--- title: Let's Talk About Google's Chromebook Pixel | TIME description: TIME Tech talks about the new Chromebook Pixel, a $1300-and-up laptop that runs Google's web-connected Chrome operating system. canonical: https://time.com/video/JLslwCcD/ og:title: Let's Talk About Google's Chromebook Pixel og:description: TIME Tech talks about the new Chromebook Pixel, a $1300-and-up laptop that runs Google's web-connected Chrome operating system. og:url: https://time.com/video/JLslwCcD/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/JLslwCcD/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Let's Talk About Google's Chromebook Pixel twitter:description: TIME Tech talks about the new Chromebook Pixel, a $1300-and-up laptop that runs Google's web-connected Chrome operating system. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/JLslwCcD/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Let's Talk About Google's Chromebook Pixel > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Let's Talk About Google's Chromebook Pixel [Watch (HLS stream): Let's Talk About Google's Chromebook Pixel](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/JLslwCcD.m3u8) (15:44)  _Published 2013-02-28. TIME Tech talks about the new Chromebook Pixel, a $1300-and-up laptop that runs Google's web-connected Chrome operating system._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:30 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [What To Know About Google's New Pixel 2 Smartphone](/video/PObvgJx1/) ### What To Know About Google's New Pixel 2 Smartphone [How Google's Pixel Stacks Up Against the iPhone 7](/video/MoVILMeg/) ### How Google's Pixel Stacks Up Against the iPhone 7 [For What’s Next: The New Chromebook Pixel](/video/hvGQaE8e/) ### For What’s Next: The New Chromebook Pixel --- ## Transcript I'm Doug Aamoth. I'm the Time Tech editor. Joining me today from San Francisco is Harry McCracken, Time editor- at- large, which basically he's like me as a Tech editor but he has a lot more freedom to move around the city. And doesn't have to do as much paperwork as I do, and then Jared Newman joins us from Cincinnati, Ohio. He is a Time Tech contributor, which means he's got all the freedom in the world, and I'm here in Boston, which is so dreary today. It's like if, It's like a, like an RnB song where the guys breaks up with his girlfriend and he regrets it and it's raining out. That's what it's like in Boston today. So, we've got all the country covered. Jared's about to get smacked by snow but we're talking about the Chromebook Pixel from Google. Harry your review is ready to be published. And let's just get some overall general impressions from you if you would. Well I think Google did a pretty good job of doing what it set out to do, which is to build a really high end, thoughtfully designed Chromebook and not worry about the price. And the big question is how many people are there. Who want a Chromebook and justify spending at least $ 1, 300 for it, I think it's probably a pretty small group of people. But if they're out there, I think they'll probably be pretty pleased with this except for the battery life which is one downside. Battery life seems to be shrinking over time rather than getting better. Yes, so if you look of the innards of the the Chromebook itself it's got the, the, the hardware of basically something you'd find for $ 600 or $ 700 at Best Buy in a standard PC notebook. Except the screen we have this super high resolution touch screen. Which which adds substantially to the price. And Jared I know you have the the Samsung the 500 the, you have the Samsung, the, foreign series. The Series 5550, yes. Okay and you also have, you've been playing with the Chromebook Pixel. So what are, what are the kind of differences between the two as far as the build quality goes? The build quality is, is the main difference. Arguably the only difference, but significant one. I mean, in terms of performance is pretty similar even though the processor's inferior in the $ 450 Series five Chromebook. You're basically browsing the web so, you know, it's it's fine and they both gave four gigabytes of RAM, which is enough to have lots of open tabs. The difference is really just the, the quality the track pad. I like the track- pad on the Series 5550. It's big and it's you know, easy to use. But this is just you know, it's, it's as close to a Macbook as you get in terms of the quality of the track- pad, and the keyboard and I just like, there's all these little flourishes on here. Just the way the plug for the power changes color when it reaches full charge. And, and the way that, I could show you, when this is blue but when you close the laptop, it's gonna do that. Not really that important in terms of productivity but it's just like, you know, there's these nice little things here and there that I really enjoy about that. What happens to that, that color, that lighted bar on the back of it if you enter the Konami code from Contra? Let me see wait hold on. