Switcher 2026: Initial Thoughts on Googlebook ⭐️

While an iPad is incredibly versatile and can be used like a laptop, Googlebook will have some advantages too. Key among them, it's literally a laptop and is thus a more direct alternative to Windows 11.
📲 The question has arisen
It's impossible to have this discussion without addressing that age old debate in the personal computing space: Is it better to take a full-featured desktop OS and try to slim it down to create a simpler, smaller OS, or is it better to start small and scale up, adding sophistication as you go?

Theoretically, either approach should work. And history shows us that Apple did both successfully: It took Mac OS X, a big and thorny desktop OS, stripped away everything unnecessary for phones, added multitouch and other device-specific capabilities to make iOS, a mobile platform, and then later scaled that up (and down, go figure) into related platforms like iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and more. But Microsoft was less successful. It tried to scale down desktop Windows many times, starting with Windows CE in the late 1990s and ending with Windows RT in 2012, but those efforts ultimately failed. Windows 11 on Arm is what it is today because of that history.

Google is different. And its approach to personal computing platforms is fascinating to me. One might argue that Google simply copied Apple when it started down this path with Android, as it initially targeted phones and was reset in the wake of the iPhone launch in 2007. And like Apple, Google scaled Android up (and down) to other platforms, in this case Wear OS, Google TV, Android Auto, Android XR, ChromeOS, and now Googlebook. But Google also does things like Microsoft in that it offers a more open platform for developers and licenses its OSes to hardware maker partners, giving customers more choice.

I used to make this observation a lot in the 2010s, but it's still true today: In the client computing space, Google is in many ways the new Microsoft.
🏁 Positioning
One thing that really resonates with me is the way Google is positioning Googlebook. Where ChromeOS was created to address the unique needs of the cloud era of personal computing, Googlebook was created to address this new AI era. This isn't just marketing: As I noted recently in Switcher 2026: ChromeOS and Chromebooks for the Win ⭐️, rewatching the original ChromeOS launch event all these years later is a refreshing reminder of how differently—how Googly–the company approached the laptop space.

Now, over 15 years later, Google is hitting reset on this device type again and it is approaching the problem in a similar fashion, just adjusted for today. Obviously, there is some marketing involved: The notion that Google is transforming Android from an operating system to an intelligence system is perhaps a little too on point, a little too cute. But consider the following.

First, recall that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once infamously said that he felt that Copilot would become the new Start menu, the...