The Vergecast - Googlebooks are coming for your Mac

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

We tried out the new Googlebooks, which are essentially Chromebooks evolved with an Android elemental stone. They're made by Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, and Asus (not Google), but all have the new Googlebook OS, heavy Android phone and Gemini integration, and a built-in "Glowbar." Laptop reviewer Antonio G. Di Benedetto went hands-on with the new devices, and reports back to guest host David Imel. Further reading: ⁠iPhone owners can now submit claims in Apple’s $250 million Siri AI settlement⁠ ⁠The M5 Ultra Mac Studio tears through our benchmark tests⁠ ⁠Gemini went rogue and hacked 3 companies⁠ ⁠I got to see Google’s wild ideas about the future of laptops⁠ ⁠These are the first five Googlebook laptops⁠ ⁠Googlebooks feel like the first laptops built for Android owners⁠ ⁠The long dream of the Googlebook⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Google's new, new operating system. I'm David Amel. Today we're talking to Verge laptop reviewer Antonio D. Benedetto about Google's new Google Book project. This is a new initiative from Google to develop a premium laptop experience that takes the best of your smartphone and integrates it deeply with a high-end laptop. Antonio recently went hands-on with some of these laptops, so I'm going to ask him about what's new, who this is for, and if you thinks Google can see, seriously compete with Apple this time. But first, here's what's happening on the verge today. This is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Monday, September 21st, 20206. Apple intelligence claims have officially opened. If you live in the U.S. and purchased an iPhone 15, 15 Pro Max, or iPhone 16 model between

June 10th, 2024 and March 29th, 2025, you can now file a claim to receive between $25 and $95 in compensation. This comes after a class action lawsuit alleged that Apple created a clear and reasonable consumer expectation that the new AI features previewed at WWDC 2024 would launch on the iPhone 16, which instead launched with a more limited set of features. If you fit that description, you can submit a claim for compensation

until December 21st, 26. Next, our $12,300 M5 Ultra Mac Studio review is out, and as expected, it absolutely tore through our benchmark tests. Our nearly maxed out M5 Ultra came out about 30% fast. than our similarly specced M3 Ultra from last year in both single-core and multi-core synthetic CPU tests. On a heavier GPU rendering test, Cinebench, the M5 Ultra scored 63% higher. And finally, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google's Gemini model broke containment in May and hacked three separate companies.

The incident happened while third-party firm irregular was testing its capabilities. The model brute forced a password to access the company and then stopped. Google didn't disclose the hack until now because it didn't disclose the hack until now because it was a single, didn't consider it an instance of misalignment. You can read more at Theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Monday, September 21st, 2026. This family is on the brink of civil war. Mobland.

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Do I have to do it? Everything myself. You want a more? I'll give you a more. Mobland, new season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. Support for the show comes from Masterclass. A new field, a new hobby, or a new perspective can sometimes be all it takes to push you into the next error. Masterclass can help you get there.

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Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash verge. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash verge. Head to masterclass.com slash verge to see the latest offer. Antonio D. Benedetto, welcome to the Vergecast. Hello. Thanks for having me again. So we're talking about Google books today. You recently did a hands-on of all these Google books. I believe there are three or four of them. There's maybe five. How many are there? There are five. Okay. Yeah. So there's, there's ones from Del, Lenovo, HP, Acer, and Asus. Okay. So this is more of a OS experience, right? This is not the Chromebook that we have all known and loved, these cheap laptops that are basically Chrome in a computer. Can you explain what is a

Google book and why is Google doing this whole project? Yeah, it's definitely interesting and it's something that I came to like months ago when they first teased it. I was like, why does this exist? What is the point of this? And now having seen them in person a little bit and experienced them poked and prodded a little bit, it's like, okay, I'm maybe starting to get this and maybe this could be kind of cool. But basically in nutshell, this is like a new swing at Chromebooks kind of, but it's essentially kind of a blending of Chrome OS and Android, but I mean, really at its core is Android. So these laptops run Android.

