Tech

Review: New Chromebook Pixel is still lovely hardware with limited appeal

It's $300 cheaper and lasts over twice as long, but few need a premium Chromebook.

Andrew Cunningham – Mar 11, 2015 5:00 PM | 219

The Chromebook Pixel 2: Still nice, still expensive, still a Chromebook. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Chromebooks are cheap. They work best that way. It’s rare to find one north of $400, and the sweet spot is between $200 and $300. While they've got shortcomings, the cost is reasonable for what you get. In some cases, the limitations are even desirable.

Only one Chromebook has truly gone against that grain—the Chromebook Pixel. It was the polar opposite of every other device bearing the name. The Pixel was high-quality hardware where others are low-rent, but even though it cost five times what you could pay for a regular Chromebook it didn't really do much more. It's a laptop as nice as it is niche.

Now, two years later, Google is back with a second Pixel. The outside is mostly the same, which is a good thing. The inside gets a big upgrade courtesy of new Intel Broadwell processors, also a good thing. And even though at $999 the price remains high relative to other Chromebooks, it's still $300 cheaper than the original. That is certainly a good thing.

Specs at a glance: Google Chromebook Pixel 2
Screen	2560×1700 at 12.85" (239 ppi)
OS	Chrome OS
CPU	2.2GHz (2.7GHz Turbo) dual-core Intel Core i5-5200U or 2.6GHz (3.2GHz Turbo) dual-core Core i7-5600U
RAM	8GB or 16GB 1600MHz DDR3
GPU	Intel HD 5500 Graphics (integrated)
HDD	32 or 64GB solid-state drive
Networking	Dual-band 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports	2x USB 3.0 Type A, 2x USB 3.0 Type C, card reader, headphones
Size	11.7 × 8.4 × 0.6" (297.7 x 224.5 x 15.3 mm)
Weight	3.3 lbs (1.5 kg)
Battery	"12 hours"
Warranty	1 year
Starting price	$999, $1,299 for "Ludicrous speed" version
Price as reviewed	$999
Other perks	720p webcam

Look and feel

The construction and design of the new Pixel change surprisingly little from its predecessor. Size and weight are nearly identical, and the new Pixel has the same boxy corners and edges of the last Pixel. It's a handsome machine, but where most Ultrabooks are all about curves and tapered edges, this one is squared-off and conservative.

The most noticeable external change is in the lid next to the lightbar. The old Pixel had some antenna cutouts here, but the new one does away with them. Google has tried to hide most of the utilitarian stuff that laptops like this need to have. The rear-facing fan vent is a subtle gap between the hinge and the bottom of the laptop. The mic and speakers are hidden underneath the keyboard. It's a clean design, though it's unadorned to the point of being generic.

The lightbar is the one bit of personality the Pixel has. During normal use, its four LEDs are blue, red, yellow, and green, the regular Google colors. When the battery is low, the bar turns an angry red. Tap out the Konami Code on the keyboard and it blinks out a multicolored pattern. The new thing in the second Pixel is that the lightbar can serve as a battery indicator. When the lid is closed, tap on it near the lightbar twice. If you've got a 50 percent charge, two of the LEDs will light up. If you've got a 25 percent charge, one of them will light up.

Build quality remains first-rate—it’s not just the rock-solid all-aluminum chassis, either. The chiclet keyboard still has great travel and feels nice to type on. The redesigned hinge doesn't wobble when you touch the screen. The 12.85-inch, 2560×1700 display retains its oddball 3:2 aspect ratio, but its pixel density stands up to the best that Apple and the Windows ecosystem have to offer. Google tells us that the panel supports the sRGB color gamut, though not all the way up to Adobe RGB.

The display’s “effective” resolution is 1280×850, but the OS offers different Windows-like scaling options you can use to maximize the screen’s usable space. We think the best balance between visibility and usability is either 1440×956 or 1600×1062, but 1920×1275 and even the full native resolution of 2560×1700 are available if you’ve got particularly sharp eyes.

