It’s turning out to be a bit of a crazy week for cool new products, isn’t it? We already got Ubuntu Touch Preview for phones and tablets, then we got the new PlayStation 4 yesterday, and today Google surprised us all by launching the Chromebook Pixel. Google’s first laptop appears to be a stunning machine – just don’t ask who the hell it’s for.
The Chromebook Pixel is a Core i5 laptop with 4GB of RAM and a 32GB or 64GB of storage. It’s also got a crazy-beautiful anodised aluminium case, and Google is making a lot of fuss over the trackpad being specifically coated and designed. According to the first few hands-on articles, the work on the trackpad has paid off – it’s quite good.
The real looker here is of course that display – 2570×1700 pixels at 12.85″ means a ppi of 239, which is quite insane. It’s also touch-enabled, but ChromeOS isn’t exactly touch-optimised. Still, my Surface RT has taught me in a few days that even in a non-touch interface, it’s just natural to touch stuff, so good on the Pixel for including it. The display is also 3:2, which isn’t a widescreen – a bit weird, but it probably makes sense for most webpages.
The price is hefty: it starts at $1299 – which makes me wonder who this thing is for. ChromeOS is not really a full operating system, and still has a long way to go in that regard. Well, maybe it’s hackable and we can run Linux-proper or Windows 7 on it.
So Google put an SD card slot and Verizon LTE on this thing. I can hear the collective ‘WTF’ from Nexus users everywhere. Not only does Verizon hate Android users, but Google apparently does too.
It’s required – since every single distro will look gorgeous on this beast, I need a bulk order of SD cards on which to load them.
This thing comes with a terabyte hard drive and 2 USB ports, so it’s not like you’ll be hurting for space. Nexus 4 users, on the other hand …
Um…
* One terabyte Google Drive cloud storage for three years
* 32GB solid state drive (64GB on LTE model)
It doesn’t come with a terabyte drive… it comes with a terabyte of cloud storage (for 3 years).
No it comes with a 32GB or 64GB drive and 1 terabyte on Google Drive.
Yeah, sorry… that was my bad
Might want to keep it in the box because its gonna end up a pretty rare bird. I mean did Google not learn anything from the OEMs with warehouses full of better specc’d ultrabooks they can’t sell?
One big advantage of 3:2 is that photos can be shown full-screen without black borders.
Personally, I hate wide-screen displays if they do not have a decent height.
Everyone who wants to get actual work done on a notebook hates widescreens.
I really miss good old 1600×1200 screens. :'(
By “everyone” you meant yourself?
Him and me at least. And I know quite a few people feeling the same.
The fact is, when you work on documents, it’s usually better to have vertical space.
Me.
High-res 4:3 is the way to go. Too bad decent 4:3 monitors are hard to find without parting ways with a kidney.
What is this thing???
Want! I hope we can get a proper Linux distro on it though. I frkickin love the screen. Square and hires, it’s like 2002 all over again.
https://plus.google.com/100479847213284361344/posts/QhmBpn5GNE9
Lovely! Now we wait (for the price to drop).
LOL
So, you have to play $1300 for the privilege of be spied by google.
Not at all, there are a range of chrombooks that will allow for them to spy at more modest prices. /jk
I wouldn’t really trust anyone to not spy. Windows 8 really wants you to login to your own computer with a “Microsoft account” and send all of the websites you visit to them so they can make sure they are safe. Ubuntu has the whole global search thing turned on by default.
I’m pretty sure that anyone who has the means to spy on you, is.
At least with Windows 8 I can opt out.
As you can with Ubuntu.
But I have no idea how you would opt out of providing usage data to the provider of a web app-centric operating system, since you are generally using their servers to run your applications and store your data. (I know Chrome supports off-line mode, but the whole point of Chrome as I understand it is to run web apps.)
And how can you know that Windows 8 doesn’t spy anything you do? It’s closed source software, you have to trust them.
I’d rather thrust Google than Microsoft.
You can use this thing called “Wireshark” you know? so you can audit all your network traffic.
Just launch it while running Chrome, you’ll get surprised how many calls does that thing to Google’s servers even when idle.
Oh, I can use Windows 8 offline if I want and will still be usable, not like Chrome OS.
