Gross. This is just more proof that corporations simply don't know how to market AI. Everything is an ad for an ad at this point. The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI.
No one is doing that, these people don't exist. No matter how hard corporate America wishes they did. This is why AI doesn't sell. This is why companies like Microsoft and Dell are pulling back on their AI claims and why Apple has nearly wiped it off their site all together, seriously go check out apple.com, not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.
At this point I'm convinced that marketing has been completely taken over by shareholder shills, marketing to customers they wish they had instead of the real customers that exist.
Not super relevant to the Googlebook ad, but in case the perspective is interesting to you: I'm quite tall (194cm) but not very wide, so I usually struggle with buying clothes online. I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores to see whether they sold a men's shirt with an LT or slim fit size, in stock, and matching a particular vibe.
This is kinda the exception that proves the rule. I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience, but I will bet you anything that any searches you try to do will lead you to the same half-dozen giant mail-order clothing vendors that everyone already knows about.
There have been several startups focused on helping consumers find clothes that fit properly due to lack of consistent sizing between brands (or dress size "inflation" for women). Some of these used optical or laser scanners, or asked consumers to measure themselves. I think they're all dead or on life support now, but it still feels like there's a profitable business opportunity in there somewhere?
Yeah, that’s how AI should be used. If the ad was using AI as a tool to solve a real problem then I’d be down. But that’s not what this is. This is AI as a shopping cart, or a thing to organize the busy life of a casually rich person who flies to Japan to buy vintage clothes.
Basically I’m only saying the ad is wildly out of touch with reality.
I use chatGPT to track my nutrition goals, and adjust exercises. I also let it code review my personal projects to (at worst) gain exposure to new patterns.
I wouldn't buy a deeply-ingrained AI laptop even if you paid me, and even then I'd install Linux on it in a heartbeat.
Undecided. One of the sites didn't have an LT but the LLM flagged that chest dimensions on their large were narrower than others, so could be worth trying.
By that logic though wouldn’t Google have wildly successful products instead of a long line of failures? Googles product strategy is akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
Sure some stuff sticks but most falls off the wall and is axed barely half way into the product life cycle.
Yes, I absolutely use AI To find stuff to buy. The results are mediocre but the alternatives are even worse. Google search for any product is SEO garbage. Reddit is somewhat useful for filled with astroturfing and tedious to get actual signal from. AI can summarize the Reddit recommendations and set filters to save time a bit.
From what I see of my own use and friends use of "AI" - it is a glorified search aggragator with nice pretty print output which has replaced Google search because all involved are tired of wasting time with the cesspool that vanilla search has become.
Meanwhile i just tried to have Gemini AI on my Android read the screen to add an event to my calendar: it can't do it. It could, some year ago, which several articles wrote about. It no longer can.
God this is so annoying. The actual functionality we need is not there or is half-assed.
Plus the random decision to split Google Assistant functions off from the bottom search bar. I still randomly try to tap that bar with it's mic button to ask the assistant to do something only to have it try to do a Google search. That's leaving aside all the random things that worked rather well in assistant until they started trying to push Gemini, can't think of a reason that should correlate (/s).
Unfortunately, they do. "Normie America" loves that shit. It's why they've been pushing it so hard: it's one of the few areas they're getting serious traction in day to day life.
My friend just bought a Pixel instead of an iPhone because it had better AI voice chat integration, he's non-technical and has been on iPhone as long as I remember
Google's product managers live on another planet. Whole Google Stadia fiasco comes to mind. Imagine the claims - real time 4k 60fps gaming over Internet. Went through acquiring game studios. Designed their own controller. A year later - nothing.
Sometimes I feel like there's no huge tech companies left* that remember: you're supposed to convince me to give you my money. I'm not just going to do it because you used the right trendy buzzwords.
It's like Meta advertising their AR glasses with it annotating prices over fruit at the grocery store - like why are you trying to sell me on some made up use case that doesn't even exist?
There are several AI companies now with billions in yearly revenue that didn't even exist a few years ago. Saying AI doesn't sell is completely delusional. You're in an anti-AI bubble.
Reminds me of all those facebook portal ads (was that the name?) showing kids talking to their grandparents all excited, or those ads where people point their phone at a thing (I think it's for Gemini?) and it pulls up the item to buy. I've literally never seen someone do that, and I have some insufferably-obsessed-with-AI people in my life who try to use it for everything.
Yeah anecdotal, but it just doesn't strike me as how people shop.
What's funny is that these days if I see a Google product that I'm even remotely interested in, I just immediately write it off because I know it's something they will kill in a very short time frame.
It's just never worth the hassle of buying/using a Google product. Never.
Their hardware is usually fine when it comes to support. Google announces the support lifetime of their devices and sticks to it, with feature updates coming to things like phones even after the support period ended through things like app stores. Just check the support lifetime of the device before buying (early Pixels only had 2 years of support, as was announced at release).
Their cloud services are nothing but hot air but their hardware support has been excellent for the past few years. Easily beats other major manufacturers. I'm still annoyed that Apple won't tell you how long they will support their hardware. Other competitors manage to be even worse.
What about Nest? It's great that they announced a lifetime and stuck with it I guess? Sucks for anyone who bought into the ecosystem. You'd have to pay me to try and adopt more google products at this point, otherwise it's almost certainly sooner or later going to be deemed a waste of money/time.
"support" meaning drivers and basic security updates, sure.
but if you buy this for the gemini integration, what are the odds that google actually sticks with that, or two years from now are you going to have a laptop that lags behind the feature set available in the gemini app for mac because they didn't sell enough of these to bother continuing development?
The increased update timelines by Google, Samsung and others roughly coincided with EU legislation coming into effect that mandates 5 years of updates after end of sales. We'll see.
Not arguing with your point about Google, but isn't Apple very often accused of forced obsolescence through updates to their phones? Is there any truth to the accusations of "running slower and dying faster" after a new model releases?
> early Pixels only had 2 years of support, as was announced at release
They also announced a promotion for unlimited cloud storage of photos and then shrank and JPEG massacred the photos. That part of my photo library is still visibly trashy to this very day. Every time I browse my photos, I am reminded that google did this.
That is a gross misrepresentation of the situation. Old batteries' internal resistance rises and they become unable to deliver high current. If you try, thanks to V=IR, the output voltage will droop and you'll brown out. Limiting CPU speed prevents high current draw and random device resets. The alternative was to let it run fast and have it randomly reset under load even when battery is 50% full.
All of this is only relevant cause apple devices are often used for so long after release (5-7 years, this message typed on a 5 year old iPhone) [1] (random source, more available on google.com) while statistically few android devices last long enough in consumer pockets for this to matter (2.5-3 years is average)
They started throttling devices based on battery age after "Batterygate" in 2016, after a wave of news that their phones were suddenly shutting off on high load because the batteries terminal voltage dropped. They do not "artificially slow down before a new release".
The were sued because in their typical arrogance, they neglected to _tell_ people about that. They did not lose, they settled a class action suit.
As a result, they made battery management and state a lot more transparent in iOS, as they should have done in the first place.
Claiming malicious planned obsolescence, as you did, requires facts not in evidence.
Try iOS 26, you'll see what it means in practice, you will get a phone with worse battery life, slower operating system and no path to downgrade, only way is to upgrade your phone to the next big thing.
If it's not malicious, then it's gross incompetence, but at the end of the day, it will still eventually require to purchase a new Apple device, when a downgrade would have been enough.
> Their hardware is usually fine when it comes to support. Google announces the support lifetime of their devices and sticks to it
If they announce a support lifetime they stick to it.
For other products they'll just decide they're done with it and give you a little warning period. Maybe some store credit or another bonus depending on the product.
I argue this is both true and not true in stark ways with Google. Just look at Google Groups listserv, it's been running forever and arguably mosts used neighborhood listservs globally and has been very stable.. all largely for free. On the other hand, new experiments get chopped very quickly at Google. So, it's more like if the service can survive 2 years, then Google generally keeps it around*.
* unless it gets merged dozens of times into other similar projects.
Google Fiber has been advertising a lot in my area. Despite the legacy ISP being as bad as most entrenched ISPs I can't see myself switching and adding another Google product into my life.
It might be cheaper and faster now, but will that still be true in a few years once Google has gotten bored with the project? Are they going to use this service to spam me with AI slop like they do everywhere else? What happens if a Google bot nukes my Google account, will that cut off my entire internet with no warning as well?
I'm not famous enough to raise a social media storm when they screw me over so it's a big risk doing business with the company.
> What happens if a Google bot nukes my Google account, will that cut off my entire internet with no warning as well?
Yeah, the general approach to get support has been to be famous or to marry a Google employee, but the churn rate on Google employees is at the point that the latter is unsustainable.
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.
Please not the schools. We don’t need privacy-invading closed systems with built-in slot machines. We need deterministic open systems where kids’ privacy is protected.
The performance of the machine offered at schools seems to get just a little worse every year too... like one of these days they won't have to worry about kids playing Krunker in class because they won't be able to.
It would be so much better for the student's IT proficiencies if the were some ordinary Linux computers instead. Preferably with limited central managment.
The Chromebooks are probably cheaper than the hardware itself could be, but that's a good demonstration of the issue.
It wouldn’t. The central management of Chromebook is what makes the whole system usable. All you’d be doing is sentencing school IT folks to endless, endless support requests.
