Totally forgot to mention the end of support date on this one. According to the Chrome EOL support page this one will receive updates through June of 2027. lon.tv/chromeoseol
Is there anything that can be done with Chromebooks after the support date ends? I have a 2016 Dell Chromebook that has much much better specs than this 2022 Acer but Support ended last year. I've had a hell of a time trying to install Zorin OS or Linux Mint on it to no avail. Hate to see such a nice piece of hardware relegated to e waste status
I bought the 311 in April of 2021 at Target. It went on sale before fathers day. I paid 140 dollars for it. It's been great. I mostly use it for email, and to watch RU-vid and Hulu. I used it for a virtual doctors visit not long ago and the camera looked good. I've had it a year now and I am still happy with it.
I'm truly impressed by your ability to find great deals like this, Lon. I had earlier followed up on one of your previous recommendations, the Lenovo 10e Tablet (but ultimately I canceled the order because Lenovo was experiencing long delays with delivering the tablets). This Acer Chromebook may actually be an even better all-around value, though! I might wish for a Full HD display on this device (at $99 I really can't quibble over the specs) and I'm certainly impressed by this Chromebook's 2 USB-C ports and its ability to run external 4k monitors. Thanks, Lon, for bringing this laptop sale to our attention with your detailed review. Your channel here on RU-vid is definitely one of the best, most accurate sources of information I've found anywhere.
I ended up buying one of these from Target after your live stream about it yesterday. I ordered from Target this morning around 7am and had it delivered to the house by 10am. Decent Chromebook..no touchscreen or yoga fold ability but decent. Love that it can be hooked up to multiple displays. Has Google Play and updates for a few years. I had an Acer r11 I bought refurbished for about the same price a few years ago...but support ended for it. $116.xx with tax and delivery for this laptop. Target had one left when I ordered.. confirmed with the delivery person. ;-)
Target has a similar 2-in-1 touchscreen Acer Chromebook Flip with an 11.6" touchscreen, 4 GB RAM and 32 GB storage. IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass. 14+ hours of battery life but a weak Mediatek CPU. I bought it for half off at $149 in May, but I returned it when the Acer CB311 went on sale for $99. The CB311 performs better due to its Intel CPU. The CB311 also has two old and two new USB ports, whereas the Flip had only one of each.
I got the N4020 variant of this laptop for $130 on Black Friday 2020. I can 100% recommend this little Chromebook. It’s a great value and gets all the basic things right. AMA about hardware specs, gaming, Linux, I’ve tried lots of stuff with this.
I bought one of these when this video was released a few months ago as a backup machine but I have found that I use it all of the time. It does not have much horsepower but it is amazing how ChromeOS has been optimized to be snappy for things that most people want to do. For example, RU-vid and other streaming apps work amazingly well. I have been impressed with the quality of the screen and the battery life. I use it a lot when sitting outside for watching MLB and other video streams.
Thank you for your review of this item and also for saying where you got it and how much you paid. I was just about to purchase 1 from Woot for $124.99 but thanks to you I got it at Target for $99.99.
This Chromebook looks perfect for students. Long battery life and a comfy keyboard - what more could you need? I think the Kompanio is a cool one in terms of the performance that can revamp the process of multitasking and also integrates a great gaming process.
Wow I use a 2 in 1 as my main labtop. So it is not good for typing on lap. Something like this could help fill that niche use case. Keyboard is reasonable
The new rendition of this Acer 311 has noticeably faster boot times and app launches due to the MediaTek Kompanio which seems to be optimized for ChromeOS
It's really tempting to buy something this cheap just to see what it can do, or to fill really basic needs for a student or something. But 5 years of support and no good way of upgrading or changing the OS means this'll quickly become e-waste.
People spend $800 on an iPhone that will last them five years and will end up being e-waste shortly thereafter. A $99 Chromebook that has 5 years of OS updates is still a worthy purchase.
May be an interesting video to simply see how well this would work as a cheap transcoding plex server since it's gemini lake, either with linux/docker under chromeos or in a pure linux boot scenario. See how much 4k/1080p hw transcoding you can do on the n4000 and such. Probably have a lot of wires hanging off of it, usb->eth adapter, usb hdd for content, usb ssd/thumb to move plex metadata to, so not ideal vs say the old gemini lake nucs obviously, but interesting none the less. Just a thought
The Acer 315 is the same specs except a 15.6 inch screen for 129 Best Buy currently and you get the number keypad since it's a bigger laptop I wonder if it's worth $29 more
From a repair point of view its ewaste main issue being the fixed emmc storage will go bad before anything else. But hey for the price for a kid for school where there going to smash it up anyway.
I bought this from Target in mid-May on this deal and, according to chrome apps Cog - System Info Viewer and System, it has an N4020. The box says N4000, though. This could be the case with yours as well, explaining the high benchmark score.
Hi Bro, I always do like little cute laptops like this, everything is so thin and overpriced these days, it is great to see something different, in fact ipads and dell laptops made me miss large heavy laptops, :)
I bought an RCA Cambio a few years ago. Although it was cheap, the experience felt cramped in every way and has since downshifted to slug speed. I'd personally recommend buying an older used laptop with a strong reputation (ie ThinkPad T430) instead of one of these budget burner systems from a retail store. You'll get more computer for your money, and pay less.
True an old ThinkPad will run better but this Chromebook isn’t bad and it will offer you like 4x the battery life of something like a T430. That’s important to some people.
Given how great the speech to text is, these chromebooks are a game changer. we've gotten senior members of the family to dictate their biography to compile a family biography book we will self publish for family members from Amazon...
You can play kotor with controller and button icons that might not make sense with youre controller,(click the no Google games warning away) and on low mobile legends bang bang with keyboard and mouse. Might take a while to start the last 1
Hi. You said was better to watch Netflix without app and yes directly from Web to get better experience. Do you recommend it with all streaming services?
With most useful websites expecting you our screen at 1080p, having any screen with lesser resolution makes viewing them frustrating with lots of scrolling. As such, this laptop at best is used for lite web surfing and email access where you do a lot of writing.
thanks for sharing. I am having problems connecting 2 monitors. I have a HUB but it is not connecting to the laptop and it doesn't have any display options other than, Built-in display, Orientation and night light.
During the live stream Lon had an issue with using his hub for connecting an external screen. He ended up just using an adapter cable and it worked great. You might try that. Some hubs may not be compatible.
I have a Question. I have a Chromebook and i am trying to do a Network file share with my Router/USB Drive. Thing is i can't share it, it won't recognise the pathway. I have my WB My Clouds Network shared, chromebook see's it, But i can't get the chromebook to see the router, any idea's how to fix it? I want to dump my Windows Laptop and go Chromebook, my Asus Router has a built in Bittorrent client, so i download to there then distribute my files to drives, but chromebook can't access the Router.
I have a similar laptop from Asus and have a problem with Libre office, whenever opening a .pdf file, I get an error and cannot open it. Does this laptop have the same problem?
for some reason, anything with "Acer" slapped on it just gives me bad vibes. my first laptop from 2006 was an Acer. Paid $4000 for it and it had 1 GB of ram. Hated it so much that I would never buy another Acer anything.
@@andrewwhitfield5480 Weird. I've had my Acer Chromebooks for years with zero issues. No problems at all, unlike the Toshiba Chromebook I once had which self-destructed.
@@kerc Toshiba is another name brand I will not buy again either. To be fair I can't migrate to Chrome OS as per my requirements so my distaste does somewhat stem from that. Otherwise I've had Acer and Toshiba devices fail on more than one occasion due to heavy use and my activities. Had I not pushed the devices as hard it may have been a favorable experience.
