To start off its grand new adventure in laptops, Google is working with the usual troop of PC makers to craft the first slate of eponymously named Googlebooks. There are a total of five models to start, all releasing in the next few months, and they run the gamut from cheaper 2-in-1 convertibles to costlier creative-focused laptops with bright OLED displays. However, if you know your laptops, it’s difficult to call any of these notebooks truly “new.”
If you want to know the full feature rundown of this laptop slate, shuffle on over to my other hands-on with GooglebookOS. The actual laptops themselves running Google’s combination of Android and ChromeOS are relying on higher-end chips than a typical Chromebook to power some of these new features. You’ll have the choice between x86 and ARM-based chips, but Google promises the experience should be the same across both. Google also said Googlebooks should support up to 32GB of RAM, though we don’t know what kind of price you can expect for better memory configs considering—you know—RAMageddon.
Every one of these laptops also includes a special “Glowbar.” It’s the one design element Google imagines will help differentiate its laptops from the pack. It showers you with a miniature light spectacle on opening the laptop lid and otherwise displays your current battery level. It’s not quite gamer-level RGB rainbow puke levels of light, but it’s a small nod to making these laptops a little more “fun” than your typical clamshell.
Let’s start with the Snapdragon-based lineup. The Dell XPS Googlebook should look very familiar to anybody who’s seen one of the company’s recent XPS 13 models. The $1,200 laptop is running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor. That’s not the more-recent Snapdragon X2 Elite, which proved to be a much-improved and capable chip in our own tests.
It’s otherwise packed with a base of 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. In fact, Dell told me these laptops are explicitly designed off the same XPS 13 chassis, and that means it’s using the magnesium aluminum body alongside a bright 13-inch LCD touch display. I picked it up and thought to myself, “Yep, that’s an XPS 13 in all but name.” It’s also slightly heavier than the Windows 11 version at 2.5 pounds, though it features a haptic touchpad instead of the XPS 13’s mechanical pad.
HP is the other company pushing a Snapdragon X Elite laptop with its $1,300 HP Googlebook 14. Instead of an LCD, it packs a 2.8K OLED touch display. There was a part of me that wondered if I had seen this laptop before, and it turns out much of the shell and laptop feed are based explicitly on the Omnibook Ultra 14.
There are three Intel-based Googlebooks arriving in the next few months. Asus told me it based its Googlebook 14 on many of its Elitebook business-grade designs. The $1,300 laptop can support either an Intel Core Ultra 3 or Core Ultra 5 chip and starts with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. However, Lenovo’s design may be even more extravagant with its Googlebook 15. That design has a 15.3-inch, 2.8k OLED touch display and speakers that also support Dolby Atmos.
Lenovo is also planning to ship a special “AI Mouse” that includes a Glowbar that works in tandem with the company’s Googlebook. The mouse also has a button located directly below the scroll wheel that brings up Gemini AI features. A long press of one of the side buttons also calls up the new Magic Pointer mode without having to wiggle your mouse—something that may actually come in handy based on my failed attempts to wiggle the cursor into compliance.
Lenovo’s laptop will also cost $1,300, so in the end there’s only one laptop that will cost less than $1,000 at launch. The $900 Acer Googlebook 14 is also the only convertible 2-in-1 of the pack, meaning you can flip it around and use its 2.8K OLED touch display as a pseudo tablet. Here’s the thing: Acer said its laptop pricing is a “limited-time offer” through Best Buy. In the end, you’re going to have a hard time finding a Googlebook that costs as much as even the most feature-packed Chromebook.
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