Google's cost-cutting kills the Pixelbook division

Enlarge / The Pixelbook Go starts at $649 for a Core m3 processor, 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Valentina Palladino

Google's hardware division is still unable to provide a consistent and reliable selection of hardware. A report by The Verge claims that Google has "cancelled the next version of its Pixelbook laptop and disbanded the team responsible for building it." This has been the case for several years, but the only new Chromebooks will be those from third parties.

The last laptop launched by the company was the Chromebook Go in 2019, which is still for sale on store.google.com. Shortly after the launch of this device, reports surfaced that the laptop and tablet division was being downsized. While tablet plans have managed to recover thanks to Android, portable plans are apparently dead. The last credible rumors about Google laptops date back to the run up to the launch of Google Tensor/Pixel 6. The rumor was that Google was making its own chips, and alongside the rumors about the phone (Pixel 6) was constantly claiming that a portable version of the chip would occur. Google Hardware senior vice president Rick Osterloh said last May that the company "will make Pixelbooks in the future." According to the report, "the device was in development and expected to debut next year" before being cancelled.

The reason for the breakup of the Pixelbook team is apparently Google CEO Sundar Pichai's cost-cutting. Google's CEO said in August that "productivity as a whole isn't where it needs to be for the workforce we have" and warned that the company would "consolidate where investments overlap and streamline process". The Verge report states: "The Pixelbook team and the Pixelbook itself have been victims of this consolidation and redeployment."

It's always been difficult to take Google Hardware seriously as a real company. Google treats the hardware market as a small secondary hobby and only sells devices in a small number of countries. Google Hardware's product lines are barely "lineups" of products, with inconsistent releases and none of the iterative annual improvements that seem to power other hardware operations. Without an automatic annual Pixelbook release, Google's timing with this relaunch would have been horrible. It last released a Chromebook a year before the pandemic, and when the pandemic hit and Chromebook sales hit an all-time high, Google had nothing to offer. Google's Pixelbook would have arrived just before Chromebook sales returned to Earth.

The instability of Google hardware means that no dead product is ever truly dead. Google stopped making tablets in 2015, came back for Chrome OS tablets in 2018, then stopped for another three years, and now it's planning to launch a new Android tablet in 2023. Surely we'll get another Google laptop one day, but we'll just have to wait a few more years.