They feel a bit like Chromebooks, and they run multiple chips. You've got options from Intel with Intel Panther-like chips. You've got Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips, and there's supposed to be MediaTech chips coming at some point later, five different OEMs. So it's very much like a partnership thing. and it's all united by the software. And the software experience may feel kind of Chromebookish,

but what's actually the most appealing thing is that the way it interacts with an Android phone, right? You have certain features that if you have an Android phone and you need to have an Android phone, that you can kind of pair them together and interact with them in a way that really, no one else really doing to this level yet. Okay, so can you still use these computers without an Android phone? You're being very specific there. Yeah, you can, but I don't think there'd be much point. At least you wouldn't gain much from it like you would if you have an Android phone.

Like if you have an iPhone, and I asked this question like, what do you do? And there is essentially just like a link to iOS app and it helps you with some like message relaying. But it's nothing like what you can do when you have an Android phone pair, which I guess I should I should cut to the chase on like the things that this can do. Yeah, what exactly does it do with your phone? All right. So it's nothing completely crazy, but it's like, it's just, it's just better integrated than what we normally see, uh, even on like macOS and iOS. Um, so there's a few like hallmark features. The files, you open the files app and your, your phone files are just there. Like, it's loaded up on the sidebar, just like another, you know, drive. Um, and you can click there and all your phone files are there. So it's like someone sent you something and you download it or you download something on your phone. You don't have to like email it to yourself or find some other way to like get it over to your, you know, laptop. It's just there and you can pluck it and paste it and share it. Do you know exactly how that is working? Is it some sort of mirroring? Is it transferring the files? Because if you're not on Wi-Fi, is that going to go up into the cloud and you take a lot of data? Like, how does it do that? That they

didn't specify. So it'll be something we definitely explore. And when we review these, I should also say at any point, but you should say now, I guess we don't have review units. And it's definitely like, not to get too inside basebally, but it's whenever someone, whenever a company doesn't have, like review units early and like there's like oh we're going to launch it on October 4th and after that is when review units will come and it's like hmm that doesn't always doesn't always instill confidence but yeah to I digress this is something I find a little interesting Google is taking pre-orders for Google books is that correct yeah they're taking pre-orders now uh and they ship on the fourth or their rivaled shores on the fourth and we'll get review in it sometimes on the

fourth or later so the fourth is a Sunday so it's like right I think it's Sunday uh so it's like the fifth really later. Okay. So when you go on the website to pre-order a Google book, do you get to pick the laptop that you're pre-ordering? How do you, do people really know about how these computers work? I mean, I've been on their site. I've seen what they're showing it as, but just like a scrollable page that kind of gives the highlights of what a Google book is doesn't seem like it's really informing customers of what the experience they should expect is. How do you think Google's angling this? It's hard to say. I think these, again, just like from one, what I've observed in the briefing and everything like that.

This seems like it may be coming in a little hot. I mean, frankly, even like OEM reps that I was talking to on the side, like, we're kind of at the event. We're like, oh, we just got the hardware like today or yesterday. And it's like, so I think this is all kind of coming together. It seems like maybe late or maybe whatever, but I can't speculate too much. Point is, though, like this does some cool stuff and we will know, we'll need to know a lot more later.

I mean, especially when we test them. And the reason I think like this is actually maybe kind of cool, even though like this is like Google, we we can't always trust Google with like sticking through with things and like, you know, or whatever the direction they may take things. And Chromebooks already exist. And we don't know a lot about, you know, where Chromebooks will go when now Google books are in the fold aside from they've promised 10 years of service. But here's what like the other features that are actually seem pretty cool about. this. Like, again, going back to you have an Android phone paired to a Google book, you have the file structure, but then also, like, probably the bigger things are like, you know, you have this feature called continue on where if you're using an app on your phone, it just kind of like hangs out in the bottom bar on a Google book and you can just click it and it'll just hand over to the laptop, right? You know, like whether it's from like the native app to a native app on the Google book that's installed or native app to a web app, you can just take over from where you left

