I attended Google I/O in 2013 and was given a Chromebook Pixel, their $1300 laptop. The hardware was very, very nice, and I quite enjoyed using it for a while. One day, I dropped it and damaged the screen well outside of its warranty period. "Oh no," I thought. "This is probably going to be pretty expensive to fix." So, bracing for the damage, I called up Google and told them what had happened. They replied that there was no fixing it. They would replace the laptops under the warranty, but there was no repairing to be done. I was welcome to call around and ask local repair shops if they could do it. That went nowhere, of course.
I've been pretty skeptical of Google laptops ever since.
Those original Chromebook Pixels were awesome machines.
I wish they'd had open bootloaders, but I seem to recall you had to keep it in developer mode which required a nag screen, or something along those lines, if you wanted to run your own OS on it.
You can easily remove the nag screen by opening the device and unscrewing a screw and running coreboot with SeaBIOS. Pretty neat security approach (not too hard to do, not too easy for a layman to fall for instructions to self-compromise). I have two that work just fine today.
Looks and feels premium, but ultimately fundamentally disposable.
This pattern extends to so many goods in modern life. Washing machines, microwaves, etc aren't worth the time of a local repairman. Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.
Clothes are replaced, not stitched. And after a few washes at that. Cars, phones, etc, consist of proprietary parts all sealed up.
Isn't that a feature not a bug? That means labor, a proxy for quality of life of the laborer, is more expensive than parts. That's abundance.
In fact, in "shithole countries" where everyone wants to emigrate from, it is exactly the opposite: i.e. you try to fix everything even if it takes sooo long.
Good clothes can be definitely stitched. Some brands even offer free or reasonably priced repairs. Patagonia or Citizen Wolf are two examples that spring to mind. Same applies to good hardware, but you need to do some research before buying.
I am afraid Google's business model is incompatible with this approach as they have almost no customer service because it doesn't "scale". Actually, what they are doing is turning customer service costs into externalities, i.e. environmental waste.
Tying the browser version to the system version was a mistake too. Once it stopped getting system updates, it stopped being compatible with big corners of the web that expect Chrome to always be the newest version.
That's still the default state of Google Hardware. Just look at their out-of-warranty Pixel Watch repairs.
And if you're not in North America (or EU), chances are very high that any repair to Pixels is going to be either not possible or will cost you dearly. I personally had a terrible experience of this with Pixel 7 Pro that was in warranty and had a water-related damage, since then, I've stayed away from any device made by Google.
Strata
Pixels,
Nest Cameras
Google Smart Speakers
Nest Home Security system
but then I broke my Google Pixel 1 watch. I ended up chatting with service in India and they pretty much told me that there was no way to fix it. After that, I quit buying all things Google and switched to Apple. Now I only buy Google software products, no consumer devices.
Very upfront: "Don't pay attention to RAM, processor, battery, monitor, price, etc. We're not telling you that, because you'd laugh. We're selling access to web services. Lower your expectations, get excited for AI. Please clap".
Very rough. Moore's lesser-known cousin, Les, predicted transistor density-per-dollar would actually start to decrease over time. I guess Google's ready for that world?
And even the most virulently pro-AI people I know aren't using any of these services Google is trying to market as sexy. Who is this for? "Make a band poster for my kid", could they have chosen a sadder example?
It doesn't help that the first result on Google for "Google book" is Google Books. Even their "AI overview" is helpfully telling me about the specifications and pricetags of books on Google Books.
I imagine they're going to do the same thing with this as with Chromebooks: i.e. do enterprise deals with schools and so on? Google's iteration-style structure where they kill products is fine for SaaS type offerings that are free and that you don't build your world around, but buying a laptop they won't support soon enough isn't that useful. Ultimately, just like with Amazon and their phone, it's obvious even prior to release that this is not a priority for the company and the side gig type stuff doesn't work when you are selling hardware.
Might have been more interesting if it were under a separate company that Google owned a large portion of, rather than carrying the Google brand. Then again, maybe the Google brand isn't toxic to the wider ecosystem of buyers. I still think consumer-hardware-wise Google is the Safeway Essentials version of Apple but others might think Gmail or Google itself which consumers consider best in class.
It's possible (likely?) that if the concept takes off that they might license or give the software away to other hardware vendors, just like the Android ecosystem.
I was anticipating an "AI phone" from someone like Google, not an "AI laptop", although it seems to be Android compatible so maybe that is coming next.
I'd imagine they'll mimic the Chromebook ten year support guarantee, at minimum the eight year guarantee on phones and it'll probably extend to Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo models.
Shipping enterprise desktop hardware with AI integrated features will likely be a priority to improve the cloud footprint amongst fortune 500.
I think you're underestimating Google's ability and willingness to launch and maintain multiple competing products that appear redundant. But you are overstating the lack of support for past ChromeOS devices, because for the enterprise and education markets the support timelines for Chromebooks have been the same as "forever".
I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo, and if i wanted a non-gaming expensive one i'd get a macbook pro.
I really don't see the market fit for this, I guess the android integration. But my god, I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook". Believe it or not, these things matter a lot, particularly if you're trying to target a young audience.
I think it's a successor to the Chromebook. In the vast majority of modern K-12 public schools, the school district owns the hardware, not the students.
I recently heard from couple of Technology Directors at schools that they are looking to procure Macbook Neos replacing their Chromebooks. This might be a strategy to defend their Chromebook market in schools.
Unless they're cheap, it's not going to sell well for K-12.
I used to work for an ed-tech company that was specifically focused on software for chromebooks and in talking with customers the biggest selling point of chromebooks for schools what their price. The school issued devices get absolutely beat to shit and they just expect a certain number to be decommissioned at the end of the year. Most schools are looking to buy the cheapest thing that does the job and the small group that have the money to actually buy premium devices are going to gravitate toward Apple products.
If Google is selling these for less then $500 then maybe there's a place for them, but like we saw it with the Pixelbook, there just isn't really demand for an $1000 chromebook
Linux gaming is getting a definite boost from Windows 11 being a shitshow.
And pracically _nobody_ does native Linux games, they're all just running Windows games through Proton, and faster. So fast actually that Proton is Microsoft's performance target :D
That wasn't really my question. The M1 is a 5nm chip up against the 8nm RTX 3090 - for $2000+ and 220W you'd kinda hope the M1 Ultra outperforms the 8nm stuff.
My question is, what games are people playing on Mac? Tomb Raider is one of ~6 AAA titles that was ported to Mac in the last decade. All the other big-ticket games - GTA V, Arc Raiders, Elden Ring - are all hamstrung by Apple's terrible translation software and don't run much better with Crossover either.
Apple Silicon, strictly speaking, is the least adept hardware that you can own for gaming. If you are a gamer, almost every single other GPU on the market would perform better for your needs.
ChromeOS is a very competent, fast, and easy-to-use operating system. For my family, it's basically perfect. It's virtually unbreakable and anyone can pick it up quickly.
Windows is a hot mess and frankly I wouldn't recommend it to anyone outside of gamers. For the technically competent, there's nothing to gain on Windows, and it will just get in the way. For the those less technically inclined, Windows means complexity and viruses. Also most Windows laptops suck major ass.
MacOS is better, especially if you have an iPhone. But even MacOS is a bit too complex for the less technically inclined. If you have an android phone, then a chromebook is 100% the way to go for those people. Also, chromebooks get crazy software support these days, on par with macbooks.
The number of people who have "installed linux" other than ChromeOS on a Chromebook is probably in the low single digits, while the ChromeOS installed user base is in the hundreds of millions. For any given thing someone is going to try to put linux on that thing, but it is not a common use case for Chromebooks that we need to discuss.
I was genuinely asking. In “my circles” a Chromebook is a cheap laptop that one can install Linux on. As in, “oh, I just picked up this used Lenovo Chromebook and installed Ubuntu on it”.
...basically, I have "nerd cred" and run linux on my desktop, but for my laptop I wanted: disposable (no leaky hard drive), zero maintenance (no kernel modules for sound drivers), battery-portable.
90% of the time I'm wanting `vim` + `git` + `ssh`, and 20% of the time i'm wanting to run some random stuff locally. Chromebook is basically zero friction and 1/10th the price (and 1/10th the capabilities) of a "very nice mac laptop", plus you can pop into a very capable linux VM (w/ passthrough GUI support) without a lot of ceremony.
Windows laptops are out of the question, and pure linux laptops (until only very recently) were of marginal support and low battery capabilities (especially "close it and stuff it in a backpack for 3 days").
Just the build quality on MacBooks compared to your random PC laptop piece of plastic that falls apart within a few years would make me very picky. I have a random “corporate” Lenovo and everything physical in it is way way worse than in my work MacBook
Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price? Especially considering you can install linux on it natively.
