ASUS’ less powerful Googlebook could still cost a small fortune

We have spent the past few weeks seeing Googlebook laptops with increasingly premium hardware, but pricing has remained one of the biggest unanswered questions. A new ASUS leak may finally give us a better idea of where at least some of these machines could land, and even the less powerful models may not be particularly cheap.

A now-removed Canadian retail listing spotted by GbookHub showed an ASUS Googlebook CX9406 with an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. The laptop was listed for roughly CA$1,900, which works out to around $1,380.

ASUS has not officially announced the CX9406 or confirmed its pricing, and Canadian pricing will not necessarily reflect the eventual U.S. MSRP. Still, this is one of our clearest indications yet of how expensive Intel-powered Googlebooks could become.

This is nowhere near the best ASUS configuration

The interesting part is that this is not one of the higher-end Googlebooks we have seen leak. The Core Ultra 5 325 is an eight-core Panther Lake chip with four performance cores and four low-power efficiency cores. GbookHub has also spotted earlier benchmark and certification listings for more powerful CX9406 configurations with 32GB and 64GB of RAM, including a top-end model pairing the Core Ultra 7 355 with 64GB of memory.

In other words, the roughly CA$1,900 listing is attached to a 16GB model sitting much lower in the expected CX9406 lineup. If the retail price is anywhere close to accurate, the higher-end configurations could become considerably more expensive, especially while memory prices remain elevated.

Cheaper Googlebooks may have to come from elsewhere

We previously reported that Googlebook designs using Qualcomm’s older Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 processor are also in development. Those machines already looked like a possible route toward more affordable Googlebooks, and this ASUS listing makes that possibility even more important.

Intel-powered models from ASUS and Acer are increasingly looking like premium laptops rather than Chromebook replacements built around affordability. Snapdragon models could give manufacturers room to bring Googlebook further down the price ladder without abandoning the platform’s focus on capable hardware.

Google is holding an embargoed media event in New York on September 15, where Googlebook hardware from its partners is expected to be available for hands-on testing.