> We need deterministic open systems where kids’ privacy is protected
I don't think we need any computers really. They'll be inundated with computers and technology their whole lives. They'll figure it out. Just keep this tech out of the classroom altogether.
We've had computers in the classroom for over a decade now, scores and learning has not gone up. It's a failed experiment.
> Why are you opposed to using personal computers for education?
They'll have computers at home. And the evidence seems to point in one direction: the more exposure kids have to devices, the more stunted their development tends to be. Add to that the class division, where rich kids are increasingly raised with strictly-policed device exposure, while poor kids' classrooms are littered with iPads and Chrombooks, and I think we can start making blanket statements.
I don’t think we need math really. They’ll be inundated with math and arithmetic their whole lives. They’ll figure it out. Just keep math out of the classroom altogether.
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.
The EU Cyber Resilience Act already requires updates for at least five years (or the life expectancy of the product) after the last unit was sold. So if they sell them for 5 years, they're barely keeping up with the law. On top of that, there are already voices pushing for mandatory 15 years of support.
I think it's the overexposure to the inside workings of tech that leads a dislike of these brands. As long as Amazon delivers to you the next day and accepts free returns, you're pretty happy.
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.
What are they trying to gain with this product? Financial incentives obviously won't be the reason as this can only be a loss leader. They have zero chance competing against Apple in the entry market after Apple introduced the neo and obviously no chance in the lucrative premium market against the Apple.
This is not an Apple competitor, this looks to me like a rebranding of Chromebook with a bunch of AI sprinkled on top. (There's very little market overlap between the Chromebook and practically any Apple product.)
My guess is that they wanted to name this Geminibook but couldn't for some ultimately uninteresting reason.
Not sure if it matters that they compete with Apple blow-for-blow, it's probably just the threat of existential risk if they don't own any platform. They want to make sure they don't get Facebook'd by Apple if/when they decide to go fully vertical on AI.
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".
> 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".
ChromeOS devices fall out of support on a timeline. Google sometimes extends the timeline for some devices, and new devices have a longer timeline than in the past; maybe it's better for Education targeted devices, but the Chromebooks I've had for personal devices stopped getting updates and you're left with whatever state it is in; my first one stopped getting updates in the middle of the printing switch where cloud printing was discontinued and local printing didn't actually work.
My understanding is that Google has announced they will stop development for new ChromeOS devices and ten years after the last device is released (not purchased) support goes poof ... and I imagine support activity for the last 5 years of the last device's ten year support will be a lot less than the first 5 years.
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.
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.
I see this too often. But, realistically users do not care about the harvesting as it is unseen and behind the scenes. Most people just want get stuff done in a competent, fast and easy-to-use operating system.
>It also locks you into the cloud services of an advertising company
this is pretty much any company these days. microsoft is guilty of the same.
Until your google account gets locked for some unknown reason and you there is 0 support and recourse. And now you can't even log into your own computer.
Users absolutely care, what a terrible comment. Users have ZERO choice. Tech companies are not regulated, tech companies abuse their monopolies at their users detriment, and tech companies do not have consumer councils to help mitigate these issues.
What it actually appears to be is we have a market where undemocratic business leaders are deciding the direction of technology in a country that only seems to benefit them and not the population.
What a terrible mindset to have and I sincerely hope you never have any capacity to yield power in your life.
>But, realistically users do not care about the harvesting as it is unseen and behind the scenes.
Like them I think I am also surprised not because that isn't the case, but because it's wild to see that take on HN, which skews way more towards privacy/owning your compute.
So does Windows. macOS locks you into a company that hoovers up your data but pinky promises not to sell it and will fight tooth and nail to have prevent others from doing the exact same thing on their operating system.
If you care about privacy, Linux and BSDs are the only options, but actually good out-of-the-box Linux laptops are few and far between.
Apparently you can create a local account on a chrome device [1], although I can't vouch for the process; otherwise cloud auth is tied to Google, yes. You could use a guest account for everything, if your really want; but then you lose out on persistence.
But as long as you accept that everything you do is in a browser; which is reality for the vast majority of computer users, there's no real lock-in. You can just as easily use the browser version of Microsoft Office as the browser version of Google Docs.
You're certainly locked into Google for the browser and for updates, unless you do a lot of work. But it's been a while since it was common to get commercial OS updates from a 3rd party.
That’s no better than Windows (without a lot of effort and a constant game of cat and mouse only achievable by technical users). At least Google’s cloud services tend to actually be good, if you made peace with the tracking and privacy concerns.
I used to think so too, but when my extremely-non-techy mother's Chromebook died, she was able to switch from chrome OS to Ubuntu with minimal fuss. Chrome OS has some specific features, but if you just need a web browser Ubuntu works fine.
My mother (80+) runs Fedora, and I believe she is incapable of messing it up, even if she did have the root password. Doubleclicking random exe files off the internet is almost uniquely a Windows problem. I dunno about Macs - its users are usually technically illiterate, but Apple has done a pretty good job of locking users out of their own machines.
The HP Dragonfly Chromebook is pretty good. The Asus models are also very nice. The Acers are hit or miss; quality is iffy on those and there's a zillion models so it's impossible to find a specific one.
I wish Framework would keep supporting ChromeOS but alas. You could put ChromeOS Flex on one - it doesn't have Android apps, which is fine for me, and it does support the Linux environment, which is excellent.
...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").
In the year 2026, on my Linux laptop (T14, Linux 6.18.26) I ran the following:
lsmod | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | grep snd | wc -l
And it responded: 53. Fifty three kernel modules are dedicated to sound. I, of course, never had to install any of them by hand, or take any other direct care.
> 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").
Dell has sold laptops with first-party Linux support for nearly fifteen years, to say nothing of other smaller OEMS.
As for the battery issues during sleep: that actually has to do with a combination of the BIOS settings + downstream ramifications of secure boot (and how the old-fashioned "hibernate" used to work). Unfortunately, that isn't specific to Linux. My MBP has the same problem, and so do the same laptops running Windows.
Chromebooks make a pretty nice, Linux friendly machine. They're usually cost optimized given the market they address, but that's fine if it fits your needs. Sometimes they have "weird" hardware, keyboard/mouse controllers and stuff at least wasn't always "pc standard", audio controllers seem to be commonly outside mainstream as well.
It's nice to run Linux on a machine that was built to run Linux. No silly windows key, no fighting with firmware that was built for windows first. I have a Chromebox that was a great mini desktop and the pricing was nice. My first Chromebook ran FreeBSD pretty well once it was no longer needed for ChromeOS, etc.
You have to shop carefully, you want something that's easy to put a MrChromebox firmware on and doesn't have any known issues with the OS you want to run. It's been a while since I purchased a ChromeOS device and the current state is different than it was then; I'm not sure how easy it is to find reasonable options now, but there were plenty of good options in the past. You also want to be sure that it has enough ram and storage for you needs or that those are expandable, but I think soldering ram and storage is pretty common across the range.
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.
FWIW I'm one of those people. I have an old rotting pixelbook that I installed Linux on back-in-the-day thanks to Mr. Chromebox. It was a huge improvement over chromeos but I'd never buy a chromebook to install Linux on it again because there was too many small annoyances like needing to fix the keymap every time I did a clean install (the caps lock key was bound to super and I vaguely recall some craziness around the higher function keys), and sound didn't work.
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”.
You'll get a more informative answer from them. I couldn't speak to their motivations. But I certainly wouldn't advise doing it. ChromeOS has better security and performance than Ubuntu, and it automatically updates things like peripheral firmware that Ubuntu isn't even aware of.
It feels like the wrong tool for the job in both directions. If you wanted a host platform for Ubuntu you'd choose something else, and if you wanted platform software for a Chromebook ChromeOS is the right choice.
In the real world, Chromebooks are excellent candidates to install Linux. They are highly compatible, low power, excellent size/weight, and run great. You don't sound like a person who has any real world experience with this topic despite the authoritative tone in your responses.
> ChromeOS has better security and performance than Ubuntu [...]
I'm going to need a citation on that, especially performance. Doubly so if Crostini is put into the mix.
> [...] updates things like peripheral firmware that Ubuntu isn't even aware of.
Like what? WiFi cards, etc.? Isn't that generally in kernel already? What kind of updates do you think are not done by Ubuntu or another Linux distro?
Last I tried ChromeOS was on the Pixel Slate way back when. A buggy, unstable, clearly not properly tested, unperformed mess that I would not wish upon my enemies. Glad to see it has improved to usable now, but that it is better than any other Linux distros, I can't say how considering even being on par with e.g. Fedora would have been a miracle not to long ago.
Happy to admit that purely on the UI/UX, ChromeOS is very solid in my opinion, arguably and subjectively the most consistent and user friendly designed desktop environment I know. Far more consistent than anything MSFT or Apple have provided in quite some time, everything looks like it should, placement is easy to grasp and reliable with a clear identity. Consistency wise, only Gnome can hold a candle to the strictness with which the ChromeOS team execute their vision, though there is the clear divergence in the Gnome team pushing new UX innovations and concepts even if they are controversial and may need to time to learn, whilst the ChromeOS team seems purely focused on the most clearly easy to master approach one can take.
We tried Chromebooks for our kids, and the instant I could buy Neos I did. It might just be that we're fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, but I had a hell of a time trying to get stuff like parental controls figured out on ChromeOS.
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.
