So this is essentially Android desktop mode with Android 17 Gemini integration.
Please get rid of that top panel. I just don't get why this and desktops like GNOME tries to copy macos top panel when clearly in macos it is menu bar that host app menus but that concept doesn't exists in these other desktops and yet they have a top panel. This is just bad UX.
This will follow same model as Chromebooks i.e different devices from different OEM partners and for x86 and arm. So soon someone will be able to create a generic ISO for this that you can boot on a standard x86 PC/laptop.
Samsung is also working on such devices but they will probably have Dex which is much better then the current Android desktop mode.
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'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for?
The primary difference between a Chromebook and a Googlebook appears to be the ability to run LLM's locally.
The requirements were spelt out at Google I/O. They boil down to a 40 TOPS NPU and a minimum of 16GB of memory. They appear to be trying to match Apple's M series memory bandwidth using software compression. ChromeOS didn't need an NPU and specified a minimum of 4GB of memory. Aluminium OS looks to have the same relationship with its LLM as a Chromebook did with Google Chrome, and needs the hardware to power it.
If they pull it off you will get GPT-4 performance, running locally.
As for who this is for: your guess is as good as mine. But if their replacement for crostini works (crostini is so hopelessly unreliable it felt like it never got out of beta, so it's a big if), even the minimum specs would be a very good Linux laptop.
i can kinda see it, they spent a lot of time getting Gemma 4 pretty efficient and then seeing everyone buy macs to run them and realize it’s maybe a real moat since Apple doesn’t make any AI
Would be an interesting product if it could actually give you GPT performance locally, will be an awful experience if it’s essentially just cloud AI…like a premium laptop where most of the features are locked behind a subscription would be wild
> 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.
Android 16+ offers a built-in integrated Linux VM that can be enabled from Developer Mode, and if this[0] third-party site is accurate, "Android on laptop" will have it enabled by default.
So it should not be too different from working on a Windows laptop with WSL2, or on an OSTree distro where you use distroboxes to work with non-sandboxed programs.
(fwiw, I would still refuse to have one of these for personal use because Google is a shameless data robber. Unless someone were to de-google Aluminium like LineageOS and GrapheneOS did for Android, but that would probably take years.)
No idea. The people that have no need to run real software and want a high end device probably have an iPad with a keyboard case. Those that want a low end device have a chromebook.
Yeah, a Chromebook's killer 'feature' is that it's web browser attached to a keyboard and functional screen for cheap on a platform that you can't otherwise screw up.
If you price that up to $1,000 (which some Chromebooks definitely do), then I start to ask a variation of the same question: Why did you buy that?
every large corporation is going to come out with a hardware device in the next 12 months where you don't directly use applications, where the AI acts as an intermediary
openai, anthropic, meta, google, all of them
even you will want one of these devices, probably (not saying this is a positive development in the world)
And every one of these ‘AI first’ laptops will be cancelled in a couple of years when generative AI is no longer the hot new thing and end users realise its severe limitations.
Would prefer a 'Google Linux'—a native desktop OS with a unified UI philosophy, similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility.
The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly. Resurrecting Web Intents as 2-way App Intents would be the key to making this work.
Also, keeping prompts as local .md files with an Obsidian-like system editor would be a huge win for power users. Simply gating Gemini behind 'premium' Chromebooks feels like the old 'licking the cake' strategy from the Google+ days—trying to force a new product's success by coopting existing hardware rather than building a superior platform.
I can imagine having Gemini + local Gemma working with Agents, which have access to my e-mail (ideally on GMAIL, but also supporting outlook), keeping local history of my visited sites and messages... and using RAG or something even better, ideally with looking also on repos I have checkouted to my file system, and maybe even whole file system....
Work related e-mail about "sending invoice to customer"... it may suggest proper content for e-mail. Having "dashboard" with summary of todays communication to you, your tickets (at work) and so on....
Can Google build such thing? If somebody can - it will be them. Will they build it? Probably not, they would prefer to build 3rd version of Google Pay.
> The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly. Resurrecting Web Intents as 2-way App Intents would be the key to making this work.
I think for something like this, it will only work if you can allow you local files to get messed up by the LLM but then, because everything has been synced to the cloud, there's a safe "revert" option.
I'd love that built on a Linux foundation too, but realistically reckon if they're going down that path they've got the core of "all your app state can be backed-up/transferred" already in Android so they'd likely lean heavily on that.
> similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation.
From a security perspective, this cannot exist. MacOS is fundamentally superior to classical GNU/Linux distros. Android/ChromeOS are the only Linux systems that make a serious attempt to close that gap.
I think the closest thing I can imagine is a system that goes all in on a Snap/Flatpak type platform (basically, like Fedora Silverblue, plus throw ~50 million dollars at fixing all the sandboxing, improving the SELinux policies or whatever, cranking up the system integrity story, getting some kernel hardening in place, stuff like that). With Google's funding I do think that's technically viable, I would love to see it. But, I dunno if it would count as "standard Linux foundation". And, kinda a weird thing to do for a company that's already spent billions over the last 20 years to build several existing Linux OSs.
(BTW, this is a totally security-brained take. I do actually run classical GNU/Linux on all my personal computers, the fact that it's a fundamentally insecure OS doesn't actually bother me that much. But I don't think Google can realistically ship a "product" like that. If it really took off and gained the kinda adoption they are presumably hoping for, it would honestly be quite irresponsible of them).
Reading comments like this makes me feel like I live on a different planet from some people.
The Coral USB dongle is from 2019 - it is a dev kit, not a souped-up edge inference unit. It was not designed to compete with the Macbook Mini (???) and is not some sort of touchstone or landmark in AI development. It's a tiny TPU that Google made to prototype technologies for their own SOCs like Google Tensor later down the line.
I mean, I'm sure they absolute could build it and do a great job of it, but their incentives are all aligned to having you use web apps or buying from their store. A real linux would be absolutely counterproductive to those goals.
I can't see how this would be meaningfully different from ChromeOS. Google cannot force GNOME and KDE to stop clashing, there's no opportunity to "unify" the UI philosophy of Linux any better than the current efforts do. And upstream Linux has no big selling point for most users - the people that do care about that stuff will typically avoid Google's distro altogether.
If you want an upstream Linux kernel with folders of markdown prompts and virtualized ChromeOS/Android containers, just use Linux. You don't need to wait for Google to build that experience for you.
I bought a Pixelbook during the middle of their product lifetime, and it was one of the best laptops I ever had. I genuinely don't know how broadly that sentiment was shared, but the cancellation of the product line suggests "not that broadly." Google has changed since that time and I am a bit skeptical this will meet that specific niche for me.
Yeah, I had the original Chromebook Pixel and the Pixelbook and they were both great. Somehow I'm still using the Pixelbook today and it chugs along.
That said, its hard to justify the prices for these premium Chromebooks. When I picked them up they were heavily discounted with some developer code or other.
I also agree with the shaky future as far as being able to actually opening these things up with developer tooling. It seems like they've simply been on a path to rollback all of that.
I recently replaced my Pixelbook with a Lenovo Chromebook Plus. I don't like the increase in size/weight, but it's far more performant and Lenovo periodically has steep discounts on their hardware.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Example: Point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting, find good spots to meet up, or draft a reply.
This is actually a good use case for AI. My university sends a lot of newsletters with several events in free text format; all I want is to be able to select one of them, have an LLM parse the title, date, location, and category, and put it in my calendar.
Still, I'm sceptical this will work. Samsung phones supposedly have this same feature, and it works 1/10 of the times. Pasting it to ChatGPT and tell it to add the events to my calendar works fine, but the bottleneck is always the project managers in charge of the UI. Of course, having a small local model and being able to choose my own right-click items like I could in 1995 would be an actual solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do that all the time with my iPhone and my windows machine, sadly. Still not a particularly compelling feature, just speaks to how sad our modern ecosystem is.
I feel like very much not the target market for this. Tokyo Vintage Shopping Trip? LOL
I got mad when I bought a Chromebook thinking it was a cheap laptop I could install any OS on only to find it was boatloader locked and the model I bought hadnt been cracked yet. Say nothing of all of Google's recent practices with Android. This whole thing just sounds like the plague.
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.
Damn... ~1min in he verbally asks to put the 2 ingredients on the list.
Like... my dude that's way even slower than drag&drop the text on a light right next to it!
Same later on about changing the calendar appointment from whatever to 8pm... he is behind a desktop with a mouse, just input the number or click on the arrows to adjust.
I bet some people will mention that those are "just" simple to understand examples or that it's great for accessibility ... but it's not. It's not reliable enough for complex cases and not reliable enough for accessibility. So... yes JUST basic examples that are slower than other means.
PS: I did prototypes using voice and pointing in XR and yes that paradigm IS powerful, it's just being multimodal.
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.
Also, P.S: Not to say that clothing/shopping is the primary use case, but I know plenty of women who use AI for clothes/fashion/interior decoration etc related tasks.
What feels already like old history is that Apple made a generous deal to OpenAI based on the premise that their AI could do the claims.
Apple engineers spend months trying to prompt engineer their way, thinking the prompter is at fault if the soon to be AGI system diverged. Some of these instructions were trending out there, as reveals of how naive Apple was at the time.
They could be traced from the device's logs so not so much of a leak: Don't hallucinate, strictly follow instructions, followed by all sort of refined predicates, appended as if an LLM had reason
Then Apple released a paper to warn everyone (well, a few, and to save face) that we are getting fooled.
I had a similar reaction from in-law family members. The main reason was that they wanted to be able to see the ads that unlocked more gameplay time on their free game.
Just feels crazy to me, but I guess that's what addiction looks like.
EDRi is in the minority, the EFF is in the minority, and so on. But someone has got to fight the corps, they can’t be the only ones dictating what’s socially acceptable.
Ditto. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she was clicking on the damned things, but then I’d never thought to ask “hey, how did you find out about this useless Chinese plastic crap that lives in a drawer and is never used”.
This. This is why "sync your files and cast your apps with 0 installs" are even being sold as features.
Normies HATE customizing their devices. Children will literall reach for AI instead of search engines when they just want to change a background image.
Jailbreak is a slur for "Installation" that tech companies want to keep that way.
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.
let's be clear: Google is a titan because they successfully sold ads to people who sold to you. We were never the target market beyond building a monopoly on eyeballs, and it's questionable if their ad empire continues. Outside of that they've had very few successes, and while traditionally the hardware is high quality, the bundled services and level of enshitification now is a no-go for my family. If you're buying into the single vendor for the rest of your life, the choice is currently Apple IMO, because they're "least bad".
Why wouldn't I use AI to shop for clothes? I'm not much into fashion, but I could see using AI to help me search for a winter parka that meets my needs, for example.
And I did use AI recently when shopping for a car. After doing a bunch of research on my own, I decided why not try feeding my criteria into ChatGPT and see what it recommends. And it did actually recommend a couple of models that I had not previously considered, including one that I ended up considering very seriously.
I also pointed it towards some used listings and asked questions like "does this listing have ventilated rear seats" - and it was able to respond that it likely doesn't, and told me where to look for the controls in photos to verify for certain. I probably could have figured out on my own with a bit of digging, or else contact the seller, but this was a pretty quick and easy way to get the information I was looking for.
Is that gross?
I didn't look too closely at the Googlebook, so I don't know why I would use that instead of just an app on my MacBook. But at some point when competent models can be run on comodity hardware I think hardware and OS-level support for AI will definitely become a selling point for me. We're just not quite there yet.
I guess the pragmatic answer is that you don’t need AI for that. You need good filters. I don’t like Zalando one bit, but I’ll grant them that it’s easy to find the right clothes on their website because they have very good filters.
LLMs don’t ‘know’ if a pair of jeans is a tapered slim fit with a gusseted crotch, at least not by default. But if the brand uploaded them as such, the filters will find them.
That’s just a quick take. I’ve tried to shop with LLMs and the results are mediocre at best. Of course search, filtering, and content tagging could always be improved, instead of “just slap AI on it”.
Given how Search-Engine-Optimisation (SEO) has been gamed, what will make you think that somehow this NEW system, that's really prone to prompt hacking & already promotes sponsors' products over alternatives, won't be?
Nobody is picking their laptop for the best AI integration. You can do those things just as well on every other platform. In fact, additional AI integration is universally a turnoff to most normal people.
My terse answer to, 'Why not use AI to shop for [X]' is that if you are letting AI do the shopping for you at any level, you aren't actually distinguishing products by features or quality or it's ability to solve a problem. You are being fed junk that is likely paid to be moved to the top of the list.
It's probably a nice feeling when you can put in a list of soft requirements to ChatGPT et al and get a list of things it recommends, but I would suggest you are a fool if you think those listings aren't bought and paid for.
In an era where the gap between a 'good product' and a 'bad product' is growing ever larger and the price is not an indicator of anything, the onus to actually become knowledgeable re: "How to identify products worth buying" is becoming greater and greater. If you are using AI to do the shopping for you, not only are you not building that muscle, you are actively weakening it as a chatbot convincingly recommends something to you based on unverifiable platitudes about 'quality' and 'value' - a recommendation that was, again, bought and paid for.
So yeah, that's gross and I would argue pretty strongly that it's just as brain rot adjacent as something like Tiktok. Like Tiktok though, I expect it will see at least some level of popular use, and also like Tiktok, I think it'll end up making the population dumber on average.
> 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
I don't know what world you live in but I personally know at least 4 people (all female interestingly) who regularly use ChatGPT to give outfit advice and when clothes shopping. One has manually taken photos of clothes laid out separately so she can put different combinations into ChatGPT and ask if they work together.
I work routinely from coffee shops. Literally like 80% of people on their laptops have Claude or ChatGPT open when I glance over. Listen, I do think AI still has a LONG way to go to be the automation & productivity utopia we so desperately crave, but underselling its usefulness is just silly at this point.
I used to be vehemently against AI coding just a few years ago, because the hallucinations were a deal-breaker. However, these days, most of my code is written using AI. It's still very "corporate junior" so it takes constant tweaking, hand re-writing, or total re-architecting, but it's leaps and bounds better than what it was. And I find myself working on the interesting parts: product, user experience, novel algorithms, etc.
Sry to say this, but I honestly just want a working shopping AI model.
I want to make a picture from me, add perhaps height and one or a second other metric, then i want it to generate styles for me, finetune it with me and then it helps me buy it.
I'm waiting for this for ages as i HATE shopping but I would find it nice to look better.
Nonetheless, when I saw this page for the first time, i was very impressed with the case not with anything related to softeware. Might be a second type of device which might be a good alternative to an apple product. Framework and now this (perhaps)
If such an AI shopping thing existed, I wouldn’t trust it to do a good job. We consumers probably wouldn’t pay enough for it in enough volume to be the customers (Are you a Stitch Fix subscriber? Why not?). The fashion brands would be the customers and we’d be sold to them. The AI tools would tell you and show you that your skin tone really works well with a shirt from $BRAND who bid the highest that day, and the brand that can afford to do that won’t be one with low margins (aka: a good deal), it’ll be one with high margins, and that means some combination of cheap construction and high price.
If giving the customer more filter/searching power was something companies wanted, Amazon's search result page wouldn't be like visiting a flea market.
I'm pretty sure what Decart is building does exactly what you want.
I saw a demo - it took you, put a piece of clothing on you, and showed in realtime how that clothing moved on your body in the size you'd selected. I think it even picked the size.
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 just shows how bad search engines have become. About 15 years ago you could type fully worded questions into Google and would be pointed to the exact sentence of a website that answers your question. I happened so slowly, we were all frogs in boiling water.
An the same will happen to AI. We will remember these days as the golden age for AI, where you weren't required to prompt an AI three times before it answers with a non-ad response.
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.
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.
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?
Heh when I came to this country I was overjoyed to see that they had a "Big & Tall" store. Until I realized they actually meant the conjunction there...
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.
Researched men's sneakers last night. Super conflicting TMI for my odd size so going to a store for human sizing and gait evaluation. Info on durability was complete garbage. Suspicious about tuning for favored brands but AI recommended shoes will have the edge in my purchase decision since I've done some research.
I recently used AI to shop for clothes. A T-shirt I liked and wanted more of had doubled in price due to tariffs, while some shorts that needed replacement had been discontinued. AI helped identify alternatives with comparable fit and fabric that were respectively domestic and available, which would have been a much bigger hassle pre-AI.
You scrape sites, okay, but what's "ai" got to do with that (I assume ai means chat bots in this context?)
I'm genuinely curious, whatever you're doing sounds cool, but more details beyond the buzzword pitch you'd tell your manager would be welcome on a hard technical site like hn?
(ftr, I'm skeptical of all applications of machine learning, but I keep experimenting with all the various kinds of it, generally with no good result; last real-world useful [to any extent] ml model I tried was BASnet, but whatever you tinkered out sounds cool and if it actually scrapes and filters clothes the way you describe, that'd be quite cool [perhaps even product worthy…?], cuz there are way too many clothes online to look at all of them manually and then esp. on fast fashion sites, there are oftentimes reviews you want to be wary for that indicate low quality products… anyway, that just sounds impossible to automate in my experience, but feel free to prove otherwise)
Imagine you could take a few photos of yourself and a system would find your real-life doppelgangers around the world. Then see what they wear and easily copy them. They get a commission.
Or have shopping items be shown on your twin in a simulated fashion shoot on a doppelganger simulation. It should also show movement, situations and vibes.
Hi. What AI and procedure did you use for this?
I am also looking for good formal clothes that fit my broad shoulders but narrow waist than typical mass market clothes shoot for
What were your results? I'm nearly the exact same height with a shorter torso than leg length but super long arms, so I tend to need a medium tall, 36" inseam pants.
I asked Gemini for help with something similar recently and it just made up a bunch of stores and items. When I pointed it out it said sorry and that it won't do it again. Then it did it again.
Hilariously I've done something similar for the same reason. Medium shirts/sweaters are generally too short on me but large sizes feel baggy. I only travel occasionally to the US for work, so last trip I had ChatGPU look at several US-based retailers (eg Land's End, LL Bean, American Tall) to see if there was stuff in stock I might want to have shipped to my office/hotel.
Your valid use case doesn't contradict the point that so far most consumer-focused "AI features" are rarely useful and often just get in the way. I'm pretty sure a specific "AI Shopping Feature" wouldn't actually do what you're already doing, or if it did, it would add more steps/distractions than you have now.
Just asking a web search / browser-enabled chatbot, as you are now, is already close to the optimally efficient tool for you. Unfortunately, aggregating results from many disparate retailers into one seller-neutral page filtered down to what you uniquely need today is no longer considered optimally efficient by most web retailers. Just like they erected barriers to stop being indexed by unaffiliated shopping aggregators, most large retailers will try to stop automatic aggregation of their current inventory (or lack thereof).
Sadly, we're now in a post-enshittification world where Amazon's learned removing search features like requiring or excluding terms increases revenue and Google's learned giving you the search result you want first reduces ads served.
I feel the real problem is poor standardized sizing for clothing in store and worse online. I swear every store has their own unique sizes and when it comes to no names on sites like Amazon it's just pure good luck.
As far as this laptop is concerned I feel like it's a repeat of that super expensive chrome book that fizzled out because it was basically nerfed by Google unshockingly. As one of the top posters here if they delivered quality hardware, good Linux and solid Google support and even gapps, this would be an absolute win. instead i can only guess what this is unless I missed any real information on the site it's just a metal Chromebook with extra AI?
I mean, same on the struggle as a tall person, but doing that kind of research is pretty easy even without AI. Just find a couple brands that fit and some shops that sell them and you're pretty much set. I buy almost all my t-shirts from a specific company for tall people now, that I found on amazon by typing in something like "tall t-shirts"
I wonder if for the next period websites will really try hard to prevent scraping (already happening, in some industries very pervasive, i.e. its impossible to get accurate quote for power) until they realize they can sell much more to people using agents.
Or everything just going to race to the bottom like a manufacturer or distributor since it's so easy to find everything anything you need. Kinda already happening with saas companies loosing value while infrastructure is soaring.
AI is good for shopping today because all other platforms are fully enshitified but AI is still in the pre-enshitification phase. It will be infested with ads soon enough. Enjoy it while you can.
And I just came back from Seoul where Gemini suggested local clothing labels I would have never found if I hadn't told Gemini what brands I liked already and to find similar ones. And it was bang-on style-wise (some of the shops were really hidden and out of the way).
You sent Anthropic a picture of yourself and had it generate images of you wearing various articles of clothing and then bought them based on the images that it showed you?
“Just had a baby, generate a shopping list for my registry”
“For each major item on registry, research and recommend the top 3 products. I care about GreenGuard certification. I’m not price sensitive.”
“I’m looking for new shoes. I’ve previously owned XYZ models and here’s what I liked/disliked. Can you recommend shoes I should consider?”
It’s immensely helpful. It replaces what I used to do before which was typically search for “[product] Reddit” and read and sift through a ton of comments.
It’s not perfect but the volume of transactions I’d have to do research for is high enough and the return policies easy enough that it makes mistakes feel much easier to correct.
Tangental rebuttal, but I shop for food using AI every day. Grab app (Asia's equivalent of Uber Eats/DoorDash) has an option "Translate using AI". It (attempts to) translate dishes and ingredients. The app gives a prominent warning (in corporate speak): "these AI translations can be horrendously bad" - and some translations are indeed way off (often hilariously!) but although scrappy, this AI feature is incredibly useful.
Before this feature, I'd have to laboriously screenshot (since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS) then open the screenshot in Google Translate. This only gets you one screen's worth of translations making browsing too arduous.
