediaTek Kompanio Ultra chip. That should not only give it good AI performance but extraordinary battery life — up to 17 hours.
- MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 chip (50 TOPS)
- 12GB ($650) or 16GB ($750) of RAM
- 128GB or 256GB UFS 4.0 storage
- 14-inch, 1,920×1,200-pixel OLED (touchscreen available)
- Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
- 2x USB-C (5Gbps, DisplayPort 1.4 support), USB-A (5Gbps), 3.5mm combo jack
- Starts at 2.6 pounds (1.2 kilograms)
- 5-megapixel webcam with dual mics and privacy shutter
- Quad speakers with Dolby Atmos support
- Fingerprint reader option
The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 will also have two exclusive on-device AI features. Smart grouping will scan your current open tabs and documents and use AI to recommend organizing them into logical groups. For example, if you’re planning a trip or organizing an event, it’ll be able to suggest a grouping of all the relevant information you have open.
The other exclusive feature is image editing straight from the Gallery app. It’ll add advanced AI options like removing backgrounds or creating stickers.
AI updates for ChromeOS
Google also announced new features that will roll out to Chromebook Plus models starting today. The most helpful for me is the addition of select to search and text capture. Just like Circle to Search, you’ll be able to highlight a picture or text and get instant Google search results. Text capture can be used similarly to pull data into Google Workspace apps or calendars.
The Quick Insert key, which first appeared last year on the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus, lets you easily get contextual writing help. Now, you’ll be able to highlight text and generate AI images based on that text. For example, I wrote an email about a Fourth of July barbecue, highlighted the text, and it produced a flyer for the event (packed with typos, but still).
The other big addition is that NotebookLM will come installed on every Chromebook Plus. It’s an AI tool can ingest complex materials like research papers and help simplify them. You can then ask it questions like a chatbot, but the answers only come from the information you’ve given it. It can even generate a podcast from it.
Every Chromebook Plus includes one year of Google’s AI Pro plan, which really lets you sink into Google Gemini AI, including its Veo 3 AI video generator. Just don’t get too attached, unless you’re willing to pay $240 once the first year ends.
