Acer is launching its first desktop computer powered by Google’s Chrome OS. The Acer Chromebox CXI Series will be available in the US and Canada starting in late September, and Acer is targeting education and business customers, but the computers will be available for anyone interested in a cheap, small Chrome OS computer.
An Acer Chromebox CXI with 2GB of RAM will sell for $180 (or $199 in Canada), while a 4GB model will sell for $220 in the US and $239 in Canada.
Both models feature an Intel Celeron 2957U Haswell processor, 16GB of solid state storage, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and n SD card reader. The systems have HDMI and DisplayPort output and come with a mouse and keyboard optimized for Chrome OS.
The Acer Chromebox also features a TPM 1.2 chip for data encryption and other security features.
We first learned that Acer was working on a Chromebox in July, but now the company is making it official with a press release and everything.
Rivals HP and Asus also offer Chromeboxes, but those models feature Celeron 2955U Haswell chips and at least the entry-level models lack TPM chips.
What’s the difference between the Celeron 2957U and 2955U?
https://ark.intel.com/compare/75608,78942
There is no effective difference in the specs.
Brad, actually all official Chrome OS devices have a TPM: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/tpm-usage
I’m not sure that indicates that all devices have it… just that the OS supports it. I know the HP Chromebox has a TPM chip though… I’ll update that line in the article to reflect that it has the enterprise-friendly TPM security chip.
It was a HW requirement when I worked on the Chrome OS team (albeit in marketing). It’s very unlikely the requirement changed because a lot of the security features rely on it – see this presentation: https://www.ncsi.com/nsatc11/presentations/wednesday/general_session/gwalani.pdf
Ahh… thanks for the clarification! I guess I just hadn’t really seen anyone play it up until recently when companies like HP and Acer started pushing these devices as enterprise-friendly.