Goodbye ChromeOS, Hello… Aluminium OS? - DTNS 5153

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 25th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context, and help each other understand. Oh, and today, Michelle Roman is going to join us because Google's aluminum OS might replace Chrome OS on the PC. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Merritt. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. Can we redo that? I'm sorry. I screwed up the music. I realized I forgot to fade it out. That's all right. No, no. Yeah, right through to the big story. I forgot to introduce myself, too. So let's, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I pressed the wrong one.

0:48Okay, here we go. Three, two.

0:55This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 25th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. And today, Michelle Roman's going to join us because Google's aluminum OS might replace Chrome OS on the PC. I'm going to stumble over that, I guarantee you. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Marituminium. Yeah, Tom Marriott. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

1:25That's a little close to Marriott, which I didn't mean to imply. Yeah, my dad always tried to imply that he was related to Bill Marriott because my dad was Bill Merritt. You know, anyway. Wow, who knew that there was overlap there? Google's working on a new Aluminium OS. Aluminium or Aluminium? We're going to find out. According to apparently a job listing that was spotted by Android Authority. And yes, Michelle Roman is at least the one who wrote about it for Android Authority. We have the author of that article. And we're going to talk all about what this Aluminium OS is. Welcome, Michal. Thanks for having me, Jason.

2:06It's a pleasure to be back on DTNS. It's been a while. Hey, yeah. Thanks for coming back. Thank you so much for being here. Okay, so how are you saying it? Or have you even spoken it out loud? You probably just wrote about it. Aluminium? Aluminium? I have spoken it out loud in my head. I have not spoken it out loud in my mind. I mean, like, out loud. So this will be the first time saying it. how you minium it feels how you minium it does it does i'm having flashbacks i feel like it was was it apple however many decades ago aluminium and they're giving any british listeners that are like that's the correct way to say it that's the way you're supposed to say it yeah totally okay all right well that's probably the least important aspect of this story what is this operating system and what what kind of clues did you find uh in this job listing to give you a sense of what it is and where it's going.

2:56So basically, earlier this year, in an interview after Google I.O., Samir Samad basically let slip that Google is working on combining Chrome OS and Android. Now, that kind of followed rumors that I published back in November of last year saying that, oh, this is the direction that Google is working and they want to combine Chrome OS and Android into a single platform so that they can better focus their development efforts on a single unified desktop OS instead of wasting time with Chrome OS on one side and Android on one side, converge the two and better compete on the PC platform. And then at the Snapdragon Summit, back in late September, Qualcomm and Google executives went on stage and publicly confirmed that, yes, we are working on combining Chrome OS and Android into a single PC platform.

3:46So we have confirmation. Like we know that Google is working on a new unified desktop OS platform. But beyond that confirmation, we didn't really have much idea on, okay, what will it be called potentially? What segments will it be targeting? Which is another very important question because, you know, Chrome OS has been known for a long time to be targeting the budget and the mid-range segments. But they don't really go after the same premium segments as MacBooks and certain high-end Windows laptops do. Now, they have tried to expand into that segment with Chromebook Plus, but it's not really seeing much traction.

4:22So they're kind of concerned like, OK, where is Google going to be going with their Android on PC project? Are they going to be targeting the same primarily low end strategy that they did with Chrome OS? Or will they go across the price spectrum? And over the weekend, I was made aware of a job listing that Google posted a couple of months ago on LinkedIn, or at least like just through LinkedIn, for a senior product manager on Android, on the Android team working on laptops and tablets. And this job is responsible for basically for driving the strategy of basically creating a roadmap for all of their existing Chrome OS devices and tiers, as well as a roadmap for their new aluminum Android platforms and devices.

5:11And the job listing specifically defines aluminum as a new operating system built with artificial intelligence AI at the core. hmm and that sounds familiar uh because we know you know very recently android xr was announced released and google really highly touted that as like their first os with ai built at its core so it kind of seems like this is the the new focus is this meant to be like ultimately would you say this is a replacement for chrome os or this is an addendum to just depending on form factor and specs and that sort of stuff? I think for like the first couple of years, it's going to be an addendum, like a side grade, because there are a lot of Chromebooks still being sold right now.

5:57And they're promised X number of users to support. There's still a lot of devices that won't reach end of life for many years. So Google can't conceivably, without really damaging the relationship with users and with enterprises, end support for Chrome OS anytime soon. But they also want to eventually migrate people and new enterprises over to this new Android-based Aluminium OS project because, you know, that's the future of their combined platform. So they do mention in the job listing that they want to, this person responsible for the team will try to transit Google operations from Chrome OS to Aluminium without disrupting any of their existing business relationships.

