For a long time now, Chromebooks have been gaining market share, and there are now more models to choose from than there ever has been. What started off as just a choice between Acer and Samsung has now become a smorgasbord of choice from ASUS, Dell, Lenovo and many more. Dell is one of the few names that, despite releasing very few models, has received critical acclaim for the Dell Chromebook 11 and Dell Chromebook 13, with the latter being hailed as a quality alternative to other, more cheaper Chromebooks out there. Now, according to a new report, there might be a new Chromebook from Dell on the horizon.
As reported by Chromeunboxed, who have done quite a bit of digging on the matter, Dell might be getting ready to release a new Intel Skylake-powered Chromebook. How they came to this conclusion is down to the name of a particular ODM that creates laptops for the biggest names out there such as HP, Acer, ASUS and of course Dell. Digging through some commits to some source code in the Chromium project, Chromeunboxed stumbled across a Wistron email address. Wistron is the name of the ODM that has made Chromebooks for these companies in the past and while an email address attached to new commits wouldn’t be enough to say that Dell is making a new Chromebook, the fact that the same email address was attached to both the Dell Chromebook 11 and Dell Chromebook 13 probably is.
Codenamed “Asuka” the new Dell Chromebook is said to be tested with a touchscreen and will be running on new Skylake hardware, too. Whether or not Dell is to release this device before the end of the year remains to be seen, but it is possible. What’s more likely, however, is that Dell introduce the new device in the Spring of next year to get the next-generation of Chromebooks off to a flying start. With Acer’s new Chromebook 15 now available, it’s possible that Dell is looking to leave Acer to the remaining Chromebook sales of the year. We’ll have to wait and see if Dell plan on releasing a new Chromebook, but one thing’s for sure, it’s now a better time than ever to release a new Chromebook.