It's rare for a piece of tech news to truly catch me off-guard these days — to actually make me open my eyes wide, mutter something along the lines of "crikey," and then scratch my gorilla-head as I try to make sense of what happened.

Well, lemme tell ya, my fellow primate: That very thing went down last week when word broke that Google was moving dozens of employees off its laptop/tablet hardware team and into other roles within the company. The news got a bit buried amidst all the Android Q beta brouhaha, but as first noted by Business Insider, the shift affects both hardware engineers and program managers whose pending projects have been called off. It's part of a broader series of hardware-related "road-map cutbacks," the site's sources reported, and is seen as being a first step in Google's plan to "pare down" its product lineup.

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