Hisense Chromebook 11

Updated on June 4, 2026

Note: This product has been discontinued and reached its Chrome OS Auto Update Expiration date in June 2020. It is no longer available for purchase new and no longer receives security updates.

Hisense sold this Chromebook exclusively through Walmart from 2015 at $149, pairing a Rockchip RK3288 ARM processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB or 32GB of eMMC storage. As PCWorld noted, someone earning minimum wage would only need to work about 15 hours to afford this Chromebook, compared to 20+ hours for competitors at the time. The fanless design kept operation silent, though Hisense made clear compromises in build quality, display, and input devices to hit that price point.

The Ultra-Budget Chromebook Era

By early 2015, Chrome OS had spent four years climbing out of its Cr-48 prototype days and into mainstream retail. School districts were buying Chromebooks in bulk for one-to-one student programs, and the back-to-school category at big-box retailers had quietly turned into a price race. Google’s reference platform was lean enough to run on modest hardware, and ARM vendors saw an opening: if a tablet-class system-on-chip could drive a laptop with no fan, the bill of materials for an entire computer could dip below $100. Hisense landed at the bottom of that curve where ordinary shoppers would see it, on a Walmart shelf next to printers and inkjet cartridges, at a price almost anyone could justify.

The Haier Chromebook 11, announced alongside the Hisense at the same Google press event in early 2015, shared the same Rockchip RK3288 reference design and the same $149 price. The Asus Chromebook Flip C100PA, the Asus C201, and the second-generation Samsung Chromebook 3 used variations of the same ARM platform during the next year, and Acer’s CB3 series rounded out the budget tier with Intel Bay Trail and Braswell silicon. For about two and a half years, this cluster of devices defined what an entry-level Chromebook looked like: an 11.6-inch 1366 by 768 TN panel, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of eMMC, plastic chassis, no fan, and a battery that could plausibly last a school day. This was the only Chromebook Hisense ever shipped under its own name in the United States.

By 2018 Google was tightening Chromebook requirements: the new education-tier Chromebooks ran Intel Apollo Lake or AMD A4 chips with 4 GB of RAM as a default, and 2 GB ARM models stopped being competitive. Google’s Auto Update Expiration calendar made the cutoff explicit. The RK3288 generation, including this Hisense, hit its AUE in mid-2020. Buyers who picked one up in 2015 got five years of updates, exactly as Google’s original policy promised at the time, and then the device aged out.

Pros and Cons

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Hisense Chromebook 11 Comparison Chart

	Hisense Chromebook 11	Hisense Chromebook 11
Price	List Price: $149.00 Amazon Prices: Check Price on Amazon	List Price: $179.00 Amazon Prices: Check Price on Amazon
Model number	C11	C12
Performance Rating	2.0	2.0
Chromebook Plus	No	No
Processor	Quad-core 1.80 Ghz Rockchip RK3288	Quad-core 1.80 Ghz Rockchip RK3288
RAM	2 GB	2 GB
Internal Storage	16 GB eMMC	32 GB eMMC
Screen Size	11.6"	11.6"
Screen Resolution	1366x768	1366x768
Screen Type	TN	TN
Touch Screen	No	No
Stylus / Pen	No Stylus Support	No Stylus Support
Dimensions width x length x thickness	8.03 x 11.42 x 0.76 inches (203.96 x 290.07 x 19.3 mm)	8.03 x 11.42 x 0.76 inches (203.96 x 290.07 x 19.3 mm)
Weight	2.4 lbs (1.09 kg)	2.4 lbs (1.09 kg)
Backlit Keyboard	No	No
Webcam	No Webcam	No Webcam
WiFi	802.11 a/b/g/n/ac	802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 4.0	Bluetooth 4.0
Ethernet	No	No
Cellular Modem	No	No
HDMI	Full-Size HDMI	Full-Size HDMI
USB Ports	2 USB 2.0	2 USB 2.0
Thunderbolt Ports	No	No
Card Reader	microSD Card Reader	microSD Card Reader
Battery	Lithium-ion	Lithium-ion
Battery Life	8.5 hours	8.5 hours
Fanless	Yes	Yes
Auto Update Expiration Date	June, 2020	June, 2020

The 11.6-inch TN display offers a 1366 by 768 resolution with 200 nits of brightness according to PCWorld’s testing. Viewing angles suffer considerably, a typical TN panel limitation, though this matters less for direct viewing during typical use. The Rockchip RK3288 quad-core Cortex A17 processor paired with Mali 760 graphics proved somewhat competitive with Intel’s budget Celeron chips of the era, handling full-screen video playback with only occasional hiccups.

