14 DAY TRIAL // Chromebooks have still not gained any sort of ground with consumers, though some did warm up to the idea of always-on laptops. That hasn't demoralized laptop makers that much though, not enough to prevent them from planning a new wave of them. Both ASUS and Acer are preparing laptops with the Google Chrome operating system, though a key difference from existing ones should be mentioned.
Long story short, the Chromebooks will actually have on-board storage, instead of relying solely on cloud access.
Google envisioned Chromebooks as things that operated fully in the cloud. This allowed the files to be accessed immediately from any other Chromebook or software account.
Thus, the Chromebooks only had a token amount of storage, enough for the OS but not much else. Under 20 GB all told.
Acer was the only relevant exception to this. Its current Chromebook has a hard disk drive of 320 GB, with 100 GB Google Drive cloud access backing it up.
Speaking of details, the laptop measures 11.6 inches in diagonal, is powered by a 1.1 GHz Intel Celeron CPU, and has a price of $199 / €199.
Currently, Acer makes around 20,000 – 30,000 of them each month, which is a small amount compared to the original 150,000 – 200,000.
In the second half of the year, Acer will launch a new 11.6-inch Chromebook, so we can assume the manufacturing capacity will rise again.
Meanwhile, as Acer prepares for the second round, ASUS is getting ready for its first. The company originally didn't intend to sell any Chromebooks, but it will join the fun in the second half of this year, as will HP, Lenovo and Samsung.
From what we can gather, this second generation will almost exclusively be aimed at schools and students, and will contend with both Microsoft PCs and Androidbooks.