Thinking About Chromebook Plus and Premium Chromebooks (Premium)

Back in February, I traveled to New York City for my first in-person work event since the start of the pandemic, an HP reviewers workshop. It was a little strange, of course, but very much worth it. I got to see a few people I hadn’t seen in ages. And HP provided in-depth overviews of two exciting new laptops, the Dragonfly Pro and Dragonfly Pro Chromebook it had announced weeks earlier at CES 2023.

The two PCs are nearly identical at first glance, and both are available in Ceramic White or Sparkling Black. But there are some important differences. The Dragonfly Pro, for example, runs Windows 11 and utilizes an AMD Ryzen 7736U mobile processor with custom power management capabilities that span the performance/battery life divide in ways I’ve never seen before. And the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook, of course, runs ChromeOS and is powered by a 12th Gen Intel Core i5 processor. 

Creating nearly identical PCs and Chromebooks is not unheard of in the education market, where prices are as cheap as the product quality But this is unheard of in the premium space. And HP really made things interesting by giving the Chromebook model some curious advantages over its Windows stablemate, including an extra Thunderbolt 4/USB-C port, a superior webcam (8 MP vs. 5 MP), a keyboard with RGB dynamic lighting, and a brighter display with a higher resolution. (The Chromebook also lacks the PC’s weird custom keys.)

I took both PCs to Mexico City in March and wrote my initial impressions of each in accordance with HP’s embargo date and time. And then I published my review of the HP Dragonfly Pro in May. To be clear, I loved it, and still do, and aside from some weird custom keys, it’s basically perfect for my needs.

But I never reviewed the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook. This wasn’t laziness on my part. I just didn’t know what to make of it. As I noted in my first impressions article, I’ve been fascinated by premium Chromebooks since the original Google Chromebook Pixel in 2013, in part because the term has always seemed somewhat oxymoronic. But that’s not really fair: As a long-time Windows user, I am if anything overly-sensitive to my favorite computing platform’s many flaws. And not begrudgingly at all, I have always given Google credit for addressing those issues with its own PC platform. Chromebooks are simple to use, update seamlessly, and are inherently secure. Plus they’re easy enough to manage that many cash-strapped schools can get by with little or no IT help.

My experiences with Chromebooks, and I’ve used and owned many of them, including the first-ever Google Chromebook CR-48 from 2010, have always resulted in the same conclusion. I remain impressed, and that’s especially true as the platform matured. But I also find Chromebooks to be curiously confining and restrictive. And this has always been a weird stumbling block for me.

On one level, my issue with the Mac and Linux is the same: I’m so familiar with Windows, and so tied up in workflows that I developed and honed over so many years that these less familiar environments are different enough or lacking in some keys ways that I find them to be less desirable. But on another level, this problem is exacerbated in ChromeOS because this platform is deliberately simplified to a point where it feels hobbled to me. Even basic actions, like positioning a floating window precisely, are literally impossible. It’s like trying to write with your left hand when you’re a rightie. 

And so I remain interested and curious. It’s not that I don’t get it. It’s just that it’s never stuck … for me. And as the years went by, and Google continued improving ChromeOS and amping up the quality, I kept waiting for that moment. That moment when it finally did make sense to me. The addition of Android app support seemed like it could be that moment. The arrival of so-called “gaming Chromebooks” not so much.

But I always felt that if I was going to really connect with a Chromebook it would be in the premium space. Not because I have money to burn, but because the bar is lower with this education-friendly platform. A sub-$1000 Chromebook would likely perform as well or better than a $1500 to $2000 Windows PC. Assuming such a thing ever made any sense at all.

HP’s February briefing sticks with me. In an interesting and I think deliberate move, it started with the Chromebook, forcing the Windows-centric room of reviewers to pay attention to a device that some might have simply skipped otherwise. And HP’s John Groden, who shepherded these products to market, shared the stage with two Google executives, John Maletis, a vice president of ChromeOS, and Will McLeod. It was all interesting enough that when HP later held a virtual version of the presentation, I attended that too.

