If you are a boldly going early adopter, the Samsung Chromebook PRO is orderable again for $550 at Amazon by Amazon itself. It had returned a few days ago but then quickly became un-orderable again. But as of the time of writing, this is orderable again in the all-encompassing “temporarily out of stock” status.
The difference between this and the $436 PLUS model is that the PRO has an Intel processor versus ARM of the PLUS.
More details on what caused the delays and their plans for the future of the ChromeOS + Android marriage can be found in this Google I/O 2017 Verge post. It turns out the delays were a mix of software and hardware:
“The Chromebook Pro hardware itself needed to be redesigned. Issues with the thermals and antennas meant some things had to get shifted around. Google itself handles the software stack, so it needed to tweak that software as Samsung tweaked the hardware.”
Of photography interest is the combination of the S-Pen (for retouching and such), touchscreen, combination of Android and ChromeOS apps and options, a 3:2 QHD screen (if you prefer to work in this aspect ratio), and such.
Note however that it may take a few weeks/months before everything gels as Android apps are in Beta. On the plus side, it is on a six week update cycle, so fixes will definitely come faster than they do with Android phones.
If I wasn’t a poor blogger I would scoop this up 🙂 Please feel free to send me one 🙂
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