off. And that's a really cool feature that you can kind of interact with, you know, like start a task on your phone and be like, no, I need a bigger screen. This is a laptop job, as we know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And like, you know, it's like that's pretty cool. You don't normally get that kind of thing. And then, but generally any, any app you have on your phone is kind of also available on your laptop because since all Android-based, if you have an app installed on your phone, it actually will live on the Google book in like a second app drawer, right? There's like the main app drawer which has all the stuff you've installed, and then there's a second app drawer for your phone, and if you click on any of those, it'll just cast the app to your Google book. And it's kind of

like, you know, like we have a little bit of experience this with like, you know, iPhone mirroring on iOS or iOS and macOS, but, you know, that's like mirroring your whole phone. screen. This is like going on like a per app basis. Right. So it's again, it's, it's all interesting and intriguing. But I mean, we talk about like, who is it for? I was still like, the only answer I have so far is like someone who has like most likely a high end Android phone because these are not cheap devices. But they what, I guess they don't want Windows. They don't want a Mac. So they're looking for alternative. That's mostly all I can think of. Yeah, I think that there was always a a little bit of attention with Chromebooks, right?

Because Google sold Chromebooks in this way where there were ultra-cheap Chromebooks, and those were probably the ones that moved the most. They sold them to schools. They sold them to people that just wanted a laptop for things that they did online. But then there was sort of a move towards really high-quality Chromebooks that were over $1,000, very expensive, but at the end of the day, we're still kind of just running Chrome. And they did evolve ChromeOS over time to be able to run Android apps natively. But at the same time, you still have to download those Android apps from the

the Play Store onto your Chromebook. It was a separate instance. So I can see the appeal of just casting your phone to your laptop if you're the type of person that uses your phone for almost everything, but sometimes you want laptop tasks. My question to you here is like, it seems that Google is trying to have some sort of a barometer for quality with these laptops, right? They're all around $1,000 or over $1,000. Can you break down the different models and what are the standards that Google has for the manufacturers that want to make these laptops? Yeah. So there don't seem to be like standards, but like, there's a whole lot of like vibes he elements

to what Google's doing here. And like, and it even goes like, I guess like is there a basement of a spec? There is no basement of spec for these laptops. Like they said like, you know, like they have touch screens, but there's no guarantee that they're always gonna have touch screens.

They have 16 gigs of RAM. There's no guarantee that, you know, they're always gonna have 16 gigs of RAM or more. Like I wouldn't be surprised if eight Kigabyte models come later when, you know, they need to have some lower cost options. You don't think it's something that they're mandating? It doesn't seem to be, at least they haven't told us when we asked.

They didn't say there was any kind of baseline spec. Interesting. So I don't, it's, there's a lot of, there's still a lot of questions, but all the names sound exactly the same. Of the laptops. Yeah. Like the lowest cost one is the Acer Google Book 14, which is very much like an Acer spin kind of, you know, Chromebook.

Tablet. Yeah, it's, it's the only convertible two and one. It starts at $900. Acer reps have told us that's like a limited time off. and we don't exactly know what even that means like okay how long will it be nine hundred dollars for I don't know but you know Google says these Google books started 899 then there's a Dell XPS Google book which is basically a rehoused XPS 13 in a different color and it's got a Qualcomm snapdragon chip

instead of Intel Wildcout Lake that's a little more it's like 1199 starting at again these are all starting at prices you can configure these with more and get more expensive of course there's an HP, I think this is just called Google Book 14. Another Snapdragon chip, again, like 1299, I believe that one is. There's Lenovo's also 1299, Google Book 15, so it's a little bit larger. And that one has like a little, if I recall correctly, that has a little more ports. A bunch of these have OLEDs. Some of them have like haptic track pads, but not all. So again, nothing is really, there's no threading the needle like, oh, this is, it's got to have this, this, this, like Chromebook Plus. did have some minimum spec requirements. Yeah, and some things you're expected on it. These are all nice. They're all nice laptops.

