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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.
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.
I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo, and if i wanted a non-gaming expensive one i'd get a macbook pro.
I really don't see the market fit for this, I guess the android integration. But my god, I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook". Believe it or not, these things matter a lot, particularly if you're trying to target a young audience.
I 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.
Google seems to have made an official post on Reddit describing the feature set in detail:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb8xls/introducin...
[Edit]
And, the feature set references the 'AI mouse pointer' from this Deepmind blog..
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.
So I repeat my question: Who is this for?
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
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.
How long will this be supported until it is in the google graveyard though?
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.
Love the confidence of launching a teaser page with zero specs. I’m not emotionally prepared to be marketed to before I know how much RAM it has.
Google basically said “here’s a mysterious glowing rectangle” and expected us spec junkies not to immediately start clawing at the walls for a datasheet, and losing sleep for weeks on end until we get them.
Indulge some pedantry with me... Why "Googlebook?" Pixel was meant for first-party computing devices, I thought. Nest for smart home and Fitbit for fitness trackers.
If you don't want to associate with past Pixelbooks and want to highlight Gemini, why not Geminibook or something like that? Does Google not have faith in the Gemini branding?
Random thoughts from a nerdy mind.
> "Intelligence is the new spec."
Oof.
Very upfront: "Don't pay attention to RAM, processor, battery, monitor, price, etc. We're not telling you that, because you'd laugh. We're selling access to web services. Lower your expectations, get excited for AI. Please clap".
Very rough. Moore's lesser-known cousin, Les, predicted transistor density-per-dollar would actually start to decrease over time. I guess Google's ready for that world?
And even the most virulently pro-AI people I know aren't using any of these services Google is trying to market as sexy. Who is this for? "Make a band poster for my kid", could they have chosen a sadder example?
It doesn't help that the first result on Google for "Google book" is Google Books. Even their "AI overview" is helpfully telling me about the specifications and pricetags of books on Google Books.
Awful branding aside this will be dead within 3 years.
MacBook neo @ $499 and the ability to finance it leaves almost zero room in the US market for an Android laptop.
*edit
It looks like will be a ChromeOS successor and their demographic will be schools?
I sooooo want to buy it and have every single keyboard stroke, mouse and eye movement tracked.
I don't know about you but these AIs ran out of internet data to train and I volunteer all my blood, sweat, tears and movements to improve them.
Off topic i know but, who goes from SF to Tokyo for a 6 day "vintage shopping trip" ? Who do they think their audience is here?
It looks great. If the price is good, I think it will sell well. The only thing holding it back is Google’s own reputation of canceling things so rapidly.
> Intelligence is the new spec.
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.
Magic Pointer requires the user to be 18+...
"1. Check responses. Internet connection required. 18+."
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…
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."
"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?
I just want a good working Desktop Mode (Dex etc) for my Android phone, my phone is already powerful enough, I don't need another computer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is Google reacting to:
- laptop manufacturers and customers preferring Linux over Googles os shenanigans
- Apple Unified Business Platform, that is going to take an enormous piece of the enterprise pie
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.
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
To me, everything about this seems AI-generated. What else but a LLM could have come up with these features and the name?
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.
I can't invest in Goolge products. I always feel like they're going to pull the plug or change the terms, pricing model etc.
I guess it will be running Google's new operating system (a "modern OS designed for Intelligence") that combines elements of Android and ChromeOS.
Edit: Probably Android at the core, and then a desktop-grade Chrome browser on top.
Can't wait to see the rooting hacks resulting from mousing over a strawberry and text saying "count the r's".
Chromebook, Pixelbook, Googlebook.
Google loves to just remake the same-ish thing again in hopes of adoption.
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?
See you soon... https://killedbygoogle.com
“As computing shifts from operating systems to intelligence systems…”
That framing is probably directionally right. But if that’s true, why rethink the laptop instead of rethinking human-computer interaction itself?
A cloud-native laptop made sense 15 years ago because the browser became the platform. Today, AI agents are increasingly the platform: they already operate across devices, apps, and operating systems.
I’m not convinced the future is a new kind of cursor or seamlessly moving apps between phone and laptop. If I can describe a workflow in natural language and have an agent compose tools dynamically or even generate a bespoke app/UI on demand then the traditional boundaries between OS, application, and device don't really matter.
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.
In practice I find the Gemini models to be the worst for coding and design.
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?
Just a little too late for school. The product probably doesn't even exist. They're screaming bc of the Nep.
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.
Hey Google: please control my computer.
This is really cool (although they could've recycled the Pixelbook brand). I hope there'll be a way to dual boot Windows 11 on this.
For a split second I thought this was a joke/commentary on Google and Facebook.
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.