Lenovo and MediaTek Add Performance and Battery Life (and AI) to Google’s ChromeBook Plus
Thanks to a new chipset from MediaTek and smart design by Lenovo, the Chromebook Plus 14 is the best Chromebook I’ve ever tested, both from a performance and battery life standpoint. It’s easily my top Chromebook recommendation, and it should make people really think whether ChromeOS is right for their needs. The new ChromeOS AI features, including a few that run on-device, are nice to have but should not be a major purchase driver.
Context
Historically, ChromeOS has been purchased for two main reasons. The cloud-based system offers unique management capabilities: it is secure and constantly updated, it makes it easy to deploy and manage software, and it enables multi-user scenarios with interchangeable hardware. Also, some Chromebooks are dirt cheap. Sure, a $160 Chromebook may be flimsy and break in half when you deploy them in bulk to middle schoolers, but you can just pull another one out of storage and they’re off and running. Of course, the attributes that make ChromeOS so attractive to schools, parents, and enterprises have also been limitations: you can’t run full-strength Windows or MacOS apps, onboard storage is minimal, and connectivity is crucial. The hardware has been underpowered, inefficient, or both, and that has meant battery life of just 4 – 7 hours on many of the systems I have tested.
To address the performance problem, Google launched the Chromebook Plus program in 2023 with a set of minimum processor, RAM, storage, and webcam specs. Chromebook Plus-branded Chromebooks can run modern browser-based apps like video processing and photo editing, and don’t bog down when you have dozens of tabs open. There have certainly been premium Chromebooks even before the Chromebook Plus program – I still have a first-generation Google Pixel Chromebook in my collection, and HP has a line of enterprise Chromebooks that match its Windows EliteBook line in specs, build quality, and price. The challenge has been that the price point for premium Chromebooks negates any hardware cost advantage ChromeOS has over Windows or Mac, and battery life still badly lags systems that run on Apple Silicon, Qualcomm Snapdragon X, or even Intel’s Lunar Lake processors.
MediaTek is the silicon market leader for Chromebooks, but most of the MediaTek processors that have been used in Chromebooks have been designed to offer just enough performance at the lowest possible price. MediaTek can certainly make premium silicon – just look at the Dimensity 9000-series for smartphones – but it left the top of the Chromebook market to Intel, until now. When MediaTek quietly launched two new chips in April the same week that Trump tariffs dominated the news cycle, I called out the Kompanio Ultra as worth paying attention to in a short report focused on the specs. Having now tested the Kompanio Ultra 910 in Lenovo’s Chromebook Plus 14, I may have underhyped it.*
The Kompanio Ultra CPU performs like the latest generation Intel Core Ultra 2 i5, MediaTek’s 50 TOPS NPU is even more capable than Intel’s (on paper), and its GPU benchmarks within 20% of Intel’s Arc graphics. Geekbench 6 for Android showed CPU single-core 2588, CPU multi-core 7650, and GPU-Vulcan 18678. However, while this puts its CPU performance in the same ballpark as a $1200 Lenovo ThinkPad X9, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus only costs $650 – and it has much better battery life than the Intel and Windows machine. Lenovo specs the Chromebook Plus at 17 hours of battery life, and my real-world usage confirmed that estimate is realistic. There has never been a Chromebook like this before.
Hardware
The first thing that struck me about Lenovo’s design for the Chromebook Plus 14 is the size, weight, and materials: it weighs just 2.58 lbs (1.17kg) and is .62” (15.8mm) thick in an aluminum chassis with a ridged plastic bottom panel. It’s not so light that it feels like an empty IKEA desk prop, but significantly lighter and more premium than you might expect given the long battery life and relatively power-hungry display tech. It is also tested for durability under MIL-STD-810H (though Lenovo doesn’t list specific environmental protection). The MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 with its 50 TOPS NPU does not require fans, helping with the ThinkPad Plus 14’s height, and it is dead silent during operation. There is no cellular support, but Wi-Fi 7 is standard. The case edges are rounded, and the keyboard is flanked by a pair of speakers with two more on the bottom. Atop the display is Lenovo’s signature camera bar with a 5 MP webcam and a physical privacy slider.
Another premium touch is the display, a 14” 1200p OLED in a 16:10 aspect ratio, with 400 nits brightness, 100% DCI-P3 color reproduction, and a touchscreen. 400 nit OLED isn’t the best panel I’ve ever seen – it’s not the highest resolution, and it doesn’t support HDR. But, come on, it’s an OLED panel on a $649 laptop!
The keyboard is nicely spaced and styled; it’s remarkably quiet, and reasonably tactile. It’s very good. I do wish that there was a delete key rather than just backspace, but this is a common complaint on Chromebooks. The trackpad isn’t oversized like many we see nowadays, but it’s big enough and worked without issue. To the right of the trackpad is a fingerprint reader for added security and convenience; its location makes it easier to hit when you start up the Chromebook than fingerprint readers that are integrated onto a key within the keyboard.
Streaming Foundation on Apple TV+ revealed one of the few weaknesses of the hardware: while the super-saturated colors of the show popped nicely on the OLED screen and the quad-speaker Dolby Atmos sound system plays clearly and without distortion, it simply can’t get loud enough. This was especially an issue in my office with the AC droning in the background, but even when I moved to a completely quiet room, it still never got beyond just moderate volume even when maxxing out the slider.
