By 2007, the internet wasn't the future anymore. It was just life. And Google developed this big idea that maybe instead of Google being a search engine and Chrome being a browser, that Google could take over your entire computing life. And maybe we'd even get to the point where your computer didn't matter at all. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce and today on the show we're talking about the early days of Chrome OS and the very first Chromebook.
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All right, we're back. Let's talk laptops. Joining me in the studio, The Verge's Nilay Patel. Hello, sir. You are, I would say, as longstanding a Chromebook person as anyone I know. You have believed in Chromebooks a very long time.
I have longer than Google, I believe.
Certainly more consistently than Google. [laughter] Have you owned Chromebooks over the years?
No, I give them to my parents.
Smart. They're the ultimate parent computer for a variety of reasons that we can get to. I love it. Also joining us from the Waveform Studio and thus we are rivals today, Marques Brownlee. Welcome to the show, buddy. Good to have you here.
Yeah, you have, I believe, the subject of our show sitting in front of you. Usually remote guests don't get to play with the thing we get to play with. You do this time.
I do have one and I heard we were talking about it so I had to go dig it up. I didn't have to go digging very far cuz I've just got this thing around me all the time.
[laughter] You just carry it in the backpack just in case.
Yeah. You know, this is the greatest blank matte black laptop ever made. It's the CR-48.
Oh, I just realized how on brand this is for you. You just have to have it around, right? Unbranded matte. That's perfect. Yeah, it's great. You take it to briefings with other companies. [laughter] You're like, "This is what I'm looking for. Another one, please."
Yeah, truly. So yeah, that is the CR-48. The very first Chromebook. It's not even technically a Chromebook. We will get into that. The CR-48 predates the word Chromebook, which is very fun. But so to go all the way back, I want to go back extra far in particular for you, Nilay, because we spend a lot of time making fun of Google for being just a mess of a company. And this is a perfect version of the mess that is Google. So there's one version of the origin story of Chrome OS, which predates even the Chromebook. We're going to get to the launch of the actual hardware, but if you go back a ways, there's this guy Jeff Nelson, who's an engineer at Google, who basically decides to create an operating system called Google OS. It was just a chopped down version of Linux. And he eventually files for and gets a patent for what's called a network-based operating system across devices. It wasn't based on Chrome because Chrome didn't exist. It was based on Firefox. But the idea was basically like, how do I build a very fast operating system? He builds a very fast operating system, tests it for a while, that's very cool. He would tell you he invented Chrome OS and that there are some steps in between and that became Chrome OS. There are a bunch of other people who helped create Chrome OS who would tell you that is not the story. [laughter]
It's Google in a nutshell. Like you can pick any year of Google's history and be like there was a guy who created a cut down version of Linux and called it Google OS. And that would be true every year of Google's existence. We were just at Google I/O and the big demo of Gemini was it can code an operating system now because that is in Google's DNA. They can't get enough of it.
Yeah, Marques, this is just what this company has done for as long as any of us have been paying attention, right?
Yeah. I'm sure there's four or five versions of this story, but none of these people have spoken to each other. So, this is [laughter] just the one that made it to the top.
Yeah. So, this is the thing, and this is actually the thing I love about it is actually, especially given Google's culture, it is perfectly plausible that all of these stories are true. That there was a guy who built this thing and then there were a bunch of other people who basically simultaneously built the same thing and they had no idea about each other.
This was 2006, 2007-ish when these products first started. And the thing I think is if you look at that time I think that the thing that is sort of obvious in retrospect was that this was an idea whose time had come. Right? This is kind of a thing we talk about on the show like was this a sort of singular genius moment or was a bunch of stuff all running at each other and anyone paying attention saw them crashing into each other. And so I think in this case you look at the internet is very mature and very modern and very mainstream and also is becoming a relatively successful app platform. Right? Like Web 2.0 is in full swing and the idea that you're going to be able to run full apps on your web browser is very much alive. Also, Windows and Mac OS are heavy and messy and complicated and Windows in particular is problematic in lots of ways at this point. For Google, but also for anyone who had to use Windows [laughter] like it's just not a great user experience at this time. So, you can sort of see how you'd look at it and say, well, we believe in the internet. We don't believe in Windows. We think apps can run this way and sort of land in the sweet spot, right? Like this doesn't, Marques, strike me as like a massive sort of meteor from the sky at this moment in time.
I mean, this kind of feels in line with some of Google's other let us do the compute for you ventures where I guess, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the thesis is okay, you don't need a ton of local computing power. We're gonna let Google do a lot of the most intensive things to make the browser and the stuff happen faster and then it just shows up on your end eventually. The same thing they did with Stadia, the same thing they did with a lot of other things that sound like that.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Google's whole theory of the case at this point is devices don't matter, computers don't matter, the cloud is everything to everyone.
Yeah. [laughter] Basically, what if we shipped you an underpowered Linux? Is that something you're interested in?