6:41So that's one of the key tasks that this person will be responsible for. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that in the screenshot you put, because that job listing is now gone, that you still see Chromebook and Chromebook Plus mentioned alongside these new aluminum-style names. Yeah. And yeah, I think, yeah, as you mentioned, there's still a lot of Chromebooks being sold under the Chromebook Plus branding. So I think they're going to continue to have these two brands exist simultaneously. But what's unclear is how they're going to differentiate the new Android-based version of Chrome OS from the non-Android-based version.

7:21I have some theories based on some things that I've seen on bug reports that Google, how Google engineers are referring to it internally. I've seen a mention of the old version or the current version of Chrome OS be referred to as Chrome OS Classic. so maybe they could call the current Chrome OS Chrome OS Classic and then the new Android-based version is just Chrome OS like basically supplanting it and just becoming the new Chrome OS for everyone or maybe they could just call the new they could go with Android branding entirely and ditch Chrome OS and maybe call it Android Desktop to be something similar like put an emphasis on the Android side of things kind of like they're doing with Android XR but I don't know if they'll fully ditch Chrome OS branding just because it still has such a powerful presence in the education market, especially.

8:08That's kind of similar to what Amazon's doing with Fire OS, actually, where they've rebuilt it from the ground up, but they're still calling it Fire. Yeah. Well, I think for... And Amazon's also doing kind of an emulation layer, right, a cloud-served emulation layer. That could also happen here, potentially. Actually, I think for Amazon, they did name it something differently. I think they do call it Vega OS. they call it the os vega and they call the device fire is that right yeah yeah yeah yeah okay gotcha so probably still have chromebooks i don't know yeah you know they'll be calling it something else just because everyone knows people know what a chromebook is for sure pretty known quantity at this point like you said they are everywhere and not just everywhere like at least i i see them a lot because my kids you know have have gone uh through the school system and and often those are the devices that kids are given.

9:00So definitely in the education world. But like you pointed out, and I hadn't really considered that, these devices have such a long period of support. Often they have upwards of seven years right out of the box of support for them. So the thought that they might just suddenly be sidelined doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There has to be some sort of significant bridge between the two. Otherwise, you end up making a lot of people upset. And people in places like the education system and all that. That's not good. Yeah. So, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see how they handle this transition period, especially if they're going to offer a way for people to migrate from the non-Android Chrome OS to the new Android Chrome OS, because that is always a very huge technical undertaking whenever you try to migrate from different operating systems with retaining the user data.

9:54Or if they're just going to make it optional or just not offer it. at all from any devices and just continue supporting Chrome OS until the last device they released under the old branding reaches end of life, which I don't know. One of the brilliances of Chrome OS is that it can run on really old machines, right? You can revive old machines. So I can't imagine they'd want to totally abandon that aspect of things, but it's Google. Who can say? Yeah. I mean, to be clear, Android can also run on really low-end hardware. But Chrome OS was kind of special in just how efficiently it ran on low-end devices.

10:33I have a nine-year-old Chromebook I still use, and it works fine. Yeah. Yeah, that's a big selling point. I realize it's probably pure speculation, but knowing that we're seeing this job posting now, and it still feels a little early, Do you have any sense of a suspected timeline where we might start to see or hear more about this? Any clues? I think at Snapdragon Summit, Rick Arcelo did mention that we'll start seeing... They're going to announce something next year, 2026. I kind of doubt we're going to get commercially ready devices with all the bells and whistles you expect of a desktop OS.

11:17I think maybe we'll just get some announcements of like, oh, here are our partners. Here's a look. at an early version of the operating system that we got. And here's what to expect. And I think we'll probably have like a, maybe a launch date 2027 or something for like actual commercial hardware. I just don't see, I can imagine them treating it like Android XR. We're like, we're going to announce something to get as much interest as possible next year, but it's not going to be ready for a while. Yeah. And parsing the name too closely, probably when I say this, but the fact that it's called aluminum, makes me wonder if there is a chromium style approach to this where they would allow more manufacturers to use it uh and and make use of it and do their own forks and and stuff of it and i probably reading too much into it just because two things end in em but you know it's interesting to think about i mean technically android is still open source so they could do that right now we I think for now, a lot of the desktop-related changes that Google is doing to Android does end up in the Open Source version of Android.

