I get the feeling that these Chromebook Pixels aren't made for the public. My theory is that they're the result of an internal Google compromise between ChromeOS managers who want their team to dog food Chromebooks and ChromeOS developers who replied "Get me a compromise free, top of the line chormebook, and I might consider it". The only real customers they care about are Google developers and they don't care about price.
The Pixel is probably a little bit like an overpowered Nexus line:
1) Set a high standard for build quality and all for all the other Chromebooks.
2) Create a consumer perception that Chromebooks can be high quality devices of substantial value
3) Create a powerful playground for testing with heavy Chrome apps & getting native Android apps to work on ChromeOS and other such features that will come to the cheaper Chromebooks a year later.
All leading to the $300 Chromebooks feeling like high-quality bargains with ever increasing functionality.
Beyond that, the device seems ridiculous unless you put a different OS on, you're either better off with a cheaper Chromebook, or an equally pricy Windows Laptop (e.g. Dell XPS 2015) or Macbook. So I really think the Pixel is more of a strategic asset (see above) than something meant to be a popular revenue generating consumer device in and of itself.
I wish Google had an official way of putting a Linux distribution on these machines. I know they want people working in Chrome OS but for me it just isn't enough.
If I could buy the Pixel and have an official way of putting Debian or something on it to make it a proper laptop I probably would buy one. I love the design, the specs are very decent and the display is beautiful.
There is an official way. Turn on developer mode, open a shell, run "sudo crossystem dev_boot_legacy=1", then reboot and hit ctrl-L to boot a PC BIOS (SeaBIOS) that can install Linux. Then install and run any Linux distribution you like.
Right. Crouton lets you run Linux in a chroot under Chrome OS. This lets you completely replace Chrome OS with your Linux distribution of choice. Both make sense depending on what you're trying to do.
And I guess now there's a Chrome extension that lets you just run Ubuntu (or whatever you installed) in a browser tab?
It's interesting that this is nearly what I've naturally arrived at with my current work MacBook. I got so tired of trying to get various Linux-y things running (and through OS updates) on OS X that I just created a Vagrant box that I can wipe and re-install at my leisure. Now 90% of my actual work is done on a virtual machine.
I'd have to figure out how to get port-forwarding working, and probably a few other things, but I'm willing to bet this new Pixel would make a darn good work machine.
Wait you can run Ubuntu on a browser tab? That sounds completely awesome. Now I really want one.. I just wonder if there's going to be enough space with the tiny SSDs they ship
This has also been my OSX experience. I bought a Toshiba CB2 a couple months back to see if ChromeOS could handle my workflow; It does. I want a pixel bad!
My only question: can you physically have a 512Gb ssd inside that thing? Anything else is irrelevant to me. The previous Chromebook pixel had the mini PCIe port used by the WWAN modem wired with only the USB lines, meaning you couldn't do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0_u8bjQFzg
I won't buy a chromebook pixel until I can at least get a decent storage. It doesn't have to be sold with this storage. The motherboard just needs the right tracks to the mini PCIe and mSATA support so that I can do it. Google might have saved 2 cents, but won't be getting a dollar from me and other people from this thread who say "this laptop would be absolutely perfect for me if it had more storage"
> * It's likely that it's still soldered to the motherboard which makes replacing or upgrading it impossible. Given that the Pixel can only be disassembled using suction cups and a great deal of force I'm not able to actually look inside to check. *
So it seems this "review" didn't even attempt to open up the laptop to check out the motherboard. Disappointing.
That's how reviews usually work. They evaluate a product to see if it does what it's supposed to do. They don't tear it apart and attempt to to repurpose it for some other use entirely.
I have the same opinion that you do - 64Gigs is just too minimal.
But if I can use that 64-gigs for OS/Apps, and mount my home directory on an SD card, I'm happy with that solution .. assuming that the SD card slot can hold a very fast SD (128Gigs or so) without physically protruding out of the case. Its not clear to me that this is so .. anyone know?
I actually think that the ability to host a larger SD partition is a good feature - it makes for backups and opsec in ways that my current rMBP, with its soldered-in Flash drive, cannot deliver. So that aspect is kind of intriguing to me ..
I'm not the guy you replied to, but come on. Install some big software like MATLAB or MS Office, oh no there goes several GB for each one. Set up a few VMs, oops there goes tens more GBs. Install some modern video games, multiple GB each one. And that's without even getting to the obvious culprits of pictures, music, and video.
64 GB would only work for a computer used almost exclusively for doing things on remote systems (browsing internet, working on remote servers, storing things on external HDs, etc).
VM's, mostly. Compilers, secondary. Blender, Inkscape. And then there's the big builds I do: the Linux kernel, rootfs, MOAI .. this all adds up and is quite space-filling.
If all I was doing is produce Word .docs and a few spreadsheets, I'm sure it'd be fine. But if you're a modern developer in the F/OSS world, 128gigs is barely enough to get rolling ..
I'm not too familiar with hardware constraints but I remember when people were comparing microSDs on phones vs built in storage one of the big issues was that the speed on microSDs was way worse.
The battery life is great, but the thing that worries me about all non-Apple laptops with sealed batteries is the lack of an official battery service. If I buy an Apple laptop, I know that for $130-200, they'll swap out the battery pack once it's capacity goes down. That does wonders for resale value. What's the story with the original Pixel?
