In the near future at least. Google revealed the same at the ongoing Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, stating that it had no plans to launch a third iteration of the Pixel laptop anytime soon. Chrome OS will continue but the company is throwing the gauntlet after just two iterations of the Pixel laptop.
The fact was revealed by Google’s senior vice president for hardware Rick Osterloh in a meeting with members of the press. As per TechCrunch, Google has no plans to release further iterations of Pixel at present. Bear in mind though, that it is the Chromebook we are talking about, not smartphone Google launched recently.
In case this sounds confusing to you, here is a brief bit of background: In Google’s context, we know Pixel as the company’s top-of-the line smartphone launched late last year. However, the first time Google used the Pixel brand, it was to market its premium Chromebook. The reason why not many people know about that particular Chromebook is because they were limited and came with a $1,299 price tag in 2013. You could — and still can — pick up a MacBook Pro from Apple at that price point.
However, the devices were undoubtedly premium and indeed, you won’t find any on sale were you to go into retail stores today. Despite the heavy price tag, Google managed to sell of all the Pixel laptops it ever manufactured — although it did not really assemble them on a very large scale. They were more a manifestation of what the company wanted Chromebooks to be rather than a product expected to bring in a lot of revenues.
Google has been known to follow two distinct strategies in pushing out devices — whether smartphones, or laptops. In the first, it partners up with an OEM and lets them manufacture the hardware. It does participate in the design process of course, but for the most part, design, manufacturing and after sale service is left to the third party. In the second strategy, Google takes a greater, more active role in the hardware manufacturing process as well. The company is known to prefer the first method more than the second as it allows it to focus on the OS without needing to gets its hand dirty with manufacturing hardware.
The company has pushed out a range of Chromebooks running the Chrome OS and smartphones running the Android OS, using the first strategy and partnering with OEMs. In the future as well, Google is not planning to lay off selling Chromebooks or shut down the Chrome OS. And yes, just like it used the Pixel brand name to launch a smartphone, it could continue launching other devices with the same branding as well — Indeed, it already sells the Pixel C tablet along with the Pixel smartphones.
However, the company does not have any plans to come up with a Pixel laptop anytime soon.
