A new Chromebook tablet ‘Sapphire’ just appeared with a decidedly ‘Made By Google’ feature

The discovery of ‘Tanjiro’—the reference board for a new generation of MediaTek Kompanio Ultra-powered Chromebook tablets—was already easily one of the most exciting ChromeOS developments of the year. As a baseboard, we knew it was only a matter of time before the first real-world devices began to spawn from it.

That day is now upon us. I’ve just uncovered commits in the Chromium Gerrit for the very first development board based on ‘Tanjiro’, and its name is ‘Sapphire’. But this isn’t just any new tablet; it’s being tested with a very interesting and familiar feature that has my mind racing with a tantalizing possibility.

‘Sapphire’ is the first of the ‘Tanjiro’ family

First, the basics. The new commits confirm that ‘Sapphire’ is the first official variant of the ‘Tanjiro’ reference design. This is our concrete proof that a thin, light, powerful, and incredibly efficient ARM-powered Chromebook tablet is in active development. On its own, this is fantastic news. But it’s the other detail we found that takes this story to another level.

The LED light bar may return

Alongside the initial commits for the board itself, we found another set of code changes that explicitly add support for an LED light bar for ‘Sapphire’. And if you’ve followed Google’s hardware over the years, you know that the colorful light bar is one of the most iconic and signature hardware features of Google-made devices, from the original Chromebook Pixels right up to modern Pixel phones.

Now, we have to take this with a grain of salt. The presence of a light strip doesn’t 100% guarantee this is a Google-made device. We’ve seen a light bar on one random Lenovo Chromebook in the past, so there is a slight precedent for it on a third-party devices, thought that particular light bar wasn’t capable of the full Google color spectrum.

Looking a bit deeper in the early code for this new ‘Sapphire’ hardware feature, it becomes clear that the light bar being tested is definitely full-color, so I’m leaning far more towards this being an addition that will be able to pull off the beloved 4-color Google light strip at some point on the device itself.

Additionally, the timing of this discovery makes it an incredibly compelling possibility. As we’ve argued before, the upcoming shift of ChromeOS to the Android kernel creates the perfect opportunity for Google to launch a new ‘halo’ device to showcase its unified software vision. What better device to do that with than a powerful, ARM-based Pixelbook tablet that sports a signature Pixel hardware feature?

For now, however, this is just an educated leaning. But the discovery of ‘Sapphire’ is huge news in its own right, and the addition of the light strip makes it the most intriguing Chromebook in development right now: hands-down. You can be sure we’ll be tracking its progress with extreme interest.