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At this year’s CES show in Las Vegas, our first in-person attendance since 2020, we saw a ton of awesome new tech. Some ChromeOS related, some not. While the highlight for us was most definitely our first look at the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook, there was plenty of other Chromebook-related stuff that caught our attention. From MediaTek’s booth that features cloud-gaming on low-end hardware, to Acer’s Add-in-One Chromebase, it was a great year for ChromeOS at CES.
Personally, my favorite piece of hardware that appeared at the show was ASUS’ latest Chromebox. The ASUS Chromebox 5 is the company’s latest iteration to its popular ChromeOS desktop box but this model comes with a very unique feature that you won’t find on any other device. Wireless charging. No, the Chormebox doesn’t charge wirelessly. That would be a heavy lift for a PC that runs a fanned Intel Core processor. Instead, the top of the quite attractive miniPC features a 15W Qi-compatible wireless charger.
Robby discovered this device back in September but it wasn’t until CES that we found out that it was the latest ASUS Chromebox. When announced, ASUS said that the Chromebox 5 would be available at some point in Q1. The end of the first quarter of the year is rapidly approaching and while we have no official release date, the new ChromeOS miniPC has finally surfaced at a reputable seller and is available for pre-order in multiple configurations.
At the starting price of $294, you can grab your place in line to pick up a Celeron 7305 Chromebox 5 with 4GB of RAM. Unlike a lot of base model Chromeboxed that come equipped with 32GB or 64GB of storage, this model actually has 128GB and like most other Chromeboxes, you can upgrade the storage and RAM whenever you want. For $660, however, you can get a massive upgrade to a 12th Gen Intel Core i5 w/Iris Xe graphics and 8GB of RAM. If you’re looking to do some Steam gaming or you’re just a power user, this would be the option that I would aim for.
If you want to go all out, you can pick up the Core i7 with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage but I would argue that the Core i5 is more than enough CPU for anything that you might do on ChromeOS. Besides, you can grab the Core i5 and upgrade the RAM and storage yourself for a little less money. There are four models available for pre-order at B&H Photo. There’s no shipping date at this time but I would bet that B&H will have inventory in the very near future and the online seller is a respected Google Authorized seller and you can rest assured that you’re going to get exactly what you pay for. Find all four models below. We’ll have the ASUS Chromebox 5 in the office very soon and we’ll get you our first impressions ASAP.
