This week, I’ve been harshly reminded of the feature gap between Chromebook and Chromebook Plus

I’ve spent the last couple of days beginning the review process for the newly refreshed Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 Chromebook – the quiet update packed with the MediaTek Kompanio 540 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of UFS storage. From a hardware perspective, it’s already an impressive little laptop for the price. But using just for a few days now has forced me out of my usual Chromebook Plus bubble, making this the first time in a very long while that my daily driver is just a standard Chromebook. And honestly? It has been a bit of an eye-opener.

Living on a standard Chromebook for the past 48 hours has made me realize just how many tiny, quality-of-life platform features I’ve subconsciously started taking for granted with Chromebook Plus. The feature gap isn’t just marketing fluff; it really does change the day-to-day experience.

The missing pieces of polish

The very first thing that caught me off guard was a purely aesthetic change: the floating system windows. I unboxed the Slim 3, fired up a few applications, and immediately noticed that the window borders felt strangely sharp. On Chromebook Plus, windows feature beautifully rounded corners that give the entire OS a premium, modern aesthetic. I didn’t even realize that was a Plus-exclusive until it was gone. Small gripe, but a very noticeable one.

But while sharp corners are easy enough to get over, the loss of system-wide camera controls is a tougher pill to swallow. On a Chromebook Plus device, you get baked-in OS-level adjustments for lighting, background blur, and touch-ups, regardless of what video app you open. I use them instead of the ones baked into Meet, Teams, or Zoom, and moving back to a standard Chromebook strips away those added controls.

The Gemini productivity gap

By far the biggest hurdle I’ve encountered, however, is the absence of the awesome Gemini in Chrome feature that arrived in the last 6 months on Chromebook Plus.

On those devices, the persistent Gemini in Chrome side panel is simply a button click away, sitting silently until you need it and ready to pull context from your open tabs. It can instantly summarize long research documents, or quickly draft an outreach email right where you are working instead of forcing you to jump back and forth from Chrome to your Gemini window.

Losing that native sidebar button has left a massive hole in my daily productivity workflow. Without it, I’m constantly forced to break focus, open a separate tab, head to the Gemini web app, and manually copy-paste blocks of text just to get a simple summary. It really feels like stepping backward into an older era of the web.

Going without the core Chromebook Plus features for a few days has shown me just how much I actually rely on Google’s AI integrations. If you are shopping for a new ChromeOS device and you care about getting every single ounce of efficiency out of your laptop, I can’t recommend Chromebook Plus enough. If those things aren’t a huge deal to you, never experiencing them will clearly shield you from missing them; but if you do value simpler workflows and enhancements across the board, I’ve been reminded to make the separation of the two platforms clear to potential and seasoned users again this week.