What I realize now in the wake of this week’s Chromebook Plus announcement is that Google, in partnering with HP, was offering the world of preview of what was to come. Because the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook is very much a Chromebook Plus device, an archetype of what was to come. The only thing missing was the additional software and services, many of which are AI-based.

The message, that day in February, was that the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook was the end result of a two-year partnership, which is perhaps not coincidentally the same development timeline that Google cited during my Chromebook Plus briefing last week. These higher-end Chromebooks, developed in tandem with hardware and software partners, originally went by the placeholder name Chromebook X, and they were designed to change how customers—real or potential—viewed the platform.

HP and Google shared the same goal for the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook, which we now understand to be the vanguard of the Chromebook Plus line: It would be the best Chromebook in the world, period, and a spiritual successor to Google’s Chromebook Pixel. The two firms worked as one company to define the product, arguing that “people buy experiences, not software or hardware,” and that this PC would be the perfect companion to a Pixel smartphone. 

The specs reflect these goals, from the high-end components that would be at home in any premium Windows PC to technologies like Nearby Share, Fast Pair, and cross-platform Android apps. There are many firsts here. It’s the first Chromebook with four Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports. The first with a front-facing 8 MP webcam. The first with a 1200-nit display. And it’s the first non-gaming Chromebook with a customizable RGB keyboard.

And it is targeted specifically at freelancers, a suddenly huge and obvious market in this world of hybrid work that spoke to me for obvious reasons. It’s a premium product that needs to augment all that power with a professional look and feel, modern remote meeting capabilities, and the ability to seamlessly transition between docked and mobile states. And I bought into it. Maybe HP and Google had finally cracked the code.

Maybe. But this past year, I kept running to the same old limitations. What was I missing? 

Lots, perhaps. Inspired by a damning Wall Street Journal article that explained the dark side of its promised value to educational institutions in particular, I began writing a post on this topic. I discussed this with my sister, a teacher who knew about the problems firsthand and was unhappy with what she viewed as her school district’s short-term views when it came to adopting Chromebooks. And then Google surprised us all and eliminated this platform’s Achilles Heel when it announced two weeks later that it would now support Chromebooks with 10 years of automatic updates. This is more than Apple or Microsoft promise

With that criticism eliminated, I began thinking about premium Chromebooks again, and whether this thing—which I still thought of as an oxymoron—could ever make any sense. And then Google reached out. Would I be interested in hearing about a new kind of Chromebook? Yes. Yes, I would. And when I met virtually with Google last week, I was told that it was finally ready to take the next step. It would take a fresh look at the laptop market it had disrupted over a decade ago and turn it up a notch.

As noted in Laurent’s news article, Chromebook Plus models offer all of the familiar benefits of ChromeOS combined with a set of minimum specifications that put them in the lower-end of premium PC territory: a modern 13th Gen Intel Core or AMD Ryzen 7000 series processor, 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, a Full HD (1080p) IPS or better display, and a 1080p+ webcam with temporal noise reduction. These specs, which are heady in the Chromebook world, are all about 2X their mainstream Chromebook minimum spec equivalents. And they come at a significant pricing advantage compared to similar Windows PCs. 

That’s great. But I was already stymied by the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook with its even headier specs. For a premium Chromebook to make sense to me, no matter the specs or branding, Google has to do more than continue providing good value. It has to address my concerns about the limited and constrained experience I have each time I use one of these devices. And so I was particularly interested to hear what it intended to do on the software side as well.

Looking past the Material You-based theming capabilities, which are terrific but unrelated to my current concerns, no one will be surprised to know that most of the other new features are AI-related. And as is the case with Windows 11 too, these new AI features are spread throughout the system, and many come directly in specific apps. Some are consumer-focused niceties that don’t impact me day-to-day, like Google Photos editing improvements (background blur, Magic Eraser), but some are quite interesting and could be beneficial. Those Chromebook Plus-specific advances include:

Video controls. This one seems to one-up Windows by offering system-wide and app-agnostic video controls, plus global microphone mute and webcam shutter toggle buttons, all from the Shelf (the ChromeOS Taskbar). Very nice. And to be clear, these things work with any meeting app, including Zoom and whatever else.

