Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Chromebook Pixel Review!”.
Hey, what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the chromebook pixel easily one of the most confusing products of the first half of 2013 and one of the most difficult to review, because so many of the products we look at all the time are geared for Consumers this one is not anyway in terms of pure aesthetics. This thing is awesome: it’s made of an aluminum chassis and has a very squared off design. In fact, it bears some resemblance to the 13-inch retina macbook pro in more ways than one, but that’s probably a good thing, because they both look pretty good and the design is all topped off. With this sweet light bar that google says is included simply because it looks cool and it does, the design is so understated, otherwise that the light bar is an awesome but subtle lighting effect. That brings together the whole google design like a boss. It’S a nice looking accessory and outside of that it’s a very handsome notebook. Again.
We like the aluminum unibody stuff and the port layout is also pretty basic. We have some usb ports, we have an sd card reader, but all that is to be expected from a basic laptop. Now, if i were to recommend a chromebook to anyone, i’d recommend the 64 gig lte model, but this here is a wi-fi, only version. So it’s a 32 gigabyte pixel.
Even so, if i spend 1 300 on a laptop any laptop, it better. Have a nice keyboard, a nice track pad a nice display, might better heat. You know nice build quality, the whole nine. I expect the most when you go over a thousand dollars and the chromebook pixel actually does deliver that.
So this chiclet style keyboard is very comfortable to type on with. You know: big hands small hands. It has just a tiny bit of flex in the center, but it’s not too bad, and the speakers are incredible. Like mind-blowingly good, they happen to be invisible because they’re hidden beneath the keyboard, but they are really really loud. So you can watch a movie literally in a loud environment with them and they’ll be loud and crisp and clear, they’re, awesome and the track pad is also magnificent. This large, smooth, matte black trackpad, is pleasing to the eye and very pleasing to use it’s nice and smooth and it completes the laptop experience and then, of course, it’s called the chromebook pixel because of that display.
So this guy is rocking a pretty noteworthy display. It’S a 12.85 inch, 2560 by 1700 display, which makes it noteworthy for a couple of reasons number one. This is the highest pixel density display on any laptop at 239 ppi. It also is noteworthy because of the brightness 400 nits very bright display, it’s extremely sharp and crisp and clear.
It’S also noteworthy because it’s a three by two aspect: ratio which makes it taller than your typical 16×9, not laptops that we’re used to, but then again you’re building a machine for the web. So every single web, page scrolls vertically so you’re actually getting some generous extra vertical pixels in there, even if you do get some letterboxing with movies, so that extra screen real estate is welcome and it’s noteworthy because it’s a touch screen now. I have very mixed opinions about touch screens on laptops. My number one problem with them is usually how much the hinge wobbles when i try to touch the screen and the pixel is no exception. So i find myself holding the back of the display in place. While i use the other hand on the touchscreen, but i can still use the keyboard to type regular things, but the other problem is the lack of anything touch. Screen, optimized and chrome. Os is no exception, at least right now. A lot of people expressed the desire for this device to run android in one of my previous videos in the comments section, and that seemed to make sense, but i’ll get to that in a second.
So speaking of chrome os, how is the operating system? Well, it’s very similar to what we’ve seen on those cheaper 200 and 250 chromebooks, and probably the web browser you’re watching this in right now. This is a pretty advanced version of chrome os though, and it has some neat tricks to make – it feel like a little bit more than just a web browser. First of all, multiple window action is always nice and window management is now built in and it works well. There’S also this bar at the bottom. That feels like the dock in windows 7, where you can pin and launch your applications, and you can also auto hide it too, with just a swipe. So that’s nice, there’s also a settings tray floating at the bottom right hand corner, and this gives you quick access to settings and things like volume, bluetooth, etc. Kind of like android was for tablets, and i can see this going further into that direction in the future.
As a performer, the pixel was pretty solid. In fact, it felt like it was overall a bit more stable than the chrome beta is for my desktop and a few benchmarks, pretty much confirmed that it scored a lot higher on browser mark than the cheaper chromebooks, but still less powerful than the hackintosh pro. That runs, google, chrome also, of course, since it’s chrome os, it boots super fast and it wakes from sleep instantaneously and all that stuff. You can go pretty much from a cold boot to surfing internet. In a matter of seconds. Battery life is again very average for a laptop of this size coming in at about five and a half hours from my use, but watching a movie on that display could kill it a bit faster at maximum brightness.
But honestly, this is like the ultimate grandma surf. The web machine, though it feels very much like a beta product pinch to zoom, for example, is buried in the settings in chrome flags, but once it’s enabled you can start playing around with it and you can see it works pretty well on a lot of sites. Scrolling is 100 smooth all the time. It’S actually common to see that core i5 and its integrated graphics hiccup a little bit when trying to scroll down really big sites, but for the most part, websites loaded quickly and scrolling and zooming was a pleasure.
So you can tell it really: you can tell really easily which parts of websites aren’t retina display optimized with certain graphics and things like that. But text always looks good whenever you zoom in on text on this display. It looks extremely crisp and sharp from any viewing distance. So really my only complaint about the chromebook itself would be that it gets a bit warm sometimes when using it for a long period of time, and sometimes that display is just a bit too glossy.
The reflections might get annoying in daylight, but outside of that, it’s arguably the best hardware in the business right now, but not google. Now google has like a really massive task ahead of them to get chrome os up to speed and to get the chrome os web store up to speed. Even though google drive can replace microsoft office and a lot of the web store.
Apps are really well done. Right now, apps, like photoshop and video editing apps, for example, and native software, are really irreplaceable. Still and most people would opt for something running windows or os 10 over a chromebook every time, because the ability to run native apps but google i’ll tell you something right now.
If you want to make a little money i’ll, let you in on a secret. If you give the chromebook pixel the ability to run android apps prepare yourself to sell out, because that would be a real unlocker of the potential of this machine. But in the end it is really difficult to summarize the chromebook pixel in any sort of concise way. But basically i would say it goes back to the explained, video that i did a couple of days ago. I’Ll have a link right below the like button on this video or you can click the annotation right there. But this is basically the definition of a halo product and i would say, as a summary, this is a beautiful piece of engineering, a really good, looking solidly built piece of hardware that you should never buy.
That being said, definitely go watch the explained video, because this is the real definition of a halo product right here and it’s something that will basically be a beacon of light and shine the way forward as a sort of an inspiration for where google wants their partners To go now so, like we said, we’ve seen lots of very cheap 250 200 chromebooks. Now that have proven that chrome os can be uh great for a basic, cheap computer, but google’s trying to shine the way for high-end chromebooks and basically we’ll just see how it goes from here. So that’s the chromebook pixel guys thanks for watching and definitely be sure to subscribe. If you want to see more videos like this uh, it definitely helps out a lot and if you leave a thumbs up, that’s also very helpful. Either way. Thanks for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace, you .