We were told last year that ASUS had some big plans for Chrome OS in 2014. And it appears that they are starting things off with two new Chromeboxes. These are basically the same Chromebox just different configurations available. They will be on sale “soon” starting at just $179 in the US.
There are two different Haswell processors here. One has the Intel Celeron 2955U CPU which is the same as what’s in the Acer C720 line of Chromebooks. It’ll also come with 2GB of RAM, while the more expensive Chromebox will feature the Intel Core-i3 4010U processor with 4GB of RAM. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather grab the i3-based Chromebox. But that’s not all. ASUS says that there will be an i7-powered variant in select countries outside of North America.
As far as the other specs go, it’ll be sporting Intel Integrated Graphics along with a 16GB SSD drive. As far as the port situation goes, there’s the usual ports of HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet, 4 USB 3.0, and a SD card reader. There’s also WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 built-in. At this time though, we have no idea when these Chromeboxes will be available, but hopefully ASUS doesn’t waste anytime in releasing them. This Chromebox is actually a pretty nice looking one from ASUS and it appears to be pretty small in size, which is nice to have. It is compatible with VESA mounts in case you do want to mount it on the wall for some reason.
ASUS also has a few Chromebooks coming in “early 2014” so we should see those pretty soon as well. For those that would rather have a Chromebook instead of a Chromebox. It’s great to see even more manufacturers jumping on the Chrome OS bandwagon. Hopefully we’ll see some great Chrome OS devices coming out this year.
How many of you are interested in picking up an ASUS Chromebox?
Source: OMGChrome