Google’s cost-cutting kills Pixelbook division

A consistent, reliable hardware selection is hard for the hardware division to find. The team responsible for building the next version of thePixelbook laptop has been dissolved, according to a report. The only new Chromebooks out there will be ones from third parties.

The last laptop released by the company was the Chromebook Go in 2019, which is still for sale at store.google.com. Shortly after that device's launch, reports surfaced that the laptop and tablet division was being downsized. While the tablet plans managed to recover thanks to Android, the laptop plans are apparently dead. The last credible Google laptop rumors were from the lead-up to the Google Tensor/Pixel 6 launch. Google was rumored to be making its own chips and, along with a phone (Pixel 6) rumors, consistently claimed a laptop version of the chip would be happening. Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh said as recently as May that the company was "going to do Pixelbooks in the future," and the report says "the device was far along in development and expected to debut next year" before it was canceled.

According to reports, the reason for the dissolution of the team is due to cost-cutting by the CEO. In August, the CEO of the company warned that productivity was not where it needed to be for the number of employees. The Pixelbook team and the book itself were casualties of that consolidation.

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It has been difficult to take the business seriously. The hardware market is only sold in a small number of countries by the internet giant. There are no iterative yearly improvements that seem to power other hardware operations and the product lines are barely product lines at all. The timing of this relaunch would have been terrible without an annual Pixelbook release. When the Chromebook sales were at an all-time high, the last time it was released was a year before the outbreak of the Pandemic. The Chromebook sales crashed back to Earth just before the arrival of thePixelbook.

No dead product is ever really dead because of the instability of the hardware division of the company. We will get another laptop one day, but we will have to wait a few more years.