A shitty AI feature that actually solves a problem is great, whereas a polished AI feature that doesn't is "gross" :)
> since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS
This is all you need to know about mobile to understand we're in a complete duopoly that desperately needs a modern "ma bell" style breakup.
The fuckers who make these devices have zero interest in allowing you to do anything other than spend money with them, of which they will take their cut.
The whole thing feels optimized for trapping users, not enabling them.
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.
Mate I'm in the EU and neighbor has got a statue of big gorilla on his balcony.
The EU is just as consumerist as the US. I can't tell you the number of young dudes who think they look cool because they're wearing a fake Hermes manpurse and who wear a cap as if a videoclip from the 90s from Vanilla Ice just called (don't get me wrong: I love Ice Ice Baby and I read Vanilla Ice is a good person. But it's 2026).
And there have been several EU companies getting funding to create an "AI personal shopper app" (all getting pwned by Google and other big players).
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.
plenty of people are shopping online and in fact they are using the same services that this company provides to them. That is why this type of targeting is affective. Society has grown to a large customer base that is simply what they are everything is for sale. This makes the point that to sell a computer these days they have to imaging you are using it to shop, based on statistics that sad truth usually lies in numbers. How many hours a day is an average American looking for deals or the hottest thing out right now. Newer products are not event glamouring the specs of their devices it simply what you can do with them now that sets them apart from their competitor. Smartphones ads are mostly focused on the camera capabilities and the screen clarity, that is what today's average user is focused on along with how long in a day they can enjoy this new smartphone (battery).
What worries me is how invested in the AI idea these companies are. You can see the great deal of hope they're emphasizing on.Not sure if this will last, but time will tell.
Funny, clothes shopping is actually my favorite personal use of AI.
A while back I was driven nearly insane because I discovered that 90% of hiking pants don't have a rear left pocket. Some clothing designers have some specific vendetta against it that I just cannot figure out. As a user of said pocket who wanted to buy compatible hiking pants instead of changing my pocket usage habits, I wasted hours looking at photos and browsing physical stores to no avail. In the end I just surrendered and let $Skynet suggest some for me, which it happily did immediately.
I don't know which universe you hail from where Google Search would give that information prior to LLMs, but I don't think I came from that timeline.
But if your claim is that no one needs specific hardware to do that instead of just pulling up $Skynet.com, then I completely agree.
> I don't really get why people have the audacity to presume what other people like and do.
Part of this is that we are increasingly in self-selected communities of people just like us. Prior to the Internet and social media, you more often interacted with people that all you had in common with was spatial location and a dash of socio-economic status. It wasn't an unbiased slice of the populace, but it was at least less biased.
But today, it's much easier to have all of your social interactions limited to a social media bubble that reflects yourself.
That in turn makes it really easy to believe that whatever is true for you must be true for everyone because it seems to be largely true for all the people you see on a daily basis.
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.
Someone on HN a few months ago said that they gave up and decided to try Copilot in Outlook, which Outlook kept nagging him to do. He tried the example prompt that the nag screen gave him, whatever it was, and Copilot said 'sorry, I don't have that functionality' or something.
Not only the actual functionality people want is missing, but the functionality they're nagging us to use is missing./
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).
Google is desperately trying to find their place in this brave new world, where the only thing they make well is hosting other people's VMs and LLMs. It is so sad. It was their labs that invented the transformer, yet they failed to capitalize on it. Sure, many people are in a position to have to use Gemini via APIs, myself including, and not happy about it... because it is dirt cheap compared to most all, but still this is not what I would call AI-era domination or even stable presence.
Meanwhile Microsoft and Amazon is eating their cake with Azure and AWS. A whole new generation of smart kids is now starting their day with ChatGPT (not me, I do Claude, but same point), instead of Google... so for many people it is not Facebook nor Google Search where "the internet starts from". This is massive loss. Broadcom is probably going to eat at their push for in-house TPUs. And surely Apple already ate everyone's cake on the affordable laptop with Neo, which is incredible for Apple to do, as they've always been roughly 1.5 the price of windows competitors. And Apple did it years after Google forayed into Chromebook, which this Gemini Laptop basically is version 2.0 of. The moment ads start showing intertwined with GPT output, Google is roast, most their revenue is ad-based, no matter the very strong (and perhaps top) cloud tier and Android licenses. Regarding this - Fuchsia is still not used in any frontier product, and poor Android is so much Java-tied, that it basically lives in the 90s from in a certain sense.
We can only speculate what the reason for this all is, but I'll put a very unpopular bet on Google shrinking massively the next few years into something aggressively robotized which looks more an utility company, than a SOTA research camp. For what is worth IBM was clairvoyant enough to do this shrinking years ago, and now can brave for thousands of COBOL lines being rewritten, and then some layoffs. But IBM has evolved an ecosystem that keeps companies locked in many dimensions, similar to Oracle perhaps, while Google does not.
I think CEOs are so drunk on the shareholder buzz for AI that they think this is also what the customer wants. I love integrating AI into products, but only in a way that is seamless. For example, I did my taxes recently and there was a button to upload my tax pdfs to do a best effort auto-fill of some forms on the tax website. No mention of AI even though AI was almost certainly used for that button, just a simple plain button.
Also product managers. Google has a chromebook brand that will a strong. It feels like someone split off the hardware and software under a different brand to get a promotion...
> The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI.
You may be the wrong gender to market this to, but giant numbers of shops and the space in those shops are devoted to one half of the population in general really liking buying clothes. Going shopping is a leisure activity. Retail therapy is a common phrase.
I also think it's not a great, world-changing, google-scale idea, but I'm probably the same gender as you.
"Going shopping" - exactly. That is a social activity with the primary goal of hanging out in a shop and having a good time. You don't do that at home in front of a laptop. This is a total misunderstanding of what "shopping" fundamentally is about.
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
The Google voice chat integration in android auto is vile currently. You ask it to map something. The map spins up and adds the address quickly. Shortly thereafter, the Gemini agent asks you if you want it to plot the directions? And then it starts bothering you with extra questions like "want me to tell you the weather for your destination or figure out some fun activities?". No, leave me alone and do your job better, please.
I shop for things with AI as well. For example for haircare, or skincare, there is no way to figure out what ingredients are fine in various products. I pulled down 600 shampoos, prices and their ingredients, and made the AI choose which one based on my hair type and what I want.
I have another pipeline that pulls down all the groceries from stores every week in a 3km-radius and then builds cheap, healthy recipes from them, then orders the things I need by how the stores are laid out.
In general I spend about 65% of what I used to, so I think that the incentives for consumers are there.
Wtf. I use OpenAI for all my shopping now. How to match clothing and finding things I have seen.
ChatGPT has helped me with all the wired social things I have no clue about. Like how long should a suit jacket be, what to pair with loafers. And more often than not I buy the things ChatGPT suggest.
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.
Regretfully, search engines and SEO astroturfing have become so bad that one is often forced to rely on AI to sort through online storefronts. I've had to resort to this for several recent purchasing decisions, as web searches didn't reliably surface the options (nor surfaced trustworthy information/reviews)
I use AI to research different options when buying. Eg, I used Google Search AI Mode to search for specific t-shirts with specific attributes. And I found what I was looking for and bought it.
Thanks to AI I did not have to parse through a lot of different vendors and different webpages manually.
I thought similarly, until I actually tried using AI to shop for clothes, now I’m a total convert. It’s like the best possible men’s fashion concierge…
The pressure to turn on the money faucet is very real, and as soon as they do, the AI shopping experiences are going to just mean “run an auction and steer the user to the highest bidder”. Like how Amazon, google, etc all have been doing it for ages. It’s way too profitable for them to ignore.
I think this is probably the wrong group to say people don’t use AI for shopping. Even if only 10% of the world uses AI for shopping, you’d likely find 8% of them active in this group.
Really? I must be hallucinating the multiple people I know who do this here in Portugal. Clothes, random parts for stuff they need. They just point a camera and ask for it, often iterating. They clearly prefer the chat interface that somewhat also limits their choice, instead of the plethora of ad-filled websites that are hard to navigate. I'm aware this poses several problems we will need to solve, but it's still happening.
Related: Bar some of my somewhat AI-resistant friends and some older relatives, almost everyone I know (including college students I teach to, my dad, friends, non-tech co-workers...) no longer uses google as their first choice (they do fallback to it if they need to). They all use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Used to be just ChatGPT but now there's a relatively equal divide. And an ever-increasing number of them are clearly using AI for pretty much everything else (proof-reading, writing e-mails, building spreadsheets, tiny custom apps for themselves, creating music, images, jokes, memes, photo editing/touch-ups, student evaluation, school material preparation/creation, personal/intimate advice, and much, much more.)
It is especially fascinating to note that, with the exception of AI-assisted coding, there is clearly more AI usage among the non-tech folks, as so many tech people are immensely resistant to using AI for something other than work. It's clearly shifting, though, as I see more and more of those AI-resistant people slowly also using it in their daily lives, as opposed to "only for work".
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?
How is it getting that pricing data? By reading the giant, three-inch-high price labels that are right next to the fruit?
Call me crazy but I don't think that "discovering how much oranges cost" is a big enough pain point for most people to spend hundreds of dollars on smart glasses to solve.
I know plenty of friends into fashion that use and want to use AI features to find fashion, design looks for themselves, etc.
I know this game is 13 years old but had non-gamer friends who are into fashion get addicted to the Covet Fashion game.
Personally I want to use AI for fashion shopping, it just currently sucks. I want to be able to search for very specific things. Example: "women's button down collared shirt with thin vertical red and white stripes and a floral inside collar lining"
gets me a few close results but also gets thick lines, wrong colors, and not a single one actually matched the description.
It's crazy how confident that sounded. I'd bet that energy would have been better spent on asking people instead of assuming that a subjective opinion is representative for anything.
First words "Now Supercharged by M5, [LEARN MORE?]"
*M5*
AI in the fast lane. MacBook Air delivers blazing‑fast AI performance thanks to the powerful combination of the GPU, Neural Engine, and unified memory in M5. With a Neural Accelerator built into each GPU core, AI tasks run with amazing efficiency. From AI image upscaling to running the latest large language models, you’ll be more productive and creative than ever.
As for the fact that corps like Apple backing out of AI marketing, it is because AI itself becomes a negatively connotated term that is no more associated with something great and pleasant - but has become a negaive term people associate with fear of job loss, uncertain future, high computer + RAM prices, rising retail electricity prices, AI slop spam etc etc. We basically approaching AI fatigue to the point of AI hatred - and you do no want to raise those feeling and have them associated with your brand. Apple gets that, others will follow suit.
This has btw. nothing to do wheter or not AI does actually have positive impact on society or not - it is the feelings that matter, not objective facts.
In the mid 90s, one of the main use cases advertised for the Web was sharing recipes. I didn't know anyone who primarily searched for recipes online, clearly those ads were targeted at a different demographic group.
"I don't personally know enough people doing what a mega-corporation with a massive market research team with multiple layers of market research audits has concluded people claims to want, so I'm just going to diss the product"
yeah, any of the AI bots are bad at helping me find clothes b/c they don't even consider my size, gender, or anything when suggesting things after like 3 back and forth messages (this is both ChatGPT and Claude).
I went to the apple.com homepage, literally zero mentions of Apple Intelligence, just a dropdown option under iPhone's menu items.
I know my comment is not useful, but this scenario makes me ill. We have been taught to consume. Forced to consume. Reminds me of that Monty Python skit. "It's only wafer thin." And then we explode. https://youtu.be/MFQuP-DSmGo
You are just misunderstanding the job that it is doing.
It is not "shopping for clothes with AI". It is recreating the dressing room experience from home, and it likely will be a table stakes for online shopping in the near future.
> 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.
Lol. You're really out of touch, aren't you.
That being said, I don't know if people shop with AI would need a laptop for this... what they showed in the ad looks perfectly doable on an iPad. Perhaps this is Google's iPad attempt?
Many people are slowly realizing that AI are the fancy letters this corporations tack on to increase their prices or make it seem better then what is it. Does not improve the experience or anything
Really? I extensively use AI for shopping recommendations now, down to 3d printer filament, I don't touch sites like Wirecutter.
I was even at a shoe store the other day and just took a pic of a whole shelf full of sneakers and asked claude to explain them for my use case (running vs tennis).
It combines research with a buying decision, which most eCommerce sites don't currently do (except for just listing hundreds of reviews)
I dont think you are right. In the near future every purchase and every offer request will go through AI. I imagine you request 1000 offers from similar companies for your product wish. No longer do I need to spend 1 week searching for a good priced painter for my house. My AI does it. Same for all other products. At the same time, companies at the other side need to adapt to this situation and have to use AI to handle the massive amount of requests. Requests can be a real offer. But also crawl results from AIs. The circle is complete. Google wins.
There’s no way this scenario doesn’t get wall gardened off in some sort of way - as the AI SEO market will decimate current AI results in the next 3 to 6 months for sure. The slop is already making organic product hunting impossible.
I asked an LLM to research some clothing options just yesterday and it's done a great job putting together a list of brands and models with the specific parameters I wanted, very quickly.
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.
Went through acquiring game studios. Closed them before they released a single game.
A big part of Stadia failing was it didn't get traction, and a big part of that reason was Google's history of just giving up on products out of nowhere, so very few people were willing to give Stadia money with the risk of everything they bought vanishing. Then, when Google did give up on Stadia out of nowhere, Google said they'd refund everyone everything they spent - the kind of pledge that might have encouraged more people to actually give it a try.
Then again I heard anecdotal stories from a lot of developers that Google was a pain in the ass to work with because they didn't understand anything about working with game studios; it was just "we'll give you X money to bring your game to Stadia" when that money didn't make it worth taking developers away from the platforms they were already publishing to.
There are several AI companies now with billions in yearly revenue that didn't even exist a few years ago. Many more with many millions in revenue. Saying AI doesn't sell is completely delusional. You're in an anti-AI bubble.
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.
Which is weird because Apple Intelligence + Shortcuts is the most underhyped corporate use case for AI. For my money, it’s the quickest and easiest method a non-programmer can use to prompt-build a program that both works and that they can understand.
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.
> 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.
A bit of a tangent here, but the tldr is that I think this has been the case for quite a while.
I don't have any stats to back this up, and maybe someone does and will prove me wrong, but marketing doesnt feel significantly more effective than it was, say, 50 years ago, and yet the main reason every scrap of data about our personal lives is harvested is supposedly for marketing. Maybe it turns out theres just not that much you can do with the data, I'd certainly hope so, but I think a lot of it is just down to the fact that marketing execs don't actually use the data in any meaningful way, like you say marketing to customers they wish they had to buy the idea they were gonna do either way.
Like I remember a decade or so ago, the promise/warning was that advertising and entertainment would seamlessly blend when it can be tailored to exactly you, to the point where people happily and willingly watch advertisements. We got the opposite, adblockers are extremely common, companies have to strong arm you into even looking at their ads, and people count down the seconds until they can press the skip button
I for totally agree with you. I actually think the people disagreeing with you are just exceptions that prove the rule. You are right, nobody is really asking for this. Now, we can't say literally "0%" but what this prove, and we all sort of know, there are a lot of neurotic people out there. But, yes, this is just slop for the vast majority of people.
Theres a similar ad fod chatgpt that is on YouTube and it totally baffles me. It shows a guy lifting weights and then someone typing into chatgpt "can you help me get to 40kg by Xmas" and fhen he goes back to lifting weights again.
What the hell was that?! Chatgpt didnt do anything. The person that made that ad should be fired for gross incompetence
> Check responses. Internet connection required. 18+. Results may vary based on visual matches and are for illustrative purposes only. Sequences shortened.
My next startup will be a company selling cars, with a little disclaimer at the bottom: "Car features not guaranteed to work. Drive infrequently and slowly."
What does this mean? I'm in Australia so I would expect Sept-Nov.
But since I've only ever heard of American companies use seasonal typed release dates, my first instinct is to assume this is an American site and therefore American Spring - but Googling 'spring season usa' tells me Mar-May. And we are already in May.
So then I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see what region this might be in, and it has got Australia selected. I change to UK, scroll to the top, and it has changed to autumn.
So, it is actually Australian Spring. That actually surprises me since most pages like this would not be updated to reflect my region, and so I would never expect this kind of text to be localised.
Let's just all use unambiguous wording and units :)
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.
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.
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.
Googlebook is cringe? It's just the name of the company, calm down.
They used to have something called the pixelbook, which is the most generic name you can possible have. Neither of these names are unarguably better than the other.
If this ends up being great for developing android apps, and running them on the desktop, plus having 15+ hour battery life, it could be interesting. Knowing google, it probably won't though.
I think it's a successor to the Chromebook. In the vast majority of modern K-12 public schools, the school district owns the hardware, not the students.
I recently heard from couple of Technology Directors at schools that they are looking to procure Macbook Neos replacing their Chromebooks. This might be a strategy to defend their Chromebook market in schools.
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 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
I'm a happy Apple ecosystem user. However, there are many more Windows and Android users worldwide.
I think that the appeal of this product is that the Wintel monopoly of years ago is dying. If the Googlebook is well executed (as the Apple M1 line was), it can be an option for Android users who wish to move away from Windows but are not knowledgeable enough to use Linux. I think the only problem here is Google's track record of abandoning product ideas. A new product like this requires multiple iterations to get it right, but if Google abandons it as soon as the results are not what was expected, it will not have the time to mature in areas like gaming or app support.
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.
The problem with cloud gaming is that there's too many ways for it to go wrong and only one way for it to go right.
It's hard to explain to normal people that if you have a stable internet connection and live relatively near to a data center and you buy a dongle and a cat6 cable to avoid any Wi-Fi interference and you enjoy playing certain genres of games but not other genres of games, then you can get a good gaming experience.
You have to be a technical person to understand the failure modes and most people aren't technical, get frustrated, and just say that it sucks. Cloud gaming is not a mass market product.
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.
It seems pretty inconsistent. I tried GeForce Now on my gigabit internet and it was super laggy with a lot of audio glitching. Maybe I just didn't have a datacenter near by.
The main problem now is publishers have to opt their games in to be playable. Until that's solved cloud gaming is a non-starter for me given my current library.
Apple was given a free run by Intel's fab issues. I'm hoping Panther Lake laptops together with Dell's CAMM2 will make Linux on amd64 highly competitive with Linux on the M-series, so maybe months and months - not years and years.
Got a cheap Acer Win11 machine for like $500 last year. I don’t think they even know what the low-end market is like, it is all about getting the most RAM/storage while everything else is reasonable and cheap enough. In which it is really hard to make a profit there because the price is the most important thing
Why anyone would view a non-upgradeable phone slapped into a laptop case with minimal computing capability for the price would ever consider a Neo is beyond me. At that point, get a damn tablet. It’s literally the same thing but, like, designed with intent rather than a bunch of scrap pieces.
Seriously, what’s the draw? The 8 gigs of ram? The 200 gigs of storage? The major lack of ports?
Have you ever touched a Neo? It does not feel like scrap pieces. That is the magic.
A phone has great battery life and standby power management. What’s the problem with running a different OS on it if it works just fine?
Different stuff for different folks I guess. At work all files are on the cloud, I have a NAS and a computer I can remote into for development. A Neo is just perfect to make all of that mobile.
As for tablets, I’d only recommend one if you need a stylus for drawing or a smaller form factor. I think that is the market where the Neo is competing, that is where you have a point.
In local prices, a MacBook Neo is $800 for a 13" display, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage.
A 13" iPad Air with 8GB RAM, 256GB storage and a Magic Keyboard is $1648.
The iPad has a notably more capable CPU, for over double the price.
An Android tablet isn't a capable replacement for a MacBook/iPad. (And I don't know that you can get even get any 13" Android tablet with a reasonable keyboard case for a discount over a MacBook Neo.)
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
>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.
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?
The Googlebook name won't stick around for that long. It'll be like the Nexus and Pixel C, around for 1-3 revisions, canned, then brought back a few years later.
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.
The processing power is there but the actual game support is not, which is the more important part. There are some games that support it but at least 3/4th of my Steam library won't run on a macbook.
Even games which used to run on mac mostly stopped after 32bit support was killed.
So, I'm not usually one to point these out but one of those words is considered pretty offensive by some and I am assuming that was not your intention.
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.
What is more sad is that no one in the Linux world has taken the bull by the horn like those three former Apple engineers who got a license from Arm to design Arm chips why hasn’t anyone taken the leap in the Linux world to make that happen for Linux OS? In short, that isn’t Apples job it’s been 35 years for someone in Linux land to step up to the plate.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
Good. Pixel phones are the single most overrated phone you can get today.
They've managed to convince people to pay $800 (usually with some discounts to be fair) for what's essentially a $400-450 mid range phone. Even if nothing was defective and customer service was "perfect", it's still a midrange phone priced like a flagship.
>I was sent a phone with a defective modem that they refused to replace
To be fair, how would they even verify this? Unless it's outright broken (eg. no cell reception), someone with a "defective modem" is basically indistinguishable from the 99 other people with a perfectly fine phone, but nonetheless want their phone replaced for various nonspecific issues about cell reception.
My experience with Google hardware is that they shipped an update for Pixel 4a that crippled the battery. In Australia, they announced a safety recall due to a discovered battery safety issue, but in the rest of the world, it seems they wanted to save money by crippling people's phones of their own volition without much explanation. But no worries, they're offering 3 methods of compensation: free battery replacement to restore it, $50 cash, or $100 credit for another Google phone.