12:26So it's not like Wear OS where almost all of that is behind closed doors. So I think we probably could see a legitimate One UI from Samsung version of Android Desktop, whatever they end up calling it. That's fascinating to think about. Yeah, indeed. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for carving out some time. I know you're already on your Thanksgiving break week, so you gave us 10 minutes of your time, and we really appreciate you being here. What do you want to point people to? Your work at Android Authority, a couple of podcasts that you do? What do you want people to know? Yeah, just go to androidauthority.com.

13:03You can find all the reporting that I've done on this aluminum OS project, as well as, hopefully in the future, more work to be done showing off what Google is working on in Android 17 and beyond. So, yeah, just check out Android Authority. Excellent. Right on. Thank you, Michelle. It's great to have you here. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Big thanks to Michelle Sergiu, Kirk Stephenson, Miranda Janelle, and big thanks to Brenda, who gave us a raise, Jason. Yeah. Thank you, Brenda. We finally did it. Thanks, Brenda.

13:41There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Yeah, Google is in talks with Meta, the Facebook makers, to negotiate the sale by Google of a large supply of tensor processing units for Meta's data centers beginning sometime in 2027. At least that's the scuttlebutt from the information. Meta would reportedly rent those chips from Google Cloud starting next year. Google has in the past restricted the use of its TPUs to its own facilities and operations. So I guess the idea is meta rents the chips, but puts them in their own data centers. This would bring Google nearer to NVIDIA in the data center processing market.

14:20And Google thinks it could probably capture close to 10 % of NVIDIA's annual revenue. NVIDIA had some thoughts on this, posted on X that, quote, we're delighted by Google's success. They've made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google, pointing out that like, yeah, maybe they'll take some money from us. but they're also going to give us some money. They also, NVIDIA, pointed out that its own hardware is, quote, the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. So don't mess with me. Neener, neener. Na, na, na, na, na, na. Yeah, and I guess, you know, NVIDIA reaction on, you know, Wall Street trading, if that's your thing, definitely took a little bit of a hit, at least in pre-Bell, whatever you want to call it.

15:10There's a lot of momentum behind Alphabet right now. I don't pay any attention to that day of stock market stuff because there's so many other factors that come into it. But I think NVIDIA is right. Like, yeah, we're going to continue to sell chips. It's not like people are going to stop buying NVIDIA chips because of this. This is a pretty limited test. I mean, they are renting the chips. It's coming from Google Cloud. Like, this isn't the same thing NVIDIA does in any way. NVIDIA just sells a chip to anybody and you can do whatever you want with them. NVIDIA is actually trying to get into the idea of running data centers with its own chips and selling more of the things to build data centers.

15:49So it's more like these two are moving closer to meeting in the middle in some way. Oh, so then could we have NVIDIA and Google kind of collaborating in that regard in the future? Oh, like, yeah, at some point, could Google Cloud buy a data center from NVIDIA? Sure, yeah. Yeah, right. Absolutely. I could see that happening. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, very, very interesting stuff. And I guess to a certain degree, I'm kind of surprised that Google hasn't dipped its toes in this yet. Like it kind of seems like one of those things where I'm like, oh, I'm surprised they hadn't done this before. TPU has been around a while.

16:27But yeah, Google's in an interesting position here. I'll be curious to see how that plays out. You've got to build out a whole sales organization. You have to build out a whole maintenance and support organization when you provide these kinds of products. So Google probably was like, you know what? It makes more sense just to keep the advantage all to ourselves and then just sell people Google Cloud that runs TPUs in them. This isn't actually that much different from that. But it is taking a small step into a wider world, as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said. There you go. Yes. Love that. Yeah. Anthropic just launched Opus 4.5 yesterday.

17:03Don't know if you noticed that. It was kind of a big deal. People thought it was a big deal anyways. I played around with it a tiny bit. Improved coding performance, a much larger context windows. That basically means that users can have longer uninterrupted chats without kind of hitting that memory roadblock that forces you to stop and maybe open up a new chat and start over again. Claude also summarizes key points in the background. So you don't really see that, but that happens during the conversation. And that's an effort to improve on the coherence inside of those conversations to keep those longer conversations focused because things can kind of break down over time.

17:43With all LLMs, they all kind of face that. And so this is how they're tackling it with Opus 4.5. Anthropic says that 4.5 is more efficient. It uses far fewer tokens for similar or better results than its previous versions. They claim it's, quote, harder to trick with prompt injection than any other frontier model in the industry. Okay. Although they also admit that it's not entirely immune to those attacks. So I don't know how we test that. There's probably a test or some sort of benchmark for that. Yeah, you can do some pen testing on that. Yeah. But it has made gains also in agentic coding, in tool use.

