10:01
Hmm. This one's a little bit of a weird one. ASUS Google Book? An ASUS Google Book across my desk? This might actually be one of the best deals that you can get in 2026 in our computationally uncertain times, let's call it. Panther Lake Core Ultra 5, 16 gigs of memory, 512 GB of SSD. At this price point this might be one of the better deals out there. This is the ASUS CX946CAA. What a catchy name. Let's take a closer look and uh those of you that have been following me for a long time know that I might have something special in store because this seems like a weird We're already off to
a weird start. Stay tuned till the end. Okay. Chromebooks. You may have heard of Google Book. What's the difference between a Chromebook and a Google Book? Google's going through a bit of a rebranding. They want you to use this as the operating system. They want you to mostly live in the cloud, which is why this has Wi-Fi 7, a really killer network connection. Uh see what I did there, but it's not. It's Wi-Fi 7 plus Bluetooth. 14-in screen, 70-W hour battery life. Pretty good specs on all accounts. Has a matte gray textured finish.
It doesn't pick up fingerprints super easily. I also tried to scuff it up a little bit, you know, how does it handle scuffs? Kind of rubbing it on the table a little bit here. And you can get it to scuff fairly easily, but if you spend a few minutes cleaning it comes off. So, maybe the finish is a little abrasive. It is designed for serviceability. The screws, you know, are on the bottom. There's not glue or anything like that, so you can get at the battery and that of stuff. We'll take a look at that in a second. The touchpad responds haptically no matter where you touch. It feels like it's clicking. I think it's a haptic mechanical
type thing. It stretches from the space bar to the bottom of the laptop. So, if you're one of those people that your thumbs sort of rest on the area around the touchpad, you're going to have to learn to keep your thumbs off the touchpad. Now, it is a touch display and the touch display, you know, usually the hinge is going to be pretty stiff and the hinge is kind of stiff on this. It really doesn't take a lot of touch. The thing that I like about this touchpad is that it's got some kind of super oleophobic coating on the screen because it's really not picking up fingerprints. It's not a glossy display. It's a matte display. And I've touched the crap out of it and it really hasn't picked up a lot of
grease. So, that's very impressive. It also doesn't take a lot of touch pressure. Like I feel like I can almost just get my finger really close to the screen and it will basically register as a touch. I mean, I do have to just the slightest tap for it. I was kind of surprised by that. Google, I think, also intends for this device to be a part of their anti-gravity ecosystem. Anti-gravity is Google rethinking um the workspaces. And so, you have Android terminal, which is what it sounds like. And you have uh an app directory and uh you know, you can do use the whole like Google for business things. So, Google's sort of
rethinking how you can deploy a fleet of these in business or anything else. It's a lightweight terminal to get onto the internet that's controllable and lockdown and has all the stuff that you would expect for fleet management, but doesn't require participation in any of the uh you know, Windows ecosystem and doesn't require you to invent new solutions for being something that's purely based on Linux. It's an interesting strategy and like as a piece of hardware in that kind of an ecosystem, okay, yeah, maybe it makes sense. Uh schools, school management, yeah, I get it. Cuz this is relatively powerful Panther like i5, you also have the Linux VM functionality. You can deploy a full Linux virtual machine which runs under
uh Google's, you know, Chrome OS here or Google OS. When I run terminal, it tells me it's Debian. It's like, "Oh, this is Droid at Debian." Debian kernel 6.12.93. But if you run lspci, mhm, it's all these Red Hat virtio devices. This isn't really Linux, it's a sandbox. 16 GB of memory, Linux derivative OS, Google's operating system, 16 GB of memory might not seem like a lot, but with this kind of an operating system, kind of is. Uh 20 hours of battery life just sitting on the screen, you know, light duty, watching Netflix is achievable here. And keep in mind this is only a 70 Wh battery. So, uh medium screen brightness, the keyboard backlight off, just, you know, watching a Netflix movie, reading documents, things like that, 16 18 20
hours is achievable. Playing with this over the last little bit has been very fun, but uh there are some more differences between Google's Chrome OS and the Google OS. This is much more locked down. Another spot that things were a little more rough than I would have expected from Google is progressive web apps, PWAs. On Android, this is great. You go to a website and you can install the website as a progressive web app. It's not an application cuz like if you install something from the Play Store, in my opinion, Google really hasn't done an amazing job with privacy and security considerations of things come from the app store, but a progressive web app is in a web sandbox on the device. So, it's it's pretty
limited. And a lot of real applications use PWAs to get their stuff done. Like, for example, Slack. You can install Slack as a PWA and it's just running in a browser. It's not a real application. You don't have to go through the Play Store. Like, this is actually a pretty good architecture to not have a walled garden like uh you know, like the App Store, but still have something that users can feel good about security because it's the same level of security as a web page in a browser. It's just a more convenient form to consume a web page instead of having everything go through, you know, Chrome or whatever on your device. And so, progressive web apps on Chrome OS are on our new Google
Book, um it work differently than on Chrome OS. And I it's a little weird. Um it seems like Google is also playing a little bit fast and loose with the language here because they say, "Oh, you can install a compliant progressive web app." But, it's not easy. It's like, "Okay, are you telling me that the progressive web apps that work fine on Android are not compliant?" Because that's a sort of odd. Uh for their part, for popular applications, it seems like Slack, um the operating system here knows enough about what I'm doing, kind of creepy, to direct me to the Google Play Store to get the app, like an Android app. So, where does that leave us?
