Google has unveiled its new Chromebook Pixel, and The Verge has its review up.
The new Chromebook Pixel is slightly cheaper than its predecessor, at $999, but it’s still wildly more expensive than other Chromebooks. It has almost the exact same design as the original, and thus is a beautiful machine. It still runs Chrome OS, which has advanced significantly in the past two years, but not enough to be a real replacement for what you can do on a Mac or a PC.
But the improvements in battery life and speed are both huge. When you use it, the dichotomy between what your heart wants and what your brain says is almost bittersweet. It’s an amazing laptop that I want to use all the time, but when I really need to do more intensive “computer” things, it’s not quite enough.
Core i5, 8GB RAM, 12.85″ 2560×1700 touchscreen, 12 hours of battery life (The Verge got 14 hours), $999 – but ChromeOS.
I have the previous gen Pixel, but almost never use it. There’s simply too much I cannot do, and when I have the choice of opening the lid of the pixel and the macbook pro, the choice is simple. The Mac. It’s better in every single way, a clearly worth the extra cost.
Yeah. I don’t get the point of this machine, and never have. It’s so over-powered for what it can actually do. Suppose it’d make a decent Linux laptop if you put it into dev mode, but it’s far overpriced even for that.
I think of it as a premium concept product that they actually ship. (Google being Google they don’t need to make a profit on the product line.)
Over time the faster processors, higher-resolution displays etc should trickle down to the cheaper devices from other manufacturers; in the meantime they’ve tuned the OS to work on high-res screens so it’s ready when higher-res displays are more cheap-mass-market-ready. (And from looking at the Windows laptop world that’s starting to happen…)
Remember the first model MacBook Airs? Thin and pretty but had serious performance problems and were overpriced for common usage, all us techies made fun of it (or bought one and were annoyed with it
… Now the MacBook Airs are the entry-model Mac laptops and people just gobble them up.
$999 for this is “overpriced?”
I just can’t understand why people expect everything for nothing.
A Macbook Pro or a Dell m3800 is twice that price and still worth it.
Yeah, assuming you can put a real Linux on the machine, and that the processor supports AES-NI and virtualization, it is quite a bargain. What other laptop is going to give you a non 16:9 display?
A Macbook Pro runs a full os. Why is it that people don’t actually know how to read? I said it was over powered and over priced for what the machine is actually capable of doing, as shipped.
Sure it is, considering the whole OS is a browser.
Considering it’s basically a $1,000 web browser, yes. If you want to put a real OS on it? Maybe …
The verge article explains the purpose of the device: Its a development platform for Googlers working on Chrome OS.
They say that the make small numbers of them and Google itself uses 85% of that small number that are produced. Its an odd device, no doubt. Strangely enough though, both Linus and GKH both loved the first version. Probably because of the screen.
It’s not overpriced for what it is. Look at an equivalent Thinkpad T450 with touchscreen and high-res display.
Seems the XPS 13 is a better developer laptop whenever Dell releases the developer model from their Sputnik project.
So Apple release a netbook with a full-sized OS, and Google release a desktop replacement with a netbook OS.
First there is nothing wrong with ChromeOS. Its amazingly fast and capable. In case you hadn’t seen a screenshot in the last, oh year, ChromeOS has an actual desktop now and you can run stand alone apps without your browser open. The desktop isn’t like a traditional desktop but you can certainly see it and minimize the browser to the taskbar.
And you can easily run Linux via Crouton if you wish.
No you can’t. You can run horrible browser apps in a window that pretends not to be a browser but is. That doesn’t make it any more useful. Best thing I ever did was sell my chromebook.
You can’t. The entire GUI is Xorg drawing a full screen Chrome window (or using Freon to talk directly to the kernel on some newer devices). Chrome OS “apps” are still running in your browser.
Do you know is Crouton method proven to definitely work with the updated Pixel yet?
And that USB-C port mmm, will a Thunderbolt adapter be available to allow it work with StarTech Thunderbolt/Thunderbolt2 docks for instance do you think??
,obviously without the power delivery
Maybe need to wait for new USB-C docks methinks. But THEY presumably at 10gbps can’t do 4K/5K like TBP2/mDP1.3 probably can.
I love first world problems..! (don’t mean that in the bad way it could be taken……).
…for 100 Euro extra with a 256 GB SSD and a real OS?
I also love the TWO USB-C ports on both sides, and enough old fashioned USB3 ports as well, that Apple stupendously didn’t include on their 300 dollar more expensive machine
Since when do Microsoft and Google make the “inspirational devices”? This machine really ticks all the boxes for me except for the above mentioned SSD/OS
Edit1: Serious question: If I connect a fast bootable SSD through one of those USB-Ports, would I be able to run Windows-To-Go on this Pixel? Or is this device locked through some BIOS/UEFI/BootLoader?
Edit2: YES YOU CAN: Enable Developer Mode, Enable Legacy USB Boot, GO
https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-install-windows-8-on-your-google-…
Now to buy this or wait for Surface Pro 4?
Edited 2015-03-12 01:17 UTC
Installing Windows:
There are 7 issues that are not really resolved:
Your keyboard won’t work.
Your touchpad won’t work.
Your touchscreen won’t work.
The system sometimes powers off instead of going into standby.
You have no battery indicator.
You cannot adjust screen brightness.
You cannot adjust the audio level.
I wouldn’t call this a success.
Maybe the 2015 version of the Pixel works better with Windows.
If Chrome OS is not an option then Linux would be a better match.
I read that far last night and it seems from the comments some of these problems have been resolved, especially on Linux.
