WEBVTT

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i remember when google chrome came out of nowhere and completely pulled the rug

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out from under internet explorer and firefox

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then Android stormed from zero to half

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of the phone market in almost no time at all

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then we got chrome os a google polished version of Linux

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for the low power machine that you let your kids use when daddy needs the real

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computer and not much more could that

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change though the pixel book is a laptop

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with main rig specs and premium design

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with a price to match but is chrome os ready for that kind of responsibility

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now no no it's not

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and our argument for why is brought to you by tunnelbear tunnelbear makes it

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easy to privately and securely browse a more open internet to try tunnelbear for

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free go to tunnelbear.com LTT linked below

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right out of the gate the pixel book's design is polarizing some people really

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like the two-tone back while others think it is outright ugly but what i

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think everyone can agree on is the build quality it is excellent and it's super

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portable too at only 10 millimeters thick and 2.4 pounds honestly the list

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kind of goes on from here the screen and the hinge feels solid the aluminum

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chassis is rigid and it stays firmly planted where you put it down whether

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it's on the table or on your lap due to the large rubber surface on the bottom i

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o wise yeah it's pretty good for something this thin i mean yeah you'll

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need usbc dongles for your well most of what you own but they both

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charge the device giving you the option to plug in to either side and it also

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includes a headphone jack which is no longer a given on pixel devices

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spec wise our config is pretty much perfect for web browsing and light

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productivity it's a core i5 dual core with eight gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD

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but you can get it with up to a core i7 and 512 gigs of NVMe solid state storage

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and the quality of the hardware extends to the glasstop trackpad which has an

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excellent feel and after a bit of sensitivity tuning is actually pretty

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close to macbook level good and the keyboard which is solidly built with a

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light crisp feel to the switches that i really enjoyed i was easily able to get

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up to speed and typing on it would be amazing except for three things one the

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lack of a dedicated delete key and home and n keys

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can be worked around with all backspace and this handy remapper tool

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but are still annoying omissions two

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while the rubber wrist rest material feels nice it is easy for the heel of

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your hand to end up on the corner between the rubber and the aluminum making it uncomfortable after a pretty

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short time and three the inclusion of a

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google assistant button seems pretty cool in theory but unless you operate a

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keyboard and trackpad pretty slowly voice recognition might not be faster

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for a lot of things so i'd have personally preferred a function key with

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secondary functionality for some of the others the pixel book has a productivity

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oriented 3x2 aspect ratio ips display

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with a bright backlight and vibrant colors its 2400 by 1600 resolution gives

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you nice sharp text and there's lots of room for vertical scrolling content in

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your web browser which is good because it basically runs a web browser and

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there are great big bezels that yeah give it a bit of a 2016 rather than 2017

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look but i understand why they're there since

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you got to put your fingers somewhere in tablet mode

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which i guess brings us perfectly to tablet mode it's

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a tablet i guess but like not as good as a regular one so

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anything that you would do in the chrome browser on your Android tablet is fine

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but while theoretically you can install Android apps on chrome os

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a lot of the ones that we installed had issues ranging from not rescaling

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correctly for the display to just not working at all so

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we'd strongly recommend an Android tablet if you want to install Android

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apps and it'll run chrome too and

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furthermore this one might seem like a pretty petty complaint but the included touch

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keyboards issues made the tablet experience markedly worse like

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why would i ever want to type like this

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the shift key inexplicably defaults to some stupid jaden smith capitalize all

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the first letters mode and why would i want two spaces when i go back and

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change a word i assumed that it would just be the same

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google keyboard as Android but it's not

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and making matters worse at this time third-party keyboards like swiftkey

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aren't supported and i mean while we're at it the camera

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is a bit of a disappointment too i mean it's not unusable but i was expecting something

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in line with the front shooter on the pixel 2

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for you know crystal clear video calls isn't that the whole pixel branding

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instead what i got was a very soft image

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some exposure issues and an included app

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that doesn't support recording video we

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had to do this through some janky website it also lacks cool features like

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face recognition like Windows hello or a fingerprint scanner for easy unlocking

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though if you have a supported Android phone you can use that to unlock it

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instead unless like me you find it faster to

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just type in your password than to pull something out of your pocket

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and the frustrations just keep coming

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this script had to be written in google docs because our template for word

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crashes office online for some reason on this device uh file system navigation

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feels like an afterthought there's no back or upper level buttons

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the hardware back key doesn't work and copy pasting our network drive wouldn't

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work the display scaling is weird and doesn't actually report useful things

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like the resolution or scaling percentage

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honestly the rest of this video could easily be uh just a boring list of other

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nitpicky things that i think will wear on you the same way they did on us

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every time you try and be legitimately productive on your pixel book so i won't

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bore you with that instead i want to talk about the possibility then of using

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a different os on this device to address them because the hardware is dope as the

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kids say Windows is locked out at a BIOS

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level so no luck there but i found this

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great life hacker tutorial for some kind of

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kick-ass Linux switching functionality where you can actually have both oss

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booted even and then just switch between them and it works

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sort of so you switch by hitting control shift

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alt back so we're good so far but then

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in Linux the trackpad sucks

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and because of the high resolution display the icons are super small with

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at least in this distro fairly limited scaling options

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so with this guide for free by the way you've got the

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option then of a polished but somewhat

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kneecapped experience or a kind of broken or requires a lot of

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tweaking Linux experience that at least lets you do whatever you want which

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would be pretty cool on a 200 chromebook

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the issue i have then is that for 1200

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us dollars you could have a surface laptop

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a macbook air a thinkpad

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a razer blade stealth i don't know any number of things that come with a

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real operating system so overall the

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pixel book is a sexy piece of hardware and in my opinion design that is

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unfortunately let down by an os that just isn't versatile enough to justify

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the price tag we love google around here and we think that they're doing a lot of

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cool things right now but this just isn't one of them

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speaking of cool things though squarespace squarespace has 24 7 support

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via live chat and email so if you've been thinking to yourself gee i'd love

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to set up a website but it looks kind of complicated

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give it a try they've got a free trial for 14 days and then after that it is

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just 12 bucks a month and the whole website creation process is cloud-based

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so you take one of their gorgeous templates that'll scale great across any

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device be it a desktop a chromebook a phone whatever the case

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may be you plunk in your photos you plunk in your text you uh you know use

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their logo designer to make a cool looking logo you create a blog that you

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can publish content in in apple news format making it available to millions

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of potential readers and oh yeah they've got a store module included with every

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squarespace site and it's off to the races

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so head over to squarespace.com LTT and try it out then use offer code

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LTT to save 10 on your first purchase

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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the

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like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in

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the video description also linked in the description is our

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merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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you should totally join