Google’s next Pixelbook Chromebook has been canceled

Google has canceled the next version of its Pixelbook laptop and disbanded the team responsible for building it. The device was well under development and expected to debut next year, according to a person familiar with the matter, but the project was cut as part of recent cost-cutting measures inside Google. Members of the team have been moved to other locations in the company.

As recently as a few months ago, Google planned to keep the Pixelbook going. Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference, Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh told The edge that “we’re going to make 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’s 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 like it once did.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has said for months that he intends to slow 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 note. “In other cases, it means pausing development and redeploying resources to higher priority areas.” The Pixelbook team and the Pixelbook itself were victims of this consolidation and repositioning.

“Google does not share future product plans or personnel information; however, we are committed to building and supporting a portfolio of Google products that are innovative and useful for our users,” said Laura Breen, a communications manager at Google. The edge. “In terms of our people, in times of shifting priorities, we are working to move team members across units and services.”

Google’s hardware strategy, especially with the Pixel devices, has been both to make good products and to try to show other manufacturers how to do the same. It began investing in Pixel phones as a way to show what Google’s take on Android could look like. More recently, the company has resumed making smartwatches, with the Pixel Watch coming in a few weeks, and building an Android tablet to ship next year. Both of these latter devices are in categories where most Android devices have failed. Google is trying to convince developers, manufacturers and customers that they can be good.

Similarly, Google spent nearly a decade trying to prove to the world that a high-end Chromebook was a good idea. With the first Chromebook Pixel in 2013, it deliberately went over the top, putting ChromeOS—an operating system Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt had said would appear on “completely disposable” hardware—on a beautiful device with a $1,300 price tag. The Chromebook hardware was never meant to matter, but the hardware matters, and that’s why Google made the best hardware. Still, the Pixel and the later Pixelbook models were high-priced niche devices, and even if Google isn’t breaking out its Chromebook sales, it was clearly too expensive to make any real noise in the wider laptop market.

Photo by James Bareham/The Verge

In 2017, when Google launched the Pixelbook, the chassis for ChromeOS had changed somewhat. It was no longer just a beautiful, useful laptop – it was also a convertible, flip device that could be used as a tablet. Google even built a stylus, called the Pixelbook Pen, to accompany the device. The Pixelbook was Google’s attempt to combat the iPad and MacBook Air in a single product. It had Google Assistant built in, it could connect to a Pixel phone and use its data, and it could run Android apps. It was Google’s entire computing vision in a single body. (It also had one of those really big laptop keyboards.)

Since that device, Google has mostly failed to recapture what made the Pixelbook great. It continued to chase down and Chrome OS-ize anything that looked like the future of computing: First, there was the disastrous Pixel Slate, a tablet with a pluggable keyboard that looked a lot like the Microsoft Surface. Then there was the Pixelbook Go, a smaller and slightly cheaper version of the Pixelbook that, when it launched in 2019, just couldn’t keep up with the competition. “Comparable Chromebooks cost at least a hundred dollars less for similar features,” The edge‘s Dieter Bohn wrote in his review of the device. “So with the Pixelbook Go, what are you paying for?”

In 2019, something strange had happened: Chromebooks were great! Acer, Asus and others had started investing in non-disposable hardware for their ChromeOS devices. Lenovo had a Yoga Chromebook, and Dell and HP started selling Chromebooks across a wide range of prices and specifications. Chromebooks had gone from “the crappy but cheap option” to a genuine alternative to Windows. And most of these options were also significantly cheaper than any of Google’s Pixelbooks.

The devices have been particularly successful in education, but as Brian Lynch, an analyst at research firm Canalys, said last year, “Chromebooks are truly a mainstream computing product now.” There are great Chromebooks available in all shapes and sizes: you can buy flip Chromebooks, foldable Chromebooks, detachable Chromebooks, Chromebooks with ThinkPad-style trackpads. Even the high-end market has become competitive, with devices like the Acer Chromebook Spin 713 and Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 bringing some of Google’s design prowess to the space.

In the early days of the pandemic, when students had to go to school from home, Chromebooks boomed. ChromeOS devices surpassed Apple’s Macs for the first time, according to data from research firm IDC. And Canalys said Chromebooks grew 275 percent between the first quarter of 2020 and the same period in 2021. But as the PC market has slowed after a huge early pandemic boost, ChromeOS has fallen more than most: research firm Gartner predicted that Chromebooks will see a drop of a whopping 30 percent in 2022.

Photo by Becca Farsace/The Verge

Meanwhile, Google hasn’t shipped a new laptop in nearly three years, though the Pixelbook Go is still on sale in the company’s store. In recent months, some have speculated that Google’s Tensor chip could be a reason the company is reinvesting in the space, looking for ways to bring its AI prowess to ChromeOS and laptops — and to solve the Android compatibility problem one once for all.

Going forward, it’s clear the company is focusing where it believes the Android ecosystem needs it: smartwatches and tablets. It’s also possible that after years of trying to make luxurious, cutting-edge Chromebooks happen, the company has realized that schools and students will likely continue to be the best ChromeOS customers, and that those customers will never pay Google’s prices.

To be fair though, Google has a long history of abandoning projects before eventually deciding to give them another go – smartwatches and even Google Glass all come to mind, and remember three years ago when Google said, that it was getting out of the tablet business to focus exclusively on laptops? — so Google may one day decide it needs to help push the Chromebook market again. But for now, the ChromeOS market is strong and Google is no longer trying to move it forward.