i remember when google chrome came out of nowhere and completely pulled the rug
out from under internet explorer and firefox
then Android stormed from zero to half
of the phone market in almost no time at all
then we got chrome os a google polished version of Linux
for the low power machine that you let your kids use when daddy needs the real
computer and not much more could that
change though the pixel book is a laptop
with main rig specs and premium design
with a price to match but is chrome os ready for that kind of responsibility
now no no it's not
and our argument for why is brought to you by tunnelbear tunnelbear makes it
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right out of the gate the pixel book's design is polarizing some people really
like the two-tone back while others think it is outright ugly but what i
think everyone can agree on is the build quality it is excellent and it's super
portable too at only 10 millimeters thick and 2.4 pounds honestly the list
kind of goes on from here the screen and the hinge feels solid the aluminum
chassis is rigid and it stays firmly planted where you put it down whether
it's on the table or on your lap due to the large rubber surface on the bottom i
o wise yeah it's pretty good for something this thin i mean yeah you'll
need usbc dongles for your well most of what you own but they both
charge the device giving you the option to plug in to either side and it also
includes a headphone jack which is no longer a given on pixel devices
spec wise our config is pretty much perfect for web browsing and light
productivity it's a core i5 dual core with eight gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD
but you can get it with up to a core i7 and 512 gigs of NVMe solid state storage
and the quality of the hardware extends to the glasstop trackpad which has an
excellent feel and after a bit of sensitivity tuning is actually pretty
close to macbook level good and the keyboard which is solidly built with a
light crisp feel to the switches that i really enjoyed i was easily able to get
up to speed and typing on it would be amazing except for three things one the
lack of a dedicated delete key and home and n keys
can be worked around with all backspace and this handy remapper tool
but are still annoying omissions two
while the rubber wrist rest material feels nice it is easy for the heel of
your hand to end up on the corner between the rubber and the aluminum making it uncomfortable after a pretty
short time and three the inclusion of a
google assistant button seems pretty cool in theory but unless you operate a
keyboard and trackpad pretty slowly voice recognition might not be faster
for a lot of things so i'd have personally preferred a function key with
secondary functionality for some of the others the pixel book has a productivity
oriented 3x2 aspect ratio ips display
with a bright backlight and vibrant colors its 2400 by 1600 resolution gives
you nice sharp text and there's lots of room for vertical scrolling content in
your web browser which is good because it basically runs a web browser and
there are great big bezels that yeah give it a bit of a 2016 rather than 2017
look but i understand why they're there since
you got to put your fingers somewhere in tablet mode
which i guess brings us perfectly to tablet mode it's
a tablet i guess but like not as good as a regular one so
anything that you would do in the chrome browser on your Android tablet is fine
but while theoretically you can install Android apps on chrome os
a lot of the ones that we installed had issues ranging from not rescaling
correctly for the display to just not working at all so
we'd strongly recommend an Android tablet if you want to install Android
apps and it'll run chrome too and
furthermore this one might seem like a pretty petty complaint but the included touch
keyboards issues made the tablet experience markedly worse like
why would i ever want to type like this
the shift key inexplicably defaults to some stupid jaden smith capitalize all
the first letters mode and why would i want two spaces when i go back and
change a word i assumed that it would just be the same
google keyboard as Android but it's not
and making matters worse at this time third-party keyboards like swiftkey
aren't supported and i mean while we're at it the camera
is a bit of a disappointment too i mean it's not unusable but i was expecting something
in line with the front shooter on the pixel 2
for you know crystal clear video calls isn't that the whole pixel branding
instead what i got was a very soft image
some exposure issues and an included app
that doesn't support recording video we
had to do this through some janky website it also lacks cool features like
face recognition like Windows hello or a fingerprint scanner for easy unlocking
though if you have a supported Android phone you can use that to unlock it
instead unless like me you find it faster to
just type in your password than to pull something out of your pocket
and the frustrations just keep coming
this script had to be written in google docs because our template for word
crashes office online for some reason on this device uh file system navigation
feels like an afterthought there's no back or upper level buttons
the hardware back key doesn't work and copy pasting our network drive wouldn't
work the display scaling is weird and doesn't actually report useful things
like the resolution or scaling percentage
honestly the rest of this video could easily be uh just a boring list of other
nitpicky things that i think will wear on you the same way they did on us
every time you try and be legitimately productive on your pixel book so i won't
bore you with that instead i want to talk about the possibility then of using
a different os on this device to address them because the hardware is dope as the
kids say Windows is locked out at a BIOS
level so no luck there but i found this
great life hacker tutorial for some kind of
kick-ass Linux switching functionality where you can actually have both oss
booted even and then just switch between them and it works
sort of so you switch by hitting control shift
alt back so we're good so far but then
in Linux the trackpad sucks
and because of the high resolution display the icons are super small with
at least in this distro fairly limited scaling options
so with this guide for free by the way you've got the
option then of a polished but somewhat
kneecapped experience or a kind of broken or requires a lot of
tweaking Linux experience that at least lets you do whatever you want which
would be pretty cool on a 200 chromebook
the issue i have then is that for 1200
us dollars you could have a surface laptop
a macbook air a thinkpad
a razer blade stealth i don't know any number of things that come with a
real operating system so overall the
pixel book is a sexy piece of hardware and in my opinion design that is
unfortunately let down by an os that just isn't versatile enough to justify
the price tag we love google around here and we think that they're doing a lot of
cool things right now but this just isn't one of them
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