Most Chromebooks cost somewhere between $200 and $300, a price range they've occupied since the launch of the first $199 Chromebook in late 2012. For a long time, they were unchallenged in this price range, but recent efforts by Microsoft and PC OEMs have brought decent Windows laptops down to $200, too. Today the price war escalates again—Google is announcing a pair of Chromebooks that go down to $149.

The new Chromebooks are the first from Hisense and Haier, two Chinese companies known primarily for supplying budget products to specific retailers. Hisense products, including the new Hisense Chromebook, are typically sold through Walmart, while the Haier Chromebook 11 will be available from Amazon.

Both of these Chromebooks come with ARM processors rather than the more common Intel offerings, which partially explains why they're so cheap. The other specs are pretty barebones, too: each laptop includes 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage and an 11.6-inch 1366×768 display with a maximum brightness of 200 nits. Each has two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, a microSD card reader, a headphone jack, a full-size HDMI port, and a 720p webcam, as well as 867Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support.

The only real differences between the two are their size, weight, and promised battery life. The Hisense model is 0.6 inches thick but weighs 3.3 pounds and promises 8.5 hours of battery life. The Haier Chromebook is thicker at 0.71 inches, but weighs 2.54 pounds and runs for up to 10 hours. A second variant of the Haier Chromebook 11 offers a removable battery in a slightly thicker, heavier package (0.89 inches and 2.76 pounds).

Both $149 Chromebooks are available for preorder now and should begin shipping within two to three weeks.

Powered by Rockchip and Cortex A17

All of the hardware in today's announcement is powered by the Rockchip RK3288, a chip we haven't run into yet. If you're not familiar, Rockchip is a smallish Chinese chipmaker that mostly uses off-the-shelf CPU and GPU designs from ARM to make low-cost chips for midrange and entry-level devices. The RK3288 combines four 1.8GHz ARM Cortex A17 CPU cores with a quad-core ARM Mali T760 GPU.

Cortex A17 is an oddity. It's ARM's newest 32-bit ARMv7 design, and it's intended more as a low-power replacement for the old Cortex A9 or A15 designs than as an alternate for 64-bit ARMv8 cores like A53, A57, or A72. The idea is to approximate the performance of Cortex A15 without using as much power, something made possible both by architectural improvements and newer manufacturing processes (this particular chip is built on a 28nm process).

Performance estimates for the Mali T760 GPU are even harder to come by—ARM says it's "400 percent more energy efficient" than an old Mali T604 GPU. That could mean a lot of things. It could be four times faster in the same power envelope, or the exact same speed with a quarter the power consumption, or some mix of the two. We know its API support is pretty good—OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenCL 1.1, and DirectX 11 are all present and accounted for—and Rockchip says the SoC includes 4K H.265 video decoding support.

We haven't seen much of either architecture out in the wild yet, so all we can do is make broad guesses about performance based on the ARM chips that have shipped in other, older Chromebooks—namely the Samsung Exynos 5250 that came with Samsung's first ARM Chromebook and HP's Chromebook 11. That chip came with a quad-core Mali T604 GPU and two 1.7GHz Cortex A15 CPU cores, so assuming that Chrome OS can make decent usage of all four CPU cores, these new devices could be around twice as fast as the older ARM Chromebooks. That's still not quite in Intel's territory, and the 2GB of RAM will still be a limiting factor, but for $149 the experience should be bearable.

A convertible, and Chrome OS on a stick

Aside from the cheap Chromebooks, today's most interesting announcement is an Asus device called the "Chromebit." Coming later this summer for "less than $100," the Chromebit is a cross between a Chromebox and the Chromecast. It's an HDMI dongle with the same guts as the other devices being announced today—a Rockchip 3288 SoC, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.

Google thinks the Chromebit will prove popular in schools or businesses with existing screens and fairly basic needs—plug the Chromebit in to an old TV or monitor and get a modern (if low-end) computer without creating a big cable mess or spending a bunch of money. If you're just looking for a Chrome OS test or development device, this will probably be the cheapest way to get one. As with Chromebooks and Chromeboxes, people with more complex needs will have other options; Intel has already announced a Compute Stick that crams a Windows- or Linux-compatible Atom processor into a similarly sized HDMI dongle.

Finally, Asus has also announced a new "Chromebook Flip" convertible with the same internals. It's got a 10.1-inch touchscreen that flips most of the way around so you can use the base of the computer as a monitor stand, and it promises ten hours of battery life. It launches "later this spring" for $249. Update: Google tells us the hinge has a 360 degree range of motion.

We'll be taking a closer look at one of the $149 Chromebooks in the coming days. Up until now, Intel-powered Chromebooks have been vastly preferable to the ARM ones, but the new price and the new chip could change the equation for the cash-strapped schools and businesses where Chromebooks have the most appeal.