Acer is about to give us a Chromebook 516 GE Chromebook Plus upgrade

I haven’t been this excited about a new Chromebook find in quite some time. Sure, figuring out the fact that Samsung is finally getting back in the game with a new Chromebook Plus model that has an Assistant key was pretty sweet a few months back, but this latest discovery hits home a bit more for me.

You see, I’ve been using the Acer Chromebook 516 GE a lot since it debuted in the fall of 2022. In that 18 month span, it has been in my bookbag as often as possible and is my companion every single time I’m out of town and know I’ll need to get some work done.

The reason is simple: this Chromebook excels in all the areas that matter most to me and to the work I do. The highlight is undoubtedly the 16-inch QHD 16:10 120Hz screen that gets over 350 nits at peak brightness, but it’s also so much more than that. The expansive screen canvas feels comfy to work on wherever I go, and even though the chassis is large, it isn’t heavy. At only 3.7 pounds, it doesn’t weigh down my backpack and manages fantastic rigidity as well.

On top of that, you get an RGB keyboard that is fantastic to type on, a massive OceanGlass trackpad, great upward-facing speakers, a massive array of I/O options, and super-fast internals. The 12th-gen Intel Core i5-1240P, 8GB of RAM and 256GB NVMe storage make this device fly, and when you add it all up, you get a Chromebook experience that – for me, at least – leaves me wanting very little for an MSRP of just $649.

Proof of a branded Chromebook Plus version inbound

But that’s all about the current model. Clearly, I love this thing and have a hard time not explaining why each time I reference it. But an upgraded, branded Chromebook Plus version of this Chromebook is something I’m keenly interested in, and I’ve found evidence that we’re getting exactly that. (For reference before we move on, the current version has the Chromebook Plus upgrade already.)

Looking around in some of the normal places I check out on a regular basis, I discovered a reference to a new version of the 516 GE over at cros.tech (which pulls from Google’s own OS update server) simply called the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE (CBG516-2H) and I was so excited to see it. As it shares the same development board with its predecessor, this is one I could have overlooked for a bit. But now I know it’s on the way, and I’m pumped for it!

Though the two models share the same development board of ‘Osiris’, that doesn’t mean they’ll be carbon copies. With 12th and 13th-gen Intel processors, the main ‘Brya’ baseboard remains the same. So that hopefully means we’ll at least see an upgrade to a 13th-gen Raptor Lake processor for the new 516 GE, and maybe some other slight tweaks along the way, too.

I need to dig around a bit on ‘Osiris’ and see if I can find anything fun in the Chromium Repositories regarding this one, but I feel certain that if Acer is making a new version on the same board, they’ll likely take the route they’ve previously followed with devices like the Spin 714 and simply iterate on an already-amazing Chromebook. And I absolutely cannot wait to see it!