That said, its hard to justify the prices for these premium Chromebooks. When I picked them up they were heavily discounted with some developer code or other.

I also agree with the shaky future as far as being able to actually opening these things up with developer tooling. It seems like they've simply been on a path to rollback all of that.

   ...as computing shifts from operating systems [to intelligence systems](TKTK)...

I loved my Pixelbook, fantastic piece of hardware. When that ended, I went with an Acer Chromebook. Works fine, just not the same.

I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.

I will most likely get a Googlebook, and would be more likely to do so if it was not named Googlebook and did not have Gemini built in.

Emphasis on AI and connecting to your phone. How many Iceland trips do students make?

If it is both, then all the Neo needs to do is have a browser only mode and goodbye Chromebook market.

Maybe it is better but my experience using it as desktop was absolutely atrocious. I mean it works as designed but it sucks

I think for something like this, it will only work if you can allow you local files to get messed up by the LLM but then, because everything has been synced to the cloud, there's a safe "revert" option.

I'd love that built on a Linux foundation too, but realistically reckon if they're going down that path they've got the core of "all your app state can be backed-up/transferred" already in Android so they'd likely lean heavily on that.

From a security perspective, this cannot exist. MacOS is fundamentally superior to classical GNU/Linux distros. Android/ChromeOS are the only Linux systems that make a serious attempt to close that gap.

I think the closest thing I can imagine is a system that goes all in on a Snap/Flatpak type platform (basically, like Fedora Silverblue, plus throw ~50 million dollars at fixing all the sandboxing, improving the SELinux policies or whatever, cranking up the system integrity story, getting some kernel hardening in place, stuff like that). With Google's funding I do think that's technically viable, I would love to see it. But, I dunno if it would count as "standard Linux foundation". And, kinda a weird thing to do for a company that's already spent billions over the last 20 years to build several existing Linux OSs.

(BTW, this is a totally security-brained take. I do actually run classical GNU/Linux on all my personal computers, the fact that it's a fundamentally insecure OS doesn't actually bother me that much. But I don't think Google can realistically ship a "product" like that. If it really took off and gained the kinda adoption they are presumably hoping for, it would honestly be quite irresponsible of them).

ChromeOS was honestly the best they could do.

How so? It displays useful info at a glance. Where's the bad UX?

As an aside: From a 'clickability' perspective the app menus in the top bar are nice of course and I theoretically agree that's the best place for an app menu. But in practice I really dislike macos' 'separated' app menus when a window is not maximized.

Google literally already sells Coral usb inference engines, so they’re most of the way there already: https://www.coral.ai/products/accelerator

If you want an upstream Linux kernel with folders of markdown prompts and virtualized ChromeOS/Android containers, just use Linux. You don't need to wait for Google to build that experience for you.

TBF, the reason Apple removed "Apple Intelligence" is that they failed to deliver on its promises.

So much so that they just settled their false advertising in a class action lawsuit for $250M:

https://archive.is/efWkb

Also, P.S: Not to say that clothing/shopping is the primary use case, but I know plenty of women who use AI for clothes/fashion/interior decoration etc related tasks.

It sounds totally insane but we’re the minority here. That’s why Google is a $4.5 trillion company.

For me, unless you can run LLM's and whatnot locally (which is not the case on this undisclosed low-end hardware), "AI" just means doing some API call to a web service and have it serve me some freshly made up tokens. You can do that on a potato. The fact that they happily announce something that can be done on any other cheap-ass laptop as the main selling point, means this product is nothing special at all.

(they've gone to the next level this time)

That info can be shown in the bottom panel, there is enough space there.

This is just a lot of wasted space and makes the menubar harder to click, compared to having the menubar at the very top, next to the screen boundary.

Reading comments like this makes me feel like I live on a different planet from some people.

The Coral USB dongle is from 2019 - it is a dev kit, not a souped-up edge inference unit. It was not designed to compete with the Macbook Mini (???) and is not some sort of touchstone or landmark in AI development. It's a tiny TPU that Google made to prototype technologies for their own SOCs like Google Tensor later down the line.

It might be a good way to get Steam compatibility?

I wonder what it says for places which don't really have seasons, like say Singapore?

So it does say fall on web archive

Android 16+ offers a built-in integrated Linux VM that can be enabled from Developer Mode, and if this[0] third-party site is accurate, "Android on laptop" will have it enabled by default.

So it should not be too different from working on a Windows laptop with WSL2, or on an OSTree distro where you use distroboxes to work with non-sandboxed programs.

(fwiw, I would still refuse to have one of these for personal use because Google is a shameless data robber. Unless someone were to de-google Aluminium like LineageOS and GrapheneOS did for Android, but that would probably take years.)

[0] https://aluminium-os.com/

This thing will be killed early 2028...

You're not the only one asking this. I'm right there with you.

They've managed to convince people to pay $800 (usually with some discounts to be fair) for what's essentially a $400-450 mid range phone. Even if nothing was defective and customer service was "perfect", it's still a midrange phone priced like a flagship.

I went to redeem my compensation - free battery replacement unavailable in your country, $100 credit unavailable in your country. I guess I'll take the $50 cash...? I fill in the form with my IMEI, full name, address, etc etc. After a week they send a response saying unfortunately after thoroughly looking into my case, I'm not eligible, and no further explanation is offered as to why. In effect it's as if they hacked into my phone and installed a virus that cripples the battery and there's nothing I can do about it, like this is just a normal way to do business now. You don't really own your phone after all...

Everyone and their mom will have their own hyperspecific custom apps prompted into existence

Something like Claude Code with stricter sandboxing built into the OS for consumers

Not just desktop either but also on phones

And if you're not in North America (or EU), chances are very high that any repair to Pixels is going to be either not possible or will cost you dearly. I personally had a terrible experience of this with Pixel 7 Pro that was in warranty and had a water-related damage, since then, I've stayed away from any device made by Google.

