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 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.

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?

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.

My suggestion, if they really want to go this route, is to shorten it to "gBook".

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.

Of course, there are more than 2 options for laptops. Thankfully those two shit companies didn't get to round up that market yet.

8GB of RAM for MacOS is a concern. ChromeOS is probably more RAM efficient..

i'd hate for my computing choice to lack fashion forward qualities -- I wouldn't want to be embarrassed at Gate A-13 with my new Apple perched on my lap proudly while waiting for the next question from my adoring fans.

I hope they appreciate the new color!

real talk : my favorite excuse for using an Apple product throughout my life is the tried and true "my company stuck me with it and I hate this piece of shit.", so I find it kinda fascinating that they're such cult objects -- and to be fair I am sure i'd say exactly the same thing if I was ever stuck in a company stupid enough to try to make me be productive on a fancy chromebook, too.

My 2013 MBP was going strong with Debian until the battery started puffing up last year, and I finally had to recycle it.

I get it, I know I'm not their market, but it still pains me because it was a great laptop.

Seriously, what’s the draw? The 8 gigs of ram? The 200 gigs of storage? The major lack of ports?

I would recommend the same. I absolutely love my Neo. It's such a nice machine for the price.

Until other manufacturer step up their game, there will be years and years.

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.

> I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook"

A "GBook"? "Goog"? "Gook"? "Glook"? "Boogle"?

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.

Care to elaborate? I have no ide a what you're talking about here.

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.

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.

   ...as computing shifts from operating systems [to intelligence systems](TKTK)...

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...

> 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.

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.

A disaster from the first step.

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.

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.

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.

That said, its hard to justify the prices for these premium Chromebooks. When I picked them up they were heavily discounted with some developer code or other.

I also agree with the shaky future as far as being able to actually opening these things up with developer tooling. It seems like they've simply been on a path to rollback all of that.

Chromebook Pixel 2013 had that atrocious function key row that didn't align with the rest of the keyboard and where made of different material and had terrible travel. The Pixelbook had some terrible PWDM issues with the display and iirc it also had severe ghosting issues. Not to forget the cut in performance of these mobile fanless Intel chips because of Meltdown & Spectre. I think the Pixelbook's WiFi/Bluetooth module made by Intel also suffered from hardware faults where using Bluetooth could degrade WiFi performance and vice versa.

Built for Gemini?? No thanks.

If so, there likely will be some variation in the cases.

Advertising aimed at the actually rich is usually more about saving time, "elevated" experiences, or building legacy.

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.

Shipping enterprise desktop hardware with AI integrated features will likely be a priority to improve the cloud footprint amongst fortune 500.

It's a "most loved" brand according to https://rankings.newsweek.com/americas-most-loved-brands-202...

Please not schools…

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Strata Pixels, Nest Cameras Google Smart Speakers Nest Home Security system

but then I broke my Google Pixel 1 watch. I ended up chatting with service in India and they pretty much told me that there was no way to fix it. After that, I quit buying all things Google and switched to Apple. Now I only buy Google software products, no consumer devices.

It 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...

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.

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.

(they've gone to the next level this time)

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.

* unless it gets merged dozens of times into other similar projects.

It might be cheaper and faster now, but will that still be true in a few years once Google has gotten bored with the project? Are they going to use this service to spam me with AI slop like they do everywhere else? What happens if a Google bot nukes my Google account, will that cut off my entire internet with no warning as well?

I'm not famous enough to raise a social media storm when they screw me over so it's a big risk doing business with the company.

Why anything AI make me want to buy a whole laptop? I can use AI from websites, apps, etc. already.

Pixelbook.

Chromebook.

Google Pixel.

What's next? Nestbook? Drivepad? Geminiphone?

Some people like ikea - try to build. Others want just works items. Why not...

And when they cancelled Stadia I got a full refund including all game purchases, so it wasn’t that bad.

Uh, you do know that Google releases as open source most of Chrome, ChromeOS and Android?

But at least your AI can then tell you it will all be okay eventually.

Yeah anecdotal, but it just doesn't strike me as how people shop.

*except maybe Valve.

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 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.

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

It’s amazing how confident you are while being completely wrong. A pristine internet rant.

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

God this is so annoying. The actual functionality we need is not there or is half-assed.

It sounds totally insane but we’re the minority here. That’s why Google is a $4.5 trillion company.

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.

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)

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.

Litterally hundreds of millions shop with AI today.

I went to the apple.com homepage, literally zero mentions of Apple Intelligence, just a dropdown option under iPhone's menu items.

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".

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.

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.

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 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)

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

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.

Always has been. What do you think pays for all the “free” stuff on the internet?

“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.

> 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.

"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"

What the hell was that?! Chatgpt didnt do anything. The person that made that ad should be fired for gross incompetence

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" :)

so out of touch lol. Had an ex-partner (complete non-computer person, working in branding & communications) who was doing that three years ago.

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.

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.

Regular people will use AI for everyday things, not writing code and managing Asana boards

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.

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.

I can only imagine the fashion horrors created by AI sycophancy. That said, most "fashion" is already a horror show.

This is probably because they know it is not very good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

303 results including https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/

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.

Thanks to AI I did not have to parse through a lot of different vendors and different webpages manually.

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.

This thing will be killed early 2028...

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)

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.