Other then that, Gemini is the biggest advantage. Google can offer Gemini for free because its TPUs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia stuff. Even free tier Gemini is really good considering it can integrate with a bunch of your stuff like google docs, and the lower last gen models have pretty generous usage limits.
Overall, if you are in Android ecosystem, you don't really even need a cheap laptop anymore, considering things like Samsung Dex exist.
You might be surprised how good cloud gaming has gotten. I play AAA games at max settings on my MacBook Pro through GeForce Now, and with fiber internet it's nearly indistinguishable from native.
I bought a Pixelbook during the middle of their product lifetime, and it was one of the best laptops I ever had. I genuinely don't know how broadly that sentiment was shared, but the cancellation of the product line suggests "not that broadly." Google has changed since that time and I am a bit skeptical this will meet that specific niche for me.
Yeah, I had the original Chromebook Pixel and the Pixelbook and they were both great. Somehow I'm still using the Pixelbook today and it chugs along.
That said, its hard to justify the prices for these premium Chromebooks. When I picked them up they were heavily discounted with some developer code or other.
I also agree with the shaky future as far as being able to actually opening these things up with developer tooling. It seems like they've simply been on a path to rollback all of that.
I don't know if these were related but I had a Pixel C tablet and I'm still upset they killed that off too. It was a nicer tablet than any Samsung I tried and felt like a genuine competitor to the iPad equivalent really excellent build quality, and then they abandoned it. I still have it but whatever they did to the software before giving up on it made it crash and blackscreen all the time while completely idle and I haven't had the energy to install something else on it, if something else even exists.
Likewise I bought the Chromebook Pixel LS and a Pixelbook during that dark period before M-series laptops and these laptops were awesome and IMO well ahead of their time. The ChromeOS with all its faults was a modern OS without legacy. For example the OS settings are closer to the Phone OS like settings vs MacOS settings that are still a mess these days.
AI mouse pointer is definitely not something I wanted to think about today. A recent HN post implored vibe coders not to modify the mouse pointer and now we get this from Google.
Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error?
...as computing shifts from operating systems [to intelligence systems](TKTK)...
`[text](link)` is the syntax used to create a link. But since `TKTK` isn't a valid URI, it doesn't render a link. My guess is TKTK is placeholder and they were supposed to fill it in before posting on reddit... but forgot?
I haven't been around reddit much for a few years, but in the past at least, /r/android was one of the best tech communities on the internet. It was even better than the iPhone subs for iPhone discussion.
I mean if you think about it, the type of person to own an android phone and care enough about phones to join a community is pretty much guaranteed to only be a tech geek.
Oh my goodness, the use cases are so… badly conceived:
> If a friend sends you a picture on your phone and you need to email it from your laptop, the file is just there — no need to email it to yourself.
So are there really people who will email a photo to themselves from their phone to… send the photo in an email?
Interesting to note that there is no mention of processor or operating system in that post. I’m guessing that it’s Android in a laptop form factor which I suppose might be something that some people would want, but I’m not one of them.
They should have just said "USE it on your laptop", not email it.
I all the time use my phone as a camera (esp. for coin photography) than e-mail the photos to myself as the most convenient way to get them on my desktop where I can edit them with GIMP etc.
I just open photos.google.com and grab them. No need to fiddle on my phone.
When on wifi, the photo backup upload starts immediately. If it doesn't (possibly due to your settings, this used to be my issue) you can manually open the photos app and tap the backup now button.
It’s a poor example. Recently, I did have to email myself photos taken with my phone to access them on my laptop. Would be nice if they were automatically synced. It’s work phone and laptop so I could have gone through OneDrive or Box but just as inconvenient as email.
Getting files on and off of a phone is shockingly hard. Shockingly. It's even worse on an iPhone, if you don't have a mac. To get my photos from my iPhone to my PC, I had to first upload them to iCloud and then download them again. My phone and computer are, like, a foot away from each other but I had to send the photos across the country to some server and back just to look at them.
Wiggling the mouse is what people do involuntarily when the computer isn’t working right. They are setting themselves up for Gemini to be the uninvited Clippy, except this will send everything you are working on to Google to harvest data from.
Branding is way off. Marketed as an AI laptop sounds like local inference to engineers, but no. The general public are weary of AI. The Neo is selling so well that Apple is running out of the A18 Pro chips. Rumors are that Apple may have 2 steps: mark as sold out, or upgrade to the latest iPhone SOC which comes with an upgrade to 12GB of RAM. I also suspect this is Ternus' first product launch as CEO (not officially until Sept 1).
Anyway, this will be fun to see price point, manufacturer differentiation (surprised that Google isn't building this themselves) and reviews. Hard to see how it competes with the Neo at $499 that can run a full Desktop OS and integrates well with the ecosystem.
As someone with a closet full of dead Google devices, I just can’t get excited about new hardware from them.
I think LLMs have the potential to make computers work how we’ve always envisioned them to (i.e. 60s sci-fi), but I’m also not convinced a dedicated laptop is the right form.
With that said, a 128GB RAM MacBook Pro is getting tantalizingly close to running useful local LLMs.
If the Googlebook was announced as a machine capable of running a small Gemini model locally, I’d probably enter back into the abusive relationship I have with Google hardware and preorder it…
I know people are kinda freaky on here with all the LLM love, but saying "tantalizing" here is a little on the nose, if not just plain weird. Get a room!
I’m not sure I understand the customer use case for this.
1- Chromebooks have made huge inroads in schools because they’re easy to maintain, share, upgrade, and they’re very cheap.
2- Obviously, running desktop software is a huge new piece of the ecosystem, but isn’t this customer already opting for Windows/Mac, who have extremely robust 30-year ecosystems and suites like Office, iLife, Adobe, etc that will obviously never build for this platform
There’s no way Google OS ever hits any kind of parity of exclusive software that is unavailable on Windows/Mac. Best they can do is run Android apps. This also introduces a high new threat vector to their existing customers who might not want it.
Lastly, what will this do to Chromebook buyers who are now wondering which OS will be actively developed in 5 years?
I will never buy another google hardware product again after my most recent pixel experience. I was sent a phone with a defective modem that they refused to replace. This is despite having bought 5 other pixels and also using google fi and a bunch of other google products.
I will never trust them with a hardware purchase ever again.
Indulge some pedantry with me... Why "Googlebook?" Pixel was meant for first-party computing devices, I thought. Nest for smart home and Fitbit for fitness trackers.
If you don't want to associate with past Pixelbooks and want to highlight Gemini, why not Geminibook or something like that? Does Google not have faith in the Gemini branding?
AI polls lower than "congress". People hate it - they hate it so much. They probably _wanted_ to call it that but someone who knows anything put their foot down.
buth the very first two bits of copy are about "intelligence" and "gemini". If they wanted to stay away from AI as branding they didn't do a great job.
If Samsung isn't a Googlebook partner then those laptop OEMs could be shipping the Google desktop environment while OEMs are free to ship a Googlebook or scale up their own desktop environments.
A plastic macbook lookalike with no ports, a mobile phone OS, a 1366x768 display and probably the cheapest SoC they can scrounge from the parts bin.
This thing, like all other google/android products, will be DOA, and the ones actually duped into buying one will be left with a paperweight in a year or two when the cheap hardware inevitably breaks.
I really wanted to stay in the google chromebook / googlebook echo system. But the hardware was expensive for what you get. Apple announced the macbook neo and I picked one up. Great hardware. can run light weight mac software. I don't run much beyond chrome and wahoo SYSTM (bike trainer app). It's really solid hardware and cost $600 or so.
I use gemini extensively (and claude). But - do I need this integrated in my laptop? Don't quite see it. And it's hard to beat Apple on hardware now.
There was a time where Google could've been competitive in this space, specifically against Apples MacBook product line, but that has long since passed. The 3rd party manufacturer path means Google isn't committed to this and won't have competitive hardware. It'll just be another Chromebook and limited to the Google Play Store too, which just isn't good at this point.
The quality of apps in the Google Play Store has dropped massively. There are still some gems, but for better or worse, the ecosystem is simply not as strong as Apples and it's certainly not comparable to just having a device where you can install anything you'd like in a full desktop grade OS.
Seems like they want a MacBook for people with Pixel phones. Okay. I assume it will be an ARM based system running some Android variant, if you can seamlessly launch Android apps on it. "Designed for Gemini Intelligence" is somewhat repellant - look at how poorly MS has done pushing Copilot on people. Overall I'd need way more info to know if this is a device I'd be interested in at all, but since I have a MacBook and iPhone, I don't think I'm the target market. Perhaps their ideal target market, but it seems like this would be best for people who are already knee deep in the Google ecosystem.
I'm going to need to see how that top bar works. If they've ruined the ChromeOS UI by not allowing maximized windows to use the top of the screen for tab bars then I will be very disappointed.
