alt Hacker NewsSo, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for? They are marketing what is ostensibly a computer for people who seem to not want to use a computer in scenarios that I don't think even exist.
Beyond that, this is a laptop that is running a really shitty, 'apps only, no you cannot do anything useful with this' operating system. I have an awful lot of complaints about MacOS's relatively restrictive use cases, but it's still at least a General Purpose OS. Android on laptop is very much not.
This is an overgrown phone with all the trash that comes with a phone, and the very finite use cases that come with a phone, only now it has a keyboard. It's solving none of the problems with Android as an operating system and doesn't seem to even be interested in doing that anyway. The marketing is demoing use cases that don't even exist.
So I repeat my question: Who is this for?
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Without pricing information, it’s hard to the question "who is this for?".
Below $500? Same as the cheap Chromebooks market.
Around $700? (Or $600 educational) Direct competitor to Macbook Neo, educational market and the middle of the road laptop market.
Above $900? No idea, maybe for Google Platform die-hards.
> So, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for?
The primary difference between a Chromebook and a Googlebook appears to be the ability to run LLM's locally.
The requirements were spelt out at Google I/O. They boil down to a 40 TOPS NPU and a minimum of 16GB of memory. They appear to be trying to match Apple's M series memory bandwidth using software compression. ChromeOS didn't need an NPU and specified a minimum of 4GB of memory. Aluminium OS looks to have the same relationship with its LLM as a Chromebook did with Google Chrome, and needs the hardware to power it.
If they pull it off you will get GPT-4 performance, running locally.
As for who this is for: your guess is as good as mine. But if their replacement for crostini works (crostini is so hopelessly unreliable it felt like it never got out of beta, so it's a big if), even the minimum specs would be a very good Linux laptop.
GrapheneOS users that need to access their banks but their bank's websites treat users on browsers as second class users by requiring phone in 2fa. Chase.com is an example of this. Android app on Chrome device? No issue.
> Beyond that, this is a laptop that is running a really shitty, 'apps only, no you cannot do anything useful with this' operating system. I have an awful lot of complaints about MacOS's relatively restrictive use cases, but it's still at least a General Purpose OS. Android on laptop is very much not.
Android 16+ offers a built-in integrated Linux VM that can be enabled from Developer Mode, and if this[0] third-party site is accurate, "Android on laptop" will have it enabled by default.
So it should not be too different from working on a Windows laptop with WSL2, or on an OSTree distro where you use distroboxes to work with non-sandboxed programs.
(fwiw, I would still refuse to have one of these for personal use because Google is a shameless data robber. Unless someone were to de-google Aluminium like LineageOS and GrapheneOS did for Android, but that would probably take years.)
No idea. The people that have no need to run real software and want a high end device probably have an iPad with a keyboard case. Those that want a low end device have a chromebook.
This thing will be killed early 2028...
> So, I'm only slightly trying to be a smartass here, but... Who is this for?
You're not the only one asking this. I'm right there with you.
I mean you basically just described a chromebook, though I believe one of the selling points of chromebook is that it's dirt cheap.
Wait, there are people there who use computers for more than creating family albums? Gosh, I lived in ignorance all this time.
every large corporation is going to come out with a hardware device in the next 12 months where you don't directly use applications, where the AI acts as an intermediary
openai, anthropic, meta, google, all of them
even you will want one of these devices, probably (not saying this is a positive development in the world)
> MacOS's relatively restrictive use cases
I’m very curious what you mean by this.