Google Announces Its Chromebook Successor: The Googlebook

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reporting for The Verge (gift link):

Google is announcing a new line of laptops coming in the fall called Googlebooks. Details are sparse for now, as the tease is just a small part of various Android announcements during Google’s Android Show. But we do know this is a major new initiative in the laptop space for Google, seemingly designed to succeed Chromebooks with something more capable: a platform running a long-rumored new operating system based on a fusion of Android and ChromeOS.

While there are many outstanding questions to be answered about Googlebooks, the biggest and most obvious ones are what will these laptops look like, what chips will be in them, and what will they cost? We’ve got none of that so far. Google only has some initial renders of a mysterious Googlebook and the promise that it’s working with Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first models. There are no model names. No specs. Nada. Google isn’t even saying if the laptop in its renders is made by a partner or a tease of some first-party Pixel-like Googlebook to come or is just a cool mockup.

This is so light on details that I was hesitant to even link to it yet. (Di Benedetto is skeptical as well.) But this caught my attention:

Googlebooks will have a Magic Pointer feature that offers contextual suggestions whenever you shake your cursor and point it at something on the screen. Google’s examples include setting up a meeting by pointing at a date in an email or selecting images of furniture and a living space to visualize them together.

Shaking your cursor over something is an interesting gesture. The only feature I’m aware of that uses that gesture is MacOS’s feature that makes your cursor bigger when you shake it, to help spot on the display. It seems a bit silly to me — why not just add the “Magic” features to a contextual menu? But, then again, here we are in 2026 and the standard gesture to invoke the Undo command on iOS is to shake your whole iPhone like a maraca.

★ Thursday, 14 May 2026