Comment by Kadecgos
16 hours ago
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?
A company that mostly works inside the browser and/or Google workspace. ChromeOS makes sense and just decent devices here are rare.
Without pricing information, it’s hard to the question "who is this for?".
Below $500? Same as the cheap Chromebooks market.
Around $700? (Or $600 educational) Direct competitor to Macbook Neo, educational market and the middle of the road laptop market.
Above $900? No idea, maybe for Google Platform die-hards.
> Above $900? No idea, maybe for Google Platform die-hards.
Managed corporate machines. I've worked with all platforms and managing ChromeOS is massively, massively easier than MacOS or Windows.
> MacOS's relatively restrictive use cases
I’m very curious what you mean by this.
A user has to use the CLI to turn off the Apple DRM to install software on an Apple laptop. The CLI is often cited as the reason people won't try Linux. This makes the entire user experience on those machines a restricted use case.
My daily driver for the past 20 years or so has been a Mac, doing everything from software development to music production to general computer use.
I’ve never had to use the CLI to turn off Apple DRM to install software. I use the Homebrew package manager to install all types of command line and GUI software and I download and install all manner of software outside the App Store regularly.
The only times I’ve had to do anything is if the app isn’t signed which is rare to come across, and even then it is a couple clicks in the macOS GUI to allow installation (I’ll grant you the fact they’ve made it more cumbersome in the past years by requiring you to go into the settings panel and click a button there, but it never outright prevents installation and never requires CLI use).
I really have to question if you’ve actually used a Mac or if you’re just repeating something you’ve heard because it doesn’t match my daily experience at all nor that of any Mac user I know (all my coworkers for example).
I’ve used macOS for over a decade and can count on one hand how many times I’ve had to use the CLI to disable DRM. Zero times in the past 5 years.
> 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
They are already rolling it out in Chrome: https://www.pcmag.com/news/chrome-is-quietly-downloading-4gb... It won't work on a Chromebook with 4GB of RAM, so they need beefier hardware.
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For corporates it could be a good balance between security and being able to spoon feed people AI. It is an alternative to Microsoft and the mess of different products and licences.
GrapheneOS users that need to access their banks but their bank's websites treat users on browsers as second class users by requiring phone in 2fa. Chase.com is an example of this. Android app on Chrome device? No issue.
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...
> 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/
> 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.
It's for Google.
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.