For now, it seems MediaTek’s powerful new MT8196 will not be in Chromebook tablets

So, this is a bit of a bummer for sure. If you recall, a few months back I found some evidence that one of the baseboards that will house the powerful MediaTek MT8196 – ‘Hylia’ – may in fact be built as a tablet. That’s exciting stuff, for sure, and the idea of a desktop-class SoC in a detachable Chromebook is absolutely tantalizing; but for now it looks to be dead in the water.

My early findings for ‘Hylia’ were not what I would call definitive, and as I’ve searched almost daily for more proof that it would in fact become a Chromebook tablet, I’ve come up empty day after day. This day, however, I’ve found evidence to the contrary, and as much as I hate to show you all this, I need to temper expectations around the new Chromebooks that will come bearing the powerful MT8196 likely later in 2025.

While this isn’t the final say on ‘Rauru’ devices, it is quite clear about the ones currently in development. Those devices are ‘Hylia’ and ‘Navi’, and not only does it look like these won’t be tablets; they won’t be convertibles, either. And I have to admit at this point, that stings a bit.

You see, in the past weeks as I was desperately looking for proof of a tablet form factor for ‘Hylia’, I kept hope that even if it wasn’t a detachable, it could be a very thin, light convertible. Though not a tablet, a device like the original Pixelbook really did function in some tablet-like ways thanks to the ultra-thin chassis and squared-off edges. I thought maybe ‘Hylia’ or ‘Navi’ could be something like that.

Alas, that is clearly not the destiny for either of these devices. While I have to admit I tend to use Chromebooks 99% of the time in clamshell mode, I do enjoy a well done convertible Chromebook when we get one. The best require fanless designs with thin chassis, and ARM chips like the MT8196 help to make that possible, so I had pretty high hopes for these Chromebooks as svelte convertibles.

For now, that hope is on ice. However, the commit does say “We’ll revisit when/if we need this for convertible,” so not all hope is lost. Also, we have another likely high-end ARM chip in the MT8189 on the way, so the plan could be to put that chip in tablets and convertibles. We’re still unsure on the core layout of that MT8189 SoC and there are no development boards available just yet (only the baseboard ‘Skywalker’ for now), but I have reason to believe it will be powerful in its own right.

For now, we can start looking forward to some clamshell Chromebooks with a very powerful, hopefully battery-friendly SoC that is well versed at running Android apps and primed for the eventual move of ChromeOS to the Android Kernel. We’ll keep an eye on all these new devices for sure, so stay tuned for more as we find it.