The Pixel retains an accurate trackpad and a touchscreen, but they’re frustrating for the same reasons as they were in the original Pixel two years ago—the hardware Is great, but Chrome OS does very little to take advantage of it. The OS lacks OS X or Windows 10-style multi-finger trackpad gestures, which go a long way toward making laptop multitasking easier. And while we don’t think touchscreen gestures and swipes are tremendously useful on a laptop screen, Chrome OS doesn’t even try. Chrome OS UI isn't even well-optimized for touch.

The Pixel is intended to be a developer machine, something for Chromebook OEMs to aspire to. From that perspective, it makes sense to include a touchscreen. Why not? There are a handful of instances in which it might be useful (playing games, designing touch-friendly sites for phones or tablets). The software just isn’t making the most of the hardware’s potential.

The promise of USB Type-C

My favorite thing about the Pixel is how it uses USB Type C, and I suspect that most PC OEMs are going to ape what Google has done here when their laptops begin including the new connector.

We won’t recap all of Type C’s features here, but this is what you need to know to understand how the Pixel is using it. The Type C connector can be used for a whole lot more than file transfers and accessories—the supplementary USB Power Delivery spec allows Type C to provide up to 100W of power. USB Alternate Mode allows the physical USB cable to carry other kinds of signals, including DisplayPort and HDMI. And the Type C connector is physically larger and more robust, which inspires more confidence than the sometimes-flimsy Type B connector does.

Google is using all of these in the Pixel. The laptop charges via USB Type C rather than a standard power adapter, and it uses Type C plus various dongles (yes, yet more dongles) to drive HDMI and DisplayPort displays. Unlike the recently announced Retina MacBook, Google has included one Type C port on either side of the laptop, which is kind of ingenious: you can plug in the power adapter or the display from either side. Normally, you need to twist your charger cable around to accommodate the location of the power connector. In the Pixel, you just plug it in on whatever side is the most convenient.

It’s a small change, but when I first saw it I had one of those forehead-slapping “of course” moments. The ability to plug either your power adapter or your monitor in from either side is a big help if your desk at home has a different layout from your desk at work, or if the surge protector on your side of the couch/bed is opposite the power plug on whatever laptop you’re currently using.

One thing about USB Type C that we’ve mentioned several times is that, even though it promises to be the only port you need, in these early days it’s just something else to adapt to. The fact that the Pixel has more ports than the Retina MacBook is great, and its two run-of-the-mill USB Type A plugs help too. But if you want to plunk it down on your desk with all of your existing monitors and other accessories, you still need to be prepared to buy some new dongles or adapters.

Google's official dongles vary in price; male Type C to male Type A cables and male Type C to female Type A cables will each run $13. Type C to DisplayPort and Type C to HDMI will each run $40. As Type C ports become more common, hopefully these adapters and dongles become more plentiful and inexpensive.

Chrome OS is still Chrome OS

Chrome Apps (the calculator, Solitaire) and the Android App Runtime for Chrome (Evernote) are different solutions to Chrome OS' app gap. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Like Chrome itself, Chrome OS is all about small, gradual improvements. Look at the Chrome Releases blog to see how frequent these tiny updates are. The core of Chrome OS is the same as ever; it’s designed mostly to be used with an Internet connection, and most of the “apps” you’re going to run are ones that run in a browser.

Google has slowly been adding to the number of ways developers can develop more traditional apps for Chrome OS, things that feel more like Windows or OS X programs than Web apps. Chrome Apps still use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, but they lose the standard Chrome UI and look and act like self-contained applications. Google services like Docs and Sheets have gradually changed to work better when you don’t have an Internet connection. Even if you don’t have an active connection, you can launch Docs, create a new document or edit a document you had saved for offline use, and your changes will just sync the next time you’re back on the Internet.

Virtualization is another possible fix, though it’s geared more at schools and businesses than regular people. Chrome Remote Desktop is one way to use standard desktop apps on your Chromebook, and Adobe has even been experimenting with a virtualized version of Photoshop.