I went to redeem my compensation - free battery replacement unavailable in your country, $100 credit unavailable in your country. I guess I'll take the $50 cash...? I fill in the form with my IMEI, full name, address, etc etc. After a week they send a response saying unfortunately after thoroughly looking into my case, I'm not eligible, and no further explanation is offered as to why. In effect it's as if they hacked into my phone and installed a virus that cripples the battery and there's nothing I can do about it, like this is just a normal way to do business now. You don't really own your phone after all...
For those wondering why this isn't using the Pixelbook brand, the Reddit post sheds more light.
A Googlebook is something "above" a Chromebook (maybe the AI featureset imposes hardware demands that Chromebooks can't service) but is still made by third parties. I suppose they're keeping Pixelbook for first-party devices.
The most interesting part to me is the "Create your own widget". I'm really interested to see bespoke UI become a first class citizen. Why _can't_ I just ask Gemini to build a widget that serves the data I want how I want it?
Building "small" UI is for the birds, just expose the API and the basics and let users tell the AI what UI they want.
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.
This is not a laptop announcement. This is an attempt at a software announcement disguised as a laptop announcement.
All that's shared about the actual laptop are renders. The website and the video spend much more time and pixels advertising hypothetical software features. The worst part is it's not a hardware announcement, but it's also not even a software announcement since the software is also just conceptual renders and nothing material. It's a website to advertise non-existent software features, running a non-existent google-branded laptop, for the purpose of what exactly?
I can imagine two reasons this website exists today. It exists because someone at Google has seen the possibility of getting a promotion by relaunching Chromebooks, and it was launched today hoping people will hold off a few months on buying the MacBook Neo, to weigh their options once this launches.
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
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.
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.
My wife and I actually went to Tokyo for a vintage shopping trip haha. I went to Shinjuku to buy vintage camera lenses and she went to Omotesando to buy a vintage bag. I mean, we did other stuff besides vintage shopping too, like eating good food, but still.
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.
The ZipAir direct flight can get you a week long trip from SF to Tokyo for ~$750 outside of peak seasons, although I'm not sure what their rates for extra bags are if you were only going to shop.
the last time I went to Japan was I think 2015 and the exchange rate was about 120 yen to the dollar. I bought almost all of the clothing that I wore for the next year or two during a stretch of three days in Tokyo. The exchange rate right now is 155 yen to the dollar and prices on everything in the US have gone through the roof, so this doesn't seem all that ridiculous to me. I am more annoyed by the assumption that I live in SF than the idea that I might go from SF to Tokyo on a vintage shopping trip.
Indulge some pedantry with me... Why "Googlebook?" Pixel was meant for first-party computing devices, I thought. Nest for smart home and Fitbit for fitness trackers.
If you don't want to associate with past Pixelbooks and want to highlight Gemini, why not Geminibook or something like that? Does Google not have faith in the Gemini branding?
AI polls lower than "congress". People hate it - they hate it so much. They probably _wanted_ to call it that but someone who knows anything put their foot down.
buth the very first two bits of copy are about "intelligence" and "gemini". If they wanted to stay away from AI as branding they didn't do a great job.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.
No, it's because repair involves labor and unless we ship it across the world to take advantage of people making a dollar a day it's just not worth it.
The cost of making and importing stuff from the third world is just so cheap now that it's simpler to get a new one then to have someone making a living wage in the west fix it.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
Disregarding whether I like it or not (I don't), it's a strategically interesting product.
This appears to be an AI-device to mainly check the boxes for "low-complexity tasks", "high user-dependency" and "continuous flow of training data".
Perfect to catch the high-profit consumers of AI: They will use AI-services for the most mundane tasks, which won't be taxing on AI-infrastructure but also very sticky, as it will be a core of the desktop-experience.
FWIW my mum is still rocking my 2013 chromebook pixel. It is on all day, every day, and has been ever since I gave it to her a decade ago. I have repasted it three times now, it's been covered in sugary crap, dropped, trodden on by my kids, had charger cables tripped over and ripped apart while plugged in (sans magsafe), and it still looks and feels almost indistinguishable from when I bought it. The keyboard and screen are somehow both still fantastic, speakers great, experience snappy. It is phenomenal hardware, and if this 'Googlebook' comes even remotely close (and I suspect it will), I'm buying one as soon as I can.
There are a lot of people here complaining about AI and Google and Android and Ads and clothes and marketing and whatever. I'm assuming a lot of that is HN anti-AI derkaderbs bias, with some Apple/Google tribalism for good measure. Yeah Gemini might be shite at writing code, but Gemini Web / Android is by far the best executed and most useful conversational/consumer AI assistant out there (at least in my experience, it's not even close).
I'm not a Google fan by any means, but credit where credit is due, I don't see a timeline where they don't end up completely owning genpop consumer AI. The more I think about that the more convinced I am, and the more I feel uncomfortable.
"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?
Somehow all the Windows laptops are now "Copilot PCs" now. It's crazy...
Anyway, you didn't miss out on anything by not bothering to look into the details. There are no details. No specs, no nothing. Only "get notified" for when it comes in fall.
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.
Phew, good to know LLMs still can't make a good product or market it properly. Yes, people will buy it--if that's your standard for "good product", you should apply to Google :)
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.
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.
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!
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 can't stand websites like this. I get there's no substance to my complaint, but it just seems pointless to do this. If you want a slow reveal, do a video or something (but I won't watch that either).
I legit thought it was just an image. The first panel fills my whole phone screen and there is no indication that there is anything to scroll. I don't like this new web.
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.
So this is a notebook with good enough TPU capabilities to run Gemini partially (like in a MoE), a small model that knows when to delegate to the main model?
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?
The OS on these Googlebooks will probably be a lot closer to Android 17 than to current ChromiumOS. Google has been consistent in saying that they're phasing out the ChromiumOS code base (while continuing the support the Chromebooks they've already sold) in favor of modifying AOSP to work better on laptops and desktops.
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.
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.
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.
Fuchsia ended up in some Google products, such as Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, and Google's smart speakers, thermostats and displays.
But Fuchsia won't be in the Googlebook because there's no Chrome browser for Fuchsia. (In early 2024, Google officially stopped trying to port the full, desktop version of Chrome to Fuchsia.)
The dream of Fuchsia is effectively dead, and aside from some older Nest devices, Google only remaining efforts with the OS is basically as a tiny runtime that they'll run in VMs on Android for some secure process needs.
It was just a speculative research project and a bunch of bloggers went wild declaring it the end of Android, Linux (Android of course sitting on Linux), ChromeOS, etc. That was never real.
I’ll be blunt and say this looks like a rebrand of ChromeOS with a normal keyboard and AI slapped in it.
Chromebooks are associated with low quality garbage that people only buy if they’re desperate.
I don’t think this product will be successful. Someone buying a laptop at all needs more compatibility than Google’s OSes offer. Even with Android apps, those are all really shoved in haphazardly.
Why am I buying this when I can get a MacBook for $499?
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.
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 hear people complaining about Windows shoving ads at them, then you have something like this from Google that makes me ask why would anyone in their right mind want to use an OS like this? Seems built to hook you into Google's services.
I guess there are some people who want to be locked tightly in an ecosystem which will be a lifelong dependency for them. Meanwhile Google extracts thousands and thousands of dollars from the "user" over their lifetime.
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.
The gemini/ai part aside, but I really like this revival of passion for PCs and Laptops. Totally anecdotal here and I could have definitely spend couple of minutes to research the marketing numbers, but I cannot help but feel happy with Framework, Panther Lake and Dell XPS and of course the mini Mac and Macbook family. I feel like there were years when center of attention had turned to mobile/ipads (and consoles) which were severly locked down to the point of no use point their intended creators purpose. I felt bad my siblings never get hooked into my old PC, as they went from PS3 to phones.
I want to cheer them on just because i think the improvements they made to Android (such as the Linux terminal) as part of the Android-based laptop project are pretty cool. They increase the usability of Android tablets by a bunch.
This laptop though? Uhhhh who would EVER buy this over MacOS????
If everything is Google then there won´t be any more competition. They already have their hands in way to many things. Laptop margins are thin. They could squeeze smaller players out of the market with a decade of dump prices, seizing control of the computer market. Say hello to attestation and not owning anything anymore. Hope this laptop flops.
Even if the hardware is great, the thought of giving Google more data is icky to me, even if logically it makes no difference. I already use Gmail, and Apple collects just as much. Something about Google's image just makes me grossed out in a way Apple does not.
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.
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.
The second feature shown in this global launch is ... widgets. Like, Windows Vista widgets. And then, I could also open phone apps but not on my phone but on my computer (because I'd want to do that) and then the remaining feature is file sync.
I am just lost.
I wanna watch a documentary on how this kind of thing gets thought out and made and approved by a lot of people and then comes to being annouced as an actual hardware product.
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.
"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?
> 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.
yeah, even on product lines that they kill (like Stadia) they usually do right by the user (eg they refunded everyone, both on hardware and software people bought on the platform).
My experience with Google hardware has been the opposite. Three early Pixel phones died within a year or two, and pretty abysmal experience with Pixel Buds. They'd send me replacements, but I tired of them breaking.
I switched to an iPhone after being a long-time Android fan. Haven't looked back. Converted my wife to an iPhone too. Apple is better at hardware.
iPhones also receive security updates for a long time. I buy iPhone 3+ generation old brand new at the Apple store, and it... works really well.
Apple might not specify a time upfront but they do consistently support hardware for a good length of time. IPhones generally get OS updates for 5-6 years and security for at least a couple more.
I’ve never used anything they made long enough to get there.
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.
> 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.
It doesn’t matter to me that some of their products have longevity. I don’t know which they will keep and which they will discontinue and there are many vendors out there who have a better track record.
A laptop built entirely around AI, which is definitely a stable business that will be around in its current form indefinitely and whose cost definitely won't go up once Google needs to start making a profit on it.
Agreed. I have been an early adopter of so many google products. I have been burned every single time. They have systemically and carefully sabotaged any trust the industry had in them.
If they don't kill it, they might kill your account with no recourse, or some automatic process might lock you out of certain features, or some major bug might leave you staring at a forum post with a "I have the same question" numbering in the thousands.
As much as Stadia was a gut punch, at least for consumers Google did pretty well at making us whole (Full refunds for all Stadia purchases across the board) [0]
Obviously that's not much recompense if you were a game developer lured into some exclusive publishing deal, or even just someone buying a Stadia Controller, but c'est la vie I suppose
People who badmouth Stadia's shutdown expose themselves qw non-buyers. I'm yet to hear of a better product wind-down than Stadia: every single buyer got full refunds for games and hardware (i.e Chromecast). The firmware to convert Stadia controllers to plain ol' Bluetooth was a nice parting gift.
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.
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
Apple’s operating systems have fantastic interoperability and familiar UX. There’s no ads bugging you at every step, and things seem to just work.
(for most users)
This keeps users locked in.
Then there’s this thing. Who is this even for?! How does it fit into the ecosystem? It’s another rebrand instead of what was needed which was an ecosystem upgrade.
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.
> I have a hard time seeing how any Chromebook above $ 349,- could still survive in an post-MacBook Neo age.
I doubt there's enough of a market for the use case alone, but nice Chromebooks are perfect for travelling internationally - you can reset them before border crossings and quickly restore them after passing through border crossings where anybody is liable to ask for access to your devices.
Never thought of it, but conceptually, I could see the appeal for very privacy minded folks and those with heightened security requirements. Course, it's a question of thread profile whether one trusts Google and case dependent whether one can actually expect free and unrestricted access to a VPN for set up once they are in the country in question. Plus, you could just do this with any OS or laptop really, just use Tails or some other live distro. In any case, as you said, likely a small target market.
> 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.
Google don't dogfood so I'm not interested. I remember when the Pixel Fold came out asking people at Google and nobody had one. Have fun, but if nobody at Google will use this why should I?
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.
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.
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.
Is this the Android desktop based which was leaked quite a few times? I feel the discussion here is overly negative. Android finally having an official desktop mode is good for competition. Windows is dropping the ball with each release, Macs need some good competition.
Mostly dismissive comments, it seems. Maybe justified. But I think a more interesting conversation is what happens if this or other devices like it become a hit? I wonder if the next generation of users will look at computers with no AI features the way we look at MS-DOS.
Because taking Windows from an operating system to an intelligence system worked out so well for them, that now they're trying to figure out how Windows can reach performance parity with Linux running Windows software :)
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.
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.
Google could make a killing if they directly competed with the MacBook Mini. People paying out $2k to run OpenClaw will care about how well Gemini or whatever runs on their hardware. Scale up the Coral accelerator they already sell.
This is a landing page with basically no details, but if it’s a thin console that calls home to Google it loses on latency and privacy immediately.
Both Google and Samsung have adopted the sleek, rounded edge, sharp trackpad cutout and metal frame like Apple.
If the Macbook Neo didn't exist, both of sleek designs might of tided people away from Apple, but the price on the Neo, with the hardware polish from Apple is hard to beat if you're content with MacOS.
Here’s my optimistic take - Google is already supplying Gemini/Gemma models for the next generation of Apple Intelligence. It makes complete sense for them to enter the hardware market.
I’d be happier if they use more on device models by optimizing their hardware for the next generation of Gemmma models.
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.
So Google will kill it in a year or two when the AI hype will be over, and the average consumer won’t care about AI showed into their face. But hey, at least they created more e-waste.
When I saw the name, Googlebook I had my fingers crossed that Google had finally built something that could compete with the Apple MacBook. If that ad is anything to go by, this will flop and there will be no shortage of consumers who will go along for the ride.
If it ends up having ML-centric hardware, like a version of their TPUs, the story could change, especially if they don't try to keep it locked within their ecosystem. Local AI is the future.
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.
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.
Features like the magic cursor look cool: an infinitely flexible context menu. However, context menus make it clear what you can and cannot do. If the magic cursor can't "do everything reasonable", it'll be just as usable as Siri.
I'd be more likely to believe them if they had already implemented this feature on their Pixel phones, but they haven't so I expect it probably isn't "done".
I'm prepared to buy a laptop that utilises AI to improve things and generally makes things better. I see no evidence so far to suggest that this is it.
Google should totally be experimenting with what can be done, but it seems to be a bit odd that they put something so uninspiring front and center like that.
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.
Is this a laptop designed to be powerful enough to run local models? I suspect not.
Is this a laptop with a built-in integration with Google's cloud models? I suspect so. And if so, it's the integration that's special, not "the laptop."
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.
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.)
Yeah, if you now check for 'pc is stuck' by wiggling your mouse, you suddenly eat up more resources if it actually was getting stuck, making matters worse.
But at least your AI can then tell you it will all be okay eventually.
What I would buy: a local AI focused laptop with a built-in, powerful TPU. And it would have to open its hardware interface so that I could actually do what I wanted to do with it.
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.
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.
reminds me of the pixel c! that thing was pretty neat. this thing has the same "glowbar"... i bet it's old stock for them now since the pixel c didn't see many sales; that was from an era where google at least pretended to be a 'good guy.'
i have always liked netbooks more than chromebooks (but I really only ever had the samsung NC10, specifically for the keyboard). i really miss that thing. these days i am wary of the gewgly eyes on my digital person, so i'ma pass on this til someone less on the radar makes another platform pop.
where to next! linux on risc-v? steamOS on ARM? screenless lozenge wirelessly coupled to an EEG that makes me hallucinate images?
Competition is always good. I got a Mac Neo recently to supplement my larger 16” MBP and they really nailed it. It’s the perfect laptop for kids and travel. Most importantly it feels like it’ll last for a decade like my MBP. I hope it’s the same for googlebooks but even pixels have issues with surviving beyond 5 years.
so Aluminum OS is finally here. it should be big enough of an announcement by itself but what we get is googlebook; hardware with an AI-tied value proposition. how do they think people would justify choosing a googlebook over everything else only to use gemini?
I wish it was framed around the OS and how it can run on a wide range of devices (similar to android and chrome os) and become something more in time (maybe with apps that can be developed outside the android ecosystem with a desktop experience in mind).
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.
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.
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.
HN always disappoints me with these kind of threads, with all the generic disappointment and Google scepticism dominating the conversation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still disappointed. But mainly because it looks so superficial. I was trying to work out what's new and it just looks like an Android device (or Chrome? I can't tell) with some party trick Gemini features sprinkled on it. There isn't anything technically interesting here.
I'm still waiting for someone to ship a truly AI native device - something with the right sandboxing and UI layers to let an AI model truly understand and work with the device natively, but safely. The OS SDK itself should natively incorporate all these elements as first class primitives. And the model would be trained heavily to explicitly understand and work well with them.
I presume since they're going to be actually showing off the details of the Aluminium OS at Google IO, they probably want to keep it surprising, so that should hopefully explain the sparse details. HN is a bubble... this sentiment about Google really isn't widely shared. Personally, I'm pretty happy that Android is coming to desktop, I really feel like Windows and macOS need more competition. Unless Valve does something spectacular with Linux desktop adoption, Android is probably the best bet.
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?
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.
technical people are the ones that have built AI farms, stuffing AI on normies throat.
> files is cloud-based
was long gone. Seems you are assuming like Mac iCloud or iOS. There is plenty of local storage if you want to do that.
> Macs (because their hardware is great on laptops).
In other news, many other people don't have money but spend on overpriced macs (excl. neo) - so they buy cheap and cheerful - just works Chromebooks - for basic stuff. Normies also not need 3 x 8K monitors.
> And a laptop is something very personal to me. I don't want to be depressed every time i
Normal people wont use AI features. How many windows users are using copilot etc? many have accustomed to ignore - popup from AV or jumping triggers and just do to their basic stuff in computers.
It is just here in hn - everyday some blogpost - I used AI to completely automate this or that. this model is 1.27 times better that yesterdays model.
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.
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.
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
Had a pixelbook and it was hands down one of the best laptops I ever had. Sure, ChromeOS is fairly boxed in but the Linux VM was reasonably good and the built quality was just something else.
I wish they'd just make ~ pixelbook with ubuntu... it'd be such a powermove, and they if anyone could pull it off
I was excited at first by this, but the "designed for gemini intelligence"... like what does that even mean
I don't think it's about AI. It's about the success of the MacBook Neo. Google kinda missed the point that at this day and age you can take a huge cut of the Windows market share just based on the fact that your laptop pairs up with your phone.
That's the killer feature of the Neo. This is going to be the killer feature of this one. Working alongside pixel. You have some sort of a platform.
What are they after? Your data, obviously. I doubt they have such a success, I don't see THAT many Pixels around.
Am I the only person who PANICs whenever I accidentally somehow activate the AI on my android? I'm so conditioned to panic whenever I see that floating rainbow that the whole marketing page is covered in I get very negative feelings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They bought that TLD and then never did anthing fun with it. I can forgive them for not doing https://google, since that's discouraged apparently, but not even fonts.google? docs.google? mail.google? Apparently once upon a time you could do com.google for an April Fools prank but they didn't even keep a basic redirect. The only thing they ever permanently used it for (afaik) was domains.google, and they sold that to Squarespace. Why even spend the money?
WTF is a Googlebook?
"Hey buddy, you got a little googlebook hanging out of your nose, a little nasty looking googlebook. Don't eat it, that's so gross!"
"open apps from your phone on your laptop" only thing there that I thought: "that would be pretty awesome ngl." It would be a way to easily test android apps in a real environment with an actual large screen. Yes, I know android studio has a good emulator but emulators are still a horrible platform compared to the real thing. Particularly the networking there is nothing like how it works in the real world.
I'd be interested in knowing the specs, more about the OS, software details, platform... A laptop integration like this based on android is cool to me. I couldn't care less about the AI crap though. This is a fascinating concept because phones themselves can provide a full desktop experience when you plug them into a screen. So could help encourage mobile computing more.
"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?
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.
It does feel as if AI wrote that copy. Then again, this looks like a slop making machine; a slop landing page seems weirdly appropriate. Maybe no human is meant to look at this announcement for more than a few seconds.
> 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
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 don't think the strategy of trying to figure out what an "AI laptop" should be will work. The best bet is to see what use cases organically emerge from the current tech, figure out the biggest gaps, and design a product around that. This is more like they just took "AI" plus "Laptop" and came up with a grab-bag list of cool sounding features, like "custom widgets".
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?
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?
I used to use Chromebooks as a souped-up iPad with Linux terminal support.
They missed a great opportunity to create a special user interface experience supporting multiple tasks (e.g. Gemini-CLI, anti gravity, Gemini-chat, browser) while sharing the same context . It could have been an awesome developer device . Imagine virtual desktops all sharing the same context with various tools : Gemini-CLI working on infra and artifacts, Antigravity running development , Gemini chat generating graphics assets. Hardware enabled with special shared memory / NPU.
Instead, I see a Chromebook with the nagging MS Edge “right click for copilot”.
If their intention is to target the general public, then I think they're out of touch with reality, and it doesn’t seem targeted at AI enthusiasts either.
Let me elaborate if it isn't obvious. If it is higher, people will just use their regular laptops ie. there will be no use case. If it is low, it will find it's use. Like when I am travelling, this would be amazing.
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?
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?
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?
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)
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 this is essentially Android desktop mode with Android 17 Gemini integration. Please get rid of that top panel. I just don't get why this and desktops like GNOME tries to copy macos top panel when clearly in macos it is menu bar that host app menus but that concept doesn't exists in these other desktops and yet they have a top panel. This is just bad UX.
This will follow same model as Chromebooks i.e different devices from different OEM partners and for x86 and arm. So soon someone will be able to create a generic ISO for this that you can boot on a standard x86 PC/laptop.
Samsung is also working on such devices but they will probably have Dex which is much better then the current Android desktop mode.
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?