18:20People are saying it's doing a great, you know, it's a great upgrade for tool use. and clod code by the way also now available as a desktop application i'd say if the main line kind of like frontier llms clod is probably the one i have the least direct experience with i don't know why do you think that is i don't know because i only have the capacity to work with or to like organize in my brain but why did you why didn't you make clod one of the more prioritized ones because claude is usually held up as the one that's safest it provides the most satisfaction it's good at writing yes but none of this improves that i found it interesting that this came out right after the gemini 3 stuff and just right it wasn't lost like you said like a lot of people paid attention to it but there wasn't as much hoopla around this as gemini 3 pro i mean And there's also just kind of an exhaustion right now.

19:21We have, in a very short period of time, just been inundated. The major players have unloaded their big models before the end of the year, really big updates. It's kind of hard to track it. Yeah, I don't know how I would answer that question, Tom, as far as why I hadn't. Because a lot of what I use AI for is around kind of assistance in writing. And Quad does have a solid reputation as far as that's concerned. I've been pushing myself to use it more the past week prior to even this news just because I saw that as kind of like almost a short-sightedness on my part. And so I've been using it a little more.

20:00And, yeah, I think at the end of the day, like there's so many different directions you can go. Like I almost need an LLM to organize what I use each LLM for. You probably get an agent to do that for you. Right. Yes. Probably so. Indeed. The president of the United States has signed an executive order directing the Department of Energy and National Labs to create a platform to consolidate U.S. scientific data. The idea is called Genesis Mission, and it wants to make government and other scientific data more easily available for academic and corporate researchers, well, as government researchers, and help the government use that data to solve engineering, energy, and national security problems.

20:45Now, there's some medical going on in some of these efforts, but that wasn't the focus. It was definitely solving the national grid and national security and the engineering around both of those. The data is going to be used to train foundation models and create agents that can test research. Dr. Dario Gill, the Undersecretary for Science and the mission director, or I guess the Genesis mission director, believes that they could possibly double research and development productivity. At least that's their goal. The order specifically mentioned, quote, acceleration in AI development and utilization as one aim.

21:22So this is very much about supercharging AI development and very much a response to China, which is doing this for factories in the US. They want to do it for power. So it will include the Lux and Discovery supercomputers that are being built by HP Enterprise at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the Department of Energy. Data centers needed for the expansion of generative models account for about one and a half percent of the world's energy use. That is expected to double to 3 % of the world's energy use by 2030. So making it more efficient, improving energy distribution, finding new ways to get energy sources is one of the aims of this mission to address that.

22:04The Department of Energy will identify its first data set and model assets within four months and demonstrate operating capability on at least one national science and technology challenge within nine months. Among those challenges are a focus on nuclear fusion, modernizing the electrical grid, advancing scientific discoveries in general, just making it easier to find new scientific discoveries, creating advanced models to improve national security. And that last one includes nuclear weapons reliability and the development of defense materials. So a lot of challenges there in the focus. They need to hit one of them or at least made some advancement on operating capability for one of them within nine months.

22:48This is an interesting national effort. The administration is trying to compare it to the moon landing. In some ways, it may be just as complicated, if not more complicated. But it's an example of saying, let's use AI to solve the problems that AI is creating, but also to advance science. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, when I think of science and the overlap of what AI is capable of, those are often the stories that I get really excited about. It seems like a really solid tool to be able to apply in situations like that, both science, health research, and that sort of stuff.

23:35So, I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of people looking at this with a raised eyebrow like, okay, but I don't know. What about the risk? What about all the other stuff? But yet we are at a moment right now where it's important to explore this stuff and kind of see what is possible. And I don't know. There's a lot of scope here. And I guess I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the wide-reaching kind of scope of something like this. But I think it's important to explore this stuff. Yeah, I don't think it's a bad thing at all for the government to be involved in directing cooperation and facilitating that, which is what's going on here.

24:17It's very focused on energy. On the one hand, that is incredibly important. And so it is important to do that. It's also a problem that AI is. Well, yeah. And sure, your answer could be, well, let's not use AI. If you think that's possible, then you wouldn't need this. But if you are someone who thinks, you know what, people are going to be using this and building it out, it's better to figure out how to supply the energy for it in a responsible way than to pretend it will go away. Then this is a good project for that and likely to create advances and new ways of providing energy that will have side benefits beyond just being used for this Genesis mission.

25:04It is only focused on energy. And I think that is a criticism that you can always have for anything because not everything is meant for everything. But there should be other executive orders or other projects that are focused on dealing with responsible use and making sure that safety is a part of this. not just safety and like, I don't want it to say a mean thing or an inaccurate thing, but like making sure that it is protecting privacy and protecting government data. There's a lot about confidential data in here. And they sort of did a little hand wave of like, we'll make sure it's secure, but I'd like to see some details on that.