The last one is the ASUS Google Book 14. Again, I think it's just his name. You know, I don't know why Google insists on all the names being the same. But again, an OLED screen, very lightweight, at least that one. Like some of them have some little standouts, like their haptic track pads or more ports or the convertible for the ACER. the ASUS is like very lightweight. It's like only weighs like 2.2 pounds, one kilo or something like that.

But all the hardware is like, it all feels familiar because they're all pretty much based on like existing. I think the ASUS, for example, is like an expert book. Right. And it's just now with Google Book OS. One thing that I find kind of strange here is that they're only working with ODMs to make these computers. There's no Google made Google Book.

Do you know why that is? That seems a little bit weird when they pivoted a lot of Android to be sort of centered around the pixel phone. Yeah, I don't know why. I am kind of of two minds where I would, I would, I kind of wanted to see that like Halo device, that flagship device kind of lead the charge. But I am also kind of like looking at it across this and it's like five somewhat evenish laptops, give or take, little bits here and there. And it's like, maybe that's fine. You know, Google has made their own, Google has made its own Chromebooks in the past, obviously, even like a pixel ones. Pixelbook, the pixel book go. They had the Google made laptops and now they just are not doing that anymore.

Yeah. Who knows if that may just be, this may just be the precursor to them making one of those at some point. Or I don't know, maybe they're just feeling things out and see how it goes. But, you know, it's obviously easier for, for these OEMs to make, just kind of remix an existing laptop versus Google spinning up an entire new model. Yeah, it almost reminds me of like the HTC 1M8 Google Play Edition, right? Oh, man. That's deep cut and I used to own that phone. That's awesome.

Yeah, yeah. I miss those days. So yeah, maybe this can, I mean, again, maybe this will be like that, like, just find this niche and enthusiasts and like, you know, people who really like the idea. of just not being on Windows or Mac and having something that works something that works really well with their Android phone specifically, but who knows, we'll see.

But it's an interesting premise that, yeah, Google is just bowing out of the hardware this side. We'll see if that holds. Okay. Well, much like Google redesigned Android to be based around Gemini, it seems that they are also sort of redesigning Chrome OS to be around Gemini with this Google OS. Can you talk to me about this new magic cursor feature

that I keep saying. They have this banner on their site that says intelligence is the new spec, clearly pointing to Gemini. And then they have a little cursor with a rainbow around it that they shake. What exactly is happening here? What is this feature? So you wiggle the cursor and you can pull up Gemini on pretty much anything. You can just have it, like, look at stuff on your screen.

You can just prompt it via the cursor, right? You just wiggle it and then just start typing something away to ask a question. So it's baked further into the OS. and yeah, I mean, we can't avoid Gemini, right? If it's Google thing, just like kind of how it is on Android, well, now the same on Google Books. And yeah, so you wiggle it, pull it up, and then type away, but it's not exactly clear when things are happening on device

and when things are running out to the cloud. You know, obviously all the chips that they're using have NPUs so they can do some on-device AI, but, you know, there's got to be stuff happening going to the cloud almost all the time. Yeah. Okay, so you wiggle the cursor around. Is that on images you see? Is that on text you see?

Is this like anything on your screen you can practically interact, interact with Gemini with? Is that the idea? Basically, yeah. Like, the part that was kind of cool is you can, you know, like, you can have multiple images loaded right into it to like, you know, do a prompt based on what you're feeding it. So you can do like multiple documents, multiple images. I guess that could be cool and helpful. Or you could just be straight up text. Okay.

So it seems to me that Google. is sort of trying to get you to interact with Gemini by putting things you see on the web into a context window. And then either chat about those things or generate images about those things. Would you consider that their motive here? Basically. I mean, and like just give you faster, quicker access to Gemini. And they also are putting in a couple of recent Android features like Rambler, where it'll do speech transcription with like, you know, you could just go at it and just like, speak your mind, like stream of consciousness, and it'll remove all the ums and us.

