This Asus Chromebox doubles as a 15W wi-fi charging pad on your cellphone

If you need a hockey puck of a pc to simply deploy on a desk or behind a monitor, you’ll discover loads on sale, from the Mac Mini to Intel’s bare-bones NUC. But Asus is including a “why didn’t anyone think of that?” function to its new Chromebox 5 this yr: a built-in 15W wi-fi charger on your cellphone and / or earbud case.

The Chromebox 5 runs the light-weight ChromeOS, which makes it decide for laptop stations the place plenty of totally different customers need to log in and have their Google and internet apps prepared and never have to fret about updates. It appears fairly decently geared up, packing as much as a twelfth Gen Intel i7 processor, a PCIe Gen 4×4 SSD, two HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, 2.5Gbps Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E, 4 USB-A ports (two entrance, two again), a entrance 3.5mm headphone jack and microSD reader, and one rear Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C.

It’ll begin at $399 when it launches in Q1.

Speaking of ChromeOS, Asus can be introducing a brand new gaming Chromebook, the Chromebook Vibe CX34 Flip (CX3401). Gaming Chromebooks are type of a bizarre class contemplating Google axed its Stadia cloud gaming service, and this one’s notably awkward given the way it’s decked out in Stadia’s orange and magenta colours… however Asus remains to be promoting that this one can play GeForce Now and Amazon Luna video games on its 14-inch, 144Hz, 1920 x 1200 display screen. This one additionally has a backflipping 360-degree hinge, a four-zone RGB backlit keyboard, HDMI 2.1 for 4K 60Hz output to a TV, a stylus with built-in storage, Wi-Fi 6E, and as much as Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of PCIe 3.0 storage relying on the configuration.