
The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature - snotrockets
http://shayelk.in/?p=841
======
shoopy
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I talk about aspect ratios with
average consumers. Most people really do believe--probably through HDTV
marketing--that wider screens are better. The lion's share of most people's
time on the Internet is spent reading and scolling vertically, yet our devices
are optimized for watching little sixty second movie clips at a time. Why
wouldn't you want to make the 95% case more pleasurable at the expense of a
few black bars on the top and bottom of your movie? Besides, most Internet
videos need to be upscaled to fill the screen anyways, the detail is mostly
interpolated anyhow.

~~~
lenazegher
The author dismisses the possibility of side-by-side windows on a small
screen, but I no problems using multiple windows on my 1080p 15" laptop
screen. Therefore i find a wider screen much more productive--it's much harder
to intelligently fill a screen with a narrower aspect ratio

~~~
bjustin
I have a 13" Macbook Air with a reasonable 1440x900 resolution, and I can fit
about 1 1/3 windows on screen, at best: a narrower-than-usual browser window
and TweetBot.

Laptop screens are generally not wide enough to fit two windows side by side.
Even the ones that are, such as your 1080p 15" laptop, are unusable for most
of us due to tiny text and so on.

~~~
comex
My 15" MBP at 1400x900x2 is wide enough to fit a split editor, or an editor
and part of a terminal (I find that having part of a background window visible
makes it less jarring to switch to it). I wouldn't mind it being physically
taller, but I wouldn't want it to be any narrower.

~~~
bjustin
1440x900 is just enough for me to use Sublime Text 2 in two column mode, or
Xcode with the assistant editor. I do have to hide any sidebars for both to be
usable.

I stand by earlier post for, say, a web browser or email client.

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NateDad
Absolutely. I hated when everyone started making 16:9 monitors. The 16:10 ones
weren't quite as bad, but seriously, give me some vertical pixels. Especially
true for coding where it's useful to see as many lines of code on the screen
at possible.

~~~
jfim
Get a monitor stand that swivels, so you can use the 16:9 ratio to your
advantage. The only catch is that you start noticing when people write long
lines over 120 chars, though they shouldn't do that in the first place.

Edit: It's also really awesome for reading/editing documents, since you can
fit the full page onscreen.

~~~
r00fus
I'm doing this right now @ work with 2x16:9 monitors. Coworkers are amazed and
amused, but if you don't do this with IPS panels, the vertical viewing angles
(now horizontal) are pretty bad on most non-IPS monitors... so it's sometimes
hard to share your screen.

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shurcooL
I agree.

I really dislike 16:9 on productivity machines. It's not wide enough for 2
windows side by side, and too short for a single window.

Even Lenovo has recently switched to 16:9 (probably from the incentives of
Microsoft Windows 8), leaving Apple as the last one standing making 16:10
laptops.

16:10 is the maximum wideness I can accept, but 3:2 (i.e. 15:10) would
probably be slightly better.

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raldi
The Pixel's best feature is the touchscreen. The first time you tap a tiny
onscreen link with your finger, instead of trying to aim for it with the
trackpad, or the first time you pinch to zoom out on Google Maps, you'll never
want to use a non-touchscreen laptop again.

~~~
nsp
My understanding (source: most recent verge podcast) was that the touch screen
doesn't support pinch to zoom - is that incorrect? I'd love to be wrong

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xnxn
It does, according to the product page.

[http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-
pixe...](http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixel/#pixel-
touch)

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antiterra
This blog entry presents a single argument: aspect ratios should favor a more
narrow width because they should aspire to the readability of a page.

That's a single bullet point in a long pro/con list and you'll never reach
consensus on the definitively correct aspect ratio. Plenty of people watch
movies on their computer screens, others like having an IDE with frames on the
side, others want games to spread across their horizontal field of view and
some just think it looks modern. Why on earth does that make the screen ratio
'boneheaded?'

Be excited for your preference, argue the use cases that it suits, that's all
fine. Maybe toss the prescriptive attitude that your opinion is categorically
correct for everyone else who has not yet discovered it.

~~~
snotrockets
(author here) I would have written that as a one line, but to quote Pascal,
"that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is." Thank you for
doing that for me.

I don't call for a single aspect ratio: I just call for more variety: there is
a good use case for more squarish laptop screens, but they are gone from the
market, the main reason for that mistake being copying TV designs.

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ChuckMcM
I find the aspect ratio an interesting choice. And I agree that 'wide' isn't
necessarily "good" with laptops. Although, as the Ubuntu for Tablets demo
showed, you can do some interesting things with the extra space to the right
of a 4:3 (or 3:2) chunk.

I would really like to see some interesting really wide and short touch
screens as the 21st century replacement for 'function' keys along the top of
the keyboard. Sure there are keyboards with LCD screens on every key but a
nice 1920 x 480 bar that was as wide as the top of my keyboard, three rows of
12 "160 x 160" 'super tiles' I could put status in, or touch to activate, or
what not, but below the screen where its easy to press my finger. Won't happen
for a while though I'm afraid.

