As part of its restriction policy, Google has decided cancel the next Pixelbook and disband the team responsible its design and construction. Members of this part of the company have been transferred to other positions within the same organization so we understand they have not been made redundant.

For those lost, the Pixelbook is or was a line of Chromebooks promoted by Google. Introduced in 2013 as the Chromebook Pixel, it was initially aimed at the high-end, but over the years, models with configurations at more affordable prices have appeared.

Pixelbooks have come to play a similar role to Android Pixel smartphones, a way to signal to other manufacturers how things should be done. However, Rick Osterloh, head of hardware at Google, acknowledged in 2017 after the launch of the first Pixelbook that “the good thing about the category is that it has matured“, which has been interpreted by some to mean that ChromeOS no longer needs such an active role on the part of the corporation.

On the other hand, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (formerly Google’s parent company), said that the company has been reducing the pace of recruitment in recent months and that it will end some projectsso the dissolution of the team responsible for the Pixelbook should not be so surprising, especially considering that Pichai himself stated in a memo last July that the purpose of the policy he was promoting was as follows: “In some cases, this means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes. In other cases, this means pausing development and reallocating resources to higher priority areas.“.

As for the reasons behind the end of the Pixelbook, the high-end focus transformed those teams highly specialized products whose prices tend to be high. Added to this is the fact that ChromeOS, at least for now, is not seen as a production system like Windows, macOS and even “traditional” Linux distributions, so in the end its sales were probably low.

And it can’t be said that Google doesn’t try to add value to its Chromebooks, if we see that convertible models and a digital pen, the Pixelbook Pen, came to the market, but if the search engine giant decided to disband the team responsible, one thinks that the results at the sales level were not satisfactory, which cannot be known for certain due to the lack of public figures in this regard.

We can’t leave the Pixel Slate in the ink tank, and removable with ChromeOS launched in 2018 to compete with Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Surface. At the time, Google was already showing signs of not knowing where to direct its PCs as it struggled to keep up with whatever trend seemed to be the next big thing in consumer computing.

Good things for Chromebooks may have started in 2019 when companies mainstream such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, Lenovo and HP have begun to bet very seriously on ChromeOS. This means that Chromebooks led the PC revival in the first quarter of 2021, increasing sales by 275%. This huge increase in sales sparked Valve’s interest in bringing Steam to ChromeOS via a port of the client available for Linux.

In short, everything seems to indicate that Google has stopped production of Pixelbooks and other proprietary lines with ChromeOS, at least for the time being. The future isn’t written, but when we see the system starting to take off through OEMs, it’s logical to think that the search engine giant will continue to bet on them to expand the user base of its desktop-focused operating system.