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, BABA, blah. Whoa. So that alone could make it worth the the $ 1300 price point for some people. But Harry, for most regular people, do you think, is this a hard sell at $ 1300? I know we've talked a lot about how this is not a cheap, this is not Google making a bunch of money on this Chromebook. For all intents and purposes, Google might be losing money on this Chromebook. But do you think it's gonna be a hard. I think it's possible, yeah. Hard sell for the casual consumer? I mean most people on the world don't spend $ 1300 for any computing device these days. So if you are spending that much on this device, either you're going extremely well and you can afford to spend it on kind of a secondary gadget. Or you are ready to use a Chromebook as your, your one and only primary computer. I have to say Chrome OS is getting better and better. It's far better than it was a couple years ago when it first tried. It was kind of buggy and hard to get around, and the touch pad was not good. I think this is the best browser I have used on any computing device probably. And I have 15 tabs open. With no performance degradation all, at all. But the big question is how many people are, are so committed to the stream they'll, they'll spend that much money on it? Also important to note that the, the, the Chromebook Pixel comes with a terabyte of Google drive cloud storage. Every month, which three years worth, which would normally cost. 50 bucks a month, so you're actually if you're gonna spend that much on, on Google drives towards, you're, you're better off just buying the, the Chromebook Pixel if you can afford all of it up front. So. I, I kind of wonder about that though, because, because, I know Harry you said that even if you use it all, they, they don't, they don't take it away from you at the end of th -, three years. So if you put all your photos on there then. They're not gonna then start charging you gobs of money after your three years are up. Even so what happens if you and the three years ends and now you want to keep using more storage, I don't know, I don't even know how much you have to pay to like keep adding more storage on top of this terabyte that they've given you. And I, getting into that and using so much that I'd be shangled [ UNKNOWN ] this month for the rest of my life. Right, I, I asked Google about that and they, they not unreasonably said, they don't know how much they're gonna be charging for storage in three years. I mean the chances are pretty good it'll be less than they do now, just because of the way things go. But it is true that even if Google doesn't start charging you for the, the stuff you put online, once you put on hundreds of gigabytes of data on, onto Google drive, you are probably webbed to Google drive and its gonna be tough to move to dropbox, or sugarsync or, or a competitor. What about the concept of this computer as a premium cloud device for professionals, that, that want something that's really easy to use. That they don't have to worry about losing their data and stuff like this. Is this, is this an easier to sell for professionals for say doctors or corporate people that are always on the move? I mean this as long as they never run into an instance where they don't have an internet connection. And they don't wanna do anything that requires an internet connection, there are some applications like, like the, Google's productivity apps, which don't need a connection. I use pixler, which is a really great image editor, it seems to work well without a connection. But this is not like an iPad where you still have hundreds of thousands of apps you can use when you're offline. You really have to buy into the notion that if you're disconnected from the internet, you're working in a reduced mode. Yeah Gerald, so you've been using, you used the Chromebook for most of the consumer electronics show the, the Samsung, you've been using this the Chromebook Pixel. How much stuff can you actually do offline versus needing to be online? there's, there's a surprisingly decent amount, Google Drive works offline, and there's, there's games that you can get for offline use and there's Y'know, plenty of certain Notepad kind of apps. You just need to take notes. So, I mean, it's, it's, it kinda gets a bad rap for being worthless offline, which is not really true. y'know, I'm, I'm the kind of person that when I'm on a plane I end up going to a tablet anyway, either an iPad or a Nexus seven. Because it's more entertaining to use when I'm just trying to kill the time, play a game or something like that. I'd rather do that on a tablet then have this laptop in front of me. But I'm kind of going to what Harry said. Like I'm kind of the ideal professional user. I'm not a doctor or lawyer but I, you know, I do all most of my work. Through a browser anyway, and I would very much like to have a premium device like this. I just have a couple qualms with this device in particular. Most notably the battery life and it, it is a little bit expensive for what it is I think. Yeah the battery life is, that's the, the ultimate deal breaker for me at five hours. All the other stuff. Even if I had, you know, had the money to spend on it, I think that, that the, the five hour battery would be the deal breaker for me. But Harry, let's talk about the, the screen which is, is added to the price of the machine. Have you been using the touch screen and three questions, have you been using the touch screen? What's do, what's your take on the new the format, the three- by- two format that they're, they've done? And how is the actual the image quality as far as the pixel density goes? The touch screen right now is not really a major argument in favor of this device, cuz there's just not that much you can do with it. You, you're able to scroll, and you're able to, to touch buttons, basically cuz the web right now is not just time for a touch screen, and even Google has this Google Plus photo app which they're working on, but it's not yet available, so. There is some chance that at that some point that the touchscreen will be a frustration on people. But right now, I don't think it's a factor. And the the resolution of the screen it's kind of like a retina MacBook Pro. If you're looking for something that takes advantage of it, it's fantastic. Google has this wallpaper that looks spectacular. Retina ready icons look great. But there is an awful lot of stuff on the web, which is not designed for a screen this high resolution yet. Yeah, so, so some icons are blocky. I noticed in Pixeler, in