Video editors. If my experience with Clipchamp has taught me anything, and it has, it’s that web apps have advanced to the point where anything is possible. Interestingly, I could use Clipchamp on a Chromebook, but Google also announced two other options for Plus devices: Google Photos Movie Maker and LumaFusion. Both of which are Android apps. Interesting.

Adobe Photoshop on the Web. Adobe just released this product, which looks to be an Elements-level version of its flagship product and perhaps an ideal web-based photo editor. The issue? It requires an Adobe CC subscription, which is expensive. I need something like Adobe Photoshop, so I will test this, but I suspect I will have to turn to a free alternative like Photopea.

More on the way. Because of the excitement around AI, Google also did something it says it’s never done before by informing me and others about future AI advances that will arrive in the next few months and be free to Chromebook Plus customers. These include AI-based tools to help you write in any app that deals with text, help you read better (summaries, conclusions, key sentence highlighting), help manage tasks across apps and devices, help you create wallpaper using generative AI for personalization, and help you make video calls more personal.

But there was one non-AI feature that really caught my eye. If you think about the blockers I and many Windows users might have with a Chromebook, a lot of it comes down to workflow. We use certain apps and have certain ways of getting things done, and if we can’t duplicate those things or find suitable replacements, switching turns into a non-starter. And key to my own workflow is OneDrive integration with the Windows file system via such features as Files on Demand. This also works on the Mac. But it does not work on Chromebooks. And I basically can’t live without it.

That said, during my recent digital decluttering sweep, I discovered something unexpected: Google Drive was more reliable than OneDrive for Business and offered better performance. And since I’m already paying for 1 TB of storage as part of my Google Workspace subscription, I could use that for my local file sync instead of OneDrive. And not just on Windows, but on a Chromebook as well. (And a Mac, I guess.) 

The one non-AI feature I noted above was described as offline file sync. This is a bit confusing because I thought Chromebooks already offered this for Google Drive via the Files app. But there is clearly something new here–why else would Google specifically call it out?–and so I tried to figure out what is changing.

It appears to be subtle. In ChromeOS today, I can navigate to a Drive folder in Files and toggle a “Available offline” option that will do what you’d expect. This works with individual files as well, of course. 

Looking at Google’s documentation, it appears that Chromebook Plus users will see an “Access your Google Drive files when you’re offline” screen during Setup, similar to what Microsoft does with OneDrive during Windows 11 Setup (though users don’t usually see a choice, just that this offline access, which Microsoft calls “backup,” is happening). But this will enable offline access to all of your Drive storage, which isn’t desirable to me. (And this won’t be offered if your device storage is too small to contain it.)

Beyond that, it appears that nothing is changing: Offline access to Drive will work identically to the system in place today. Which is fine, I think it will work as I expect and want. I just have to use Drive and not OneDrive. Which I wanted to experiment with anyway. (Even on PCs.)

Does all this add up to Chromebook Plus meeting my needs? Has Google finally done enough to make this switch possible?

I’m honestly not sure. The workflow issues cited above are a combination of apps and services availability, and I have noticed over time that there are fewer and fewer blockers in both categories. And if I can switch to Drive, that would obviously solve a big part of the problem. And what the heck, I have this high-end Chromebook, which will be updated to give me access to all of the functionality that is unique to Chromebook Plus. So testing this is certainly possible.

And so I will do that. We’ll see what comes of it, but the first step will be using Drive this month for my day-to-day work, most crucially in Windows. I would rather see OneDrive integration in ChromeOS, and full-featured, offline-capable versions of the Microsoft Office web apps. And will hold out for that. But I can at least get started, and see where this leads. 

Whatever happens now, I do feel that ChromeOS will eventually mature to the point where it can make sense to people with needs as specific as mine. It seems inevitable.