I was anticipating an "AI phone" from someone like Google, not an "AI laptop", although it seems to be Android compatible so maybe that is coming next.

And I did use AI recently when shopping for a car. After doing a bunch of research on my own, I decided why not try feeding my criteria into ChatGPT and see what it recommends. And it did actually recommend a couple of models that I had not previously considered, including one that I ended up considering very seriously.

I also pointed it towards some used listings and asked questions like "does this listing have ventilated rear seats" - and it was able to respond that it likely doesn't, and told me where to look for the controls in photos to verify for certain. I probably could have figured out on my own with a bit of digging, or else contact the seller, but this was a pretty quick and easy way to get the information I was looking for.

Is that gross?

I didn't look too closely at the Googlebook, so I don't know why I would use that instead of just an app on my MacBook. But at some point when competent models can be run on comodity hardware I think hardware and OS-level support for AI will definitely become a selling point for me. We're just not quite there yet.

I want to make a picture from me, add perhaps height and one or a second other metric, then i want it to generate styles for me, finetune it with me and then it helps me buy it.

I'm waiting for this for ages as i HATE shopping but I would find it nice to look better.

Nonetheless, when I saw this page for the first time, i was very impressed with the case not with anything related to softeware. Might be a second type of device which might be a good alternative to an apple product. Framework and now this (perhaps)

Not super relevant to the Googlebook ad, but in case the perspective is interesting to you: I'm quite tall (194cm) but not very wide, so I usually struggle with buying clothes online. I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores to see whether they sold a men's shirt with an LT or slim fit size, in stock, and matching a particular vibe.

> No one is doing that, these people don't exist

I don't know what world you live in but I personally know at least 4 people (all female interestingly) who regularly use ChatGPT to give outfit advice and when clothes shopping. One has manually taken photos of clothes laid out separately so she can put different combinations into ChatGPT and ask if they work together.

I don't live in the US.

It’s amazing how confident you are while being completely wrong. A pristine internet rant.

Tangental rebuttal, but I shop for food using AI every day. Grab app (Asia's equivalent of Uber Eats/DoorDash) has an option "Translate using AI". It (attempts to) translate dishes and ingredients. The app gives a prominent warning (in corporate speak): "these AI translations can be horrendously bad" - and some translations are indeed way off (often hilariously!) but although scrappy, this AI feature is incredibly useful.

Before this feature, I'd have to laboriously screenshot (since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS) then open the screenshot in Google Translate. This only gets you one screen's worth of translations making browsing too arduous.

A shitty AI feature that actually solves a problem is great, whereas a polished AI feature that doesn't is "gross" :)

“Just had a baby, generate a shopping list for my registry”

“For each major item on registry, research and recommend the top 3 products. I care about GreenGuard certification. I’m not price sensitive.”

“I’m looking for new shoes. I’ve previously owned XYZ models and here’s what I liked/disliked. Can you recommend shoes I should consider?”

It’s immensely helpful. It replaces what I used to do before which was typically search for “[product] Reddit” and read and sift through a ton of comments.

It’s not perfect but the volume of transactions I’d have to do research for is high enough and the return policies easy enough that it makes mistakes feel much easier to correct.

Apple engineers spend months trying to prompt engineer their way, thinking the prompter is at fault if the soon to be AGI system diverged. Some of these instructions were trending out there, as reveals of how naive Apple was at the time. They could be traced from the device's logs so not so much of a leak: Don't hallucinate, strictly follow instructions, followed by all sort of refined predicates, appended as if an LLM had reason

Then Apple released a paper to warn everyone (well, a few, and to save face) that we are getting fooled.

https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...

In case Apple is a biased anti AI propagandist, here is a similar, more recent research paper from MIT and co:

https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24755v1

Normies HATE customizing their devices. Children will literall reach for AI instead of search engines when they just want to change a background image.

Jailbreak is a slur for "Installation" that tech companies want to keep that way.

Sure some stuff sticks but most falls off the wall and is axed barely half way into the product life cycle.

Just feels crazy to me, but I guess that's what addiction looks like.

And before you make some claim like "use keyboard", the UI includes these window elements for a reason. Top bar makes them less friendly to use: They're tiny and with top bar it's an aiming game instead of a quick way to do something with a mouse or a touchpad.

As an i3/sway user I don't greatly care about this because I already have things the way I like, but I understand the frustration of the OP.

> Coming autumn 2026

I would also never expect this kind of text to be localized. Strange.

Unfortunately, they do. "Normie America" loves that shit. It's why they've been pushing it so hard: it's one of the few areas they're getting serious traction in day to day life.

Below $500? Same as the cheap Chromebooks market.

Around $700? (Or $600 educational) Direct competitor to Macbook Neo, educational market and the middle of the road laptop market.

Above $900? No idea, maybe for Google Platform die-hards.

I’m very curious what you mean by this.

The primary difference between a Chromebook and a Googlebook appears to be the ability to run LLM's locally.

The requirements were spelt out at Google I/O. They boil down to a 40 TOPS NPU and a minimum of 16GB of memory. They appear to be trying to match Apple's M series memory bandwidth using software compression. ChromeOS didn't need an NPU and specified a minimum of 4GB of memory. Aluminium OS looks to have the same relationship with its LLM as a Chromebook did with Google Chrome, and needs the hardware to power it.

If they pull it off you will get GPT-4 performance, running locally.

As for who this is for: your guess is as good as mine. But if their replacement for crostini works (crostini is so hopelessly unreliable it felt like it never got out of beta, so it's a big if), even the minimum specs would be a very good Linux laptop.

To be fair, how would they even verify this? Unless it's outright broken (eg. no cell reception), someone with a "defective modem" is basically indistinguishable from the 99 other people with a perfectly fine phone, but nonetheless want their phone replaced for various nonspecific issues about cell reception.

