Best early Black Friday Chromebook deals 2022: HP, Samsung, Acer, and more laptops on sale

• Current price: $499
• Original price: $699

Ahead of Black Friday and the holiday season, Best Buy has launched a sale including the HP 2-In-1 touchscreen Chromebook. This Chromebook comes with a 14″ touchscreen display, an 11th-gen Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB RAM, Intel UHD Graphics, and 128GB SSD storage. 

• Current price: $79
• Original price: $429

Samsung is offering the Galaxy Chromebook 2 360 for just $79 with an eligible trade-in. And if you’re an educator, first responder, government employee, or active or former military, you can save an extra 10% with Samsung’s Offer Programs. 

The Chromebook features a 13.3” FHD QLED display and is equipped with an Intel Celeron processor, 64GB of storage, and either 4GB or 8GB RAM. While it probably won’t replace your work machine, it’s still got plenty of power and space for everyday tasks. 

The 13-hour battery also lets you stream, web browse, and work all day without needing to recharge. 

• Current price: $170
• Original price: $250

The Acer Chromebook 311 is an excellent choice for students and professionals working from home, especially if you’re looking for a convertible machine. 

While you can’t upgrade the 64GB storage drive yourself, you can expand your internal storage with microSD cards for working on larger files like photos and videos. The Chromebook also has 2 USB-C ports for faster data transfers than USB 3.0 and for charging the laptop, an Intel Celeron processor, and 4GB RAM.

But with the 10-hour battery life, you won’t be worrying about topping up your laptop throughout the day. It even has Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity for setting up wireless peripherals like headsets, mice, and speakers.

Walmart is offering the Samsung Chromebook 4 for just $115, letting you get your hands on a great Chrome OS laptop for Christmas for less than your typical cable and internet package bill. It has an Intel Celeron processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 32GB eMMC storage drive.

The 11.6-inch screen gives you plenty of viewing areas for web browsing, word processing, and streaming shows and movies. And the 12.5-hour battery life lets you binge-watch old seasons of Seinfeld until you realize the sun has risen once again.

• Current price: $79
• Original price: $98

If you need a simple laptop as an affordable gift over the holiday season, this HP Chromebook is all you need. With an 11.6″ display and 4GB of RAM, they can access internet resources, knock out papers, and complete projects with ease. 

Traveling can be hard on laptops, but this Chromebook is built to withstand backpack journeys. With metal-reinforced corners, this laptop was tested to survive drops of up to 122cm. 

The main difference between the two is what kind of operating system it runs. A Chromebook uses the ChromeOS, developed by Google, while most other laptops run either Windows or macOS, though there are some models that are capable of running Linux. 

Chromebooks are also capable of running Windows if you’re willing to do a little work yourself, but they’re really at their best when left running ChromeOS.

You should keep in mind that the ChromeOS app ecosystem, by design, is limited. Therefore, if you need to run specific software on your new Chromebook, you should check that it is compatible first.

That is a solid “no.” Chromebooks are built to be used for everyday tasks like word processing and web browsing. They simply don’t have the correct components (like a discrete GPU and tons of RAM) to support any sort of gaming.

If you’re looking for an affordable gaming laptop, you can check out our list of the best cheap gaming laptops available. 

The biggest disadvantage of Chromebooks compared to other kinds of laptops is their low RAM and storage capacities. Most cap out at maybe 16GB of RAM (which is soldered in place so you can’t upgrade it yourself) and at 128GB of storage. Though many Chromebooks have permanently installed 32 or 64GB eMMC storage cards, it is possible to find models equipped with a 128GB SSD; but since their processors aren’t very powerful either, 128GB is about all they can support for storage, so you can’t really upgrade the hard drive yourself either.

However, if you’re looking for a laptop your kids can use for schoolwork or just something to be able to watch Netflix and browse the web on, they’re a perfectly suitable option. 

Black Friday 2022 is on Friday, Nov. 25 — the day after Thanksgiving. But deals aren’t limited to that day and appear in the run-up to and after Black Friday itself. We’ll be tracking the best Black Friday deals for the entire period. 

Cyber Monday is the Monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday — in 2022 it falls on Monday, Nov. 28, 2022.