New Haswell Chromebooks from Acer, HP, ASUS, and Toshiba arriving in coming months
A fresh mix of Intel-based Chromebooks — something for everyone — Chromebooks were designed to make computers faster, simpler, safer and much more affordable for everyone.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after the first Chromebooks went on sale in mid-2011, the category has been stuck between a compelling price and hardware that reviewers treated as a compromise. What changed this week came from Intel: fourth-generation Haswell Core processors shipping with power draw as low as 4.5 watts, announced alongside Brian Krzanich's IDF keynote where he demoed a 14-nanometer system-on-a-chip and predicted sub-$100 tablets.
The new wave matters because it is broad, not experimental: Acer, HP, ASUS, and Toshiba are all committing Haswell-based Chromebook models for the coming months — three of the four being core Windows OEMs. The pickup was unusually wide too, spanning ZDNet, Engadget, Mashable, BGR and even The Windows Blog, a sign the story landed squarely on Microsoft's turf.
First-order effects
- Four of the biggest PC makers put Intel's most power-efficient mobile silicon inside Chrome OS machines for the holiday season, giving shoppers full x86-class performance and battery life at Chromebook prices rather than the earlier Atom-and-Celeron compromises.
Second-order effects
- Intel wins on either side of the OS line — Krzanich is simultaneously pitching Haswell as the chip that can save struggling Windows tablets while shipping it into Chromebooks — so every unit Google's platform sells still feeds Intel's mobile volume.
- Microsoft faces a cheap, familiar-hardware alternative running a rival OS through its own OEM channel, since Acer, HP, and Toshiba now sell both Windows laptops and Chromebooks built on the same silicon.
Third-order effects
- If low-wattage Haswell holds up in the field, the Chromebook stops being an experiment and becomes a permanent budget-laptop tier, forcing the Windows ecosystem to compete on software value rather than hardware cost — a structural split where OEMs hedge across operating systems while the chip supplier stays neutral.
The trend: Intel's low-power Haswell generation is turning the Chromebook from a 2011 experiment into a mainstream laptop category, with the same silicon now underpinning both Chrome OS and Windows devices.