At WWDC 2025, Apple finally brought the iPad back to its post-PC era roots. But what's going on with Google's Chromebook platform? Google hosted a virtual event for Android last month and then Google I/O came and went with barely a mention of Chrome OS.

I may be reading into this a bit. Looking back over the past year or two, I can see that Google typically makes big Chromebook announcements just a few times a year, most recently in May 2024 and October 2024. And today's news about a new Arm-based Chromebook Plus laptop and new AI features for Chrome OS in roughly inline with that schedule.

But there is also an open question about the future of Chrome OS as a platform. Google is on the one hand promoting more premium and capable Chromebook Plus laptops with its partners. But on the other, it is also replacing key parts of the Chrome OS software stack with Android code. And Android 16 will get a major new Desktop Mode feature, based on Samsung Dex, that makes that mobile platform a viable Chrome OS replacement in many ways. There are mixed signals there.

It's impossible to know what Google's thinking. And if the past is any guide, that could change suddenly regardless. After all, this is the company that's gone and forth over whether Android or Chrome OS was the better choice for tablets over several years, and now it's not even clear that it thinks either is viable. Perhaps foldables are the future. Or something. We can only guess.

Whether that lack of clarity gives a bit of an edge to the iPad in the post-PC era race is perhaps beside the point: The iPad has always had an edge over Google's platforms in the tablet space and it probably always will. The issue now is whether either--or both--can eat into PC and Mac usage share and make these legacy platforms even less relevant to mainstream users.

Today's Google announcement doesn't answer any of these questions definitively. But it is notable for at least three reasons.

First, we see a single new premium Chromebook Plus device, from Lenovo, that utilizes a high-end Arm processor with a 50 TOPS NPU. MediaTek announced this processor back in April, and I noted at the time that it was (suspiciously) on-par with the Copilot+ PC-class Snapdragon X Elite processors we see on the Windows side of the fence. This seemed like the belated response to the issue I raised a year ago when I noted that Chrome OS would benefit even more from efficient, reliable, and powerful Arm processors than would Windows.

Second, Google continues to tie its most powerful new Chrome OS features to Chromebook Plus-class devices. And those features are invariably AI- and Gemini-based. Today, Google announced several new features like this, from Select to Search in Lens to Text capture, image creation with the Quick Insert key, new Help Me Read features, and more. But with its powerful NPU, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 adds a new Copilot+ PC-style wrinkle: It offers two features that are for now exclu...