Back a couple weeks ago when we broke the news of the Samsung Chromebook Pro, there was a very, very loose date attached to the leak. Provided by a quickly-removed B&H listing, we had thin hope that the device would show up on or before October 24th.
It clearly did not.
And, frankly, I doubt too many of us are surprised at this. Let’s all face the facts together: within 24 hours of our article going live, the landing page was removed (reconstructed here for our readers, though), the Adorama listing was withdrawn, and the B&H listing that began all this had also already been taken down.
Things leak all the time. Even the Google Pixel Phone leaked a few days before release. When the articles went around the internet, the listings were pulled down.
None of this is odd
Yet, when we see availablilty dates from resellers (like B&H), we have to reconcile the fact that those dates don’t appear out of thin air. There was something in the original information received that gave B&H reason to include that date.
While this could be a sign of an unexpected delay (Samsung IS dealing with some significant stuff right now…), we still hold to the likelihood that The Samsung Chromebook Pro will see a release in the Chrome OS 54 window. While this is not set in stone, as we reported here, there are many commits about the development of this device that reference testing being done against version 54 of Chrome OS.
We are about 4 days overdue for 54 hitting the Stable Channel, so any day now we should see Chrome OS 54 make its way to Chrome OS users everywhere. Our hope is that with this update comes at least a few more devices getting access to Android Apps in the Stable Channel. That isn’t confirmed, but a solid hope and realistic possibility.
It would make sense, then, that The Chromebook Pro wouldn’t be released until this update is out and ready. So, while we hate that we still haven’t heard anything official from Samsung yet, there’s hope that this is a legitimate OS time frame issue, not a delay.
If the Chromebook Pro does release in the R54 window, then it could show up any time between now and December 7th and still be inside the expected release window. If we come across anything more firm, we will be sure to let you know.