theory, at least, you should be able to open up a really high resolution photo and see all of it on the screen at once in Pixeler. But you can't because it's basically down scaling the image cuz it doesn't really know how to deal with the screen and so for that to you sort of have to buy this in anticipation that the web will catch up with it eventually. [ INAUDIBLE ] Yeah the old school [ CROSSTALK ] Two by two. Yeah, two by two used to be a very [ UNKNOWN ] [ UNKNOWN ] then everyone went wide screen, so it's kind of refreshing to come back to. Now you're able to scrolling really long web pages without loading much and the got you is that it's a relatively tall screen for the diagonal dimension, which means that on a coach seat in an airplane. You might have issues in the same way you do with almost any laptop that has a screen that's 13 inches or higher. Jared, how's the keyboard? It's very nice. I, I, I always have trouble describing like how nice a really good keyboard is except to say that it's Apple- like, you know. But the, you, it's just the kind of the thing that you can type on very easily, and. And I've already filed lots of words just using the Chromebook and in a lot of ways it's better than the keyboard that I use on my desktop computer. It's just very comfortable. There's a lot of palm space to rest your hands and Just a very good experience, along with the trackpad. So, I think that stuff a lot of the times gets underrated, at least by the, the tech spec obsessed crowd but I think that stuff is really important now and when you just need to type a long document and it needs to be comfortable. So, if we're gonna irresponsibly speculate about things right now Google has these low ends, inexpensive Chromebooks that top out at $ 500, and they've got the super Chromebook that starts at $ 1300. Do we see some sort of, is there any point to Google putting out a middle of the road, something $ 700, $ 800 maybe that has a really nice keyboard, really nice build quality, pretty nice screen but not necessarily a touch screen Harry? Yeah I mean, I think that might make a lot of sense. The slogan Google has for this is. Something along the lines of the chrome book pixel is ready for what's next. And they, they have this additional copy on the web that kinda talks about how it's designed to encourage innovation. I think a lot of people don't want a machine that's designed for what's next. So it's not designed to encourage innovation, but they just want something that it's useful and nicely done right now, and there does seem to be sort of a, a gap in the Chromebook line. The Samsung Jared has is not bad, and the Chromebook Pixel, in some ways, is spectacular at a high price. And, and something, something right in the middle might, might work well for a bunch of people, especially. If you can get back to, a more impressive battery life. I, I, kind of disagree only because, I, I like. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] The, the Chromebook, and I, I see that that's not the Chromebook that became popular. You know, dominating the Amazon sales charts are the ones that are dirt cheap. So I, I really wondered how many people would go for a, a you know, a slightly more expensive Chromebook than the middle range one. At least, you know, with this one there's, it makes a statement. It's a premium device for people who want it. I would be interested in something like this, maybe a little less expensive. I don't, I don't think that touch- screen is really necessary unless it's gonna be a form factor that, that kinda, turns into tablet, something that's more conducive for actually using a touch- screen. And I wouldn't, but I wouldn't want to see a lot of compromises in terms of you know, the build quality and things like that because that's what makes this an interesting device to begin with. I think, I think the battery life could just be improved by nature of moving on to future processors that are built for that kind of thing. And hopefully they can bring the price down over time, in other ways without seriously trying to create like a middle high range thing that's totally different. I would just like one, important to note that this is the first chrombo key thing get with a 4G LTE connection which But all the other chromebooks with an optional cellular connections are three g only. So this, that, that, that is intriguing to me, but not for, you know, that version is 1450 dollars. I would like a, you know, some, something for 600 or $ 700. That would, that have the 4G LTE. But I can only, I can only assume that, that will come in the future. With future Chromebooks whether they're priced high or low. Does, does Google still include the 100 megabytes free of the 4G LTE, do you guys know? I believe you get that, and you also get 12 free Go- go in- flight wifi sessions which is not bad. That's worth quite a bit of money right there. I was pleasantly surprised during CES to be flying back and going online, just intending to pay the fee and then being reminded that I didn't have to pay for it cuz I was using my Chromebook so that was nice. The go go is, yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a Chromebook wide, every Chromebook gets that go go stuff. The free. The free sessions. Okay, so let's leave it at that. That's the Chromebook PIxel by Google. The Wi- Fi version is out now. It's $ 1300. And then the 4G LTE version coming in April, for $ 1449. Wanna thank Jared and Harry. Jared in Cincinatti. Area out in San Francisco where the weather's always perfect, 70 degrees, never wavers. The most perfect place to live, and then. Uh- huh. I'm here in crap- ass Boston. Doug Aamoth for Harry McCracken and [ LAUGH ] Jared Newman. Thanks for watching, everybody. 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