It's not that the company has given up on the Pixelbook 2. Yes, some might have thought that the company was moving away from higher-priced laptops when Google announced the Pixelbook Go instead last year.

However, recently uploaded Google hardware benchmarks suggest otherwise. But how is this potential successor going to be one of the best Chromebooks?

Rumors of Chromebook code names like Hatch, Kukui, and Cheza have been floating around for months. However, in the aftermath of the Pixel Slate, a detachable Cheza is looking increasingly unlikely.

Take a look at the major ChromeOS hardware releases by Google: the Pixelbook surprised the eye on October 30, 2017, and attempted to redefine what a Chromebook could be. Next came the Pixel Slate (no sequel) on October 9, 2018.

Most recently, the Google Pixelbook Go was announced on October 15, 2019; like the Pixelbook and Pixel Slate, Google announced the Go at a media event.

Do you see a pattern? Yes, the only real launch date we can point to would be October 2020. However, nothing is certain anymore. Google does not need to limit itself to large events for product launches, although it could have a much larger gathering by then.

What is interesting about the Google Pixelbook 2 rumor is that Google is riding a recent computing trend.

Multiple Geekbench 4 benchmarks posted on the app's own site show signs of a device dubbed the "Google zork" running on an AMD Ryzen processor. Scores were published on April 1 and June 3 (both in 2020), with the machine on the former date using an AMD Ryzen 7 3700C and Radeon Vega Mobile graphics, while the June upload was powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 3250C 15W and Radeon graphics " This was done with the Google zork; the odd name Zork has been rumored as a codename for potential Chromebooks since the 2019 About Chromebooks post.

The highest multi-core score from these tests was 8,298 (on a Ryzen 7-powered device), only slightly better than the 7,927 recorded by the original Pixelbook (with a 7th generation Intel Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM) in the same tests.

Could the Pixelbook be AMD-only? It is not unlikely, as more and more laptops are offering both AMD and Intel versions.

By the way, don't worry about Geekbench showing these scores as being for devices running Android; ChromeOS does not have its own version of Geekbench, so the Android app must be run through emulation.

Google still believes in high-priced Chromebooks. How do we know? The original Pixelbook still sells for as low as $999 on Google.com, even though it was released 2.75 years ago.

That's why I'm betting that the Pixelbook 2 will also start around $1,000. How they convince us to drop that kind of pennies we are waiting to see.

As it stands, we expect the Google Pixelbook 2 to offer more reasons than a slight performance boost. The original Pixelbook had a bit of a problem with battery life, lasting only 7 hours 43 minutes on a single charge, below more affordable competitors.

So, as we continue to look for news and rumors about the Pixelbook 2, we expect to learn about a redesign and claims of longer battery life. there is still time until October, and there is plenty of room for rumors to materialize as to what the Pixelbook 2 will look like .