I’m breaking my own rules to highlight this $119 Google Chromebook

I have a general set of rules I stick to when recommending anyone to go and buy an affordable Chromebook. Since we made the post and video about those rules, I’ve stuck by them when it comes to recommending low-priced devices. While places like Walmart or Amazon tend to have all sorts of Chromebooks listed at or around $100, generally speaking, none of them are worth that sort of money.

And the problem tends to lie with performance, the quality of the build, the quality of the screen, and AUE. Many cheaper Chromebooks didn’t get the AUE boost over the past few years, so even though you are buying a budget Chromebook on the cheap, it likely won’t get upgrades after a year or two in many cases with these insanely-cheap devices.

That’s why we made the post and video about this very thing. Many times, a device may look appealing at that $99 price point, but you get it and realize it really is a terrible Chromebook and that you’d have been better off saving for a bit longer and waiting for a slightly more expensive device that you can keep around and enjoy for years.

I’m breaking some rules today

So, in order to set some standards for my recommendations, I decided that certain processors simply weren’t worth it in the long run for consumers, and I’ve steered clear of recommending them ever since. I still stand by those recommendations, and you’ll notice all the things I point out in our post/video about being a smart Chromebook deal shopper still apply to the devices I highlight most days in our daily deals post.

That being said, there are times when rules are made to be bent and/or broken. And for me, today is one of those days. The Lenovo IdeaPad 3i Chromebook over at Best Buy falls a bit shy in many of the categories I care about and talked at length about in our post and video about all of this; but it’s always been just out of consideration – not widely disqualified.

It has a 1080p display, but it’s only 220 nits. It has a decent small-core Intel N4500 processor, but that’s one generation behind the N100 I generally keep as my baseline. It has an all-plastic build that I don’t love and comes with the bare-minimum 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.

On most days, even a decent discount isn’t enough to get this one in the daily deals post. But today, things are a little different. You see, right now at Best Buy, you can get this competent Google Chromebook for just $119. Yes, $119.

With an AUE date of June 2030, you still get a solid 5-6 years of updates with this Chromebook, a nice, large screen, Lenovo’s always-solid keyboard/trackpad combo, and a processor that isn’t the best, but won’t bog you down in a frustrating slew of lags and hiccups. I’m not telling you it’s the best device you can buy, but it’s worth a lot more than $119 – I’m certain of that much.

As these things tend to go, I doubt we’ll have this deal available for too long. If you need a Google Chromebook at home for basic tasks or for a student that just needs to get some classwork done, this is a very good deal on a decent device you don’t have to worry about being wildly outdated or excruciatingly slow. Just don’t wait too long – it could be gone by the end of the week.