I would just put this in slightly different context. And the reason I said Windows was a problem for Google is that no one ever thinks of it this way, but the web is Google's app platform. And it is in fact the most dominant app platform of all time. Every new desktop app ships as a web client and then if it shows up on the Mac or Windows, it's usually wrapped in Electron. Right. And our friend John Gruber gets very upset about that and our group gets real mad about it. But that was a huge threat to Microsoft and they knew it. And the idea that you would install Chrome on a Windows PC and get all of your apps through Chrome broke a lot of their model. The idea that you would need a more powerful Windows PC on a cadence broke a lot of Microsoft's model and the way they license Windows. The idea that Google eventually would give all this stuff away for free to run on Intel computers really, really broke Microsoft's model. So Microsoft had every incentive to crush web browsing on Windows and they tried to do it with Netscape and using Internet Explorer. They definitely were headed that way with Chrome. So I think Google just saw, oh, we need a hedge against Microsoft's desktop operating system monopoly and we can maybe do our own with Linux because you don't need an operating system really anymore. You just need a web browser because that's where the apps already live.
Totally. Did any of that work out in the end? I don't know. But like that moment in time was so much about the web browser becoming an operating system that ran on the operating system you already had and no one knew if it was going to work, right? And I think if you're Google, you're like, "Okay, we've built Chrome. It's very fast. It is essentially hamstrung both in performance and capability by this layer of software underneath it that maybe we don't need anyway."
So Google is just like let's cut the middleman and just give you the thing that you want which is the internet, right? Like that is, Marques, you're exactly right, that is the thesis here is that you don't need anything. The phrase they kept using was nothing but the web, like over and over and over. That's the tagline for Chrome OS and even Chromebooks. But just to continue on this, like Google saw this coming. Here's a line from a story Eric Schmidt wrote in 2006. He wrote this for The Economist. He says, "In 2007, we'll witness the increasing dominance of open internet standards. As web access via mobile phone grows, these standards will sweep aside the proprietary protocols promoted by individual companies striving for technical monopoly. Today's desktop software will be overtaken by internet-based services that enable users to choose the document formats, search tools, and editing capability that best suit their needs." There's the thesis right there. Right? Like that is before all of this ships. But that is the big idea of Google is we are not going to be a page in a web browser. That is going to move down and be your device and all of that turns into Chrome OS.
It's so interesting cuz a lot of this, like a lot of the Google things do, the pitch evolves over time. When I think of a Chromebook today I think of, oh, you don't really need a lot of the other stuff that would come from having an operating system and so you're able to pay for less computer, cheaper computer, less powerful computer and still get everything you want because you're just going to use a browser anyway. But it sounds like that wasn't at least explicitly part of the original pitch that you could get a cheaper thing or maybe it was implied.
It becomes one very quickly. And I actually think one of my big questions for the two of you is was Google totally wrong to pitch all of this as cheap? Was the fundamental original sin of Chrome OS that they couldn't stop talking about how cheap it was?
I've been told I'm not allowed to discuss the Chromebook Pixel on this podcast. I'm ready [laughter] to do it right now for hours.
As you will see, I want to build to that because as you will see, the whole sales pitch, like you said, Marques, by the time this thing starts to come out is about how unimportant the device itself actually is. So, let's fast forward here. So, in 2009, Google sort of reveals the idea that they're working on this thing called Chrome OS. They don't share a ton about it. They put it out as part of the Chromium project. But it just kind of, in Google's way, they're just like, "Ah, we did a thing. Here you go." But then in 2010, they do a real sort of proper honest-to-god launch. They explain what Chrome OS is. They talk through the Chrome Web Store. It's a very sort of like Apple-style announcement. He gets up, he does the thing. Dave Limp, who was at the time running all the Kindle stuff at Amazon, comes out and demonstrates Kindle for web, which is a product no one has used then or since. [laughter] It's just so... but all this comes and then I just want to play you a clip from this. I want you to notice two things. One, Sundar Pichai, now the CEO of Google, is an absolute baby in this. And two, he explains the setup process of what Chrome OS and a Chromebook is supposed to be.
This is when Sundar is running Chrome.
Let's switch now to a Chrome notebook. And this is what users will see when they first open the lid. You can basically... you open the box, this is what you see, to choose your internet connectivity obviously. So you can do that. The next step is for you to read and accept terms and conditions. So once you do that we check for updates. In this case we are in the latest version and then you need to log into your machine. You can continue without logging in if you want. The next step is for you to take a picture. It turns out such as this is... one of the product... users don't like their pictures being taken. So we need to improve this step but Ken clearly is not one of them. So let's go ahead and take a picture, Ken. So we'll click okay and what you will see is we are now going to launch you into the Chrome notebook. Four steps and you're inside in a brand new Chrome notebook [laughter] with your applications, your bookmarks...
I just want to pause on that bit very briefly first because I want you to notice there are things like an app called Poppit, which EA made that was going to be a big huge exciting web app. There's a Sports Illustrated Snapshot app which I have absolutely no idea what that is.
