Similarly, Google spent almost a decade convincing the world that a high-end Chromebook was a smart idea. When Google released the first Chromebook Pixel in 2013, it went intentionally over the top, placing ChromeOS — an operating system Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt had declared will be featured on “totally throwaway” hardware — on a stunning gadget with a $1,300 price tag. Google never intended for Chromebook hardware to matter, but it does, so Google produced the finest hardware. Nonetheless, the Pixel and subsequent Pixelbook variants were specialized devices with high costs, and although Google does not break out its Chromebook sales, it was plainly too pricey to have a significant impact on the larger laptop market.
When Google announced the Pixelbook in 2017, the argument for ChromeOS had shifted somewhat. It was no longer simply a lovely, functional laptop; it was also a convertible, flipping gadget that could be used as a tablet. Google even created a pen called the Pixelbook Pen to go with the gadget. Google’s Pixelbook was an effort to compete with the iPad and the MacBook Air in a single package. It had Google Assistant, could connect to a Pixel phone and access its data, and could run Android applications. It embodied the whole of Google’s computer vision.
Google has mainly failed to recreate what made the Pixelbook amazing since then. It proceeded to pursue and Chrome OS-ize anything that seemed to be the future of computing: first, there was the catastrophic Pixel Slate, a tablet with an attachable keyboard that resembled the Microsoft Surface. Then there was the Pixelbook Go, a smaller and somewhat cheaper version of the Pixelbook that, by the time it was released in 2019, couldn’t compete.
