Robby has been busy chasing down every little detail he can find on the new Comet Lake Chromebook codenamed ‘Hatch’. Even though Intel’s 9th Gen processors aren’t expected until mid-year, we’ve now identified one manufacturer that is working on a Comet Lake device and it should be exciting news for a lot of Chrome OS users.

Arguably, Samsung ushered in the next generation of Chromebooks with the poster child Chromebook Pro that debuted at CES “way back” in January of 2017. Since that time, we’ve seen the birth of Google’s Pixelbook, the first Chrome OS tablets and detachables and a smorgasbord of flagship-caliber Chromebooks of all shapes and sizes.

The latest and greatest on the market feature Intel’s 8th gen Kaby Lake chips and honestly, they are more than capable of handling pretty much any workload you can throw at it. Oddly enough, Samsung has been silent on the Chromebook front as it pertains to what we consider “power user” devices.

Instead, the electronics giant has been content pumping out a wide variety of Chromebook Plus variants and for the most part, they seem to be quite popular. Still, Samsung is overdue in making a new Chromebook Pro.

As popular as Samsung’s flagship is, the aging convertible has garnered some serious criticism from users who are still waiting for the addition of support for Linux apps, a.k.a. Crostini. At this point, I’ll be the one to say what everyone is thinking. It is unlikely we’ll see Crostini added to the Pro or the ASUS C302 for that matter but that’s a conversation for another time.

Anyway, the exciting news is that we have uncovered a new Comet Lake device and along with it, the usual suspects from our friends at Samsung.

kohaku

The new Chromebook was added to the repositories earlier this month copied its initial images directly from ‘Hatch’. Based on the few files already added, it isn’t clear what features will be found on ‘Kohaku’ but I did find Samsung emails including Jongpil Jung who has had his hands on pretty much every Samsung Chromebook since the Series 5 that debuted back in 2012.

While there isn’t much to go on, I would presume that this will be the next major flagship Chromebook from Samsung. Given the normal development timeline, it is very possible that we will see another CES announcement from Samsung which gives them a solid eight months to get this Chromebook ready for prime time.

We love the Chromebook Pro and it still offers a lot for a two-year-old Chromebook but the market has evolved greatly in that time and hopefully, Samsung will raise the bar even higher with their next device. We only have to wait two-thirds of a year to find out. Stay tuned and we’ll share more details about ‘Kohaku’ as they show up.

Source: Chromium Repository