I think we all know what that is. [laughter]
There's an NPR app. There's a New York Times app. Google Reader, RIP.
Are these apps or links to websites?
Yes. [laughter] Correct, Marques. I could not have said that better. But anyway, so he runs through this whole thing and let me just play at the very end of this clip.
Your bookmarks, your themes, your extensions. Zero to done in less than 60 seconds on a brand new machine.
So that in a nutshell, the whole pitch for Chrome OS, right? Super fast setup, super simple product. You didn't have to figure out how to use it. Did you catch the thing where he said 50% of users didn't like having the camera automatically appear? That made me laugh. It's a real like jump scare when all of a sudden the webcam turns on and there's your own face. I really got a kick out of that. But this is the vision. It is part app store, part web browser, part computer. And I think from the beginning they're just like, it's very fast. And that's kind of all they have to say about it, which I find very strange.
I actually do hear a little tiny bit of maybe the budget pitch in there too because he used a certain word which I don't know if you caught that but he said netbook and I remember explicitly when he said that a whole bunch of memories came flying past me and I remember like around that time this new thin and light category, people trying to make, you know, super portable, super thin, like a sub-laptop category of what they were calling netbooks where it was like, oh, you really only have to do a few things like go on the internet, emails, word processing, whatever, netbooks are perfect for. If you want less computer, here's a cheaper thing. And then Sundar goes on stage and he said the word netbook and I think that kind of implies like this is directly competing with those, but it's Google's version and you really just need Chrome.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And one of the things that jumped out to me from this launch event is it is very much the CR-48, the device comes at the end. There's a whole big explanation of Chrome OS, but they really thought the Chrome Web Store was going to be huge. He talks about at one point how there are at that point 120 million Chrome users which he said made it bigger than any other app store platform at the time which is like not exactly apples to apples but okay, Sundar. They talk about the security, the app model, they had a bunch of interesting UI ideas in Chrome OS about how apps might work, like they really thought this was going to be an app platform and I think even then were deeply confused about what that was supposed to look like inside of a Chromebook and inside of a web browser.
Okay, two things. One, I think Marques is totally right about the netbook thing. Yes, we built this house on the failed netbook experiment. [laughter] Shout out to our friend Joanna Stern who covered every single one of them. I used to have a text expander for writing blog posts and it just typed out the specs of any Asus netbook. I don't remember them because I had a text expander for the specs, but I wrote them so many times.
And that whole product category was going to be Linux.
Mhm. Like the first netbooks ran Linux because they didn't have to pay the licensing fee. So they could make the cheaper computer and then Microsoft was like, no, no, no, no, we are not doing that. We'll license you Windows Starter for a dollar. Sure.
And in the classic Microsoft fashion that version of Windows was ultra limited in like very stupid ways.
Right. So I think Google was like, do you want to run Windows? Do you want to run dumb Windows or do you just want Chrome that's fast? And you can see a world in which that all on its own was a compelling pitch.
Sure, I don't want any of this garbage. I certainly don't want a nerfed version of Windows. I just want fast Chrome.
They talked about speed so much because all these browsers, you know, even Chrome was like a reaction to Firefox, which was a reaction to Internet Explorer, which was a reaction to Netscape. Like there was a period of time when every new browser was just marketed in terms of speed because the old ones had gotten full of cruft. And Chrome was that thing for real.
Carry the weight of Windows at the browser because this is actually a thing you want. Yeah. The second thing, and it's just not everyone was confused about app store models in 2010. That's fair because the iPhone had hit. The iPhone App Store was a phenomenon and then even Apple showed up with the iPad and they're like the future of computing is the iPad App Store.
Which has gone about as well as the Chrome Web Store.
Sure. And for a long time was do you want to run iPhone apps? Very large. [laughter] Has anything changed? That's fair. I don't know, Marques, looking back, Chrome Web Store, reasonable idea in 2010 or kind of lost in the sauce even at that time?
I was one of those optimistic people who was like, maybe I will go all in on Chrome web apps. So, I do kind of remember this was also like Chrome has the bloated reputation now, but this was kind of back in the day where Chrome was the fast one, like people did browser benchmarks and it was like, oh yeah, this is the fastest browser significantly. So, I was like, okay, yeah, this is going to be a really fast computer. I'll just have Chrome and if I want to do extra stuff, I will find the apps, extensions to make this possible to all work on this fast computer so I can get away with spending less. I'm a student. I'm younger at the time. I'd happily spend half the money. And yeah, it did. It actually seemed reasonable from a user perspective. As long as you were optimistic about those apps actually getting made and working. Whether they did actually work and get the things done is another story. I didn't obviously stick with that for very long, but I was optimistic.
