In a new report published by Computerworld, Google is officially done making first-party tablets. The company reportedly had two more tablets in the works—both smaller than the current Pixel Slate; however, development on them have since been suspended and employees working on them have been reassigned to various other areas, with most being moved to the laptops division. Google still has plans for more laptops it seems.
Google also released the following statement to the media:
“Chrome OS has grown in popularity across a broad range of form factors and we’ll continue to work with our ecosystem of partners on laptops and tablets. For Google’s first-party hardware efforts, we’ll be focusing on Chrome OS laptops and will continue to support Pixel Slate.”
In addition, Rick Osterloh, Senior VP of Hardware at Google, also confirmed the report in a tweet:
Hey, it's true…Google's HARDWARE team will be solely focused on building laptops moving forward, but make no mistake, Android & Chrome OS teams are 100% committed for the long-run on working with our partners on tablets for all segments of the market (consumer, enterprise, edu)
— Rick Osterloh (@rosterloh) June 20, 2019
So there you have it. Future Google-made tablets are dead, but the existing Pixel Slate and other Chrome OS tablets will still continue to be supported. It is a bit of a bummer that Google has such a short attention span with some of their products, though. After the Nexus 7, it seems that everything since has been a half-hearted effort to steal some market share of Apple’s iPads. I’m glad they’re still sticking to laptops at least because I do love my Pixelbook.
Source: Computerworld, Twitter
