Have You Met Google’s Chromebook Pixel
Google’s Chromebook idea has been around for a while, they’ve had multiple OEMs like HP create inexpensive laptops running their in own Chrome “OS.” The OS is much less of a conventional operating system, and more of a super functional browser. Because the cost of previews Chromebooks were always a hair under the “real” offerings of PC and Macs, the brand was able to move along with little to no static, especially for those heavily vest in the Google world.
In comes the Chromebook Pixel. Priced at $1,299, the Pixel brings along with it some nice additions to the laptop world. For starters, it comes with a 1.8GHz Core i5 processor, 4gb of ram and a 32GB or 64GB SSD hard drive. I don’t know about you, but those hard drive options sure do look out of place at glance, but given the fact the entire nature of Google’s Chrome OS is cloud based, its not terrible, not to mention, on purchase, Google ups your Google Drive online storage to 1TB, sweet! It will even be offered with a LTE version in April for the road warrior in your life.
The real star of the Pixel’s offering is its 2,560 x 1,700, PPI 239 rated, touch screen display! Beating even that of the MacBook Pro 15 with retina, the Pixel’s display is currently the highest resolution of any laptop sold on the market today. That’s all wrapped up in a thin (not the thinnest, no where close to MacBook air) all metal design, gives the Pixel a few premium feel, and price!
Cool, so what’s the problem? This thing is strange from a few different angles. First, that’s an usually high resolution display for something that is not regarded for multimedia use. I am not talking about Youtube and Netflix videos, I am talking Blu-ray! With no optical drive, it just seems off. Second, the touch screen is left out in the cold as the “OS” isn’t optimized for touch, it comes away feeling like a Windows Vista touch screen experience, why? Third, Chrome OS really isn’t much of an OS to validate such beautiful hardware and efforts as yet, there is much work to be done on Google’s behalf. Fourth, the design sure is nice, but I can’t help but shake the feeling the screen deserved more, something a super thin as the Macbook Air. I am surprised this wasn’t the case already, with no physical drive, there is no reason this thing couldn’t be razor thin. Fifth, the price. With all these raised eye brows from many different angles, the Pixel feels a bit like a treat for the Google fan, nothing more.
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If you are married to Google ecosystem
1. Get a Surface Pro or any other Windows 8 Touch Laptop.
2. Install Chrome
3. Go to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/home in your Chrome.
4. Now you have both Windows 8 and Google ecosystem.
5. You save at least $300, if you stay away from Google Pixel.
Thoughtful of you Ram, but it’s looking like people worldwide are managing to switch to Chrome without needing you to spell out the steps for them.
Regarding ChromeOS, over time more people are doing more things using the web as their platform and less time outside of the web, now to the point where plenty of people are good to go with their computing needs all inside the Chrome browser. ChromeOS has limitations, especially for the likes of us, but it has major advantages including security, essentially no maintenance and simplicity/ease-of-use.
Also over time Chrome itself improves, the things programmed for it and the rest of the web improve, the cloud improves, adoption of these things (including the browser’s adoption) improve and so forth, over time the fundamental concept of ChromeOS grows less and less absurd. To offer you a trend that goes in the other direction for contrast, PC sales.
As for this $1300/$1450 device, I love pixels as much as the next guy, but I’d rather have the cash instead. Kudos though to Google and Apple for continuing to raise the bar on consumers’ expectations of hardware, specifically resolution in this case, rather than always playing catch-up or actually mandating 480×800 and single core as maximums in hardware for your platform in recent times.
Fair enough if you never want to do anything offline…. But seriously? Brilliant hardware wasted IMO