Most people who haven't reddit would assume googlebooks are made by google

This pattern extends to so many goods in modern life. Washing machines, microwaves, etc aren't worth the time of a local repairman. Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.

Clothes are replaced, not stitched. And after a few washes at that. Cars, phones, etc, consist of proprietary parts all sealed up.

Strata Pixels, Nest Cameras Google Smart Speakers Nest Home Security system

but then I broke my Google Pixel 1 watch. I ended up chatting with service in India and they pretty much told me that there was no way to fix it. After that, I quit buying all things Google and switched to Apple. Now I only buy Google software products, no consumer devices.

It was my travel laptop for at least 5 years.

It was expensive, but the quality, performance, and durability was top tier. And it lasted 5+ years.

The Pixelbook also had a "Google Assistant" button built in the keyboard. Should be easy enough to relaunch the hardware and swap in a gemini button...

I wish they'd had open bootloaders, but I seem to recall you had to keep it in developer mode which required a nag screen, or something along those lines, if you wanted to run your own OS on it.

It's a "most loved" brand according to https://rankings.newsweek.com/americas-most-loved-brands-202...

Please not schools…

Shipping enterprise desktop hardware with AI integrated features will likely be a priority to improve the cloud footprint amongst fortune 500.

I saw a demo - it took you, put a piece of clothing on you, and showed in realtime how that clothing moved on your body in the size you'd selected. I think it even picked the size.

I genuinely don’t think when Chat GPT 3.5 launched, that anyone believed people would integrate the usage of them as quickly and solidly as they have.

So Im with you on this, people use Chat GPT, Claude and so on for anything and everything.

I wouldn't buy a deeply-ingrained AI laptop even if you paid me, and even then I'd install Linux on it in a heartbeat.

You’re on HN and know 4 females, that’s the truly interesting part :-)

It's May and you chose a bright green and red sweater with a picture of Santa Clause.

"You're absolutely right! Maybe this would be a better choice for December."

I used to be vehemently against AI coding just a few years ago, because the hallucinations were a deal-breaker. However, these days, most of my code is written using AI. It's still very "corporate junior" so it takes constant tweaking, hand re-writing, or total re-architecting, but it's leaps and bounds better than what it was. And I find myself working on the interesting parts: product, user experience, novel algorithms, etc.

LLMs don’t ‘know’ if a pair of jeans is a tapered slim fit with a gusseted crotch, at least not by default. But if the brand uploaded them as such, the filters will find them.

That’s just a quick take. I’ve tried to shop with LLMs and the results are mediocre at best. Of course search, filtering, and content tagging could always be improved, instead of “just slap AI on it”.

It's probably a nice feeling when you can put in a list of soft requirements to ChatGPT et al and get a list of things it recommends, but I would suggest you are a fool if you think those listings aren't bought and paid for.

In an era where the gap between a 'good product' and a 'bad product' is growing ever larger and the price is not an indicator of anything, the onus to actually become knowledgeable re: "How to identify products worth buying" is becoming greater and greater. If you are using AI to do the shopping for you, not only are you not building that muscle, you are actively weakening it as a chatbot convincingly recommends something to you based on unverifiable platitudes about 'quality' and 'value' - a recommendation that was, again, bought and paid for.

So yeah, that's gross and I would argue pretty strongly that it's just as brain rot adjacent as something like Tiktok. Like Tiktok though, I expect it will see at least some level of popular use, and also like Tiktok, I think it'll end up making the population dumber on average.

An the same will happen to AI. We will remember these days as the golden age for AI, where you weren't required to prompt an AI three times before it answers with a non-ad response.

Also aren’t you concerned your behaviour is marketers’ wet dream? They now dictate what you should consume.

> since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS

This is all you need to know about mobile to understand we're in a complete duopoly that desperately needs a modern "ma bell" style breakup.

The fuckers who make these devices have zero interest in allowing you to do anything other than spend money with them, of which they will take their cut.

The whole thing feels optimized for trapping users, not enabling them.

Welcome to HN? :)

Anyway, you didn't miss out on anything by not bothering to look into the details. There are no details. No specs, no nothing. Only "get notified" for when it comes in fall.

It's a shame because I love the Pixel series and they're doing it a disservice by not marketing it better. Apple's copy on the other hand is generally excellent.

If you're not failing often, you're not an innovative company.

This has always been the way Google has worked. This is why they are literally the most successful company in the history of the world.

They also have failures, then again most companies have failures as well at all points in the product cycle.

Purchasing upon ads is the opposite. Trading dollars (and freewill) for time (along with painkiller to having to have personal taste)

Mate I'm in the EU and neighbor has got a statue of big gorilla on his balcony.

The EU is just as consumerist as the US. I can't tell you the number of young dudes who think they look cool because they're wearing a fake Hermes manpurse and who wear a cap as if a videoclip from the 90s from Vanilla Ice just called (don't get me wrong: I love Ice Ice Baby and I read Vanilla Ice is a good person. But it's 2026).

And there have been several EU companies getting funding to create an "AI personal shopper app" (all getting pwned by Google and other big players).

No really: the EU is incredibly consumerist too.

If you price that up to $1,000 (which some Chromebooks definitely do), then I start to ask a variation of the same question: Why did you buy that?

Managed corporate machines. I've worked with all platforms and managing ChromeOS is massively, massively easier than MacOS or Windows.

I am afraid Google's business model is incompatible with this approach as they have almost no customer service because it doesn't "scale". Actually, what they are doing is turning customer service costs into externalities, i.e. environmental waste.

I'd add that experiences like GP help expose that the main difference in most products between 'premium' and 'disposable' is in the branding and the price tag. With few exceptions, most companies that used to make the respected brand of the thing (e.g. Sony, G.E., Craftsman) now churn out the same garbage as you used to find 30 years ago in a fleamarket with a brand you'd never heard of - and that's if they don't actually outsource the design and/or production to that low-bidder company and simply license their logo directly to them.