Yeah, I think there were good reasons to be, right? Like your computer can be very fast and much simpler and much cheaper. It's just a good pitch and to some extent it does come true over time. Like parts of that turn out to be right. I want to mostly leave Chrome OS behind here, but I do just want to show you one thing I found. I don't know if you guys might have seen this before, but I went back like deep in the Chrome OS YouTube archives and found a UI concept video of how they thought Chrome OS might work with some like genuinely fascinating ideas about how apps might work on this thing. Let me just show this brief clip of it to you.
Chrome OS Concept Video Narrator
18:56 ↗
Other applications can be accessed from the Chrome menu. Some of these will open in application tabs and others will open in small overlays that we call panels.
Of course. Yeah. Little tiny mini apps in the bottom corner.
Chrome OS Concept Video Narrator
19:07 ↗
These allow you to use small applications and chat with friends without leaving the page you are viewing. These panels are collapsible and float above your regular content. If I swap tabs or even create a new window, these panels stay readily accessible, allowing me to look things up while I chat with friends.
Every 5 years or so, Google reinvents widgets.
Yep, [laughter] they can't help themselves.
Chrome OS Concept Video Narrator
19:30 ↗
Basic file handling is also provided in Chrome OS through the panel system. For example, if I want to access a photo on my camera, I can just plug it in and browse to the file I need.
This eventually turned into like a hideously ugly browser tab file manager.
Chrome OS Concept Video Narrator
19:44 ↗
To navigate between open windows, you may use shortcuts and mouse gestures or you can zoom out into overview mode.
Chrome OS Concept Video Narrator
19:52 ↗
Chrome OS also supports the concept of sidebars.
Chrome OS Concept Video Narrator
19:55 ↗
If you don't want your panels to overlap your content, you may easily drag and dock them to either side of the screen.
That's horrible. [laughter] Looks like our notification system is telling me it's time for me to go. We look forward to revealing more about Chrome OS in the coming months. Thanks for watching.
Okay, am I crazy or is that vastly more ambitious than anything that ever shipped in Chrome OS in terms of like making this feel like a desktop operating system?
Yeah, they're doing the thing where they're trying, it looks like they're trying to make it familiar to people who are going to be coming from Windows or thinking about multi-window experiences or dedicated apps, which I think happens in almost every product category. It's like here's a brand new thing. We know you're going to be used to a certain paradigm, so let's give you equivalents, but they're kind of bolted onto the side of the real idea.
Yeah. It's very much like, oh, you wanted your car to have steering wheels. This one has two levers, [laughter] you know, but you're still doing turns. You love turns, right? Like there's an element of that with every one of these new interface paradigms. And just to put this again in the same context we've been talking about, this is the era of radical new operating systems every week.
Like Windows Phone was like it's all text, just showed up out of nowhere. WebOS was like here's some wacky ideas about the web and tabs. You interested in those? Two levers, still turns. And like over and over again, like we would write lengthy blog posts dissecting every UI element of an entirely new operating system at every turn because there were so many at that time. But most of them were pointed at mobile, right?
I think what's unique about this is this was the first time someone had pointed all of that energy at a desktop operating system.
That's true. Which really hadn't happened in quite some time. So at the end of this event they talk through Chrome OS, they talk through the Chrome Web Store and at the very end Sundar says he's been using a notebook with this operating system as his main PC for the last 6 months and he says lots of people in Google have and he says we're now ready to start testing it for real. And then he holds up this thing, the CR-48, this like deeply undesigned, unadorned...
It's so beautifully designed.
Yes. And he says Google is going to start a pilot program, right? Basically, the idea is we need to get real feedback from real users. We can't just ship you Chrome OS to install on your thing because there's some of the stuff in this that requires new hardware and new ideas about how these laptops work, but we're going to give these away. He said they had 60,000 laptops ready to give away to various testers. People could apply. Everyone in the room that day got one, which was like a big exciting Oprah Winfrey, you get a car kind of moment for everybody in that room. But he said that this line has stuck in my head ever since I first heard it. He said, "The hardware exists entirely to test the software." Like immediately just like, "Don't even worry about the laptop. This thing is not important. Whatever." But then in the same breath he also says but there are some things in here we think our partners might want to do that there's like there is a thesis in this device about what a laptop is supposed to be that he didn't really quite want to talk about but was still very much in there. So this thing is the CR-48. They end the event by being like we're going to start shipping this to people soon. We want everybody to test it. We really look forward to your feedback. It all gets very exciting. Marques, did you get one in that first run?
No. I remember this really vividly now. I really wanted one. I couldn't get one. I think there was some sort of application process or whatever. I was trying to get one and then I didn't get one and I was like, "Oh, come on Google. I'd make a video, like please. I wanted to try this [laughter] thing out." I couldn't get it. And then a YouTube friend of mine actually, he did get one and then when he was done with it he sent it to me and that's how I got my hands on a Chromebook.
Is that the one you have there?
And that is the one that I have here.
You never sent it back? That's kind of messed up, man.