Pretty sure when they talked about "very high build quality" and such they're saying this is not a replacement to the cheap chromebooks (which I think the macbook neo is eating anyway) but a higher price point.
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.
Macs are very popular in schools today for teachers and staff. Switching to Macbook Neos for students would actually simplify their support burden. I'm not sure they'd be cost justified though.
I don't think these are Chromebook successors. This is supposed to be a premium line according to the "Android Show" video. But I suspect future Chromebooks will use this OS eventually.
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
A Chromebook is far cheaper than a neo. It could be less then a third the price, and that makes a big difference when you're buying a thousand of them.
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 know people in general hated it, but I found Stadia to be quite good. I'm not too upset because Google paid me back full purchase price, but it's almost a shame that they managed to mess up cloud gaming that badly.
I don't know, I saw quite a few positive comments on Stadia, both as a service and the general approach. Most of the negativity was about it being a Google product and not wanting to get invested in a platform they would inevitably kill. Then of course there was the reaction when it was inevitably killed.
I use boosteroid, which is just steam on cloud. ~4k @ 120Hz for $12/month. No HDR though (they recently removed it). Such a stupid good deal compared to the price of a gaming PC, that I can't really complain. So many data centers with GPU sitting around...
Yes, it's just streaming a video to you. The main limit is your connection speed if you're not near a datacenter as you're limited by ping, so controls can be laggy. You can try it out for free though, which will give you an idea of how good your link is.
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
I wanted to like the Pixelbook, but it had a lot of limitations, ChromeOS being the major one. I recall that people were able to run Linux on them, but no idea what that experience was like.
>but my god, I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook"
i'd hate for my computing choice to lack fashion forward qualities -- I wouldn't want to be embarrassed at Gate A-13 with my new Apple perched on my lap proudly while waiting for the next question from my adoring fans.
I hope they appreciate the new color!
real talk : my favorite excuse for using an Apple product throughout my life is the tried and true "my company stuck me with it and I hate this piece of shit.", so I find it kinda fascinating that they're such cult objects -- and to be fair I am sure i'd say exactly the same thing if I was ever stuck in a company stupid enough to try to make me be productive on a fancy chromebook, too.
It's sad that the M5 Apple chips don't support Linux better. I'm in the market for a laptop, and I'd buy a MBP in a heartbeat if I could wipe it and put Debian on it.
My 2013 MBP was going strong with Debian until the battery started puffing up last year, and I finally had to recycle it.
I get it, I know I'm not their market, but it still pains me because it was a great laptop.
There's an entire world outside of Silicon Valley and the Apple ecosystem. Apple has a ~9% PC market share. Who is buying the other 91% if there is no demand?
They’re surprisingly powerful for all three games that are available on the platform.
Jokes aside, there are some games with competent Mac ports and if you only have an M-series Mac, you can find some titles that play nice. But most of the stuff that you’d play on a PlayStation or on Windows is simply not available.
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 Ultra 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.
I have an RTX 5090 and am an avid gamer. When I travel I use my M1 MacBook Air and play indie games like Slay the Spire, Hades 2, Balatro, and Hollow Knight Silksong. Not cutting edge but definitely cutting edge fun. Those games run with no difficulties.
Slay the Spire 2 is in early access and has some major issues running but I suspect that’s some issues in the game engine because it’s not framerate but some sort of hitching that makes button presses not register.
YapYap which is an intentionally retro ugly 3D style runs barely in a playable state on the M1, but it got me through in a pinch when my kid wanted us to both play.
If I want to play AAA I fall back to my desktop, you can stream using Moonlight or Parsec but unless both sides are wired it isn’t great.
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.
> 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
Good point, that could work. Buy this and you get so many years of Gemini for free and such. "Why pay Anthropic $200/month for Claude when you can buy this and get Gemini for free for a few years". OpenAI and Anthropic are not going to make their own devices most likely either to compete.
> 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?
What makes you think a googlebook will be half the price of a macbook neo?
Also, a used M1 macbook air is $300 on swappa/ebay and will be even better than the neo anyway. It's still more performant than every other non-Apple ARM based laptop/chromebook on the market and will have far superior build quality.
> Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power
I pre-ordered a Neo on a whim to use as a couch laptop alongside my work laptop and gaming computer. It's so fast. It blows everything out of the water when it comes to interactivity.
Plus the whole build quality, screen, touchpad and speakers are all so much better than the work Latitude. Linux support is lacking, but it's still a full usable Unix.
Having seen how people managed to run Cyberpunk 2077 on the Neo with okayish frame rates I don't think there's a single ARM laptop out there that could deliver that performance on Linux. Maybe I'm wrong though.
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.
I think the big issue is it's still not a real full laptop, and that dramatically limits the audience. No matter how well it's made, they're never going to actually do what needs to be done to make it a mass market product. Google doesn't really have the dedication to be a real hardware company. Their hardware is more of a showcase to demonstrate things they want other people to do. And at this point they kill projects so often lots of folks are very hesitant to spend money on their things only for it to die, just like you experienced.
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.
I always wanted a pixelbook as I loved the hardware design and the taller aspect ratio screen, it was just too expensive for me to spend on a chromebook only laptop. IMO it looked nicer than the Macbook Pro's of the time.
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.
They all suffered from severe hardware issues that got never fixed.
Chromebook Pixel 2013 had that atrocious function key row that didn't align with the rest of the keyboard and where made of different material and had terrible travel. The Pixelbook had some terrible PWDM issues with the display and iirc it also had severe ghosting issues. Not to forget the cut in performance of these mobile fanless Intel chips because of Meltdown & Spectre. I think the Pixelbook's WiFi/Bluetooth module made by Intel also suffered from hardware faults where using Bluetooth could degrade WiFi performance and vice versa.
So, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for? They are marketing what is ostensibly a computer for people who seem to not want to use a computer in scenarios that I don't think even exist.
Beyond that, this is a laptop that is running a really shitty, 'apps only, no you cannot do anything useful with this' operating system. I have an awful lot of complaints about MacOS's relatively restrictive use cases, but it's still at least a General Purpose OS. Android on laptop is very much not.
This is an overgrown phone with all the trash that comes with a phone, and the very finite use cases that come with a phone, only now it has a keyboard. It's solving none of the problems with Android as an operating system and doesn't seem to even be interested in doing that anyway. The marketing is demoing use cases that don't even exist.
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.
The video they show (which is probably exaggerated by cutting out LLM generation time) is pretty sci-fi. I don't know how it works in practice, but it looks fun to try out. If this could run locally, I'd love to have a feature like that.
Most people don't really seem to care about data collection when it comes to AI usage. A lot of people who will feed Gemini/ChatGPT/Bing/Claude/shady clusters across the internet for bargain bin prices/Mistral every detail of their lives will probably be fine with Gemini as long as it doesn't interfere unnecessarily.
It is deliberately designed for maximum accidental invocations so the managers and execs behind it can claim the large user numbers in their promo packets.
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.
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.
Everyone emails themself stuff, that's normal. The weird part is how often will you ever need to email it specifically from your laptop, but it's already on your phone? If it's on your phone and you need to email it to someone, couldn't you just email from your phone?
Oh, I use use AirDrop to myself for this. Yes, given my photo library syncs to iCloud, just opening Photos seems like it makes sense on a fast WAN which I sort-of do have, but of course, iCloud syncs only happen when the device decides the mood is just right, and can't be triggered manually, because I guess that would just be 'clutter' in the UI.
That's mostly an iPhone problem. Plugging in an Android phone still works, and wireless exchange with QuickShare also works on most devices. With Google reverse engineering Airdrop, I hope they can get the Android <-> macOS experience to finally work correctly soon as well.
I'm super techy but I admit that I just use Signal to send me a "Note to self" whenever I need a file from my phone on my computer quickly. For images I just use immich, but texting myself is honestly the quickest way for files because the experience is indeed terrible.
Yeah I and i suspect a lot of others email myself little files all the time because surprisingly that's the most convenient way to get those files quickly from phone to laptop.
These are usually targeted at kids and newbies. My mom would 100% appreciate that feature for photos and pdfs. She still struggles with files on Windows and managing files are even less clear on chromebook.
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.
I'm not sure if that's an option for me, since I'm not using the regular camera app - I'm using Halide which is better suited to macro (coin) photography.
Google Drive would be another option to transfer, but would be more work (about same to "share" as email, but less convenient to access on desktop).
The e-mail way is actually quite convenient since on the desktop you can just download all the photos you sent in one go - they appear as a zip file that you can then just extract to your working directory, rather than having to save one at a time.
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.
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.
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.
All of society is heading towards an incredibly unpopular future. Nobody wants this. Tech was a mistake. I wish them all failure and shame. Feel bad and quit
No, it isn't. If you're making hardware product, sell me hardware thats worth it. No spec sheet, just AI pushing. Chromebook 2.0 where the chromebook was a browser for an OS.
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.
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.
That’s a western perspective because we are spoiled and have no thought for sustainability.
Please take a look at poor countries of the world like Pakistan. They have a repair culture. They have vehicles from the 80’s out on the road doing daily driving work instead of being used as vintage show pieces. It’s a poor country, this is a necessity. But nevertheless seeing the repair culture there in contrast to the disposable culture in the western world makes me pause.
This... I wonder why isn't there a market in Tijuana, Juarez and other border towns for fixing broken electronics and similar appliances.
