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If you read between the lines, the Google book is doomed to fail, right? Well, I'll be the first to admit that I had that sinking feeling right up top. But I now have thought about it. I think no. I'm not the target market for this product. You might not be too, and it probably isn't going to fail. And that's okay. Let's get into it and why I think that in this video. Hey, if you want more Google Book content when they finally release, well, how about hitting that subscribe button because we'd love to have you as part of the team, especially when we dive deeply into these laptops in the coming months.
Cheers. Since being announced or teased, I have to admit I have changed my opinion on what I think the Google book needs to be, and I hope that you will feel the same after this video. In fact, I think like many in this space, I often find myself imparting something onto a product, a service or anything else for instance, and realize that no, I might not be the person Google is aim or aiming squarely at with this next laptop product specifically. And I think that's fine because not everything needs to be for every single person. Sometimes I have to tell myself this very obvious point every few days. And I think it's a really good exercise for people to do anyway, especially in an era where
information is beamed from these glowing rectangles we all carry around right into our eyeballs basically every few minutes. It's easy to get caught up in hating things before you've even had time to process them or even had time to try them out for yourself. We're either insensed or related about practically everything today. And I do think that's a problem that expands way beyond the Google Book lineup. That said, my first concerns with the Google books seemed pretty obvious, at least to me. How is Google going to make something that will ostensibly be marketed alongside other notebooks comp and compete with them where Android the platform is right now? If this is just an extension of what we
use on our phones, I do think there needs to be more work done to make sure that something or someone forgoing Windows or a Mac laptop is catered for. At least that's probably what you would be thinking straight away. And like tons of fans and analysts, I kind of thought to myself that Chrome OS in its current incarnation is fine. And that does make a lot more sense to expand those Chromebook capabilities rather than start from scratch. This definitely feels like a weird play to merge the two operating systems. Something we have expected for a while. Anyway, maybe I'm I'm thinking about this from the wrong position though. Firstly, Chrome OS is solid, but it hasn't really evolved
since maybe about 2020, 2018, and the gloss has definitely dulled in recent years. Android is a trusted operating system. It's Google's flagship operating system, and Android's brand awareness, I think, still trumps Chrome OS's. A lot of the younger generation also associate Chrome OS, and Chromebooks with cheap plastic shells, and let's be honest, poor performance due to underpowered hardware that tends to be given out in schools. and the like. I'm old. I like a desktop to be a desktop for what it is. The thing I've grown up with since the mid 1990s. I didn't necessarily see a smartphone until I was in my 20s. And the younger generation is very different from me. Gen Z or Gen Zed has grown up with an era of mobile
applications at the forefront of their life. Most young people are phone first. And that has sort of become the norm for the vast majority of the planet now anyway. And because of that, there is no doubt a big portion of the buy and pump public that simply don't care what form their laptop OS takes nowadays, so long as you can access the applications they use and they love, like Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, all those kind of things. And you can do that potentially here without needing to jump through hoops. I can 100% see how someone who uses an application like Cap Cut on their phone would take to an Android based OS on a laptop with zero friction.
Even so, the idea that you can get work uh done on a phone feels really at odds with my millennial brain. And I kind of need to process just like anyone would or want to use such a device to get such things done. Again, I know I'm not the target market for Google Books, and that was something I've I've kind of quantified over the past couple of weeks. I'm merely someone who cares about Android, and if this is an expansion of the OS into a new form factor, you can kind of see my initial worries from where I'm stood. And that made me think, I should be thinking about this more positively. More work on Android for more form factors is something we've kind of been dreaming of, at least since the Android 12L era.
