Well, its that time of year again, isn’t it? With Google’s yearly hardware event now officially slated for October 15th, it seems like we should be hearing more about the presumed release of a Pixelbook successor we expect to see at the event. As we get closer and closer to the event and more and more inundated with Pixel 4 leaks, the lack of Pixelbook 2 leaks is starting to feel a little strange. Though we have a few new leaked images available today, I’m not supremely confident that this is the new Pixelbook or that we’re even certain we’ll get a new Pixelbook at the event.
So, first up, what you came here for. We’re looking at a pair of images that were put in the Chromium Bug tracker. Unfortunately the bug they were attached to has since been made private. The images don’t give us much and since we don’t have access to the actual bug any longer, I don’t even know for sure why the images were included. 9to5Google first posted the images and we reached out to Kyle Bradshaw about where they came from and what they were in reference to. There’s nothing in the photos that show clear reference to Google or ‘Atlas’, but Kyle assures me the bug referenced ‘Atlas’ specifically, so the base board in the device in the photos is likely ‘Atlas’.
Here’s why I’m not 100% putting my faith in these pics being exactly what we’ll see from Google’s next Chromebook. We’ve seen leaks from developers working on devices with ‘Atlas’ boards before and they’ve all varied pretty wildly in outward appearance. There’s little reason to think this particular set of partial device shots is the final hardware for ‘Atlas’. We’ve talked at length about why we believe ‘Atlas’ is Google’s next Chromebook and we see little reason for Google to invite us out for their event if a new Chromebook wasn’t coming, so seeing ‘Atlas’ next month at the event feels like a forgone conclusion: I just don’t know that these images accurately portray final hardware at all. Just look at the image from the last ‘Atlas’ leak from the same Chromium Bug Tracker source below. This doesn’t look like the same Chromebook at all.
Either way, we’ll finally be able to put all this ‘Atlas’ speculation to rest in less than a month and I will be very happy to get this one in the rear-view mirror. Not that I’m not excited about what Google is planning to do in the Chromebook space; it’s just been long in the tooth with this one and with so many new Chromebooks from so many manufacturers coming in the next couple months, there’s a lot of non-Google-made Chromebooks I’d like to be spending my time on, too.