> So, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for?
The primary difference between a Chromebook and a Googlebook appears to be the ability to run LLM's locally.
The requirements were spelt out at Google I/O. They boil down to a 40 TOPS NPU and a minimum of 16GB of memory. They appear to be trying to match Apple's M series memory bandwidth using software compression. ChromeOS didn't need an NPU and specified a minimum of 4GB of memory. Aluminium OS looks to have the same relationship with its LLM as a Chromebook did with Google Chrome, and needs the hardware to power it.
If they pull it off you will get GPT-4 performance, running locally.
As for who this is for: your guess is as good as mine. But if their replacement for crostini works (crostini is so hopelessly unreliable it felt like it never got out of beta, so it's a big if), even the minimum specs would be a very good Linux laptop.
Do you have a source for this local stuff?
i can kinda see it, they spent a lot of time getting Gemma 4 pretty efficient and then seeing everyone buy macs to run them and realize it’s maybe a real moat since Apple doesn’t make any AI
Would be an interesting product if it could actually give you GPT performance locally, will be an awful experience if it’s essentially just cloud AI…like a premium laptop where most of the features are locked behind a subscription would be wild
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> 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.
Android 16+ offers a built-in integrated Linux VM that can be enabled from Developer Mode, and if this[0] third-party site is accurate, "Android on laptop" will have it enabled by default.
So it should not be too different from working on a Windows laptop with WSL2, or on an OSTree distro where you use distroboxes to work with non-sandboxed programs.
(fwiw, I would still refuse to have one of these for personal use because Google is a shameless data robber. Unless someone were to de-google Aluminium like LineageOS and GrapheneOS did for Android, but that would probably take years.)
[0] https://aluminium-os.com/
No idea. The people that have no need to run real software and want a high end device probably have an iPad with a keyboard case. Those that want a low end device have a chromebook.
This thing will be killed early 2028...
> So, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for?
You're not the only one asking this. I'm right there with you.
I mean you basically just described a chromebook, though I believe one of the selling points of chromebook is that it's dirt cheap.
Yeah, a Chromebook's killer 'feature' is that it's web browser attached to a keyboard and functional screen for cheap on a platform that you can't otherwise screw up.
If you price that up to $1,000 (which some Chromebooks definitely do), then I start to ask a variation of the same question: Why did you buy that?
Wait, there are people there who use computers for more than creating family albums? Gosh, I lived in ignorance all this time.
every large corporation is going to come out with a hardware device in the next 12 months where you don't directly use applications, where the AI acts as an intermediary
openai, anthropic, meta, google, all of them
even you will want one of these devices, probably (not saying this is a positive development in the world)
And every one of these ‘AI first’ laptops will be cancelled in a couple of years when generative AI is no longer the hot new thing and end users realise its severe limitations.
Would prefer a 'Google Linux'—a native desktop OS with a unified UI philosophy, similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility.
The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly. Resurrecting Web Intents as 2-way App Intents would be the key to making this work.
Also, keeping prompts as local .md files with an Obsidian-like system editor would be a huge win for power users. Simply gating Gemini behind 'premium' Chromebooks feels like the old 'licking the cake' strategy from the Google+ days—trying to force a new product's success by coopting existing hardware rather than building a superior platform.
I can imagine having Gemini + local Gemma working with Agents, which have access to my e-mail (ideally on GMAIL, but also supporting outlook), keeping local history of my visited sites and messages... and using RAG or something even better, ideally with looking also on repos I have checkouted to my file system, and maybe even whole file system....
Work related e-mail about "sending invoice to customer"... it may suggest proper content for e-mail. Having "dashboard" with summary of todays communication to you, your tickets (at work) and so on....
Can Google build such thing? If somebody can - it will be them. Will they build it? Probably not, they would prefer to build 3rd version of Google Pay.
> The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly. Resurrecting Web Intents as 2-way App Intents would be the key to making this work.
I think for something like this, it will only work if you can allow you local files to get messed up by the LLM but then, because everything has been synced to the cloud, there's a safe "revert" option.
I'd love that built on a Linux foundation too, but realistically reckon if they're going down that path they've got the core of "all your app state can be backed-up/transferred" already in Android so they'd likely lean heavily on that.
> similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation.
From a security perspective, this cannot exist. MacOS is fundamentally superior to classical GNU/Linux distros. Android/ChromeOS are the only Linux systems that make a serious attempt to close that gap.
I think the closest thing I can imagine is a system that goes all in on a Snap/Flatpak type platform (basically, like Fedora Silverblue, plus throw ~50 million dollars at fixing all the sandboxing, improving the SELinux policies or whatever, cranking up the system integrity story, getting some kernel hardening in place, stuff like that). With Google's funding I do think that's technically viable, I would love to see it. But, I dunno if it would count as "standard Linux foundation". And, kinda a weird thing to do for a company that's already spent billions over the last 20 years to build several existing Linux OSs.
(BTW, this is a totally security-brained take. I do actually run classical GNU/Linux on all my personal computers, the fact that it's a fundamentally insecure OS doesn't actually bother me that much. But I don't think Google can realistically ship a "product" like that. If it really took off and gained the kinda adoption they are presumably hoping for, it would honestly be quite irresponsible of them).
I just made a comment to the same effect. They should be trying to compete with MacBook mini.
Google literally already sells Coral usb inference engines, so they’re most of the way there already: https://www.coral.ai/products/accelerator
> so they’re most of the way there already
Reading comments like this makes me feel like I live on a different planet from some people.
The Coral USB dongle is from 2019 - it is a dev kit, not a souped-up edge inference unit. It was not designed to compete with the Macbook Mini (???) and is not some sort of touchstone or landmark in AI development. It's a tiny TPU that Google made to prototype technologies for their own SOCs like Google Tensor later down the line.
I don't know, but they do let you run Linux in a VM already on Chromebook. Hopefully that will continue.
I mean, I'm sure they absolute could build it and do a great job of it, but their incentives are all aligned to having you use web apps or buying from their store. A real linux would be absolutely counterproductive to those goals.
I would honestly switch from a Macbook to this Google Linux
I can't see how this would be meaningfully different from ChromeOS. Google cannot force GNOME and KDE to stop clashing, there's no opportunity to "unify" the UI philosophy of Linux any better than the current efforts do. And upstream Linux has no big selling point for most users - the people that do care about that stuff will typically avoid Google's distro altogether.
If you want an upstream Linux kernel with folders of markdown prompts and virtualized ChromeOS/Android containers, just use Linux. You don't need to wait for Google to build that experience for you.
There's a joke about how Win32 is the most stable API on Linux. Maybe they could do that :-)
It might be a good way to get Steam compatibility?
gLinux already exists. Its meh.
ChromeOS was honestly the best they could do.
They would never build something so open.
I bought a Pixelbook during the middle of their product lifetime, and it was one of the best laptops I ever had. I genuinely don't know how broadly that sentiment was shared, but the cancellation of the product line suggests "not that broadly." Google has changed since that time and I am a bit skeptical this will meet that specific niche for me.
Yeah, I had the original Chromebook Pixel and the Pixelbook and they were both great. Somehow I'm still using the Pixelbook today and it chugs along.
That said, its hard to justify the prices for these premium Chromebooks. When I picked them up they were heavily discounted with some developer code or other.
I also agree with the shaky future as far as being able to actually opening these things up with developer tooling. It seems like they've simply been on a path to rollback all of that.
I recently replaced my Pixelbook with a Lenovo Chromebook Plus. I don't like the increase in size/weight, but it's far more performant and Lenovo periodically has steep discounts on their hardware.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Google seems to have made an official post on Reddit describing the feature set in detail:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb8xls/introducin...
[Edit]
And, the feature set references the 'AI mouse pointer' from this Deepmind blog..
https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/
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.
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It's the unofficial "where's my mouse pointer" macro
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
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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.
> Example: Point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting, find good spots to meet up, or draft a reply.
This is actually a good use case for AI. My university sends a lot of newsletters with several events in free text format; all I want is to be able to select one of them, have an LLM parse the title, date, location, and category, and put it in my calendar.
Still, I'm sceptical this will work. Samsung phones supposedly have this same feature, and it works 1/10 of the times. Pasting it to ChatGPT and tell it to add the events to my calendar works fine, but the bottleneck is always the project managers in charge of the UI. Of course, having a small local model and being able to choose my own right-click items like I could in 1995 would be an actual solution.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
I do that all the time with my iPhone and my windows machine, sadly. Still not a particularly compelling feature, just speaks to how sad our modern ecosystem is.
I feel like very much not the target market for this. Tokyo Vintage Shopping Trip? LOL
I got mad when I bought a Chromebook thinking it was a cheap laptop I could install any OS on only to find it was boatloader locked and the model I bought hadnt been cracked yet. Say nothing of all of Google's recent practices with Android. This whole thing just sounds like the plague.
Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error?
`[text](link)` is the syntax used to create a link. But since `TKTK` isn't a valid URI, it doesn't render a link. My guess is TKTK is placeholder and they were supposed to fill it in before posting on reddit... but forgot?
edit: hah, maybe someone from Google saw my comment. This has now been fixed and TKTK replaced with https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb83gy/making_and...
TKTK is a common placeholder for something that should be filled in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing)
Looks like the link got fixed.
I'm really enjoying reddit just completely roasting the entire concept in the comments.
I bet this is an LLM output mistake that escaped human proofreading.
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.
Posting an official announcement of an AI-powered laptop on Reddit were the users there tend to have a hard Anti-AI stance is certainly something.
I haven't been around reddit much for a few years, but in the past at least, /r/android was one of the best tech communities on the internet. It was even better than the iPhone subs for iPhone discussion.
I mean if you think about it, the type of person to own an android phone and care enough about phones to join a community is pretty much guaranteed to only be a tech geek.
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.
"We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks."
A disaster from the first step.
Damn... ~1min in he verbally asks to put the 2 ingredients on the list.
Like... my dude that's way even slower than drag&drop the text on a light right next to it!
Same later on about changing the calendar appointment from whatever to 8pm... he is behind a desktop with a mouse, just input the number or click on the arrows to adjust.
I bet some people will mention that those are "just" simple to understand examples or that it's great for accessibility ... but it's not. It's not reliable enough for complex cases and not reliable enough for accessibility. So... yes JUST basic examples that are slower than other means.
PS: I did prototypes using voice and pointing in XR and yes that paradigm IS powerful, it's just being multimodal.
Well, that AI mouse pointer idea is one of the most horrifying things I've seen in quite awhile. Hard pass, do not want, do not trust anyone involved.
“Hey google, do something with this. Huh, I guess that’s fine.”
> It's really easy to access your phone’s files right from your Googlebook's file browser.
Yeah but what about Windows Explorer? They've been passively blocking SMB access forever at this point (by disallowing ports below 1024).
I would not be surprised if Googlebook's file browser goes via the cloud.
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.
> why Apple has nearly wiped it off their site all together, seriously go check out apple.com, not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.
TBF, the reason Apple removed "Apple Intelligence" is that they failed to deliver on its promises.
So much so that they just settled their false advertising in a class action lawsuit for $250M:
https://archive.is/efWkb
Also, P.S: Not to say that clothing/shopping is the primary use case, but I know plenty of women who use AI for clothes/fashion/interior decoration etc related tasks.
What feels already like old history is that Apple made a generous deal to OpenAI based on the premise that their AI could do the claims.
Apple engineers spend months trying to prompt engineer their way, thinking the prompter is at fault if the soon to be AGI system diverged. Some of these instructions were trending out there, as reveals of how naive Apple was at the time. They could be traced from the device's logs so not so much of a leak: Don't hallucinate, strictly follow instructions, followed by all sort of refined predicates, appended as if an LLM had reason
Then Apple released a paper to warn everyone (well, a few, and to save face) that we are getting fooled.
https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...
In case Apple is a biased anti AI propagandist, here is a similar, more recent research paper from MIT and co:
https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24755v1
My wife got upset with me when I dns-blocked all the ads.
It sounds totally insane but we’re the minority here. That’s why Google is a $4.5 trillion company.
I had a similar reaction from in-law family members. The main reason was that they wanted to be able to see the ads that unlocked more gameplay time on their free game.
Just feels crazy to me, but I guess that's what addiction looks like.
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We are in the minority, but don't think the majority is the opposite and like this kind of thing. The majority just don't care at all about it.
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EDRi is in the minority, the EFF is in the minority, and so on. But someone has got to fight the corps, they can’t be the only ones dictating what’s socially acceptable.
Ditto. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she was clicking on the damned things, but then I’d never thought to ask “hey, how did you find out about this useless Chinese plastic crap that lives in a drawer and is never used”.
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This. This is why "sync your files and cast your apps with 0 installs" are even being sold as features.
Normies HATE customizing their devices. Children will literall reach for AI instead of search engines when they just want to change a background image.
Jailbreak is a slur for "Installation" that tech companies want to keep that way.
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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.
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Okay, I just have to pry here: why? Does she like ads?
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My wife also got upset with me over this.
let's be clear: Google is a titan because they successfully sold ads to people who sold to you. We were never the target market beyond building a monopoly on eyeballs, and it's questionable if their ad empire continues. Outside of that they've had very few successes, and while traditionally the hardware is high quality, the bundled services and level of enshitification now is a no-go for my family. If you're buying into the single vendor for the rest of your life, the choice is currently Apple IMO, because they're "least bad".
Why wouldn't I use AI to shop for clothes? I'm not much into fashion, but I could see using AI to help me search for a winter parka that meets my needs, for example.
And I did use AI recently when shopping for a car. After doing a bunch of research on my own, I decided why not try feeding my criteria into ChatGPT and see what it recommends. And it did actually recommend a couple of models that I had not previously considered, including one that I ended up considering very seriously.
I also pointed it towards some used listings and asked questions like "does this listing have ventilated rear seats" - and it was able to respond that it likely doesn't, and told me where to look for the controls in photos to verify for certain. I probably could have figured out on my own with a bit of digging, or else contact the seller, but this was a pretty quick and easy way to get the information I was looking for.
Is that gross?
I didn't look too closely at the Googlebook, so I don't know why I would use that instead of just an app on my MacBook. But at some point when competent models can be run on comodity hardware I think hardware and OS-level support for AI will definitely become a selling point for me. We're just not quite there yet.
I guess the pragmatic answer is that you don’t need AI for that. You need good filters. I don’t like Zalando one bit, but I’ll grant them that it’s easy to find the right clothes on their website because they have very good filters.
LLMs don’t ‘know’ if a pair of jeans is a tapered slim fit with a gusseted crotch, at least not by default. But if the brand uploaded them as such, the filters will find them.
That’s just a quick take. I’ve tried to shop with LLMs and the results are mediocre at best. Of course search, filtering, and content tagging could always be improved, instead of “just slap AI on it”.
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Given how Search-Engine-Optimisation (SEO) has been gamed, what will make you think that somehow this NEW system, that's really prone to prompt hacking & already promotes sponsors' products over alternatives, won't be?
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Nobody is picking their laptop for the best AI integration. You can do those things just as well on every other platform. In fact, additional AI integration is universally a turnoff to most normal people.
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My terse answer to, 'Why not use AI to shop for [X]' is that if you are letting AI do the shopping for you at any level, you aren't actually distinguishing products by features or quality or it's ability to solve a problem. You are being fed junk that is likely paid to be moved to the top of the list.
It's probably a nice feeling when you can put in a list of soft requirements to ChatGPT et al and get a list of things it recommends, but I would suggest you are a fool if you think those listings aren't bought and paid for.
In an era where the gap between a 'good product' and a 'bad product' is growing ever larger and the price is not an indicator of anything, the onus to actually become knowledgeable re: "How to identify products worth buying" is becoming greater and greater. If you are using AI to do the shopping for you, not only are you not building that muscle, you are actively weakening it as a chatbot convincingly recommends something to you based on unverifiable platitudes about 'quality' and 'value' - a recommendation that was, again, bought and paid for.
So yeah, that's gross and I would argue pretty strongly that it's just as brain rot adjacent as something like Tiktok. Like Tiktok though, I expect it will see at least some level of popular use, and also like Tiktok, I think it'll end up making the population dumber on average.
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> 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
I don't know what world you live in but I personally know at least 4 people (all female interestingly) who regularly use ChatGPT to give outfit advice and when clothes shopping. One has manually taken photos of clothes laid out separately so she can put different combinations into ChatGPT and ask if they work together.
I don't live in the US.
"This outfit is bold and shows off your strong personality, a perfect choice for today!"
It's May and you chose a bright green and red sweater with a picture of Santa Clause.
"You're absolutely right! Maybe this would be a better choice for December."
I work routinely from coffee shops. Literally like 80% of people on their laptops have Claude or ChatGPT open when I glance over. Listen, I do think AI still has a LONG way to go to be the automation & productivity utopia we so desperately crave, but underselling its usefulness is just silly at this point.
I used to be vehemently against AI coding just a few years ago, because the hallucinations were a deal-breaker. However, these days, most of my code is written using AI. It's still very "corporate junior" so it takes constant tweaking, hand re-writing, or total re-architecting, but it's leaps and bounds better than what it was. And I find myself working on the interesting parts: product, user experience, novel algorithms, etc.
These Gen AI tools have proved to be incredibly sticky!
I genuinely don’t think when Chat GPT 3.5 launched, that anyone believed people would integrate the usage of them as quickly and solidly as they have.
So Im with you on this, people use Chat GPT, Claude and so on for anything and everything.
> I personally know at least 4 people (all female interestingly)
You’re on HN and know 4 females, that’s the truly interesting part :-)
Sry to say this, but I honestly just want a working shopping AI model.
I want to make a picture from me, add perhaps height and one or a second other metric, then i want it to generate styles for me, finetune it with me and then it helps me buy it.
I'm waiting for this for ages as i HATE shopping but I would find it nice to look better.
Nonetheless, when I saw this page for the first time, i was very impressed with the case not with anything related to softeware. Might be a second type of device which might be a good alternative to an apple product. Framework and now this (perhaps)
If such an AI shopping thing existed, I wouldn’t trust it to do a good job. We consumers probably wouldn’t pay enough for it in enough volume to be the customers (Are you a Stitch Fix subscriber? Why not?). The fashion brands would be the customers and we’d be sold to them. The AI tools would tell you and show you that your skin tone really works well with a shirt from $BRAND who bid the highest that day, and the brand that can afford to do that won’t be one with low margins (aka: a good deal), it’ll be one with high margins, and that means some combination of cheap construction and high price.
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If giving the customer more filter/searching power was something companies wanted, Amazon's search result page wouldn't be like visiting a flea market.
I'm pretty sure what Decart is building does exactly what you want.
I saw a demo - it took you, put a piece of clothing on you, and showed in realtime how that clothing moved on your body in the size you'd selected. I think it even picked the size.
Huh, I shopped for clothes using AI today.
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 just shows how bad search engines have become. About 15 years ago you could type fully worded questions into Google and would be pointed to the exact sentence of a website that answers your question. I happened so slowly, we were all frogs in boiling water.
An the same will happen to AI. We will remember these days as the golden age for AI, where you weren't required to prompt an AI three times before it answers with a non-ad response.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Heh when I came to this country I was overjoyed to see that they had a "Big & Tall" store. Until I realized they actually meant the conjunction there...
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.
Researched men's sneakers last night. Super conflicting TMI for my odd size so going to a store for human sizing and gait evaluation. Info on durability was complete garbage. Suspicious about tuning for favored brands but AI recommended shoes will have the edge in my purchase decision since I've done some research.
Did it work? Did you buy something?
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Yes, you used it but in a way not even remotely close to how they envision you should use it.
But I did this with Google before the LLMs
I recently used AI to shop for clothes. A T-shirt I liked and wanted more of had doubled in price due to tariffs, while some shorts that needed replacement had been discontinued. AI helped identify alternatives with comparable fit and fabric that were respectively domestic and available, which would have been a much bigger hassle pre-AI.
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You scrape sites, okay, but what's "ai" got to do with that (I assume ai means chat bots in this context?)
I'm genuinely curious, whatever you're doing sounds cool, but more details beyond the buzzword pitch you'd tell your manager would be welcome on a hard technical site like hn?
(ftr, I'm skeptical of all applications of machine learning, but I keep experimenting with all the various kinds of it, generally with no good result; last real-world useful [to any extent] ml model I tried was BASnet, but whatever you tinkered out sounds cool and if it actually scrapes and filters clothes the way you describe, that'd be quite cool [perhaps even product worthy…?], cuz there are way too many clothes online to look at all of them manually and then esp. on fast fashion sites, there are oftentimes reviews you want to be wary for that indicate low quality products… anyway, that just sounds impossible to automate in my experience, but feel free to prove otherwise)
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Imagine you could take a few photos of yourself and a system would find your real-life doppelgangers around the world. Then see what they wear and easily copy them. They get a commission.
Or have shopping items be shown on your twin in a simulated fashion shoot on a doppelganger simulation. It should also show movement, situations and vibes.
"Turning Doug Quaid back into Carl Hauser"
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You realize that if anything, this way of using AI for shopping is something corporate would rather hate?
By using AI to filter out results, you don't see ads, upsells, other products, recommendations, reviews, dark patterns, etc.
Hi. What AI and procedure did you use for this? I am also looking for good formal clothes that fit my broad shoulders but narrow waist than typical mass market clothes shoot for
My brother in size Small-Tall, tell me where you shop!
This is a good one: https://tallslimtees.com/
I also do some made to order from Son of a Tailor and Proper Cloth, but it’s expensive and laborious and slow and risky.
