Lenovo is launching a new line of laptops and convertibles aimed at the education market, with prices starting as low as $189.

That entry-level model is called the Lenovo 100e, and it’s a Windows notebook with an Intel Celeron N3350 Apollo Lake processor, an 11.6 inch display, and up to 10 hours of battery life. It’s one of the new low-cost laptops for the education market that Microsoft is showcasing in a blog post today… but what Microsoft doesn’t tell you is that some of Lenovo’s other new models are Chromebooks.

Lenovo 100e

Laptop Magazine notes that the Lenovo 300e, for instance, is an 11.6 inch convertible with a 720 display and two configurations: one with Chrome OS and the other with Windows.

The Windows model features an Intel Apollo Lake processor, a stylus, and up to 8 hours of battery life, while the Lenovo 300e Chromebook will have a MediaTek MTK8173C processor, up to 10 hours of battery life, and no stylus. Prices for the Lenovo 300e are expected to start at $279.

There’s also an 11.6 inch convertible Chromebook with a pen, up to 8GB of RAM, up to 64GB of storage, up to 10 hours of battery life, and an Intel Celeron N3450 Apollo Lake processor. It’s called the Lenovo 500e.

Lenovo is also updating its ThinkPad 11e and ThinkPad 11e Yoga models with a new $429 laptop and a $499 convertible (with pen support). Both will ship with Windows 10.

According to Laptop Magazine, all of the new Chromebooks are MIL-SPEC tested and feature spill-resistant keyboards and the ability to survive a drop of about 2.5 feet. While they’re all designed for use in classrooms, most of Lenovo’s laptops for the education market are also available for purchase by the general public, although prices may vary.

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6 replies on “Lenovo’s new education laptops start at $189”

  1. It’s about time we started seeing general, consumer-level laptops with 8gbs as a standard. 4gb is the absolute minimum just for basic web with a few open tabs. After a year or two of browser “updates” that are more focused on everything but rendering pages, the 500e provides a little bit of future-proofing.

    On a real Operating System, 8gbs should be today’s minimum unless you know what you’re doing in terms of installing light-weight OSes and know where to find lightweight apps.

  2. Recently bought a low end PC with an Atom Z3735F
    CPU (1.3 GHz quad core). After taking several hours
    to update Windows 10, including Microsoft patches for
    those Intel CPU bugs, found the unit to be so slow
    as to be unusable. This is before any third party
    protection (anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware)
    was installed.

    The unit’s Passmark score was around 900. Based on
    this finding, wouldn’t recommend any Windows device
    with a PassMark below 1500, say, to be sure the device
    could still be usable. For those who want to check,
    PassMark is at
    https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

    If your CPU is not featured, believe you can download
    the tests and upload the results to them.

    1. I fully agree. The extra battery life is not worth the slow experience. My experience is that Core Celeron is a good balance of speed and low price. I also stay away from Arm systems as they are not easily converted to Linux systems. I love my Odroid C2 and RPi3, but not in a notebook.
      Does Apollo Lake have hardware h265 and 4k HDMI?

  3. This is basically the price point I’d expect for a Windows on ARM device. If I’m not mistaken, the performance of Windows on ARM devices isn’t that much different from these entry level Celeron laptops.

  4. 8GB RAM and an N3450 processor on a Chromebook? My initial reaction was that this was a super-weird combo. That’s a healthy amount of RAM for a Chromebook. But the processor is less than initially inspiring.
    Looking over some info on the N3450 it seems more reasonable. Not just reasonable but actually very thought out. The N3450 is quite capable for day-to-day tasks, delivers four cores and is still pretty light on the battery. The RAM should let you have tons of tabs and Android Apps open without issue. The non-volatile memory at 64GB is also more than reasonable for a Chromebook at the moment I think. With the Android bit starting to mature it would be my minimum spec I think.
    The price seems a little high but I think that is also about the hardened physical build. I remember when Panasonic used to charge insane money for its hardened laptops. Perhaps they still do.
    All in all I’m slightly intrigued.

Comments are closed.