New Chromebooks and Chromebit stick start at $100 thanks to lower-power chips

After a steady two-year drizzle of Chromebook releases, Google and its partners are preparing a flood of new hardware to sway consumers away from cheap Windows laptops. Chromebooks from HiSense and Haier go on sale today at $149 each, followed by the Asus Chromebook Flip, a 360-degree convertible, in the coming months.

And if a Chromebook itself is too big and bulky, then you might consider the Asus Chromebit, a Chromebook-on-a-stick that will cost less than $100. In all, 10 Chrome products will launch over the next two months, Google executives said. Besides the HiSense and Haier laptops highlighted here, youll see models from Acer, AOPEN, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and LG ranging from $149 to $499.

Were very happy in that weve played a part in moving computing a little bit further, said Caesar Sengupta, the vice president of product management for Google.

The Asus Chromebook Flip will be available later this spring, executives said.

The secret behind these low-cost Chromebooks is the RK3288, a very inexpensive ARM processor from Rockchip, a Chinese chip maker thats little known outside of industry circles.

The Rockchip RK3288 is one of the first chips based on the quad-core ARM Cortex-A17architecture, which was launched in mid-2014. Because the chip can draw as little as 3 watts of power, the Chromebooks based on it are designed without fans, and can last all day on a single chargeup to 13 hours in the Asus Chromebook Flip, according to Gayathri Rajan, director of product management at Google.

The story behind the story: The essential Chromebook concept relies on the premise that a huge cross-section of users will be happy with good enough computing, especially at rock-bottom prices. The systems arent powerful enough to play hardcore games and Windows applications, but theyre good enough to browse the web and tap into Googles extensive suite of cloud servicesGmail, Drive, Maps, and so on.

However, you could argue that with fewer than25 million Chromebook sales last year (opposed to more than 302 million PC sales), Google still has work to do. And thus todays announcement. Google and its partners are lowering prices further while chasing the one commodity laptop users value most: battery life.

The basic hardware specs of the Asus Chromebook Flip, the two Chromebooks from Haier and HiSense, and the Chromebit Chromebook-on-a-stick are all nearly identical. You get the aforementioned Rockchip chip, 2GB of storage, and a 16GB SSD.

Our general belief is that you cant get to lower-priced devices by just dropping specs, Sengupta said. Users see through that. But if you keep the performance bar the same, but bring the price down, thats really how you need to go through it.

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New Chromebooks and Chromebit stick start at $100 thanks to lower-power chips