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A good friend of mine has the opposite problem. I'm 5'11" (180cm) with a slender frame and long arms. A small Patagonia jacket fits me great.
My friend is probably 5" shorter than me. A small on him would be too long.
So he's always on the hunt for things that fit him properly in both dimensions.
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What were your results? I'm nearly the exact same height with a shorter torso than leg length but super long arms, so I tend to need a medium tall, 36" inseam pants.
Wow, I’m in the same boat - do you mind sharing more about how you did it? I was thinking about that too (I’m 197cm) and would love to learn!
I asked Gemini for help with something similar recently and it just made up a bunch of stores and items. When I pointed it out it said sorry and that it won't do it again. Then it did it again.
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Hilariously I've done something similar for the same reason. Medium shirts/sweaters are generally too short on me but large sizes feel baggy. I only travel occasionally to the US for work, so last trip I had ChatGPU look at several US-based retailers (eg Land's End, LL Bean, American Tall) to see if there was stuff in stock I might want to have shipped to my office/hotel.
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I use AI regularly to consider new looks. Just have it render someone like me in different outfits. Super useful.
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Your valid use case doesn't contradict the point that so far most consumer-focused "AI features" are rarely useful and often just get in the way. I'm pretty sure a specific "AI Shopping Feature" wouldn't actually do what you're already doing, or if it did, it would add more steps/distractions than you have now.
Just asking a web search / browser-enabled chatbot, as you are now, is already close to the optimally efficient tool for you. Unfortunately, aggregating results from many disparate retailers into one seller-neutral page filtered down to what you uniquely need today is no longer considered optimally efficient by most web retailers. Just like they erected barriers to stop being indexed by unaffiliated shopping aggregators, most large retailers will try to stop automatic aggregation of their current inventory (or lack thereof).
Sadly, we're now in a post-enshittification world where Amazon's learned removing search features like requiring or excluding terms increases revenue and Google's learned giving you the search result you want first reduces ads served.
I feel the real problem is poor standardized sizing for clothing in store and worse online. I swear every store has their own unique sizes and when it comes to no names on sites like Amazon it's just pure good luck.
As far as this laptop is concerned I feel like it's a repeat of that super expensive chrome book that fizzled out because it was basically nerfed by Google unshockingly. As one of the top posters here if they delivered quality hardware, good Linux and solid Google support and even gapps, this would be an absolute win. instead i can only guess what this is unless I missed any real information on the site it's just a metal Chromebook with extra AI?
Hacker News demographics isn’t real!
I mean, same on the struggle as a tall person, but doing that kind of research is pretty easy even without AI. Just find a couple brands that fit and some shops that sell them and you're pretty much set. I buy almost all my t-shirts from a specific company for tall people now, that I found on amazon by typing in something like "tall t-shirts"
I’m sorry but I’m not buying this argument. This problem was solved in 2005 with search engines.
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> I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores
I wonder if for the next period websites will really try hard to prevent scraping (already happening, in some industries very pervasive, i.e. its impossible to get accurate quote for power) until they realize they can sell much more to people using agents.
Or everything just going to race to the bottom like a manufacturer or distributor since it's so easy to find everything anything you need. Kinda already happening with saas companies loosing value while infrastructure is soaring.
I'm a similar build and I could imagine using ai for this purpose but come on. 194cm is like top 1% of human height. It's not a solid business model.
As 204cm human, I have also built a thing to scrape all the major brands for LT sizes.
It is deeply annoying we have to do this.
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AI is good for shopping today because all other platforms are fully enshitified but AI is still in the pre-enshitification phase. It will be infested with ads soon enough. Enjoy it while you can.
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I’ve shopped with Claude a few times in the past month alone. It’s really quite good at finding brands I wouldn’t have otherwise.
It’s amazing how confident you are while being completely wrong. A pristine internet rant.
I’m actually amazed and horrified at the same that you have outsourced spending money to robots.
Also aren’t you concerned your behaviour is marketers’ wet dream? They now dictate what you should consume.
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And I just came back from Seoul where Gemini suggested local clothing labels I would have never found if I hadn't told Gemini what brands I liked already and to find similar ones. And it was bang-on style-wise (some of the shops were really hidden and out of the way).
You sent Anthropic a picture of yourself and had it generate images of you wearing various articles of clothing and then bought them based on the images that it showed you?
>> It’s amazing how confident you are while being completely wrong
Welcome to HN? :)
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I use AI heavily for shopping.
“Just had a baby, generate a shopping list for my registry”
“For each major item on registry, research and recommend the top 3 products. I care about GreenGuard certification. I’m not price sensitive.”
“I’m looking for new shoes. I’ve previously owned XYZ models and here’s what I liked/disliked. Can you recommend shoes I should consider?”
It’s immensely helpful. It replaces what I used to do before which was typically search for “[product] Reddit” and read and sift through a ton of comments.
It’s not perfect but the volume of transactions I’d have to do research for is high enough and the return policies easy enough that it makes mistakes feel much easier to correct.
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> No one is shopping for clothes using AI
Tangental rebuttal, but I shop for food using AI every day. Grab app (Asia's equivalent of Uber Eats/DoorDash) has an option "Translate using AI". It (attempts to) translate dishes and ingredients. The app gives a prominent warning (in corporate speak): "these AI translations can be horrendously bad" - and some translations are indeed way off (often hilariously!) but although scrappy, this AI feature is incredibly useful.
Before this feature, I'd have to laboriously screenshot (since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS) then open the screenshot in Google Translate. This only gets you one screen's worth of translations making browsing too arduous.
A shitty AI feature that actually solves a problem is great, whereas a polished AI feature that doesn't is "gross" :)
At the risk of going slightly tangential here...
> since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS
This is all you need to know about mobile to understand we're in a complete duopoly that desperately needs a modern "ma bell" style breakup.
The fuckers who make these devices have zero interest in allowing you to do anything other than spend money with them, of which they will take their cut.
The whole thing feels optimized for trapping users, not enabling them.
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That's not really "shopping using AI" in any meaningful sense. Or at least it's not in the same spirit as what's being discussed.
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Have you tried learning the local language?
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> No one is doing that, these people don't exist.
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.
Not where I’m from. No one has the money to fly to Japan for a shopping trip like this ad suggests. Where do these people exist outside the Bay Area?
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> "Normie America" loves that shit.
Mate I'm in the EU and neighbor has got a statue of big gorilla on his balcony.
The EU is just as consumerist as the US. I can't tell you the number of young dudes who think they look cool because they're wearing a fake Hermes manpurse and who wear a cap as if a videoclip from the 90s from Vanilla Ice just called (don't get me wrong: I love Ice Ice Baby and I read Vanilla Ice is a good person. But it's 2026).
And there have been several EU companies getting funding to create an "AI personal shopper app" (all getting pwned by Google and other big players).
No really: the EU is incredibly consumerist too.
I don't know why your being junked, few companies know more about people than Google. That's why this pos is marketed directly at them.
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Are you sure? I think "normies" would prefer to see and try on the clothes they buy.
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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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761821
You wrote this remember
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.
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For stores with strong curation, you could just skip the research phase and buy whatever Costco or Lee Valley is selling.
Goodness me, when are we just going to stop buying “products” already?
Well i mean,,,
plenty of people are shopping online and in fact they are using the same services that this company provides to them. That is why this type of targeting is affective. Society has grown to a large customer base that is simply what they are everything is for sale. This makes the point that to sell a computer these days they have to imaging you are using it to shop, based on statistics that sad truth usually lies in numbers. How many hours a day is an average American looking for deals or the hottest thing out right now. Newer products are not event glamouring the specs of their devices it simply what you can do with them now that sets them apart from their competitor. Smartphones ads are mostly focused on the camera capabilities and the screen clarity, that is what today's average user is focused on along with how long in a day they can enjoy this new smartphone (battery). What worries me is how invested in the AI idea these companies are. You can see the great deal of hope they're emphasizing on.Not sure if this will last, but time will tell.
Funny, clothes shopping is actually my favorite personal use of AI.
A while back I was driven nearly insane because I discovered that 90% of hiking pants don't have a rear left pocket. Some clothing designers have some specific vendetta against it that I just cannot figure out. As a user of said pocket who wanted to buy compatible hiking pants instead of changing my pocket usage habits, I wasted hours looking at photos and browsing physical stores to no avail. In the end I just surrendered and let $Skynet suggest some for me, which it happily did immediately.
I don't know which universe you hail from where Google Search would give that information prior to LLMs, but I don't think I came from that timeline.
But if your claim is that no one needs specific hardware to do that instead of just pulling up $Skynet.com, then I completely agree.
I don't really get why people have the audacity to presume what other people like and do.
You are not every other person. People are different from you.
While I 100% agree Ai is getting shoved down people's throats by tech giants, I would never presume to know how people are using it.
More people are discovering it, at least, as a better search box than Google. There's at least data behind that.
It isn't too far of a jump to then have it shop for you as well.
One thing that is interesting with stories like this: the wild, emotional responses Ai-related news gets out of people.
> I don't really get why people have the audacity to presume what other people like and do.
Part of this is that we are increasingly in self-selected communities of people just like us. Prior to the Internet and social media, you more often interacted with people that all you had in common with was spatial location and a dash of socio-economic status. It wasn't an unbiased slice of the populace, but it was at least less biased.
But today, it's much easier to have all of your social interactions limited to a social media bubble that reflects yourself.
That in turn makes it really easy to believe that whatever is true for you must be true for everyone because it seems to be largely true for all the people you see on a daily basis.
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.
Someone on HN a few months ago said that they gave up and decided to try Copilot in Outlook, which Outlook kept nagging him to do. He tried the example prompt that the nag screen gave him, whatever it was, and Copilot said 'sorry, I don't have that functionality' or something.
Not only the actual functionality people want is missing, but the functionality they're nagging us to use is missing./
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It's the new assistant on my phone but it can't even set a timer or alarm when I ask it to. Gave up using it after that.
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You probably have a custom domain Google account? They have Gemini locked down and barely able to do anything.
Switch to a consumer Gmail account and loads of Google features start working.
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I dropped a screenshot and it worked great. Like a screenshot of sports practices.
This worked for me just a few weeks ago
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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).
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Google is desperately trying to find their place in this brave new world, where the only thing they make well is hosting other people's VMs and LLMs. It is so sad. It was their labs that invented the transformer, yet they failed to capitalize on it. Sure, many people are in a position to have to use Gemini via APIs, myself including, and not happy about it... because it is dirt cheap compared to most all, but still this is not what I would call AI-era domination or even stable presence.
Meanwhile Microsoft and Amazon is eating their cake with Azure and AWS. A whole new generation of smart kids is now starting their day with ChatGPT (not me, I do Claude, but same point), instead of Google... so for many people it is not Facebook nor Google Search where "the internet starts from". This is massive loss. Broadcom is probably going to eat at their push for in-house TPUs. And surely Apple already ate everyone's cake on the affordable laptop with Neo, which is incredible for Apple to do, as they've always been roughly 1.5 the price of windows competitors. And Apple did it years after Google forayed into Chromebook, which this Gemini Laptop basically is version 2.0 of. The moment ads start showing intertwined with GPT output, Google is roast, most their revenue is ad-based, no matter the very strong (and perhaps top) cloud tier and Android licenses. Regarding this - Fuchsia is still not used in any frontier product, and poor Android is so much Java-tied, that it basically lives in the 90s from in a certain sense.
We can only speculate what the reason for this all is, but I'll put a very unpopular bet on Google shrinking massively the next few years into something aggressively robotized which looks more an utility company, than a SOTA research camp. For what is worth IBM was clairvoyant enough to do this shrinking years ago, and now can brave for thousands of COBOL lines being rewritten, and then some layoffs. But IBM has evolved an ecosystem that keeps companies locked in many dimensions, similar to Oracle perhaps, while Google does not.
I wonder what's with the moonshots side of the business of Google and could they scale that.
They are still very strong in versatile r&d. And AI would open many new opportunities.
I think CEOs are so drunk on the shareholder buzz for AI that they think this is also what the customer wants. I love integrating AI into products, but only in a way that is seamless. For example, I did my taxes recently and there was a button to upload my tax pdfs to do a best effort auto-fill of some forms on the tax website. No mention of AI even though AI was almost certainly used for that button, just a simple plain button.
Also product managers. Google has a chromebook brand that will a strong. It feels like someone split off the hardware and software under a different brand to get a promotion...
> The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI.
You may be the wrong gender to market this to, but giant numbers of shops and the space in those shops are devoted to one half of the population in general really liking buying clothes. Going shopping is a leisure activity. Retail therapy is a common phrase.
I also think it's not a great, world-changing, google-scale idea, but I'm probably the same gender as you.
"Going shopping" - exactly. That is a social activity with the primary goal of hanging out in a shop and having a good time. You don't do that at home in front of a laptop. This is a total misunderstanding of what "shopping" fundamentally is about.
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> This is why AI doesn't sell
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
The Google voice chat integration in android auto is vile currently. You ask it to map something. The map spins up and adds the address quickly. Shortly thereafter, the Gemini agent asks you if you want it to plot the directions? And then it starts bothering you with extra questions like "want me to tell you the weather for your destination or figure out some fun activities?". No, leave me alone and do your job better, please.
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I shop for things with AI as well. For example for haircare, or skincare, there is no way to figure out what ingredients are fine in various products. I pulled down 600 shampoos, prices and their ingredients, and made the AI choose which one based on my hair type and what I want.
I have another pipeline that pulls down all the groceries from stores every week in a 3km-radius and then builds cheap, healthy recipes from them, then orders the things I need by how the stores are laid out.
In general I spend about 65% of what I used to, so I think that the incentives for consumers are there.
Wtf. I use OpenAI for all my shopping now. How to match clothing and finding things I have seen.
ChatGPT has helped me with all the wired social things I have no clue about. Like how long should a suit jacket be, what to pair with loafers. And more often than not I buy the things ChatGPT suggest.
ChatGPT lets me be normal.
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.
*except maybe Valve.
Regretfully, search engines and SEO astroturfing have become so bad that one is often forced to rely on AI to sort through online storefronts. I've had to resort to this for several recent purchasing decisions, as web searches didn't reliably surface the options (nor surfaced trustworthy information/reviews)
I use AI to research different options when buying. Eg, I used Google Search AI Mode to search for specific t-shirts with specific attributes. And I found what I was looking for and bought it.
Thanks to AI I did not have to parse through a lot of different vendors and different webpages manually.
I thought similarly, until I actually tried using AI to shop for clothes, now I’m a total convert. It’s like the best possible men’s fashion concierge…
Enjoy it while it lasts.
The pressure to turn on the money faucet is very real, and as soon as they do, the AI shopping experiences are going to just mean “run an auction and steer the user to the highest bidder”. Like how Amazon, google, etc all have been doing it for ages. It’s way too profitable for them to ignore.
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I think this is probably the wrong group to say people don’t use AI for shopping. Even if only 10% of the world uses AI for shopping, you’d likely find 8% of them active in this group.
Google: site:apple.com "Apple Intelligence"
303 results including https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
"Apple Intelligence AI for the rest of us."
Modern day's "think different".
Your ingroup is other people's outgroup, come join us, we are cool and different.
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist.
Really? I must be hallucinating the multiple people I know who do this here in Portugal. Clothes, random parts for stuff they need. They just point a camera and ask for it, often iterating. They clearly prefer the chat interface that somewhat also limits their choice, instead of the plethora of ad-filled websites that are hard to navigate. I'm aware this poses several problems we will need to solve, but it's still happening.
Related: Bar some of my somewhat AI-resistant friends and some older relatives, almost everyone I know (including college students I teach to, my dad, friends, non-tech co-workers...) no longer uses google as their first choice (they do fallback to it if they need to). They all use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Used to be just ChatGPT but now there's a relatively equal divide. And an ever-increasing number of them are clearly using AI for pretty much everything else (proof-reading, writing e-mails, building spreadsheets, tiny custom apps for themselves, creating music, images, jokes, memes, photo editing/touch-ups, student evaluation, school material preparation/creation, personal/intimate advice, and much, much more.)
It is especially fascinating to note that, with the exception of AI-assisted coding, there is clearly more AI usage among the non-tech folks, as so many tech people are immensely resistant to using AI for something other than work. It's clearly shifting, though, as I see more and more of those AI-resistant people slowly also using it in their daily lives, as opposed to "only for work".
Only hackernews commenters know how to market AI, but they are too good to work for a trillion dollar corp
Well a number of people here work at those corporations.
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?
How is it getting that pricing data? By reading the giant, three-inch-high price labels that are right next to the fruit?
Call me crazy but I don't think that "discovering how much oranges cost" is a big enough pain point for most people to spend hundreds of dollars on smart glasses to solve.
I know plenty of friends into fashion that use and want to use AI features to find fashion, design looks for themselves, etc.
I know this game is 13 years old but had non-gamer friends who are into fashion get addicted to the Covet Fashion game.
Personally I want to use AI for fashion shopping, it just currently sucks. I want to be able to search for very specific things. Example: "women's button down collared shirt with thin vertical red and white stripes and a floral inside collar lining"
gets me a few close results but also gets thick lines, wrong colors, and not a single one actually matched the description.
Re: Apple. I don't get what you mean? https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ still exists. Were you referring to the home page only?
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist
so out of touch lol. Had an ex-partner (complete non-computer person, working in branding & communications) who was doing that three years ago.
> No one is doing that
It's crazy how confident that sounded. I'd bet that energy would have been better spent on asking people instead of assuming that a subjective opinion is representative for anything.
> seriously go check out apple.com
First words "Now Supercharged by M5, [LEARN MORE?]"
*M5* AI in the fast lane. MacBook Air delivers blazing‑fast AI performance thanks to the powerful combination of the GPU, Neural Engine, and unified memory in M5. With a Neural Accelerator built into each GPU core, AI tasks run with amazing efficiency. From AI image upscaling to running the latest large language models, you’ll be more productive and creative than ever.
I shop with AI recently because it gave you more accurate recommendation.
As for the fact that corps like Apple backing out of AI marketing, it is because AI itself becomes a negatively connotated term that is no more associated with something great and pleasant - but has become a negaive term people associate with fear of job loss, uncertain future, high computer + RAM prices, rising retail electricity prices, AI slop spam etc etc. We basically approaching AI fatigue to the point of AI hatred - and you do no want to raise those feeling and have them associated with your brand. Apple gets that, others will follow suit.
This has btw. nothing to do wheter or not AI does actually have positive impact on society or not - it is the feelings that matter, not objective facts.
> The very first thing they show this new machine doing is helping people shop for clothes using AI.
I can only imagine the fashion horrors created by AI sycophancy. That said, most "fashion" is already a horror show.
In the mid 90s, one of the main use cases advertised for the Web was sharing recipes. I didn't know anyone who primarily searched for recipes online, clearly those ads were targeted at a different demographic group.
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist.
"I don't personally know enough people doing what a mega-corporation with a massive market research team with multiple layers of market research audits has concluded people claims to want, so I'm just going to diss the product"
> Everything is an ad for an ad at this point.
Always has been. What do you think pays for all the “free” stuff on the internet?
I agree with you but you are missing the fact that a lot of people are shopping with ai.
My wife in fact just presented me with a spreadsheet generated by Claude of the jewelry she’d like to have.
So yes. I expect a lot of people will use ai to shop.
I shop for clothes with ai
yeah, any of the AI bots are bad at helping me find clothes b/c they don't even consider my size, gender, or anything when suggesting things after like 3 back and forth messages (this is both ChatGPT and Claude).
I went to the apple.com homepage, literally zero mentions of Apple Intelligence, just a dropdown option under iPhone's menu items.
I feel like "find me the shirt from the Instagram post" (which is what's depicted in the ad) is a use case that most people will love.
I know my comment is not useful, but this scenario makes me ill. We have been taught to consume. Forced to consume. Reminds me of that Monty Python skit. "It's only wafer thin." And then we explode. https://youtu.be/MFQuP-DSmGo
Every single Apple product page for a product that supports it mentions Apple Intelligence. You’re wrong.
Yes, I checked the page for Macbook Neo and there's a section called Built for Apple Intelligence. Seems like it's still there.
You are just misunderstanding the job that it is doing.
It is not "shopping for clothes with AI". It is recreating the dressing room experience from home, and it likely will be a table stakes for online shopping in the near future.
It's a formula for disgruntled customers who thought it would look ok because AI and then you won't be able to return it.
>not a single mention of Apple Intelligence.
This is probably because they know it is not very good.
> 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.
Lol. You're really out of touch, aren't you.
That being said, I don't know if people shop with AI would need a laptop for this... what they showed in the ad looks perfectly doable on an iPad. Perhaps this is Google's iPad attempt?
Marketing isnt marketing in the traditional sense any more, it’s just deceptive stuff to make you buy more
HN is not the target market.
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
I look forward to the results. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
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Historically the Chromebook target market is students, where this AI will probably be disabled by the school.
Unless these things are much cheaper than a Macbook Neo, I don't see it succeeding.
Many people are slowly realizing that AI are the fancy letters this corporations tack on to increase their prices or make it seem better then what is it. Does not improve the experience or anything
You know what they say: there are only two industries now, fraud and gambling.
I used AI to shop for shops of clothes. But I would probably use it directly if I trusted it to give me good results.
I use claude to quickly find products nearly everyday. Mainly as a powerful web search.
Really? I extensively use AI for shopping recommendations now, down to 3d printer filament, I don't touch sites like Wirecutter.
I was even at a shoe store the other day and just took a pic of a whole shelf full of sneakers and asked claude to explain them for my use case (running vs tennis).