Overall, the Google Book operating system experience is surprisingly polished. It's actually more coherent than Windows. Like, I'm sort of skeptical of, you know, the whole cloud account thing and signing in and how much telemetry and analytics is this surfing is surfacing back to Google and like what am I doing, but in terms of like a cohesive experience for somebody that wants to get stuff done, I'm very impressed with how well put together the operating system is. Now, even though the bootloader is not a locked, you might think, "Oh, I can dual boot." No, uh Google's actually created a number of booby traps to destroy your information if you want to do that.
You unlock the boot loader and try to boot from the internal drive, it will erase the drive. Unlocking the boot loader is also a two-step process. You got to enable developer options here. You got to toggle on OEM boot loader unlock, which ASUS doesn't lock down, which is very kind of ASUS. And then you have to hold control and escape as you turn the machine on, and then you get another unlock the boot loader option, and then at that point the boot loader is actually unlocked. But it hard resets the device when you do that. Oh, you have might have messed with the operating system, and it'll just delete whatever you had saved locally or any
configuration or anything like that. Which makes me not want to It's like, "Okay, I you know, the Linux GUI support stuff is kind of janky. You have to click on the little GUI icon in the terminal, and it's not really good video acceleration cuz it's a virtual machine, and it's like, "That's not our focus right now." You know, like the PR message from that. Um so, if you are a power user, uh don't feel bad about just installing Linux on here and not dual booting because Google obviously doesn't care about that use case, so just enjoy the several hundred dollars off of the hardware and just run Linux on it and be done with it. The Google like what they're they're doing with the terminal and you know, full Linux as a virtual
machine is nice from a sandboxing and security standpoint. It's also nice operationally. Like I can install Visual Studio Code. I can install like real developer stuff. I can install Linux applications like I was even able to get the theme that makes it kind of sort of look like Photoshop. Uh photo And um that works pretty well. There are still bugs. Uh the Google, you know, Google Books uh operating system here I has some bugs and you know, I have some familiarity, I have some experience with uh Chrome OS and I'm surprised at the changes from this to Chrome OS. So, I think that the rename here was a little bit more than just a marketing rename. I think that some past architectural decisions were made with this that they're trying to
roll back or they're trying to walk back or undo. But, at the same time, they haven't locked the bootloader entirely and there is still a path to install other operating systems on these. So, I've written a guide. If you'd like to put full Linux on this, that unlock is available to you and you can boot this up and run Linux on it. The engineering is solid. It's is a surprising amount of laptop in 2026 considering the landscape of other prices. Uh I'm sort of very surprised. I didn't expect the Linux VM functionality that's built in to be as good as it is. I think for lots of use cases, bare metal Linux on this also super appealing. And the cost savings? Nah, that's just gravy.
I want to close out this level one with a quick look at ASUS's Google Book 14 for 2026. Uh if you have any questions or miss anything, uh hit me up in the forum so we can chat and have some fun. All right, I'm signing out and I'll see you there.