Here in Mexico there are plenty of "unofficial" laptops/mobile (Apple, Windows, Androids) repair shops that even receive your device by DHL/UPS, fix it and return it. Because the labor costs are low enough to make it worth. The only downside is that most of the spare parts are imported from the US.
In Western countries, the time of skilled repairmen is better spent repairing things which are much more important and expensive than consumer goods.
And a consumer usually has a much higher return from working in his specialized field to earn money and buy a new product, then spend time with difficult repairs of a broken product.
Yeah, this is entirely a function of labor costs. If you want your stuff repaired, ship it to a low-labor cost economy or hire someone to whom it’s worth the time.
> Looks and feels premium, but ultimately fundamentally disposable.
I'd add that experiences like GP help expose that the main difference in most products between 'premium' and 'disposable' is in the branding and the price tag. With few exceptions, most companies that used to make the respected brand of the thing (e.g. Sony, G.E., Craftsman) now churn out the same garbage as you used to find 30 years ago in a fleamarket with a brand you'd never heard of - and that's if they don't actually outsource the design and/or production to that low-bidder company and simply license their logo directly to them.
And that's because these are all public or PE-owned companies, and it's a shortcut to easy short-term quarterly growth if you can cut your costs while keeping your price high or almost as high (after all, you're a "Premium Brand" so you can leverage your past reputation to trick customers into continuing to pay that premium).
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.
Absolutely not when replacing costs 100% and repairing usually costs 0.1%.
And the reason people want to leave certain countries is for totally different reasons than not wanting to repair something. In fact, I would say with quite some certainty that emigrees who repaired first before leaving would still do it after emigrating.
The real reasons, in my opinion, are: 1) it takes skill and will to repair something yourself, 2) something new generally feels better than repaired/used, 3) logistics make replacing/repairing less cost efficient, 4) with every replace, companies have a new touchpoint to try to upsell their customers, 5) it takes less time to go to a shop and replace than repair, 6) it takes some giving a shit about the environment to prefer the more complicated route. And probably more.
If repairing usually cost 0.1% then everyone would do it.
The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor.
Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.
This is actually a thought-provoking perspective! I have to admit you're right in your conclusions, though the issues are:
1. The waste is still a tremendous shame, both in the materials that will realistically never be recovered in 'recycling', and in the toxicity that results from a lot of that trash created.
2. Jobs in repairing lots of things were arguably pretty good jobs, and we've traded these for, best case, more complete drudgery retailing/supply chain jobs as we get a new laptop every year or two instead of 5 years. Arguably a bigger failing of our economic system, which doesn't seem capable of adapting to global trade, or this shift we're discussing here, nor AI, but still a bummer regardless of fault.
> repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product
It requires specialized and local labor. For products you can ship back to the assembly line, this can sometimes work. If you need a local technician, on the other hand, because the assembly line is in China or the product is heavy, yeah, it very well may be that there is no niche where repairs aren’t a material fraction of a new product.
this logic does not hold up if the reason that labor is more expensive than parts is that the labor involved in creating those parts has been outsourced to a "shithole country"
What are you talking about. Trash is inexpensive, but Americans absolutely pay for it (solid waste utility bill). I think people conceptualize that they have utility bills?
Where Americans are renters and garbage service is hidden in their monthly rent payment, sure, but for Americans who own a home, they have to pay their local jurisdiction a fee for taking away trash and recycling and compost (and batteries and light bulbs). Also sewage and water.
Wat. Almost all Americans either pay someone to deal with their waste or are dependents of someone who pays on their behalf. Do you think we're all burning our trash in barrels or dumping it in the local river or something?
Horseshit. It means we're doing less with more and anyone with a brain should be able to figure out that's bad for Quality of Life on a long term. Wasting your resources is not how an economy grows strong.
Labor is an input too. Fixing something in a way that saves some materials, but requires hours of skilled labor and specialized equipment doesn't straightforwardly mean you're saving overall.
There are various localities that add recycling fees to electronics. They're on the order of 1% of the purchase price, so it's unlikely to make a difference in the repair vs replace calculation.
I'm going to offer a counter narrative here based upon my experience. I have LG appliances and they have fairly reasonable "fix everything wrong" prices. It's not literally everything, your bells and whistles might not work, but if you want just a washing machine, just a dishwasher, or just a fridge/freezer, it will be less expensive than the cheapest new option out there.
When our fridge stopped fridging, we got it fixed for $300: this included replacing the compressor and the coils. When our dishwasher stopped washing, we paid $250 to have 3 or so things fixed at once. And so on.
I don't know if any appliance makers offer this, but if LG still offers it when we eventually replace, they're going to be on the top of my list.
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, and it's even more common once you cross a certain price point. 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.
My washing machine started making weird loud noises recently. Had a repair guy come by and he told me it's the plastic gears in the gearcase wearing down. I asked him what it would cost to repair and he said with parts and labor it would be cheaper to buy a new one. He told me to just keep using it and deal with the noise until it stops working, so that's what I'm doing. When the time comes I'm considering paying $150 for the new gearcase and trying to fix it myself, but it's so stupid to that it's come to this
The rose-tinted era of things being made to last never really happened. For each of the old survivor washing mashines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and Casiotron wrist watches that are still out there doing good work, countless thousands of others were recycled or landfilled because it was better to buy something different than to fix the old one.
It was never cheap to pay someone to work on stuff. The costs of hiring professional labor and the overhead associated with that labor (for service techs, that means things like vehicles, buildings, inventory, tools, training, insurance, book keeping, and covering next week's paycheck even if this week was slow) have always been expensive.
Parts have always been relatively expensive, too. Availability of parts has always been somewhat hit-or-miss.
It seems like an unpopular opinion, but I don't think it came to this. Instead, I think that it started off this way, and that it simply remains this way today.
So, sure: $150 for a new widget? Not so bad. Maybe a pro could get it done in a few hours (maybe they can even get two of them done in one workday!), while perhaps it will take you a day or two to work through R&Ring this thing on your own for the first time.
Whether the total investment (including time) is worth it to you is a personal decision, but that kind of decision-making is also not new. :)
It's the result of manufacturing at scale being so tremendously more efficient. It really does use less human effort, resources, energy, whatever metric you want to measure, to just produce a brand new one than to produce a more resource-intensive one and then try to fix in a one-off fashion.
Unlike a lot of hardware and such in our homes, this mostly just boils down to people refusing to learn and is incredibly easy to remedy. Basic stitching is not super difficult. My partner has very light knowledge of stitching, learned it mostly as a kid and never used it much, but has repaired plenty of my clothes. I'm wearing stitched jeans as we speak (pocket got caught on a hook and tore nearly off). Typically gives my regularly worn clothes an extra year or two of life.
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.
I went all in on the Nest ecosystem when I bought my house eight years ago, and Google absolutely ruined it with the botched acquisition. Half the stuff is Google branded, half is Nest branded, a different half has Google branded software and a different half has Nest branded software. None of it really works reliably anymore. The lock to my front door is completely incompatible with modern "Google Home" and I'm unable to change its passcode.
It's a total disaster and I will never buy Google hardware again.
How is Apple any different? IIRC Apple watches have an abysmal repairability score too.
If anything, Apple is in general the worst on this particular metric. Switching to Apple because you had a repairability problem with another brand is kinda funny.
I haven't had an issue with Apple, but it's only been 3.5 years.
Are there stories where Apple straight up said they wouldn't repair a watch? I thought they'd repair it even if the repairs were more the the replacement value.
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 really miss the Chromebook Pixel / Pixelbook / whatever it was called.
It was my travel laptop for at least 5 years.
It was expensive, but the quality, performance, and durability was top tier. And it lasted 5+ years.
The Pixelbook also had a "Google Assistant" button built in the keyboard. Should be easy enough to relaunch the hardware and swap in a gemini button...
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.
When I was actively hacking my chromebook, there was tons of advice like this, and 90% of it didn't work on both arm and intel-based chromebooks, and the advice-givers never mentioned which category it worked on. Sometimes it was buried 5 paragraphs into the webpage you were sent to for downloads, sometimes not.
Has any of this changed?
Also, I tend to take with a grain of salt any comment that starts with "it's easy/simple/obvious", especially if it doesn't provide details or a link.
I was talking about a specific device on a specific dimension brought up by the GP, i.e., "freedom to tinker for the owner while preserving security for the masses." Whether that became a standardized process is a different story. By and large it has changed across models, but nevertheless it was a good balance of ownership/hackability without compromising security that can be emulated by other devices if they choose to.
MacBooks aren't that unrepairable, you just have to go to someone who isn't Apple. Apple will tell you that you have to replace the entire logic board, and then you go to the independent repair shop and they can fix whatever it was for $100.
I've repaired my MacBooks multiple times before (although not one in the last seven years, so maybe they are totally unrepairable, but I doubt it).
The main issue is that Apple will want to replace everything to avoid you coming back and saying it didn't work, when it's actually a different issue.
The soldered on RAM and SSD, while technically replaceable, make it a much more difficult process than just swapping some DIMMS and an m.2.
I understood the technical need for soldered on memory (physical limitations of SODIMM got in the way of power and speed requirements), but the soldered on SSD is just inexcusable considering flash memory is very much a wear item.
It is absolutely unlike the situation for MacBooks, where you can walk into any of hundreds of retail stores and talk to someone who will quote you a repair or replacement price.
