The State of Chrome OS in 2025 (Premium)

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 exclusive to this one laptop because they rely on on-device AI. One assumes they will come later to other (new) Chromebooks, though it’s not clear if they require a specific class of NPU.

Third, Google is predictably shutting down its overly liberal Gemini give-aways. A year ago, anyone who purchased a new Chromebook Plus laptop would get one year of what’s now called Gemini AI Pro, which provides 2 TB of Google Drive cloud storage and expansive Gemini capabilities across the ecosystem, a $240 value. Going forward, new Chromebook Plus laptops like the Lenovo are only offering 3 months of this service. This is similar to what we see on phones. Anyone who purchased a Pixel 9-series phone last year received a year of what’s now called Gemini AI Pro, but that’s since been lowered to 6 months. And those who buy the newer Pixel 9a in 2025 will get just 3 months of the service.

To be fair, there are still plenty of cheap Chromebooks out there, the $139 HP Chromebook 14 being perhaps an extreme example. But where that and other $300 and cheaper Chromebooks may satisfy a need for the truly budget constrained, they’re not going to attract developers, business users, power users, or anyone who is using a mid-level or better Windows laptop. Chromebook Plus has always been interesting to me, specifically because of the premium nature of those devices and their value when compared to $1000 to $1500 Windows laptops.

Chromebook Plus ostensibly competed with various iPads as well. There, you were looking at least $350 for the iPad itself plus $250 for a Magic Keyboard Folio (or perhaps closer to $150 if you went with a third-party alternative). But the limiting factor there was always artificial and Apple’s fault. That situation is about to change with iPadOS 26, making almost all iPad models potential laptop replacements. And so that base iPad, or an iPad Air, perhaps, is suddenly more competitive for a wider range of users than was the case before.

This could be a big problem for Google, whether it chooses Chrome OS, Android, or both for future laptop-class devices. We all know that when it comes to “traditional” tablets–i.e. tablets that are used exclusively (or nearly so) for so-called consumption tasks like browsing, reading, playing games, and watching videos, that there is iPad and then there is nothing else, no other viable choice. But with the iPad now weaving decisively into the productivity side of the “what’s a computer?” equation, all bets are off. Will the magic continue?

I think it will. One of Apple’s biggest strengths is its ability to get developers to buy into its platforms, and the iPad has been well served by more and better optimized apps since its inception than Android ever has (or will, most likely). This isn’t Google’s fault per se, God know it’s tried, and it has continuously improved Android to work well on big screen devices like Chromebooks, tablets, and foldable phones. But developers just appear to move more slowly, or not at all, with implementing new Android functionality.

I think this will continue to be a problem with productivity apps. Android is still Android, so we’ll see iffy support in native apps. But Chrome OS has the desktop version of the Chrome browser, which offers some nice advantages, given the popularity of capabilities we see with web apps. It can also run Linux, and does so quite well on Chromebook Plus devices. That’s a big deal for developers, in particular: You can make Android apps with Android Studio on a Chromebook, but you cannot make iPad or iOS apps on an iPad, as Xcode remains Mac-only.

One thing I find particularly interesting about the new iPad multitasking capabilities is how immediately natural and obvious it is. App windows on the iPad look and work the way you expect them to work, and they offer the same positioning and sizing granularity we’ve all come to expect from desktop platforms like Windows and the Mac. But that’s not true of Chrome OS. Yes, it multitasks, and supports floating and full-screen windows with Snap-like layout options. But Chrome OS app windows are old-fashioned looking, with weird halos on mouse-over, and they’re impossible or difficult to position precisely. There’s an odd insistence on snapping to edges that looks and feels unsophisticated.

Between the high quality and sheer volume of native apps and its suddenly versatile multitasking functionality, the iPad is a real threat. You can spend a lot of money on an iPad Air or, especially, an iPad Pro. But a mainstream 11-inch iPad is cheap, and turning it into a laptop-like device with a keyboard/touchpad cover isn’t particular expensive. I’m not sure how Google should respond, but I am sure it will need to. I assume that Android 16’s Desktop Mode will offer some advantages, and that future Android tablets and foldables will offer it. But until and unless you can run Linux generally or Android Studio specifically, it will never meet any developer’s needs. To be fair, neither will the iPad.

(That could be coming, by the way. There is a Linux terminal option in Android on Pixels now, and it uses an on-device Debian-based virtual machine.)

Picking a computer is in some ways a personal choice, though most are probably heavily influenced by experience and stick with the familiar. Here, the iPad and Chrome OS both have some niceties that will appeal to users coming from Windows or the Mac. Android? Well, based on an early look at Desktop Mode on my Pixel 9 Pro XL, it has a ways to go. This is the least sophisticated of these platforms, which makes sense given its pre-release state.

That suggests that Chrome OS has some life left in it. But the sudden maturity of iPadOS has upended this conversation. So what was unclear and confusing is now even worse. And only Google can clear this up.