And that's because these are all public or PE-owned companies, and it's a shortcut to easy short-term quarterly growth if you can cut your costs while keeping your price high or almost as high (after all, you're a "Premium Brand" so you can leverage your past reputation to trick customers into continuing to pay that premium).

When our fridge stopped fridging, we got it fixed for $300: this included replacing the compressor and the coils. When our dishwasher stopped washing, we paid $250 to have 3 or so things fixed at once. And so on.

I don't know if any appliance makers offer this, but if LG still offers it when we eventually replace, they're going to be on the top of my list.

No, it's because repair involves labor and unless we ship it across the world to take advantage of people making a dollar a day it's just not worth it.

The cost of making and importing stuff from the third world is just so cheap now that it's simpler to get a new one then to have someone making a living wage in the west fix it.

Please put a date on your research papers! I could figure it out roughly by looking at the "last accessed" date on their citations - 2025-05-15.

Pepole around me don't even know what google is doing besides search and probably maps.

I'm the person with an adblocker, the others are not.

Who is Googles target audiance? Its not me. I might only be a target for when i run some IT Platform in my work as an architect.

Failures like YouTube, GMail and Android?

i can kinda see it, they spent a lot of time getting Gemma 4 pretty efficient and then seeing everyone buy macs to run them and realize it’s maybe a real moat since Apple doesn’t make any AI

Would be an interesting product if it could actually give you GPT performance locally, will be an awful experience if it’s essentially just cloud AI…like a premium laptop where most of the features are locked behind a subscription would be wild

Please take a look at poor countries of the world like Pakistan. They have a repair culture. They have vehicles from the 80’s out on the road doing daily driving work instead of being used as vintage show pieces. It’s a poor country, this is a necessity. But nevertheless seeing the repair culture there in contrast to the disposable culture in the western world makes me pause.

In fact, in "shithole countries" where everyone wants to emigrate from, it is exactly the opposite: i.e. you try to fix everything even if it takes sooo long.

- Chromebook with Gemini

- Chromebook Pro

- Geminibook

- Googlebook

They all have their pros and cons.

This is more than just search + filtering. I've done similar things when trying to visualize home improvements, and find that it really is a useful way to help validate my ideas.

So far a lot of the negative responses I've gotten have been along the lines of "only a fool would let AI do your thinking for you". But I find that it's a useful tool sharpening my thinking. Brainstorming, overcoming my own personal biases and gaps in my knowledge, idea validation, etc. Like "rubber ducking" [1], but the duck actually responds with some pretty insightful advice with surprising frequency.

Do I "need" AI for shopping? No, of course not. Can it reduce friction and lead to more informed buying decisions in certain cases? In my experience, yes.

Of course I've seen plenty of useless "just slap AI on it" jobs, too. Netflix put out an AI chatbot that I found particularly egregious, for example (I think maybe they've taken it down since). I didn't find Amazon's "Rufus" to be very trustworthy, either. And I know I'm coming across as pro-AI here, but in other matters I have plenty of serious concerns about AI. I'm just hoping to have a more nuanced conversation than "shopping with AI? Gross!". Or "only a fool would use a product built by greedy corporations!"

[1] https://theconversation.com/stuck-on-a-problem-talking-to-a-...

LLM’s absolutely have utility but it feels like everybody is trying to constantly poke me and go “are you using it? Are you using it? Please God fucking use it”

> I need dishwasher tablets

Could mean buy a 30 pack for £25 which have all the marketing buzz surrounding them, or buy the own brand 45 pack for £5 which does the job just as well.

I previously would have spent this time opening up 4 tabs on three diff hardware store sites, and an additional tab to pull up the relevant car forums for tips and advice. Which I ended up doing anyways, as well as some YouTube videos because I don't trust the results. But it still saved me a ton of time investigating and weighing out options as a decent aggregator of info.

I have a half dozen facebook marketplace searches going. I used to automate craigslist searches before craigslist became irrelevant. It's nothing complicated but "AI searches for me and notifies me" is better than me remembering to look.

Using several AI models to cut through the multidimensional sea of options.

It's not all grim, thia technology can genuinely be helpful.

But whether it's search or AI-chat, what's annoying is efforts to have it replace that things that exist rather than serving as useful addition. I use ChatGPT X many times a day (or hour) but unless I ask for an AI's opinion, I don't want it.

Well obviously you shop for clothes, but nowhere like the way people who like clothes shop for clothes.

Finding clothes is about matching the vision in your head. If you’re the type that just buy clothes whatever, this is not a problem that exists in your world.

At least i'm not buying pants every month.

Btw. you know who is buying my stuff? My wife :P

That said, for specific queries—e.g. "I need a linen sportcoat that is beige/natural. What are some brands? My price range is $XXX"—it is very good.

Got something that fits and is working: something that, even if I'd done some more homework on my own, I might not have gone with because I would have been hung up on finding a perfect, 1:1 replacement.

Love the idea but difficult problem to fix.

It's a total disaster and I will never buy Google hardware again.

Love their SaaS offerings though!

My guess is that they wanted to name this Geminibook but couldn't for some ultimately uninteresting reason.

ChromeOS devices fall out of support on a timeline. Google sometimes extends the timeline for some devices, and new devices have a longer timeline than in the past; maybe it's better for Education targeted devices, but the Chromebooks I've had for personal devices stopped getting updates and you're left with whatever state it is in; my first one stopped getting updates in the middle of the printing switch where cloud printing was discontinued and local printing didn't actually work.

My understanding is that Google has announced they will stop development for new ChromeOS devices and ten years after the last device is released (not purchased) support goes poof ... and I imagine support activity for the last 5 years of the last device's ten year support will be a lot less than the first 5 years.

You know, everyone used to have specific needs in clothing when I was young. Somehow fast fashion advertised that out of us to solve their own supply chain problems.

