Google Cancels Its Next Pixelbook and Shuts Down the Team Building It (theverge.com) 38
Google has canceled the next version of its Pixelbook laptop and dissolved the team responsible for building it. The device was far along in development and expected to debut next year, The Verge reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter, but the project was cut as part of recent cost-cutting measures inside of Google. Members of the team have been transferred elsewhere inside the company. The Verge: As recently as a few months ago, Google was planning to keep the Pixelbook going. Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference, Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh told The Verge that "we are going to do Pixelbooks in the future." But he also acknowledged that the Chromebook market has changed since 2017 when the original (and best) Pixelbook launched. "What's nice about the category is that it has matured," Osterloh said. "You can expect them to last a long time." One way Google might be thinking about the ChromeOS market is that it simply doesn't need Google the way it once did. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, has been saying for months that he intends to slow down hiring and cut some projects across the company. "In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes," he wrote in a July memo. "In other cases, that means pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas." The Pixelbook team and the Pixelbook itself were casualties of that consolidation and redeployment.
Wonder why (Score:2)
Why not sell with an Apple style blitz and make up the money by removing the mechanism behind ad blockers.
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Google decided they didn't need to wait until users got used to this product before killing it.
I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad change from the usual.
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They were making a killing on hardware. Most competitors were a little above half the price of a Pixelbook. The problem is that they finally figured out that people don't want to pay $1200 for a web browser that has as most a five year life span.
As for Ad Blockers, The day Google kills extensions or ad blockers either through bans or changes to API policies (they're trying with Manifest v3) is the day Chrome dies. Either the world+dog switches to Firefox or they switch to Edge in the hopes that MS forks Chr
Just maybe... (Score:2)
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They can't even make a browser that allows audio from multiple tabs to be played in the background. They also can't make a browser that properly closes when closed. Then there is all the trashy default apps that cant be removed and I have to find replacement for. Still can't really find anything in the app store worth using.
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As a Nexus/Pixel user, I can say that most of the fixes come with the next generation of hardware, not in a software update. The new hardware, of course, will have its own lifelong bugs that will never get fixed.
ChromeOS is now a self-sustaining entity? (Score:2)
"One way Google might be thinking about the ChromeOS market is that it simply doesn't need Google the way it once did"
I have no idea what this statement is supposed to mean. Has ChromeOS been spun off to create it's own company?
Re:ChromeOS is now a self-sustaining entity? (Score:4)
Presumably means that the spin they are attempting is that ChromeOS devices are made by a variety of OEMs, so Google is not needed. Strangely this logic doesn't seem to carry over to phones (well, Google goes back and forth, from owning Motorola, to a branded partnership model, back to in-house phones branded Google...).
The practical answer is that was already the case, but what Google was specifically trying to make a thing was 'high end' chromeos device. This is currently a dead-end concept (ChromeOS is valued mainly because of how little it lets you do, which is at odds with expensive high end specs) so better to just let the OEMs keep making cheap crappy Chromebooks and give up on expensive Chromebooks.
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The whole point of a ChromeOS device is that it's a laptop, right? Whether it's a good one or a shitty one, some other manufacturer is already selling one in volume that would be a Chromebook if it just ran Chrome OS. And now you can literally download that yourself through Chrome, have Chrome make you a bootable USB stick (which actually failed here though) and load it on your own PC. I wouldn't suggest trying to actually use it yet though, it's early days. I figured out how to get the image, and wasn't ha
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The point is what ChromeOS brings to the table is not interesting in conjunction with high spec devices. Effectively, as the name states, the primary mission is 'the browser is the only thing that matters, everything else is an afterthought'.
The promise of value with ChromeOS is the device you are using is disposable, and all you are doing is using Chrome based applications that store your data on internet services exclusively, *particularly* hooked into Google's services. While that model *could* be consis
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The promise of value with ChromeOS is the device you are using is disposable
I have a $300 laptop with a Ryzen 3 that does the same job as a Chromebook. The promise of value with ChromeOS is what the Macintosh used to promise, simplicity around what the user wants to do — web surf, and run web apps.
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"One way Google might be thinking about the ChromeOS market is that it simply doesn't need Google the way it once did"
I have no idea what this statement is supposed to mean
The Chromebook market now has many offerings from many (major) companies. The Pixelbook was, in some configurations, a premium offering, but its volume was probably small and shrinking compared to the other manufacturers who can now offer better value and sell more units. While a small part of a growing market can be profitable, the shrinking margins with more competition favor the larger manufacturers.
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Of course, it's worth pointing out that all those major companies had offerings before the Pixelbook was ever a thing. Someone at Google got it in their heads that the OEMs all selling only crappy cheap devices to schools wasn't a good look on the ChromeOS platform, thus a high-end product that no OEM was going to touch because they saw it as a pointless exercise.