Connectivity includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, HDMI output, two USB 2.0 ports, a headphone jack, and microSD card expansion. The absence of USB-C and USB 3.0 reflects the device’s 2015 vintage. A USB Ethernet adapter could be used through the USB 2.0 ports for wired network access, though at reduced speeds compared to USB 3.0 connections. At 2.4 pounds it stayed portable enough for the students and casual users Hisense was aiming at.

Inside the Rockchip RK3288 Platform

Built on a 28 nanometer process and announced in 2014, the Rockchip RK3288 integrates four ARM Cortex-A17 cores, a Mali GPU, hardware video decoding, and the usual collection of camera and display controllers onto a single die. The same system-on-chip defined the early ARM Chromebook generation. ARM positioned the Cortex-A17 as a refresh of the Cortex-A12, with branch prediction and out-of-order execution tuned for tablet workloads, and Rockchip clocked it up to 1.8 GHz for laptop use. That made it competitive on paper with Intel’s Bay Trail Celeron N2840 used in some sibling Chromebooks, and slightly faster in the JavaScript and HTML rendering benchmarks Google cared about when it certified the platform.

In day-to-day terms the RK3288 means the Hisense behaves like a mid-range Android tablet pretending to be a laptop. Single-tab browsing feels snappy, YouTube playback at 1080p stays smooth as long as the encode is friendly to the hardware decoder, and Google Docs is well within its envelope. Open more than half a dozen Chrome tabs and the 2 GB of RAM becomes the bottleneck; Chrome OS will start unloading background tabs and reloading them on focus, which feels jerky. Heavy WebGL, modern web applications that lean on JavaScript frameworks, and the post-2018 wave of progressive web apps all push the chip harder than its original target workload anticipated. Owners who keep usage simple and lean (one to three tabs, classic web mail, document editing) still find the experience tolerable on the original hardware.

Soldered Internals and a Two-Stream Wi-Fi Radio

The chassis is matte plastic with a textured lid, hinges are stiff enough to keep the screen at a chosen angle, and the bottom panel is a single piece with no user-serviceable doors. The eMMC storage is soldered to the board, the RAM is soldered, and the battery is internal and held in with adhesive. None of that is unusual on a sub-$150 laptop (Asus, Haier, and Samsung made the same calls on their RK3288 models), but it does mean the device is not a candidate for hardware upgrades.

The 802.11ac radio runs 2x2 MIMO rather than a single stream, and the Bluetooth 4.0 stack is good enough for a wireless mouse and a pair of earbuds at the same time. Hisense spent more on the wireless side than the rest of the parts list suggests. The webcam is a basic 0.9-megapixel sensor with a built-in microphone and was never going to flatter anyone on a video call, but it works for the school-conferencing scenarios it was designed around. The single combo headphone jack and stereo speakers underneath the chassis round out the audio path; sound projects downward and bounces off whatever surface the laptop is sitting on, which is forgiving on a desk and muffled on a soft bed or blanket.

Reviewer Insights

PCWorld

Gordon Mah Ung and Melissa Riofrio’s hands-on review emphasized the economic reality of the Hisense Chromebook 11. The utilitarian textured matte-plastic chassis featured a sturdy lid, though the brushed-metal wrist area felt “uncomfortably cold” during extended use.

PCWorld wrote that “The keyboard is the cheapest-feeling part, with hard-plastic keys that feel second-rate”, noting limited key travel and noticeable flex during typing. On video playback the same review said, “We could play an action movie at full-screen with only very occasional hiccups.”

Battery testing yielded 6.22 hours versus Hisense’s claimed 8.5 hours, a substantial gap, though still adequate for a school day.

