Samsung Chromebook 11.6" Xe310Xba 2020, Celeron N4000, 4GB, 32GB eMMC, Silver

The Samsung Chromebook 4 is a dirt-cheap 11.6-inch Chromebook that nails the basics: web browsing, email, and streaming. Battery life is excellent and it's light enough to carry anywhere. Just don't expect it to handle heavy multitasking or anything beyond simple tasks with its Celeron N4000 and 4GB of RAM.

The Celeron N4000 is a dual-core chip from 2017, and it shows. Our benchmarks place it at the 0th percentile for CPU performance among traditional laptops, which means it's about as slow as modern laptops get. The 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM is also at the 0th percentile. In practice, this means you can have maybe five or six browser tabs open before things start to chug. A single heavy Google Doc plus a YouTube video is fine. Ten tabs plus an Android app? You'll feel it.

The integrated Intel graphics are actually the one spec that doesn't embarrass itself, landing at the 61st percentile. That's not because the GPU is good, it's because most Chromebooks in this class have equally weak graphics. Don't expect to play anything beyond simple Android games or browser titles. The 32GB eMMC storage is also at the 3rd percentile, so you'll be leaning hard on Google Drive and cloud storage. ChromeOS is designed for that, but it's still a limitation if you want offline files.

Stacked against something like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon or Apple MacBook Pro, this Samsung isn't even in the same conversation. Those are $1,000+ machines with high-res screens, fast processors, and premium builds. The Chromebook 4 is a $119 tool for basic tasks. The Dell Latitude 7430 and HP EliteBook 845 G7 are business laptops with far better keyboards, screens, and performance, but they cost five to ten times as much. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 is also a different class entirely.

Where the Samsung actually competes is against other budget Chromebooks and cheap Windows laptops. Against a similarly priced Windows machine, the Chromebook 4 wins on boot speed, battery life, and simplicity. Against a newer budget Chromebook with 8GB of RAM and a 1080p screen, it loses on just about everything except price. If you're deciding between this and a used ThinkPad from a few years ago, the ThinkPad will be faster and more capable, but heavier and likely with worse battery life.

At $119 USD renewed, the value proposition is simple: you're getting a functional laptop for less than the price of a nice dinner for two. The CAD 149 listing is similarly cheap for Canadian buyers. Compared to a new Chromebook at $250-300, this saves you real money if you just need a basic machine. But you're also buying a renewed unit with a 4.2-star average across nearly 2,500 reviews, which suggests most people get a working device. The risk is the occasional lemon, and the short return window some buyers mention doesn't help. If you can stretch to a new Chromebook with 8GB of RAM, do it. If you can't, this is a reasonable gamble.

The Samsung Chromebook 4 (XE310XBA) sits in that ultra-budget Chromebook category where you're mostly paying for portability and a keyboard, not raw power. It's an 11.6-inch machine with an Intel Celeron N4000, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage. At around $119 USD renewed, it's one of the cheapest ways to get into ChromeOS, and honestly, that's the whole pitch. This isn't a laptop for people who need to edit video or run heavy software. It's for checking email, writing docs, streaming Netflix, and maybe some light Android apps from the Google Play Store.

People searching for a cheap Chromebook for students or a basic laptop for web browsing will find this model everywhere on Amazon, often renewed. The 11.6-inch 1366x768 display is small and not particularly sharp, but it keeps the whole thing light and easy to toss in a bag. ChromeOS boots in seconds, which is a nice change from Windows machines at this price that take forever to wake up.

We should be upfront: our database ranks this thing dead last for CPU and RAM among traditional laptops, and the screen is near the bottom too. But it's also in the 100th percentile for affordability and 98th for compactness. So the question isn't whether it's powerful. It's whether it's good enough for the basics, and for a lot of people, it kind of is.

Skip this if you need to run Windows or Mac software, do any kind of photo or video editing, or keep more than a handful of browser tabs open at once. The 4GB of RAM and Celeron N4000 will frustrate anyone used to a modern laptop. If you need more power on a budget, look at a used ThinkPad or a newer Chromebook with 8GB of RAM and a 1080p screen. Also skip it if you're buying renewed and can't handle the risk of a unit with freezing issues or a garbled display, because those do happen.

Should you buy the Samsung Chromebook 4? If you need a cheap, portable machine for web browsing, email, Google Docs, and streaming, and you can find it for around $119, yes. It's not fast, the screen isn't great, and you'll need to be disciplined about tabs and storage. But for a student or a secondary machine that lives in a bag, it does the job. The battery life is a real highlight, and ChromeOS is genuinely pleasant for basic tasks.

But if you're planning to run Linux apps, do any kind of photo or video editing, or keep more than a handful of tabs open, skip it. The 4GB of RAM and Celeron N4000 will frustrate you. And if you're buying renewed, be prepared for the possibility of a unit with freezing issues or a garbled display. Most buyers get a good one, but the ones who don't are loud about it.