Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and we're taking a look at the Chromebook pixel which is actually one of the more confusing devices I've seen in a while so Google's been building Chrome OS for a while and until now there's been kind of a race to see how cheap a Chromebook companies could build they were $249 or $199 but now from Google itself comes the pixel an incredibly high-end laptop that cost twelve hundred ninety nine dollars it's something completely different this is Google trying to position Chrome OS next to Windows and OS 10 as a legitimate third desktop operating system the OS is one thing and might be a harder sell but the pixels hardware is definitely on par with the best laptops out there it really starts with the screen the twelve point eight five inch 2560 by seventeen hundred touchscreen display that's insanely high resolution even more so than the MacBook Pro with Retina display and the screen looks incredible this really is probably the best screen I've ever seen on a laptop it has a 3:2 aspect ratio which means it's a little taller than a lot of laptops that's really good for web browsing but it does mean movies get letterboxes above and below the touch screen works well enough the real limiting factor is Chrome OS there just aren't a lot of apps that are particularly touch optimized though google has shown there changing that a little the rest of the hardware is just as good to the all-metal body is a little thicker and heavier than a MacBook Air and it doesn't taper so it feels much bigger but it's sleek sturdy and looks almost kind of futuristic especially the light bar on the back which really serves no purpose other than to glow and look awesome but it looks really awesome it's a really basic simple body the keyboard and trackpad are both pretty excellent the trackpad is smooth and glassy and it works great for to finger scrolling or pinch-to-zoom it's kind of limited though it doesn't have a lot of gestures available and it really doesn't do much other than just scroll and work as a cursor but it's smooth and responsive and does everything it does perfectly the keyboard is really good too it clacks nicely and the keys are really well spaced out it actually feels a lot like a MacBook keyboard with the chiclet keys there are a bunch of chrome specific tweaks like the search key instead of caps lock and a whole row of function keys above the number row those top keys are a little stiff and kind of hard to find with your finger which is a little awkward but overall I really like the keyboard so the pixels Hardware stands up to any laptop on the market it's beautiful well made and basically flawless in its design but making the case for a $1300 computer that's really only a web browser gets kind of difficult Chrome OS saw some really smart things to disguise the fact that it's basically just a web browser you can open websites in separate windows that kind of feel like apps and there's even a new app launcher that I actually like better than the OS 10 dock but the thing is you're still mostly just using a web browser not only do not get access to all the native apps you'd get on OS 10 or Windows you don't get a lot of the functionality either RDO is totally useless offline for instance and even little things like switching between apps gets a lot harder there's a file browser but it's incredibly basic and Google pushes you constantly to use Google Drive and actually you should the pixel comes with just 32 or 64 gigs of internal storage but you do get a terabyte of drive storage and the Chrome OS file manager is the best way I've seen to manage your Drive files the pixel oddly doesn't do a great job of playing back local files for some reason despite the fact that it's powered by an Intel Core i5 processor a 1080p video looks great and sounds great the pixels speakers push sound through the keyboard and it's pretty loud and clear but it stuttered a lot throughout the whole movie weirdly streaming YouTube videos at 1080p worked much better for the most part though the pixel just worked like any other Chromebook it's smooth and fast without a lot of problems but of course most Chromebooks work about the same we didn't really have issues with $200 Chromebooks so I'm not surprised that you'd get good performance for $1000 more than that one thing Chromebooks should have over windows or OS 10 is battery life but that's not really the case here we only got four and a half hours on our battery test which isn't necessarily surprising given the high res screen but still seems like less than such a simple browser based OS should get I am convinced that a certain kind of person could do just fine with a Chromebook as a primary machine especially if you don't travel a lot and you don't have a lot of need for offline use it works really well it's the most stable browser I've ever used by far and almost never lags or crashes I wish chrome was this good on Windows or OS 10 it's also just a simpler and sometimes smarter OS but unless you're comfortable using web services for absolutely everything and don't need something as powerful as Photoshop or word and don't want to play games it's still pretty hard to say that your $1300 is better spent on any Chromebook over a MacBook or a Windows Ultrabook you can also get an LTE capable pixel for fourteen hundred and forty nine dollars and you even get some free data from Verizon but that's again an extra from a pure hardware standpoint I like to pixel better than any laptop I've ever used but it just has some limitations its competitors don't when for $100 less you can get a MacBook Air limitations are pretty close to unacceptable