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 Windo...