When I reviewed the Samsung Chromebook Plus earlier this month, the most surprising thing was how well it performed. It’s based on an ARM System on a Chip (SoC) — and that’s generally a recipe for disappointment when it comes to laptop performance.

Not so with the Chromebook Plus, which managed to handle well over a dozen Chrome tabs before it started breaking a sweat. It isn’t quite up to the tasks that a $1,000 Mac or Chromebook Pixel would be, but it’s also half the price at $450. When I ran the standard Chrome benchmarks on the Plus, it performed better than every ARM Chromebook that’s been released so far — it was very much on par with low and midrange Intel Chromebooks.

It was so good I considered it a kind of mystery — especially…

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