Google's new Googlebooks hit shelves today, and so did an asterisk: some Android apps will not run smoothly on the Intel-based models.
Google made the admission in a statement to Android Authority, confirming that while every Googlebook gives owners access to the full Play Store library, smooth performance is not guaranteed on every chip. The company says the vast majority of apps work fine right out of the box on both Intel and Qualcomm Googlebooks. It did not say which Intel models or which apps are affected, and the statement arrived on launch day rather than before preorders opened.
This is not really a Googlebook bug. Many Android apps are built and tuned for ARM chips like Qualcomm's, not x86 Intel silicon, so some performance gap is the normal cost of running a phone app on different hardware. The problem is that Google spent weeks marketing "entire Play Store library" access as a selling point without flagging that the experience depends on which chip is under the keyboard.
It is the kind of caveat that used to live in ChromeOS support documents, not in a product's launch-day press cycle.