> Googlebooks are the big G’s replacement for Chromebooks, the web-centric computers it launched in 2011 and which run ChromeOS. Chromebooks have won plenty of admirers in the education sector, especially schools which see them as a fine way to get decent and well-priced computers into kids’ hands without having to take on the burden of managing a full OS.
The newer Googlebook range uses more powerful processors than their predecessors, plus a new OS called Googlebook OS that bakes in Google’s Gemini AI – a product the Chocolate Factory is very keen to see succeed as the great AI land grab continues.
>...If you buy a Chromebook today, updates will end in 2034 eight years into the future
So they have introduced a major change and said any older Chromebooks bought going forward will only get 8. So its not a retrospective reduction for existing customers.
Sounds reasonable.
8 years is still a long time for a cheap Chromebook.
Large organisations don’t buy a single batch of machines then call it a day. If an organisation standardised on Chromebooks because of the support period, they will still need to buy new machines and those won’t get the support period they had expected.
Extremely sarcastic take but - shouldn't the 10x productivity boost of LLMs like their own in-house Gemini make maintaining software easier?
Nothing in terms of feature release / quality / maintenance I am seeing out Big Software would lead me to believe there's been any productivity increase.
There would still need to be money to make from doing so and a will to do it.
My company has a shitty old defunct group management portal that has been twice superseded and is finally getting shut down. But we have LLMs, why not maintain it in perpetuity? Because it's shit, nobody likes it, there are other options, it would still cost someone's time just to follow all the processes we have to do releases and keep things running, security testing, yada yada.
Adding more years of support to some shitty old thing is certainly going to cost them more than it makes them.
I know plenty of people who use Apple products such as iPhones and Macs and have to stop using them and throw them into landfill basically because there are no further security updates, although the device works fine and is fast enough for their needs.
Shortening security updates absolutely has an environmental impact.
This. I have an old 2012 Intel Retina Macbook Pro which is already several MacOS versions behind and I’m unable to update it through normal means any longer. It works fine and it still has the best looking screen of any laptop I ever owned.
I keep it at my parents’ house and I maybe use it 3/4 times per year, but it’s enough for my needs when I’m visiting and it feels wasteful to throw it away or store it for good. I fully understand that it is a 14yo machine and it is unreasonable for a company to support old hardware indefinitely, but still, it does feel like a waste.
I have a 12 year old Acer C720 that while obviously doesn't run chromeos anymore, it's still useful as a super durable 12'' linux machine.(thankfully it's intel based)
It road around in a backpack while cycling around campus, survived multiple bike spills, knocked off tables half a dozen times.
Really sad we can't get something like this anymore.
I wouldn't even say 8 years is "old" for a computer anymore, right around Intel's Haswell generation we crossed a threshold of cores and performance and computers became Good Enough. You can see it with Android and iOS tablets too they last a very long time, and of course Apple Silicon leaves no doubt.
I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything, in fact it's worse, since browsers are usually heavier than real apps.
But you get less functionality, and have to hack into it even if you can to make it your own.
They're even worse for browsing, as you can only install addons and adblockers allowed by Google, which are deliberately gimped.
At least we get to enjoy freedom on our PCs - the smartphone-ification of computers is a worrying trend (this applies to games consoles too).
> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything,
In a time when buttons are too expensive, avoiding having a windows key is a valuable savings :P
I've purchased a few chromebooks over time, and probably need to get one more for my mother-in-law. For her, the limitations of ChromeOS are a feature --- it's much harder for her to screw it up when she's on a call with fake support than with windows and she hadn't run anything other than a browser on her windows computer anyway.
Certainly the core hardware is basically the same, but fluffy optional hardware tends to be left off or lower cost for Chromebooks. Many manufacturers offer laptops without an OS, but you usually miss out on pricing promotions so you're paying for Windows even if you don't want it. Chromebooks get pricing promotions and firesales, so careful shopping gets you pretty inexpensive computers that are good enough to do what they need to do.
I don't like the forced expiration, and it's especially brutal when you purchase a new device late in its model life ... but I do try to purchase models that can use 3rd party bios replacement scripts so you can use them for other stuff when the OS is too far expired. Kind of derpy to have to bios replace to run ChromeOS flex to keep doing what you were doing, but such is life. Sometimes the device doesn't live that long, and that's fine too. Some of the chrombooks are cheaper simply because they have a very tiny SSD, and few of them are user replaceable, which makes prospects for running Windows later in life pretty bleak, but Windows is pretty bleak these days anyway. :P
> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything, in fact it's worse, since browsers are usually heavier than real apps.