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mtgx
Google should make Android tablets 3:2, too, if they aren't going to make them
4:3 like Apple. It should be a bit better than 16:10, which I think still
turns a lot of people off from using Android tablets vs iPads, knowing they
can't really use them in vertical mode.

~~~
barrkel
The Nexus 7 viewport feels very book-like as portrait. The iPad is the one
that looks "wrong", too fat.

~~~
zevyoura
This is a matter of opinion, and I imagine probably highly correlated with
which device you own.

~~~
omaranto
"book-like" seemed spot on, maybe it's also correlated with how much time
you've spent holding print books in your hand?

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ryeguy
How big of a difference is this though? 16:10 is 3.2:2.

~~~
t0
Lots of different comparisons here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)#Visual_com...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_\(image\)#Visual_comparisons)

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kylec
Interesting observation. I don't particularly care if the Chromebook succeeds
or not, but I wholeheartedly agree that the trend towards wider and wider
(i.e. shorter and shorter) screens was terrible. In addition to all the valid
points I'm seeing other people make here, it's also worth noting that the move
to widescreens has enabled manufacturers to ship displays that, based on their
diagonal measurement, a customer would think are larger than their non-
widescreens when they're actually the same size or even smaller. For example,
a 47" 4:3 screen has the same area as a 50" 16:9 screen.

~~~
js2
<http://tvcalculator.com/> has been around forever and is good for comparing
these things.

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antidaily
The 13" retina Macbook Pro is 2560 x 1600 at 229 ppi - about the same.

~~~
shurcooL
They use 16:10 screens. The 13" rMBP has 2560x1600 resolution while Pixel has
2560x1700, 100 pixels taller.

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t0
That's a very interesting point. I remember when we had 15 and 17" LCDs back
in the day that were always nearly square. Now it seems rare to find a
computer screen even remotely square.

~~~
panacea
I find this (oddly) most pronounced on the iPhone 5. On previous models,
landscape browsing was a valid option, but once you get the extra length
vertically in portrait, the limited landscape view feels completely uselessly
constrained.

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abat
Personally, my preference for aspect ratio varies by screen size and how I'll
likely divide it up.

On a small laptop screen like a Chromebook, I agree with the author that a
wide aspect ratio can be annoying because a maximized window often feels to
short.

On a large monitor (ie 27+ inches) though, I think wide aspect ratio is good
because a common use case is multiple side by side windows, and it's also a
good fit for full screen video.

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edmundhuber
Use xmonad, reclaim your space.

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jrkelly
I held onto my 3:2 thinkpad until it died for exactly this reason. You
literally couldn't buy a new 3:2 laptop. Especially on small screens it is so
much better.

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s0rce
Who makes the panel, is it custom?

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Cieplak
It is a great machine crippled with 32gb hard drive.

~~~
skore
Well, obviously it's marketed as a device that is supposed to have the lion
share of its data in the cloud. In that regard, 32GB is plenty.

I like to think of it as something that could make a pretty neat remote
desktop workstation. I've actually thought about putting my main linux
workstation on the LAN, somewhere else (it's a bit noisy) and logging into it
from a thin client. The Chromebook Pixel does make a rather attractive option
for that.

Of course, you'd have to slap a proper OS on it, but that may be an
intentional hidden option. I'm also not up to date on how well modern day
RFB/X11 performs in terms of i/o latency, so I have all this marked as
"potential weekend project".

~~~
taligent
Actually it would be a pointless to use it for the purpose you describe.

What truly separates Pixel from a $250 laptop is the retina, touchscreen
display which is wasted if you are exclusively using it for VNC.

~~~
skore
The touchscreen maybe, but why the high resolution?

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rjzzleep
anyone knows if i can just replace it with a custom ssd and put on a random
linux distro? i have a feeling the answer is no.

also 4 gb? not for me ;/

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pfraze
The oculus rift is going to be an unbounded monitor. It has no screen size!

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helloamar
Currently they say the battery comes upto 5hrs. If they could double it up, it
will be great,

~~~
taligent
Really. The only thing not making it a 'great' device is the battery life ?

You do realise that ALL it does is surf the web ? I don't understand why
anybody would buy it over an iPad or a refurbished MacBook Pro. I personally
think it is one of the most pointless devices released in the last few years.

~~~
Cieplak
It can boot Linux. In that regard, it has the potential to be a general
purpose laptop. Although you have to keep your files in the "cloud" because it
only has 32gb of storage.

~~~
taligent
It can boot Linux but the trackpad and touchscreen doesn't work.

Again. Why wouldn't you buy a MacBook Pro that is usable out of the box ?

~~~
snotrockets
I ran into warranty issues with the last Mac I owned, and swore never to buy
one again.

But even if I did, I'm not sure it would run a sane Linux distribution out of
the box (from what I'm reading, it's a bit touch and go,) and I don't consider
a computer usable unless it can run the setup I need, which depends heavily on
Linux -- developing on Mac OS X and deploying to Linux never worked for me: I
could never keep a "sane" environment with the former.

