Google and Dell team up to unveil Latitude enterprise-grade Chromebooks, with 8th-gen Intel Core i7 CPUs, available to order from August 27, starting at $699
The next time you get a laptop from your company's IT department, you might be getting a Chromebook.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third act in Dell's long Chrome OS climb. In 2015 Google and Dell made the first [[a:831883|push into business with the $399 Dell Chromebook 13, paired with new management and virtualization tools]], and Dell has since tested the consumer ceiling with the $599 Inspiron Chromebook 14. What changed now is the badge: Latitude is Dell's corporate IT brand, so Chrome OS is being sold to the procurement channel that buys fleets, not to consumers or the schools Dell targeted with its 2017 Latitude and Chromebook 11 education line.
The spec sheet is the signal — an 8th-gen Core i7 in a Chromebook at $699 says Google and Dell believe enterprise workloads, not just browser tasks, are the market. It matters because IT departments standardizing on Latitude now have a Chrome OS option inside the same product family they already manage.
First-order effects
- Enterprise IT buyers ordering Latitude laptops from August 27 get a Core i7 Chrome OS option starting at $699, putting Chromebooks inside the corporate refresh cycle for the first time under Dell's flagship business brand.
- Google gains a distribution channel into corporate fleets it could not reach through its education-focused Chromebook partnerships, using Dell's existing enterprise relationships.
Second-order effects
- Windows laptop makers selling into the same corporate refresh budgets now face a sub-$700 i7 alternative in the exact product line IT managers already trust, forcing them to justify the Windows premium on software rather than hardware specs.
- The 2015 management and virtualization tooling becomes the deciding factor: whether Chrome OS sticks in the enterprise depends on those fleet-management tools maturing fast enough to handle Latitude-scale deployments.
Third-order effects
- If Latitude-branded Chromebooks gain traction, laptop procurement bifurcates by workload — browser-centric corporate fleets shift to Chrome OS while Windows retains compute-heavy roles — and Chromebooks follow the path from education (2015-2017) through premium consumer (2018) to enterprise that Dell's own product history traces.
- Acer's later move upmarket with an industry-first 17.3-inch Chromebook suggests the pattern holds beyond Dell: vendors competing on screen size and form factor for grown-up buyers rather than classroom price points, reshaping the low end of the corporate laptop market.
The trend: Chrome OS is climbing the market ladder from classrooms to corporate fleets, with Dell putting it inside the Latitude enterprise brand as the marker of that shift.