Build quality
How well are the Chomebooks put together, and do they look good?
Taking the form of a Macbook Pro the Acer R 13 certainly looks the part with its all-aluminium chassis. It’s a two-inone design so the screen rotates right round and back on to itself. Despite its good looks it doesn’t feel all that sturdy, with noticeable flex when you pick it up with one hand. This was proved with our drop test where the display popped out, although the device kept on running.
The updated Asus Flip C434 was released towards the end of 2019 with larger everything. It’s built around that 14-inch display keeping its usual aluminium chassis with convertible fold-back display. Despite its excellent looks, when we drop tested it this model came off worst of any we’ve come across, including suffering from a cracked screen.
The Google Pixelbook Go comes in two colours: black and pink. Bold choices to be sure, but a straight metallic would have been a fine third choice. It’s a magnesium alloy with a matte texture paint that, along with its rippled base, is super-secure to pick up and carry around. The frame has been designed not to flex and we can say it feels very sturdy. You can easily open the lid with one finger without the base slipping.
The HP Chromebook 14 G5 is part of HP’S annoyingly generically named “14” range, which varies widely in specification depending on the specific model within it. This G5 is a budgetpitched offering based on an Intel architecture and updated 1080p display that was launched mid-2019. It’s a textured plastic chassis and feels well built.
Although the Yoga C630 has a clean, understated design signature that’s found across Lenovo’s newer consumer laptops, the device is rather boring to look at. Even the reliably colourful Chrome logo is concealed in grey on the dark lid. Under that black is an aluminium chassis with a premium feel. It’s based around a 15.6-inch display so it feels big and clunky for a Chromebook, even though it weighs just 1.85kg.