There is Another ⭐

When Luke Skywalker abandons his Jedi training early to fly off to Bespin and try to rescue his friends from Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, Obi-Wan Kenobi says, "That boy is our last hope" as Luke lifts off. But Yoda, watching the X-Wing fighter blast off, answers, "No. There is another."

As Star Wars fans and most human beings know, Yoda was previewing a reveal in the next movie, released three years later, that Princess Leia is Luke's sister and possesses Jedi powers too. But this notion of another hope is fairly general and might be applied in different scenarios when things are going south and it's difficult to imagine a way out.

Which is exactly how I feel right now about Googlebook as a platform given just three days of experience. Where Apple nailed the landing with the iPad when it released iPadOS 26 in late 2026 and unleashed the power hidden in those devices for those who wished to use one as a productivity laptop-like device, Google, inexplicably, coughed up a hairball.

This wasn't just unexpected. It was inconceivable. Thanks to various rumors, we had anticipated Google bringing Android to laptops for almost two years, and we spent most of 2025 and early 2026 watching the online giant slowly confirm its plans to replace Chrome OS with Android on laptops with a project that was codenamed Aluminium internally. The first Googlebooks shipped this past Sunday, and the Android variant they run is for some reason called Googlebook OS.

I wish branding was the only failure here, but Googlebooks are a non-starter for the one purpose they seek to accomplish: They are not a viable alternative to laptops running traditional desktop platforms like Windows, macOS, or Linux. That they are not a viable alternative to an iPad with a Magic Keyboard either is both curious and alarming. But in the sense that Googlebooks had just one job, all I can say is that they failed at that, and they do so in ways that feel avoidable given that modern Chromebook and Chromebook Plus laptops work just fine in that regard. This is the mother of all regressions.

And that sucks.

I mean that personally, as I'm quite excited by simpler mobile platforms like iPadOS and Googlebook OS making inroads into a market that's dominated by complicated dinosaurs that should have been put out to pasture years ago. And I mean that more broadly, because this inability to move beyond our past is holding back not just personal computing as an industry but also all of us. We are all victimized by this inertia and fear of change. Except that now, Googlebook users are further victimized by Google's inability to deliver the features these laptops need, which are features its previous Chromebook-based laptops provided. For f#$k's sake, Google.

Google's ability to half-ass just about anything is unmatched in our industry and it should give anyone pause, whether you're a card-carrying member of the Pixel fan club or just someone who knows that competition is a...