If by "Save on anything" you mean saving files, you are completely wrong.
There is a filesystem that you can save any data to. If you use the Linux VM you can run nearly any typical Linux software (including any of the in vogue coding agents). You can even run llama.cpp or ollama with GPU acceleration, though you might be constrained by the laptop level GPU and Memory constraints.
There are completely offline apps and tools available (via Android, Linux, and even offline PWAs).
You can even write your own apps and run them only locally on the any of the above 3 runtimes.
Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.
If you mean "Save money", then that's wrong too. ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS's because of the relative lack of legacy cruft and the managed runtime. Even the Linux distro it includes is very stripped down by default (although you can bog it down by running too much stuff like any computer)
The only thing you can't do is run Windows or Mac specific software, but if you need that, ChromeOS was never a consideration anyways.
My wife and my 9yo have Chromebooks. Their needs are met. I (mostly) don't have to worry about data hygiene.
I'm sure my kid will want a "real" computer at some point, but by then he will hopefully have enough maturity to keep it secure. My wife couldn't care less.
Yeah pretty much this. Google had a pretty successful effort to sell these devices as part of a managed solution: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-educati...
Im guessing it was pretty easy for teachers (who they reached out to bypassing school procurement officers) or IT to manage.
Honestly, I used use a cheap chromebook throughout college since it was a fantastic linux device. Cheap (bought secondhand), Very little compute power, but fantastic keyboard, battery life, durable, light, and it ran coreboot. Super easy to unlock too for the early devices. You just had to remove the read protect screw. Obviously thats very niche though
I also have two X220 machines, and I use them more than the X200 now. They still work perfectly, while my X200 is getting flakey. (Although with its SSD and 8GB of RAM, it runs Alpine very well indeed and could be a daily driver.)
The X220 has a slightly shallowed screen; that's a weakness. But mine are 100% usable: between them, I run Haiku, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and Pop OS, and all of them go like stink and are daily-drivable on this 2011 hardware.
"Best build quality" is the most important part. If you never got to handle one you are missing out. Glass and Solid milled aluminum. Silicone wrist pads and grip. 4:3 screen ratio. high quality keyboard. Rock solid 360 screen hinge.
Hardware is essentially a high end cellphone from 2016, which isn't a powerhouse but still does everything I would ask of a chromebook in 2026. Batteries are all generally going well.
Repair-ability is a challenge, but I want to work on that. You can mod it to run windows or linux. Stock it runs chromeos, linux subsystem, and android apps. It has a "feature" where if you keep in developer mode it auto-wipes itself if anybody else tries to boot it (hitting anything but the un-indicated ctrl-d at the boot screen initiates powerwash). Great for international travel.
It isn't a good choice for "power" but dominates every other aspect of "being a good laptop". It was too expensive for the chromebook market back then, but now you can pick them up for $200 and hand them to your parents and stop getting asked to fix their computer.
There's simply no real reason that a mobile device can't function as a desktop from a technical level either in software or hardware. Simply dock your phone or it could be even wireless. Boom! Go from mobile experience to desktop experience. It seems they want to cram the mobile experience into a traditional desktop environment (mouse and keyboard driven with windows paradigm). IOS and Android have not embraced desktop paradigm. We simply need a unified SDK to support both experiences and the store downloads the appropriate assets. We're beginning to see somewhat of these concepts with foldables phone coming into the market.
That's sort of the point of the Googlebooks. They run Android internally, and then to get Android to support Googlebooks, they had to add/improve things like multi-window support, very large monitors, keyboards, mouse support, etc.
If you have a USB dock that your keyboard/mouse/display is plugged in to, you should be able to stick it in your Pixel phone's USB jack and get a desktop experience. Some of my team would actually test keyboard support that way, by plugging a keyboard into a tablet.
Apple having shown that the same CPU they use in some iPhones and iPads, Apple A18 Pro, worked perfectly well to build a laptop around running macOS, the MacBook Neo, should take the logical next leap in making an iPhone/laptop blend.
Make an iPhone and corresponding docking station, where the docking station is a MacBook shell + screen + touchpad + keyboard + battery that you slot the iPhone into in order to use the iPhone as a laptop. The slot you push the iPhone into would be reminiscent of the PCMCIA slots of old, but having the dimensions of the iPhone and connecting via ThunderBolt 5. When slotted into the shell, no part of the iPhone will extend outside of the shell. To eject, you push it in slightly and it pops out same way you push on a microSD card to eject it from many devices.