And it does a very good job. That's in Google Books as well, as well as the Create My Widget, where you can kind of vibe code your own little personal home screen widget on a Google book. So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves. Lifestyles are priority.

Motivation is being inspired. But regardless. how you feel about Gen Z. It's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties. Many now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden

they're all socialist. That is just not the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are embracing candidates who are offering new, bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America, actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Jambaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science, and I keep saying, like, young voters aren't that complicated after all. It's pretty simple.

Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Phoebe Judge. And for more than a decade, I've hosted the podcast criminal, telling stories about people who've done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. But while I was starting one of the very first true crime podcasts out there, I was also taking phone calls from my sister, from prison. This fall, I'm going on tour, and I'm telling a story I've never told before, my own. Pre-sale tickets are on sale now for Criminal Plus members. General sale tickets go on sale on Thursday, September 24th.

Get tickets at this iscriminal.com slash live. A lot of these features to me feel kind of tailored for business users. You know, like I see people show up to the coffee shop all the time with their HP laptops or their Lenova laptops. And they have all this business software on them. They're writing emails all day. They're doing presentations and stuff like that. Many of the Gemini features, including Rambler, including, you know, putting things in Gemini, making images and graphics feel tailored to business users. When you say that this kind of feels like a business play, or does this,

seem like they're really going after consumers here? I think they are going after consumers. It's hard to say because like a lot of, like as we hear about on the Vergecast and talk about the Vergecast a lot, it's like a lot of AI stuff is kind of enterprise focus or it can't, it seems like I can't escape the appeal of the enterprise. So I could see like maybe there is some kind of play here for that too, but I think they're looking at, I think they're looking at consumers. But it's hard to say. I mean, they're talking about, wanting to reinvent the laptop. And, you know, it's like big, big boards, big claims.

And they've got some interesting and some cool stuff here. But a lot of questions are open questions. Would you say this is like a true play at trying to create their version of the Apple ecosystem? Because it seems to me that they are trying to say you can still do most of these things. If you buy a Google book, it comes with a year of Nvidia GForce now. So you can still stream high quality. games on it. That's not a limitation. Most of the stuff that you're doing online is going to be through Google services anyway. If you buy the Google Book, if you can stream or Android

directly to your laptop. And they do have an edge on Apple here, right? Like, Apple has limited capabilities between moving things from your phone to your computer. Like, they have AirDrop. They have iPhone mirroring, things like that. But it's not as integrated as the Android to Google Book integration. Do you think that they're going for Apple's throat here? I think that's what they want to do, and at the very least, they want to make, I think, just how, like, I'm sure they see how iPhone and Mac, like, someone who owns an iPhone and a Mac is, has some levels of integration and many reasons for staying within that ecosystem within those walled gardens, because things talk to each other. And, you know, Google, it's like they don't, they're blocked on that front. They can't interact with a Mac quite like an iPhone does. And then, They don't have it fully on Windows either. So it's like, this is their way to make this more integrated ecosystem. And ideally, I would imagine then keeping more people on Android, keeping people on Android,

and people using Android apps. You know, again, I think like just thinking about how like, oh, you know, one of my hurdles with not using MacOS or not using Windows is like, I need, I want to, no, I don't want. I need to use Lightroom Classic. Like I just because I'm ingrained in it, right? And this doesn't have Lightroom Classic, but it's like, oh, it has Lightroom, the mobile version, but it's like it's a little bit better on the desktop, on a Google book, should be at least. I've used it a little bit on Windows on Arm when before Lightroom Classic was compatible.

