With less than a month to go for Google’s October event, the tech giant has cancelled the upcoming Pixelbook and disbanded the team responsible for building it. Google was reportedly working on a new Pixelbook with rumours suggesting it would make its debut sometime next year.
But, according to a report by The Verge, a person familiar with the matter has said that the device was cancelled as part of Google’s recent cost-cutting measures. Also, the members of the Pixelbook team were transferred to another team.
Earlier this year in May during Google’s I/O developer conference, Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh told The Verge that it was planning to introduce more Pixelbooks in the future.
In an internal memo shared in July, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company will be “slowing down the pace of hiring for the rest of the year. In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes. In other cases, that means pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas.” It looks like the Pixelbook project and team were part of the redeployment. That said, Chromebook sales peaked during the early pandemic days with students looking for cheap options to attend school online.
But the last Chromebook made by Google was the Pixelbook Go, which was launched three years ago. Turns out, the company wants to focus on Android-powered wearables, smartphones and tablets now.
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