Google Offers Free Laptops: Cr-48 Chrome OS Pilot Open Till Dec 21

Google is giving away laptops. Not selling — giving.

At its Chrome event on December 7, the company announced a pilot program for Chrome OS, its browser-only operating system, and the vehicle for the pilot is the Cr-48: an unbranded, matte-black 12.1-inch notebook that Google will ship free to selected testers — developers, journalists, educators, and ordinary users willing to live inside the browser for a few months and report back.

The Cr-48 is a statement of intent disguised as hardware. There is no branding on it anywhere. The caps-lock key has been replaced with a search key — Google's little joke about the future of keyboards. It boots in seconds, stores almost nothing locally, and comes with built-in 3G connectivity. The entire thesis: the computer is the browser, the browser is the computer, and everything else is legacy.

Applications for the pilot program are open now and run through December 21. Google hasn't said how many units it will distribute, but the company has been characteristically ambitious in its language about the program's scale.

The bet is enormous. Chrome OS assumes ubiquitous connectivity, user comfort with cloud storage, and a willingness to abandon decades of desktop habits. The Cr-48 pilot is Google's way of buying real-world data on that bet — paying in hardware for the feedback it needs before Chrome OS notebooks go on sale next year.

Free laptop? Yes. Free in the Google sense: the price is your usage data, your bug reports, and your participation in the largest operating-system experiment the industry has seen in years.