AI News Feed
Market watch
Analysts Raise Targets on CoreWeave, Palo Alto Networks and AmazonBandwidth Is Not Internet Speed, and Upgrading It May Not Fix a Slow ConnectionSyncing a Phone to a Rental Car Can Leave Private Data for the Next DriverMobLand Season 2 Episode 4 Lands on Paramount+ October 9AirPods Pro 3 Fall to $179 in October Prime Day Deal3D Printing Infill Density and Pattern Affect Strength, Material Use and Print Time, Engadget Says
Analysts Raise Targets on CoreWeave, Palo Alto Networks and AmazonBandwidth Is Not Internet Speed, and Upgrading It May Not Fix a Slow ConnectionSyncing a Phone to a Rental Car Can Leave Private Data for the Next DriverMobLand Season 2 Episode 4 Lands on Paramount+ October 9AirPods Pro 3 Fall to $179 in October Prime Day Deal3D Printing Infill Density and Pattern Affect Strength, Material Use and Print Time, Engadget Says
Products & Applications

Google’s Cr-48, the Forgotten Prototype That Started the Chromebook

The Verge podcast revisits Google’s Cr-48, the unmarked prototype that introduced ChromeOS and the Chromebook.

AI News Feed · 2026-10-04 22:20

In the episode, The Verge’s Nilay Patel and MKBHD’s Marques Brownlee join David Pierce to relive the release of the Cr-48, Google’s prototype laptop. They explain the history of ChromeOS and Chromebooks and discuss whether Google’s approach to computer hardware was the right one, according to The Verge.

The Verge said the current season of Version History has been exploring the most iconic school tech. Last week’s episode examined Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child XO-1 and his goals for global distribution. The series has also featured the lead game designer of The Oregon Trail and explained why everyone had to own a TI graphing calculator.

The Verge noted that subscribers can access Version History and its other podcasts without ads through their account settings. For more on Cr-48 history, The Verge pointed to earlier coverage including The New York Times’ “Chromebook From Samsung Has Its Head in the Cloud,” PCMag’s “The Google Chrome OS CR-48 Notebook: Hands-On,” and Ars Technica’s “Nothing but ’Net: hands-on with the Cr-48 Chrome OS laptop.”

The Cr-48’s lack of consumer availability and branding made it an unusual first step, but The Verge’s episode presents the prototype as the beginning of the Chromebook line and of a larger argument about cloud-based computing and school technology.