Project Aluminium could finally kill off awful, clunky Chromebook names

Let me be brutally honest for a second: Chromebook names are absolutely terrible (for the most part). If someone asks you what the hottest $599 laptop on the market is right now, Apple fans can simply say MacBook Neo. Two words. Clean, iconic, and instantly recognizable.

If someone asks me for the best mid-range ChromeOS device, I have to recite names like the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 714 or perhaps the ASUS ExpertBook CX54 Chromebook Plus. It’s a branding mess from Google and their OEMs and frankly, it makes the ecosystem look clunky before you even open the box.

But as we look toward the launch of Project Aluminium, there is a massive silver lining on the horizon: the end of OEMs being forced to include “Chromebook” or “Chromebook Plus” in the device title. And that could be pretty amazing.

How we got here

The naming problem isn’t entirely the fault of the manufacturers. Google has strict branding guidelines. If an OEM wants to build a ChromeOS laptop, the word “Chromebook” has to be in the title. When Google launched the new premium tier in the latter half of 2023, that requirement expanded to “Chromebook Plus” for the most popular devices.

When you force an OEM to use a two-word OS brand, and then they add their own company name (ASUS), their product line (ExpertBook), their form-factor (Spin/Flip), and their model number (CX54), you end up with a name that doesn’t fit on a Best Buy price tag.

We know Google is capable of clean branding. The Pixelbook and Pixel Slate remain two of the best-named (and best-looking) devices in Google’s history. But the broader OEM ecosystem has been drowning in syllables for years.

The ‘Aluminium’ clean slate

This is why the merger of Android and ChromeOS is so incredibly exciting from a marketing perspective. As Google re-baselines the operating system for the Project Aluminium era, the very concept of a “Chromebook” is likely going to evolve or completely disappear over time.

Without the strict requirement to cram “Chromebook” or “Chromebook Plus” into every title, OEMs are going to have an opportunity to hit the reset button. Imagine a world where that high-end Lenovo tablet we’ve been tracking in the Gerrit simply launches as the Lenovo IdeaTab Pro. Imagine Dell getting back into the mix and dropping a flagship clamshell just called the Dell XPS 14. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Winning the branding war

If Google actually wants their OEMs to go toe-to-toe with something like the MacBook Neo, they have to win on more than just the spec sheet. They need clean branding on top of a unified, desktop-class Android operating system running on high-end Qualcomm and MediaTek silicon. Those sorts of devices deserve names that sound like premium devices, not enterprise inventory codes. Here’s hoping that Project Aluminium delivers on that front.