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Q1 of 2018 is rapidly coming to an end and we have seen the release of numerous Apollo Lake Chromebooks geared toward the education market and there are even more coming down the pipeline.
On top of that, Chromeboxes have made a comeback worthy of an ESPN highlight reel.
Exciting stuff, indeed.
As encouraging as it is to see the continued expansion of low and mid-level devices, we’re growing increasingly anxious to see tablets, detachables and more flagship Chromebooks come to market.
New form-factors will be arriving some time this year but I wouldn’t hold my breath anticipating their arrival before the end of summer, if not later. That doesn’t mean we won’t see new high-end convertibles sooner than later.
Kaby Lake devices are growing in numbers and thanks to the poster child Pixelbook, manufacturers now have a bar to aim for if they are looking to enter that space.
One such device appears to be taking its cues directly from Google’s flagship Chromebook.
Atlas
The latest Kaby Lake Chromebook to turn up in the repository is barely a week old but what little we do know reveals that its code is being cloned directly from ‘Eve’ a.k.a. the Pixelbook.
WIP: atlas: add board support, posing as an eve
this takes the atlas EC code and drops it on top of
the eve code so we can boot up atlas with an eve build.
Apart from being a duplicate of the Pixelbook, little else can be divined about this device at the moment which leads me to question, who’s making ‘Atlas’?
At this point, it’s anyone’s guess who the OEM behind this new Chromebook could be. We have yet to discover any of the tell-tale signs that point to any one manufacturer. Honestly, I wouldn’t be too surprised if it is HP. They’re long overdue for a high-end device and despite the lack-luster reception of the HP Chromebook 13 G1, it is a beautiful machine that delivers performance that can rival any model released around the same time.
Love them or hate them, HP makes beautiful hardware and seeing a new Chromebook along the lines of the HP Spectre gets my blood flowing. Likely, this new device won’t trump the Pixelbook in the area of functionality but a little competition in the market is a good thing.
I’m looking forward to digging up some more details on ‘Atlas’ and hopefully we’ll see some new flagships in the very near future.
Source: Chromium Repository