It all came down to “no drivers for some special controllers”. I hope I will soon read a similar topic about this 2015 model or see this machine from another OEM somewhere.
What really annoys me is that in every “new Macbook” review I see it mentions the thickness up to the tenth of the milimeter, but on this machine the words “dimensions” or “thin” are completely absent while it is still thinner than the MacBook Air. Weight IS mentioned though because that is where this machine is “10% heavier”. How can so many reviewers all be so biased?
I cannot believe the battery life on this machine though. It has a crazy high-res touchscreen and is running chrome all the time and got 14 hours in a review (while being rated for 12?)
Yawn, Yawn, Yawn….:-)
Does Chrome OS still have no printer drivers?
The fact that a document is sent to Google in order to be converted to match the local printer and then sent back to the sender’s printer is laughable.
Who in their right mind would do that?
(Especially for confidential documents…)
It’s called cloud printing. I do it all the time – from my phone, tablet and now from my Chromebook. Most printers support it natively, like my HP 6600. Ohh… I forgot, I’m in my Left mind.
Have a look
https://youtu.be/KHZ8ek-6ccc
I almost made a second account just so I could +1 funny this!
The Mercedes Benz Vision Golf Cart:
http://d37fcqijlx1yog.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Mer…
Edited 2015-03-12 12:18 UTC
I’d like to touch on some of the subtle, but I think not well understood, realities of the Pixel (and ChromeBooks in general). And full disclosure, I had one of the 1st Gen Pixels and loved it.
I think it’s a conceptual misnomer, or at least conceptually limiting, to use the term “ChromeOS” — it implies that somehow Chrome has been made into an Operating System and that is what ChromeBooks run: a kind of Chrome-ified Operating System. And they can only run Chrome.
Of course, I happen to think the term “Operating System” is widely misused or at least widely misunderstood. To me the OS is really the part you never really see: the part interfaces with the hardware and provides services for stacks of layers built on top of it. I think most people confuse the “User Interface” with “Operating System”. I remember once hearing a Mac described as a graphical operating system. There really is no such thing. There are graphical interfaces, but they are not OSes. So, an iPhone, for example is really Darwin (yes, the same Darwin that underpins your desktop Mac OS X) compiled for arm, slaved into running as UI “Springboard”… I remember how on the early iPhones there was no “multitasking”. Which was bullshit. They could multitask just fine — the Springboard UI and the iOS API provided no ability, but if you jailbroke the device, went to a terminal, presto, apps ran in the background all the time.. This is important to understand since once you grok that the UI can be replaced you realize many many more possibilities for your devices. But I digress…)
Of course, if you subscribe to the UI-is-the-OS way of thinking, then a Chrome seems very limiting. You open the lid, you see Chrome. Nothing else. No ability to run anything other than Chrome. If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, etc. But in this case the devil is really in the details.
ChromeBooks are more accurately described as: a Linux distro (call it GoogleLinux) hacked to start up running the only real app bundled on the system: a modified version of Chrome locked permanently into fullscreen without much of a windowing system or desktop. Once you understand that your ChromeBook is really a Linux box with only Chrome installed, you immediately understand that yes, it is (or can easily be) a fully fledged OS. You just need to do a little bit of work. And if you’re a reader of this site, odds are you’re up for it. I mean this is OSnews, afterall. And the “OS” (see my rambling definition above) on all Chromebooks is (Google) Linux. 🙂
So, on my Pixel I installed Crouton (Google it) with little effort, and presto, I had a fully fledged *current* Ubuntu installation on my Pixel. I wasn’t running two OSes.. I wasn’t running “ChromeOS” and Ubuntu. I was running one and only one OS. One of the apps was a weird full-screen only Chrome (what some might call ChromeOS) and the other apps were all Ubuntu apps (heck, firefox, libreoffice, shell terminals, etc etc). But only one kernel, Google Linux, was running and providing all the services for all these apps.
Granted, the high PPI meant I had to massage KDE into using large fonts and push my icon size way up and twiddle with the DPI settings, and some screen elements were really really tiny, but to all those who cry, “it’s not a full computer”… take a closer look. It is. Just because it’s not sold or marketed as a Linux box doesn’t deny the fact that that’s exactly what it is.
The only “complaints” I had, for example, were that if you stick to the Google Linux the machine comes with, you’re stuck with whatever the Google Linux kernel has been compiled to support. So, I couldn’t get NFS/autofs to work — no kernel support for it — the workaround was to use sshfs. I couldn’t run virtualbox since the kernel didn’t fully support running virtualized services. But hey, whatever. But I could run cups and print locally, I could build/compile apps, program in python…
Of course, the internal HDD is rather small… which limits of course how much extra “apps” you can install. The new Pixels seem to have more space –but probably not enough. Plug in an an external drive and you’re good to go.
So, by all means use Pixels (or ChromeBooks) to just run Chrome. 99.9% of the people who buy them will do just that. But when you find you are missing some “fat” desktop app that you can’t live without, take a closer look. Before you shout “ChromeBooks” aren’t real computers, think again. Odds are you can run that desktop app with minimal effort.(*)
(*) Provided the app is a Linux/Ubuntu app 🙂
Very interesting story, and exactly what I am looking for in this new version. Except I don’t care for Linux and prefer Windows. Do you have any experience with that? My idea is to leave the pixel as-is and use it that way but boot it from a very fast 256 GB USB3 USB-Stick (basically an SSD on a stick) that I have to run several Windows versions that I already have on there. This machine seems just right for me. Perfect mix of speed, size, portability, extensibility and price, just running the wrong OS.