On the other hand, if maximized windows work properly and Linux apps are still supported and they have a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme version, I might be interested.
All the shots at the name apart I think this is a very good strategic move. The other frontier labs would die to have this level of surface available for their models as a testing ground, with the current state of things on Apple side the ChatGPT on MacOS integration is probably the best everyone will get for a good time on how a full integration of LLM model with OS could really looks like.
Agents will need a different level of understanding of your activities across different surfaces to act effectively, IMHO the OS is the perfect place to offer it.
It is not very encouraging that most of the marketing materials on the website show the Googlebook having filleted (rounded) edges similar to Macbook Neo, but the video shows the laptop having a bevelled profile similar to framework 13. Seems like a hastily put together attempt at a response to the acclaimed Macbook Neo. Literally zero information on the page apart from the "fall" release window.
The product photos that reveal about as much as a monster in a JJ Abrams movie is because I don't think they have "Google" production hardware it sounds like they'll be farming this out to the ASUSes and HPs of the world.
This is how I feel. No matter what they do at this point it is moot as they cannot be trusted to maintain products into the future. So much so it is a meme at this point.
Like most things in tech, it's targeted at upper middle class or rich people since they have way way more disposable income. It's a "premium Chromebook" which, as much as I like Chromebooks, seems like you would need a lot of disposable income before considering since most actually resource intensive stuff (video games, video editing, etc) you wouldn't get a Chromebook for.
From past phone launch ads, its usually the people who were always looking for dinner reservations, concert booking, meeting at drinks. Basically leisure class people. So this vintage shopping trip seems to fit right in.
I like the idea of a phone that fully inserts into a laptop bay to get its functionality in a different form factor. Not sure the laptop needs a powerful CPU, if any. Or it could have a really powerful one while adding storage and memory.
I personally would want to also be able to switch off the telco signal.
I have a hard time seeing how any Chromebook above $ 349,- could still survive in an post-MacBook Neo age.
Say what you want, a cheap Windows laptop at least has an edge on obscure software compatibility over MacOS and a notebook running any modern Linux distro gets the luxury of user control. ChromeOS meanwhile has neither. Paying more for worst in class software compatibility inferior build quality, design and restrictive lock-in sounds about as appealing as a chicken tartare from the value bin.
Prior to (again) getting a MacBook Pro, I wanted to make a high end Laptop (ASUS ProArt P16, about € 3500,- back then) work with Fedora, but purely on a basis of build quality and input feel, it was unusably poor. That trackpad deserves a place in hell and if that (or likely a worse one given cost cutting) is what the Asus and Acer models get, competing with the Neo is a cruel joke.
HP and especially Lenovo fare better, I can at least live with those though a Neos input is nicer if we compare their current devices at the same price, so unless Google is willing to heavily subsidise a brand that, let's be honest, is unlikely to garner any loyalty, I can't see them being overly competitive either, given the software limits of ChromeOS.
> ChromeOS meanwhile has the worst compatibility off all four
ChromeOS can run desktop Linux software and Android software, so it definitely isnt worse than Mac. Its probably even better than Windows. Of course, if you need Mac/Windows software, Web/Android/Linux alternatives might not exist or might be worse. But the devices are hardly lacking software compatibility.
This is an attempt to flood the desktop interface market of laptops, and likely eventually desktops, with their hardware running their OS so they can enforce attestation at the hardware level across all classes of devices and lock you out of their attested Web if you’re not using one of the big three companies hardware and operating systems.
Original Pixelbook was amazing and my fam still uses it. Wish they just stuck to the lineup and kept iterating vs giving up and trying to rebrand every few years.
"Designed for Gemini Intelligence" is the primary marketing tag on the splash page. It's so underwhelming I'm not even going to bother to look into the details. Are people pleading for a laptop that is even more highly integrated with AI, above all else?
It's a shame because I love the Pixel series and they're doing it a disservice by not marketing it better. Apple's copy on the other hand is generally excellent.
Why does this entire page read like an LLM wrote it in response to "Imagine Google is making a new desktop operating system built on Android. It's focused on total app compatibility, parity with the Apple ecosystem, Linux development and power users, and deep AI integration. Write the promo page for this operating system."?
Also
> Intelligent Window Management
The OS learns your workflow patterns and proactively arranges windows, prepares files, and opens apps before you ask.
Bleh.
Edit: Oh, it is that. A fan decided to make an LLM write a promo page assuming the role of Google marketing for an unreleased, unannounced project and make up all the details.
The dream of Fuchsia is effectively dead, and aside from some older Nest devices, Google only remaining efforts with the OS is basically as a tiny runtime that they'll run in VMs on Android for some secure process needs.
It was just a speculative research project and a bunch of bloggers went wild declaring it the end of Android, Linux (Android of course sitting on Linux), ChromeOS, etc. That was never real.
I am not anti-AI, but if I am going to use AI I far prefer to have control over how I engage with it. Having a piece of hardware to focused on Google's own AI flavor being built in is a big negative to me. Not that I would totally write off this new Googlebook (despite disliking the name), but I can't really see a situation where I'd ever prefer this over an Apple Neo for example.
I'm curious what this means for ChromiumOS and downstreams like FydeOS.
If Google is now pushing this "intelligence‑first" desktop experience, how much of that work is likely to stay in the proprietary ChromeOS/Googlebook layer vs. land in upstream ChromiumOS?
I'd buy it, but for me, Google lost it's credibility when they made Chromebook on an a Linux kernel but kept the specs too low, and even made sure to hijack the market by providing for free to schools
One of the really nice things of the Macs (from Neo to Studio) is that they have a single UI (that might or might not be ideal for you, but it is unified,) yet underneath it has a Unix OS that lets you run standard compilers, docker containers, vms whatnot. The pixel and chromebooks were nice as a device to run a browser on, but not for development. Getting EMacs to run on them felt like a big achievement at the time.
I bet you all share the same feeling looking at it: it will be pretty OK for 2 years and then become abandon-ware soon after, like it is with Google products typically. Or not, but you still have that scepticist gut feeling about it.
I cannot think of a product I'd like to own less than a machine fully-integrated with Google. And I'm not some "never Google" guy—my company's entire email infrastructure lives on Google. It's a necessary evil for us.
But... Google owning my hardware? This feels so out of left field. I must not be the target audience.
This is the dumbest branding Google has ever come up with and I am here for it. I can't wait for the memes. Is that your Chromebook? No, it's my Googlebook!
Edit: It lists five OEMs, so it's not a Pixel equivalent, not Google-made hardware. Which makes it funnier, actually. Like if Windows laptops from every OEM were called Microsoftbooks.
After the Pixelbook, I don't think I'm giving their hardware another chance. When through all the choices, back on Mac for that sweet silicon and a solid desktop.
Yeah the name is a little clumsy sounding. I think Pixelbook isn't as recognizable as Chromebook.
I guess they don't want the baggage from Chromebook because Chrome is a given Google wants people to think Google == AI the way they think Chrome == internet.
We may not like Copilot but the truth is Google's OS is already delivering what Apple Intelligence promised on laptops and phones. Google has a lot of customers, a good amount of Apple customers seem to want Apple Intelligence. I'm interested in seeing how Google does against Apple (and curious what GoogleBook will cost). It's important to remember that it was in the works long before MacBook Neo was announced and maybe even before it was rumored.
Competition is always good. I got a Mac Neo recently to supplement my larger 16” MBP and they really nailed it. It’s the perfect laptop for kids and travel. Most importantly it feels like it’ll last for a decade like my MBP. I hope it’s the same for googlebooks but even pixels have issues with surviving beyond 5 years.
So this is replacing the "Chromebook Plus" line of AI-certified laptops, and also adding new Google hardware replacing the abandoned Google Pixel Slate/Chromebook Pixel?
Google Engineers don't even the other *books much for work, if they don't exclusively dogfood their own products, you know they don't have much faith to keep it going. Likewise their own phones.
Their history of committment in supporting their hardware is too far from pleasing. I wouldn't touch Google hardware again (other than Pixels) with the tip of my toe.
The main thrust behind their foray into hardware was that they feared being cut off. Whoever controls the terminal has the power to push users toward their own platforms (Bing, Microsoft 365, etc), and I guess they could see the writing on the wall and wanted to have a platform they control.
As for this project, I think part of it is just the conclusion of internal power plays between Chrome and Android. The other half is probably the same fear as before: if Microsoft puts their own AI closer to the user, Google will have a hard time keeping up. So the best defense is to have your own "AI-first" OS.
Keep in mind that Microsoft doesn't need to win to hurt Google's bottom line. For example, if Bing captures 5% of search through OS- and browser-bundling strategies, that's still a 5% that Google can't have.
Why would anyone trust Google to support these devices long-term, even ignoring all the privacy concerns that come with using Google products and services? The KilledByGoogle website should be enough of a warning sign against this company, and with rising hardware costs... this just seems dead on-arrival to me.
