Newsletter 
Google’s Chromebook ecosystem already has a few machines running on Intel’s Apollo Lake processor platform, and it would seem that another is coming in the form of “Baby Mako.” The new Chromebook recently appeared in the Chromium code repository and is somewhat interesting in that it deviates entirely in name from a previous Chromebook called Coral, but their specs are identical outside of the battery. The Chromebook’s code does not specify a single processor, so all that can be said for certain is that it runs on one of the processors in the Apollo Lake range, which likely means some form of a Pentium CPU.
The Coral Chromebook is a bit of a mysterious beast itself, with initial entries regarding it giving the impression that it would actually use Intel’s previous architecture, Braswell. Apollo Lake Chromebooks have been around for a while and exist at multiple levels of the pricing spectrum, so using Braswell at this point doesn’t make a lot of sense. As pointed out by Chrome Unboxed, many Apollo Lake Chromebooks have codenames pulled from the character roster of popular mobile game Hungry Shark, but Baby Mako may be considered an exception; it’s named after a secondary character who cannot be played on its own, but serves as an accessory to the larger Mako Shark. This may allude to its status as a version of another Chromebook, but with a smaller battery.
Reducing battery life wouldn’t prove popular with consumers and the price cut provided by doing so without making any other changes would be minimal at best. This likely means that some other differentiating factors will emerge over time, with size and processor type being two of the most likely candidates. As both Coral and Baby Mako are still in early stages of development, their hardware profiles remain in the process of being filled out, so there is plenty of time and room for differences between the two to emerge as they develop. The fact that Baby Mako was introduced so early on in Coral’s development cycle is further evidence that the two will likely develop as similar Chromebooks with a few key differences.