And I don't prefer that app at all. I much prefer to use Lyram Classic as what I'm used to. But it's like, okay, I can get by on that if I had to. And that's just something that you couldn't really do with Chromebooks. So they are overcoming some hurdles by unifying it. on Android, but again, there's just so many questions and so much to see. It certainly seems like there's more here than there were with Chromebooks, because Chromebook was an idea of everything lives in the cloud anyway, just have your computer be in the cloud.

It's the cloud computer, right? But then eventually they realized they had to start competing with the Apple ecosystem and the way that your phone interacts with it. So that's when they kind of bolted on Android compatibility onto Chromebooks, and you could download Android apps onto Chrome. this feels like the fuchsia OS kind of idea where it's a merger of the two, your phone and your laptop are sort of the same thing. Would that seem accurate to you? Yeah, I mean, there's been talks since going back to fuchsia and then there was the code name Aluminium, which they haven't, no one's confirmed, but it seems like, like Google won't confirm, but it seems like this is aluminum, right? This is what it's been talked about of unifying ChromeOS and Android.

and yeah, this seems like their play at this finally. Yeah. There are a couple hardware things here that I find a little cute, and I think that people will like. One is there's this light bar on the top of all Google Books, it seems. It seems that this is a feature that they do make sure that everyone uses, right? Can you talk about this light bar? It's like an RGB bar.

It does things when the computer does things. I can't. I mean, it is cute and fun. Like, I just look at it as like, okay, that's fun. But like, I don't know what it, I don't know what the point of it is. Like, they mentioned, like, it will show battery life. But I couldn't, this is one of those things where, like, at the briefing, like, I'm like, okay, but like, how does it show battery life? I think while it's charging, it shows sort of a charging animation.

Right, I guess. That makes sense, except, you know, like, I was asking reps and they didn't really know. Okay. But again, again, they just got their hardware. So I'll give them a break. But it seems like one of those things like that's, I don't know how many other ideas. they have for it. I think charge level is a good one. Probably the most useful one, actually, because once you're using the laptop, it's on the lid. It's facing away from you. Actually,

Lenovo was the only one that demoed something that would have a glowbar facing towards you. They have an optional mouse that has its own glowbar. Now, their mouse, yeah, that light actually on their mouse, on their globe bar has its own, it has to use Lenovo's vantage software. So I guess it's just their own doing, but there's a lot TBD on how that'll work, just as there is, you know, a lot to be figured out on what the glowbar will be used for. But Google, this is one of those things where like Google is just like, like, oh, like, and we're putting it out there and developers will be able to tinker with it too. And it's like, I think they're kind of maybe wondering if developers will really figure out its main use cases aside from like battery level. So the globe bar is

not something that Google dictates what it can do, but the OEM does. I think, no, I think Google dictate, I think, I'm not, again, we're not exactly clear. It's like, I think, I think Google dictates it, or at least from the battery level and stuff like that. And it's just glows, Googly colors on the regular. But beyond that, it's not fully clear yet. Okay. There is another hardware key that seems to be on all these laptops. It's like Google key instead of like a Windows key or something like that. Can you tell me what the Google key does? It just opens the start menu. Like, yeah, it's actually, the recent Chrome. I don't know how far back, but Chromebooks have a G key too.

So it's, I don't think anything super special. There's also the quick insert key. It's something that they added on Chromebook Plus models a couple of years back, where it's like, the caps lock key basically gives you like one-click access to Gemini, which again, this is also kind of funny because like, like the wiggle to, you know, shake the mouse cursor to pull up Gemini. Like there was already like a key to summon Gemini with the, the quick insert key.

But when you wiggle it, you're wiggling it on top of an element on your screen and you're telling Gemini I want to interact with this, right? You like wiggle it, it pulls up and then you can click on what you want. Okay. So it's, yeah, but it's all, again, I always keep coming back to like, it's all very Googly at how, like, this is all kind of, like, different ideas all thrown out there and like, they slam them into a product together. Yeah.