This was my thought too, but I didn't see anything to rule that out, did you? It says "built for Gemini Intelligence" so probably has some hardware requirement like that
Something I appreciate about ChromeOS is that updates are basically invisible. I'm worried they're gonna fuck up and overcomplicate something simple by having it run full-blown Android.
Just think of all the times that you're happily using a browser and now these sites are going to demand you install an app after they detected you can because of the user agent. Ugh.
> We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks.
I'm sorry but these Taiwanese brands Acer and Asus are the bottom of the barrel. Bad build quality, clunky keyboard, bad speakers, everything plastic etc I never had a "premium" experience ever having the luck using one. They just can't make something simple as a Macbook Air/Neo
"We’re bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world’s most popular browser."
Many have tried desk/laptop and phone integration before, but it never seems to work smoothly, which surprises me because it doesn't seem that hard, at least to run phone apps on the larger screen (with some icon modification, etc.); and it doesn't stick as a feature, which surprises me because I'd think almost anyone would want to easily integrate the two.
I wonder why this time will be different? Is there demand now? Does Google have some trick up their sleeve? Do they have a universal development platform that makes it easy to write apps for both platforms?
Why? Are you thinking this will be a 128GB behemoth running models locally? That'd be pretty cool but it almost certainly isn't. I bet it's a very lightweight device that just calls a remote Gemini model.
lmao can’t render on safari, get “this page was reloaded because a problem repeatedly occurred.”
Maybe someone could invent a format for presenting text and images over the internet that didn’t each require each text presenter to write custom (buggy) shader code?
The current cost spike is very recent. The average computer's RAM size has roughly quadrupled every four years since around 1988:
1988: 1MB
1992: 4MB
1996: 16MB
2000: 64MB
2004: 256MB
2008: 1GB
2012: 4GB
And then, from around 2014 or so, for the last 12 years, we've been kind of stuck on 8GB for some reason. There wasn't a ram shortage in 2016, so why didn't the average computer come with 16GB? The trend continuing would mean we'd have 64GB average machines by 2020. So what happened?
I'm sure you're right. I don't know why the trend didn't continue. But, still, given the current conditions I don't think it's realistic to expect a budget laptop with 128 GB of RAM rolling off the line right now.
I can’t really tell who this is for, no specs even listed that I can find, at first I thought it was going to be for running local models based on the copy but after a moment of sobriety and knowing Google clearly this is just a consumer device that they will fail to support in a couple years.
Is this a rebranding of Chromebook Plus? For those who haven't been following the laptop form factor recently, Chromebook Pluses with Mediatek Kompanio Ultra SoCs are the best deals in laptops today. If this is just a Chromebook Plus with a fashion light bar, I'm not interested.
You mean the average person's problems aren't solved by a custom widget to track their flight to Iceland?
The irony is that most of these things would be better solved by a bot you can text. Create a thread for a trip or whatever, have it text you when flights are delayed or cancelled, reminders, let you ask it question, etc. So just...a chatbot.
"Cast My Apps" - did they, uh, use AI to make that actually work? Because it's very flaky on my Chromebook, which I am otherwise very, very pleased with (especially given the price)
I attended Google I/O in 2013 and was given a Chromebook Pixel, their $1300 laptop. The hardware was very, very nice, and I quite enjoyed using it for a while. One day, I dropped it and damaged the screen well outside of its warranty period. "Oh no," I thought. "This is probably going to be pretty expensive to fix." So, bracing for the damage, I called up Google and told them what had happened. They replied that there was no fixing it. They would replace the laptops under the warranty, but there was no repairing to be done. I was welcome to call around and ask local repair shops if they could do it. That went nowhere, of course.
I've been pretty skeptical of Google laptops ever since.
Those original Chromebook Pixels were awesome machines.
I wish they'd had open bootloaders, but I seem to recall you had to keep it in developer mode which required a nag screen, or something along those lines, if you wanted to run your own OS on it.
You can easily remove the nag screen by opening the device and unscrewing a screw and running coreboot with SeaBIOS. Pretty neat security approach (not too hard to do, not too easy for a layman to fall for instructions to self-compromise). I have two that work just fine today.
Google isn't making these (or having them – the devices themselves – made under a Google brand). Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo are making them.
Looks and feels premium, but ultimately fundamentally disposable.
This pattern extends to so many goods in modern life. Washing machines, microwaves, etc aren't worth the time of a local repairman. Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.
Clothes are replaced, not stitched. And after a few washes at that. Cars, phones, etc, consist of proprietary parts all sealed up.
Isn't that a feature not a bug? That means labor, a proxy for quality of life of the laborer, is more expensive than parts. That's abundance.
In fact, in "shithole countries" where everyone wants to emigrate from, it is exactly the opposite: i.e. you try to fix everything even if it takes sooo long.
That means that the cost of (not) utilizing garbage is externalized
Welcome to modern life. It looks amazing — but its all a lie.
Good clothes can be definitely stitched. Some brands even offer free or reasonably priced repairs. Patagonia or Citizen Wolf are two examples that spring to mind. Same applies to good hardware, but you need to do some research before buying.
I am afraid Google's business model is incompatible with this approach as they have almost no customer service because it doesn't "scale". Actually, what they are doing is turning customer service costs into externalities, i.e. environmental waste.
Tying the browser version to the system version was a mistake too. Once it stopped getting system updates, it stopped being compatible with big corners of the web that expect Chrome to always be the newest version.
That's still the default state of Google Hardware. Just look at their out-of-warranty Pixel Watch repairs.
And if you're not in North America (or EU), chances are very high that any repair to Pixels is going to be either not possible or will cost you dearly. I personally had a terrible experience of this with Pixel 7 Pro that was in warranty and had a water-related damage, since then, I've stayed away from any device made by Google.
I used to have everything Google.
Strata Pixels, Nest Cameras Google Smart Speakers Nest Home Security system
but then I broke my Google Pixel 1 watch. I ended up chatting with service in India and they pretty much told me that there was no way to fix it. After that, I quit buying all things Google and switched to Apple. Now I only buy Google software products, no consumer devices.
They completely changed their watch design for the Pixel Watch 4 so that it is actually repairable: https://www.ifixit.com/News/113620/the-pixel-watch-4-is-the-...
[delayed]
> "Intelligence is the new spec."
Oof.
Very upfront: "Don't pay attention to RAM, processor, battery, monitor, price, etc. We're not telling you that, because you'd laugh. We're selling access to web services. Lower your expectations, get excited for AI. Please clap".
Very rough. Moore's lesser-known cousin, Les, predicted transistor density-per-dollar would actually start to decrease over time. I guess Google's ready for that world?
And even the most virulently pro-AI people I know aren't using any of these services Google is trying to market as sexy. Who is this for? "Make a band poster for my kid", could they have chosen a sadder example?
It doesn't help that the first result on Google for "Google book" is Google Books. Even their "AI overview" is helpfully telling me about the specifications and pricetags of books on Google Books.
I imagine they're going to do the same thing with this as with Chromebooks: i.e. do enterprise deals with schools and so on? Google's iteration-style structure where they kill products is fine for SaaS type offerings that are free and that you don't build your world around, but buying a laptop they won't support soon enough isn't that useful. Ultimately, just like with Amazon and their phone, it's obvious even prior to release that this is not a priority for the company and the side gig type stuff doesn't work when you are selling hardware.
Might have been more interesting if it were under a separate company that Google owned a large portion of, rather than carrying the Google brand. Then again, maybe the Google brand isn't toxic to the wider ecosystem of buyers. I still think consumer-hardware-wise Google is the Safeway Essentials version of Apple but others might think Gmail or Google itself which consumers consider best in class.
It's possible (likely?) that if the concept takes off that they might license or give the software away to other hardware vendors, just like the Android ecosystem.
I was anticipating an "AI phone" from someone like Google, not an "AI laptop", although it seems to be Android compatible so maybe that is coming next.
I'd imagine they'll mimic the Chromebook ten year support guarantee, at minimum the eight year guarantee on phones and it'll probably extend to Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo models.
Shipping enterprise desktop hardware with AI integrated features will likely be a priority to improve the cloud footprint amongst fortune 500.
> Then again, maybe the Google brand isn't toxic to the wider ecosystem of buyers.
It's a "most loved" brand according to https://rankings.newsweek.com/americas-most-loved-brands-202...
I think you're underestimating Google's ability and willingness to launch and maintain multiple competing products that appear redundant. But you are overstating the lack of support for past ChromeOS devices, because for the enterprise and education markets the support timelines for Chromebooks have been the same as "forever".
I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo, and if i wanted a non-gaming expensive one i'd get a macbook pro.
I really don't see the market fit for this, I guess the android integration. But my god, I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook". Believe it or not, these things matter a lot, particularly if you're trying to target a young audience.
