Googlebook deserves some patience: why early launch quirks don’t define its future

If you’ve been following our Googlebook coverage lately, you know that I’ve been grappling with two competing realities around the current, nascent state of Googlebook. Earlier this week, I expressed my frank frustrations with the desktop maturity that Googlebook had left behind ChromeOS, only to return to a traditional Chromebook the next day and realize how much I immediately missed using a Googlebook.

Stepping back and looking at the broader reaction on YouTube, Reddit, and tech blogs, however, I can’t help but think that the more tech-savvy crowd is being harder on these machines than they need to be. Yes, asking people to be patient when spending $899 to $1,299 of their hard-earned money is a tough sell, and it’s a sad reality of modern technology that almost no launch is completely finished anymore.

Yet when you look at the commodity hardware installed on our studio desktops and compare this launch to some of the biggest platform transitions in recent memory, these early missing features are far from a deal breaker. If history is to be believed, Googlebook has a very bright future ahead of it.

Even the best platform transitions started with broken workflows

In the tech world, we tend to romanticize successful product launches after the dust has settled and forget how bumpy the first few months were. Every time a company rips off the bandage to build a new architecture from scratch, version 1.0 always comes with collateral damage.

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Take Apple’s jump to M1 ARM chips for macOS in 2020. Everyone remembers the battery life and speed of those early Apple Silicon MacBooks, but it was far from smooth at first. When we switched our studio video workflow to M1, almost all of our custom graphics packs and plugins in Final Cut Pro were completely destroyed during the transition. We just accepted it, Apple just adopted it, the developers finally updated their tools and everything that was broken at launch was cleaned up and working. – over a period of time, though.

We saw the exact same story play out with Google’s own hardware and software milestones. When the CR-48 and the first commercial Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer were released in 2011, critics mocked them relentlessly as glorified web browsers that turned into paperweights the second you lost Wi-Fi.

Even the original Google Pixel phone from 2016 arrived with massive bezels, zero water resistance, glaring camera lens flare issues, Bluetooth dropouts, and restrictive Verizon exclusivity. Today, ChromeOS is a powerhouse in education and enterprise, and my Pixel 11 Pro XL sits right next to my Galaxy Z Fold 8 as one of the most polished phones you can get your hands on. Over time, things become much more refined.

Quality hardware is easy to maintain when software patches are already on the move

The reason the first Chromebooks took years to shed their bad reputation was that the initial hardware was truly rudimentary: dim screens, cheap trackpads, and slow processors can’t be fixed with an over-the-air patch. With Googlebook, Google has completely reversed this equation.

Across all five launch devices, the physical hardware is phenomenal right out of the box. You get additions like 120Hz OLED displays, touch-sensitive glass haptic trackpads, punchy upward-firing speakers, instant biometrics, and effortless phone synergy via Better Together features.

Better yet, the software flaws that reviewers are currently piling on are relatively simple fixes that Google is already fixing in real time. After power users complained about the browser’s lack of profile switching, Google’s engineering team quickly confirmed that full support for multiple profiles in Chrome was actively in the works. When early adopters noticed washed-out dark grays on OLED panels when playing a movie, Google’s Mishaal Rahman weighed in on the r/Googlebook community to confirm that the root cause was identified and a software fix was in progress.

The remaining problems on my list are just as fixable over the air. Upgrading Virtual Desks’ overly basic setup, adding trackpad swipe gestures, and fixing a collapsible folder tree in the Files app can all be delivered cleanly via standard system updates. Even missing day one items like device tracking have clear explanations, as Google confirmed that Find Hub was temporarily suspended simply to smooth out battery drain in sleep state before flipping the switch back on.

None of this means we should stop putting our feet to the fire with Google to deliver these updates quickly. When you buy a $1,000 laptop, you deserve the fundamentals of a desktop, and we’ll keep pushing until every one of these quality-of-life features from ChromeOS comes to Googlebook OS.

At the same time, canceling the entire Googlebook platform because of a handful of software omissions in the first version 1.0 is missing the forest for the trees. Much like Apple’s move to M1 silicon, Google has built a fast, modern foundation with an incredibly high ceiling, and six months from now I have a feeling we’ll look back on these launch month hiccups as a minor speed bump on the path to something pretty special.