Edited 2013-02-22 16:09 UTC
I haven’t seriously played with Chrome OS, but I thought you could continue working offline. Is this no longer the case? I fully realize that some features wouldn’t work as well with it offline, but you should be able to edit simple documents and the like.
The thing I like the most about this new thing is what Google say about the lightbar: ‘Just because it looks cool.’. That’s all. Honest.
Google is so inconsistent when it comes to their consumer electronics product offerings, it’s amusing.
The main value proposition of a nettop is price, this thing missed any attractive price range for a device of this type by a mile. This does not look good on google’s management part, they have had a couple of duds in a row. Unless of course, they expect this thing to suck and they simply want to eat some of the loses creating a market.
Edited 2013-02-21 22:16 UTC
I’m not sure they have to be consistent – they don’t necessarily rely on hardware sales to survive.
I’m guessing they’re throwing this out there to see what the reception is like – I wouldn’t even be surprised if they have artificially inflated the price simply to target wealthy people with disposable income looking for a new toy to play with.
I suspect they’ll use it to gauge interest in the various technologies it comes with and use that information to generate some further products with those features.
Yeah, there seems to be an attitude of “throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks” as an MO of sorts for google. And why not, they have the pockets deep enough for it.
The introductory marketing video, with some design team members talking about the product, had a weird “applesque” vibe. A disappointing lack of originality, considering google is kind of a gigantic ad agency…
I’m curious – in what universe does a “nettop” (I suspect you mean “netbook”) come with a 12.85†2560×1700 touchscreen?
Rather, this appears to me to be Google’s assertion that Chrome is a full-featured desktop OS ready for the mainstream, in much the same way that the original Nexus smartphone was Google’s assertion that skin-free Android was ready for the mainstream.
It certainly worked well for the Nexus.
In the universe where google is trying to convince me to buy a device that can only perform a fraction of what a fully fledged “traditional” stand alone device can.
This device is at the same price level as a retina macbook, so right off the bat it becomes an almost impossible sell.
No, “I don’t think it’s a good value” isn’t the definition of a netbook.
My iPad also can’t do a lot of things that a less expensive netbook can do – read an SD card, compose long documents, run Microsoft Office – and yet Apple seems to be doing OK with the product line. Perhaps because it can do things the netbook can’t? Just a thought.
I’m fine if you think a high-end Chrome laptop won’t sell. We’ll know soon enough.
And a netbook can run Chrome, while doing things that aren’t Chrome.
Hell, for $200 more, a 13″ MacBook Pro Retina can run Chrome, only have 256,000 less pixels, have significantly more CPU power, twice the RAM, 4 times the local storage, and do things that aren’t Chrome…
And for 100 more you can get an Asus laptop with i7, 12GB of RAM, 500 GB HDD and GeForce GTX 670M.
Plus a shit screen resolution.
Which plays 1920×1080 movies with 1:1 pixel matching and plays games without taxing the GPU much (playing games in 1920 x 1080 -compared to a higher resolution- allows for more effects).
I hate the “more pixels is better” motto and the whole “retina” hype. With “retina”, you are essentially taxing the GPU more in order to push more pixels than your eye can really see from a normal distance (15cm for tablets and phones, 30cm for laptops). For a 17inch laptop, you don’t need more than 1920×1080 for normal viewing distances. For normal viewing distances, it already exceeds the limits of your eye.
That’s unpossible.
More pixels are always better. ALWAYS. The eye has nothing to do with it. Better hardware is always better. That’s why we buy better hardware. Because it’s better and has more numbers.
Are you trying to telling me I wouldn’t be able see pixels at the molecular level? In the future I will be watching 50 episodes of Full House simultaneously on my fingernail and we’ll see who the big dummy is.
“Pixels at the molecular level” (comparable in size to the wavelength of light) would be GREAT – it’s more or less the thing needed for proper holographic video displays (along with processing power and memory we’ll nowhere near).
Imagine a screen which feels like a window or mirror, that’s what proper holograms feel like.
Ok, my bad assuming it uses the shitty universal 1366×768. Which Asus model are you talking about exactly?
Nettop, Network Laptop, Chromebook, Glorified Terminal with a very fancy screen,… whatever other buzzword suits your fancy and helps you keep missing the point. Better now?