I think it's a successor to the Chromebook. In the vast majority of modern K-12 public schools, the school district owns the hardware, not the students.
The target is definitely not the K12 education market. It looks more like a premium device which most Chromebooks are not.
Everything on this page suggests it's not for education.
Emphasis on AI and connecting to your phone. How many Iceland trips do students make?
I recently heard from couple of Technology Directors at schools that they are looking to procure Macbook Neos replacing their Chromebooks. This might be a strategy to defend their Chromebook market in schools.
Why would an organization want to move from a centrally managed fleet to an unmanaged fleet?
Is the value of the Chromebook in education that it is 1) cheap or 2) doesn't do anything except have a browser?
If it is both, then all the Neo needs to do is have a browser only mode and goodbye Chromebook market.
Unless they're cheap, it's not going to sell well for K-12.
I used to work for an ed-tech company that was specifically focused on software for chromebooks and in talking with customers the biggest selling point of chromebooks for schools what their price. The school issued devices get absolutely beat to shit and they just expect a certain number to be decommissioned at the end of the year. Most schools are looking to buy the cheapest thing that does the job and the small group that have the money to actually buy premium devices are going to gravitate toward Apple products.
If Google is selling these for less then $500 then maybe there's a place for them, but like we saw it with the Pixelbook, there just isn't really demand for an $1000 chromebook
supposedly macbook pro's M-series are quite adept for gamers these days.
But the gaming software market is very heavily biased towards delivering for Windows on Intel. That said, I’m not a gamer so what do I know?
Linux gaming is getting a definite boost from Windows 11 being a shitshow.
And pracically _nobody_ does native Linux games, they're all just running Windows games through Proton, and faster. So fast actually that Proton is Microsoft's performance target :D
I'd like to meet the person that supposed this to you, and ask them what games they play.
The M1 Ultra got 70% of the frames of an RTX 3090 on Tomb Raider[0], so I suppose they're right. Performance-per-watt monsters.
And Apple GPUs have only gotten better.
[0]https://techjourneyman.com/img/blog/m1-ultra-vs-rtx-3090-ben...
You really had to squeeze those numbers through those filters to get that diction out, didn't you? :P
My 16" M1 Max is kinda crap at running games - I'd put it somewhere around cheaper laptops with 3050 series GPUs.
That wasn't really my question. The M1 is a 5nm chip up against the 8nm RTX 3090 - for $2000+ and 220W you'd kinda hope the M1 Ultra outperforms the 8nm stuff.
My question is, what games are people playing on Mac? Tomb Raider is one of ~6 AAA titles that was ported to Mac in the last decade. All the other big-ticket games - GTA V, Arc Raiders, Elden Ring - are all hamstrung by Apple's terrible translation software and don't run much better with Crossover either.
Apple Silicon, strictly speaking, is the least adept hardware that you can own for gaming. If you are a gamer, almost every single other GPU on the market would perform better for your needs.
Chromebook users.
I loved my Pixelbook, fantastic piece of hardware. When that ended, I went with an Acer Chromebook. Works fine, just not the same.
I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.
I will most likely get a Googlebook, and would be more likely to do so if it was not named Googlebook and did not have Gemini built in.
> I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.
To each their own, but this is absolute insanity.
ChromeOS is a very competent, fast, and easy-to-use operating system. For my family, it's basically perfect. It's virtually unbreakable and anyone can pick it up quickly.
Windows is a hot mess and frankly I wouldn't recommend it to anyone outside of gamers. For the technically competent, there's nothing to gain on Windows, and it will just get in the way. For the those less technically inclined, Windows means complexity and viruses. Also most Windows laptops suck major ass.
MacOS is better, especially if you have an iPhone. But even MacOS is a bit too complex for the less technically inclined. If you have an android phone, then a chromebook is 100% the way to go for those people. Also, chromebooks get crazy software support these days, on par with macbooks.
It's the only OS for my 93 year old mother. I can manage it remotely, too, and she can't mess it up.
Why would you want ChromeOS and not Linux?
ChromeOS is linux. It's a Linux distro that works correctly out of the box, setting it apart quite strongly from all other Linux distros.
Then why do people install Linux in Chrome books?
The number of people who have "installed linux" other than ChromeOS on a Chromebook is probably in the low single digits, while the ChromeOS installed user base is in the hundreds of millions. For any given thing someone is going to try to put linux on that thing, but it is not a common use case for Chromebooks that we need to discuss.
I was genuinely asking. In “my circles” a Chromebook is a cheap laptop that one can install Linux on. As in, “oh, I just picked up this used Lenovo Chromebook and installed Ubuntu on it”.
b/c you don't have to think about the operating system and updates. I posted about my experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48051902
...basically, I have "nerd cred" and run linux on my desktop, but for my laptop I wanted: disposable (no leaky hard drive), zero maintenance (no kernel modules for sound drivers), battery-portable.
90% of the time I'm wanting `vim` + `git` + `ssh`, and 20% of the time i'm wanting to run some random stuff locally. Chromebook is basically zero friction and 1/10th the price (and 1/10th the capabilities) of a "very nice mac laptop", plus you can pop into a very capable linux VM (w/ passthrough GUI support) without a lot of ceremony.
Windows laptops are out of the question, and pure linux laptops (until only very recently) were of marginal support and low battery capabilities (especially "close it and stuff it in a backpack for 3 days").
I thought Microsoft had the market cornered on terrible product naming but "Googlebook" is extremely awful.
My suggestion, if they really want to go this route, is to shorten it to "gBook".
The first thing that came to mind is "What about all that gobbledygook in your Google-dee-book?"
I'm imagining poultry running around clucking: "gBook! gBook! gBAWK!"
I am old enough to remember that iPad was supposed to be a product-line-dooming bad name.
Everyone was expecting "iSlate", which would have been far better according to popular opinion at the time.
I was expecting the Apple Palette
MacBook neo is not expensive but it's not cheap.
Just the build quality on MacBooks compared to your random PC laptop piece of plastic that falls apart within a few years would make me very picky. I have a random “corporate” Lenovo and everything physical in it is way way worse than in my work MacBook
It's $600. In this market that's practically free.
Gembook or Geminote would've been cooler. But no one asked me unfortunately.
>I really don't see the market fit for this,
Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price? Especially considering you can install linux on it natively.
Other then that, Gemini is the biggest advantage. Google can offer Gemini for free because its TPUs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia stuff. Even free tier Gemini is really good considering it can integrate with a bunch of your stuff like google docs, and the lower last gen models have pretty generous usage limits.
Overall, if you are in Android ecosystem, you don't really even need a cheap laptop anymore, considering things like Samsung Dex exist.
These things are $250?! Where did you find that info?
You might be surprised how good cloud gaming has gotten. I play AAA games at max settings on my MacBook Pro through GeForce Now, and with fiber internet it's nearly indistinguishable from native.
I bought a Pixelbook during the middle of their product lifetime, and it was one of the best laptops I ever had. I genuinely don't know how broadly that sentiment was shared, but the cancellation of the product line suggests "not that broadly." Google has changed since that time and I am a bit skeptical this will meet that specific niche for me.
Yeah, I had the original Chromebook Pixel and the Pixelbook and they were both great. Somehow I'm still using the Pixelbook today and it chugs along.
That said, its hard to justify the prices for these premium Chromebooks. When I picked them up they were heavily discounted with some developer code or other.
I also agree with the shaky future as far as being able to actually opening these things up with developer tooling. It seems like they've simply been on a path to rollback all of that.
I don't know if these were related but I had a Pixel C tablet and I'm still upset they killed that off too. It was a nicer tablet than any Samsung I tried and felt like a genuine competitor to the iPad equivalent really excellent build quality, and then they abandoned it. I still have it but whatever they did to the software before giving up on it made it crash and blackscreen all the time while completely idle and I haven't had the energy to install something else on it, if something else even exists.
Likewise I bought the Chromebook Pixel LS and a Pixelbook during that dark period before M-series laptops and these laptops were awesome and IMO well ahead of their time. The ChromeOS with all its faults was a modern OS without legacy. For example the OS settings are closer to the Phone OS like settings vs MacOS settings that are still a mess these days.
Google seems to have made an official post on Reddit describing the feature set in detail:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb8xls/introducin...
[Edit]
And, the feature set references the 'AI mouse pointer' from this Deepmind blog..
https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/
AI mouse pointer is definitely not something I wanted to think about today. A recent HN post implored vibe coders not to modify the mouse pointer and now we get this from Google.
Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error?
`[text](link)` is the syntax used to create a link. But since `TKTK` isn't a valid URI, it doesn't render a link. My guess is TKTK is placeholder and they were supposed to fill it in before posting on reddit... but forgot?
edit: hah, maybe someone from Google saw my comment. This has now been fixed and TKTK replaced with https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb83gy/making_and...