Yeah. No, he never asked for it back. He was done with it. So, that was... Yeah, I did. And this was right around when I was starting, like I was starting to make hardware videos, so I don't know that I reviewed it, but I did make videos about it. Yeah, it was tough to actually get my hands on it, but for the people, people really wanted to get their hands on this thing.
Yeah. Especially because it's beautiful.
Yeah, it is. So, if you're listening to this, not watching, and you've never seen a CR-48 before, I want you to picture an all black matte black laptop. No logos on it, none on the back, none on the front. And it has simply the generic things that you need for it to be a laptop. It has a port, it has a charging port, it has one USB port, it has a headphone jack, it has speakers, a trackpad, and then it just has a really simple keyboard. And I think there was maybe one... Yeah, there's a couple like window management like Chrome buttons at the top of the keyboard, but no logos, nothing, no fancy bells or whistles or anything. It was simply a laptop and that was great.
Yeah. It's just, it literally as you describe, you're like laptop, it's a... if you the icon of a laptop if you made it real and then gave it the sickest like material finish, this like matte black rubbery...
All matte and the display was matte. Everything was matte. It was nice.
Yeah, it's great. So, okay, let's take a quick break and then I want to dig into the hardware of this thing because it is deeply fascinating. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Let's talk the hardware on the CR-48. So, this thing again was straight up a prototype. They actually named it CR-48 because it's named after an isotope of chromium that is particularly unstable.
Google's full of a bunch of nerds. It's a great, great code name. I have no notes.
They shipped it to people after saying like in a blog post they were like the pilot program is not for the faint of heart is what it said. Things might not always work just right. They ship it to people with what I think might be the funniest manual of all time. Which is not a thing I ever thought I would say out loud, but I just want to read you a selection from this product manual. It says, "This product contains sensitive components. Do not drop, disassemble, open, crush, bend, bake, deform, puncture, blend. Guess we'll never know if it'll blend, shred, incinerate, paint, bring to the moon, or insert foreign objects into the device. Do not spill liquids, rocks of any size, or food on the device. Do not expose the device to water, moisture, or rap music. This product contains small parts which may present [laughter] a choking hazard to small children as well as men who have not emotionally matured. Keep the device and accessories away from small children regardless of how much they want to bang on the keyboard." It goes on like this for some time, right? Like over and over and then at the very end there's like really fine print of regulatory notices. [laughter] It's like it's perfect. You can just tell immediately that this thing is not a real product. It's fun. It's silly. It's insidery. The very first line on the manual says, "Don't panic."
Sure. Perfect. That's what everything should say.
But so they ship this thing to people and, Nilay, I want you to pick it up and guess how much it weighs. This is just a fun game we're going to play right now.
I'm just going to warn the audience that ours is particularly unstable, so when I pick it up, it's going to turn off.
The CR-48... hold the power button in. Well, we don't have a battery, so...
I'm going to go... True. I'm going to go six with a battery.
No, that's... This is good. This... You're going to be pleasantly surprised. It was 3.8 lbs, which was like heavy, but not absurd for a laptop.
Sure. It ran an Intel Atom N455 chip, which no one would have been all that impressed by even in 2010.
Yeah. Netbook chip, a gig of RAM, I believe.
That's right. Yes. And it was, as you were describing, Marques, it is sort of the minimum viable laptop.
No, please. 16 megabytes. I was going to say, yeah, doesn't need any storage at all.
Yeah. I was trying to remember the netbook that these are the standard netbook specs, basically.
Yeah. But there are a couple of things I want to point out on this device that I think are very interesting. Um, well, Google really didn't want to talk about the storage on it to the point where people couldn't really figure out how much storage there was because Google was like, 'Don't worry, you don't need storage.' Uh, there was one USB port uh that nobody could figure out quite what to do with. Some things you plugged in worked, some things you plugged in didn't. It was just a delightful mystery. Um, it had a headphone jack, which kudos. It had Wi-Fi, and here's a big one. It had a 3G connection. It had built-in Verizon cellular networking.
And one of the deals that they got was that if you got this computer, you got 100 megabytes of data a month free from Verizon. And then they had plans at, you know, all different amounts. You could buy day plans, you could buy monthly plans, whatever. But like they really thought cellular was a key part of this. That that was like one of the big bets, one of the things they hoped other people would adopt is cellular connection inside of your laptop. Boy, I wish I'd had stuck.
Right. Yeah, this is how I feel too. I think basically there are, as far as I can tell, three ideas in this laptop. Like if you go back to Sundar saying we think there are some things our partners should adopt and look at. I think there are three of them. There's the 12.1 in screen which is what this is. The size and aspect ratio I think they really thought was the correct size for a laptop to be. And Nilay, I know you as a 12-inch MacBook stan agree with that.
They were correct about this. Uh, Marques, I feel like all of your laptops are enormous. What do you think about 12-inch laptops?
No, that was fine with me. I'm actually coming back to Earth on... I have like a smaller laptop now, so it sounds about right. Yeah, that's a whole another podcast, though.