It sounds like problem with the lack of volume then? Since macs are super common, you can find a lot of places that repair them. Doesn't say much about the HW comparison between the two, IMO.
How is "I don't like the price of the readily-available vendor or third-party repair services" the "same" as "no repair is available for any price from the vendor or third parties"?
I have a macbook but my father had dropped my m1 air (which my brother has gifted me) accidentally from his car on literal straight concrete bricks from a considerably high height.
The damage is literally close to none aside from just a very small bump* but later I realized that if it was any other laptop then it would've been smashed to pieces but Apple's aluminium body came into clutch.
I am not much of apple's fan but I wish to give credits where its due and so from my anecdotal evidence it wouldn't have been the case with atleast my mac air.
This thing is crazy light, has a decent battery life and survived quite a high damage with tis but a scratch. Credits where its due to Apple hardware engineering.
I don't wish to oversell apple tho but from my anecdotal evidence, it handled pretty good in real life stress test and I am super happy with it surviving that drop with almost literally no difference, so there's that.
"AppleCare+ covers fall and accidental damage (drops, cracks, liquid) for a reduced, fixed service fee per incident. It offers unlimited incidents (or up to two per 12 months, depending on the plan), providing a significant discount over out-of-warranty repairs. A service fee, such as $29 for screen repairs, applies"
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?
Googlebook sounds like a first party hardware product but apparently it's just the new name for Androidified ChromeOS? They should have just called it "Android". And if there's ever first party hardware it should be Pixelbook or Gbook.
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.
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.
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 thought that too, but it looks like this isn't a laptop but a new laptop class, and Lenovo, Dell and HP will all be producing Googlebooks. This does not appear to be a first-party laptop product.
I agree with "who is this for" but to be fair to Google's example, the most common use I see of AI for "normal people" besides chat/homework is creating event/business posters and small business promo graphics. The kind of stuff that used to be a Canva template, can now be created quicker/easier with an AI prompt. I agree it's a super-lame use for AI, but the average person's use-cases for AI as it exists now are still very limited (IMHO).
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.
Have you interacted with the 'general public' in the last year or so?
Every non-technical person I know uses AI for 'fact checking' now, as well as 'doing the math' before deciding something, despite these two literally being the well known blind spots of modern AI. People have adopted AI suspiciously cleanly into their habits and workflows.
The only person I have seen being weary of AI recently is a labor activist, for good reason.
A simple search for "neo" is now up to 32 results, up from 6 at the time of this comment :) Somewhere someone said why Neo when Googlebook would be 1/2 the cost, but I highly doubt its going to be $250. No official pricing has been released.
Between Crostini and Android, it's "full desktop os" that much of a differentiator? And as far as "works well with the ecosystem", the press release makes it sound like this will integrate well with an Android phone.
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!
Another perspective from the posters saying "rich people"; in most advertising, it is aimed at aspiration and not reality - so "people who want to be rich leisure class people, or social media influencers", which tracks for a low-end laptop for a younger phone-native audience.
Advertising aimed at the actually rich is usually more about saving time, "elevated" experiences, or building legacy.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, there is almost no point buying this when the MacBook Neo exists, and runs a full-fledged operating system rather than ChromeOS or Gemini or whatever it is they’re calling it.
What is the product here? A chromebook with a different name, and some Gemini stuff thrown on top of the UI?
This really just feels like an incremental upgrade to ChromeOS, with a new name to distance it from a brand that's synonymous with "cheap crap schools give to kids."
Yeah especially the AI stuff is so... not a driving force for anyone to buy this?
For me, unless you can run LLM's and whatnot locally (which is not the case on this undisclosed low-end hardware), "AI" just means doing some API call to a web service and have it serve me some freshly made up tokens. You can do that on a potato. The fact that they happily announce something that can be done on any other cheap-ass laptop as the main selling point, means this product is nothing special at all.
"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.
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.
That page has logos of Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo. That makes me assume this won’t be a Google product, but a series of products that carry the “Googlebook” label.
If so, there likely will be some variation in the cases.
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.
Wow. That has to be one of the worst announcements I have ever seen. A hardware launch that only talks about software and most of the software is AI. This announcement is nothing. This could have been a ChromeOS update.
Most comments here are about Chromebook/Googlebook hardware. But IMO the more interesting part is AI-native OS features. Unfortunately it seems like not a ton, but I think the future is in custom software created from user prompts.
Ie the other day I wanted to track my clipboard history, and I preferred to trust a locally coded & executed AI-generated clipboard history mac app over a random github project.
Now obviously trusting AI has its own concerns vs trusting people, but interested in other ways companies will reimagine interfaces with AI
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.
It’s amazing to scroll through this whole product page and leave feeling like I don’t know what it really does / who it’s for.
Why are these features compelling? I went through the whole page and still don’t know what OS runs on this laptop… the value prop for this is incredibly unclear.
Related: How is it possible for Google in 2026 to get away without a cookie banner that allows you to manage your tracking preferences? The cookie notification only links to a "Learn more" [0] page but provides no specifics on how cookies are used on this site? Is this some legal wizardry or plain ignorance of the GDRP?
They don't have to offer a version of the website without consent. As long as they inform you that the site will use cookies if you use it that should be GDPR-compliant.
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.
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.
Calling it "just a speculative research project" is severely underestimating how big of an effort Fuschia was. At its peak it had a couple hundred eng IIRC.
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.
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?
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 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 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.
No, ChromeOS cannot. You can only run Linux applications via Crostini. Heavily sandboxed and restricted to limited hardware access, that is not software compatible by any reasonable measure. If that counts, my MacBook is compatible with all software ever made via UTM. Also, lest we forget ISA. If these Googlebooks are arm64, that restricts software compatibility further still as Crostini doesn't translate between arm64 and x86_64, so we are going from poor, limited support, to worse.
For reference:
> Cameras aren't yet supported.
> Android devices are supported over USB, but other devices aren't yet supported.
> Android Emulators aren't yet supported.
> Hardware acceleration isn't yet supported, including GPU and video decode.
> ChromeVox is supported for the default Terminal app, but not yet for other Linux apps.
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?
There's now a Photoshop web, and Google has their own office suite. Canva and Figma are websites. iLife is discontinued. Are there specific things in "etc" that you're thinking of? Davinci Resolve and Blender are available for Linux and thus Crostini on a Chromebook/Googlebook. ChromeOS came out in 2011, 15 years ago. So not 30, but it's been around a while now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who thought wiggling the cursor to invoke AI is a good idea?
People do this when the system is stuck or something is not working for some reason, and this will just add extra burden when that happens.
It's such a bad idea that I can see Microsoft immediately adopting this! (Opens up three variants of copilot, one deprecated and spins without getting the API handle right.)
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.
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.
What in the Microsoft Surface is this? Are they trying to frame a life-long dependency on Google's LLMs as a feature?
Also, I find it funny that they have burned through the "chromebook" and "pixelbook" branding already, leaving them with the less snappy "googlebook." Not sure if the third time's the charm here.
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.
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. The Snapdragon is very competitive with Apple's M5 even including single core performance and battery life.
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.
Perhaps the bay would be in the laptop screen itself and the two screens could operate side-by-side - or in the main body and the phone would go dormant.
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.
The interesting thing to me is that this is Android based if I understand correctly. The Google TV Android based experience is very good, I've been wanting a good Android based desktop OS since forever.
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.
Does it use ChromeOS or Android? I read an unreliable comment in Reddit that Google may be forced to sell ChromeOS to satisfy antitrust lawsuit. The comment provided zero evidence for the conjecture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
My understanding is that the shortage has more to do with DRAM manufacturer capacity, rather than specifically making chips with high RAM amounts.
From TrendForce's analysis:
"The laptop market's 2026 shipments have been revised down from the previously expected annual growth of 1.7% to -2.8%, and further adjusted to -5.4%. Brands with highly integrated supply chains and more flexible pricing, such as Apple and Lenovo, have more flexibility to handle rising memory prices. However, low-end and consumer laptop brands face difficulty passing on costs and are constrained by processor and operating system requirements, making further spec reductions difficult."
Google can obviously just make this machine more expensive, but to launch a completely new brand of consumer laptops in a year where production is already very constrained is only going to exacerbate the core issue.
Google never sold through their first production run of Chromebook Pixels. Will prediction markets take bets on when will end up at https://killedbygoogle.com?
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.
"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?
Eh sure. Everyone will totally check the vibe coded "widget". Is this really all that's necessary to discount all responsibility when that widget deletes your disk and kills your grandmother?
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.
> 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
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?
Only 7.66% have 8GB on the Steam hardware survey (and <2% have less than that), granted those are gamers. 16GB is most common (40.86%) though 32GB appears almost as often (37.55%)
Meanwhile, I have 64GB in my latest Thinkpad (fortunately this was ordered before the RAM price increase), because with 16GB in the Thinkpad before that, Firefox and Chrome tabs would eat up all the memory...
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 clicked on the link hoping to find out the price first thing so I could compare it to Apple Neo's price. Didn't find price anywhere. Also, is an AI subscription required for this?
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.
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.
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?
No thanks, I’m sick of companies with their super connected bullshit. MS , Google, Apple etc. We need more isolation between hardware and these conglomerates
So, these will just be dumped into schools and the already deteriorating education system will just collapse because kids won't know anything and Gemini will just be doing everything for them.
