Overall, it's an interesting idea. Although it's Google and it's packed, it's going to be packed with Gemini and Google AI and whatnot. My problem is not the AI, nor is it that it's an undefined territory for what a laptop use case is. My problem is Google's attention span. Google is notoriously bad at paying attention to any product for more than 18 months. I'm not going to spend money on buying a piece of hardware where it's going to be totally irrelevant from a manufacturing point of view in 18 months and be left high and dry holding the bag.
Googlebook
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: Googlebook
#972I personally think Google should just stay away from consumer-facing devices.
I have a Pixel phone, and just the finish on it sucks! Lots of little annoyances. Each app has its own quirks, as you know the teams working on these apps do not talk to each other, and there is no central figure vetting the apps that they do put out.
Re: Googlebook
#973this is stupid af
Re: Googlebook
#974Well, so interesting, the future keeps on evolving day and night
Re: Googlebook
#975So, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for? They are marketing what is ostensibly a computer for people who seem to not want to use a computer in scenarios that I don't think even exist. Beyond that, this is a laptop that is running a really shitty, 'apps only, no you cannot do anything useful with this' operating system. I have an awful lot of complaints about MacOS's relatively restr…
every large corporation is going to come out with a hardware device in the next 12 months where you don't directly use applications, where the AI acts as an intermediary openai, anthropic, meta, google, all of them even you will want one of these devices, probably (not saying this is a positive development in the world)
And all of them will learn how expensive and difficult it is to make good hardware that the majority actually wants to use. Meta learned this the hard way (Facebook phone, Oculus, Meta home devices, etc.), the same for Google. I don't think OAI and Anthropic have the capital and time to ride out the hardware loss. Google and Meta could afford their hardware blunders because it's not their revenue sources.
Re: Googlebook
#976Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't get Gemini to not cut me off mid-sentence and reply to only half of what I wanted to say. It doesn't reliably integrate with Google Maps. I can't trust it for basic shopping tasks because it doesn't reliably evaluate stated criteria. I can't even ask it if a specific web store has a specific item in stock and trust the answer. Google hasn't gotten the bare-ass basics right. They're not about to "make apps irr…
This product is exactly how Google improves Gemini. For better or worse (I'd argue worse) Google will be putting these devices in classrooms and everywhere else to train Gemini.
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Re: Googlebook
#977I see the vision here, which the top commenters (sorry, couldn't read all of them) seems to miss. This should be a moonshot bet on the next generation of user experience. People are complaining about apps, but the idea here should be to make apps irrelevant as a concept. You don't need "apps", you need data feedable to LLM and a visualization toolkit for presenting results. And maybe some tools to manually wrangle th…
> You don't need "apps", you need data feedable to LLM and a visualization toolkit for presenting results. Unless Im missing something, how do you capture this data? It needs to be some sort of UI friendly method, as I dont see my mom chatting with an LLM all day about her dog's location (via GPS) or my dad counting calories through ChatGPT.
It'll probably require access to your contacts, call history, messages, geolocation and browsing information at all times. Maybe even a Microsoft Recall-style data suck where it takes periodic screenshots of your activity and ingests it into its knowledgebase.
Re: Googlebook
#978Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be curious to see how OpenAI or Anthropic would implement this vision without the inertia of a ~200,000 person company and with all the enormous brain gain these two companies now have. A Linux-based, LLM-native phone/laptop hybrid is pretty close to being my personal dream consumer device.
Can I somehow strip out the LLM-native part and just have a polished Linux-based mobile device, without someone trying to control what I run on it? Because that would be my personal dream.
Isn't that what the Framework laptop does?
Re: Googlebook
#979Re: Googlebook
#980For those wondering why this isn't using the Pixelbook brand, the Reddit post sheds more light. A Googlebook is something "above" a Chromebook (maybe the AI featureset imposes hardware demands that Chromebooks can't service) but is still made by third parties. I suppose they're keeping Pixelbook for first-party devices. The most interesting part to me is the "Create your own widget". I'm really interested to see besp…
This just oozes design by committee. Googlebook is the most confusing name they could chooses, some asinine compromise... Most people who haven't reddit would assume googlebooks are made by google
Also, any name with Google in it sounds cheap, gross, subsidized by ads, you pay less because you're the product.
Chrome..., Pixel..., Gemini..., Android..., anything but Google, please.