Google reportedly scraps new Pixelbook, shutters team behind it

Google is out of the laptop game — the company has reportedly killed its next big Pixelbook and dissolved the team working on it.

The details come from The Verge, which cites a “person familiar with the matter.” The news is somewhat contradictory to what Google itself has said over the last few months — notably, at its I/O developer conference in May, Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh told The Verge that the company was “going to do Pixelbooks in the future,” while acknowledging that the market has changed significantly.

However, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has been vocal for months about plans to slow down hiring at Google and cut some of the company’s projects. It very much seems like the Pixelbook and the team behind it were one such project.

A Google spokesperson told The Verge that it doesn’t share plans on future products and that in “regards to our people, in times where we do shift priorities we work to transition team members across devices and services.”

The Verge included a look through the history of Google’s Chromebook and Pixelbook ambitions, which is worth the read if you’re interested in that kind of thing. The main takeaway, however, is that the main customers for ChromeOS and Chromebooks aren’t going to pay for pricey Pixelbook hardware. For example, ChromeOS is huge with schools, but schools won’t be kitting out teachers and students with $1,000 Pixelbooks.

Source: The Verge