"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)
There must be such a disconnection between the general people and more technical oriented people. I would never ever buy such a laptop. The reasons are very simple:
- it's owned by Google. Google is the worst tech company out there to trust your data
- it has AI all over the place. Overuse of AI depresses me. And a laptop is something very personal to me. I don't want to be depressed every time i open my laptop
- the "files" functionality is cloud-based. That's insane. I don't want my files in the "cloud". I want a file system
I run linux, and still own Macs (because their hardware is great on laptops). Of course I'm not the target audience. But still.
No one is doing that, these people don't exist. No matter how hard corporate America wishes they did. This is why AI doesn't sell. This is why companies like Microsoft and Dell are pulling back on their AI claims and why Apple has nearly wiped it off their site all together, seriously go check out apple.com, not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.
At this point I'm convinced that marketing has been completely taken over by shareholder shills, marketing to customers they wish they had instead of the real customers that exist.
Not super relevant to the Googlebook ad, but in case the perspective is interesting to you: I'm quite tall (194cm) but not very wide, so I usually struggle with buying clothes online. I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores to see whether they sold a men's shirt with an LT or slim fit size, in stock, and matching a particular vibe.
I wouldn't buy a deeply-ingrained AI laptop even if you paid me, and even then I'd install Linux on it in a heartbeat.
It is deeply annoying we have to do this.
It sounds totally insane but we’re the minority here. That’s why Google is a $4.5 trillion company.
Sure some stuff sticks but most falls off the wall and is axed barely half way into the product life cycle.
God this is so annoying. The actual functionality we need is not there or is half-assed.
It’s amazing how confident you are while being completely wrong. A pristine internet rant.
Unfortunately, they do. "Normie America" loves that shit. It's why they've been pushing it so hard: it's one of the few areas they're getting serious traction in day to day life.
My friend just bought a Pixel instead of an iPhone because it had better AI voice chat integration, he's non-technical and has been on iPhone as long as I remember
*except maybe Valve.
There are several AI companies now with billions in yearly revenue that didn't even exist a few years ago. Saying AI doesn't sell is completely delusional. You're in an anti-AI bubble.
Yeah anecdotal, but it just doesn't strike me as how people shop.
In fact, if HN hates it, there is a higher chance the product will be successful
Will Bookmark it so that it becomes one of those legendary HN quotes
Unless these things are much cheaper than a Macbook Neo, I don't see it succeeding.
It's just never worth the hassle of buying/using a Google product. Never.
Their cloud services are nothing but hot air but their hardware support has been excellent for the past few years. Easily beats other major manufacturers. I'm still annoyed that Apple won't tell you how long they will support their hardware. Other competitors manage to be even worse.
but if you buy this for the gemini integration, what are the odds that google actually sticks with that, or two years from now are you going to have a laptop that lags behind the feature set available in the gemini app for mac because they didn't sell enough of these to bother continuing development?
Two or three years is not even close to the support Apple provides. It sealed the deal for me and I switched to iPhone.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/From-June-20-EU-gives-smartphon...
Google’s hardware track record is a joke compared to Apple.
They also announced a promotion for unlimited cloud storage of photos and then shrank and JPEG massacred the photos. That part of my photo library is still visibly trashy to this very day. Every time I browse my photos, I am reminded that google did this.
For example: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772
All of this is only relevant cause apple devices are often used for so long after release (5-7 years, this message typed on a 5 year old iPhone) [1] (random source, more available on google.com) while statistically few android devices last long enough in consumer pockets for this to matter (2.5-3 years is average)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/9uha1o/android_vs_...
They started throttling devices based on battery age after "Batterygate" in 2016, after a wave of news that their phones were suddenly shutting off on high load because the batteries terminal voltage dropped. They do not "artificially slow down before a new release".
The were sued because in their typical arrogance, they neglected to _tell_ people about that. They did not lose, they settled a class action suit.
As a result, they made battery management and state a lot more transparent in iOS, as they should have done in the first place.
Claiming malicious planned obsolescence, as you did, requires facts not in evidence.
If it's not malicious, then it's gross incompetence, but at the end of the day, it will still eventually require to purchase a new Apple device, when a downgrade would have been enough.
It's not the first time even: https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/iphone-update-iss... <iPhone user sparks debate after device becomes ruined following mandatory update: 'This is just ridiculous'>
If they announce a support lifetime they stick to it.
For other products they'll just decide they're done with it and give you a little warning period. Maybe some store credit or another bonus depending on the product.
* unless it gets merged dozens of times into other similar projects.
It might be cheaper and faster now, but will that still be true in a few years once Google has gotten bored with the project? Are they going to use this service to spam me with AI slop like they do everywhere else? What happens if a Google bot nukes my Google account, will that cut off my entire internet with no warning as well?
I'm not famous enough to raise a social media storm when they screw me over so it's a big risk doing business with the company.
Yeah, the general approach to get support has been to be famous or to marry a Google employee, but the churn rate on Google employees is at the point that the latter is unsustainable.
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.
Please not schools…
The Chromebooks are probably cheaper than the hardware itself could be, but that's a good demonstration of the issue.
I don't think we need any computers really. They'll be inundated with computers and technology their whole lives. They'll figure it out. Just keep this tech out of the classroom altogether.
We've had computers in the classroom for over a decade now, scores and learning has not gone up. It's a failed experiment.
They'll have computers at home. And the evidence seems to point in one direction: the more exposure kids have to devices, the more stunted their development tends to be. Add to that the class division, where rich kids are increasingly raised with strictly-policed device exposure, while poor kids' classrooms are littered with iPads and Chrombooks, and I think we can start making blanket statements.
FreeBSD?
Shipping enterprise desktop hardware with AI integrated features will likely be a priority to improve the cloud footprint amongst fortune 500.
It's a "most loved" brand according to https://rankings.newsweek.com/americas-most-loved-brands-202...
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.
My guess is that they wanted to name this Geminibook but couldn't for some ultimately uninteresting reason.
ChromeOS devices fall out of support on a timeline. Google sometimes extends the timeline for some devices, and new devices have a longer timeline than in the past; maybe it's better for Education targeted devices, but the Chromebooks I've had for personal devices stopped getting updates and you're left with whatever state it is in; my first one stopped getting updates in the middle of the printing switch where cloud printing was discontinued and local printing didn't actually work.
My understanding is that Google has announced they will stop development for new ChromeOS devices and ten years after the last device is released (not purchased) support goes poof ... and I imagine support activity for the last 5 years of the last device's ten year support will be a lot less than the first 5 years.
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 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.
It's a great stopgap OS for older hardware.
To each their own, but this is absolute insanity.
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 also locks you into the cloud services of an advertising company that loves harvesting your data to help find new ways to sell you things.
>It also locks you into the cloud services of an advertising company
this is pretty much any company these days. microsoft is guilty of the same.
What it actually appears to be is we have a market where undemocratic business leaders are deciding the direction of technology in a country that only seems to benefit them and not the population.
What a terrible mindset to have and I sincerely hope you never have any capacity to yield power in your life.
Like them I think I am also surprised not because that isn't the case, but because it's wild to see that take on HN, which skews way more towards privacy/owning your compute.
If you care about privacy, Linux and BSDs are the only options, but actually good out-of-the-box Linux laptops are few and far between.
Except for Chromebooks, of course.
But as long as you accept that everything you do is in a browser; which is reality for the vast majority of computer users, there's no real lock-in. You can just as easily use the browser version of Microsoft Office as the browser version of Google Docs.
You're certainly locked into Google for the browser and for updates, unless you do a lot of work. But it's been a while since it was common to get commercial OS updates from a 3rd party.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/how-use-chromebook-without-go...
Tell that to my partner's grandfather, who managed to find and install malware chrome extensions on his chromebox.
I wish Framework would keep supporting ChromeOS but alas. You could put ChromeOS Flex on one - it doesn't have Android apps, which is fine for me, and it does support the Linux environment, which is excellent.
Similarly, but I would extend that to mac mini/studio, but I would like Linux on it. I like hardware, but I hate the OS there.
...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").
What century did you write this in?
Dell has sold laptops with first-party Linux support for nearly fifteen years, to say nothing of other smaller OEMS.
As for the battery issues during sleep: that actually has to do with a combination of the BIOS settings + downstream ramifications of secure boot (and how the old-fashioned "hibernate" used to work). Unfortunately, that isn't specific to Linux. My MBP has the same problem, and so do the same laptops running Windows.
In the end, after hours of frustration, my solution was to print the document from my (amusingly, Google Pixel Android) phone.
It's nice to run Linux on a machine that was built to run Linux. No silly windows key, no fighting with firmware that was built for windows first. I have a Chromebox that was a great mini desktop and the pricing was nice. My first Chromebook ran FreeBSD pretty well once it was no longer needed for ChromeOS, etc.
You have to shop carefully, you want something that's easy to put a MrChromebox firmware on and doesn't have any known issues with the OS you want to run. It's been a while since I purchased a ChromeOS device and the current state is different than it was then; I'm not sure how easy it is to find reasonable options now, but there were plenty of good options in the past. You also want to be sure that it has enough ram and storage for you needs or that those are expandable, but I think soldering ram and storage is pretty common across the range.
It feels like the wrong tool for the job in both directions. If you wanted a host platform for Ubuntu you'd choose something else, and if you wanted platform software for a Chromebook ChromeOS is the right choice.