If I need to buy something new in order feel like I'm having 'fun', then I try to ask 'why' as many times as necessary to work out what hole I'm actually trying to fill, or what scratch I'm trying to itch. There are a couple of second hand items I want to buy off Gumtree, but I have no immediate need for them, they'd be for some future situation that's more likely than not to be only theoretical. Knowing that they are there, available, makes me want them, rather than some actual existing purpose.

> to find out about new things to buy.

I would interpret this as "to find out why I should feel unhappy and empty that I don't own these things".

On things that look nice, yes, I've got some nice art, but there's a limited amount of space in which to put up nice looking things, and if you're buying them frequently then you're either throwing out a lot or you're having to store a lot. Additionally, I don't think I've ever seen anything that looks remotely nice advertised on the Internet; or at least looks nice and isn't, in actuality, mass-produced shit that's been polished up.

Having said that, if I had more money to throw away I'd do up my study like an old-school English manor-house library, full matching bookshelves, wainscoting, desk and chair. That's purely 'looks nice' and I would throw away the patchwork that currently furnishes my study. I'll say that's been advertised to me through (un)intentional 'product placement' in movies and TV shows, rather than Internet advertising though.

I am a basic human being, however.

I think this is an easy question to answer: 1. what's your monthly ad spend? 2. how many ads did you view lasy week? You're probably not their target.

I think the problem with HN/Engineer types is they basically never see ads designed to appeal to them because they aren't a large enough audience.

Or perhaps just Wet or Dry if you live in northen Australia.

To me that's like living in a transparent house where your landlord can always watch you but it's fine because you really like the nice showerhead.

Though, people "want" a lot of things that actually end up making them less happy. So responding to demand doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, but only time will tell.

Despite this, adidas does not have a tall thin filter despite them selling tall thin shirts in shops.

I do not know why.

Now i have to start searching around what brands have this option to filter.

I do not know why ecommerce online is so shit at least it feels shit for me.

If AI would find something in that price range and it would just work, man i would be happy.

If Google was launching a new laptop that was meant to run models locally I would be really excited.

At no point in the process did ChatGPT direct me to any listings. I fed it my criteria, and it gave back a text response listing car models that met my criteria. The only links it included were links to reddit posts and other car reviews. And the results were useful to me because they pointed out where my own pre-existing biases had caused me to overlook one model that I probably should have paid more attention to.

What you are suggesting feels more like a potential future threat than my actual experience thus far.

I found the listings by conducting a separate search on a used car listing website - and the number of matches that met my criteria were small enough that I was basically able to look exhaustively through all the matches. But shopping for used cars can be a little confusing at times because there are a lot of different configurations that change every year. Sometimes the listing might just say something like "2022 Touring, Safety Package" and include a bunch of photos - and identifying whether a given listing has a particular feature you are looking for requires some investigation (ideally they would include a full list of options, but often times they don't). Or often times the listing itself might contain incorrect information. And I found ChatGPT to be a useful tool for quickly making sense of the various configurations, and of course conduct my own sanity checks to be sure the information is not hallucinated.

I'm not suggesting you should solely rely on AI for shopping (although in some cases for low-risk purchases it may be fine) - but rather as an additional tool to aid in research and decision making.

As if the products you find in mass market brick'n'mortar stores are any different.

That's not how that works; "someone is doing this" doesn't prove a rule "no one is doing this" -- quite the opposite

"The exception that proves the rule" is for things like "closed Thursdays" (rule = open on other days), "no parking after 8 PM" (rule = parking allowed before 8 PM), "no refunds on games" (rule = refunds available on other items), etc.

> I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience,

That is kind of the idea of serving the long tail. Everyone is unique, and there are a lot of everyones.

That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.

Quality is amazing, fit is incredible, and the price is only 20-30% more than off the rack, but the clothes can last a decade+.

Sometimes the ancient solution (meet another person with a measuring tape) is the best one.

If anything, Apple is in general the worst on this particular metric. Switching to Apple because you had a repairability problem with another brand is kinda funny.

https://9to5google.com/2024/07/12/chromeos-lacros-ending/

I don't think we need any computers really. They'll be inundated with computers and technology their whole lives. They'll figure it out. Just keep this tech out of the classroom altogether.

We've had computers in the classroom for over a decade now, scores and learning has not gone up. It's a failed experiment.

FreeBSD?

(I hate ads too, but I think I understand the alternative perspective).

Also, Japan is a cheap travel destination right now. Two people can do a 14 day trip easily for $3000 total. That's not nothing but it's also in the realm of many middle class people regardless of where they live.

Here in Mexico there are plenty of "unofficial" laptops/mobile (Apple, Windows, Androids) repair shops that even receive your device by DHL/UPS, fix it and return it. Because the labor costs are low enough to make it worth. The only downside is that most of the spare parts are imported from the US.

1. The waste is still a tremendous shame, both in the materials that will realistically never be recovered in 'recycling', and in the toxicity that results from a lot of that trash created.

2. Jobs in repairing lots of things were arguably pretty good jobs, and we've traded these for, best case, more complete drudgery retailing/supply chain jobs as we get a new laptop every year or two instead of 5 years. Arguably a bigger failing of our economic system, which doesn't seem capable of adapting to global trade, or this shift we're discussing here, nor AI, but still a bummer regardless of fault.

I think in abundant society people would be able to have nice things and the time to take care of them.

Given the right guidance and difficulty level, I would enjoy fixing things in my washing machine.

If they want to compete with Apple then focus on Pixelbook, maybe (ditch other vendors).

Another option would be to buy Ultrabook trademark from Intel.

This does nothing for the customer and you can see a brand called Apple which has been successful with the Air, pro and neo under one brand.

And a consumer usually has a much higher return from working in his specialized field to earn money and buy a new product, than spending time with difficult repairs of a broken product.

