Lenovo’s 12th-gen Intel Alder Lake Chromebook begins development in ‘Taeko’

As we roll into the second half of 2021, it’s no secret that tons of Chromebooks are on the way before the year comes to a close. With Snapdragon-powered tablets, crazy fast Intel Tiger Lake Chromebooks, vertically-integrated MediaTek-powered ARM Chromebooks, and a ton of faster, small-core Jasper Lake devices all on the horizon, there’s no doubt that the next six months will be jam-packed with new Chromebook hardware releases.

As always, we keep looking forward to what’s next, and Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake is part of that ongoing story of faster, better, and stronger for the upcoming generation of Chromebooks. With updated features like a hybrid big.LITTLE approach to cores – giving users faster performance with more battery life – Alder Lake-powered Chromebooks could be pretty sweet machines when they do start hitting the market.

We already have eyes on 4 of these devices in ‘Brya’, ‘Primus’, ‘Shadowkeep’, and ‘Gimble’, and today we’re adding another to the list: ‘Taeko’. Like the ‘Volteer’ Tiger Lake Chromebooks before them, we fully expect our list of Alder Lake Chromebooks to continue growing at a relatively-rapid pace.

We have a handful of the 11th-gen Tiger Lake Chromebooks already, but there is still a robust list of devices on the way. At this point, we have 19 ‘Volteer’ Chromebooks in development that are still unidentified. That’s a healthy number when compared to the prior year’s 13 ‘Hatch’-based 10th-gen Comet Lake Chromebooks. We fully expect to see something close to 20 or more again this year with ‘Brya’-based boards, so we’ll continue hunting as the months pass.

Made by Lenovo

While there isn’t much we can glean from the commits around ‘Taeko’ just yet (it’s still very early), there is one detail that cannot be missed: an LCFC email address. Yep, the same @lcfc.corp-partner.google.com that we earlier tied to Lenovo’s new Flex 5i and 5i Chromebooks. As we noted at that time, LCFC is a huge laptop manufacturer that only supplies Lenovo-made devices. At this point, there is no mistaking that ‘Taeko’ will be the next flagship Lenovo Chromebook we’ll see in 2022. My money would be on another ThinkPad or perhaps a return to the standard consumer-facing Yoga brand we had back in 2018. We’ll keep an eye on this as it develops.