I'm browsing from a Pixel 9 phone running GraphenOS phone, plugged into a 4K monitor, and paired with a bluetooth Logitech MX Vertical mouse and a MX Keys Mini keyboard. Works prefect. I don't miss my Macbook Air M5 much.
When I left $DAYJOB-1 they let me keep my Dell Latitude 7270. I have upgraded its RAM to 16GB (the max it takes) and downgraded to a smaller SSD.
It runs ChromeOS Flex and it runs it very quickly indeed. It's a quad-core Core i7, so it should.
This 10YO laptop is in daily use and it runs well enough that an EOL for ChromeOS that is 8Y away is a concern for me. I expect the laptop will still be in use then; I still have several 15Y old Thinkpads in frequent use.
So, if I read that correctly, they're promising that whatever Chromebooks run in 2035-6 will work on the hardware that was sold with ChromeOS in 25-26. And there'll be an upgrade path. Right? That's what they're saying?
As per usual, this is a tech industry product naming mess, with a layer of technology consolidation spread on top.
It probably means that low spec hardware won't support whatever they're calling the operating system for a higher spec laptops. Whatever they call it it's an evolution of ChromeOS with an Android runtime, which is nothing new in Google's products.
I guess we should just not trust tech companies for long term support of the stuff they make. How do they think they'll fare after squandering goodwill with shit like this?
I stopped buying Chromebooks and switched to MacBooks after my fantastic Samsung Chromebook Plus ARM units stopped getting updates after a few years, around the same time the 10 year from release support commitment for new devices was made.
Unfortunately Samsung no longer make Chromebooks, they had some fantastic hardware.
...Unless I'm misunderstanding, I don't think any promises were broken here. Google said they would provide ten years of software updates. Now they're saying existing ChromeOS devices will be upgraded to the new "GoogleOS" within that ten year window, they will continue to receive said updates.
This is annoying if you don't like GoogleOS, but also par for the course. You can't stay on iOS 26 and continue to receive security updates, you have to upgrade to iOS 27.
> For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths
The word "many" feels like it's pretty much explicitly saying it's not "all". If it's not "all" then I'd say the promises were broken.
It's possible those devices will offer indirect migration paths (e.g. you have to reinstall the OS). While annoying/inconvenient, that would probably still qualify as keeping the promise in my book.
It's not just security updates, there's also whether all the device management tools and techniques, training and institutional knowledge, and customer acceptance will carry over to the new OS. Whether the devices that are within AUE and receive the update are going to run the new operating system well, or they're going to languish with poor performance or broken drivers that will never get another look from the manufacturer because they're 2 generations behind in a vast sea of models and individual configurations.
I also can't find anything online to do with what they're going to do to Chrome OS Flex, so thank goodness I didn't set it up for my mum who was sick to death of Windows 11.
I use my kids' former high school Chromebook while on the road with great satisfaction. It's small (11.6 inches) which allows for easy lap operation. It's touchscreen which also helps when sitting in a car with the laptop close to your body. It's "tough" (IP52 certification) and was thoroughly abused by my kid for 4 years with almost no damage besides scuffs.
She hated it but I LOVE it and will look for a similar form factor when it finally dies which will 100% come after Google ends support.
Lastly, I often use it to remotely control my primary Windows PC which makes it even MORE useful.
I did 10-12 years ago. Google was cool back then. I bought them for family when I wanted something cheap that would work and not be a support burden. Plus, it was (kinda) Gentoo based! But yeah, stopped doing that 5-6 years ago. Now I go with old Thinkpads and Bluefin.
ChromeOS is targeted to and adopted by large organizations like enterprises and governments and school districts, because it is extremely easy to manage and has maybe 0.2% as many headaches as Windows or Mac.
Why? They haven't killed anything, they have reduced support from 10 years to 8.
Chromebooks tend to be cheap relative to other laptops so 8 years isn't bad. Android tablets and Phones costing 2 or 3 times a chrome book have been promised 7 years for Android.
Googlebook is Android with the ChromeOS application stack ported on top of it. ChromeOS hosts Android apps in a compatibility subsystem. They basically just turned it upside-down and shook it.
And this is why when Pixel phones started promising 7 years of support, everyone with a brain said “uh huh, suuuure” and kept buying iPhones which DO deliver that.
So far so good for the rest of us without brains. Pixel 6 got it's full 5 years of promised support. We're hoping it's cheaper to provide the full promised 7 years of support than to pay the class action lawyers.
My students Chromebooks can't run python online. 1 tab. Ad riddled. IT won't install ad blocker. The misery so many of us deal with. I'm happy has to know. Depressing.
