Riddle me this: What exactly is a Chromebook?
Ask 20 people that question, and you’re bound to get 20 different answers. And for good reason: For the past decade and a half, Google has kept its ChromeOS platform in a near-constant state of evolution.
Since their debut in 2010, Chromebooks have been everything from barebones web portals to high-end laptop/tablet hybrids. They’ve been simple laptops for students and platform-defying powerhouses for professionals. They’ve gone from supporting literally no native apps to supporting a dizzying array of different app formats, including Android, Linux, and even Windows programs. They unofficially took on the role of the “Android tablet” for a few years, too, and continue to look and act more like Android devices with every passing month.
And now, Google’s ready to reinvent the wheel once more and reframe the chameleon Chromebook as the optimal vessel for its AI technology.
The question, as has become familiar with ChromeOS over the years, is if the world is ready for Google’s newest vision for the platform—or if, like with the Chromebook’s original web-centric ambitions, the concept is ahead of its time and the technology that supports it.
With the current state of generative AI technology frequently seeming more impressive on a theoretical level than a practical one, that latter bit in particular could be tough hurdle to overcome.
Google’s ChromeOS-AI infusion
Ask John Solomon about the Chromebook’s endless-feeling evolution, and he’ll tell you it isn’t an identity crisis or a sign of Google’s infamous commitment issues. Rather, he argues, it’s an indication of the company’s willingness to adapt and keep thinking about what a computer needs to be in our current tech climate.
Three years ago, when I last spoke with Solomon—the VP and GM of ChromeOS at Google—that meant polishing up the ChromeOS experience and making the devices feel even more complementary and connected to their Android-running cousins. Now, it means transforming them into “AI computers” ready to give Microsoft’s new Copilot+ PCs and Apple’s similarly priced products a run for their money.
“We believe that AI is incredibly powerful technology for transforming the experience on a computing device,” Solomon says. “What we’re doing is saying, ‘Look, we can deliver simple, affordable technology that really up-levels your experience for things like writing, reading, [and] creating better photographs.’”
To that end, Solomon and his team are rolling out their latest vision for what Chromebooks could represent for regular consumer-level users moving forward. They’re still simple, secure, and surprisingly capable laptops for school, work, and personal use. And they’re still versatile devices that seem like natural complements to anything running Android, in particular. But in Solomon’s view, they’re also now the most affordable and effective way for anyone to experience Google’s rapidly expanding AI enhancements.
This framing is specific to the Chromebook Plus designation, which is a relatively new term to describe the cream of the ChromeOS crop—the higher-end devices that meet specific hardware standards and are guaranteed to provide a certain level of performance. “Higher-end” is a relative term here, though, as the newest Chromebook Plus systems now sell for as little as $349, with the latest top-of-the-line models topping out at $699 in their base configurations.
And that’s where Solomon senses a world of fresh potential. With Microsoft’s new “AI PCs” starting at $999 and even Apple positioning its $999 iPad Pro as an “AI PC” in its own right, he sees Google as being uniquely positioned to offer a more affordable AI-centric computing alternative that fits in perfectly with his company’s current AI-everywhere mission.
“It really comes down to us trying to use Chromebook Plus and Gemini to bring the most helpful, useful, and fun [features] to desktop computing at mass market price points,” he says.
Based on my time with a loaner review unit of the Acer Chromebook Plus 514 that Google sent me, it seems safe to say that most of those features will feel familiar, especially if you’ve been paying attention to Google’s AI efforts as of late. Chromebook Plus devices now have Google’s Gemini-powered Help Me Write system integrated in at the OS level, for instance—meaning anytime you right-click on a text field within a website or web-based app, you’ll see a special prompt offering to write or rewrite and refine text on your behalf. Soon, right-clicking on any web page will also surface an option to summarize its text and ask questions about its contents.
Notably, these same deeds can also be accomplished with Gemini or other similar AI services on any computer, no matter what operating system it’s running. The difference with Chromebook Plus devices is that the options are seamlessly integrated into the software and positioned to feel like native, natural parts of the experience.
“We’re not trying to invent a whole new user journey,” Solomon explains. “We try to keep you in the flow of the application you’re using versus taking you off to a different experience”—meaning, in other words, the AI features are right there and ready exactly when you need them. And you don’t have to rely on an awkwardly detached side panel or think to open up a totally separate program to find them.
Along those same lines, Chromebook Plus devices will also now support Google’s excellent Magic Editor feature within their version of the Google Photos app. The Pixel-born AI wallpaper generator has a new home within the ChromeOS wallpaper tool. And Gemini itself comes pinned to the Chromebook Plus shelf—Google’s term for the taskbar-like area at the bottom of the ChromeOS desktop—for easy ongoing access.
That last piece of the puzzle feels like more of a tacked-on afterthought than a carefully integrated OS-level element. The Chromebook Plus Gemini app is essentially just a packaged version of the regular Gemini website. If I open gemini.google.com on any computer and then use my browser’s option to create a desktop shortcut to the site, the end result is exactly the same, for all intents and purposes. (I did exactly that on a Windows PC to confirm—and from my perspective, at least, I couldn’t tell any difference.)
Beyond that, mirroring a common frustration on Android right now, the venerable Google Assistant is also still present in the ChromeOS environment—in a much more prominent and native-feeling spot, too, despite it being the recipient of very little Google love lately. Assistant appears within the main ChromeOS launcher, accessible via the circular icon at the left of the taskbar or the dedicated keyboard key sporting the same symbol. It can perform all sorts of tasks and provide answers directly within that core system interface, overlapping with Gemini and making for a somewhat awkward juxtaposition.
