Lenovo has shut the lid on its Chrome OS-powered Yoga Book

You can't look at Lenovo's Yoga Book and not immediately notice its hinge. It looks like a trio of highly polished, Victorian-era mechanical gears; an anachronism that somehow found its way into an ultra-modern piece of technology. The hinge stands out in stark contrast to the laptop's most futuristic-looking feature—the completely flat, not-really-there-until-it-is, light-up "Halo" keyboard. The Yoga Book looks so different and cool that anyone who sees one out in the wild immediately thinks, I've got to get one.

Lenovo understood the unique position its Yoga Book would occupy in the laptop design space; so well, in fact, that it released two variants of the device: a traditional Windows 10 version, and a more unconventional Android model. It was determined to capture as large a share of both markets as it could. But it wasn't content with just two Yoga Book models—no, it was aiming at a third market, the one with the fastest growth among notebook computers.

Lenovo was going to introduce a beautifully futuristic Chromebook, one to end all other Chromebooks.

Until it didn't.

Yesterday, Chrome OS enthusiasts from Chrome Unboxed reported their discovery of a code commit—a revision—which in and of itself was not very noteworthy, except for a comment written by a developer, buried deep in the comment thread. A two-sentence piece, but featuring three important and ultimately disheartening words.

"Pbody is dead."

Okay, what does that even mean? you may ask. Well, Pbody happened to be the codename for the upcoming Yoga Book Chromebook. The developer's statement that the device was done for essentially confirmed that fans of both Chrome OS and everything futuristic and beautiful will never get to lay hands on this would-be perfect marriage of design and convenience.

Okay, but I'd never heard of the "Yoga Book Chromebook" 'til today. Why does this matter to me?

I don't know. It probably doesn't. But it never hurts to lament the loss of what could have been something uniquely gorgeous in today's laptop market.

I mean, have you seen the Yoga Book?

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