Gadgetory

hey what is up guys MTV HD here and this is Google pixel book love the name this thing was announced alongside that pixel - and it's in Google's holiday season product line up alongside the home many and other things like that and this thing is really weird to me now I love the Chromebook pixel which was the last high-end Chromebook that Google made but I was very careful to only recommend it to certain smaller groups of people who knew what they were getting themselves into this pixel book while it is an amazing piece of hardware is even harder to recommend to an even smaller group of people because of how all its weirdness so pixel book is a high-end laptop with a touchscreen that folds over into tablet mode and runs Chrome OS and it starts at a thousand bucks so ok aesthetically it is pretty nice it takes after the pixel smartphones with the glass window up top and this all-metal very angular boxy design it's super thin I don't even think I've ever held a laptop this thin before and this thing feels like more like a thick tablet instead of a thin laptop it's crazy sharp so I'm honestly a big fan of the aesthetics on the outside the soft palm rests surrounding the touchpad is really cool minimal fingerprints are gonna show with this design with the silver and white color combo and even the hinge is pretty sturdy and minimal the thing is flanked by two USB sea ports one on either side and of course both can be used for charging and there's a headphone jack and that's it I guess that's all the i/o most laptops seem to need these days so that doesn't strike me as weird at the core and inside you're looking at a seventh generation Intel Core i5 eight gigs of ram 128 gigs of storage really beefy specs at the baseline version and you can bump it up to an i7 and 16 gigs of ram and a half terabyte nvme SSD if you want which is nuts and then all about the front is the 12 inch four by three display it's a crispy bright 2400 by 1600 touchscreen display the whole thing is fanless you know all solid-state no moving parts basically this hardware actually has a lot going on that wouldn't make you blink twice at that thousand dollar price tag but here's the thing and you probably saw this coming at a thousand bucks you know you could say okay this nice hardware I can see that but this thing is running Chrome OS you know what else you can get for a thousand bucks the highest and biggest newest iPad pro you know Ellison get four thousand bucks the Microsoft Surface laptop a MacBook Air so this thing is kind of competing with those in that price point and then my philosophy on tune ones has always kind of been when you trying to be both a laptop and a tablet you inevitably get a little bit worse at being a laptop than dedicated laptops and a little bit worse at being a tablet than dedicated tablets so this is a decent laptop and a decent tablet but it's not fantastic at either but even more awkward about the pixel book is just all the weird quirks it has that add up these bezels around the display definitely huge like bigger than I think they need to be I understand you know you need some place to put your hands when you're holding a thing in tablet mode but damn that is just weird the speakers are just kind of behind the keyboard and they don't sound that great now I get that it's thin and it's probably the only place they could fit these speakers but couldn't they put a grill about the top it's weird flipping it around into tablet mode and having the keyboard behind the display like this no matter how long I use it it feels weird every time I'm constantly pressing keys on the back I know other two and one laptops do this too and it turns off the keyboards they're not actually typing anything but still holding something like this and trying to ignore all the buttons on the back as easy as they are at a press is just kind of weird and I've said for years I've always found using touchscreen laptops a little bit awkward because of the hinge wobble this one is no exception to that rule and the screen jittering even though the performance is fast when I scroll through menus or long lists or long pages on the pixel book there's some serious ghosting and stuttering of animations that I did not expect to see on a Chromebook with a Core i5 and then there is the pixel book pen this thing is $100 accessory first of all so there's that long metal tube with a battery inside one button and the stylus tip hundred bucks it doesn't come with any replacement tips like even the iPads pencil or surface stylists do and most others do weird this thing uses quadruple a batteries what have you ever heard of these luckily there's supposed to last about a year each but Wow okay that is also pretty weird and you'd think they would have thought of this but there's really just no place to keep it when you're not using it there's no magnet no clip if you don't have that it's just kind of rolling around loose and you have to press it obnoxiously hard to actually use it has anyone actually tried to use this stylus I have a hard time finding other people's reviews talking about this but maybe mine has some sort of problem because it doesn't work at all with normal pressure that I might use with Apple's pencil for example the only way I can get it to work reliably is by pressing so hard that I'm literally bending the display a little like you can see it here and at that point it obviously doesn't feel natural anymore super weird and then there is Chrome OS so you guys already know Chrome pretty well obviously it's been limited for a while by not having all of the professional apps so when buying a thousand dollar laptop might use but to be fair this is all most people really need it's all your web apps and all of your Android apps from the Play Store but there's no doubt you can do more with a full fledged desktop OS like on a Mac or a Windows laptop most of the Adobe suite is missing certain apps you won't find if you're a student even on the iPad the App Store is much more massive and more importantly more optimized and then another weird thing is now that you have the Play Store and the chrome store a lot of times on this pixel book you have two options for the same service the web app in Chrome or the Android app so YouTube for example there's two icons on my launcher a web app for youtube.com or the Android YouTube app and they do a good job of distinguishing between them so you never really get them confused but it's just kind of weird to sometimes open the YouTube app in desktop mode when I'm using it as a laptop but then other times open it as a tablet mode when I want to kick back but look among all this weirdness don't get me wrong Chrome OS definitely has its advantages like some really cool features on this guy pixel book automatically tethers to your Google pixel if you have one for mobile data when you don't have Wi-Fi that's pretty cool it has a couple custom buttons on the keyboard that you probably won't find anywhere else my favorite probably being the assistant button to call Google assistant anytime you want clearly you can see how hard Google is pushing it it has a power button and a volume button on the side kind of like an tablet so you can hold down the power button for a second to lock it when you're going away and if you pair it to your phone you can unlock pixel book with your phone's fingerprint sensor that is seriously cool and the stylus has of course that one button where if you hold it while circling an image it'll do a Google search for that image to find what it is or where it came from but are those two things enough to justify you spending your thousand bucks on this over a surface laptop or over an iPad pro or over a macbook air I don't really think so and so it's really really hard for me to recommend pixel book like I said when you make it two and one like this you inevitably get a little bit worse at being a laptop and a little bit worse at being a tablet so it's just kind of okay at both again so that's pretty much it thank you for watching talk together the next one pace