It’s indicative of Google’s current in-between state with the two services, in which Gemini seems poised to replace or somehow merge with Assistant but the two continue to exist clumsily together in the meantime—with Gemini taking the spotlight despite still being incapable of performing all of Assistant’s feats. It doesn’t seem like a great user experience, to say the least, and seems bound to create plenty of confusion until Google cleans things up and figures this out.
And that brings us to the broader point of what role Gemini actually plays within a Chromebook and how much it actually matters.
The value of AI in a Chromebook
Right now, the most broadly useful element of a generative AI system like Gemini is arguably its ability to parse and process large amounts of data and distill that down into a more easily digestible form.
That’s what Gemini’s Help Me Read option offers on the web on Chromebook Plus devices. And beyond that, Google’s higher-level Gemini Advanced tier does the same for lengthy PDFs and documents: You simply drag and drop any such files into a Gemini chat prompt—which, remember, you can access via that pinned Gemini web app on a Chromebook Plus computer—and can then summarize and ask questions about them.
The question in my mind is how often most people are actually going to tap into those possibilities. Are they useful enough to warrant the designation of an “AI computer” and the prominent placarding of the associated features? That’s a question you’ll have to answer for yourself.
But there’s little doubt Google is ready to go all in on the concept. For the moment, at least, the company is including a full year of its Google One AI Premium plan—which gives you access to Gemini Advanced along with 2TB of Google cloud storage—with all new Chromebook Plus purchases. That plan would normally cost $20 a month, so that’s $240 in value in and of itself bundled in with a computer that costs as little as $349.
Gemini Advanced opens the door to more complex AI processing, including the summarization of and interaction with PDFs up to 1,500 pages. And, notably, it relies on Google’s cloud-based processing to make that magic happen—an interesting twist at a time when Microsoft is emphasizing on-device AI for many of its Copilot+ PC processes and Apple is similarly eyeing an on-device-centric strategy.
Solomon says that’s a deliberate decision on Google’s part, both to keep the computers affordable for everyone and to tap into the advantages Google has built up with its cloud computing prowess over the years. It’s a mix, though, with some of the new Chromebook Plus AI systems—such as the Pixel-inspired Recorder transcription service—running locally on the device while others turn to the cloud. And much like with the hodgepodge of different app types a Chromebook is capable of supporting, Solomon hopes we as users never so much as think about the underlying technology and what’s happening under the hood.
“We don’t really think the consumer should know or care if this model is running on device or in the cloud,” he says. “We’re not doing some fancy upsell of [neural processing unit chips] and things I’m not sure people need to understand. We bring the scale of Google Cloud and just bring on-device [processing] where you need it.”
That distinction, according to Solomon, boils down to a task-by-task assessment. When something is more sensitive to latency or needs to be capable of running offline, an on-device processing model makes sense. When something is more complex and resource-intensive, Google’s cloud-based servers tend to be the more efficient and effective choice (though, to be clear, Solomon says user-submitted data is never shared or used for training of AI models in either arrangement).
“The reason we can do this at such an affordable price is the scale of [those] Google Cloud capabilities,” he says. “We’ve got this incredible infrastructure that we’ve built up over the last decade-plus, and that allows us to innovate super-fast in the cloud and then bring that [to Chromebooks] through Gemini Advanced.”
At the same time, as we’ve seen endless examples of lately, generative-AI systems like Gemini just aren’t all that reliable as general answer and information providers. The large-language model systems that power them don’t truly understand context, and so they have a habit of “hallucinating”—a nice way of saying they make stuff up and feed you inaccurate info with an astounding amount of conviction.
And we’re not talking teensy details, either. We’re talking Gemini pulling sentences from the The Onion and presenting them as fact—or snagging conspiracy-minded rants from Reddit and using them to formulate factual-seeming, authoritatively stated answers.
As both an assistant and a search system, Gemini feels almost embarrassingly bad and not ready for prime time in that regard—which is a serious problem when Google seems so determined to have it take on those roles immediately. And it’s not entirely a matter of source material selection, either: I’ve even run into accuracy issues when using Google’s Gemini-powered NotebookLM service, which relies exclusively on your own supplied documents to serve up answers.
But that’s a broader issue with the state of AI technology today—whether we’re talking Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, or any other player—and the way these very specifically tailored tools are being positioned as the end-all answers for every imaginable tech purpose.
Ultimately, only you can decide how much any of it matters to you and how much value the associated features hold. For Google, AI clearly represents a massive new opportunity to explore new areas and inspire new purchases. For the rest of us, I suspect it’ll remain more of a curiosity, a novelty, and an occasionally useful tool for specific limited purposes—for the time being, at least.
Even if you set all of that aside, though, there are lots of reasons to love the Chromebook Plus experience—and that was true even before this latest pivot. The various AI elements and Gemini Advanced subscription only add extra potential into an already impressive equation, and they’re easy enough to ignore if you simply aren’t interested. I eagerly recommended Chromebook Plus computers prior to this AI-adding pivot, and while the new AI elements may not dramatically change the way most people use these devices, they could be helpful every so often. And whether you end up using them or glancing at them once and then promptly forgetting them, they certainly don’t take away from the many other assets ChromeOS has to offer.
So to return to the question at the start of this story, what exactly is a Chromebook? The answer, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. But if an “AI computer” is what you’re after, a Chromebook can now take on that role that in addition to being all of those other things—for whatever that is or isn’t worth in your mind. And even if the AI elements don’t appeal to you, all the same assets these systems offered before still add up to create a compelling all-around package for the right kind of person.
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