It combines research with a buying decision, which most eCommerce sites don't currently do (except for just listing hundreds of reviews)
I dont think you are right. In the near future every purchase and every offer request will go through AI. I imagine you request 1000 offers from similar companies for your product wish. No longer do I need to spend 1 week searching for a good priced painter for my house. My AI does it. Same for all other products. At the same time, companies at the other side need to adapt to this situation and have to use AI to handle the massive amount of requests. Requests can be a real offer. But also crawl results from AIs. The circle is complete. Google wins.
There’s no way this scenario doesn’t get wall gardened off in some sort of way - as the AI SEO market will decimate current AI results in the next 3 to 6 months for sure. The slop is already making organic product hunting impossible.
Apple Intelligence is Gemini at this point.
I asked an LLM to research some clothing options just yesterday and it's done a great job putting together a list of brands and models with the specific parameters I wanted, very quickly.
Fwiw Amazon Fashion is a huge business.
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.
Went through acquiring game studios. Closed them before they released a single game.
A big part of Stadia failing was it didn't get traction, and a big part of that reason was Google's history of just giving up on products out of nowhere, so very few people were willing to give Stadia money with the risk of everything they bought vanishing. Then, when Google did give up on Stadia out of nowhere, Google said they'd refund everyone everything they spent - the kind of pledge that might have encouraged more people to actually give it a try.
Then again I heard anecdotal stories from a lot of developers that Google was a pain in the ass to work with because they didn't understand anything about working with game studios; it was just "we'll give you X money to bring your game to Stadia" when that money didn't make it worth taking developers away from the platforms they were already publishing to.
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"This is why AI doesn't sell."
There are several AI companies now with billions in yearly revenue that didn't even exist a few years ago. Many more with many millions in revenue. Saying AI doesn't sell is completely delusional. You're in an anti-AI bubble.
tell me more about how all this revenue makes up for their lack of profit. economics 101.
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Are any of them profitable?
I suppose you said "AI Company", and not "AI Provider", but AFAIK there are none of the latter that are turning a profit.
I don’t mean to be snide, but go touch grass.
Regular people will use AI for everyday things, not writing code and managing Asana boards
Regular people don't use AI, majority of people don't like it. You're in a bubble.
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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.
Which is weird because Apple Intelligence + Shortcuts is the most underhyped corporate use case for AI. For my money, it’s the quickest and easiest method a non-programmer can use to prompt-build a program that both works and that they can understand.
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.
> 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.
A bit of a tangent here, but the tldr is that I think this has been the case for quite a while.
I don't have any stats to back this up, and maybe someone does and will prove me wrong, but marketing doesnt feel significantly more effective than it was, say, 50 years ago, and yet the main reason every scrap of data about our personal lives is harvested is supposedly for marketing. Maybe it turns out theres just not that much you can do with the data, I'd certainly hope so, but I think a lot of it is just down to the fact that marketing execs don't actually use the data in any meaningful way, like you say marketing to customers they wish they had to buy the idea they were gonna do either way.
Like I remember a decade or so ago, the promise/warning was that advertising and entertainment would seamlessly blend when it can be tailored to exactly you, to the point where people happily and willingly watch advertisements. We got the opposite, adblockers are extremely common, companies have to strong arm you into even looking at their ads, and people count down the seconds until they can press the skip button
I for totally agree with you. I actually think the people disagreeing with you are just exceptions that prove the rule. You are right, nobody is really asking for this. Now, we can't say literally "0%" but what this prove, and we all sort of know, there are a lot of neurotic people out there. But, yes, this is just slop for the vast majority of people.
Theres a similar ad fod chatgpt that is on YouTube and it totally baffles me. It shows a guy lifting weights and then someone typing into chatgpt "can you help me get to 40kg by Xmas" and fhen he goes back to lifting weights again.
What the hell was that?! Chatgpt didnt do anything. The person that made that ad should be fired for gross incompetence
I have no stake in this race but you are clearly wrong and thinking your personal datapoint of one is correct at scale.
Litterally hundreds of millions shop with AI today.
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Wait, it's... just all AI?
> Check responses. Internet connection required. 18+. Results may vary based on visual matches and are for illustrative purposes only. Sequences shortened.
My next startup will be a company selling cars, with a little disclaimer at the bottom: "Car features not guaranteed to work. Drive infrequently and slowly."
For entertainment purposes only.
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> Coming Spring 2026
What does this mean? I'm in Australia so I would expect Sept-Nov.
But since I've only ever heard of American companies use seasonal typed release dates, my first instinct is to assume this is an American site and therefore American Spring - but Googling 'spring season usa' tells me Mar-May. And we are already in May.
So then I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see what region this might be in, and it has got Australia selected. I change to UK, scroll to the top, and it has changed to autumn.
So, it is actually Australian Spring. That actually surprises me since most pages like this would not be updated to reflect my region, and so I would never expect this kind of text to be localised.
Let's just all use unambiguous wording and units :)
Fwiw in the UK, the page says
> Coming autumn 2026
I would also never expect this kind of text to be localized. Strange.
What if you live on the equator?
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I'd say that's bad localisation since people in Australia don't use seasons but instead months or quarters.
I wonder what it says for places which don't really have seasons, like say Singapore?
Yeah it's region specific which is interesting.
So it does say fall on web archive
Why would they disable comments on the youtube video
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.
Chromebook users.
I loved my Pixelbook, fantastic piece of hardware. When that ended, I went with an Acer Chromebook. Works fine, just not the same.
I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.
I will most likely get a Googlebook, and would be more likely to do so if it was not named Googlebook and did not have Gemini built in.
> I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.
To each their own, but this is absolute insanity.
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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.
Why would you want ChromeOS and not Linux?
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You can install ChromeOS on a Mac: https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/
It's a great stopgap OS for older hardware.
As a linux desktop user, I would buy it only if I can wipe ChromeOS out of it.
> I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.
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.
> I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.
Is this satire?
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.
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Googlebook is cringe? It's just the name of the company, calm down.
They used to have something called the pixelbook, which is the most generic name you can possible have. Neither of these names are unarguably better than the other.
If this ends up being great for developing android apps, and running them on the desktop, plus having 15+ hour battery life, it could be interesting. Knowing google, it probably won't though.
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.
Everything on this page suggests it's not for education.
Emphasis on AI and connecting to your phone. How many Iceland trips do students make?
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The target is definitely not the K12 education market. It looks more like a premium device which most Chromebooks are not.
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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.
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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.
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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
Is the value of the Chromebook in education that it is 1) cheap or 2) doesn't do anything except have a browser?
If it is both, then all the Neo needs to do is have a browser only mode and goodbye Chromebook market.
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Gembook or Geminote would've been cooler. But no one asked me unfortunately.
Google MegaPixel!
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I'm a happy Apple ecosystem user. However, there are many more Windows and Android users worldwide.
I think that the appeal of this product is that the Wintel monopoly of years ago is dying. If the Googlebook is well executed (as the Apple M1 line was), it can be an option for Android users who wish to move away from Windows but are not knowledgeable enough to use Linux. I think the only problem here is Google's track record of abandoning product ideas. A new product like this requires multiple iterations to get it right, but if Google abandons it as soon as the results are not what was expected, it will not have the time to mature in areas like gaming or app support.
Does this thing run Android? There don't seem to be any details in this post.
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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.
The problem with cloud gaming is that there's too many ways for it to go wrong and only one way for it to go right.
It's hard to explain to normal people that if you have a stable internet connection and live relatively near to a data center and you buy a dongle and a cat6 cable to avoid any Wi-Fi interference and you enjoy playing certain genres of games but not other genres of games, then you can get a good gaming experience.
You have to be a technical person to understand the failure modes and most people aren't technical, get frustrated, and just say that it sucks. Cloud gaming is not a mass market product.
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.
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It seems pretty inconsistent. I tried GeForce Now on my gigabit internet and it was super laggy with a lot of audio glitching. Maybe I just didn't have a datacenter near by.
You have my attention. I assume this would also work well on a worse laptop (since the processing is done in the cloud)?
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The main problem now is publishers have to opt their games in to be playable. Until that's solved cloud gaming is a non-starter for me given my current library.
At this point, if you want a laptop, get a mac and be done with it.
Until other manufacturer step up their game, there will be years and years.
Apple was given a free run by Intel's fab issues. I'm hoping Panther Lake laptops together with Dell's CAMM2 will make Linux on amd64 highly competitive with Linux on the M-series, so maybe months and months - not years and years.
I thought Microsoft had the market cornered on terrible product naming but "Googlebook" is extremely awful.
My suggestion, if they really want to go this route, is to shorten it to "gBook".
I am old enough to remember that iPad was supposed to be a product-line-dooming bad name.
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The first thing that came to mind is "What about all that gobbledygook in your Google-dee-book?"
I'm imagining poultry running around clucking: "gBook! gBook! gBAWK!"
> I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo
8GB of RAM for MacOS is a concern. ChromeOS is probably more RAM efficient..
> 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.
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Got a cheap Acer Win11 machine for like $500 last year. I don’t think they even know what the low-end market is like, it is all about getting the most RAM/storage while everything else is reasonable and cheap enough. In which it is really hard to make a profit there because the price is the most important thing
Why anyone would view a non-upgradeable phone slapped into a laptop case with minimal computing capability for the price would ever consider a Neo is beyond me. At that point, get a damn tablet. It’s literally the same thing but, like, designed with intent rather than a bunch of scrap pieces.
Seriously, what’s the draw? The 8 gigs of ram? The 200 gigs of storage? The major lack of ports?
Have you ever touched a Neo? It does not feel like scrap pieces. That is the magic.
A phone has great battery life and standby power management. What’s the problem with running a different OS on it if it works just fine?
Different stuff for different folks I guess. At work all files are on the cloud, I have a NAS and a computer I can remote into for development. A Neo is just perfect to make all of that mobile.
As for tablets, I’d only recommend one if you need a stylus for drawing or a smaller form factor. I think that is the market where the Neo is competing, that is where you have a point.
In local prices, a MacBook Neo is $800 for a 13" display, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage.
A 13" iPad Air with 8GB RAM, 256GB storage and a Magic Keyboard is $1648.
The iPad has a notably more capable CPU, for over double the price.
An Android tablet isn't a capable replacement for a MacBook/iPad. (And I don't know that you can get even get any 13" Android tablet with a reasonable keyboard case for a discount over a MacBook Neo.)
You get 90% of the MacBook experience for half the price. Most users only need this 90%.
MacBook neo is not expensive but it's not cheap.
Just the build quality on MacBooks compared to your random PC laptop piece of plastic that falls apart within a few years would make me very picky. I have a random “corporate” Lenovo and everything physical in it is way way worse than in my work MacBook
It's $600. In this market that's practically free.
Which machines on the market beats it at the price?
Google Pixelbook from years ago was $999 IIRC. I wouldn't be surprised if Googlebook is more expensive than Neo.
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>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.
Crossover has allowed me to 100% Spider-Man Remastered on a base M5 MacBook Pro. Gaming is not out of reach.
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?
I can tell you they're not going to be buying "googlebooks" plus, Apple has never until this year offered an actual low-price machine.
Of course their market size is going to be smaller when you're leaving out the sub $1000 dollar market.
Googlebook sounds funny now, but so did iPad when it was announced.
The Googlebook name won't stick around for that long. It'll be like the Nexus and Pixel C, around for 1-3 revisions, canned, then brought back a few years later.
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I still remember the Maxipad jokes.
supposedly macbook pro's M-series are quite adept for gamers these days.
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.
But the gaming software market is very heavily biased towards delivering for Windows on Intel. That said, I’m not a gamer so what do I know?
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The processing power is there but the actual game support is not, which is the more important part. There are some games that support it but at least 3/4th of my Steam library won't run on a macbook.
Even games which used to run on mac mostly stopped after 32bit support was killed.
I'd like to meet the person that supposed this to you, and ask them what games they play.
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The Neo is amazing as an "AI thin client" the Googlebook seems to be trying to be.
> I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook"
A "GBook"? "Goog"? "Gook"? "Glook"? "Boogle"?
So, I'm not usually one to point these out but one of those words is considered pretty offensive by some and I am assuming that was not your intention.
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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.
What is more sad is that no one in the Linux world has taken the bull by the horn like those three former Apple engineers who got a license from Arm to design Arm chips why hasn’t anyone taken the leap in the Linux world to make that happen for Linux OS? In short, that isn’t Apples job it’s been 35 years for someone in Linux land to step up to the plate.
What, you mean you don’t want to sound like a turkey when describing your computer to others?
> I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo
I would recommend the same. I absolutely love my Neo. It's such a nice machine for the price.
>I really don't see the market fit for this,
Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price? Especially considering you can install linux on it natively.
Other then that, Gemini is the biggest advantage. Google can offer Gemini for free because its TPUs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia stuff. Even free tier Gemini is really good considering it can integrate with a bunch of your stuff like google docs, and the lower last gen models have pretty generous usage limits.
Overall, if you are in Android ecosystem, you don't really even need a cheap laptop anymore, considering things like Samsung Dex exist.
> 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.
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> 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.
> 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.
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.
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These things are $250?! Where did you find that info?
I would rather buy this shit than anything Apple.
Of course, there are more than 2 options for laptops. Thankfully those two shit companies didn't get to round up that market yet.
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.
Good. Pixel phones are the single most overrated phone you can get today.
They've managed to convince people to pay $800 (usually with some discounts to be fair) for what's essentially a $400-450 mid range phone. Even if nothing was defective and customer service was "perfect", it's still a midrange phone priced like a flagship.
>I was sent a phone with a defective modem that they refused to replace
To be fair, how would they even verify this? Unless it's outright broken (eg. no cell reception), someone with a "defective modem" is basically indistinguishable from the 99 other people with a perfectly fine phone, but nonetheless want their phone replaced for various nonspecific issues about cell reception.
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My experience with Google hardware is that they shipped an update for Pixel 4a that crippled the battery. In Australia, they announced a safety recall due to a discovered battery safety issue, but in the rest of the world, it seems they wanted to save money by crippling people's phones of their own volition without much explanation. But no worries, they're offering 3 methods of compensation: free battery replacement to restore it, $50 cash, or $100 credit for another Google phone.
I went to redeem my compensation - free battery replacement unavailable in your country, $100 credit unavailable in your country. I guess I'll take the $50 cash...? I fill in the form with my IMEI, full name, address, etc etc. After a week they send a response saying unfortunately after thoroughly looking into my case, I'm not eligible, and no further explanation is offered as to why. In effect it's as if they hacked into my phone and installed a virus that cripples the battery and there's nothing I can do about it, like this is just a normal way to do business now. You don't really own your phone after all...
I bought a skagen with google watch os or whatever was it called. The experience was so so bad, I’m never going back to Google products.
Mine got a software update that rendered it useless. I bought an iPhone.
As another n=1, I've been happy with my Pixel phones over the years and never had such an experience.
I was very happy with them until they sold me a defective phone, jerked me around for months, then refused to replace it.
That comment was criticizing Google's support. Did you also have an experience with them?
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Yeah I've been exclusively on Pixels since the 2 and love them
For those wondering why this isn't using the Pixelbook brand, the Reddit post sheds more light.
A Googlebook is something "above" a Chromebook (maybe the AI featureset imposes hardware demands that Chromebooks can't service) but is still made by third parties. I suppose they're keeping Pixelbook for first-party devices.
The most interesting part to me is the "Create your own widget". I'm really interested to see bespoke UI become a first class citizen. Why _can't_ I just ask Gemini to build a widget that serves the data I want how I want it?
Building "small" UI is for the birds, just expose the API and the basics and let users tell the AI what UI they want.
They just show that for widgets but I think that will be a big thing in the future
Everyone and their mom will have their own hyperspecific custom apps prompted into existence
Something like Claude Code with stricter sandboxing built into the OS for consumers
Not just desktop either but also on phones
This just oozes design by committee. Googlebook is the most confusing name they could chooses, some asinine compromise...
Most people who haven't reddit would assume googlebooks are made by google
What name would you have chosen?
- Chromebook with Gemini
- Chromebook Pro
- Geminibook
- Googlebook
They all have their pros and cons.
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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?
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.
> The general public are weary of AI.
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.
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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.
Not _just_ being able to finance; the 0% interest and 24-month period is amazing!
Not everyone wants an Apple device.
Yeah this is going the way of the Pixelbook.
This is not a laptop announcement. This is an attempt at a software announcement disguised as a laptop announcement.
All that's shared about the actual laptop are renders. The website and the video spend much more time and pixels advertising hypothetical software features. The worst part is it's not a hardware announcement, but it's also not even a software announcement since the software is also just conceptual renders and nothing material. It's a website to advertise non-existent software features, running a non-existent google-branded laptop, for the purpose of what exactly?
I can imagine two reasons this website exists today. It exists because someone at Google has seen the possibility of getting a promotion by relaunching Chromebooks, and it was launched today hoping people will hold off a few months on buying the MacBook Neo, to weigh their options once this launches.
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
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?
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.
> "people who want to be rich leisure class people, or social media influencers"
And about 0.5% of this target group want anything to do with Android [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-rules-gen-z-nearly-90-...
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.
I think you're probably right, but "premium Chromebook" is such an oxymoron. People with money just buy Macs.
My wife and I actually went to Tokyo for a vintage shopping trip haha. I went to Shinjuku to buy vintage camera lenses and she went to Omotesando to buy a vintage bag. I mean, we did other stuff besides vintage shopping too, like eating good food, but still.
I'm not a big shopper, but vintage shopping in Japan was so much fun. I get it.
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.
The ZipAir direct flight can get you a week long trip from SF to Tokyo for ~$750 outside of peak seasons, although I'm not sure what their rates for extra bags are if you were only going to shop.
the last time I went to Japan was I think 2015 and the exchange rate was about 120 yen to the dollar. I bought almost all of the clothing that I wore for the next year or two during a stretch of three days in Tokyo. The exchange rate right now is 155 yen to the dollar and prices on everything in the US have gone through the roof, so this doesn't seem all that ridiculous to me. I am more annoyed by the assumption that I live in SF than the idea that I might go from SF to Tokyo on a vintage shopping trip.
I think half of SF that works in tech has done a 1 week tokyo trip in the past year
If you watched the rest of the announcements, apparently social media influencers.
What CPU architecture does it have? No comment.
What operating system will it use? No comment.
Will I be able to play games on it? It has AI!
Probably arm with chromium
Indulge some pedantry with me... Why "Googlebook?" Pixel was meant for first-party computing devices, I thought. Nest for smart home and Fitbit for fitness trackers.
If you don't want to associate with past Pixelbooks and want to highlight Gemini, why not Geminibook or something like that? Does Google not have faith in the Gemini branding?
Random thoughts from a nerdy mind.
AI polls lower than "congress". People hate it - they hate it so much. They probably _wanted_ to call it that but someone who knows anything put their foot down.
CongressBook it is!
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.
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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.
Just calling it a "Gbook" sounds infinitely cooler.
They are renaming fitbit to google health too lol
Just the app, hardware trackers like the Air are still Fitbit.
Which matches what they did with Nest, keeping the hardware name but having everything live in the Google Home app.
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.
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> 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).
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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.
> Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.
No, it's because repair involves labor and unless we ship it across the world to take advantage of people making a dollar a day it's just not worth it.
The cost of making and importing stuff from the third world is just so cheap now that it's simpler to get a new one then to have someone making a living wage in the west fix it.
"Disposable" is fine! Things have a useful lifetime and uneconomic repairs are just that. Nothing needs to last forever.
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"Planned obsolescence" is the engineering reason for this so it's well planned.
>Clothes are replaced, not stitched
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.
Welcome to modern life. It looks amazing — but its all a lie.
I used to have everything Google.
Strata Pixels, Nest Cameras Google Smart Speakers Nest Home Security system
but then I broke my Google Pixel 1 watch. I ended up chatting with service in India and they pretty much told me that there was no way to fix it. After that, I quit buying all things Google and switched to Apple. Now I only buy Google software products, no consumer devices.
They completely changed their watch design for the Pixel Watch 4 so that it is actually repairable: https://www.ifixit.com/News/113620/the-pixel-watch-4-is-the-...
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.
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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.
Love their SaaS offerings though!
Apple gets a 3/10 for repairability to Google's 9/10 on their latest Pixel Watch 4.
Google isn't making these (or having them – the devices themselves – made under a Google brand). Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo are making them.
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...
I still think it’s amazing they manage to fit all that AI technology into something as small as a button.
Different iterations of the product were called both those things
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.
They had a fix for that in development! Sadly but not surprisingly, it was cancelled:
https://9to5google.com/2024/07/12/chromeos-lacros-ending/
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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.
Because they (Google) are so removed from manufacturing
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.
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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.
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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.
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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"?
> Same for MacBooks
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.
what? did you even bother to google ;-)
"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 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.
Please not schools…
Chromebooks that run on Google services are already the default 1:1 device in schools. They're cheap, they take a beating and have good battery life.
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> 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.
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I could not agree more. We need less tech in classrooms, not more.
>deterministic open systems
FreeBSD?
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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.
> Then again, maybe the Google brand isn't toxic to the wider ecosystem of buyers.
It's a "most loved" brand according to https://rankings.newsweek.com/americas-most-loved-brands-202...
I think 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.
> "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.
It's refreshing to see Marketing step into the Product Owner role. Let's see what they do with the oppportunity.
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).
Disregarding whether I like it or not (I don't), it's a strategically interesting product.
This appears to be an AI-device to mainly check the boxes for "low-complexity tasks", "high user-dependency" and "continuous flow of training data".