OS Updates, AI, and On-Device AI
At an NDA launch event in New York in June, Google not only showed off Lenovo’s new hardware, but also announced new ChromeOS features. Google is heavily invested in Gemini across its portfolio, and ChromeOS is no different. Google is explicitly calling out a hybrid approach to AI on ChromeOS, with a split between on-device tasks that require speed and low latency, like enhancing video calls and photo editing, and those that require full LLM access because they are more sophisticated or simply because they are updated more frequently.
In addition to live translation, writing help, and more from previous ChromeOS builds, new AI-driven features include Select to search with Lens (like on Android), text capture from images, and a physical quick insert key with image generation. Some of these features are specific to Chromebook Plus series Chromebooks. Two of the new features require the MediaTek Kompanio Ultra’s NPU in the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14: on-device image generation, and Smart Grouping. The latter is supposed to be able to assess the mess of tabs you have open and automatically group them. This is a great idea, but it didn’t work when I tried it: Gemini couldn’t distinguish between tabs researching a business trip and a family vacation. It also didn’t know that shopping tabs for gadgets were actually research for a work project, and that other items were for actual personal purchase (or, in the case of mechanical pilots watches, a window-shopping rabbit hole). I expect that a future version of Gemini with opt-in contextual knowledge about me will be able to pull this off, and perhaps it is useful today if you have more clearly defined subjects.
Similarly, Welcome Recap, an AI summary that greets you when you log into your Chromebook, was hit or miss in terms of utility. There were a few times when it was useful, and a few times when it added an unnecessary step before I could get to my work.
Google has to incorporate AI functionality into the OS both for strategic and product reasons, even if a lot of the functionality is essentially just a step away on the web anyway. There isn’t enough here being done on-device for utility or privacy that buying a Chromebook Plus 14 is necessary today, though thankfully it’s such a good ChromeOS experience in other ways that it doesn’t matter.
ChromeOS in an Age of Web Apps
In the past ChromeOS did not support my full workflow, but software support has improved, and web apps are now ubiquitous, so I took the new Lenovo Chromebook Plus on a last-minute transcon trip. A road test turned out to be the perfect way to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the platform.
ChromeOS was also ideal from a setup perspective: I unboxed the unit about twenty minutes before I had to leave for the airport, and while there were a few site credentials that I had to fill out at the United Club, it really was ready to go much faster than a Windows or MacOS laptop.
I didn’t have time to charge it past 80% before I left, so a long day made even longer by Air Traffic Control delays was an ideal way to test the battery life. It is seriously impressive: MediaTek’s Arm architecture provides both better performance than the Intel Chromebooks I’ve tested, it at least doubles the battery life. Lenovo specs the Chromebook Plus at 17 hours, and while my flight only felt that long, the laptop absolutely sipped battery. That was helped by the relatively low brightness level I had set the OLED display, but it was great to get off a plane after eight hours without needing to charge the laptop at all even though it hadn’t even been at 100% when I started. Based on what the laptop itself predicts, if you use the laptop unplugged at full brightness, you should still get 8 – 10 hours of life. If you’re more judicious about the juice going to the panel, getting the full 17 hours seems realistic, and that’s just astonishing for a Chromebook.
Some things worked quite well. Techsponential relies on many web apps, including accounting, photo storage, design software for report thumbnails, file storage and synchronization, social media, and the Techsponential.com site itself. I was able to invoice a client; write, edit, and publish this report; edit the unboxing photos; and create the graphic. I even managed to liveblog a press conference, though this only worked because connectivity at T-Mobile's Innovation Hub was extremely robust, and most of the attendees were employees there to cheer, not using network resources.
WebEx struggled at one point during a presentation I attended – my live video and the participants were stable, but the presenter’s slide deck disappeared. I have no idea whose bug that was (Webex? Google? Lenovo? MediaTek?); I had to refresh the tab and rejoin the meeting. I also had Microsoft365 telling me that it couldn’t save this report at one point and it asked that I reload the document; I copied the phrase I had just written, reloaded the document, and then pasted it back in. No harm done, but I’ve never had either of these issues when using downloaded versions of these apps on Windows or MacOS.
Most of my workload really can be done on Chromebooks most of the time. However, Chromebooks are still not ideal for often-offline Microsoft 365 road warriors who need the full functionality of Microsoft’s native Windows and MacOS apps. Other use cases, like gaming, video editing, and Adobe-centric workflows are also still better served by Windows or Mac as well. However, for users enmeshed in Google’s own ecosystem and SAAS apps, ChromeOS has long been a reasonable option on the software side. Now there is more AI functionality embedded in the experience, and the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 brings premium components, strong performance, and extreme battery life – all at a price that undercuts any comparable Windows or Mac laptop.
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*There is another reason to pay close attention to MediaTek’s best Arm-based CPUs for Chromebooks and tablets: NVIDIA is collaborating with MediaTek on the design of the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip for NVIDIA Project DIGITS, leveraging MediaTek’s expertise in CPU performance and power efficiency. There have also been persistent rumors that MediaTek and NVIDIA are working on PC chips together beyond Project DIGITS.