More recently, Google has been working with Android app developers to bring some existing Android apps to Chrome OS using the App Runtime for Chrome. That runtime is still in beta and supports just a handful of apps, and running mobile apps on a laptop isn’t a cure-all. Not all Android apps look or work great on large screens. The Android ecosystem has many of the same holes the Chrome OS ecosystem does, particularly high-quality audio, video, and photo editing apps.

As the runtime supports more applications (or once it’s opened up to allow the installation of pretty much anything), it will be another partial solution to Chrome OS’ biggest problem as an OS for current Windows users.

Internals, performance, battery life, and charging

The Pixel upgrades all the way from Ivy Bridge to Broadwell, leapfrogging Haswell entirely. The majority of our general CPU and GPU benchmarks don’t run on Chrome OS, but these Broadwell U chips are also in PCs like Dell’s XPS 13 and Lenovo’s X1 Carbon. You can see those reviews for general performance, though we’ve run a few browser benchmarks to compare it to other Chromebooks too.

More important for Chrome OS than performance is battery life, which was a primary focus of both the Haswell and Broadwell architectures; the Ivy Bridge to Haswell jump was particularly good for battery life in Windows and OS X laptops.

We don’t have an original Pixel with a healthy like-new battery to test with, but in the tests we did in our original review we got a little under five hours in light, mixed usage at 50 percent brightness. Google’s own figure was exactly five hours. The new Pixel far outstrips that. Google says it will last up to 12 hours, and our tests show that's not too far off.

It’s an impressive leap, and it brings the Pixel in line with other similarly priced and spec’d hardware from competitor laptop makers. We're so used to incremental change in our hardware refreshes that it's nice to see such a drastic one.

The USB Type C adapter included with the laptop can provide up to 71.5W of power to the Pixel if you're charging an empty battery, and Google claims that you can get "two hours of battery life with just 15 minutes of charge." If you've got a Type C cable and any other USB charger, you can still use it to charge the Pixel, it just won't be as fast. Depending on how much power your adapter can provide, you may need to put the Pixel to sleep or shut the lid to actually charge the battery.

Nice, niche

The Chromebook Pixel 2. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The new Chromebook Pixel is an improvement over its predecessor in every important way—it’s the best kind of upgrade, the kind that keeps what worked about the previous model and upgrades everything else.

It’s still the same kind of computer the first Pixel was, though. Its quality is excellent, but its operating system combined with its price makes it a nonsensical purchase for most people. This is doubly true in the price-sensitive education and low-end PC markets where Chromebooks are the most popular. The big question is still “who is this for” and the answer is still “die-hard Chrome developers, people who get them for free at Google I/O or whatever, and tinkerers who like the design and buy Chromebooks to put Linux on them.”

That’s a pretty small group, and Google knows it—Google’s Renee Niemi had a few things to say to that effect in a (since-pulled) video spotted by OMGChrome.

We will be selling [the new Pixel] but I just have to set your expectations: this is a development platform. This is really a proof of concept. We don’t make very many of these — we really don’t. And […] our developers and our Googlers consume 85 percent of what we produce.

This is not a practical mass-market product, but it’s not really intended to be. People who liked the first Pixel will love the new one. People who didn’t care about the first Pixel can continue not caring. This laptop will attract a specific kind of customer, but it still feels like hardware that’s begging for more versatile software.

The good

Outstanding build quality and an attractive if boxy design.
Great keyboard and trackpad.
Sharp, bright, colorful screen.
Excellent battery life.
The price comes down while the specs go up.
Two USB Type C ports mean you can plug your power brick and your monitor in on either side, a small but handy upgrade.

The bad

Chrome OS, while always improving, is still limited compared to Windows or OS X. That’s not a big deal at $300, but it’s harder to justify for $1,000.
Chrome OS doesn’t do much to take advantage of the excellent trackpad or touchscreen.
Don’t forget your USB Type C dongles.

The ugly

The target audience for a $1,000 Chromebook is small, by Google’s own admission.

Listing image: Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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