Perfect to catch the high-profit consumers of AI: They will use AI-services for the most mundane tasks, which won't be taxing on AI-infrastructure but also very sticky, as it will be a core of the desktop-experience.
So this is where we're heading with Desktop OS...
You forgot the user must want to own it over other products.
FWIW my mum is still rocking my 2013 chromebook pixel. It is on all day, every day, and has been ever since I gave it to her a decade ago. I have repasted it three times now, it's been covered in sugary crap, dropped, trodden on by my kids, had charger cables tripped over and ripped apart while plugged in (sans magsafe), and it still looks and feels almost indistinguishable from when I bought it. The keyboard and screen are somehow both still fantastic, speakers great, experience snappy. It is phenomenal hardware, and if this 'Googlebook' comes even remotely close (and I suspect it will), I'm buying one as soon as I can.
There are a lot of people here complaining about AI and Google and Android and Ads and clothes and marketing and whatever. I'm assuming a lot of that is HN anti-AI derkaderbs bias, with some Apple/Google tribalism for good measure. Yeah Gemini might be shite at writing code, but Gemini Web / Android is by far the best executed and most useful conversational/consumer AI assistant out there (at least in my experience, it's not even close).
I'm not a Google fan by any means, but credit where credit is due, I don't see a timeline where they don't end up completely owning genpop consumer AI. The more I think about that the more convinced I am, and the more I feel uncomfortable.
"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?
Somehow all the Windows laptops are now "Copilot PCs" now. It's crazy...
Anyway, you didn't miss out on anything by not bothering to look into the details. There are no details. No specs, no nothing. Only "get notified" for when it comes in fall.
It can make widgets though! Imagine being able to track a flight, which is so difficult currently!
If you're touting widgets in your marketing its a sure sign that you have nothing useful to sell.
I immediately closed the page as soon as I saw that pop up at the very top.
Google have been terrible at copywriting (at least in their hardware line) for as long as I can remember. Here's an example from 2020: https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1312560706965983234
It's a shame because I love the Pixel series and they're doing it a disservice by not marketing it better. Apple's copy on the other hand is generally excellent.
Phew, good to know LLMs still can't make a good product or market it properly. Yes, people will buy it--if that's your standard for "good product", you should apply to Google :)
Omg. All the worst of Google embedded in a single device.
I swear if I see it in real life I'm going to spray holy water on it.
A.I., data collecting at every level, horrible incoherent ui.
Hit me daddy !
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 also doesn't activate an LLM when you do a pointer check jfc what are they thinking
It's the same thing as Docs asking Gemini to write for you when the text cursor idles.
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How can Apple's competition be so bad? It's not even that complex: just make something quality. The closest so far is latest Framework Pro.
The visionaries know better than us. They've known better for a long time now.
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."
Surveillance PC, the product will be the people's collected data.
(they've gone to the next level this time)
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.
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.
Yeah I saw that, looks like this is a new laptop class, perhaps an AI-infused evolution of the Chromebook Plus spec: https://www.google.com/chromebook/chromebookplus/
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.
Screams of "COME ON DO SOMETHING WE NEED THE STUDENTS TO NOT BUY MACs!"
Built for Gemini?? No thanks.
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!
> 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.
I can't stand websites like this. I get there's no substance to my complaint, but it just seems pointless to do this. If you want a slow reveal, do a video or something (but I won't watch that either).
I legit thought it was just an image. The first panel fills my whole phone screen and there is no indication that there is anything to scroll. I don't like this new web.
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.
I wish google would just go away. The thought of another product with googles tentacles in it makes me nauseous.
So this is a notebook with good enough TPU capabilities to run Gemini partially (like in a MoE), a small model that knows when to delegate to the main model?
I'm curious what this means for ChromiumOS and downstreams like FydeOS.
If Google is now pushing this "intelligence‑first" desktop experience, how much of that work is likely to stay in the proprietary ChromeOS/Googlebook layer vs. land in upstream ChromiumOS?
IMO this makes the argument for ChromiumOS and downstreams stronger. Gemini wants to do everything in my browser and i can't turn it off please help
The OS on these Googlebooks will probably be a lot closer to Android 17 than to current ChromiumOS. Google has been consistent in saying that they're phasing out the ChromiumOS code base (while continuing the support the Chromebooks they've already sold) in favor of modifying AOSP to work better on laptops and desktops.
There was a time where Google could've been competitive in this space, specifically against Apples MacBook product line, but that has long since passed. The 3rd party manufacturer path means Google isn't committed to this and won't have competitive hardware. It'll just be another Chromebook and limited to the Google Play Store too, which just isn't good at this point.
> and limited to the Google Play Store too, which just isn't good at this point.
Care to elaborate? I have no ide a what you're talking about here.
The quality of apps in the Google Play Store has dropped massively. There are still some gems, but for better or worse, the ecosystem is simply not as strong as Apples and it's certainly not comparable to just having a device where you can install anything you'd like in a full desktop grade OS.
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 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.
EDIT: removed URL as the content is completely hallucinated, sorry
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.
Weird - is that a fansite that registered a Google codename as a domain?
Yeah, this is the one. Android in a desktop form-factor.
Wouldn't it be Fuchsia?
Fuchsia ended up in some Google products, such as Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, and Google's smart speakers, thermostats and displays.
But Fuchsia won't be in the Googlebook because there's no Chrome browser for Fuchsia. (In early 2024, Google officially stopped trying to port the full, desktop version of Chrome to Fuchsia.)
The dream of Fuchsia is effectively dead, and aside from some older Nest devices, Google only remaining efforts with the OS is basically as a tiny runtime that they'll run in VMs on Android for some secure process needs.
It was just a speculative research project and a bunch of bloggers went wild declaring it the end of Android, Linux (Android of course sitting on Linux), ChromeOS, etc. That was never real.
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That’s what I don’t get about this product.
I’ll be blunt and say this looks like a rebrand of ChromeOS with a normal keyboard and AI slapped in it.
Chromebooks are associated with low quality garbage that people only buy if they’re desperate.
I don’t think this product will be successful. Someone buying a laptop at all needs more compatibility than Google’s OSes offer. Even with Android apps, those are all really shoved in haphazardly.
Why am I buying this when I can get a MacBook for $499?
maybe Fuchsia?
Magic Pointer requires the user to be 18+...
"1. Check responses. Internet connection required. 18+."
Taken out of context, an 18+ device called Magic Pointer coming from Google would be wild.
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.
I can't invest in Goolge products. I always feel like they're going to pull the plug or change the terms, pricing model etc.
This is how I feel. No matter what they do at this point it is moot as they cannot be trusted to maintain products into the future. So much so it is a meme at this point.
Original Pixelbook was amazing and my fam still uses it. Wish they just stuck to the lineup and kept iterating vs giving up and trying to rebrand every few years.
Chromebook, Pixelbook, Googlebook.
Google loves to just remake the same-ish thing again in hopes of adoption.
Chromebooks had a higher market share than Macs in 2021.
That bump in adoption was most likely due to remote-learning prompted by the pandemic, something that we're not likely to see again.
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The Gemini features would be so cool if they ran locally, but as-is, this reads like a laptop running spyware to me.
The Android app casting does sound amazing though and that alone would make a full on Linux machine with MBP level build quality compelling.
https://goomics.net/239
I hear people complaining about Windows shoving ads at them, then you have something like this from Google that makes me ask why would anyone in their right mind want to use an OS like this? Seems built to hook you into Google's services.
I guess there are some people who want to be locked tightly in an ecosystem which will be a lifelong dependency for them. Meanwhile Google extracts thousands and thousands of dollars from the "user" over their lifetime.
Oh I get why they do this now...
All the comments here seem to be assuming this is a Google product, but it’s not - it’s not even a single thing.
It’s a class of laptops. Or, really, an operating system for laptops, not a new device from Google.
“We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks.”
So, there will be (if they all actually get released) at least five laptops that are ‘Googlebooks’.
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.
The gemini/ai part aside, but I really like this revival of passion for PCs and Laptops. Totally anecdotal here and I could have definitely spend couple of minutes to research the marketing numbers, but I cannot help but feel happy with Framework, Panther Lake and Dell XPS and of course the mini Mac and Macbook family. I feel like there were years when center of attention had turned to mobile/ipads (and consoles) which were severly locked down to the point of no use point their intended creators purpose. I felt bad my siblings never get hooked into my old PC, as they went from PS3 to phones.
I want to cheer them on just because i think the improvements they made to Android (such as the Linux terminal) as part of the Android-based laptop project are pretty cool. They increase the usability of Android tablets by a bunch.
This laptop though? Uhhhh who would EVER buy this over MacOS????
If everything is Google then there won´t be any more competition. They already have their hands in way to many things. Laptop margins are thin. They could squeeze smaller players out of the market with a decade of dump prices, seizing control of the computer market. Say hello to attestation and not owning anything anymore. Hope this laptop flops.
How do they justify developing and selling this? Like how do they justify the internal cost of moving people from core businesses to do this.
This page crashes in my Google-based browser. I can't scroll down more than ~50 pixels.
Even if the hardware is great, the thought of giving Google more data is icky to me, even if logically it makes no difference. I already use Gmail, and Apple collects just as much. Something about Google's image just makes me grossed out in a way Apple does not.
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.
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.
Or Chromebook? It’s the same with the messengers, they can’t settle on a single brand.
This runs Android, not ChromeOS, so the Chromebook name doesn't fit.
That said, Googlebook is a terrible name and reusing Pixelbook would have been way better.
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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.
> Googlebook
My Gobbledygook works just fine
Droidbook
Please tell me you're being sarcastic here?
For a split second I thought this was a joke/commentary on Google and Facebook.
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.
The second feature shown in this global launch is ... widgets. Like, Windows Vista widgets. And then, I could also open phone apps but not on my phone but on my computer (because I'd want to do that) and then the remaining feature is file sync.
I am just lost. I wanna watch a documentary on how this kind of thing gets thought out and made and approved by a lot of people and then comes to being annouced as an actual hardware product.
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.
"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?
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Hmmmmmmmm
Nest Secure Google Home Stadia Daydream Glass Nexus Pixel Slate Pixelbook Chromecast Audio OnHub Jamboard
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My Pixel 3A stopped receiving security updates after less than 3 years. I remember Google did this to start using their own chips in their phones.
Two or three years is not even close to the support Apple provides. It sealed the deal for me and I switched to iPhone.
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> 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.
yeah, even on product lines that they kill (like Stadia) they usually do right by the user (eg they refunded everyone, both on hardware and software people bought on the platform).
I thought Apple does tell you how long they'll support hardware.
For example: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772
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My experience with Google hardware has been the opposite. Three early Pixel phones died within a year or two, and pretty abysmal experience with Pixel Buds. They'd send me replacements, but I tired of them breaking.
I switched to an iPhone after being a long-time Android fan. Haven't looked back. Converted my wife to an iPhone too. Apple is better at hardware.
iPhones also receive security updates for a long time. I buy iPhone 3+ generation old brand new at the Apple store, and it... works really well.
Apple might not specify a time upfront but they do consistently support hardware for a good length of time. IPhones generally get OS updates for 5-6 years and security for at least a couple more.
I’ve never used anything they made long enough to get there.
> Their hardware is usually fine when it comes to support.
Pixel stands were horrible. And discontinued.
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.
> 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.
My nest thermostat disagrees with your optimism.
I was interested but then just immediately wrote it off because of the AI-centric marketing.
Why anything AI make me want to buy a whole laptop? I can use AI from websites, apps, etc. already.
exactly what i was thinking; its like as if in the early 2000s someone was advertising a laptop because you can search google with it...
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> I was interested but then just immediately wrote it off because of the AI-centric marketing.
Same here.
We're not the target audience for this product. In fact, we're as far as possible from it.
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.
It doesn’t matter to me that some of their products have longevity. I don’t know which they will keep and which they will discontinue and there are many vendors out there who have a better track record.
Chromebook has been around for 15yrs
Pretty good run. Wonder how many of those devices will support Aluminium OS and how long they'll support ChromeOS after Aluminium launches.
If I buy one today, is it guaranteed to run the newest OS in 3 years?
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Googlebook dot Google.
Pixelbook.
Chromebook.
Google Pixel.
What's next? Nestbook? Drivepad? Geminiphone?
A laptop built entirely around AI, which is definitely a stable business that will be around in its current form indefinitely and whose cost definitely won't go up once Google needs to start making a profit on it.
Agreed. I have been an early adopter of so many google products. I have been burned every single time. They have systemically and carefully sabotaged any trust the industry had in them.
If they don't kill it, they might kill your account with no recourse, or some automatic process might lock you out of certain features, or some major bug might leave you staring at a forum post with a "I have the same question" numbering in the thousands.
They'll be killing off Android any day now.
You can only dream. Even if they do it - there are billion devices that will hope google will build a new one.
And majority of the world like it.
If you want to share room with RMS and hope for GNU Hurd - do it.
The products that get killed are the ones that can't run ads or get run through the analytics wringer.
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Doesn't the Google Play Store account for something like 15% of Google's revenue?
I really like the Pixel phone.
And when they cancelled Stadia I got a full refund including all game purchases, so it wasn’t that bad.
Agreed, yet I have a Pixel 8 (2nd hand) right now. The hope is that I don't care about their support anyway, it's just about GrapheneOS.
Not to mention the “customer” “service”. I have yet to talk to a human at google.
Same, I give all Google products a wide berth.
This is just chromeos+Gemini
No, that's an Android desktop OS which ChromeOS is not
Chromecast has been great for years and years, maybe they just kill the crap that should have never existed just like everybody else
It is never for people like you. They try a lot. Something works and many not.
Some people like ikea - try to build. Others want just works items. Why not...
I've had great luck with their hardware (phones / tablets) and they get updates frequently and for quite a long time.
Same for a while. OTOH a Pixel 9 Pro screen of a close friend broke 7 times in a year.
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Even if they don't kill it, this is certain to be even more privacy invading than their pre-AI offerings.
They burned that bridge so hard with Stadia.
"Check out this unbelievably cool product. It's a walled garden though that only works as long as we maintain it."
That's cool, but we're not spending actual money on something you're gonna kill.
"No, we promise: this time, it's different. We're not going to kill Stadia."
Nice try, Google. We've read the Boy Who Cried Wolf. We're not buying it.
"No, really. We know we've fucked up repeatedly in the past, but we pinky-promise. This is for the long term."
Okay, we'll dip one toe in, but only one, because we still don't trust you.
"Well, they aren't buying enough games on our service. I guess we should kill it after all."
WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!
As much as Stadia was a gut punch, at least for consumers Google did pretty well at making us whole (Full refunds for all Stadia purchases across the board) [0]
Obviously that's not much recompense if you were a game developer lured into some exclusive publishing deal, or even just someone buying a Stadia Controller, but c'est la vie I suppose
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/google-refunding-thr...
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People who badmouth Stadia's shutdown expose themselves qw non-buyers. I'm yet to hear of a better product wind-down than Stadia: every single buyer got full refunds for games and hardware (i.e Chromecast). The firmware to convert Stadia controllers to plain ol' Bluetooth was a nice parting gift.
So whats next. Apple will force corners... Glass. Microsoft will push copilot. Firefox will push AI.
Are you waiting for w3m or curl?
I feel the same way. Looks neat. But hard pass. I've been burned several times.
Google will probably kill off and shut down Google Search at this rate.
It will also vacuum up your user data and use it to train AI models and such.
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.
GFiber isn't owned by Google anymore, which is why they changed the name. They're now part of Astound.
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> 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.
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
Apple’s operating systems have fantastic interoperability and familiar UX. There’s no ads bugging you at every step, and things seem to just work. (for most users)
This keeps users locked in.
Then there’s this thing. Who is this even for?! How does it fit into the ecosystem? It’s another rebrand instead of what was needed which was an ecosystem upgrade.
Too many syllables.
It was super disorienting for me to see the cursor pointing different directions depending on which direction it was moving.
I wonder if 1) it's actually going to be like that and not just an aesthetic for the ad, and 2) if I would ever get used to a cursor working that way.
Normalizing compute rental + no privacy vs. actual ownership.
Typical of Big Tech spirit.
Hey Google, take the cue from Microslops debacle with the "agentic" Windows : Nobody asked for this!
I don't have any comment except to say that I think this is the first non-mechanical/custom keyboard in ages to have an F13 key.
Wow, so they looked at the copilot+Windows11 and thought that would be something they want to emulate...
As much as we want to point fingers at MBAs, but isn't this the exact kind of things they teach as cases to not do?
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.
> I have a hard time seeing how any Chromebook above $ 349,- could still survive in an post-MacBook Neo age.
I doubt there's enough of a market for the use case alone, but nice Chromebooks are perfect for travelling internationally - you can reset them before border crossings and quickly restore them after passing through border crossings where anybody is liable to ask for access to your devices.
Never thought of it, but conceptually, I could see the appeal for very privacy minded folks and those with heightened security requirements. Course, it's a question of thread profile whether one trusts Google and case dependent whether one can actually expect free and unrestricted access to a VPN for set up once they are in the country in question. Plus, you could just do this with any OS or laptop really, just use Tails or some other live distro. In any case, as you said, likely a small target market.
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> 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.
Source: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en
Google don't dogfood so I'm not interested. I remember when the Pixel Fold came out asking people at Google and nobody had one. Have fun, but if nobody at Google will use this why should I?
One of the really nice things of the Macs (from Neo to Studio) is that they have a single UI (that might or might not be ideal for you, but it is unified,) yet underneath it has a Unix OS that lets you run standard compilers, docker containers, vms whatnot. The pixel and chromebooks were nice as a device to run a browser on, but not for development. Getting EMacs to run on them felt like a big achievement at the time.
> has a Unix OS that lets you run standard compilers, docker containers, vms whatnot
99% of users don't give a damn about that. This is a play for kids in schools, so they get used to their operating system.
I didn't say anything ab out that.
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.
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.
No spec, no price, just fluff. Typical Google marketing.
I cannot think of a product I'd like to own less than a machine fully-integrated with Google. And I'm not some "never Google" guy—my company's entire email infrastructure lives on Google. It's a necessary evil for us.
But... Google owning my hardware? This feels so out of left field. I must not be the target audience.
I assume you don't use a google pixel phone?
This seems like their pixel experience but on a laptop.
I'm not sure I'm their target audience, but if it can be a macbook neo quality device with chromebook, I can see a market for it.
Is this the Android desktop based which was leaked quite a few times? I feel the discussion here is overly negative. Android finally having an official desktop mode is good for competition. Windows is dropping the ball with each release, Macs need some good competition.
Mostly dismissive comments, it seems. Maybe justified. But I think a more interesting conversation is what happens if this or other devices like it become a hit? I wonder if the next generation of users will look at computers with no AI features the way we look at MS-DOS.
Nobody at Google can read a room? This is like marketing a new, more effective plow during the Dust Bowl.
They can't show me how this new shiny thing can make me more productive at work. Looks like a giant phone from the video.
Why would I want purpose-built hardware built by a company looking to lock me in, rather than hardware that does whatever I want?
In the Android IO event on Youtube today: "We're taking Android from an operating system to an intelligence system"
I had a belly laugh. They're trying so hard to be like Apple with these, but without the clear explanation of user benefit.
Because taking Windows from an operating system to an intelligence system worked out so well for them, that now they're trying to figure out how Windows can reach performance parity with Linux running Windows software :)
What does Google gain from this? They already struggle in hardware, or am I missing something - has something changed?
The main thrust behind their foray into hardware was that they feared being cut off. Whoever controls the terminal has the power to push users toward their own platforms (Bing, Microsoft 365, etc), and I guess they could see the writing on the wall and wanted to have a platform they control.
As for this project, I think part of it is just the conclusion of internal power plays between Chrome and Android. The other half is probably the same fear as before: if Microsoft puts their own AI closer to the user, Google will have a hard time keeping up. So the best defense is to have your own "AI-first" OS.
Keep in mind that Microsoft doesn't need to win to hurt Google's bottom line. For example, if Bing captures 5% of search through OS- and browser-bundling strategies, that's still a 5% that Google can't have.
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.
Did... did the AI in the video just do the Duolingo learning?
This is then the device where Google monitors everything you do, just like on the phones. And decides what you can use and what it reports.
> Designed for Gemini Intelligence
They should design one for users.
Most important question: can I run Lineage on it, or will this be the start of a departure of Google allowing OEM unlock on Android?
Google could make a killing if they directly competed with the MacBook Mini. People paying out $2k to run OpenClaw will care about how well Gemini or whatever runs on their hardware. Scale up the Coral accelerator they already sell.
This is a landing page with basically no details, but if it’s a thin console that calls home to Google it loses on latency and privacy immediately.
Both Google and Samsung have adopted the sleek, rounded edge, sharp trackpad cutout and metal frame like Apple.
If the Macbook Neo didn't exist, both of sleek designs might of tided people away from Apple, but the price on the Neo, with the hardware polish from Apple is hard to beat if you're content with MacOS.
Top 3 comments are so negative.
Here’s my optimistic take - Google is already supplying Gemini/Gemma models for the next generation of Apple Intelligence. It makes complete sense for them to enter the hardware market.
I’d be happier if they use more on device models by optimizing their hardware for the next generation of Gemmma models.
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.
Is this what happens when you let Gemini name your products?
Apple's best move was to steer away from AI lockdowns and focus on what consumers really need.
Coupling these with Gemini is so detached, especially when everyone screams Local LLM.
So Google will kill it in a year or two when the AI hype will be over, and the average consumer won’t care about AI showed into their face. But hey, at least they created more e-waste.
