Chrome Summit 2024 made me hopeful for a higher-spec Galaxy Chromebook Plus

There’s no denying it: the energy and vibe at Chrome Summit 2024 was palpable. We covered a lot about what we saw there this week in another post and video, but I am still finding myself very excited by the momentum currently found in the enterprise sector with ChromeOS, ChromeOS Flex, and Chromebooks in general.

The bottom line is this: ChromeOS is making massive strides in business, and that trajectory only looks to rise more and more in the next few years. With the ease of both deployment and management, ChromeOS makes so much sense at scale with the power of web-based applications proliferating more than ever.

Throw in the integration of Cameyo for virtualized legacy applications and the power of Gemini AI and all the pieces are in place for a massive majority of companies to make the switch to a more-seamless, less-stressful fleet of devices and services with the power of ChromeOS underneath it all. It’s the future I think many of the original builders of this cloud-based OS saw over a decade ago when it all got started.

More adoption at scale means more demand

One of the primary drivers of innovation in hardware is demand. And demand comes from users – lots of them. You see, Chromebooks have exploded and now dominate the education sector. But the demand there calls for more durable devices that cost less and less. No one is really clamoring for fleets of super-svelte, super-fast Chromebooks to get beat up in a classroom. They need their devices to last, and that’s exactly the sort of movement we’ve seen in the education space.

The consumer market is still undecided on Chromebooks, and that means there’s not as much demand as some of us would like for now. As it stands at the moment, consumers generally see a price ceiling for Chromebooks around $699, and that’s why we have that top-end MSRP cutoff for Chromebook Plus for now. The market has decided that’s what a nicer Chromebook is worth – at least until more capabilities continue to arise to sway them from Windows or MacOS.

But in the Enterprise segment, things are growing at a crazy pace. And as more companies decide from the top down that they are moving to ChromeOS, we’ll see more and more demand from workers for nicer, higher-end devices to do their work on. Sure, the consumer model of the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus is nice, but I can see many companies telling both Google and Samsung that they need and want more.

And that’s where this gets interesting. We’re going to continue seeing tons of businesses and organizations large and small moving to ChromeOS in the next 24 months and beyond. As they do, they’ll demand greater hardware to use for certain parts of their fleets, and where there’s demand, we see product growth.

We already have a Core 5-120U model of the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus in the UK, and I imagine its only a matter of time before we see that model available in many more places accompanied by one with the Core 5-120U and 16GB of RAM. Maybe even 512GB of storage while we’re at it.

The point is this: more energy in the corporate world means more demand, and that all leads to better, higher-end Chromebooks with a place to be sold. So far, $999+ devices haven’t fared so well in the consumer market. But if there’s a massive demand in the enterprise world, that gives companies like Samsung a reason to build these higher-spec models, and that means it could become available for regular folks like you and me, too.