From the Editor’s Office: Navigate through the 2020 Chromebook Crunch

I’m a Chabebook unabash fan and love nothing more than to introduce her to friends, family, and anyone looking for a drop-dead laptop that can handle a full workload and abuse you children in stride. Our best Chromebooks roundup is not just a list of recommendations, it’s my pride and joy as a tech writer. I love helping people choose a laptop that they will not pay too much for because I am a simple girl.

In the absolutely overwhelming 2020 Chromebook market, simply finding Chromebooks in stock is essentially a whole lot of work. Scarcity, demand and a whole country of kids (and adults) working at home has turned what would normally be one of the best times of the year into buying a Chromebook into the absolute worst time to buy a laptop .

Here we’re here, and what to do if you’re one of the many, many, many people who need a Chromebook next month.

Rising demand + shutdowns of production early 2020 = massive deficit

At the beginning of the year when COVID really started to crash through China, whole cities went under lockdown, including many factories and manufacturers. The production of many components and chips was shut down weeks before they could even start restarting, which means that some laptops sit in limbo for weeks or months before finally getting their laptops.

These are projected delivery dates for the @Dell 3100 2-in-1 #Chromebook.

NOVEMBER.

What the what ??!?! The cheapest configuration bumps this delivery to January. pic.twitter.com/zcjajaUI2u

– Ara Wagoner📱🏰🎶😷 (@AraWagco) June 15, 2020

We began to see in mid-March that laptop delivery times at manufacturers such as HP, Lenovo and Dell had slipped when the pandemic first began, and it only got worse as the summer wore on. Today, what Chromebooks are these manufacturers have not completely sold out have delivery dates from September to late February.

The crunch is even more pronounced for school districts, many of whom were warned back in April to buy now or the risk Chromebooks will not have at the start of the fall semester. Even districts that ordered months ago are not immune to back-ordering and delays: Alabama school districts are down more than 38,000 Chromebooks down delays and shipping shipments, and my birthplace Austin ISD could be 10,000 Chromebooks short of their goal of one to have each student by the beginning of the year.

Bulk orders stacking up for suppliers while manufacturers are not back in full capacity has put an extra crunch on normal consumers simply trying to buy a laptop for themselves as their children because everyone works at home. It will take months for delivery to meet today’s demand, but most of us can not wait months for things to recover.

That’s what I do when I need a Chromebook right now?

There are still good Chromebooks to be found at the moment, some models being redesigned more often than others.

• For children that need a child-proof laptop, the non-stylus version of the ASUS Chromebook Flip C214 is more consistently in stock than the stylus models, but it goes for $ 480 instead of the normal $ 350- $ 400 where we saw it in January.
• If you can trust your kids to take care of a laptop, or if you even need a compact laptop, get the Lenovo Chromebook C340-11 for $ 259. The C340-11 was our best overall Chromebook up to the Flex 5 the came out last month, and it will get Chrome OS updates by June 2026, so it should be a good time for your kids – if for you. I spent most of the last year on a full-time job on a C340-11.
• If you want a great screen and more storage without paying a lot, Best Buy has done a good job of keeping the Lenovo Duet in stock. It’s our favorite Chrome OS tablet and it comes with a kickstand and keyboard, so you’ve got everything you need in the box, plus 128GB of storage for many apps and downloaded content.
• Check back early and often. Chromebooks are recharged at random, so if something is sold the first time you look at it, come back later that day and the next morning and see if the inventory has been updated. I have taken to checking Chromebook ads the way one can check the daily sports results as the stock market.
• Check with your local retailers. Many laptops sell fast online, but there may be some extra units in the store that can help you finish the search and get a laptop without giving up on award-winning resellers.

I would also like to take the time to point out to anyone who has a computer that these days is just a little too sluggish on Windows that Neverware CloudReady is a wonderful service that will turn your old laptop or desktop into a Chromebook change for $ 50 or less. If you can not find a laptop in your price range, then this can at least skip you until the availability of Chromebook improves.

Who knows, a few months with CloudReady and you probably won’t have to buy a new laptop after all.

From the rest of the tech world this week

• If a Pixel 4a review unit did not arrive at my door tomorrow, I would join my co-worker Jeramy Johnson in one pre-order, because I also just want a good simple phone that does not cost $ 1000 like some other inflated oddity which launched this week.
• The Note 20 Ultra looks very interesting, but the regular Note 20 is not an upgrade and is not worth that price tag. That Mystic Green is very nice, but that’s about the best thing I can say about the Note 20.
• If the last two weeks of ‘hacks’ of Twitter and YouTube have reminded us of everything, then it’s that 2-factor verification SMS is trash and it’s time to leave it behind and Authy or another app / key / use method instead.
• The ban on WeChat could have been a lot worse than it seems now, and even then it will cause a lot of problems in the next 6-8 weeks. India may have banned WeChat a month ago, but India banned all its companies from trading with WeChat (and India had more reasons to do so). There is no “easy answer” here, but I think we can all agree, this is still a ham-hand blunder that will cause a lot of common headaches and hand crawling about what could be done better in several different ways.

When you feel the urge, you are absolutely not alone. At least I got Disney movies and freshly baked milk balls to keep my hopes and energy up; what pick-me-ups do you use these days? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you soon!

– Ara