Sounds reasonable.
8 years is still a long time for a cheap Chromebook.
Nothing in terms of feature release / quality / maintenance I am seeing out Big Software would lead me to believe there's been any productivity increase.
My company has a shitty old defunct group management portal that has been twice superseded and is finally getting shut down. But we have LLMs, why not maintain it in perpetuity? Because it's shit, nobody likes it, there are other options, it would still cost someone's time just to follow all the processes we have to do releases and keep things running, security testing, yada yada.
Adding more years of support to some shitty old thing is certainly going to cost them more than it makes them.
I get that this is not 10 years support for ChromeOS. But it is 10 years of supported software upgrades for these devices.
Perhaps the real issue is not the OS that runs on the devices themselves but support for the existing device management approach.
One more datapoint to reference in the future when evaluating Google's long term promises and commitments. "No, we mean it this time."
While there won't be many there definitely will be some; I know of an ~8 year old Chromebook currently in active use.
I know plenty of people who use Apple products such as iPhones and Macs and have to stop using them and throw them into landfill basically because there are no further security updates, although the device works fine and is fast enough for their needs.
Shortening security updates absolutely has an environmental impact.
I keep it at my parents’ house and I maybe use it 3/4 times per year, but it’s enough for my needs when I’m visiting and it feels wasteful to throw it away or store it for good. I fully understand that it is a 14yo machine and it is unreasonable for a company to support old hardware indefinitely, but still, it does feel like a waste.
It road around in a backpack while cycling around campus, survived multiple bike spills, knocked off tables half a dozen times.
Really sad we can't get something like this anymore.
But you get less functionality, and have to hack into it even if you can to make it your own.
They're even worse for browsing, as you can only install addons and adblockers allowed by Google, which are deliberately gimped.
At least we get to enjoy freedom on our PCs - the smartphone-ification of computers is a worrying trend (this applies to games consoles too).
In a time when buttons are too expensive, avoiding having a windows key is a valuable savings :P
I've purchased a few chromebooks over time, and probably need to get one more for my mother-in-law. For her, the limitations of ChromeOS are a feature --- it's much harder for her to screw it up when she's on a call with fake support than with windows and she hadn't run anything other than a browser on her windows computer anyway.
Certainly the core hardware is basically the same, but fluffy optional hardware tends to be left off or lower cost for Chromebooks. Many manufacturers offer laptops without an OS, but you usually miss out on pricing promotions so you're paying for Windows even if you don't want it. Chromebooks get pricing promotions and firesales, so careful shopping gets you pretty inexpensive computers that are good enough to do what they need to do.
I don't like the forced expiration, and it's especially brutal when you purchase a new device late in its model life ... but I do try to purchase models that can use 3rd party bios replacement scripts so you can use them for other stuff when the OS is too far expired. Kind of derpy to have to bios replace to run ChromeOS flex to keep doing what you were doing, but such is life. Sometimes the device doesn't live that long, and that's fine too. Some of the chrombooks are cheaper simply because they have a very tiny SSD, and few of them are user replaceable, which makes prospects for running Windows later in life pretty bleak, but Windows is pretty bleak these days anyway. :P
If by "Save on anything" you mean saving files, you are completely wrong.
There is a filesystem that you can save any data to. If you use the Linux VM you can run nearly any typical Linux software (including any of the in vogue coding agents). You can even run llama.cpp or ollama with GPU acceleration, though you might be constrained by the laptop level GPU and Memory constraints.
There are completely offline apps and tools available (via Android, Linux, and even offline PWAs).
You can even write your own apps and run them only locally on the any of the above 3 runtimes.
Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.
If you mean "Save money", then that's wrong too. ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS's because of the relative lack of legacy cruft and the managed runtime. Even the Linux distro it includes is very stripped down by default (although you can bog it down by running too much stuff like any computer)
The only thing you can't do is run Windows or Mac specific software, but if you need that, ChromeOS was never a consideration anyways.
I'm sure my kid will want a "real" computer at some point, but by then he will hopefully have enough maturity to keep it secure. My wife couldn't care less.
For schools it can be locked down with group policies, for boomers it's just a machine to use a web browser
Honestly, I used use a cheap chromebook throughout college since it was a fantastic linux device. Cheap (bought secondhand), Very little compute power, but fantastic keyboard, battery life, durable, light, and it ran coreboot. Super easy to unlock too for the early devices. You just had to remove the read protect screw. Obviously thats very niche though
I know of two "best laptops ever made":
Drew DeVault says it's the X200:
https://drewdevault.com/blog/Fucking-laptops/
« The best laptop ever made is the ThinkPad X200, and I have two of them. »
He has a very strong case. I own one. It is certainly one of the best ever.