Looks like the link got fixed.
I'm really enjoying reddit just completely roasting the entire concept in the comments.
TKTK is a common placeholder for something that should be filled in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing)
Posting an official announcement of an AI-powered laptop on Reddit were the users there tend to have a hard Anti-AI stance is certainly something.
I haven't been around reddit much for a few years, but in the past at least, /r/android was one of the best tech communities on the internet. It was even better than the iPhone subs for iPhone discussion.
I mean if you think about it, the type of person to own an android phone and care enough about phones to join a community is pretty much guaranteed to only be a tech geek.
Oh my goodness, the use cases are so… badly conceived:
> If a friend sends you a picture on your phone and you need to email it from your laptop, the file is just there — no need to email it to yourself.
So are there really people who will email a photo to themselves from their phone to… send the photo in an email?
Interesting to note that there is no mention of processor or operating system in that post. I’m guessing that it’s Android in a laptop form factor which I suppose might be something that some people would want, but I’m not one of them.
They should have just said "USE it on your laptop", not email it.
I all the time use my phone as a camera (esp. for coin photography) than e-mail the photos to myself as the most convenient way to get them on my desktop where I can edit them with GIMP etc.
I just open photos.google.com and grab them. No need to fiddle on my phone.
When on wifi, the photo backup upload starts immediately. If it doesn't (possibly due to your settings, this used to be my issue) you can manually open the photos app and tap the backup now button.
It’s a poor example. Recently, I did have to email myself photos taken with my phone to access them on my laptop. Would be nice if they were automatically synced. It’s work phone and laptop so I could have gone through OneDrive or Box but just as inconvenient as email.
Getting files on and off of a phone is shockingly hard. Shockingly. It's even worse on an iPhone, if you don't have a mac. To get my photos from my iPhone to my PC, I had to first upload them to iCloud and then download them again. My phone and computer are, like, a foot away from each other but I had to send the photos across the country to some server and back just to look at them.
My only real use of Google Keep is as a cross-device clipboard.
Wiggling the mouse is what people do involuntarily when the computer isn’t working right. They are setting themselves up for Gemini to be the uninvited Clippy, except this will send everything you are working on to Google to harvest data from.
> It's really easy to access your phone’s files right from your Googlebook's file browser.
Yeah but what about Windows Explorer? They've been passively blocking SMB access forever at this point (by disallowing ports below 1024).
I would not be surprised if Googlebook's file browser goes via the cloud.
Awful branding aside this will be dead within 3 years.
MacBook neo @ $499 and the ability to finance it leaves almost zero room in the US market for an Android laptop.
*edit
It looks like will be a ChromeOS successor and their demographic will be schools?
Not _just_ being able to finance; the 0% interest and 24-month period is amazing!
Yeah this is going the way of the Pixelbook.
Branding is way off. Marketed as an AI laptop sounds like local inference to engineers, but no. The general public are weary of AI. The Neo is selling so well that Apple is running out of the A18 Pro chips. Rumors are that Apple may have 2 steps: mark as sold out, or upgrade to the latest iPhone SOC which comes with an upgrade to 12GB of RAM. I also suspect this is Ternus' first product launch as CEO (not officially until Sept 1).
Anyway, this will be fun to see price point, manufacturer differentiation (surprised that Google isn't building this themselves) and reviews. Hard to see how it competes with the Neo at $499 that can run a full Desktop OS and integrates well with the ecosystem.
As someone with a closet full of dead Google devices, I just can’t get excited about new hardware from them.
I think LLMs have the potential to make computers work how we’ve always envisioned them to (i.e. 60s sci-fi), but I’m also not convinced a dedicated laptop is the right form.
With that said, a 128GB RAM MacBook Pro is getting tantalizingly close to running useful local LLMs.
If the Googlebook was announced as a machine capable of running a small Gemini model locally, I’d probably enter back into the abusive relationship I have with Google hardware and preorder it…
I know people are kinda freaky on here with all the LLM love, but saying "tantalizing" here is a little on the nose, if not just plain weird. Get a room!
I’m not sure I understand the customer use case for this.
1- Chromebooks have made huge inroads in schools because they’re easy to maintain, share, upgrade, and they’re very cheap.
2- Obviously, running desktop software is a huge new piece of the ecosystem, but isn’t this customer already opting for Windows/Mac, who have extremely robust 30-year ecosystems and suites like Office, iLife, Adobe, etc that will obviously never build for this platform
There’s no way Google OS ever hits any kind of parity of exclusive software that is unavailable on Windows/Mac. Best they can do is run Android apps. This also introduces a high new threat vector to their existing customers who might not want it.
Lastly, what will this do to Chromebook buyers who are now wondering which OS will be actively developed in 5 years?
I will never buy another google hardware product again after my most recent pixel experience. I was sent a phone with a defective modem that they refused to replace. This is despite having bought 5 other pixels and also using google fi and a bunch of other google products.
I will never trust them with a hardware purchase ever again.
I bought a skagen with google watch os or whatever was it called. The experience was so so bad, I’m never going back to Google products.
As another n=1, I've been happy with my Pixel phones over the years and never had such an experience.
Yeah I've been exclusively on Pixels since the 2 and love them
That comment was criticizing Google's support. Did you also have an experience with them?
Indulge some pedantry with me... Why "Googlebook?" Pixel was meant for first-party computing devices, I thought. Nest for smart home and Fitbit for fitness trackers.
If you don't want to associate with past Pixelbooks and want to highlight Gemini, why not Geminibook or something like that? Does Google not have faith in the Gemini branding?
Random thoughts from a nerdy mind.
AI polls lower than "congress". People hate it - they hate it so much. They probably _wanted_ to call it that but someone who knows anything put their foot down.
buth the very first two bits of copy are about "intelligence" and "gemini". If they wanted to stay away from AI as branding they didn't do a great job.
CongressBook it is!
If Samsung isn't a Googlebook partner then those laptop OEMs could be shipping the Google desktop environment while OEMs are free to ship a Googlebook or scale up their own desktop environments.
Just calling it a "Gbook" sounds infinitely cooler.
A plastic macbook lookalike with no ports, a mobile phone OS, a 1366x768 display and probably the cheapest SoC they can scrounge from the parts bin.
This thing, like all other google/android products, will be DOA, and the ones actually duped into buying one will be left with a paperweight in a year or two when the cheap hardware inevitably breaks.
I really wanted to stay in the google chromebook / googlebook echo system. But the hardware was expensive for what you get. Apple announced the macbook neo and I picked one up. Great hardware. can run light weight mac software. I don't run much beyond chrome and wahoo SYSTM (bike trainer app). It's really solid hardware and cost $600 or so.
I use gemini extensively (and claude). But - do I need this integrated in my laptop? Don't quite see it. And it's hard to beat Apple on hardware now.
There was a time where Google could've been competitive in this space, specifically against Apples MacBook product line, but that has long since passed. The 3rd party manufacturer path means Google isn't committed to this and won't have competitive hardware. It'll just be another Chromebook and limited to the Google Play Store too, which just isn't good at this point.
> and limited to the Google Play Store too, which just isn't good at this point.
Care to elaborate? I have no ide a what you're talking about here.
The quality of apps in the Google Play Store has dropped massively. There are still some gems, but for better or worse, the ecosystem is simply not as strong as Apples and it's certainly not comparable to just having a device where you can install anything you'd like in a full desktop grade OS.
Seems like they want a MacBook for people with Pixel phones. Okay. I assume it will be an ARM based system running some Android variant, if you can seamlessly launch Android apps on it. "Designed for Gemini Intelligence" is somewhat repellant - look at how poorly MS has done pushing Copilot on people. Overall I'd need way more info to know if this is a device I'd be interested in at all, but since I have a MacBook and iPhone, I don't think I'm the target market. Perhaps their ideal target market, but it seems like this would be best for people who are already knee deep in the Google ecosystem.
I'm going to need to see how that top bar works. If they've ruined the ChromeOS UI by not allowing maximized windows to use the top of the screen for tab bars then I will be very disappointed.
On the other hand, if maximized windows work properly and Linux apps are still supported and they have a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme version, I might be interested.
All the shots at the name apart I think this is a very good strategic move. The other frontier labs would die to have this level of surface available for their models as a testing ground, with the current state of things on Apple side the ChatGPT on MacOS integration is probably the best everyone will get for a good time on how a full integration of LLM model with OS could really looks like.
Agents will need a different level of understanding of your activities across different surfaces to act effectively, IMHO the OS is the perfect place to offer it.
It is not very encouraging that most of the marketing materials on the website show the Googlebook having filleted (rounded) edges similar to Macbook Neo, but the video shows the laptop having a bevelled profile similar to framework 13. Seems like a hastily put together attempt at a response to the acclaimed Macbook Neo. Literally zero information on the page apart from the "fall" release window.