This sounds about right. But Google's idea. Again, this thing is supposed to be very light, very portable. They really thought 12 in was the right thing. And then the third thing is the keyboard and trackpad. So, the trackpad on here is not particularly humongous. For 2010, it was humongous. And they really believed in this idea they should have a very good, very large trackpad. And the other thing was they swapped caps lock and they swapped the function keys for just basic controls, windows and brightness and all that stuff, and a search key instead of the caps lock key.
This was like the main Chrome OS interface change for the longest time was we ditched caps lock.
These are some horrible arrow keys just looking at them right now.
They are very bad arrow keys. They're the half size vertical keys and the full size horizontal keys. Bad.
Yeah, but the getting rid of caps lock for the search key. That was the innovation. Like when the local news covered Google made a laptop, they would do the slow pan.
Yes. I'm confident we're going to do it on this show, too. I'm sure.
That's our B-roll. But the slow pan over the magnifying glass key. Google's made a laptop. And you would... you know what I'm talking about.
Oh, absolutely. Marques, what do you think of these ideas? Cellular, 12 in, simpler keyboard and trackpad.
Okay, so 12-inch laptop, I think loved that. I was testing a lot of other netbooks at the time that were floating in that 11 to 13-inch laptop range and this was perfect for that. I think that I have no notes on that. The cellular I also wish had stuck more. So what ended up happening is we ended up just tethering it to our smartphones way more and they got built-in cellular less and less. But the idea of this just being your main computer and being able to use it anywhere, I still want cellular in all my laptops. So I like that idea. Uh, the search button on the keyboard, I do. Yeah, I have a lot of memories of that being the thing that made the headlines that people were talking about. You can Google stuff with one touch. And that was also one of those things, maybe I'm a little susceptible, it made me want to build my life around this search button. I want to search, I'm going to hit this button and rapidly search things all the time. Uh, I ended up not doing that as often as I probably pictured me doing.
If Google made this laptop today, that would 100% be a Gemini sparkle and you would still get got. I know it in my heart.
I have information to share about the product we're here to talk about.
So, I attempted to boot it.
And it crashed into recovery mode, which is fine cuz it's ancient.
Here's the model name of this product, which I never knew before. This is model IEC Mario Pony 6101. Oh, it just turned off again. That's what it says on the screen.
Well, that's... Did you know that this was the Mario Pony?
Mario Pony. If memory serves, the keyboard on this computer was also quite good. Is the keyboard good?
Keyboard's good. That's how I got to the Mario Pony mode.
Yeah, true. I was just banging away on it. It is good. There you go. See, Mario Pony.
Yeah, netbooks are always a little bit challenged with the keyboards because they were a little bit smaller. You have a little bit of a smaller screen, so the deck is a little smaller. So, you have to crunch some of those keys a little bit and be a little decisive with that stuff. So, yeah, the arrow keys are kind of rough, but the keyboard itself, the travel was nice. They laid it out nicely. I thought this was a good keyboard.
It's clicky. You know, the thing about the cellular, which I think we all are in agreement, it'd be better if more laptops had it. Uh, this was also Google's Droid era if I remember correctly, and that was a huge Verizon partnership.
Yeah. Yeah. Verizon had famously spurned the iPhone. They took their first attempt into smartphones with the BlackBerry Storm. [clears throat] That did not go well. And then they went all in on Google with the Droid line. And they were doing all the 'Droid does' ads. And I'm pretty sure Google was like, 'Hey, can we get 60,000 laptops on your network just for funsies?' and Verizon was like, 'Yeah, we're the future.' In a way that maybe did not carry through to any of Google's partners, right?
Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. And I think that was a thing that Google had going for it that it kind of squandered over the years.
Yeah. Was that like it really could have pushed on a lot of that stuff in a way that would... and this was also like as Google was working on Google Voice, like Google was really pushing on new connectivity ideas that it never quite... Marques, did you just make a face of Google Voice?
Yeah, man. See, killed by Google is such a long list at this point. Like there's so many things that they were working on that were like if they didn't get a trillion users they were gone. I, gosh, I sound such a... like a gullible... I was like, 'Google Voice is great. I'm going to have every... every device is going to ring at once. It's going to be amazing.'
Yep. Okay. So, Google starts to ship these things out to people. Um, people start testing them and almost everyone kind of immediately figures out the same pros and cons. Um, and in order to quickly run through some of them, I'd like to play you just a brief video from one of my very favorite YouTubers. Is that okay?
Basically, everything that's awesome already about Google Chrome as a browser just turns into everything that's awesome about the operating system. So, the super fast startup times, you can open up the laptop and it'll resume like nearly instantly. It's very secure and it's just really, really fast. Everything just works. You even have device sync, so it'll sync with the Chrome on your other devices. So, things like that, it just makes it seem like a very complete platform. And why not use Chrome?
You can hear the optimism in his voice. You can hear... and he does a good job of laying out why this is a good idea. It's super fast. It's attached to the stuff you're already using.