Popzara Press

Herman Exum’s review for Popzara described the device as “plainly good enough, delivering the basic experience one should expect from an entry-level Chromebook.”

The SunSpider benchmark score of 601.6 milliseconds demonstrated adequate but unremarkable JavaScript performance. Clicking and dragging on the trackpad was described as troublesome. Popzara’s battery testing proved more optimistic than PCWorld’s, achieving approximately 9 hours of use.

Heavy tab usage caused noticeable sluggishness due to the 2GB RAM limitation, but for standard web browsing and video conferencing, performance remained acceptable given the price.

Built for Light Web Work on a Tight Budget

Students and households wanting a cheap second machine were the shoppers Hisense priced it for, and it was never meant to replace a primary laptop or handle demanding workloads.

Chrome OS updates ended in June 2020 and the product is long discontinued, so anyone weighing one now is looking at used hardware with 2GB of RAM and either 16GB or 32GB of storage that cannot be changed.

Owners Should Narrow What the Machine Does

Chrome OS still boots on this hardware, the desktop still loads, and the user interface works the same way it did the day before the Auto Update Expiration date arrived in June 2020. Google stopped publishing browser updates for the device, which means the version of Chrome on the machine is frozen at whatever was current in mid-2020. The TLS stack, the JavaScript engine, the certificate roots, and the sandbox isolation that Chrome OS relies on for security no longer receive patches.

Modern web applications written against newer JavaScript features may refuse to run or behave incorrectly, and banking sites and other security-sensitive services start rejecting the older Chrome user agent. Expired certificate authorities cause connection errors, and streaming services that enforce DRM updates may stop playing protected content. Any browser-exploitable vulnerability discovered after mid-2020 will not be patched on this hardware, which makes browsing untrusted sites or opening unexpected links materially riskier than doing the same on a current Chromebook.

A post-AUE Hisense Chromebook 11 still makes a reasonable offline-first machine for typing in Google Docs over a known good network, a streaming jukebox for a household music collection, a guest-room web browser for hotel-style email and weather checking, or a dedicated kids’ laptop with parental controls on a separate access point. Disconnecting it from anything sensitive (no banking, no payroll, no health records, no shared password manager) keeps the residual risk contained.

The RK3288 is an ARM chip, so the Linux distributions most people reach for first will not run as-is on it. ChromeOS Flex requires an x86-64 processor and refuses to install on ARM hardware, which rules out the most obvious cleanup path. Community projects such as MrChromebox’s firmware utility and Mainline Linux for ARM Chromebooks have brought varying degrees of success to RK3288 devices, but the process involves removing the write-protect screw, flashing custom firmware, and accepting that hardware acceleration for video and graphics is partial at best. Owners comfortable with that level of work can usually get a lightweight Debian or postmarketOS environment booting.

When the machine finally stops being useful, recycling is the right answer. Most US municipalities accept Chromebooks at their e-waste days, and Best Buy and Staples have ongoing electronics recycling programs that take laptops at no charge. Wiping the device through Settings then Powerwash before handing it off removes the local Google account and any cached data, which is a sensible final step even on a device that never held much beyond browser tabs.

Those looking to replace this Chromebook with something current can browse the full Chromebook Comparison Chart to compare specs and prices across today’s lineup.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How much did the Hisense Chromebook 11 cost?

A: It launched at $149 for the 16GB model (C11) and $179 for the 32GB model (C12).

Q: What processor did the Hisense Chromebook 11 use?

A: A Rockchip RK3288 quad-core ARM Cortex A17 running at 1.8GHz, paired with Mali 760 quad-core graphics.

Q: Is the Hisense Chromebook 11 still receiving updates?

A: No. Chrome OS updates ended in June 2020, when the device reached its Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date, and no security or feature updates have followed.

Q: What was the battery life of the Hisense Chromebook 11?

A: Hisense claimed 8.5 hours of battery life, but independent reviewers measured between 6.22 hours (PCWorld) and 9 hours (Popzara) depending on usage patterns.

Q: Where was the Hisense Chromebook 11 sold?

A: Walmart sold it exclusively in the United States when it launched in 2015.