I'm going to need a citation on that, especially performance. Doubly so if Crostini is put into the mix.
> [...] updates things like peripheral firmware that Ubuntu isn't even aware of.
Like what? WiFi cards, etc.? Isn't that generally in kernel already? What kind of updates do you think are not done by Ubuntu or another Linux distro?
Last I tried ChromeOS was on the Pixel Slate way back when. A buggy, unstable, clearly not properly tested, unperformed mess that I would not wish upon my enemies. Glad to see it has improved to usable now, but that it is better than any other Linux distros, I can't say how considering even being on par with e.g. Fedora would have been a miracle not to long ago.
Happy to admit that purely on the UI/UX, ChromeOS is very solid in my opinion, arguably and subjectively the most consistent and user friendly designed desktop environment I know. Far more consistent than anything MSFT or Apple have provided in quite some time, everything looks like it should, placement is easy to grasp and reliable with a clear identity. Consistency wise, only Gnome can hold a candle to the strictness with which the ChromeOS team execute their vision, though there is the clear divergence in the Gnome team pushing new UX innovations and concepts even if they are controversial and may need to time to learn, whilst the ChromeOS team seems purely focused on the most clearly easy to master approach one can take.
/s
Emphasis on AI and connecting to your phone. How many Iceland trips do students make?
Source: My wife works IT for our school district.
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
If it is both, then all the Neo needs to do is have a browser only mode and goodbye Chromebook market.
8GB of RAM for MacOS is a concern. ChromeOS is probably more RAM efficient..
Based on? Chrome tabs taking up gigs of RAM would make me think ChromeOS isn't going to be very light on memory.
My suggestion, if they really want to go this route, is to shorten it to "gBook".
i'd hate for my computing choice to lack fashion forward qualities -- I wouldn't want to be embarrassed at Gate A-13 with my new Apple perched on my lap proudly while waiting for the next question from my adoring fans.
I hope they appreciate the new color!
real talk : my favorite excuse for using an Apple product throughout my life is the tried and true "my company stuck me with it and I hate this piece of shit.", so I find it kinda fascinating that they're such cult objects -- and to be fair I am sure i'd say exactly the same thing if I was ever stuck in a company stupid enough to try to make me be productive on a fancy chromebook, too.
My 2013 MBP was going strong with Debian until the battery started puffing up last year, and I finally had to recycle it.
I get it, I know I'm not their market, but it still pains me because it was a great laptop.
Of course their market size is going to be smaller when you're leaving out the sub $1000 dollar market.
Jokes aside, there are some games with competent Mac ports and if you only have an M-series Mac, you can find some titles that play nice. But most of the stuff that you’d play on a PlayStation or on Windows is simply not available.
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
And Apple GPUs have only gotten better.
[0]https://techjourneyman.com/img/blog/m1-ultra-vs-rtx-3090-ben...
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.
Slay the Spire 2 is in early access and has some major issues running but I suspect that’s some issues in the game engine because it’s not framerate but some sort of hitching that makes button presses not register.
YapYap which is an intentionally retro ugly 3D style runs barely in a playable state on the M1, but it got me through in a pinch when my kid wanted us to both play.
If I want to play AAA I fall back to my desktop, you can stream using Moonlight or Parsec but unless both sides are wired it isn’t great.
My 16" M1 Max is kinda crap at running games - I'd put it somewhere around cheaper laptops with 3050 series GPUs.
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.
Good point, that could work. Buy this and you get so many years of Gemini for free and such. "Why pay Anthropic $200/month for Claude when you can buy this and get Gemini for free for a few years". OpenAI and Anthropic are not going to make their own devices most likely either to compete.
What makes you think a googlebook will be half the price of a macbook neo?
Also, a used M1 macbook air is $300 on swappa/ebay and will be even better than the neo anyway. It's still more performant than every other non-Apple ARM based laptop/chromebook on the market and will have far superior build quality.
I pre-ordered a Neo on a whim to use as a couch laptop alongside my work laptop and gaming computer. It's so fast. It blows everything out of the water when it comes to interactivity.
Plus the whole build quality, screen, touchpad and speakers are all so much better than the work Latitude. Linux support is lacking, but it's still a full usable Unix.
Of course, there are more than 2 options for laptops. Thankfully those two shit companies didn't get to round up that market yet.
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.
Chromebook Pixel 2013 had that atrocious function key row that didn't align with the rest of the keyboard and where made of different material and had terrible travel. The Pixelbook had some terrible PWDM issues with the display and iirc it also had severe ghosting issues. Not to forget the cut in performance of these mobile fanless Intel chips because of Meltdown & Spectre. I think the Pixelbook's WiFi/Bluetooth module made by Intel also suffered from hardware faults where using Bluetooth could degrade WiFi performance and vice versa.
Beyond that, this is a laptop that is running a really shitty, 'apps only, no you cannot do anything useful with this' operating system. I have an awful lot of complaints about MacOS's relatively restrictive use cases, but it's still at least a General Purpose OS. Android on laptop is very much not.
This is an overgrown phone with all the trash that comes with a phone, and the very finite use cases that come with a phone, only now it has a keyboard. It's solving none of the problems with Android as an operating system and doesn't seem to even be interested in doing that anyway. The marketing is demoing use cases that don't even exist.
So I repeat my question: Who is this for?
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/
Most people don't really seem to care about data collection when it comes to AI usage. A lot of people who will feed Gemini/ChatGPT/Bing/Claude/shady clusters across the internet for bargain bin prices/Mistral every detail of their lives will probably be fine with Gemini as long as it doesn't interfere unnecessarily.
At least one DE I've used (MacOS? KDE?) even had it as an official macro that would make the pointer 10x bigger when you shook it
> 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.
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.
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.
Google Drive would be another option to transfer, but would be more work (about same to "share" as email, but less convenient to access on desktop).
The e-mail way is actually quite convenient since on the desktop you can just download all the photos you sent in one go - they appear as a zip file that you can then just extract to your working directory, rather than having to save one at a time.
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...
I had an instance of it this morning: Claude proposed a shell command containing a URL and it used this format, which is broken in context.
I'm really enjoying reddit just completely roasting the entire concept in the comments.
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.
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.
No, it isn't. If you're making hardware product, sell me hardware thats worth it. No spec sheet, just AI pushing. Chromebook 2.0 where the chromebook was a browser for an OS.
Not for me anyway.
I've been pretty skeptical of Google laptops ever since.
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.
Please take a look at poor countries of the world like Pakistan. They have a repair culture. They have vehicles from the 80’s out on the road doing daily driving work instead of being used as vintage show pieces. It’s a poor country, this is a necessity. But nevertheless seeing the repair culture there in contrast to the disposable culture in the western world makes me pause.
Here in Mexico there are plenty of "unofficial" laptops/mobile (Apple, Windows, Androids) repair shops that even receive your device by DHL/UPS, fix it and return it. Because the labor costs are low enough to make it worth. The only downside is that most of the spare parts are imported from the US.
And a consumer usually has a much higher return from working in his specialized field to earn money and buy a new product, then spend time with difficult repairs of a broken product.
I'd add that experiences like GP help expose that the main difference in most products between 'premium' and 'disposable' is in the branding and the price tag. With few exceptions, most companies that used to make the respected brand of the thing (e.g. Sony, G.E., Craftsman) now churn out the same garbage as you used to find 30 years ago in a fleamarket with a brand you'd never heard of - and that's if they don't actually outsource the design and/or production to that low-bidder company and simply license their logo directly to them.
And that's because these are all public or PE-owned companies, and it's a shortcut to easy short-term quarterly growth if you can cut your costs while keeping your price high or almost as high (after all, you're a "Premium Brand" so you can leverage your past reputation to trick customers into continuing to pay that premium).
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.
And the reason people want to leave certain countries is for totally different reasons than not wanting to repair something. In fact, I would say with quite some certainty that emigrees who repaired first before leaving would still do it after emigrating.
The real reasons, in my opinion, are: 1) it takes skill and will to repair something yourself, 2) something new generally feels better than repaired/used, 3) logistics make replacing/repairing less cost efficient, 4) with every replace, companies have a new touchpoint to try to upsell their customers, 5) it takes less time to go to a shop and replace than repair, 6) it takes some giving a shit about the environment to prefer the more complicated route. And probably more.
The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor.
Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.
1. The waste is still a tremendous shame, both in the materials that will realistically never be recovered in 'recycling', and in the toxicity that results from a lot of that trash created.
2. Jobs in repairing lots of things were arguably pretty good jobs, and we've traded these for, best case, more complete drudgery retailing/supply chain jobs as we get a new laptop every year or two instead of 5 years. Arguably a bigger failing of our economic system, which doesn't seem capable of adapting to global trade, or this shift we're discussing here, nor AI, but still a bummer regardless of fault.
It requires specialized and local labor. For products you can ship back to the assembly line, this can sometimes work. If you need a local technician, on the other hand, because the assembly line is in China or the product is heavy, yeah, it very well may be that there is no niche where repairs aren’t a material fraction of a new product.
Given the right guidance and difficulty level, I would enjoy fixing things in my washing machine.
I think in abundant society people would be able to have nice things and the time to take care of them.
No, it's the exact opposite, because the consumer is on the hook for the purchase price as well as any repair costs.
Labor is an input too. Fixing something in a way that saves some materials, but requires hours of skilled labor and specialized equipment doesn't straightforwardly mean you're saving overall.