Quick startup time. Yeah, it's a no-brainer.
Some good ideas. So, there were a bunch of like little additional ideas inside of Chrome OS that again in addition to that UI concept thing that they were showing. Like, you can tell they had thought about what else can we do to an operating system while having it still be the web. And then you can tell they sort of accidentally backed their way into mostly making Windows and then tried to pull it back and not mostly make Windows. So, there's just this constant push and pull, but they talk a lot about how fast it's supposed to be. Um, it has a really like crappy file manager and a media player. Um, and Chrome. And that's basically what this thing turns out to be. There was a feature at the very beginning where you could have a local text document, just like a little scratch pad that would sync to a folder in Google Drive. That's a good idea. They should bring that back. It's just neither here nor there. Um,
They've launched and killed that product 50 times. What are you talking about?
Yeah, it's fine. I spent like an hour trying to fix a very specific local Google Docs related problem for my dad this past weekend only to discover in the research for this that Google solved this 16 years ago and then killed it. It's just very irritating. But anyway, um, what I find myself wondering and I want to play one more video from young Marques Brownlee.
Who elucidates some of the downsides and then I want to see if we can figure out if Google could have made this work right out of the box, right out of the gate with just a couple of little teeny tiny changes. Here he is.
So, you got to have apps because you can't just live in the browser forever. Sometimes you need to just get stuff done with applications. Uh, there is a Chrome app store. It's called the Chrome Web Store. So, these are turning into things that are way beyond just glorified websites or shortcuts. So basically sometimes you get an app in the Chrome web store where you click on the icon it just takes you to the website for that app, where they're actually turning now into real apps like applications that are running your browser. So you click on it and you'll get this, you know, beautiful interface that looks nothing like the web app and it's really interesting to use.
So this is the thing baby Marques was wrong about in this video. Marques, I'm sorry to tell you, you got a lot of things right.
The optimism in the voice there was tinged with, I would say, like a bittersweet tone. I swear it's not the web app. It's so not the web app, I promise.
But it does make me wonder and you go on to say in that video that, you know, you have to do things like video editing and there's sort of other stuff you want to do that wants to be on a desktop. And I find myself wondering if Google had just done a little tiny bit of that or a little tiny bit of exploration at what that might look like at the beginning if that might have helped because everyone's immediate reaction to this computer was the same thing. Including from what I understand Google executives all the way back to the beginning of this project which is why would I have a computer I can't do anything with offline, just period. They're like it's the airplane problem. I can't use it on an airplane. And that even in reality was only kind of true. Google had been working on offline modes for a bunch of its stuff. You could with a little bit of work make most of the Google Drive stuff work offline. And there was some basic HTML5 app stuff you could do offline, but there was just this sense of like, you're offering me a web browser. What am I going to do when I'm not on the internet that Chrome never really recovers from in this case? And I just found myself wondering like could Google have done a little bit of work at the very beginning to resolve that. Maybe the answer is actually execute on the Chrome Web Store better.
What is Google's office suite called today?
For now, by the time this publishes, who knows? At the time it was called Google Docs I want to say and the person in charge of it I believe was Sundar Pichai who solved this problem, right? They built an offline mode in Chrome to run Google's office software. They got... the constraint made them solve it in some tiny way. And then the other piece of it which I think is incredibly interesting that Marques brought up like video editing or design or whatever other people complain about, all of that stuff works now. We are recording this podcast in a web-based video capture tool that offers this like outlandish AI video editing capabilities in it and it's one of several competitors.
Figma exists because of WebGL and then now whatever standard Figma runs on now, like Google eventually built all of the capabilities into the browser and into the standards so they could solve this core problem of applications and I want to say they won.
Yeah. Like every interesting new application comes out as a web app in some way. Even the most powerful applications exist. Canva exists. Totally a web app through and through. And that is just pure productivity software that works in a variety of ways. One of the worst Electron apps you will ever experience in your life.
And it's funny because none of that stuff works on the iPhone because Apple is like if we give up our app model to the web, we'll lose and we won't be able to collect fees. And so famously Safari and the iPhone, there's just a wall and you can bash into that wall as much as you want and there will never be more capabilities than that and then you got to ship an app in the app store and Apple makes its money. But I think Google had the right ideas at the beginning and they had to build all of the technology to solve those problems and in the end they did.
That's fair. Yeah. I mean in that sense I think history largely because of Google has been kind to that original thesis but it just wasn't there at that point.
No, not even close. Yeah, but I think if they had said, 'We're going to build X, Y, and Z, and that will be how everyone distributes all of the most interesting apps in the world,' and they hadn't really talked about the Chrome web store. Like, I think maybe the way people reacted to it from the beginning would have been different.
That's interesting. Marques, what do you think about that?