And the reason people want to leave certain countries is for totally different reasons than not wanting to repair something. In fact, I would say with quite some certainty that emigrees who repaired first before leaving would still do it after emigrating.

The real reasons, in my opinion, are: 1) it takes skill and will to repair something yourself, 2) something new generally feels better than repaired/used, 3) logistics make replacing/repairing less cost efficient, 4) with every replace, companies have a new touchpoint to try to upsell their customers, 5) it takes less time to go to a shop and replace than repair, 6) it takes some giving a shit about the environment to prefer the more complicated route. And probably more.

The rose-tinted era of things being made to last never really happened. For each of the old survivor washing mashines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and Casiotron wrist watches that are still out there doing good work, countless thousands of others were recycled or landfilled because it was better to buy something different than to fix the old one.

It was never cheap to pay someone to work on stuff. The costs of hiring professional labor and the overhead associated with that labor (for service techs, that means things like vehicles, buildings, inventory, tools, training, insurance, book keeping, and covering next week's paycheck even if this week was slow) have always been expensive.

Parts have always been relatively expensive, too. Availability of parts has always been somewhat hit-or-miss.

It seems like an unpopular opinion, but I don't think it came to this. Instead, I think that it started off this way, and that it simply remains this way today.

So, sure: $150 for a new widget? Not so bad. Maybe a pro could get it done in a few hours (maybe they can even get two of them done in one workday!), while perhaps it will take you a day or two to work through R&Ring this thing on your own for the first time.

Whether the total investment (including time) is worth it to you is a personal decision, but that kind of decision-making is also not new. :)

Building your own is expensive, which is a stretch to cover with the margins of ecommerce and not go broke. And the off-the-shelf things are shockingly bad in their core functionality (e.g. Shopify, which may actually be the most developer-friendly and innovative, has no native concept of a color swatch that works the way you'd expect, nor does it have filtering other than by a single, painfully-manual, non-composable "tag" feature). Shopify's got a huge ecosystem of one-trick-pony "Apps" that add all the missing features, but running 50 "apps" doesn't fix things either - not only can they be fundamentally incompatible with each other, but nothing can fix the underlying deficiencies of the core data models (or if I'm being more charitable, their suitability for one's unique business domain).

Brands fit for the country of the store. For example, you won't find anything for a tall but not wide person in Singapore, except a few special stores, that won't be Adidas for sure. Unless ordering from overseas (and that costs nice money).

Because market. 1% just isn't worth it.

Yes, if you engage with the 'designed marketing channels' for products, you will end up with junk. If you want to have stuff that isn't junk, you need to do some leg work. A chatbot will not do that for you.

That's the problem. It moves an incredibly amount of power into a small handful of multinationals.

I don't want to live in a fucking world where an AI watches everywhere I go, reads everything I write, listens to everything I say, and makes decisions that affect me with zero appeal or recourse.

Because that's exactly where we are headed as people.

---

As businesses, we are headed to a world where if you don't pay tribute to the AI syndicates, your business will be undiscoverable.

Indeed it is, but when you are p95 (at least for height, but not overweight), you'll soon learn that you do not have any other option: common sizes stop growing in length (at least noticeably) usually at XL or even L, so you are looking for specific fits (long, slim) and those are rarely stocked in stores. Sometimes I'll try a model from one brand and buy a different colour online.

But enter online shopping and 14-30 day return windows.

Still, for formal wear (shirts, jackets, suits), I simply stick with made-to-measure and custom tailoring.

> "The exception that proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning is contested. Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used…

Personally, I use it in cases like:

- Rule: Don't do X, it's a bad idea.

- Exception: One time, someone with very special circumstances did X, and with a lot of finagling and effort they managed to make it work sort of OK.

Or:

- Rule: This fortress was an impregnable defensive position.

- Exception: In A.D. 1305, the fortress was taken, with great difficulty and many casualties, by an attacking army 100 times larger than the defending force.

Or:

- Rule: This river never overflows its banks.

- Exception: Once in history, on the day of the biggest rainstorm in 1000 years, the river is recorded to have overflowed its banks very slightly for a short time.

The exception proves the rule because the circumstances necessary for the exception to occur were themselves exceptional.

I ended up with a T14 Gen 4 and I'm super happy with it.

Are there stories where Apple straight up said they wouldn't repair a watch? I thought they'd repair it even if the repairs were more the the replacement value.

Even as a kid, me and all my friends used to groan when the commercial breaks came on. I've been muting commercials since I knew how to use a mute button.

Do we really have to litigate this? Have you been on the Internet at all in the last 2 decades? Do you seriously think that even if that kind of advertising vector isn't being paid for today, it won't be tomorrow?

It is almost childishly naive to assume that these companies that are bleeding billions will have the ethical fortitude to say 'no' to Chevy / Ford / Jeep / Whoever when they offer them a check to make sure Toyota and Honda are unceremoniously just de-prioritized as recommendations.

---

Beyond that, the issue is still that you are not going to get complete market coverage. It's feasible that you might on certain smaller market segments (Cars, for example), but something with much more producers and products in the segment has no chance. You would be better off spending the time to understand the market, what differentiates the products in it, and how to think about the parameters involved - all things that are being just abstracted away by asking a Chatbot for a list of requirements.

Also sometimes when doing more complicated purchases that require multiple products, I use it to sift through Amazon.

Especially ChatGPT seems to be optimizing for this use case, like a “search engine that can actually reason” (by lack of a better description). It’s convenient, and saves me a lot of time compared to the mess that Google has become.

(Obviously it’s likely this will happen to AI as well in the future, but right now, it’s pretty good)

isn't that what search engines were built for? we've just forgotten how to build a search engine that's not just an ad factory, so instead we're putting an ad factory into our new search engine?

I feel like I see a brand new way of saying “something that people don’t really want” on a near daily basis nowadays

What it actually is: a salesperson

It took the mass public a long time (15 years?) to realize search engines had shifted from the former to the latter, and that allowed Google to leverage that misplaced trust into huge profits.