25:43That's a whole effort in and of itself that should happen as well. Yeah. Speaking of like defending against prompt injections and stuff like that. Sure. Absolutely. Well, interesting stuff there. We'll be following that. And we also have a few quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news that comes in the future. Yeah, like Signal now offering its end-to-end encrypted message backups. Obviously, its end-to-end encrypted messages are already on iOS, but its backups are on iOS with free storage for your media for 45 days. And then if you want, you can pay$2 a month for a plan that gives you up to 100 gigabytes of storage.

26:21Nice. Huawei's Mate 80 Pro Max phone just launched, and it features a dual-layer OLED display that's capable of up to 8 ,000 nits of peak brightness. That would make it the brightest phone screen on the market, as far as I could tell. That's super bright. Character AI has prevented teens from its chatbot platform after first reducing chat sessions to two hours per day last month. This is meant to address mental health concerns after two teens took their life following conversations with the company's chatbot. Yeah. TikTok shop moving into luxury retail. They're featuring high end merchandise, things like Hermes, Chanel handbags, those upwards of around$11 ,000 Rolex watches, sneakers from Louis Vuitton.

27:07Yes, you can get it all at TikTok shop. Most of the items, by the way, offered are secondhand, but they're verified using an AI system. So there you go. What could go wrong? Meta's oversight board has ruled that a manipulated protest video is okay to stay up on Facebook, only requiring them to add a high-risk label, even though the content has the potential to mislead viewers during a politically sensitive time involving former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Yeah. And Microsoft and Crocs launching another limited edition pair. I know they had one of these recently, I think, of Crocs shoes, this time with an Xbox theme.

27:51And the little buttons that you put in the holes on the Crocs, this time they're controller buttons attached to each shoe. So it's like each shoe looks like a controller with all the buttons on sale today for$80. I thought they were kind of cute. Speaking of sales, I'm sale crazy, so I'm making everything 12 % off, Jason. Whoa. Don't try to stop me. I won't. Do that. on the DTNS store, 12 % off in celebration of us finishing up our 12th year of DTNS. Use the code DTNSROCKS until the end of November. And you know what? While I'm doing it, new patrons, if you want to be a new patron, 12 % off your Patreon.

28:27Wow. Just go sign up, patreon.com slash DTNS. No, Jason, you can't talk me out of it. You're going 12 % nuts. I'm 12 % crazy.

28:40We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. And today it really is shared wisdom since it comes from a listener named wisdom. Yes. Wisdom wrote, Google's stock valuation is not well ahead of Apple's like Tom said on Monday's podcast. It's just below Apple's valuation nearing$4 trillion. Also, those other companies' stock you mentioned as being in decline is not supported by their Monday trading. They just aren't rising at the rate Google's is in the last few days. I know this is trivial, but I thought I have to point that out because this is the only tech podcast that I listen to that tries its best to remain factual on their reportage as well as accept feedback.

29:21And I appreciate that. Keep up the good work. Thank you, Wisdom, for your gentle correction. That's my fault. Uh, I, I definitely said what he said and what I said was wrong. I should have expressed myself properly. I wasn't speaking about market cap, but stock performance. Uh, so I was getting that from Bloomberg, which tracked alphabet stock up for its price 19.06 % over the past 30 days as of November 23rd. So when I, what I was saying sounded like I was talking about valuation, if I had phrased it properly, it would have been the price of alphabet stock has risen a lot more than Apple's. Apple's is up 5.05%.

29:59Amazon up 1.26%. The stock prices for those other companies have declined. Although NVIDIA's has only declined 0.78%. That's practically flat. So maybe it's wrong to characterize that as a decline too. But Microsoft stock down 9.3%, Tesla down 10.91%, and Meta down 18.97%. Those are all stock prices. I think the reason I didn't spend too much time on that and made the mistake in my expression of it was that I'm like, stock prices really aren't indicative of much, but it is interesting to see the stock of Google rising so much faster. Yeah. And the relationship between them is what I find interesting, especially in a particular moment.

30:42Thank you, Wisdom, for pointing that out because other people may not have realized that I was meaning stock price and was like, oh, I heard Google has more valuation and that would have been wrong. So I appreciate the correction. If you've got some insight into a story, maybe some additional information, or you're like, let me help you out in understanding this, please share it with us, feedback, at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Big thanks to Michelle Roman and Wisdom for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron.

31:13It's pretty easy. Just go to Patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you tomorrow.

31:25The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.