Yeah, it's always interesting thinking about the reactions at the beginning versus what the product ended up turning into. And I always have this, I guess the analogy if we go back to like new paradigms like you see electric cars coming out today and a lot of what they do is they know it's somebody's first electric car. So they have a bunch of features and a bunch of weird things that are kind of emulating a gas car again. Like they'll make noises like a gas car or they'll like creep forward when you let off the accelerator. They'll literally apply torque inefficiently to feel more like a gas car. They do all these things that are maybe a little bit odd. And I think maybe sometimes not doing any of the stuff to appeal to the previous paradigm is a better way to get people to embrace the new thing and then you can build more onto it later. So in the case of the Chromebook, maybe that's just there is no apps and I mean this is how the iPhone started, but like there are no apps. Everything you can do on the web is what this will be really good at and then we want to add stuff around the edges later. I'm not sure if that would have landed with enthusiasts like me at the time who wanted to figure out how to, you know, edit videos and move files around locally and do all sorts of other stuff, but it would have been curious to see how that landed if they had just gone, it's just Chrome.
It's just nothing but Chrome. Well, so let me put you back in your netbook reviewer days because what you were up against constantly was it's a netbook. It runs a nerfed version of Windows on a super cheap processor that is absolutely starved of RAM, of storage. And I don't know if that was better than it runs Chrome really well and has nothing else.
Right. And it's like that was the, at least in that world, the competition and then like hovering around it was the iPad and Apple's whole pitch was well those are all garbage, right? This thing is at least beautiful.
Yeah. Yeah. So it might have hit. It might have hit.
Yeah. It's just like which one of those was better and the answer is like all of those products kind of failed and Apple just sort of insistently kept making iPads.
Yeah, I think there is definitely something to that. But I mean like Marques, your conclusion at the end of that Chrome OS video. Um, I will not play the third clip that I brought up because I feel I've tortured you enough. Um, but you do two things, right? You basically say, um, this makes a lot of sense to me as an idea for a secondary machine, right? Cheap, portable, easy, not super complicated to set up or mess with, like great second computer, probably never going to be your first computer. But then you say, 'Wouldn't it be awesome if they would basically make one that was way better?' And you essentially, and there are a bunch of comments on that video from like years later that are like, 'Oh, he just described the Chromebook Pixel.' And so you find yourself in the middle of that being like, I completely get why this thing is the sort of low-end straightforward, not trying to do too much thing that it is, but god, wouldn't it be great if it was better?
And I just... I'm still... that is so to me the story of the Chromebook.
That's like I get all of the decisions that they made and I wish they had tried harder.
They did make the Chromebook Pixel. They made one perfect laptop eventually.
Eventually. It took years. 25 years later, 2015, 2016 was Pixel.
It was perfect. It was also $1,000.
And it can only run Chrome.
Yes. So, and the 'it can only run Chrome' thing is I think the original sin of Chrome OS that I want to talk about here is Google did itself so few favors by making that argument the whole case for Chrome OS, right? 'It can only run Chrome' was a feature, not a bug to Google. And it was nothing but the web. Their whole idea was this is already how you live your life. You're only in a web browser. People were like, 'No, I'm not.' And they were like, 'Yes, you are. You love web browsers.' And they just continued to push at the argument that no, trust us, this is all you need. And not only is this all you need, the hardware doesn't matter. Like they said this over and over and over again. Eric Schmidt in some kind of like fireside chat thing used the word disposable, that the hardware should be disposable. It shouldn't matter what device you have. And I have two things that I want to play you just to prove this. This is how Google marketed Chromebooks. I just... to put this in context, this is marketing materials for Chromebooks. So, one is, uh, this is a chunk of a long video where the shtick is guy sits down at a table, starts trying to do something in a Google doc and somebody comes and takes his laptop and destroys it in ever more elaborate ways. And the argument they're trying to make is it doesn't matter what the hardware is. You can sit down, log in, and everything is right there. Let me just play this video for you. This is again, this is marketing material for the Chromebook.
Traditionally, photo editing is something that you normally do in programs. He opened Picnik, which is an old image editor, on a Chromebook in a Chrome tab. He selected a cat. We're cropping the cat. We're cropping the cat. There's like... Oh, there's a hazmat guy and he's taking it to a testing lab. Testing lab.
Oh, if only it were a testing lab and it sits on a... Oh, they're lighting it on fire. They're heating it. They're superheating it.
Okay. And now it's just lighting on fire like... And you can see like the green vapors in the plastic. Oh, they're torching this thing.
Here, look. Have a Chromebook. We'll light it on fire for you.
Is that a marshmallow? They put a marshmallow on a fork.
I would not eat that marshmallow.
I mean, the banjo music at the end for no reason.
This is how Google tells you to buy a Chromebook. It'll burn. I don't know.
Roast a marshmallow over these feelings.
I hate it. As an argument for Chrome OS, it's very compelling, right? If what we were saying is you have a laptop you hate, put Chrome OS on it until it dies, is... I don't know, like that's a good argument.
This is a terrible argument for buying a new piece of hardware. Let me just show you one more.
What Marques was saying is Google just wants your brain to be in a vat in the cloud.