Expect commercial AI to be the same, unless it's explicitly set up otherwise (read: Kagi assistant).

Has any of this changed?

Also, I tend to take with a grain of salt any comment that starts with "it's easy/simple/obvious", especially if it doesn't provide details or a link.

The Chromebooks are probably cheaper than the hardware itself could be, but that's a good demonstration of the issue.

It requires specialized and local labor. For products you can ship back to the assembly line, this can sometimes work. If you need a local technician, on the other hand, because the assembly line is in China or the product is heavy, yeah, it very well may be that there is no niche where repairs aren’t a material fraction of a new product.

The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor.

Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.

...seems more like a case against Amazon (search) than for AI, then.

Maybe I'm fortunate enough to live someplace where Geizhals[0] exists, but it's been years since I gave up on Amazon altogether. The bad UX is just user hostile and there are many competitively priced retailers with web shops anyway.

[0]: https://geizhals.eu/

Conflicts of interest are nothing new - dating back to newspapers, radio, television, and search engines. And yet in all of these mediums companies have figured out how to display sponsored content while still maintaining the trust of their users. AI companies have a similar vested interest in maintaining their users’ trust (not to mention adherence to current and future advertising regulations).

> Do we really have to litigate this?

Yes, if you are going to assume the worst possible outcome, then you must also explain why other outcomes - such as clearly distinguishing sponsored content from “informational” content - are not possible.

> Beyond that, the issue is still that you are not going to get complete market coverage.

Which non-AI information sources promise complete market coverage?

> You would be better off spending the time to understand the market, what differentiates the products in it, and how to think about the parameters involved

I agree this should be the end goal in decision making. And in my experience AI can be a useful tool to get there.

> all things that are being just abstracted away by asking a Chatbot for a list of requirements.

ChatGPT doesn’t just give a list of results without context. It’s also quite good about justifying why it gives the results that it does. And you are free to ask follow-up questions, and fact check the responses against other sources.

I treat it the same as basically any other information source that I come across. I fully understand that it is not perfect. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not useful.

These machines are general purpose technologies used by hundreds of millions of people. ChatGPT alone is used by over 900M people every week at least. You can count the technologies with that scale of users in your hand.

You'll never conceive all the sort of uses it could possibly have, much like nobody could ever conceive all the uses the internet had and will have and it would be misguided to think so. As you see, there's like 2 dozen people here telling OP the thing he thought 'No one' could possibly LLMs use for is in-fact seeing some use.

No, it's the exact opposite, because the consumer is on the hook for the purchase price as well as any repair costs.

Labor is an input too. Fixing something in a way that saves some materials, but requires hours of skilled labor and specialized equipment doesn't straightforwardly mean you're saving overall.

Obviously, a better search engine that also doesn't display ads is better. But is it $20/month better? When it's also got daily usage limits? And they're almost certain to start injecting ads as soon as they possibly can without alienating people?

Or more succinctly, as first-year law students learn: Expressio unius est exclusio alterius — to state one thing is to implicitly exclude others.

https://definitions.lsd.law/expressio-unius-est-exclusio-alt...

If you have a list of specific criteria, search engines are impossibly bad at finding what you’re looking for, but top LLMs do it with ease.

ChatGPT and Claude have been amazing timesavers in my recent tech acquisitions at work, and I find I am able to find better solutions

Chatgpt found me a lot more choices.

I wanted custom lifts for a shoe. Chatgpt found me a local store that did it, I'd been calling around for years asking to no avail.

Chatgpt is really damn good at niche stuff.

This guy couldn't recognise the conflict of interest, and neither will 80%+ of AI users.

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzbz0HDVKEs "Louis Theroux visits top gambler's Hilton hotel suite - Gambling in Las Vegas - BBC"

http://www.ravisehgal.com/

It even supports bidding for the ad space!

Source: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

I have one shirt where each button hole has contrast stitching around it, an absolute baller of a shirt.

Even if they cost me $200 today it'd be worth it. They last so long and being able to define your exact own personal style feels great.

https://www.maxwellsclothiers.com/

If computers were that critical to education you'd think those same executives would be loading up their children with all the tech they can afford.

They'll have computers at home. And the evidence seems to point in one direction: the more exposure kids have to devices, the more stunted their development tends to be. Add to that the class division, where rich kids are increasingly raised with strictly-policed device exposure, while poor kids' classrooms are littered with iPads and Chrombooks, and I think we can start making blanket statements.

Granted, I was thinking of my home airport, SFO. The tickets from there are <$800 a person round trip

$2000/year on average seems a good estimate, and $3000/year is something that could be possible.

This is higher than I expected.

If I know what I'm looking for, Kagi is much easier.

If I don't know what I'm looking for (I have hobbies that involve learning new techniques, and my method for learning a new technique seems to involve getting inspired by short-form videos, which don't come with a glossary of terms or a dictionary of tool names, so I often don't know what I'm looking for) then I can describe it to claude who can usually come up with a name for the thing, some useful advice about it, and where to start looking.

Last time, as an example, was all about enamalling and cloisonne, which was quite a rabbit-hole. And yes, I could search for beginner guides for the thing. But that is going to land me at a YouTube video which has 5 minutes of "hi welcome to my show, hit the like and subscribe" and then 15 minutes of waffle before finally getting to "the thing you want is called a trivet". I can read way, way, faster than people on YouTube can get to the point, so I prefer talking to claude.

- mining the 95th percentile, leveraging the Pareto Principle

- optimizing and ubiquitizing under-optimized paradigms

- pioneering agentic solutions to aggressively expand product frontiers

- innovating high-risk strategies to serve underserved markets

- digging deep into the inner recesses of my being and extracting what's left of my soul through my nostrils

And so much more.

Google is likely very happy to give up on the privacy violations for a few years of a child's life in exchange for getting that child hooked on Google services so they can freely violate privacy for an entire adult lifetime.