ChromeOS is based on Gentoo Linux, and you can get a terminal emulator by hitting Ctrl-Alt-T. Hopefully they’ll add a GUI way of accessing it soon, as a gentle introduction for all the nublets. I’m seriously contemplating getting a Chromebook and seeing how much work it takes to bootstrap pkgsrc on it, because it’s already GNU/Linux, it just needs a package manager that stays out of /.
Didn’t know thr, thanks! If I took the plunge, I’d still want to give Ubuntu and SUSE (at least) a try, but I won’t rule out Chrome out of hand.
So a slimmed down version of Linux with a browser on top is a full-featured OS?
You find it more logical that Google is selling a $1300 laptop to read XKCD?
What are the other duds? The only one I can think of is the bizarre Nexus Q tv happy fun ball.
Did all the creative pros move to Adobe Creative Cloud or something? I assume that’s the market this thing is targeted at, looking at the resolution and horsepower.
Or did Google somehow manage to bloat-up the lean Gentoo bedrock that Chrome OS sits on for a browser to require an i5 all of a sudden?
Joking aside, I don’t really know who’ll want this, especially at that price. Sure, high ppi is nice and all, but just for 5hrs unplugged on a web browser?
At least one thing about it is that it should be less resistant to infection than that other OS my inlaws use for banking and facebook.
Just because their needs /could/ be met by a $300 system doesn’t mean they are attached to the idea of spending no more than $300.
Besides, for a huge amount of people I know the only thing they need a fast system for is gaming. Maybe their goal is to produce a niche product that will allow ChromeOS to expand to gaming.
In theory it’s powerful enough to run a lot of stuff currently in my steam library.
Microsoft wants to charge $100/year to rent Office 365. Home and Business is $220 and if your PC dies the licence is lost with it. The Outlook client alone costs $110. Yes, $110 for an email client.
Pixel doesn’t offer much value yet due to lack of software but if people start defecting from their PC’s Google wants to be ready to support higher end needs as well as $300 budgets.
That and I doubt many people want to write software for ChromeOS using a $250 toy laptop.
Depends on whether you consider what Google does is akin to spyware but I see your point. People who aren’t clued up are easily taken in by deceptive buttons and such, Windows is still a nightmare security wise when someone is click happy.
However, when it comes to actually getting some work done… there’s nothing stopping you from grabbing an older copy of MS Office very cheap now, sadly there’s still no real competition for anything but the most basic of spreadsheets.
Finally someone cut the widescreen crap.
No. Studios are shooting in 16:9, and when not shooting in 16:9, they are shooting in freaking 21:9. How many of you have seen a 21:9 movie played on a 4:3 screen? Let me tell you, 16:9 on 4:3 is tolerable, but 21:9 on 4:3 is ridiculous.
Unless studios get back to their senses and start selling edited-to-16:9 versions of 21:9 movies, along with the unedited (21:9) version, widescreen is the way to go.
I think the answer is there is certainly a market for 4:3 16:9 AND (probably)21:9/18:9 laptops ..same as for TVs and projectors
…but with 16:9 being the biggest market as it’s the best compromise for most consumers -with an appetite for 16:9 film&TV content.
I think 4:3 is probably the best ratio for a productivity laptop though. And I strictly mean productivity in MY case where I need to read a lot of research papers and work with a lot spreadsheet data.
and thereby length, for once, is more important than girth.. ..I mean width.. sorry.
video professionals I’m presuming will want the nearest to their native ratio.
and web developers.. well, their a funny crowd, I can’t call that one. I personally hate scrolling down more than I ‘need to’ on 16:9 displays..
If I’d a choice I’d almost go for a 16″ or 17″ (diagonal) 1:1 square-screened laptop.
But I’m strange.
There isn’t a market for 21:9 (or 18:9), just an ultra-small niche (as Philips found out after they failed to push their 21:9 TVs in significant quantities). Photos and 4:3 content look awful in 21:9. You know how it goes, photos and 4:3 on a 16:9 screen is tolerable, but photos and 4:3 on 21:9 is ridiculous.