When I saw the name, Googlebook I had my fingers crossed that Google had finally built something that could compete with the Apple MacBook. If that ad is anything to go by, this will flop and there will be no shortage of consumers who will go along for the ride.
If it ends up having ML-centric hardware, like a version of their TPUs, the story could change, especially if they don't try to keep it locked within their ecosystem. Local AI is the future.
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?
[0] https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en
I have "Agree" and "No thanks" buttons on my cookie banner. Tested on FF and Chrome (Windows) and Safari (iOS). Maybe a UI bug for you?
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.
Make it as perform as well or close to Apple Silicon and give me free access to Linux dev environment and I will give this a shot.
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.
Features like the magic cursor look cool: an infinitely flexible context menu. However, context menus make it clear what you can and cannot do. If the magic cursor can't "do everything reasonable", it'll be just as usable as Siri.
I'd be more likely to believe them if they had already implemented this feature on their Pixel phones, but they haven't so I expect it probably isn't "done".
I'm prepared to buy a laptop that utilises AI to improve things and generally makes things better. I see no evidence so far to suggest that this is it.
Google should totally be experimenting with what can be done, but it seems to be a bit odd that they put something so uninspiring front and center like that.
So eventually this will have ads everywhere right? Because selling all your info won’t be enough for google.
I can’t wait for local llms to get more powerful
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 will never buy Google hardware again. You can keep it
Is this a laptop designed to be powerful enough to run local models? I suspect not.
Is this a laptop with a built-in integration with Google's cloud models? I suspect so. And if so, it's the integration that's special, not "the laptop."
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.
A new high watermark in absolutely content-free marketing webpages.
- Annoying startup animation (at least it's skippable)
- Minimalist copy that is that is also very hard to parse for meaning.
- Elements jarringly appear and disappear as you scroll.
- Only has examples of tasks that are easier to do on your phone.
It's just a slightly different chromebook optimized for AI? Am I missing something? What a nightmare.
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.
Can't wait to see the rooting hacks resulting from mousing over a strawberry and text saying "count the r's".
Waiting for this to be discontinued in around 3-9 months
Right, just like Chromebooks were. Oh, wait...
This is going to be called the Slopbook, I’m calling it now.
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.)
Yeah, if you now check for 'pc is stuck' by wiggling your mouse, you suddenly eat up more resources if it actually was getting stuck, making matters worse.
But at least your AI can then tell you it will all be okay eventually.
What I would buy: a local AI focused laptop with a built-in, powerful TPU. And it would have to open its hardware interface so that I could actually do what I wanted to do with it.
First thing they show is shopping with Gemini AI. Everything is around advertising and shopping with Google. Not the platform for me.
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.
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.
Can this project run for 30 years at loss? Google investors don't like that.
One day an exec will say lets reduce wasteful projects and cut this.
reminds me of the pixel c! that thing was pretty neat. this thing has the same "glowbar"... i bet it's old stock for them now since the pixel c didn't see many sales; that was from an era where google at least pretended to be a 'good guy.'
i have always liked netbooks more than chromebooks (but I really only ever had the samsung NC10, specifically for the keyboard). i really miss that thing. these days i am wary of the gewgly eyes on my digital person, so i'ma pass on this til someone less on the radar makes another platform pop.
where to next! linux on risc-v? steamOS on ARM? screenless lozenge wirelessly coupled to an EEG that makes me hallucinate images?
I wonder why they think this will go better than the Pixelbook did
GBook or GoBook. They may have biffed this launch no matter how good. Googlebook is too long. Looks cool though.
Competition is always good. I got a Mac Neo recently to supplement my larger 16” MBP and they really nailed it. It’s the perfect laptop for kids and travel. Most importantly it feels like it’ll last for a decade like my MBP. I hope it’s the same for googlebooks but even pixels have issues with surviving beyond 5 years.
"Designed for Gemini Intelligence", so, not for human? Got it.
I love my Chromebook, huge fan. GoogleBook seems objectively bad.
Impressive feat of confused branding that Google has marketed Chromebooks, Pixelbooks, and Googlebooks.
Upcoming launches: Mapsbook, Waymobook, Walletbook, Authenticatorbook, ...
If it's not a new thing you can't be promoted for it. Rest assured theres still a Chromebook, Pixelbook and Googlebook team each.
so Aluminum OS is finally here. it should be big enough of an announcement by itself but what we get is googlebook; hardware with an AI-tied value proposition. how do they think people would justify choosing a googlebook over everything else only to use gemini?
I wish it was framed around the OS and how it can run on a wide range of devices (similar to android and chrome os) and become something more in time (maybe with apps that can be developed outside the android ecosystem with a desktop experience in mind).
DOA right? Since they don't have any good will that they won't just drop support next year?
I’m waiting on these to be 70% off. Assuming an open boot loader or anyway to run Linux on it, looks like a clean computer.
I don’t know what normal person wants this though. The Neo is enough for most, and if I need more I’m probably going to want a real os. Not ChromeOS++
WTF, I got this announcement from HN. Uhhh channel anyone?
Why even bother announcing an hardware product if you are not even going to mention the specs?
We are supposed to buy this because.. AI?
Maybe you can install Linux on one of these things, and turn it into something useful and not choke-full of spyware.
The very first thing I thought when I read this is "Hmm, wonder how long this one will last before Google kills it."
Well, I am still waiting for the price. If it is $450 or higher, I'd just get a MacBook Neo at that point.
In practice I find the Gemini models to be the worst for coding and design.
Put a TPU in this and I’ll buy it!
When I first started scrolling down I thought that's what they were going to tout: Contains TPUs so you can run Gemma 4 models fast, or some such.
> Designed for Gemini Intelligence
Zero chance in hell this surveillance device comes into my home.
No thanks. Google is heading for a similar closed ecosystem setup as Apple.
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.
>a similar closed ecosystem setup as Apple
Uh, you do know that Google releases as open source most of Chrome, ChromeOS and Android?
I guess it's just mobile chip and everything AI related connects directly to google services through internet.
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.
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.
I just want to state for the record that this will fail harder than Google Plus.
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.
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
I genuinely though this was an April fools joke, then remembered we're in May. This is bad.
"Chromebook" had a better ring to it.
HN always disappoints me with these kind of threads, with all the generic disappointment and Google scepticism dominating the conversation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still disappointed. But mainly because it looks so superficial. I was trying to work out what's new and it just looks like an Android device (or Chrome? I can't tell) with some party trick Gemini features sprinkled on it. There isn't anything technically interesting here.
I'm still waiting for someone to ship a truly AI native device - something with the right sandboxing and UI layers to let an AI model truly understand and work with the device natively, but safely. The OS SDK itself should natively incorporate all these elements as first class primitives. And the model would be trained heavily to explicitly understand and work well with them.
Apple will probably nail this, as usual
I presume since they're going to be actually showing off the details of the Aluminium OS at Google IO, they probably want to keep it surprising, so that should hopefully explain the sparse details. HN is a bubble... this sentiment about Google really isn't widely shared. Personally, I'm pretty happy that Android is coming to desktop, I really feel like Windows and macOS need more competition. Unless Valve does something spectacular with Linux desktop adoption, Android is probably the best bet.
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?
We started taking the phones out of schools, so I guess now we are building them back into education laptops instead?
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.
> more technical oriented people.
technical people are the ones that have built AI farms, stuffing AI on normies throat.
> files is cloud-based
was long gone. Seems you are assuming like Mac iCloud or iOS. There is plenty of local storage if you want to do that.
> Macs (because their hardware is great on laptops).
In other news, many other people don't have money but spend on overpriced macs (excl. neo) - so they buy cheap and cheerful - just works Chromebooks - for basic stuff. Normies also not need 3 x 8K monitors.
> And a laptop is something very personal to me. I don't want to be depressed every time i
Normal people wont use AI features. How many windows users are using copilot etc? many have accustomed to ignore - popup from AV or jumping triggers and just do to their basic stuff in computers.
It is just here in hn - everyday some blogpost - I used AI to completely automate this or that. this model is 1.27 times better that yesterdays model.
I came here to make essentially the same comment though I use Lenovos instead of Macs.
They are so bad at product
Finally, the laptop I've been waiting for, I can use Gemini to ask it the difference between hotdog or not hotdog.
Is this a ChromeOS ad or a Google manufactured laptop?
Google really struggles with product. Money doesn't buy everything.
A fun name... (I wonder how many non-native English speakers realize that the two occurrences of 'oo' in 'googlebook' are not pronounced the same.)
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.
Looks like they rushed the release or didn't let the LLM proofread: "Öffne Apps von deinem Android-Smartphone auf deinem Latop – ohne Installation"
Such a nice Latop!
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.
Copilot never gave Windows 11 a chance. Now Gemini will do the same to whatever this device is supposed to do.
Judging by the poor hardware quality of some Google Pixel generations, I'm not putting my money anywhere near this thing.
Edit: spelling
Feeling like no longer personal but AI laptop.
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.
I seriously have no idea why would someone pick this one up instead of MacBook Neo for 600 USD.
To me, everything about this seems AI-generated. What else but a LLM could have come up with these features and the name?
A new laptop powered by AI and they're still showing an apps toolbar....?
Is this the end of Linux powered Chromebooks?
Just a little too late for school. The product probably doesn't even exist. They're screaming bc of the Nep.
Oh boy will this be dated in 2 years
I wish Google can bring back the OG Pixelbook, where "AI" merely means Google Assistant.
Might be a good laptop, but we're trying to use less and less Google. I feel like the name isn't working in it's advantage.
Who is this for? This is why I like Apple, when they release hardware you see exactly who it is made for in the marketing copy
What pricepoint is this targeting? Is this an Android MacBook Neo? It looks like it's a tablet (phone OS) with a keyboard.
before clicking I thought this was gonna be some sort of a hardware innovation, TPU in a laptop for local AI type of product but oh well.
This was my thought too, but I didn't see anything to rule that out, did you? It says "built for Gemini Intelligence" so probably has some hardware requirement like that
Yeah- but that would be a terrible miss on marketing. "built for Gemini Intelligence" - this could also just mean a bunch of new api integration.
So...it's a Chromebook. With "ai".
Running Android, not Gentoo.
Not quite Android: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112299
Save us Richard Stallman
Renamed chromebook ++ AI!!
It's like genetic recombination: take the worst of Apple and the worst of Microsoft and you get... this!
It's just a bunch of gobbledygook.
Why announce it now without spec and so far away from shipping date?
Apple WWDC 2026 coming up…
High-end Chromebook done right could be a very good thing for computer security.
Can we replace the splash page with this blog post? https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
> powered by premium hardware
It's hard to treat this part seriously while seeing HP logo on the page.
This honestly seems so stupid. Why?
So its the same you can do with using any AI app, but they make you buy an inferior notebook (compared to macbooks)
Is this ... an Android laptop? I can't recall if Files icon on ChromeOS matches the Android version.
Had a pixelbook and it was hands down one of the best laptops I ever had. Sure, ChromeOS is fairly boxed in but the Linux VM was reasonably good and the built quality was just something else.
I wish they'd just make ~ pixelbook with ubuntu... it'd be such a powermove, and they if anyone could pull it off
I was excited at first by this, but the "designed for gemini intelligence"... like what does that even mean
How long will this be supported until it is in the google graveyard though?
4 years and 1 month! https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/
Screenshots say Sporify. Probably a human made typo in the mockups - refreshing!
I don’t think any portable laptop can beat the MacBook Neo on price and value this year.
"Intelligence is the new spec" then proceeds to show shopping ads and duolingo
I can't view the page because... Firefox, apparently.
The AI device thing reeks of 2024.
Nobody wants AI embedded into the OS spying on you every move.
The fact the team behind this came up with the name "Googlebook" doesn't give me a great confidence in the rest of the product.
We should start betting how long it's going to take Google to kill it.
Man, what the hell is that song
I don't think it's about AI. It's about the success of the MacBook Neo. Google kinda missed the point that at this day and age you can take a huge cut of the Windows market share just based on the fact that your laptop pairs up with your phone.
That's the killer feature of the Neo. This is going to be the killer feature of this one. Working alongside pixel. You have some sort of a platform.
What are they after? Your data, obviously. I doubt they have such a success, I don't see THAT many Pixels around.
Am I the only person who PANICs whenever I accidentally somehow activate the AI on my android? I'm so conditioned to panic whenever I see that floating rainbow that the whole marketing page is covered in I get very negative feelings.
This is just depressing to me. I don't really know why.
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.
Is this an April 1st thing?
Why would anyone trust Google to support these devices long-term, even ignoring all the privacy concerns that come with using Google products and services? The KilledByGoogle website should be enough of a warning sign against this company, and with rising hardware costs... this just seems dead on-arrival to me.
This link crashes my phone browser :-)
a little O/T, but i suspect these screenshots might be some of the first look at the upcoming aluminiumOS.
oops, disregard. i just saw that the machine was also previewed on "the android show". i'd missed that until i saw it on YT a few minutes ago.
Dystopiabook
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.
where did you see the price in the landing page?
Can't imagine this'll help the RAM shortage.
Why? Are you thinking this will be a 128GB behemoth running models locally? That'd be pretty cool but it almost certainly isn't. I bet it's a very lightweight device that just calls a remote Gemini model.
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.
> 1. Check responses. Internet connection required.
Looks nice. Where is this going to be discontinued?
I believe this will definetely be a thing in the near future but this OS seems shit? maybe I’m just too old for this shit
Interesting product, horrible name.
They weren't feeling "book.google"?
They bought that TLD and then never did anthing fun with it. I can forgive them for not doing https://google, since that's discouraged apparently, but not even fonts.google? docs.google? mail.google? Apparently once upon a time you could do com.google for an April Fools prank but they didn't even keep a basic redirect. The only thing they ever permanently used it for (afaik) was domains.google, and they sold that to Squarespace. Why even spend the money?
Hey Google: please control my computer.
Good lord please do not use a Tensor processor.
WTF is a Googlebook? "Hey buddy, you got a little googlebook hanging out of your nose, a little nasty looking googlebook. Don't eat it, that's so gross!"
Is this going to be running Android?
The site crashes on my 2020 iPhone SE.
The product is for Android users.
"open apps from your phone on your laptop" only thing there that I thought: "that would be pretty awesome ngl." It would be a way to easily test android apps in a real environment with an actual large screen. Yes, I know android studio has a good emulator but emulators are still a horrible platform compared to the real thing. Particularly the networking there is nothing like how it works in the real world.
I'd be interested in knowing the specs, more about the OS, software details, platform... A laptop integration like this based on android is cool to me. I couldn't care less about the AI crap though. This is a fascinating concept because phones themselves can provide a full desktop experience when you plug them into a screen. So could help encourage mobile computing more.
what a stupid name
Will it have a bootloader unlocked???
Shoulda called it the Bookgle
I've read hundreds of comments about this and not a single one was positive.
If it runs vim. I can take it.
Is this the new Centrino?
For those wondering about the OS:
"We’re bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world’s most popular browser."
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
Many have tried desk/laptop and phone integration before, but it never seems to work smoothly, which surprises me because it doesn't seem that hard, at least to run phone apps on the larger screen (with some icon modification, etc.); and it doesn't stick as a feature, which surprises me because I'd think almost anyone would want to easily integrate the two.
I wonder why this time will be different? Is there demand now? Does Google have some trick up their sleeve? Do they have a universal development platform that makes it easy to write apps for both platforms?
This looks like a better announcement page: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
Is this a rebranding of Chromebook Plus? For those who haven't been following the laptop form factor recently, Chromebook Pluses with Mediatek Kompanio Ultra SoCs are the best deals in laptops today. If this is just a Chromebook Plus with a fashion light bar, I'm not interested.
> Unbox it this fall.
It does feel as if AI wrote that copy. Then again, this looks like a slop making machine; a slop landing page seems weirdly appropriate. Maybe no human is meant to look at this announcement for more than a few seconds.
That's a lotta Os!
> 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
This isn’t constructive at all but I can’t stop laughing
Horrible computer
SpyBook was taken?
No spec, no price. Who are the marketing people coming up with these shitty announcements?
Google is so lost
Has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with Google's unchecked monopolism
It could just be me, but the usecases they're trying to solve for always seem... out of touch from reality.
Either they live in their own bubbles where their lives revolve around constant shopping, traveling, throwing parties, and doing creative work...
Or they're not bothering to do basic observational research around how normal people live.
You mean the average person's problems aren't solved by a custom widget to track their flight to Iceland?
The irony is that most of these things would be better solved by a bot you can text. Create a thread for a trip or whatever, have it text you when flights are delayed or cancelled, reminders, let you ask it question, etc. So just...a chatbot.
"Gemini, design a widget to tell me if I can afford to stop for coffee before work"
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I don't think the strategy of trying to figure out what an "AI laptop" should be will work. The best bet is to see what use cases organically emerge from the current tech, figure out the biggest gaps, and design a product around that. This is more like they just took "AI" plus "Laptop" and came up with a grab-bag list of cool sounding features, like "custom widgets".
Why does this kind of thing need new hardware? The stuff I saw here could be apps running on any OS.
This will be killed off in 18 months. Just like every other Google project that doesnt involve ads or tracking.
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?
Hah! I was just about to post 'Can I bet on the deprecation date in Polymarket?'
"Googlebook, because lets face it, your parents are only watching YouTube anyway"
I like the footnote:
> 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?
DOA
I used to use Chromebooks as a souped-up iPad with Linux terminal support.
They missed a great opportunity to create a special user interface experience supporting multiple tasks (e.g. Gemini-CLI, anti gravity, Gemini-chat, browser) while sharing the same context . It could have been an awesome developer device . Imagine virtual desktops all sharing the same context with various tools : Gemini-CLI working on infra and artifacts, Antigravity running development , Gemini chat generating graphics assets. Hardware enabled with special shared memory / NPU.
Instead, I see a Chromebook with the nagging MS Edge “right click for copilot”.
RIP Apple.
I can’t wait to get one! Growing up with the star trek series, it all seems to be coming together now.
I don’t even know who this is marketed towards.
If their intention is to target the general public, then I think they're out of touch with reality, and it doesn’t seem targeted at AI enthusiasts either.
Price will make or break this. Nothing else.
Let me elaborate if it isn't obvious. If it is higher, people will just use their regular laptops ie. there will be no use case. If it is low, it will find it's use. Like when I am travelling, this would be amazing.
TrojanBook
Third time’s a charm I guess
Slopbook
Im more interested if we'll be able to load this OS on old Windows laptops or if it's hardware locked via software checks.
They accidentally started selling these early! You can pick one up right now, here: https://www.google.com/chromebook/
no specs given. COOL.
So it's just an even more enshittified chromebook?
Are Google PMs really just saying "let's take existing product and shove AI into it"?
Googlebook. I wonder how much some marketroid was paid for that name. Wow.
A data-harvesting software product delivered as hardware. Why would anyone actually want to purchase this?
goodbye Apple.
pretty cool design!
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?
How much?
aka cringebook
Meh stuff this, no left most fn key, don't even know if there's half height inverted-t arrangement, bleh.
No thanks!
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.
With the over-reliance on AI, this looks like a veritable slop-machine, designed to create and consume slop as a primary activity. Good job Google.
Google just give up making hardware ffs. I'm still annoyed that my Fitbit no longer works with my Google workspace account.
See you soon... https://killedbygoogle.com
Do. Not. Want. Please keep your security nightmare out of the OS.
> Intelligence is the new spec.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED how bad google is at copywriting, and it clearly not mattering.
Another chromebook!
https://killedbygoogle.com
man, even google product videos show a "watch this video on youtube". can't link anything anymore
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?
They list Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo on this site.
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.
"Yes, I bought a special laptop from my advertisement pusher."
What a terrible name.
Plus the fact that they’ve clearly just ripped off the exact shape of a MacBook, but thicker and shitter.
So... they built a right-click-slop-generator and that's the default experience you get as the context menu?
Gross. I thought the Windows 11 miscreation was bad enough.
also, second question in re sideloading:
do the Googlebooks get the 24 hour fuckoff window for enabling sideloading or can I just walk granny through loading an .apk direct on the laptop
You can say whatever, but I'll be calling this a 'slop-down menu' from now on.
slopbook
lame
what’s the OS on this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112299
Slopbook
Mehhhhhhhh
> 8GB RAM.
Oh god, it's a curse. In 2026 we should be getting laptops with 128 GB of RAM. Instead we get some "new model" over and over, with 8GB.
If you haven't checked the market for RAM lately, you're in for a shock.
The current cost spike is very recent. The average computer's RAM size has roughly quadrupled every four years since around 1988:
1988: 1MB
1992: 4MB
1996: 16MB
2000: 64MB
2004: 256MB
2008: 1GB
2012: 4GB
And then, from around 2014 or so, for the last 12 years, we've been kind of stuck on 8GB for some reason. There wasn't a ram shortage in 2016, so why didn't the average computer come with 16GB? The trend continuing would mean we'd have 64GB average machines by 2020. So what happened?
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Looks like another E-waste
This is really dumb. I wish I had more that I cared to say.
Imagine buying hardware from Google, as if they haven't given enough reasons to distrust them.
You are the product.
Hard pass.
so.. a chromebook with extra ai slop?
I don't want to give them more of my data. I would like dignity, please. #datawithdignity
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.
I hate AI.
reddit? nope
Launch blog post up top perhaps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111082)
this deff going to feed all your shit to feed a hidden model running in the background
"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)
This will end up on the killedbygoogle website probably 7 years from now. Probably right next to Chromebook at this rate -_-.
No, they will promise 7 years of update but kill it in 2.
literal ai slop machine
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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