I Told You So: 12 Years In, Chromebooks Are Still Thriving and Innovating

In the earliest days of my career, as a young intern here at PCMag in 2010, one of my first assignments was to help with the unboxing of the Cr-48 Chrome Notebook. This oddly named device was the first Chromebook prototype that Google sent out to tech reviewers before the term “Chromebook” was even part of Google’s official marketing. A lot of journalists didn’t know what to make of it.

In 2011, Acer and Samsung brought the first Chromebooks to market, and soon two became three—and then four and five different models. Lenovo and HP joined the Chromebook scene in 2013 and then Google launched the first premium ChromeOS laptop to sell for over $1,000, the Chromebook Pixel. By 2013, I even wrote an article about it, declaring that The Chromebook Isn’t Bad, Just Misunderstood.

Ten years later, I’m still feeling pretty confident about what I wrote. The Chromebook has come a long, long way in the past 13 years, and the latest developments are stretching the concept past what I ever thought possible. And, looking at where the Chromebook is likely to go in the future, I feel just as safe in saying that we’re just getting started.

Cr-48: The Chromebook’s Humble Origins

Initially, Google’s ChromeOS feature support was still growing to include such basics as USB ports and SD card slots. When we first started testing the blacked-out, unbranded Cr-48 laptop, the ports didn’t work. Gesture controls were spotty, too.

At the time, the company responded with explanations that the Cr-48 was so new that the functionality was still being fine-tuned. Google literally told us, “This is the worst your computer will be.” Though awkwardly worded, the message was simple: This is a platform that will only get better.

The first-ever Chromebook: Google’s Cr-48 prototype
(Credit: PCMag)

That particular phrase stuck in my mind over the next few years. As ChromeOS went from a proof of concept to the operating system for a whole subcategory of laptops, we’ve seen the Chromebook (and its desktop and tablet counterparts) grow from a niche, minimalist web-browsing machine to briefly overtaking Apple in laptop market share(Opens in a new window). It got an enormous boost during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, as parents and schools turned to the inexpensive laptops as a solution to the problems of virtual learning and online classes for millions of students.

Google literally told us, “This is the worst your computer will be.” Though awkwardly worded, the message was simple: This is a platform that will only get better.

The range of devices in the Chromebook family has grown, as well. Back when our best Chromebooks page was merely a one-off for the 2012 holidays, we featured just four products (one of them wasn’t even a Chromebook, but a mini PC Chromebox). With prices as low as $200, they were practically stocking stuffers. These days, we test a lot of Chromebooks—nearly a dozen just in the last year. We have our full-fledged best Chromebooks buying guide, along with guides to the best Chromebooks for kids and the best Chromebooks for gaming. Naturally, Chrome-based models are found on a dozen other lists of our favorite laptops.

Chromebooks have grown immensely in capability as well. Google Docs and the rest of Google’s productivity apps started off as barely-good-enough replacements for Microsoft Office products. Today, Microsoft has browser-friendly versions of its own products as it tries to stay competitive against Google’s free online tools. Major apps, like Adobe Photoshop, have finally come to Chrome, and Google has brought its entire Play Store of Android apps to Chromebooks.

Chrome With Polish: Chromebooks Continue to Innovate

Chromebooks have been innovating right up until publishing this very article. One of the recent models I reviewed is the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition. By combining the original Framework Laptop design—with all of its upgradable, customizable capabilities—with ChromeOS, we now have a Chromebook with better longevity and repairability than most Windows laptops on the market now. You can mix and match the port selection for exactly the connections you want. You can replace everything from the display bezel to the battery. This includes upgrading the Wi-Fi, changing out the keyboard, swapping storage drives, adding RAM, and even exchanging the mainboard to one with a faster processor. It’s not fundamentally different from the Windows-based model, but the fact that this influential newcomer brand has embraced ChromeOS so readily speaks volumes to the new Chrome-filled laptop world.

The Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition is the first fully upgradable and modular Chrome laptop
(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

I’ve also recently reviewed two different gaming Chromebooks: the Acer Chromebook 516 GE and the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming Chromebook. Made to support cloud gaming through services like Nvidia GeForce Now and Amazon Luna instead of local graphics horsepower, these gaming-oriented Chromebooks keep the slim designs and zippy lightweight software of ChromeOS, but they add a few gamer-friendly tweaks, like high-refresh-rate displays and anti-ghosting keyboards that have RGB lighting. These features may seem superficial, but they make a difference during gameplay. The (relatively) beefed-up processing and faster Wi-Fi 6E networking also make these gaming models some of the best Chromebooks you can get regardless of gaming. Not only are they fast enough to keep up with games, but they’ll handily support whatever apps, extensions, or cloud services you use.

The Chromebook has come a long, long way in the past 13 years, and the latest developments are stretching the concept past what I ever thought possible.

These are the first (but definitely not the last) ChromeOS machines built with cloud gaming in mind. Like everything else we’ve seen bearing the Chromebook logo, even the gaming capabilities are cloud-based, but the point is that it works. Streaming AAA titles from libraries like Steam means that you can now enjoy the latest games without sinking big bucks into a hefty rig.

This Train Isn’t Slowing Down

Even with the maturity of more than a decade of Chromebooks behind us, it’s still safe to say that this is only the beginning. How do I know? Because we’re witnessing a massive shift in the tech world, as AI-powered chatbots and interfaces are making major waves. That revolutionary power isn’t based on your local hardware—it’s all in the cloud…where Chromebooks started. Surely AI chat apps that can run on local hardware are coming, but the big, highly capable language models we’re seeing now, like ChatGPT, aren’t made for local installations. They’re built to be run at scale, on servers accessible to users from anywhere in the world.

I’m not saying that the future of computing is in the cloud—after all, we’ve been computing in the cloud for more than a decade. ChromeOS and Chromebooks proved this model years ago, we’re just finally starting to see the ripples from that change in new, bigger ways. Again, I don’t want to say I told you so—OK, maybe a little—but I totally did.