Essentially, with 4:3, 16:9 and 21:9 content being all in the daily menu of most users (where “content” means movies and photos), 16:9 is the safest choice for consumer hardware, because it sits somewhere in the middle, so black bars (horizontal of vertical) will never be too thick.
Of course, if you want hardware for productivity, good luck finding a 4:3 laptop. A niche market for this Chromebook Pixel? (after you install a real OS in it of course)
Thought about that too, then I saw the Intel GPU. Intel GPUs have notoriously terrible Linux drivers (not that the Windows ones are a pinnacle of software quality, but at least they mostly work). In fact, THE most interesting thing about this laptop is the drivers Google will use to drive the GPU. Remember, this is an integrated product, so Google cannot say “sorry for the bugs, tee hee”, so it will be interesting to see how they plan to work around the problem that is the Intel GPU. They could turn off the acceleraton, but there is Web GL stuff they need to support. And H.264 acceleration.
Edited 2013-02-22 15:33 UTC
It has been getting better and better ever since Chris Wilson started working on it ~3 years ago. He is the guy who almost single-handedly makes Intel GPUs viable on Linux:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/log/
It a shame they don’t put more resources into it, there is a lot of problems with games with Steam at the moment with the older intel chipsets because they can’t support certain parts of the OpenGL spec.
I personally only use a laptop when I need to and am willing to compromise on the screen. I tend to use a desktop as much as possible. I like a wide screen for my desktop computers, but for productivity dual monitors is the way to go imo.
All of that having been said. I don’t have to use my laptop all that much so it’s a little easier to compromise on the screen size/resolution.
“No. Studios are shooting in 16:9, and when not shooting in 16:9, they are shooting in freaking 21:9. How many of you have seen a 21:9 movie played on a 4:3 screen? Let me tell you, 16:9 on 4:3 is tolerable, but 21:9 on 4:3 is ridiculous.”
A computer is not a cinema. If I use my computer for tall-screen-suited tasks 1800 hours a year and watching movies about 4 hours a year it makes no sense to axe the top and bottom part of my monitor just so I can have no black bars for those 4 hours.
Edited 2013-02-22 14:02 UTC
Hopefully with this we’ll see more manufacturers making the really high DPI screens. We’ve been stuck on 1080p for a while, and most laptops aren’t even that anymore.
As a high-end user, why would I buy this? ChromeOS is just, well, Chrome. For significantly less I could get a real laptop with more storage, more power, and run Chrome as well as everything else I might want. For just a little bit more, I could get a Macbook with a screen that’s just as good (for all practical purposes), and can run Chrome as well as anything else I might want. Why would I spend $1300 on something that has inferior storage, an inferior os, and is far too over-powered for the purpose resulting in crappy battery life? The only thing this offers is a touch screen, but let’s be honest, this is a laptop. How many people are going to want to reach their arm up to the top and touch tabs just to activate them? I don’t know about anyone else here, but my arms would get tired mighty quick.
If Google had wanted to make a bit of a splash, they should’ve released a nice ChromeOS tablet with this screen. I could have seen a practical purpose for that. This just makes me wonder what the top engineers at Google are smoking. Essentially, it’s a touch screen that’s not a tablet, and a laptop that’s incapable as a laptop.
Clearly this is a high end laptop for people who want to put linux on their machines. That’s really the only point I see for it.
And that will depend on how locked down it is. We’ve seen a trend towards locking down Chromebooks as tight as, if not tighter than, some Windows machines. If this is one of those, you may be stuck with ChromeOS for a while and have to bootstrap an external package manager on top of that.
Talk about a niche market! 😉
Touchscreen works out better than that in laptops – you can support your elbow in front of the keyboard half.
I’m gonna advise anyone thinking of buying this to rethink before buying a Google product. I received my Nexus 7 tablet last week. For no apparent reason its screen fractured in two, and touch no longer works. Apparently this has happened to a ton of people, but good luck to us trying to get a new device under warranty with a broken screen.
Let this post go down in history as I hereby christen this device as… the UltraChromeBook!
What a joke. Only 4GB of RAM and hardly any local storage for $1300? For $1300 I could buy three decent new laptops or two really nice new laptops that all do a heck of a lot more than run a web browser.
Edited 2013-02-22 12:32 UTC
I don’t think it’s necessarily the immediate choice..