But ultimately, like, I think as far as I know, like, the G key seems the same as Chromebook pluses of recent years, and so does the quick insert key on the caps lock. Okay. It's interesting to me when you buy one of these, it also includes a year of Google AI Pro with 5 terabytes of storage. Many of the things that come with these computers kind of are trying to get you into a cloud ecosystem. You know, there's G-Force now that you get a year of. You get a year of AI Pro with 5 terabytes of storage, all these things. That is a very Chromebooky idea, right? Like, let's do everything in the cloud. What is the value of having a minimum of 16 gigabytes of RAM? I mean, I know you said that's not. a minimum forever, but that's what these laptops start at, having specific like battery playback,

specific power with these Snapdragon X Elite chips and Snapdragon Intel Core Ultra chips. Do you think that these computers are going to be doing anything hardcore on them? Because, you know, GForce now is an online streamed service. Most Google services are processing online. Is it just to run Android apps? Because it doesn't really seem like a computer with this kind of processing power, needs to be doing those things. Yeah, I think it may have to do with, like, who they're positioning these towards. And, like, like, the president of Android ecosystem, Samir Samat told me, like, they, like, he had in mind, like, someone that has, like, a galaxy Z-fold eight, he actually had one on him. He's like, someone has, like, this kind of phone. Like, we want this laptop for

them. And, uh, you know, that's an expensive phone. And this is, these are like all, like, metal chassis, thin and light, pretty sleek. Maybe it does kind of go back to the little business element, you know, that you talked about. Maybe it's a low-key play towards enterprise, you know, a slow burn. But they are talking about, you know, 10 years of, 10 years of updates, software updates. So 10 years is a big ask. It is. Yeah.

It was already big that seven years, like seven years on pixel phones, but 10 years is a long time. Exactly. That was. And they have already. Especially for Google, by the way. And they did that for Chromebooks. And that you can kind of understand because it's. is like a whole thing with education.

But here, I think it's a matter of like, you should, I guess you should go on, go big on. They want these to be like premium devices, right? That's why they're like $1,000-ish. And they're thin and light and they're metal. And, you know, they have OLEDs and touch screens, you know. So I think they want to start up here. It also gives Chromebook and Chromebook Plus's room for now

until they maybe trickle downwards in that direction. But it separates, them more because I think what they're looking at is like this is kind of a redo, a relook at what Chromebooks could do but with a higher ceiling. You know, it's like they can, there's, there's more potential here. And maybe that potential won't be realized until like Google goes well beyond like the continue on feature and the cast my apps feature and whatever else they're having at launch. A big thing that was explained to me was that with this, they can speed up development of Google Books a lot more than they could Chromebooks.

Like, Chromebooks kind of lag behind Android development, and now it can kind of all be unified. So in some ways, this is like just as helpful for Google as it is for like a consumer that this really actually clicks with. Does this run Google OS or Android? I mean, it's Android built on a Linux kernel, but it's called Google Book OS. Okay. Got it.

So they're still going to have ChromeOS for, and they're still going to sell Chromebooks. Yep, especially. I mean, I think those may live on for who knows how long with it, especially with the education market. So now we have Chromebooks, Chromebook Plus and Google Books. Yep. Cool. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, it's almost like Chromebook Plus Plus, right? Or like, yeah. Pro Max. Yeah. I mean, like, again, there's, I just keep coming back to like, there's tons of questions. There's lots to figure out.

And I don't, I have no idea, no idea if this is actually going to be like successful. I mean, ultimately, I care if it's good. You know, like, when it comes to time for the review, it's like, if it's good, like, if it's a sales failure, like, no, unfortunately, we can't control that, whatever, man. Like, it's just, but I'm looking forward to trying these. I got to say at least, like, I thought this was pointless. And I came back saying, like, okay, maybe there's something here. There's a big swing. They Google could easily just whiff, but we'll see.

Yeah. All right. Well, Antonio D. Benedetto, thanks for joining us. And we'll talk to you next time. Yeah, man. Thank you. Well, that's it for the Vergecast. Let's know what you think.

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