Pixelbook 2 dreams and custom Google silicon

This week on The Chrome Cast, our conversation is a tad more focused than usual, and the central focus is Google hardware. No, we aren’t talking about the upcoming Pixel 4a, 4a 5G or 5. Instead, we're focusing on why the current crop of Pixel phones is such a mess and why we don’t think there’s any Google-made flagship Chromebooks on the horizon.

With a move to make and utilize their own custom processors likely happening, Google’s shifts could be occurring just under the surface and we’d likely not see the fruits of that labor until sometime in 2021 at best. While we don’t know exactly how all this will look, it is fun to put the pieces together and speculate a bit about what Google may have up their sleeves from a hardware perspective in both the Android and Chrome OS spaces.

NOTABLE LINKS:

• The Apple Master Plan (Mr. Who’s The Boss video)
• Why it’s time for Google to make their own processors for Pixel, Android and Chrome OS
• The Pixel 4a officially arrives on the Google Store (sort of)
• Why we wish Google would give us the Pixelbook 2 and why we think they might not
• Google’s brilliant new Slack competitor is based in Gmail, right on time, and looks amazing

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