Works With Chromebook: explained and tested [VIDEO]

If you’ve ever picked up an accessory and wondered whether or not it would work with your Chromebook, you’ve likely figured out by now that a ton of stuff actually does. Over the years, I can’t count how many times I’ve wondered the exact same thing and simply started plugging things into the nearest Chromebook. After all, with a pretty high rate of success, I’ve simply found that the vast majority of the times I try, things tend to “just work” on Chromebooks.

But that’s not true 100% of the time, and the fact that there’s been no real way to know if something works well with a Chromebook or not has been a real thorn in the side of many new Chromebook users. After all, most people don’t like to buy and return stuff with the regularity that I do, so they just want to know up front whether or not a certain accessory is going to work or not before leaving the store with it.

So, in response to this clear need, Google has rolled out the Works With Chromebook initiative that we’ve discussed here on the site. In a nutshell, items that are labeled Works With Chromebook are tested to meet Google’s own Chromebook compatibility standards so that users can know for sure that the peripheral they are buying will work well with their Chromebook once they get it home and unbox it. You can read even more about all this on Google’s dedicated landing page for the effort, but the idea is simple: this stuff just works.

In the following video, we put some of these items to the test. We were sent some peripherals from Western Digital that we didn’t unbox or try prior to the video, and we just started plugging things in. We used 3 Chromebooks – 8th-gen Intel, 10th-gen Intel, and AMD Ryzen-powered devices – and simply tried all of it out. Spoiler alert: it all works right out of the box. From SD cards to external drives to USB Type C docks to keyboards and mice, things marked Works With Chromebook do what they are supposed to.

As part of this post and video, Western Digital was kind enough to give us 3 WD MyPassport External drives to give away and you can get entered to win in a variety of ways below. We hope this all helps you out in making a more informed purchase in the future and we really hope you get entered to win one of these free WD MyPassport SSDs below!