Episode 44 - GoogleBook, New SnapDragon And Josh Lied?
In this episode of Tek With Josh, I’m catching up on some of the biggest tech news of the week, starting with a confession: after saying in the last episode that I would probably wait until next June to upgrade my phone, I lasted about a day. An $885 trade-in offer for my iPhone 17 Pro Max changed the equation, and I ended up ordering the iPhone 18 Pro Max much sooner than planned. I talk about why I made the decision, why I’m not necessarily recommending anyone else do the same, and how quickly my carefully thought-out upgrade plan disappeared.
From there, I get into Google’s new Googlebook laptops and why I think they are much more interesting than simply another generation of Chromebooks. With prices starting around $899 and climbing to $1,299, Google is moving directly into premium laptop territory while bringing Android much deeper into the desktop experience. I go through the different models, the hardware, Android phone integration, Gemini features, and the bigger question of whether Google can finally create the kind of phone-and-laptop ecosystem Android users have been missing.
I also break down Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, including its 2nm design, Oryon CPU reaching 5 GHz, major graphics and AI improvements, advanced mobile gaming features, and support for serious camera and video workloads. Smartphones already have more performance than most people need for everyday use, so the bigger question is what companies are going to do with all this power. Between Google trying to make Android a serious laptop platform and Qualcomm pushing phone hardware even further, mobile and desktop computing are starting to overlap in some very interesting ways.