So Googlebook actually shipped today. October 4th, right on schedule, after basically a year of leaks and a very weird marketing campaign where Google kept insisting, over and over, that this was NOT a new Chromebook. It's a "new category." Fine. Sure. I've been poking at the specs sheets all morning instead of doing the thing I was actually supposed to do today, which feels about right for a Sunday.
Here's what's bugging me, and it's not really about the hardware.
The cheapest model, the Acer Googlebook 14, starts at $899. The Dell and Lenovo versions are somewhere north of a grand depending on which price list you believe (two outlets I read this morning disagree by a full $200, which tells you Google's own comms team is clearly still sorting its story out). You get an Intel Core Ultra chip, a touch display that goes up to 2.8K OLED on the nicer configs, 16GB of RAM as the floor, and Google's throwing in ten years of guaranteed updates plus a year of their AI Pro subscription and 5TB of cloud storage. On paper that's a genuinely good deal if you were already going to spend four figures on a laptop.
But I kept thinking about my sister's old Chromebook. The one she bought for my nephew back when he started middle school, for I think $249 at Best Buy, because it needed to survive being dropped and do basically nothing except Google Docs and YouTube and the occasional janky Kahoot session. That machine, and a hundred million like it, is the actual reason Chromebooks mattered. Not because they were good laptops. They were never good laptops. They were cheap laptops that were good enough, and that was the entire point, and it's why they ended up in basically every school district in the country.
Googlebook isn't that. Googlebook is explicitly not trying to be that. One of the pieces I read put it pretty bluntly: Google hasn't really explained who's supposed to buy a $899-and-up machine when the thing it's apparently replacing, at least in spirit, was a budget category. And Google's answer so far is just "Chromebooks aren't going anywhere, they'll keep getting updates," which is true I guess, but also feels like the kind of thing you say right before you quietly stop caring about a product line in eighteen months. I've seen this movie before with a few Google hardware lines. I'm not going to pretend I trust the long game here.
I don't actually hate the hardware idea. I like that it's not just a rebadge, a genuinely new OS, built around Gemini instead of the old Chrome OS shell, apparently with much deeper on-device AI stuff than the Chromebook ever had. If I were buying a laptop for myself right now I might even look at one, especially the Lenovo config, I've liked their ThinkPad-adjacent builds for years and this is supposedly built on similar chassis tooling. But I'm not the person Chromebooks were for. The kid doing homework on a kitchen table, or the grandparent who just needs email and solitaire, is the person Chromebooks were for, and Google just told that person, pretty clearly, to go buy something else.
Maybe there's a cheaper Googlebook coming later once the premium tier establishes the brand, the way Pixel phones eventually got an "a" line. That's the generous read and it's probably right. Companies do this constantly: launch high, settle down to the real price later once the tech matures and the margins allow it. I just think it's a little funny, and a little sad honestly, that the day Googlebook launched is also sort of the day the cheap do-everything school laptop quietly lost its main sponsor. Acer, Asus, HP, Dell and Lenovo all shipped units today across five countries, and not one of them is under $800.
Anyway. I ordered nothing. I'm typing this on a six-year-old ThinkPad that still works fine, thanks, and I plan to keep ignoring the laptop upgrade cycle for at least one more year out of pure stubbornness.