Eye-watering price tag leaks for upcoming Asus Googlebook with 16 GB RAM and 8-core CPU

Over the course of the past few weeks, we have witnessed a plethora of leaks and rumours surrounding laptops from Asus, Acer, Lenovo and other OEMs with the Googlebook branding. This new family of notebooks is expected to form the upper echelon of Chromebooks, with high-end CPUs and premium features.

Google has even scheduled a dedicated event for the unveiling of this new product line on September 15 in New York, as we have previously reported.

One such offering from Asus has leaked multiple times in the past, and it now appears that its expected pricing is out in the open as well, courtesy of a leaked product listing on a Canadian website. 

According to the specs, the laptop, or rather Googlebook, will be powered by the entry-level Core Ultra 5 325 CPU paired with 16 GB of RAM and half a terabyte of storage.

The Core Ultra 5 325 is quite a capable Panther Lake chip with an 8-core setup promising multicore performance that is in the same league as a Core Ultra 7 256V SoC of the outgoing Lunar Lake family. In simpler terms, performance should be adequate for most tasks, but nothing quite worth bragging about.

Of course, the Googlebook will be running the Android-based AluminiumOS, which will most likely have several limitations of its own compared to a full-fat desktop OS like Windows or Linux. Just how well the software compatibility side of things turns out, will be revealed soon enough.

Unlike Chromebooks, the Googlebooks are unlikely to be affordability-first

Now, let's address the elephant in the room - pricing. Unfortunately, the pricing appears to be nowhere near as entry-level as the CX9406 Googlebook's internals. According to the retailer, the aforementioned variant of the Googlebook will cost a whopping CA$1902.99 or roughly $1,400.

In the past, higher-end variants of the CX9406 have leaked with Core Ultra 7 chips paired with up to 64 GB of RAM, so it is quite likely that the laptop will have more than just one SKU. Given just how expensive DRAM chips have become, the 64 GB variant will surely command an even more eye-watering price tag.