‘Zombie’: Another Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 Chromebook enters development

In what feels like serendipitous timing with Halloween right around the corner, a new Chromebook sporting the yet-unreleased Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 has begun development, making this the 5th device in production with this newer, more-powerful Snapdragon SoC on board. It wasn’t that long ago that we finally linked the internal name for this processor – SC7280 – with the already-announced Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3, and with that connection we found a few previous devices already pretty far along in development.

Very little is currently known about this new device, but there are some interesting commits already being attached to it. While devices can absolutely be tested with other batteries, both units being called on for the early phases of testing in this case are both battery packs that are heavily used by Acer.

While this doesn’t tie a direct line to ‘Zombie’ being made by Acer, I’d feel pretty confident in saying that this is the most likely scenario. As we’ve seen in the past, Acer isn’t shy about pushing ARM-based Chromebooks to the market and they aren’t concerned with sticking to one SoC over another.

The Acer Chromebook R13 was the first MediaTek-powered Chromebook to hit shelves, and the first Acer Chrombook Spin 513 was the first-ever Snapdragon Chromebook to be released. They followed with a few other MediaTek Chromebooks in the excellent Spin 513 and Chromebook 514, but there’s no reason to believe they won’t take another stab at a Snapdragon device this time around.

While I’d love to see evidence of a Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 in a detachable Chromebook, for now it seems to be all about the clamshell and convertible form factors. However, if some of these ARM-based Chromebooks continue getting nice, thin chassis, solid builds, and excellent screens (looking at you, Acer Chrombook Spin 513), I think there’s a huge market for these kind of Chromebooks.

The Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 should come with fantastic battery life, great performance, and options for LTE. If we see this SoC paired up with 8GB of RAM, decent storage (7c+ Gen 3 supports NVMe), solid build quality and good screens, Chromebooks with the 7c+ Gen 3 could be quite excellent.

The performance bump from Gen 1 to Gen 2 of the 7c was really impressive, and we’re expecting an even bigger move this time around. As to when we expect them, I’d wager it will be before too long. If not by the holiday season, I’d fully expect to see a few of them emerge around time for CES 2023 coming up in January. For now, however, we wait and keep digging for more clues as to when we may see some of these next-gen Snapdragon Chromebooks emerge.