BUT none of them are ‘proper, normal’ laptops
and each have different compromise from the traditional laptop. and they all have an element of ‘tablet’ functionality (as in the TOUCH side of it).
So I think the Chromebook Pixel is put out there as an alternative to the ‘Surface Pro/RT Considerer’
….after all, nobody needs ANY of them. And anyone that can easily justify the expense of even the baby the Surface, can probably muster the extra for the Pixel. My two pennies.
IF the Pixel will run other OS’s/linuxii it would definitely trump the surface pro for me personally.
So Microsoft and Google are going after the same .001% of the market while Apple and Android OEMs take the rest.
This thing looks cool and all, but other then the high screen resolution the specs are dismal for the price. My fiance recently bought an hp laptop for $450 USD and the specs are way better. i7 processor, same (or very similar) gpu, 17 inch display 750 gb hard drive, and roughly 8 hours of battery life under casual use. If I am droping $1300 – $1500 on a laptop I expect some decent processing power and better battery life.
not to mention 12 gigs of ram.
I think a lot of people are missing the fact that this is a touch screen machine. If you compare to other touch screen based laptops, it is at least competitive.
I have never seen such a limited device so poorly priced.
Who knew that Google would come out and make the Surface Pro look like a good deal in comparison.
Oh and I’m sure it will “sell out” just like all new hardware does these days. God when will tech journalists stop falling for that marketing scam?
Edit: 5 hour battery life?
HAhhahahhahahahhahhahahha
It does have a point, it’s great for comic relief just like Surface RT.
Edited 2013-02-22 22:57 UTC
Is it just me or does the keyboard look like it’s missing a lot of keys?
It says it right there on the home page :
“For what’s next
The Chromebook Pixel is a laptop that brings together the best in hardware, software, and design to inspire future innovation.”
To inspire future innovation. This is not a product they expect people to buy in droves. They’re :
1) Inspiring hardware manufacturers to not think of the chromebook as a budget computer but really to start rolling out high end models
2) Let application developers know that web apps no longer have to be simple games and the hardware will be out there for more CPU/GPU intensive tasks
Edited 2013-02-23 12:47 UTC
Supposedly it can run Linux Mint:
https://plus.google.com/100479847213284361344/posts/QhmBpn5GNE9
IMO think 16:9 is great for “productivity”, so long the physical size of the screen and quality is high enough.
My unqualified guess is that Google has tried to get Asus or Samsung to take on the product, but that they don’t have stamina to do it. So Google push it out themselves. I suspect that they cannot deliver the display in large volumes yet, still it is the cheapest fullsize Retina laptop out there, so it will probably sell. It’s an upgrade path for those who already have one of the cheap Chromebooks and like it. If they succeed I bet the other vendors will step up and put ChromeOS on competitively specced units at a lower price. Google probably consider Pixel to be a success if they manage recoup their R&D.
I also believe this is a longterm strategy related to Google Apps for Business. This is a perfect machine for businesses which have all their software as apps in the cloud. Perhaps ChromeOS is not mature enough for that, dunno, but still… you gotta create the market early on.
Intel does the same thing with motherboards. They push out expensive new form-factor motherboards that create new markets, when the market has been created the other mb-vendors take over because it is now profitable. Intel wants to sell lots of chips and retain a competitive edge over AMD by being in new markets early. The best way to do that is to create them yourself.
Sony does the same thing. They have some nice products that does not make business sense atm, but that explore possible directions.
Microsoft did the same thing with xbox. They didn’t need the business. They needed to consolidate and strengthen (the volume of) Direct X in order to keep the PC-platform competitive. If they had not done that OpenGL could have swept out Direct X due to the very low pricing of console hardware.
Edited 2013-02-25 11:32 UTC
Only USB 2.0 ports? In 2013? In a pricey laptop?
The year 2000 called and wanted its technology back.
I’d like to keep the 3:2 screen.
I am posting this from a Chromebook Pixel. It’s beautiful and smooth and impressive. The fonts aren’t gorgeous, although they resolution is amazing, and I wonder if this isn’t something that might be tweaked with updates, now that there is a “retina-like” display.
Either way, I’ll report back on this.