Thinking about the problems you will have with something you buy is naive? Considering a wide variety of parts on a laptop are proprietary I think serviceability and turn around time are big considerations.
I just ordered the LS model because it's what I wanted the new MacBook to be. Good build quality, decent processor, 12", HiDPI display, more than one port, and 12 hours of battery life. I fully intend to install ubuntu the second I get it and boot off that for the life of the machine. My hope is that for everything but vector/raster editing it can replace my 15" MacBook Pro for daily Python dev work.
Genuinely curious. How do you occupy all of that space on a phone? I've had my 8GB nexus 4 for almost two years, and I'm just now hitting space limitations.
Mostly photos and videos of my kids and their activities and whatnot. I do auto-backup all of it, but I like having it local on the device. Music and other media/content I try to keep and access solely from the cloud, but I like having all the personal media locally. I've been using a 32GB Moto X for a little over a year and am already getting close to the limit. I would imagine as these devices become more and more of a primary computing device for people, the space will be easier to fill up too.
Does anyone know if they fixed the bug in the original Pixel where if the battery died (or just got too low!) it'd lose the dev mode setting?
That was my main complaint with the original Pixel - I was running Debian on it as my main machine, but after that happening for the 5th time at a conference and having to reinstall...
That's not so much a bug but a known issue. The flag that you set at the command line to enable SeaBIOS is held in RAM. Which means if you lose power, that goes back to default.
The Pixel is weird. It'd be a nice laptop if it had a decent amount of storage (I'd be fine with 128GB - My MBA has that much and it can hold every personal project I've ever had, plus my entire music collection - but some would prefer 256 of 512), and a proper keyboard layout (no Super? no Caps Lock?!).
But without those things, it's an overpriced netbook with a CPU far too powerful.
Google needs to develop and release their own IDE. I shouldn't need to mess around with the terminal on what is supposed to be a developer's notebook. Android, Java, Chrome/web apps, Go etc, if Google is serious about winning developer mindshare from Apple then creating the proper tools is necessary
> I shouldn't need to mess around with the terminal on what is supposed to
> be a developer's notebook
Really? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Still, I might feel your pain. If I have to mess around with crouton to install linux on one of these devices I would not call it a developer's notebook. Which is a pity, given the ThinkPad line is almost dead.
Really like the new Pixel and see great potential in it.
My only wish is that the display was slightly wider. Not necessarily 16:9. 3:2 is too much squarish for me :P I do understand vertical scrolling and all but it's just my personal preference, I guess. And also, 128 GB storage would perfect :)
The real review here seems to be by BittenRottenApple in the comments, rather than the actual anandtech article. In particular I think this part sums up the main issue I have with the Chromebook Pixel:
The entire conceit of Chrome OS is that it's sort of a diet computer. It does the basics, and just the basics. Chrome OS will give you internet, basic word processing through Google Docs, video via YouTube, and the rest of Google's web services including a free as in freedom lifetime direct hotlink to the NSA. You can stick in Chrome extensions for added "apps" if you'd like, possibly even a future NSA all inclusive backup app. But you're not going to get any full software here, because Chrome OS isn't compatible with anything outside of itself.
And that's been OK, because Chrome OS laptops have been very cheap: a few hundred bucks for the essentials is a good deal. Thirteen hundred dollars for those same essentials is a very, very, hugely, wow-bad deal.
I have an ASUS C200, and because lately I have a need for a word processor and browser on the go, I love it despite its limitations. It's cheap and light and has insanely good battery life with an operating system that stays out of the way. I emphatically don't feel a desire to go out and buy a >$1000 chromebook, though (if I bought the pixel I would probably go and replace the OS with linux, whereas on my C200 I haven't even bothered to install a linux chroot).
You don't need to replace the OS with linux, it is already linux based. If you enable developer mode you can get to the terminal, and if your linux-foo is strong that should be all you need (and you'll still be able to use ChromeOS).
This is what made my (free) Cr-48 awesome. Does it make the (expensive) Chromebook Pixel awesome? I don't know.
Technically, yes, but not in the way the parent meant. Getting access to a few GNU tools is not the same thing as a real fully-featured desktop and software repositories.
That's before mentioning proper support for closed-source x86 applications. Most developers target Ubuntu, not ChromeOS.
Yeah, all the people I know who have a pixel (three) spend a lot of their time in linux. I think that the pixel is better conceived of as a really, really nice linux laptop rather than a netbook. That said, the market there is probably really small.
Of course, the pixel is also just an excuse to push parts and system manufacturers so that high-quality screens, keyboards and touchpads may trickle down into the regular chromebook market.
It would be a really nice Linux laptop if you could somehow get more storage in it than an emachine from a decade and a half ago.
The Dell XPS 13 is my Linux laptop of the year, assuming they do a proper Sputnik release for it and publish some FOSS drivers. As it is it does not work and where it does its with ugly proprietary hacks, but previous iterations of the line have fixed them and I hope this one does too.
Some people will be more likely to buy a more expensive product, even if the price/value ratio is inferior than a cheaper alternative, merely because they want something better, and can afford the trade-off.
Not everyone needs native software. I work in an office in which over half the employees use Chromebooks because they don't have any requirements beyond web-based applications and the Google ecosystem.
Don't underestimate the value of 'incredibly simple', 'virus-free', and 'always up-to-date'. These factors may be worth much more to another sector of the market than to you.
