Works with Chromebook: explained and tested [VIDEO]

If you’ve ever taken an accessory and wondered whether it would work with your Chromebook or not, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of things really work. Over the years, I can’t count how many times I asked myself the exact same thing and just started connecting things on the nearest Chromebook. After all, with a very high success rate, I simply found that the vast majority of times I try, things tend to “just work” on Chromebooks.

But that’s not true 100% of the time, and the fact that there’s no real way to know if something works well with a Chromebook or not has been a thorn in the side of many new Chromebook users. After all, most people don’t like to buy and return things as regularly as I do, so they just want to know beforehand whether a particular accessory will work or not before leaving the store with it.

So, in response to this clear need, Google launched the Works with Chromebook initiative that we discussed here on the website. In short, the items that are labeled Works with Chromebook are tested to meet Google’s own Chromebook compatibility standards so users can know for sure that the peripheral they’re buying will work well with the Chromebook as soon as they take it home and take it out of the box You can read even more about it all on the dedicated Google landing page for the effort, but the idea is simple: these things just work.

In the following video, we put some of these items to the test. We received some Western Digital peripherals that we didn’t take out of the box or try out before the video, and we just started connecting things. We used three Chromebooks – Intel 8th generation devices, Intel 10th generation and AMD Ryzen – and I just tried everything. Spoiler alert: everything works right out of the box. From SD cards to external drives to USB type C docks to keyboards and mice, things marked Works with Chromebook do what they should do.

As part of this post and video, Western Digital was kind enough to give us 3 external WD MyPassport units to offer and you can apply to win in several ways below. We hope all of this will help you make a more informed purchase in the future and we really hope you will sign up to win one of these free WD MyPassport SSDs below!

My Passport works with WD Chromebook HDDs