Googlebooks May Soon Overpower Any Chromebook, if That Matters

Google’s browser-based, streaming-centric Chromebooks never had any reason to be that powerful. That may not be the case with the forthcoming sequel to the lightweight laptop brand, annoyingly and eponymously called Googlebooks. We’ve already seen several Googlebook leaks showing renders from multiple laptop OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like Lenovo and Asus. The latest leaks from Chrome Unboxed offer an even better idea of what’s going on inside these larger, more powerful machines. The first Acer Googlebook 14 may sport a pretty 14-inch OLED screen and up to 512GB of SSD storage. The laptop also includes a whopping 16GB of RAM, more memory than most Chromebooks ever needed. The code sleuths at Chrome Unboxed looked through Chromium code repositories and retailer info and found the Acer Googlebook 14 also includes a mainboard with either an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 and a Core Ultra 7 355. Those are Intel’s latest Panther Lake processors built for lightweight laptops, and they’ve proved capable in Gizmodo’s own tests over the last eight months. Chromebooks never made that much use of higher-end chips, even something like these mid-range 8-core Intel processors. The 8-core M