Google recently made a splash with its announcement of google books platform. Bringing together elements of Chrome OS and Android, along with plenty of AI features, it’s the company’s latest attempt to win over laptop users after Chromebooks gained ground in the entry-level education market.
Those AI features, all lumped together under the fancy new “Magic Pointer,” seem to be the main selling point that Google wants you to pay attention to, but this is, in my opinion, a misguided effort. It’s especially unfortunate because Google has done some things right with its existing platform, Chrome OS, but instead of addressing its biggest problems, the company is investing in a feature that no one clearly wants.
Users don’t want AI
At least not like this
The goal of this article is not to discuss the merits of generative AI as a whole. There are many different tools that vary in usefulness, but let’s leave that aside. The real problem with Magic Pointer is that it’s simply not the kind of AI feature people want, and it’s certainly not the kind of tool that sells people on laptops.
Whenever you read about AI tools and capabilities, including here on XDA, when are the features built into an operating system that are interesting? How many articles cover those features beyond the initial announcement or launch? All of the interesting use cases for AI lie in applications that users must download and require some configuration to unlock significant capabilities. You can combine certain tools with your notes to create study material, or use Claude to help you identify songs and easily find them on Spotify, and much more. But none of that has to do with the features built into any operating system.
It’s not for lack of trying; Microsoft has been pushing Copilot in Windows 11 for years, and as of 2024, the company even introduced Copilot+, which uses on-device AI to provide features that integrate with various aspects of Windows. In fact, one of the main of these features was Click To Do, a capability that has been available for over a year at this point and is remarkably similar to Magic Pointer. You hold down the Windows key and can right-click on anything to have your computer analyze the screen and give you options for what to do with the things you’re seeing. With Magic Pointer, you shake the cursor instead, but it’s almost exactly the same idea.
When was the last time you saw anyone interested in Copilot+ laptops? Has that capability, or others like Recall, been a factor in your decision to buy a laptop? Even Dell, manufacturer of said laptops, admitted earlier this year that consumers simply do not buy laptops with these features.
You could consider this another classic Microsoft mistake, but in reality things are not much better in the Apple camp. The company has talked about Apple Intelligence here and there at WWDC and other events, but beyond those dedicated sections in their respective presentations, you probably haven’t heard of anyone actively using any of these features. Frankly, it’s almost confusing that Google would decide to make this a major focus for a new laptop platform in 2026.
Chromebooks have more serious gaps
PC users want PC apps
If Google wants to make its PC platform more viable, the company needs to understand that the most important factor in making users resist is applications. Chrome OS has always been based on glorified web apps and it’s true that you can do a lot with just the browser. Nowadays, most PC users spend most of their time in the browser. Until they don’t, and that’s where the problems begin.
Over the years, Google has improved things a bit. Support for Android apps added many more capabilities to Chromebooks, and the Linux developer subsystem allows users to install and run Linux apps, although it requires some work that most people aren’t willing to do.
But without these apps, Chromebooks and Googlebooks will still be limited to the same things you can do on your phone, and that’s a big problem. There are very powerful apps on Android for many things, but Photoshop and Lightroom for Android are not PC versions. They don’t have the same capabilities or the familiarity of having the tools that you have always used. If you’re interested in live streaming on YouTube, there’s no OBS for Chromebooks, no DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing. There are tools that are alternatives to them, but they are not the tools that people know or want.
For the Googlebook to be a viable laptop, it needs to run PC applications, and that means adopting Linux. Running Linux apps on Chrome OS (or Aluminum OS) should have been a no-brainer, and shouldn’t be a “developer” setup or anything like that. This is he way to get desktop apps on these devices, and Google needs to make it as seamless as possible. In fact, Google should also contribute to or learn from Wine to make Windows apps even more usable on Googlebook.
Not only that, but Google has a virtually infinite amount of resources to invest in this if it so chooses. Creating a more seamless experience with an app store and even helping companies port apps to Linux should be the most obvious step. If anyone can push companies like Adobe, Canva, and others to create tools for their platform, it’s Google. It probably still wouldn’t work all a Windows PC can do it, but it would be much closer to the workflow that PC users are used to.
Valve discovered this
It requires effort, but it is doable.
To put it more broadly, the problem Google’s PC efforts have had so far is that they expect customers to be attracted to the differences in Chrome OS. The lightweight approach to affordable devices certainly has its appeal, but it clearly hasn’t worked when it comes to making truly desirable laptops either. For that to happen, the company has to reach customers where they are, and PC users want PC features.
That’s a lesson that can easily be learned from Valve. In 2015, Valve introduced the Steam Machine line with several gaming PCs from different companies, all running Linux. Of course, the number of games that actually supported Linux was abysmal, so in many cases these were seen as glorified streaming boxes for your main PC, and that initiative failed miserably.
But when the company returned with the Steam Deck in 2022, it went all out to make it an attractive offering for PC gamers. SteamOS now had a UI designed perfectly for the intended form factor, but more importantly, it could run most Windows games. This was because Valve spent years working on Proton, taking work from the Wine project and building on it to ensure that even if a game is not made for Linux, it can run there and sometimes even better than on Windows 11. And it’s still not perfect, but the Steam Deck has become and remains one of the most sought after gaming laptops.
Valve first launched Proton in 2018, and at the time, the company had very little financial incentive to do so. After all, the original Steam Machine line had just been discontinued and no one was expecting more efforts from the company anytime soon. But Valve played the long game and continued to invest in what it knew could be the key to the future of its business, even if it didn’t pay off immediately. And when the Steam Deck launched four years later, that made all the difference.
Google needs that kind of long-term vision and investment, but it seems highly unlikely that this will happen. This is about massive short-term investments in AI and hoping that it eventually starts to be a profitable company, even when others have proven it to be a bad idea.
AI will kill Google’s book
Ultimately, Google’s focus on integrating Magic Pointer and Gemini into the Googlebook platform is very likely to be its downfall. Microsoft and Apple’s efforts have shown that users don’t care about these low-level efforts to integrate AI into an operating system, and wherever there are good uses for AI, they will always need third-party tools to configure it. Google’s focus should be elsewhere.