On the other hand, Brad Taunt says it is the X220:
https://btxx.org/posts/x220/
« The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. »
Ulaş Türkmen agrees:
https://okigiveup.net/blog/why-thinkpad-x220-is-the-best-lap...
I also have two X220 machines, and I use them more than the X200 now. They still work perfectly, while my X200 is getting flakey. (Although with its SSD and 8GB of RAM, it runs Alpine very well indeed and could be a daily driver.)
The X220 has a slightly shallowed screen; that's a weakness. But mine are 100% usable: between them, I run Haiku, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and Pop OS, and all of them go like stink and are daily-drivable on this 2011 hardware.
That's my 4 minimum requirements for a laptop nowadays. As I don't just work on my laptops, but also listen to music/podcasts and watch video content.
Hardware is essentially a high end cellphone from 2016, which isn't a powerhouse but still does everything I would ask of a chromebook in 2026. Batteries are all generally going well.
Repair-ability is a challenge, but I want to work on that. You can mod it to run windows or linux. Stock it runs chromeos, linux subsystem, and android apps. It has a "feature" where if you keep in developer mode it auto-wipes itself if anybody else tries to boot it (hitting anything but the un-indicated ctrl-d at the boot screen initiates powerwash). Great for international travel.
It isn't a good choice for "power" but dominates every other aspect of "being a good laptop". It was too expensive for the chromebook market back then, but now you can pick them up for $200 and hand them to your parents and stop getting asked to fix their computer.
If you have a USB dock that your keyboard/mouse/display is plugged in to, you should be able to stick it in your Pixel phone's USB jack and get a desktop experience. Some of my team would actually test keyboard support that way, by plugging a keyboard into a tablet.
Make an iPhone and corresponding docking station, where the docking station is a MacBook shell + screen + touchpad + keyboard + battery that you slot the iPhone into in order to use the iPhone as a laptop. The slot you push the iPhone into would be reminiscent of the PCMCIA slots of old, but having the dimensions of the iPhone and connecting via ThunderBolt 5. When slotted into the shell, no part of the iPhone will extend outside of the shell. To eject, you push it in slightly and it pops out same way you push on a microSD card to eject it from many devices.
It runs ChromeOS Flex and it runs it very quickly indeed. It's a quad-core Core i7, so it should.
This 10YO laptop is in daily use and it runs well enough that an EOL for ChromeOS that is 8Y away is a concern for me. I expect the laptop will still be in use then; I still have several 15Y old Thinkpads in frequent use.
It probably means that low spec hardware won't support whatever they're calling the operating system for a higher spec laptops. Whatever they call it it's an evolution of ChromeOS with an Android runtime, which is nothing new in Google's products.
Unfortunately Samsung no longer make Chromebooks, they had some fantastic hardware.
These new "googlebooks" (what a name), with their fancy gimmick chips, won't offer the same liberty.
This is annoying if you don't like GoogleOS, but also par for the course. You can't stay on iOS 26 and continue to receive security updates, you have to upgrade to iOS 27.
> For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths
The word "many" feels like it's pretty much explicitly saying it's not "all". If it's not "all" then I'd say the promises were broken.
I also can't find anything online to do with what they're going to do to Chrome OS Flex, so thank goodness I didn't set it up for my mum who was sick to death of Windows 11.
Not a great comparison, since iOS 16 (not 26) received a security update just a few months ago.
They are changing the support horizon for new sales only, not ending anything early.
She hated it but I LOVE it and will look for a similar form factor when it finally dies which will 100% come after Google ends support.
Lastly, I often use it to remotely control my primary Windows PC which makes it even MORE useful.
He already has a PS5 and so doesn’t need the laptop for anything more than running Chrome.
In the end I managed to repurpose an existing laptop. But a Chromebook was a serious consideration for a little while.
Gobbledegook. Planned obsolescence? This is accelerated obsolescence!
Why would anyone go for that instead of a MacBook Neo or even an iPad?
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Chromebooks tend to be cheap relative to other laptops so 8 years isn't bad. Android tablets and Phones costing 2 or 3 times a chrome book have been promised 7 years for Android.
(no longer updated?) https://gcemetery.co
https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-lifetime
It doesn't seem like they are ending support for updated software on these devices before 10 years, it will just be different software.
What are you using?