Four months after announcing it at The Android Show, Google has opened pre-orders for Googlebook — its new laptop category built around Gemini Intelligence. Pre-orders are live today at the Google Store and Best Buy. Devices ship October 4 in the US, October 5 in Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia.
With Googlebook, Google is going at a OEM-led strategy. Five manufacturers are in the first wave: Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo. Prices start at $899 and go up to $1,299 depending on the configuration you plan to choose.
In case you missed the original May announcement, Googlebook isn’t just a refreshed Chromebook. It is a new platform built on a desktop-optimised version of Android — codenamed Aluminium OS during development — that runs a concurrent Linux environment alongside it. ChromeOS’s security architecture sits underneath everything.
That gives you a pretty practical, daily-user output — a laptop that runs native Android apps, has full Linux terminal access out of the box without developer workarounds, and is built from the ground up to have Gemini embedded at the OS level rather than bolted on as an app.
Chromebooks are not being discontinued. Existing devices keep their update commitments. But Googlebook is clearly where Google’s laptop ambitions now live.
In terms of hardware, all initial Googlebooks ship with a minimum of 16GB RAM, up to 1TB SSD storage, and chips from either Intel’s Panther Lake lineup or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite. All models, despite configuration, feature backlit keyboards, haptic glass trackpads, and a Glowbar lighting strip on the lid that lights up in Google colours and responds to Gemini interactions.
The entry point is the Acer Googlebook 14 at $899 — a 2-in-1 convertible with a 14-inch 2.8K OLED touchscreen, an Intel Core Ultra processor with a 50 TOPS NPU, and up to 16 hours of battery. At the other end, Dell’s XPS Googlebook starts at $1,199 with a Snapdragon X Elite chip, 2.5K display, and 512GB storage — the most direct MacBook competitor in the lineup visually and in price.
While the Googlebook is a genuine upgrade to Chromebooks in every sense, Google is betting on Gemini to finally have meaningful success in the ever-elusive laptop category. Magic Pointer lets you wiggle your cursor over anything on screen to invoke Gemini — summarise a document, translate text, schedule a meeting — without leaving what you’re working on. Rambler handles voice dictation and structures spoken notes into readable text. Create My Widget builds custom desktop widgets from plain language descriptions. Gemini Spark runs in the background after you close the lid, finishing tasks without the laptop needing to be open.
Phone integration is deeper than anything ChromeOS offered. Signing into a Googlebook automatically transfers your Android phone’s settings, passwords, Wi-Fi networks, and messages. Cast My Apps lets you stream and interact with phone apps in a desktop window without installing them on the laptop.
Googlebook’s $899 starting price puts it squarely against the MacBook Air and Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PC lineup — neither of which is a weak competitor. Google is asking buyers to pay a premium over what Chromebooks cost, on the strength of Gemini features and Android continuity.
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