And a Google book surely enhances this. Maybe I think this is where we could have seen some improvements in how Google communicated what a Google book will do for 95% of the people who will end up buying one or at least indicated indicated what it was going to be capable of during the announcement in the Android show. And it felt like more of a tease during that than a working product. Because of that, we've we've kind of jumped to conclusions. A lot of people have jumped to conclusions because we only had a glimpse of some admittedly minor features, which looks like running on a reference laptop and little else beyond that. Not many laptop or PC makers would do the same with
their flagship hardware. They'd more likely tease the hardware itself and let the speculation do the heavy lifting on top of that. However, it is worth noting Android on laptops is a brand new frontier. That means we're working with a known quantity of Android on phones and tablets and trying to fit that to our expectations of a modern laptop or at least shoehorn them into that form factor that we know and love. At a time when people are starting to look beyond Windows and Mac for their day-to-day experiences, I think just having another option might be enough for people to look this way. After all, not everyone wants those operating systems. I don't for most for the most part. You can get
comfortable with what you enjoy if that happens to be Android. Plus, there's a few billion people that love and use Android already. So, there are bound to be people who will prefer an Android laptop over a Chromebook, over a Mac laptop, over a Windows laptop. Maybe one of the nice additions for people that I didn't necessarily think of straight away was the ability to run Linux in this form factor. As I say, that might be great for people who want to run a Linux terminal at any stage. And maybe that also opens the door for more experimentation, development work, and a wealth of solid Linux distros could potentially be running on Google Books pretty darn quickly because Android has been improving that experience
drastically over the past few years. And as a Linux gamer myself, I'd love to see it become an integral part of the experience in the next few years. Plus, it could reopen the door shut by gaming Chromebooks, which yeah, they haven't green a great success in their own right. This could be an opportunity for Google to really lean into gaming a little bit more heavily because of that. We know Android has all the big players, all of the most used applications. And no matter how it's sugarcoated, it's worth noting there is still a potential app gap. Phone and tablet applications are very different to use versus using a
desktop application. Then again, I think if Google couldn't update Chrome to match the Chromebook experience, then that would be a major step forward for Android devices. Without certain creative packages, it's unlikely someone would switch from Windows or Mac. But does that really matter? I feel like we've kind of overblown this issue somewhat because of my own preconceived notions of what a laptop should and could be. Lots of us Adobe Suite users have arguably been part of the problem, I think, because it's expected that Photoshop, Premier, Lightroom, and more are needed for this to be viable. But the truth is that billions of people have no need for these tools. I think it
would be a huge boon though if Google could be able to call Adobe or even get the Affinity packages to uh port it over to Android laptops because I think that could change the complexion of the market so drastically in ways that the Chromebook has never really been able to. During the Android show and subsequent IO 2026 keynote, generative AI though played another key part of the discussion. Vibe coding tools like AI studio and anti-gravity I think could be a really key solution to the software chasm that exists today. Generative applications like widgets and services I think could be a real way to differentiate Google books against the competition already. As a lapse programmer myself who's actively hated programming for a long time. I
think being able to build my own mini applications and tools on my local machines has been a real gamecher over the past 12 to 18 months. And I don't think Google goes about communicating this properly to the average person. I think they need to lean into this a little more with the Google book as this could potentially be the blank canvas for creativity in ways that we hadn't necessarily expected. So you can do things like build your own tool and get a true tailored OS that simply doesn't exist outside of some Linux distros out there. I think we should have less AI cursor and more building as a component and we could truly have something special on our hands here when Google
books eventually reach the public. One side of this that stands out most is that almost every other major tech brand that manufactures a laptop has its own equivalent product. What I mean by this is having a laptop with Google branding makes a lot of sense. It helps as well that Android is arguably Google's biggest software success story away from a browser window. It is the world's biggest mobile operating system by user base and an operating system that spans thousands of form factors already. And what's another added to that extensive list? I think knee-jerk reactions aside, there are major reasons that Google Books can be viable and a very successful product. I like you might not
have been the person this new lineup was aimed at. And yeah, frustrations aside initially, I think that's absolutely fine. Just show me some hardware soon, please, Google. because after thinking about it, I'm actually really excited about what's to come. And I'm sure if you start to think about it from that perspective, you might be as well too. Let me know though if you're excited or still in that hated or confused phase. I've seen a lot of discussion online and it's been a really interesting few weeks because some people have maybe 18 like I have and a lot of you have kind of stayed true to your initial opinion. Let me know down in the comments sections
below. But as always, cheers for watching and I'll speak to you later.
