How Chromebooks Are About to Totally Transform Laptop Design

Google's first Chromebook was the kind of laptop you'd design if you didn't give a damn about laptop design. It was thick, heavy, rubbery, boring, and black. Everything about the Cr-48 was designed to communicate that this device was still an experiment. Even the name, a reference to an unstable isotope of the element Chromium, was a hint at the chaos raging inside this black box. "The hardware exists," Sundar Pichai told a crowd of reporters at the Cr-48's launch event in December of 2010, "only to test the software."