Google canceled its next Pixelbook and shut down the team building it | Hacker News Reader

Google canceled its next Pixelbook and shut down the team building it

theverge.com

57 pointsAmbolia38 comments

If I'm buying a great looking and powerful laptop worth $1300, kneecapping it with ChromeOS is the last thing I'd want. This device never really made sense. Google needs to stick to the low end in this segment if they want any success.

Absolutely agreed. Chromebooks used to be great because of the battery life and low price. Now with MacBook airs, there is nothing else of the same class for the price. The fact the MacBook Air M2 has about 20 hours of usage time is absolutely astounding. A Pixelbook just doesn’t make any sense in 2022.

Chromebooks can be considerably cheaper than a MBA.

My comment was directed towards the Pixelbook.

Yeah, you can get 5 chromebooks for the price of one MBA. Makes a big difference when you're equipping a 30-student classroom. They aren't comparable at all.

A proper OS versus a browser, yep not comparable at all.

This is deliberate. Google has resisted creating a mass-market Chromebook, because such a device would threaten their relationship with OEMs who license ChromeOS.

OEMs like HP would obviously be uncomfortable if their OS vendor were also a hardware competitor. So Google targets niche devices which OEMs have no interest in creating, precisely because they won't sell well. But these high-end "halo" devices still have a role in shifting perception of what a Chromebook can be; and Google simply eats the loss. Or at least they used to.

I think most Chromebooks are low cost. I bought a Lenovo Duet 2 last year for about $320 that included a keyboard case and a pen. Linux containers work well, except for slow performance because of inexpensive hardware. Although I mostly use my top of the line Apple gear, if I had to I could do everything I need to do (slowly) on the Duet and a cellphone - a great resource for people on a budget.

Same applies to the cheaper models as well, just sponsor Tuxedo, System 76, or whatever the local Linux OEM happens to be.

In Germany and Portugal when I see Chromebooks on sale on shopping malls, they always seem to share the same as Android phones with versions that no one wants.

Pilling up with promotion of the week actions, week after week, until the shop finally manages to get rid of them and then never again.

I’m kind of curious if Microsoft Surface makes money. I always thought it was more or less a loss leader. Unlike Apple, Google or Microsoft does not have control over the hardware. Microsoft surface IMO really pushed PC OEM to design out of their typical status quo designs. I thought Pixelbooks were the same idea but I guess Google was looking for the same success they have with pixel phones.

Their revenue on the Surface side continues to increase, so even if it's not profitable, it's trending the right way. The amount they've put toward engineering makes me think they'll never give this line up.

It's very unlikely. You can only make money in hardware by having a high margin or selling at a high volume. Most companies do the latter. Apple does both. Microsoft and Google do neither.

Microsoft's Surface line is certainly priced high enough for a healthy margin.

Without a crazy amount of supply chain optimization that high price is a necessity due to high costs of manufacture.

Heck, has Microsoft made money on the XBOX yet? Or did the XBOX 720 XL X+ OneX turn the corner?

... say, what hardware do MS employees use, anyway?

Mostly Surface Books and Surface laptops, but for devs that want more horsepower for local development they also offer ThinkPads. Depending on the division Macbooks aren’t uncommon either although they aren’t standard issue.

Seems very shortsighted for Google to move away from hardware, might seem smart to cut costs and stop bothering today but it'll seem an extremely poor choice when they find themselves in Microsoft's OS position down the line.

Systems are only going to get more and more locked down, Google will be struggling to make enough money on iOS in 10 years when it gets even more restricted and 30% cut of ad sales will be the norm. Current Android OEMs are gonna throw more and more custom stuff on top and begin to deviate to systems they fully control.

Google moved away from hardware when they sold Motorola to Lenovo. They didn't understood HW anyway.

Making these horrible value vanity projects to chromeOS isn't productive.

wish they would have made a separate chromeos that is a full blown well supported linux distro. the implementation of chromeos is quite impressive and so is the google hardware. it’s not like they were making money on these things anyway

I saw one in the wild for the first time the the other day on an airplane. It looked pretty snazzy (though I prefer my Thinkpad...). Wonder how many they sold... probably not that many if this is my first sighting.

I've been pretty happy with my Pixelbook Go for a few years. Was hoping for a hardware refresh, this is disappointing

Back to the drawing board...

These were great machines. I would wait till they were 4 years old and then buy them super cheap as my daily driver. 3:2 aspect ratio screens and solid build quality, great battery life from their second device onwards. I got a 2013 pixel in 2017, a 2015 pixel in 2019, and last year I got the 2017 pixelbook. It's a shame that even as a fan of the product I wasn't willing to support it at MSRP or in any way that would have contributed to its success.

This isn't a huge surprise. Google was never really a hardware company and, as the article in The Verge points out, Pixelbooks were rather niche pieces of hardware. That said, I still have one of the original Pixelbooks. When I was using it regularly, I found it to be a solid piece of hardware.

What does this say about the future of ChromeOS ? Is the pendulum swinging back to Android ?

ChromeOS is extremely popular and deployed by major laptop companies like Lenovo and HP and Acer and Asus.

It's extremely popular in schools, but is it anywhere else? (Not a dig BTW, that's a significant accomplishment.)

In US schools mostly.

Chromebooks in US schools seem to be going away. Children in schools where I live now receive cheap, rugged Lenovo laptops that are running locked down Windows 11:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/lenovo/windows-edu-la...

Most schools and universities that I know of have also adopted Office 365 for their students and teachers ever since Google abandoned their inexpensive or free education offerings:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/14/google_free_storage_p...

It looks like Google's goals changed and Microsoft took advantage of the opportunity.

Interestingly to know. Usually in most places in Europe you still get to use pen and paper, computer is at home thing, or some kind of computer lab.

Schools where everyone gets a laptop kind of device, are the exception.

Even in COVID times, it up to the family to get them, mostly.

They are still going strong in all the school districts around me.

Here too (San Diego area).

> ChromeOS is extremely popular

Maybe in US. In DE they are the product noone uses.

These were always nice but who needs a super powerful and pricey chromebook? The lower tiered models made sense but....

People who use the many web apps that today's world is full of.

intersting because thats the laptop alot of their engineers use internally

arent they switching to hp?

Yes, the Hp elite dragonfly. I think the Pixel chromebooks haven’t been available internally for a while. I still use the Pixelbook I bought myself at home—it is fairly nice and light with 3:2 screen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com