Googlebook Review: Luxury Laptops Combine Two Operating Systems’ Worst Habits

THE CLOUD, Googlebook laptops have arrived with premium hardware, luxury pricing and Google’s confident promise to bring ChromeOS and Android together. Early reviewers say it feels less like a merger than a custody dispute held inside an increasingly costly computer.

By Gary Opinions. The machines are sleek and quick, built to reassure owners that they have bought the future rather than a laptop with two operating systems, each convinced the printer belongs to the other one.

The idea is clear. ChromeOS supplies a neat desktop; Android brings a huge app collection and its settled conviction that every object is, at heart, a phone. Put them together and you get a computer that opens a spreadsheet, alerts you about that spreadsheet, then suggests seven apps for anyone psychologically preparing to open it.

“The computer now compromises on behalf of the owner.” — Clive Niblet, spokesperson for the Office of Platform Harmony

That cooperation has attracted official praise. Professor Lint Havers of the newly formed International Committee for Shared Computing called it “a powerful new phase of cooperation, in which each platform waits patiently for the other to take responsibility.” He spoke from a conference room where a laptop had shown its loading symbol since breakfast.

The price matters. At normal laptop prices, the Googlebook would simply be confusing. At luxury-laptop prices, confusion becomes a lifestyle purchase: proof that you have enough spare money to finance a long inquiry into who made the cursor disappear.

Owners receive the full experience of both systems. Desktop features act like mobile features, while mobile features have apparently noticed a desktop and declined to comment. One test machine asked permission to rotate its screen, then demanded a separate password before rotating it back. Another put an app icon on the shelf, the home screen and, briefly, a small emotional-support cushion.

The arrangement is still expanding. Clive Niblet, spokesperson for the Office of Platform Harmony, said the Googlebook marked “the end of compromise, because the computer now compromises on behalf of the owner.” He added that Google eventually plans to include a third operating system. Nobody could establish whether that meant Linux, a television menu, or an elderly calculator with strong views.

For now, the laptops remain impressive engineering and a useful reminder that “seamless integration” usually means two systems have been sewn together tightly enough that neither can escape. The Googlebook has not reinvented the laptop. It has given it a second set of opinions and billed you extra for the meeting.