Performance

Let's talk performance, because the Lapbook Air with its Celeron N3450 isn't a speed demon, or even a regular paced demon. Instead, the N3450 is pretty slow, and that's not surprising considering it uses Goldmont cores rather than Skylake or Kaby Lake. From the moment you power on and use this device for the first time, it's clear you won't be using this laptop for anything outside of light web browsing and document creation. It's here you're really reminded that despite the pretty exterior, the insides are definitely low-end.

I'm not going to focus on any one benchmark in great detail, but across the charts you'll see here you'll see the N3450 compared to other mobile chips like the Cherry Trail x5-Z8550, which uses Airmont cores from the generation before Goldmont, along with more recent Skylake and Kaby Lake Core M and Core i3 or i5 CPUs. I've left out 8th-gen Kaby Lake Refresh here because you won't find those chips in any product even remotely close in price to the Lapbook.

The basic story here is the N3450 is very slow. It's similar in performance to the x5-Z8550 but a long way behind most other CPUs, even Core M processors that have a lower TDP. Something like the Core m3-6Y30 is around twice as fast in single-threaded workloads and in the range of 45 to 60 percent faster when all cores are hit, and the m3-6Y30 isn't exactly fast.

It gets even worse looking at the Skylake Core i3-6100U, which is in the range of 2.1 to 2.2 times faster on a single core, and 80 to 90 percent faster on all cores. Move up the chain to the i5-7200U and it gets dire for the N3450, as it gets bullied with up to 2.9 times the single-core power and at least twice the multi-core power. And when we're already talking about performance limited mobile chips, getting smashed in this way is not good news.