In the interim, no one has started doing high-end ChromeOS, the market remains 99% crappy disposable devices sold to schools. So they leave the m
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I believe "The ChromeOS market" refers to people who buy closed-down managed devices for specific purposes (whether that's education or healthcare or whatever). Compound nouns are confusing.
It's possible that the real reason is that they are planning to put both Android and ChromeOS under the Fuchsia umbrella. The first step is getting ChromeOS to run Android apps so that the ecosystem is in place, which has already happened. It may be that they need time to get that ready and a new Pixelbook won't make
fickle / unreliable / behemoth (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems you simply cannot bank on putting ANY faith in anything Google do.
So, sure, this is just a hardware device - no big deal.
However, just look at what Google have abandoned over the years - a litany of failed projects, which is all well and good - unless you happened to buy into it and got left high and dry.
The obvious answer is to just never adopt anything Google work on - easier said than done.
But it can be done - just boycott anything Google related. Don't adopt it, don't buy it, avoid it - and avoid the inevitable churn as they dump things on a whim.
Re: fickle / unreliable / behemoth (Score:2)
The world of dev is certainly keeping Go at arms length. Its really not gaining any traction even compared to Rust and I doubt it's all to do with the language itself.
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It's decent enough, but currently a go application will typically perform significantly slower than a C application, while rust is usually nearly at parity. It's faster than the manage runtimes, but not by enough to make a lot of people move away from their managed runtime implementations.
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In most cases, the programmer choices make the much larger differences, but in widely reviewed and tuned benchmark code, Go turns in significantly slower results. For many applications it is, admittedly, not enough to be too worried about, but those application sets may also be fine with Java or C# or even interpreted languages. If Go had come along before, say, Java, it would have been a slam dunk to succeed. However, it's currently in an awkward position of not having the huge legacy codebase of other
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Umm, "Buy into"? They're usually free, just supported by !^&!!? Ads. How much did you pay?
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How much did you pay?
Not all costs are directly monetary.
"Time is money". If you spend a lot of time using it, it's likely going to take a lot of time to move it to another service. That is a direct hit to your productivity, so even if you have not sent any money directly to google, you have for sure paid for it!
Not to mention all the paid services google offer. Especially to businesses.
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Luckily your time is not my money.
If it's free there's a catch. Using a free (with caveats of course) service "a lot" simply means you've invested a lot of your time and dosh! It's no skin off Google's rice pudding whether you have to invest time and money elsewhere to replace said "free" service.
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Yes, that was the exact point the grandparent comment was making, that your first comment argued against.
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But it can be done - just boycott anything Google related.
The problem with that idea is that there are no credible phones now but Google or Apple. Both are offensive in their own ways, but I will not put up with being told what I'm allowed to run on my phone.
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100% of things I've used Google for which have been abandoned have been migrated to an alternative provided by Google. 100% of them gave me the option to export data somehow.
That is far more than I can say for basically any other company. The risk of adopting something they are working on is therefore incredibly small.
Not that this is in any way relevant since we're not talking about a hardware device, but rather we're talking about something that has never been released and never seen the light of day.
But it can be done - just boycott anything Google related.
No I
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Which will affect their bottom line not at all, so long as you continue using their search and looking at their ads.
Everything else is fishing lures to get more of your data. But just by your participating in the web in a normal way they're already getting plenty.
Re: fickle / unreliable / behemoth (Score:2)
Google Cancels Project. News at 11. (Score:3)
I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you...
Nice laptop (Score:3)
I really like my Pixelbook Go (typing this comment on it, use it as a regular supplemental system every day). It's still fast enough, but it'd be nice to know that the line has a future.
Dissolved the team responsible (Score:2)
Now I'm picturing developers being thrown into vats of acid.
Transferred (Score:2)
"Members of the team have been transferred elsewhere inside the company"
To mop duty and answering phones with the corresponding adjustment in pay, I'm sure.
This does make me a bit edgy (Score:2)
when I'm considering the Pixel 7 as replacements for our Samsungs.
Schooled by Samsung (Score:2)
Google schooled by Samsung in the art of hardware design.
Don't waste your intellectual capital on Google (Score:1)
It's like expecting a whore to be faithful to you.
The Man Who Never Was (Score:1)
(It was a plot joke that it was just an average computer with marketing hype.)
No longer needed (Score:2)
The Pixelbook pioneered the premium Chromebook category. Before it came along, nobody was making Chromebooks with high build quality and medium to high end components. Other companies are now making them, so Google no longer needs to.
High end Chromebooks are always going to be a niche product. Mostly they serve as something to get the C-level executives at a company that has gone all-in on Chrome OS, with a side order of Linux geeks who will mostly use the Chromebook to run Linux applications rather than Ch