One of the questions we regularly field here at Chrome Unboxed is: ‘When will we see a new Chromebox?’
Unfortunately, we’ve had little info on that, apart from a new, low-powered device by Aopen we covered recently.
Today, that changes. Finally, into the drought of Chromeboxes over the past year or so, a rain is finally coming.
Meet ‘Fizz’
‘Fizz’, a new 7th-gen Intel device looks to be in development. Details are a little scarce for now, and many specifics won’t come until we are closer to launch.
With Intel-based devices, the need for all the details in the Chromium Repositories isn’t as great, thus the chance for us to find all the details is far less.
What we can tell you at this point is this is clearly a Chromebox based on 7th-gen Intel silicon (Kaby Lake) of the U variety.
Fizz is the new Chromebox based on KBL-U.
What We Know So Far
U processors (versus the less-powerful, fanless Y processors) still require fans and are the more powerful versions of Intel’s latest processors. They make great fits for desktop machines.
Digging around in the files in this commit also reveal this device will be equipped with USB-C for power and hopefully additional input options. Additionally, it will also utilize eMMC storage.
The inclusion of eMMC storage is interesting as it is smaller and normally non-swappable. One of the best parts of earlier Chromeboxes was the ability to swap out the SSD. We definitely hate to see that go away.
What eMMC storage could point to is a slimmer device. At this point, we just aren’t sure. A nice, thin, powerful Chromebox that could easily hide behind a monitor would be very attractive.
Enterprise?
One other thing to keep in mind is this could be a Chromebox for Enterprise. The previous ASUS N62 was a high-powered device sporting a Core i7, but was locked to high-level Google Apps accounts and would not work apart from one.
I unfortunately know from experience.
With the lack of proper Chromeboxes in the past few years, it is fantastic to see a 7th-gen device in the works. As always, we’ll be keeping an eye on this one!
If you are looking for a Chromebox now, we’d highly suggest the Acer CXI2 with a 5th-gen i3, 8GB RAM and Android Apps inbound. I use it daily!
Thanks to +Yanny Mishchuk for the tip!
