With its massive 15.6-inch screen, you might think the Lenovo Yoga Chromebook C630 was just a traditional laptop, but even at that size it is convertible, making it one of the largest tablets on the market.
Design
The Yoga Chromebook C630 is a beast, featuring a huge 15.6-inch touchscreen. Though it only offers 1,920 by 1,080 pixel resolution, an extra $250 will upgrade you a screen with 4K resolution, unheard of in the Chromebook universe. The 360-degree hinge allows the notebook’s screen to fold all the way back so that it’s flush against the chassis, turning the laptop into a tablet, perfect for note-taking or illustrating. The C630 doesn’t include a stylus in the box, nor does it offer pen support, a distinct negative. The chassis, built from aluminum and painted dark gray, is solid and sturdy, with minor give and flex.
Features
Sheer size is the centerpiece here. The C630’s keyboard is not backlit, but it is spacious — a numeric keypad wouldn’t have been out of place. The keys themselves lack travel and action, but the trackpack is the perfect side and has good clickability. The screen is dim, and the downward-firing speakers are average for the category — not deafeningly loud, but clear. Finally, while a machine of this size necessarily comes with significant weight – 4.1 pounds, in this case – the C630 is surprisingly thin. At 20 millimeters, it has the same thickness as the Dell Inspiron Chromebook 14, which has a much smaller screen.
Specs
The Yoga Chromebook C630 features the same CPU as the Acer Spin 13, a high-end 1.6 GHz Core i5-8250U. And with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of flash storage, the system has the overall most powerful configuration in this roundup. Ports are par for the category: two USB-Cs (either can charge the device), a single full-size USB 3.0 and a micro SD card slot.
Performance
If you want power, the Yoga Chromebook C630 won’t let you down. This system was the top performer on all three of the Chromebook benchmarks I ran for this roundup. On the industry standard Speedometer 2.0 benchmark (which measures the responsiveness of web applications), the C630 was 12 percent faster than the average of the field, while it was 7 percent and 15 percent faster on the JetStream 1.1 and Kraken 1.1 benchmarks. These tests consider more advanced operations, including graphics and audio processing and encryption. The bottom line is that no matter what you’re looking to do with this Chromebook, you should have no trouble; it just doesn’t get faster than this.
Battery
Large screens suck up a lot of juice, but I still squeezed 8 hours of battery life from the Yoga Chromebook C630 on my full-screen video playback test. That put this system squarely in the middle of the five units I tested for this roundup, and should be fine for most users.
Conclusion
If you’re in the market for a Chromebook with a larger screen, the Lenovo Yoga Chromebook C630 should be at the top of your list. It has almost everything you could ask for, with the exception of stylus support, and its feature set and performance are unparalleled. Lenovo lists it for $792, but you can easily find it cheaper elsewhere.
Shop Now
