“Atlas” is the codename for a Chromebook with a 4K display

Chromebooks are about to get even more high-end specs. Back in February, we wrote about Chromebooks with 4K displays being on the horizon. A commit from the Chromium Gerrit mentioned "secret upcoming 4K Chromebooks." This could have been a joke, but it did seem inevitable that a Chromebook would get such a high-resolution display. We now have a codename for such a device.

Reddit user -nbsp- discovered a few lines from the Chromium boards.yaml file. All it says is a name and screen resolution, but the resolution is 3840 x 2160, which is indeed 4K. Here's the section that mentions the new codename and resolution:

  atlas:  # 3840x2160, boots recovery image on USB ports.  screen: [3840, 2160]  sdcard: False  hi_res: [en, es-419, pt-BR, fr, es, it, de, nl, da, nb, sv, ko, ja, id,  th, ar, ms, zh-CN, zh-TW, fi, pl]  

That's literally all we know right now. People will argue that Chromebooks don't need displays with such high resolution. This is true for most Chromebooks, which are meant to target low prices. However, devices like the Pixelbook have their place. Some people want Chrome OS on the best specs possible.

This could also be the beginning of Google's plan to bring a high-end Chrome OS/Android tablet to the market. Chrome OS keeps getting more Android features and Acer announced the first Chrome OS tablet last month. A theoretical "Pixel tablet" would have high-end specs like a 4K display. We could see a new 4K Chromebook at Google I/O this year, but that's just speculation at this point.

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