Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here, and today's video is about the Pixelbook, the new Chromebook from Google.
And there's a lot of good reviews about this thing,
but I want to do something a little bit more
encompassing because I feel like some of the reviews out there are a little misleading,
not intentionally so they're just not
looking at the bigger picture of what this product is or what this product isn't. So I kind of wanted to
go through its paces. So let's just talk about the hardware first. The hardware is
fantastic. Everything that you've read about how good the hardware is, is
exactly that. It's literally the best built Chromebook available on the market. It's expensive—
it's $1000—but it is really good. The keyboard is excellent, backlit, and way better than most other Chromebooks.
I would say it's better than a lot of other regular laptops, even. The trackpad is pretty good.
It's built really well with great material choices and a good button mechanic,
but there's a little bit of a stutter in Chrome OS. The white rubber pads are nice.
They're supposedly quite resistant to dirt
or any kind of staining and they position them all over the device to kind of protect it when you have it closed or just
give it a little bit of grip, so when you're using it,
you just feel more confident in its ability to not get damaged. The tablet mode is less awesome to me. It's not super bad,
it's just not as comfortable as I'd like my tablet to be. The keyboards on the bottom, so you kind of touch that every time
you use it. And it's a little bit thicker and heavier than a
dedicated tablet would be. But any kind of two-in-one foldable device is gonna feel like this and as a tablet,
it's not bad.
One thing that seems a little bit buggy right now though is that you can't run the apps in split-screen.
So if you're in tablet mode, you're running in a full screen all the time.
Hopefully, they'll be able to fix that with a software update.
There's an optional stylus called the Pixelbook Pen, which I didn't bring into work today to film.
But, it basically works as intended. The lag is very minimal, as long as the apps have been recently updated.
It's a good stylus, as you would expect,
but there's this feature where you can circle things in Chrome and Google will search for it, which honestly feels really gimmicky.
I tried it a bunch of times and just the accuracy isn't there. For whatever reason, it's just pulling up stuff
that is somewhat related, kind of, to the thing that you've circled,
but it's just never something that I really wanted to search for. Performance is good,
it's running some 7th-gen Intel chips. But it's a Chromebook, right? I feel like the average person
that's gonna be using this Pixelbook, probably won't be able to tax it all that hard, and the battery life is...
okay. I mean, it's good,
but I just expected it to be better, considering how low demand this whole system is. I'm getting around eight hours of battery life.
Okay, I want to talk about the OS and Chrome OS is probably where this whole thing starts to break down.
I like Chrome OS. I think it's a great system. I think a lot of people call it a limited operating system.
I disagree. I don't think it's—I mean, limited is just the wrong word. I would kind of want to approach it—
it's just a different way of using your computer and I think a lot of people out there can use Chrome OS
perfectly and just
get through everything that they need to do, and they don't even realize it. They think that they need macOS or Windows
to do what they do, but they don't. They actually could do everything that they need to do with Chrome OS. The problem,
however, and I think this is where, I think, everything breaks apart, is the price tag. This thing is a thousand dollars
and, when you look at the price of any kind of competitor product, so a 12-inch MacBook, a MacBook Air, and
XPS 13, Razer Blade Stealth, iPad Pro, all of these things can do what the Chromebook does,
but more. Much more, and I feel like
that is why I...
That's why this product is so hard for me to recommend to people. I think it's a good product.
I think it's good for what it is, but it should be priced at like seven or eight hundred dollars.
See, I did a video a while ago called, "The Best Chromebook", and this was sometime in the spring,
I think, or like early summer of 2017, and to me, at the time, the best Chromebook was a product
that was five hundred dollars. It's the Asus
C302, I think. And
that's a great product.
But, it's very expensive for what it is. A Chromebook for five hundred dollars, kind of, took people aback.
I mean, you can buy Chromebooks for two, three hundred dollars that are really, really good. A $500 Chromebook was,
"Whoa, easy now, Dave." Like, "Are you sure you want to recommend a $500 Chromebook?"
This is a thousand dollar Chromebook. And, it is better. This is the new best Chromebook, but,
like, WHO'S GONNA BUY THIS? And, the thing you have to keep in mind is that, if you're gonna spend a thousand dollars,
and that's so much money,
you have to justify its purchase. Like you gotta be able to use this and
prefer it over any of the other devices that I've mentioned
and, I think, for most people, that's just not the case. If you want better battery life,
there's other options. If you want the ability to play games, there's other options.
There's just so much more versatility with the other choices
over this. Even the iPad Pro can do more than this can, just, for the average person. And
It sucks. Because this is such a good device,
it's just overpriced, and, four or five years ago, when this original Pixel came out, like the original Chromebook Pixel came out,
it was really impressive because hardware looked so
amazing for its time.
But, nowadays, everybody who's got a hand in the laptop industry, is
making really good hardware. Dell has good stuff. HP,
Razer, like there's so much good hardware to choose from, that is difficult for this thing to stand out just on hardware alone. I
think a lot of the review out there are so impressed by the hardware, they're like, "Ooh, shiny, pretty", but the usage experience is still...
very...
it's just not there. It just doesn't have the versatility that a thousand dollar device should have. Okay,
hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it. See you guys next time.