Screams of "COME ON DO SOMETHING WE NEED THE STUDENTS TO NOT BUY MACs!"
Built for Gemini?? No thanks.
The product photos that reveal about as much as a monster in a JJ Abrams movie is because I don't think they have "Google" production hardware it sounds like they'll be farming this out to the ASUSes and HPs of the world.
I can't invest in Goolge products. I always feel like they're going to pull the plug or change the terms, pricing model etc.
This is how I feel. No matter what they do at this point it is moot as they cannot be trusted to maintain products into the future. So much so it is a meme at this point.
Off topic i know but, who goes from SF to Tokyo for a 6 day "vintage shopping trip" ? Who do they think their audience is here?
If you watched the rest of the announcements, apparently social media influencers.
Like most things in tech, it's targeted at upper middle class or rich people since they have way way more disposable income. It's a "premium Chromebook" which, as much as I like Chromebooks, seems like you would need a lot of disposable income before considering since most actually resource intensive stuff (video games, video editing, etc) you wouldn't get a Chromebook for.
From past phone launch ads, its usually the people who were always looking for dinner reservations, concert booking, meeting at drinks. Basically leisure class people. So this vintage shopping trip seems to fit right in.
I like the idea of a phone that fully inserts into a laptop bay to get its functionality in a different form factor. Not sure the laptop needs a powerful CPU, if any. Or it could have a really powerful one while adding storage and memory.
I personally would want to also be able to switch off the telco signal.
I have a hard time seeing how any Chromebook above $ 349,- could still survive in an post-MacBook Neo age.
Say what you want, a cheap Windows laptop at least has an edge on obscure software compatibility over MacOS and a notebook running any modern Linux distro gets the luxury of user control. ChromeOS meanwhile has neither. Paying more for worst in class software compatibility inferior build quality, design and restrictive lock-in sounds about as appealing as a chicken tartare from the value bin.
Prior to (again) getting a MacBook Pro, I wanted to make a high end Laptop (ASUS ProArt P16, about € 3500,- back then) work with Fedora, but purely on a basis of build quality and input feel, it was unusably poor. That trackpad deserves a place in hell and if that (or likely a worse one given cost cutting) is what the Asus and Acer models get, competing with the Neo is a cruel joke.
HP and especially Lenovo fare better, I can at least live with those though a Neos input is nicer if we compare their current devices at the same price, so unless Google is willing to heavily subsidise a brand that, let's be honest, is unlikely to garner any loyalty, I can't see them being overly competitive either, given the software limits of ChromeOS.
> ChromeOS meanwhile has the worst compatibility off all four
ChromeOS can run desktop Linux software and Android software, so it definitely isnt worse than Mac. Its probably even better than Windows. Of course, if you need Mac/Windows software, Web/Android/Linux alternatives might not exist or might be worse. But the devices are hardly lacking software compatibility.
This is an attempt to flood the desktop interface market of laptops, and likely eventually desktops, with their hardware running their OS so they can enforce attestation at the hardware level across all classes of devices and lock you out of their attested Web if you’re not using one of the big three companies hardware and operating systems.
Original Pixelbook was amazing and my fam still uses it. Wish they just stuck to the lineup and kept iterating vs giving up and trying to rebrand every few years.
Chromebook, Pixelbook, Googlebook.
Google loves to just remake the same-ish thing again in hopes of adoption.
Chromebooks had a higher market share than Macs in 2021.
"Designed for Gemini Intelligence" is the primary marketing tag on the splash page. It's so underwhelming I'm not even going to bother to look into the details. Are people pleading for a laptop that is even more highly integrated with AI, above all else?
Google have been terrible at copywriting (at least in their hardware line) for as long as I can remember. Here's an example from 2020: https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1312560706965983234
It's a shame because I love the Pixel series and they're doing it a disservice by not marketing it better. Apple's copy on the other hand is generally excellent.
It can make widgets though! Imagine being able to track a flight, which is so difficult currently!
I guess it will be running Google's new operating system (a "modern OS designed for Intelligence") that combines elements of Android and ChromeOS.
Edit: Probably Android at the core, and then a desktop-grade Chrome browser on top.
https://aluminium-os.com/
Weird - is that a fansite that registered a Google codename as a domain?
Why does this entire page read like an LLM wrote it in response to "Imagine Google is making a new desktop operating system built on Android. It's focused on total app compatibility, parity with the Apple ecosystem, Linux development and power users, and deep AI integration. Write the promo page for this operating system."?
Also
> Intelligent Window Management The OS learns your workflow patterns and proactively arranges windows, prepares files, and opens apps before you ask.
Bleh.
Edit: Oh, it is that. A fan decided to make an LLM write a promo page assuming the role of Google marketing for an unreleased, unannounced project and make up all the details.
maybe Fuchsia?
Wouldn't it be Fuchsia?
The dream of Fuchsia is effectively dead, and aside from some older Nest devices, Google only remaining efforts with the OS is basically as a tiny runtime that they'll run in VMs on Android for some secure process needs.
It was just a speculative research project and a bunch of bloggers went wild declaring it the end of Android, Linux (Android of course sitting on Linux), ChromeOS, etc. That was never real.
Yeah, this is the one. Android in a desktop form-factor.
The site crashes on my 2020 iPhone SE.
I am not anti-AI, but if I am going to use AI I far prefer to have control over how I engage with it. Having a piece of hardware to focused on Google's own AI flavor being built in is a big negative to me. Not that I would totally write off this new Googlebook (despite disliking the name), but I can't really see a situation where I'd ever prefer this over an Apple Neo for example.
I'm curious what this means for ChromiumOS and downstreams like FydeOS.
If Google is now pushing this "intelligence‑first" desktop experience, how much of that work is likely to stay in the proprietary ChromeOS/Googlebook layer vs. land in upstream ChromiumOS?
IMO this makes the argument for ChromiumOS and downstreams stronger. Gemini wants to do everything in my browser and i can't turn it off please help
I'd buy it, but for me, Google lost it's credibility when they made Chromebook on an a Linux kernel but kept the specs too low, and even made sure to hijack the market by providing for free to schools
I’m waiting on these to be 70% off. Assuming an open boot loader or anyway to run Linux on it, looks like a clean computer.
I don’t know what normal person wants this though. The Neo is enough for most, and if I need more I’m probably going to want a real os. Not ChromeOS++
One of the really nice things of the Macs (from Neo to Studio) is that they have a single UI (that might or might not be ideal for you, but it is unified,) yet underneath it has a Unix OS that lets you run standard compilers, docker containers, vms whatnot. The pixel and chromebooks were nice as a device to run a browser on, but not for development. Getting EMacs to run on them felt like a big achievement at the time.
> has a Unix OS that lets you run standard compilers, docker containers, vms whatnot
99% of users don't give a damn about that. This is a play for kids in schools, so they get used to their operating system.
I bet you all share the same feeling looking at it: it will be pretty OK for 2 years and then become abandon-ware soon after, like it is with Google products typically. Or not, but you still have that scepticist gut feeling about it.
I cannot think of a product I'd like to own less than a machine fully-integrated with Google. And I'm not some "never Google" guy—my company's entire email infrastructure lives on Google. It's a necessary evil for us.
But... Google owning my hardware? This feels so out of left field. I must not be the target audience.
I assume you don't use a google pixel phone?
This seems like their pixel experience but on a laptop.
I'm not sure I'm their target audience, but if it can be a macbook neo quality device with chromebook, I can see a market for it.
Impressive feat of confused branding that Google has marketed Chromebooks, Pixelbooks, and Googlebooks.
Upcoming launches: Mapsbook, Waymobook, Walletbook, Authenticatorbook, ...
First thing they show is shopping with Gemini AI. Everything is around advertising and shopping with Google. Not the platform for me.
For a split second I thought this was a joke/commentary on Google and Facebook.
https://goomics.net/239
This is really cool (although they could've recycled the Pixelbook brand). I hope there'll be a way to dual boot Windows 11 on this.
This is the dumbest branding Google has ever come up with and I am here for it. I can't wait for the memes. Is that your Chromebook? No, it's my Googlebook!
Edit: It lists five OEMs, so it's not a Pixel equivalent, not Google-made hardware. Which makes it funnier, actually. Like if Windows laptops from every OEM were called Microsoftbooks.
> Googlebook
My Gobbledygook works just fine
Droidbook
Or Chromebook? It’s the same with the messengers, they can’t settle on a single brand.
This runs Android, not ChromeOS, so the Chromebook name doesn't fit.
That said, Googlebook is a terrible name and reusing Pixelbook would have been way better.
Google TechDeck Pro
After the Pixelbook, I don't think I'm giving their hardware another chance. When through all the choices, back on Mac for that sweet silicon and a solid desktop.
