For many of my grownup life, the thought of utilizing a laptop computer with a display screen below 13 inches made me reflexively recoil. That will appear a bit of unfair, however I got here of age when shoddy netbooks—with their tiny screens, low costs, and horrible efficiency—have been hitting discount bins in every single place. That have, together with having to speak a number of relations searching for a very good deal out of shopping for one, left a bitter style in my mouth.
I say all of this to convey how flawed I used to be (and perhaps train a lesson about letting outdated biases go, however I digress). It’s not like there was a glut of sub-12-inch laptops on the market because the netbook market died, however its important commonplace bearer, the Lenovo Chromebook Duet, has garnered excessive reward since its first iteration in 2020. Now, the corporate’s newest model is right here, and it completely received me over.
The concept behind the Chromebook Duet is straightforward: It’s an ultraportable Chromebook with a removable keyboard that permits you to shortly change between pill and laptop computer modes. The 11-inch Chromebook Duet Gen 9 carries that concept ahead, swapping in a MediaTek Kompanio 838 processor for a bit of extra energy. This isn’t meant to be your important pc, however a compact machine you’ll be able to shortly toss in a bag and use nearly anyplace with out a lot fuss.
Past the MediaTek processor, the Chromebook Duet Gen 9 comes with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage for $370 or 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage for $400 (my overview gadget is the latter). In both case, you’ll get an 11-inch LCD flanked by two audio system, together with an 8-MP rear digital camera and a 5-MP front-facing digital camera with a privateness shutter. The display screen is wrapped in a sturdy steel chassis, whereas the removable keyboard has a steel high deck with a grey leather-esque materials on its rear.