When our fridge stopped fridging, we got it fixed for $300: this included replacing the compressor and the coils. When our dishwasher stopped washing, we paid $250 to have 3 or so things fixed at once. And so on.
I don't know if any appliance makers offer this, but if LG still offers it when we eventually replace, they're going to be on the top of my list.
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.
The rose-tinted era of things being made to last never really happened. For each of the old survivor washing mashines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and Casiotron wrist watches that are still out there doing good work, countless thousands of others were recycled or landfilled because it was better to buy something different than to fix the old one.
It was never cheap to pay someone to work on stuff. The costs of hiring professional labor and the overhead associated with that labor (for service techs, that means things like vehicles, buildings, inventory, tools, training, insurance, book keeping, and covering next week's paycheck even if this week was slow) have always been expensive.
Parts have always been relatively expensive, too. Availability of parts has always been somewhat hit-or-miss.
It seems like an unpopular opinion, but I don't think it came to this. Instead, I think that it started off this way, and that it simply remains this way today.
So, sure: $150 for a new widget? Not so bad. Maybe a pro could get it done in a few hours (maybe they can even get two of them done in one workday!), while perhaps it will take you a day or two to work through R&Ring this thing on your own for the first time.
Whether the total investment (including time) is worth it to you is a personal decision, but that kind of decision-making is also not new. :)
Unlike a lot of hardware and such in our homes, this mostly just boils down to people refusing to learn and is incredibly easy to remedy. Basic stitching is not super difficult. My partner has very light knowledge of stitching, learned it mostly as a kid and never used it much, but has repaired plenty of my clothes. I'm wearing stitched jeans as we speak (pocket got caught on a hook and tore nearly off). Typically gives my regularly worn clothes an extra year or two of life.
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.
It's a total disaster and I will never buy Google hardware again.
Love their SaaS offerings though!
If anything, Apple is in general the worst on this particular metric. Switching to Apple because you had a repairability problem with another brand is kinda funny.
Are there stories where Apple straight up said they wouldn't repair a watch? I thought they'd repair it even if the repairs were more the the replacement value.
https://9to5google.com/2024/07/12/chromeos-lacros-ending/
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.
It was my travel laptop for at least 5 years.
It was expensive, but the quality, performance, and durability was top tier. And it lasted 5+ years.
The Pixelbook also had a "Google Assistant" button built in the keyboard. Should be easy enough to relaunch the hardware and swap in a gemini button...
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.
Has any of this changed?
Also, I tend to take with a grain of salt any comment that starts with "it's easy/simple/obvious", especially if it doesn't provide details or a link.
I've repaired my MacBooks multiple times before (although not one in the last seven years, so maybe they are totally unrepairable, but I doubt it).
The main issue is that Apple will want to replace everything to avoid you coming back and saying it didn't work, when it's actually a different issue.
I understood the technical need for soldered on memory (physical limitations of SODIMM got in the way of power and speed requirements), but the soldered on SSD is just inexcusable considering flash memory is very much a wear item.
I have a macbook but my father had dropped my m1 air (which my brother has gifted me) accidentally from his car on literal straight concrete bricks from a considerably high height.
The damage is literally close to none aside from just a very small bump* but later I realized that if it was any other laptop then it would've been smashed to pieces but Apple's aluminium body came into clutch.
I am not much of apple's fan but I wish to give credits where its due and so from my anecdotal evidence it wouldn't have been the case with atleast my mac air.
This thing is crazy light, has a decent battery life and survived quite a high damage with tis but a scratch. Credits where its due to Apple hardware engineering.
I don't wish to oversell apple tho but from my anecdotal evidence, it handled pretty good in real life stress test and I am super happy with it surviving that drop with almost literally no difference, so there's that.
"AppleCare+ covers fall and accidental damage (drops, cracks, liquid) for a reduced, fixed service fee per incident. It offers unlimited incidents (or up to two per 12 months, depending on the plan), providing a significant discount over out-of-warranty repairs. A service fee, such as $29 for screen repairs, applies"
I will never trust them with a hardware purchase ever again.
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.
Which matches what they did with Nest, keeping the hardware name but having everything live in the Google Home app.
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.
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?
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.
Have you interacted with the 'general public' in the last year or so?
Every non-technical person I know uses AI for 'fact checking' now, as well as 'doing the math' before deciding something, despite these two literally being the well known blind spots of modern AI. People have adopted AI suspiciously cleanly into their habits and workflows.
The only person I have seen being weary of AI recently is a labor activist, for good reason.
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…
Advertising aimed at the actually rich is usually more about saving time, "elevated" experiences, or building legacy.
This really just feels like an incremental upgrade to ChromeOS, with a new name to distance it from a brand that's synonymous with "cheap crap schools give to kids."
For me, unless you can run LLM's and whatnot locally (which is not the case on this undisclosed low-end hardware), "AI" just means doing some API call to a web service and have it serve me some freshly made up tokens. You can do that on a potato. The fact that they happily announce something that can be done on any other cheap-ass laptop as the main selling point, means this product is nothing special at all.
"1. Check responses. Internet connection required. 18+."
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.
If so, there likely will be some variation in the cases.
Built for Gemini?? No thanks.
Ie the other day I wanted to track my clipboard history, and I preferred to trust a locally coded & executed AI-generated clipboard history mac app over a random github project.
Now obviously trusting AI has its own concerns vs trusting people, but interested in other ways companies will reimagine interfaces with AI
Care to elaborate? I have no ide a what you're talking about here.
Why are these features compelling? I went through the whole page and still don’t know what OS runs on this laptop… the value prop for this is incredibly unclear.
[0] https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en
Edit: Probably Android at the core, and then a desktop-grade Chrome browser on top.
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.
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.
Google loves to just remake the same-ish thing again in hopes of adoption.
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?
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.
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 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.
For reference:
> Cameras aren't yet supported.
> Android devices are supported over USB, but other devices aren't yet supported.
> Android Emulators aren't yet supported.
> Hardware acceleration isn't yet supported, including GPU and video decode.
> ChromeVox is supported for the default Terminal app, but not yet for other Linux apps.
Source: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en
They should design one for users.
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 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.
That said, Googlebook is a terrible name and reusing Pixelbook would have been way better.
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.
My Gobbledygook works just fine
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 am saying that, as a developer (is it really only 1% of laptop owners?), the pixel/chromebooks were not really that useful.
Who knows, maybe that's changing with whatever OS this is running.
People do this when the system is stuck or something is not working for some reason, and this will just add extra burden when that happens.
It's such a bad idea that I can see Microsoft immediately adopting this! (Opens up three variants of copilot, one deprecated and spins without getting the API handle right.)
But... Google owning my hardware? This feels so out of left field. I must not be the target audience.
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.
Also, I find it funny that they have burned through the "chromebook" and "pixelbook" branding already, leaving them with the less snappy "googlebook." Not sure if the third time's the charm here.
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.
Well, I am still waiting for the price. If it is $450 or higher, I'd just get a MacBook Neo at that point.
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. The Snapdragon is very competitive with Apple's M5 even including single core performance and battery life.
Except given their recent behaviour I have very little trust that they won't execute that in the most user hostile fashion they can come up with.
I personally would want to also be able to switch off the telco signal.
Perhaps the bay would be in the laptop screen itself and the two screens could operate side-by-side - or in the main body and the phone would go dormant.
Such a nice Latop!
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 day an exec will say lets reduce wasteful projects and cut this.
Zero chance in hell this surveillance device comes into my home.
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.
- 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.
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.
Nobody wants AI embedded into the OS spying on you every move.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED how bad google is at copywriting, and it clearly not mattering.
What kind of hard drugs are they doing at Google?
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.
From TrendForce's analysis:
"The laptop market's 2026 shipments have been revised down from the previously expected annual growth of 1.7% to -2.8%, and further adjusted to -5.4%. Brands with highly integrated supply chains and more flexible pricing, such as Apple and Lenovo, have more flexibility to handle rising memory prices. However, low-end and consumer laptop brands face difficulty passing on costs and are constrained by processor and operating system requirements, making further spec reductions difficult."
Google can obviously just make this machine more expensive, but to launch a completely new brand of consumer laptops in a year where production is already very constrained is only going to exacerbate the core issue.
"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?
> 1. Check responses.
Eh sure. Everyone will totally check the vibe coded "widget". Is this really all that's necessary to discount all responsibility when that widget deletes your disk and kills your grandmother?
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.
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
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.
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?
Meanwhile, I have 64GB in my latest Thinkpad (fortunately this was ordered before the RAM price increase), because with 16GB in the Thinkpad before that, Firefox and Chrome tabs would eat up all the memory...
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.
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.
Any one would be a slightly bad sign for quality, all five are awful.
Yet another product range with lots of options, but not a single good one.
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?
I hate AI.
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
Plus the fact that they’ve clearly just ripped off the exact shape of a MacBook, but thicker and shitter.
Launch blog post up top perhaps: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111082)
- it's owned by Google. Google is the worst tech company out there to trust your data
- it has AI all over the place. Overuse of AI depresses me. And a laptop is something very personal to me. I don't want to be depressed every time i open my laptop
- the "files" functionality is cloud-based. That's insane. I don't want my files in the "cloud". I want a file system
I run linux, and still own Macs (because their hardware is great on laptops). Of course I'm not the target audience. But still.