Samsung backtracks on $1,000 Chromebooks with cheaper Galaxy Chromebook 2

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  The Galaxy Chromebook 2. It’s still extremely red. [credit: Samsung ]

CES 2021 is next week, and announcements are starting to hit the wire. Last year, Samsung launched the Galaxy Chromebook, a premium $1,000 Chrome OS laptop that felt like a successor to the Google Pixelbook. Just like Google, after experiencing the sales of a premium $1,000 Chromebook, Samsung has decided to tone down the premium-ness in subsequent versions, and today’s “Galaxy Chromebook 2,” is a cheaper follow-up.

Last year’s Galaxy Chromebook featured a headline-grabbing 13.3-inch 4K OLED display, but this year, Samsung has hacked and slashed at the spec sheet to get down to a lower price. Instead of a 4K OLED, we’ve got a 1080p LCD. The laptop is slower, thicker, and heavier than last year’s, with less storage, fewer cameras, and less RAM. All this cost-cutting has nearly cut the price in half, though: it now starts at $549.

For the starting $549, you get a 13.3-inch 1920×1080 (16:9) LCD touchscreen; a 1.9GHz, 14nm, dual-core Intel Celeron 5205U; 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM; 64GB of eMMC storage; and a 45.5Wh battery. For $699, there is an upgraded model with an Intel Core i3-10110U, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage.