Lenovo Yoga 300e Chromebook Gen 4 11.6" HD 2-In-1 Review

The Lenovo Yoga 300e Chromebook Gen 4 is a study in extremes. It scores in the 97th percentile for compactness, which is its entire reason for being. You're getting a tiny, 11.6-inch 2-in-1 that's built to be thrown in a backpack and forgotten about. But that portability comes at a steep cost to almost everything else. Its performance and storage specs land it in the bottom quartile across the board, with RAM and storage both sitting at a dismal 2nd and 3rd percentile, respectively. This isn't a laptop for getting work done. It's a single-purpose device for basic web tasks on the go.

Let's be clear about what we're working with here. The CPU and GPU performance are in the 24th and 18th percentiles. That means it's slower than about three-quarters of the laptops out there. You're looking at integrated graphics and just 4GB of RAM paired with 4GB of eMMC storage. That storage spec is almost non-existent in 2024. This setup is fine for a handful of Chrome tabs and maybe a YouTube video, but that's the absolute ceiling. It scored a 0.1 out of 100 for gaming, which tells you everything you need to know. It's built for reliability (76th percentile) over speed, which makes sense for its target use case.

At $305, the value proposition is razor-thin and entirely situational. You are paying for portability and durability, not performance. For that price, you could get a used or refurbished standard laptop with vastly better specs, but it wouldn't be this small or likely this rugged. It's a trade-off: you accept bottom-tier components to get a device that's almost perfectly compact and built to handle being carried around by a student. If those are your only two requirements, the price makes sense. If you need to do literally anything else, it's a hard sell.

Comparing this to its listed 'competitors' is almost funny. The MacBook Pro M4 Max or MSI Vector 16 HX are in a different universe. A more realistic comparison would be against other budget Chromebooks or tablets. Even then, the 4GB of RAM and 4GB of storage are severe handicaps. Many competing Chromebooks in this price range offer 64GB of eMMC storage, which is a massive 16x increase. The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s, while more expensive, offers professional-grade performance and ports this device can't touch. The Yoga 300e wins on size and price alone, and loses on every other measurable spec.

This is a very niche device. I can only recommend the Lenovo Yoga 300e Chromebook Gen 4 if your needs are exactly this: you need the absolute most portable, durable, and cheap web-browsing machine possible, and you don't care about performance, storage space, or screen quality. The data is clear—its specs are at the very bottom of the barrel. For 99% of people, even students, spending a bit more for a device with more RAM and storage is a dramatically better investment. This Chromebook is a one-trick pony, and that trick is being small and tough.