Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Pixelbook: $1000 of Weird!”.
Hey, what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is google pixel book – love the name uh. This thing was announced alongside the pixel 2 and it’s in google’s holiday season, product lineup alongside the home, mini 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 all its Weirdness, so pixelbook 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, okay 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 rest surrounding the touch pad is really cool. Minimal fingerprints are going to show with this design with this silver and white color combo and even the hinge is pretty sturdy and minimal. The thing is flanked by two usb c 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 up at the front, is the 12 inch 4×3 display it’s a crispy bright 2400 by 1600 touch screen 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 can say okay. This is a really 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 end biggest newest ipad pro. You know what else you can get for a 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 two and ones has always kind of been when you’re 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’d 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 keyboard, so 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 to press is just kind of Weird and i’ve said for years, i’ve always found using touch screen 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 pixelbook pen. This thing is a 100 accessory. First of all, so there’s that a long metal tube with a battery inside one button and the stylus tip 100 bucks uh.
It doesn’t come with any replacement tips. Like even the ipad’s pencil or surface stylus do and most others do weird. This thing uses quadruple a batteries. What have you ever heard of these? Luckily they’re 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 someone 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 in 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 pixelbook 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 a normal 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 pixelbook 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 pixelbook, like i said when you make a two in 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 to you guys, the next one peace you .