Welcome to the world, Googlebook. Google announced the new eponymous category of AI laptops at the Android Show: I/O Edition on Tuesday. Think of it as the lovechild of a Chromebook and a Copilot+ PC, Microsoft's term for AI-designed Windows laptops.
"Over 15 years ago, we introduced the Chromebook, a laptop built for a cloud-first world," Google Senior Director Alex Kuscher said in a blog post. "Now, as computing shifts from an operating system to an intelligence system, we see an opportunity to rethink laptops again."
When the first models are released in the fall, Googlebooks will run Android apps like Chromebooks, but they'll place a heavier emphasis on features powered by Gemini, Google's AI assistant. Kuscher said Googlebooks are "the first laptops designed from the ground up for Gemini Intelligence."
It also sounds like Googlebooks will have a different operating system, one that's not ChromeOS. Google hasn't specified which one, just that it'll be "a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence," wrote Kuscher. He's almost certainly talking about Project Aluminum, Google's rumored ChromeOS x Android mashup.
Chromebooks have been gaining more integrated AI tools in recent years, so it makes sense that Google is finally going full-send on proper AI PCs. Whether consumers actually want them is another story.