I think this is more you than me. The middle class in America is still strong. Is it weakening and eroding? That is also true.

> Shelling out three grand for a two-week vacation is simply unattainable for the vast majority of the population.

Would you quote me where I said it was the majority, let alone vast?

Well, actually, depending on the data and who you ask, 40-60% of Americans spend $3000 a year on travel. Is 60% the majority? I'm not good at math.

https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-th...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/travel/studies/summer-travel-repo...

So really, you may be the one who's disconnected from reality. Not to say that things aren't getting better, I think they're getting worse. Just that you've got a bit of a doomer mindset.

It's up to the folks doing the engineering to make sure that the gears last long enough.

After all, it doesn't do anyone any good at all if the gearbox (whatever it consists of) still works after while the rest of the machine has failed.

And plenty of plastic gearboxes exist in the world. We just don't usually hear much about the ones that end up working Just Fine.

I have a 20+ year old cordless drill that I've beaten the snot out of. As cordless drills go, it offers a mountain of torque. I used it to roll new threads into long, extruded holes that were stamped into radiator supports of new Chevy Impala cop cars. Where my co-workers' drills would just flatly give up and they'd use ratchets instead, this drill would finish the job without a complaint. It did take two hands to hang onto the thing when doing this job and it was not kind to the operator even then, but it accomplished the work.

The plastic gears inside are still fine. The plastic drill body is also holding up very well. Again, we don't usually hear much about the plastic parts that outlive the rest of the machine, but those parts have been great.

In this particular case the nicad batteries for it became NLA, and the ones that came with it (and their replacements) are dead AF, so it has no value to me at this point. I really should take it apart, keep whatever bits are interesting to me and recycle the rest of it.

Due to the lack of new batteries, my world of power tools has moved on. This drill is not doing anyone any good how it is -- despite the astoundingly-good plastic gearset still being (as far as I can tell; ran when parked) just fine.

If it had metal gears instead and those also lasted longer than the machine's lifecycle, then that added expense wouldn't have been an advantage at all.

---

Anyway, I aim to be helpful instead of deconstructive here.

If gearboxes are a weak link in washing machines, then it is possible to eliminate them. There are washing machines that don't have gearboxes at all; these are usually front-loaders that only spin-a-ma-thing and that don't really do much in the way of reciprocating motion, but they exist.

Some of them are very stout indeed, though they may appear to be fairly featureless.

Dexter may be at the high end, here, with a belt-driven drum and a VFD-supplied motor; they're made in Iowa. Many places like laundromats and fire stations love these machines for their durability and repairability. Dexter is certainly proud of them; they are not cheap. I once read about their in-house factory testing: IIRC, they take a machine off the line, weld a weight onto the side of the drum that is 40% of the mass that the machine is supposed to handle, and let it run at its highest speed for for 1000 continuous hours. If it fails, they consider it to be a problem that needs to be corrected upstream. It's a pretty good test, I think.

Whirlpool has similarly-shaped mechanisms at a fraction of the cost; many of those are made in Ohio. That's not necessarily an unsafe bet. (I did have a long chat with one of their process guys about things like air-conditioned final assembly areas and conformal coatings once. I've also cleaned up some corrosion on the VFD board's contacts and installed some dielectric grease on a machine that was built in that same plant, but it was built years before this conversation happened.)

Speed Queen is a common consumer favorite. They're still independent, AFAIK. (I've never been inside of a Speed Queen machine or hung out in their factories, so my commentary here is limited. The one I once had in my laundry room was completely trouble-free.)

Your phone and internet connections also have usage limits, and you’re also using them in various ways.

I agree that it’s extremely likely that, especially post-IPO, monetization will kill the current user experience, which I already hinted at in my previous comment.

For example, imagine if your skydiving instructor said "if your parachute doesn't open when you jump out of the airplane, you're gonna die", and you replied with "well actually that's not true, Vesna Vulović survived a fall from high altitude." Yeah, okay. The fact that you had to be smarty-pants about it and dig up a random exception really proves the point they were trying to make.

That’s a promise, no technical guarantee. Then there’s Cloud Act and FISA.

> Google is likely very happy to give up on the privacy violations

“likely”, exactly. This can change any time. We’ll just have to trust them. Scrolling through this thread it seems about zero trust in a US ad company who’s specialty is feeding off people’s privacy.

We should by now demanding technical guarantees. Open source, end-to-end encrypted with e.g. an overseer board checking the company. Companies like Proton are doing this.

Not anymore. Disney now targets high income earners, not the average American.

The data provided simply isn't sufficient to support the claim.

I don’t want to believe LLMs are the future of shopping either, but it’s wrong to dismiss actual successful users with hot air.

Difficult to determine causality in that system. All we can say is places with expensive labour tend to have expensive real estate. (The confounding variable, I imagine, is immigration.)

(Also that story is nuts! https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87)

Given the growing distrust of ad supported tech, I could see AI remaining as a paid product.

People on this website are so fucking pedantic and argumentative over the most obvious or inconsequential minutiae it drives me nuts.

According to [1], the average American household spend $682 on airfares in 2024, plus an additional $199 on "Intercity bus, train, and ship fare"

There is spending data on "out of town" trips in [2] but it is extremely hard to work with.

If the average household spends $881 on these cost then it's probably at least reasonable to double that in total travel spend, so in round numbers at least $2000 is an estimate I'd believe.

It also makes $3000/year within reasonable bounds of possibility. But in terms of measuring how households are doing I'd note this is down from the 2023 numbers.

The normal issues with measuring average vs median apply etc.

[1] https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trend...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables/top-line-means.htm

I posted more than one article.

A $3000 trip is within reach of more Americans than you expected. I don't know why you're unhappy to find that out.

That they were responding to someone else who couldn't see how it worked means it wasn't just pedantic nitpicking