Chromebooks can be excellent alternatives to traditional laptops, especially if you want something that’s a bit more budget-friendly while also having a good amount of power. A lot of that is due to the fact that ChromeOS is a lot more lightweight than Windows, so it’s not as resource-hungry and means you get more bang for your buck with a Chromebook.
One of our favorite Chromebooks is even cheaper right now, with the Lenovo Duet 3 discounted down to $279 at Best Buy. That’s a very respectable $100 discount, plus you get six months of Norton 360 and Webroot thrown in for free.
It’s not often you find a solid budget computer, but the Lenovo Duet 3 manages to balance cost versus performance really well. It comes with a Snapdragon 7c Gen 2, which is an entry-level mobile processer like you might find on some phones. Even so, it can still manage most productivity and day-to-day tasks just fine, and you can even do some gaming on it, although you’ll likely be restricted to slower refresh rates.
What’s much nicer to see is the 4GB of RAM, which would usually be too little for a Windows machine, but is a good amount for a budget Chromebook. Internal storage is also perfectly fine at 128GB, with Chromebooks being made more for streaming content and relying on cloud apps than built-in storage.
The only real compromise you’ll make here is that there are only two USB ports, though they are both USB-C 3.1, and while the Duet 3 comes with a detachable keyboard with a solid typing experience, it doesn’t have a stylus. Otherwise, the 11-inch display is solid, and the 2,000×1,200-pixel resolution is great for pretty much anything you’re likely to do on it. That said, if you’d still like something a bit beefier, there are several other Chromebook deals going on right now that you could consider.
