Unfortunately, retailers still use back-to-school sales to offload subpar hardware at attractive prices. Not this deal. Best Buy is selling an excellent Chromebook for almost half off, and there’s really no reason not to buy it.
If you’ve followed our almost daily roundups of the best back-to-school deals on laptops, Chromebooks, MacBooks, and other hardware, you know that bargains are often about compromise: Maybe the discounted item uses yesterday’s hardware. In the case of Chromebooks, that’s common, and the Pentium Silver N6000 chip inside the Lenovo Flex 3 on sale for $249.99 (48% off!) is still better than most. But from what we can see this Chromebook has no gotchas at all.
We often warn users to avoid Chromebooks with 4GB of RAM and a 768p screen. But the Flex 3 boasts 8GB RAM and 64GB of storage. The latter’s maybe a little skimpy, but this is a Chromebook — this device is just for primarily working on (and storing) stuff online. But a nice big 15.6-inch 1080p screen? And a Lenovo-quality keyboard? We’d advise you to grab this deal now, because we haven’t seen anything this good yet for this year’s back-to-school sales.
We even double-checked Google’s support window. According to Google, it appears that the Flex 3 line will receive patches until June 2028. As far as we can tell, this is a fantastic deal whose only concern is how long it will last.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor
As PCWorld's senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft news and chip technology, among other beats. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.