Please tell me you're being sarcastic here?
Yeah the name is a little clumsy sounding. I think Pixelbook isn't as recognizable as Chromebook.
I guess they don't want the baggage from Chromebook because Chrome is a given Google wants people to think Google == AI the way they think Chrome == internet.
We may not like Copilot but the truth is Google's OS is already delivering what Apple Intelligence promised on laptops and phones. Google has a lot of customers, a good amount of Apple customers seem to want Apple Intelligence. I'm interested in seeing how Google does against Apple (and curious what GoogleBook will cost). It's important to remember that it was in the works long before MacBook Neo was announced and maybe even before it was rumored.
This page crashes in my Google-based browser. I can't scroll down more than ~50 pixels.
Competition is always good. I got a Mac Neo recently to supplement my larger 16” MBP and they really nailed it. It’s the perfect laptop for kids and travel. Most importantly it feels like it’ll last for a decade like my MBP. I hope it’s the same for googlebooks but even pixels have issues with surviving beyond 5 years.
> Designed for Gemini Intelligence
Zero chance in hell this surveillance device comes into my home.
So this is replacing the "Chromebook Plus" line of AI-certified laptops, and also adding new Google hardware replacing the abandoned Google Pixel Slate/Chromebook Pixel?
Google Engineers don't even the other *books much for work, if they don't exclusively dogfood their own products, you know they don't have much faith to keep it going. Likewise their own phones.
"Intelligence is the new spec" then proceeds to show shopping ads and duolingo
Might be a good laptop, but we're trying to use less and less Google. I feel like the name isn't working in it's advantage.
A new high watermark in absolutely content-free marketing webpages.
- Annoying startup animation (at least it's skippable)
- Minimalist copy that is that is also very hard to parse for meaning.
- Elements jarringly appear and disappear as you scroll.
- Only has examples of tasks that are easier to do on your phone.
Their history of committment in supporting their hardware is too far from pleasing. I wouldn't touch Google hardware again (other than Pixels) with the tip of my toe.
Can this project run for 30 years at loss? Google investors don't like that.
One day an exec will say lets reduce wasteful projects and cut this.
Is this ... an Android laptop? I can't recall if Files icon on ChromeOS matches the Android version.
What does Google gain from this? They already struggle in hardware, or am I missing something - has something changed?
The main thrust behind their foray into hardware was that they feared being cut off. Whoever controls the terminal has the power to push users toward their own platforms (Bing, Microsoft 365, etc), and I guess they could see the writing on the wall and wanted to have a platform they control.
As for this project, I think part of it is just the conclusion of internal power plays between Chrome and Android. The other half is probably the same fear as before: if Microsoft puts their own AI closer to the user, Google will have a hard time keeping up. So the best defense is to have your own "AI-first" OS.
Keep in mind that Microsoft doesn't need to win to hurt Google's bottom line. For example, if Bing captures 5% of search through OS- and browser-bundling strategies, that's still a 5% that Google can't have.
Waiting for this to be discontinued in around 3-9 months
Hey Google, take the cue from Microslops debacle with the "agentic" Windows : Nobody asked for this!
How much?
DOA right? Since they don't have any good will that they won't just drop support next year?
They are so bad at product
Why would anyone trust Google to support these devices long-term, even ignoring all the privacy concerns that come with using Google products and services? The KilledByGoogle website should be enough of a warning sign against this company, and with rising hardware costs... this just seems dead on-arrival to me.
So...it's a Chromebook. With "ai".
Running Android, not Gentoo.
Not quite Android: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112299
This is just depressing to me. I don't really know why.
So its the same you can do with using any AI app, but they make you buy an inferior notebook (compared to macbooks)
lame
Put a TPU in this and I’ll buy it!
Good lord please do not use a Tensor processor.
before clicking I thought this was gonna be some sort of a hardware innovation, TPU in a laptop for local AI type of product but oh well.
This was my thought too, but I didn't see anything to rule that out, did you? It says "built for Gemini Intelligence" so probably has some hardware requirement like that
Yeah- but that would be a terrible miss on marketing. "built for Gemini Intelligence" - this could also just mean a bunch of new api integration.
They weren't feeling "book.google"?
Slopbook
Something I appreciate about ChromeOS is that updates are basically invisible. I'm worried they're gonna fuck up and overcomplicate something simple by having it run full-blown Android.
Just think of all the times that you're happily using a browser and now these sites are going to demand you install an app after they detected you can because of the user agent. Ugh.
No thanks!
> We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks.
I'm sorry but these Taiwanese brands Acer and Asus are the bottom of the barrel. Bad build quality, clunky keyboard, bad speakers, everything plastic etc I never had a "premium" experience ever having the luck using one. They just can't make something simple as a Macbook Air/Neo
For those wondering about the OS:
"We’re bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world’s most popular browser."
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
Many have tried desk/laptop and phone integration before, but it never seems to work smoothly, which surprises me because it doesn't seem that hard, at least to run phone apps on the larger screen (with some icon modification, etc.); and it doesn't stick as a feature, which surprises me because I'd think almost anyone would want to easily integrate the two.
I wonder why this time will be different? Is there demand now? Does Google have some trick up their sleeve? Do they have a universal development platform that makes it easy to write apps for both platforms?
Can't imagine this'll help the RAM shortage.
Why? Are you thinking this will be a 128GB behemoth running models locally? That'd be pretty cool but it almost certainly isn't. I bet it's a very lightweight device that just calls a remote Gemini model.
> 1. Check responses. Internet connection required.
Can we replace the splash page with this blog post? https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
Will it have a bootloader unlocked???
lmao can’t render on safari, get “this page was reloaded because a problem repeatedly occurred.”
Maybe someone could invent a format for presenting text and images over the internet that didn’t each require each text presenter to write custom (buggy) shader code?
"Googlebook, because lets face it, your parents are only watching YouTube anyway"
> 8GB RAM.
Oh god, it's a curse. In 2026 we should be getting laptops with 128 GB of RAM. Instead we get some "new model" over and over, with 8GB.
If you haven't checked the market for RAM lately, you're in for a shock.
The current cost spike is very recent. The average computer's RAM size has roughly quadrupled every four years since around 1988:
1988: 1MB
1992: 4MB
1996: 16MB
2000: 64MB
2004: 256MB
2008: 1GB
2012: 4GB
And then, from around 2014 or so, for the last 12 years, we've been kind of stuck on 8GB for some reason. There wasn't a ram shortage in 2016, so why didn't the average computer come with 16GB? The trend continuing would mean we'd have 64GB average machines by 2020. So what happened?
I'm sure you're right. I don't know why the trend didn't continue. But, still, given the current conditions I don't think it's realistic to expect a budget laptop with 128 GB of RAM rolling off the line right now.
If it runs vim. I can take it.
I can’t really tell who this is for, no specs even listed that I can find, at first I thought it was going to be for running local models based on the copy but after a moment of sobriety and knowing Google clearly this is just a consumer device that they will fail to support in a couple years.
This looks like a better announcement page: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
Is this a rebranding of Chromebook Plus? For those who haven't been following the laptop form factor recently, Chromebook Pluses with Mediatek Kompanio Ultra SoCs are the best deals in laptops today. If this is just a Chromebook Plus with a fashion light bar, I'm not interested.
what’s the OS on this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112299
It could just be me, but the usecases they're trying to solve for always seem... out of touch from reality.
Either they live in their own bubbles where their lives revolve around constant shopping, traveling, throwing parties, and doing creative work...
Or they're not bothering to do basic observational research around how normal people live.
You mean the average person's problems aren't solved by a custom widget to track their flight to Iceland?
The irony is that most of these things would be better solved by a bot you can text. Create a thread for a trip or whatever, have it text you when flights are delayed or cancelled, reminders, let you ask it question, etc. So just...a chatbot.
"Gemini, design a widget to tell me if I can afford to stop for coffee before work"
"Gemini, design a widget to tell me if I can afford to eat this week"
this deff going to feed all your shit to feed a hidden model running in the background
What a terrible name.
Plus the fact that they’ve clearly just ripped off the exact shape of a MacBook, but thicker and shitter.
"Cast My Apps" - did they, uh, use AI to make that actually work? Because it's very flaky on my Chromebook, which I am otherwise very, very pleased with (especially given the price)
So... they built a right-click-slop-generator and that's the default experience you get as the context menu?
Gross. I thought the Windows 11 miscreation was bad enough.
also, second question in re sideloading:
do the Googlebooks get the 24 hour fuckoff window for enabling sideloading or can I just walk granny through loading an .apk direct on the laptop
You can say whatever, but I'll be calling this a 'slop-down menu' from now on.
This will end up on the killedbygoogle website probably 7 years from now. Probably right next to Chromebook at this rate -_-.
No, they will promise 7 years of update but kill it in 2.