I got my 6 year old Pixel laptop out the bag in a client meeting today, used the touch screen to quickly scroll through some stuff and the non-tech crowd wanted to know what the machine was. Despite its age it still had wow factor. "You should get one of these!" - if only they knew it was 6 years old...
I passed up the opportunity to buy the new Pixelbook as the original Pixel still works nicely and I don't need Android on it particularly.
However, I think that Google have gone wrong with ditching the Pixelbook. There is a definite market for a decent developer machine that you can run Linuxii on that isn't a hack. Homebrew, Virtualbox, Ubuntu in Windows isn't ever native and the instructions are always less straightforward than with a stock Ubuntu or other regular distro.
From recent news there seems to be a small army of pissed off Mac users that want simple things like an escape key. There are also plenty of developers that don't really need Windows. The Dell developer XPS specials are very nice but the original Pixel and its descendants get a few things right, the 'no expense spared' 3x2 screen, nicest keyboard ever, best speakers ever and best trackpad going works for me.
Google should accept that their take on a 'developer machine' is going to be low volume but there is no reason why they can't make it pay its own way, really it is a matter of specification and not nickel-and-diming things like the keyboard.
If anything they should make the machine exclusive. Anyone can have a posh Apple computer but it is still just an Apple to people like the clients that I met today. Break out the Pixel though and even if you are just scrolling through a web page it has some impressive statement value to people who know nothing about computers.
I think the hardware division went the wrong way trying to make the Pixelbook 'for everyone' (rich). If they made it super cool with the ability to run a linux distro native as well as having ChromeOS/Android then they could have made something that Pixel laptop owners like myself would buy. Instead I run a regular PC for development.
I also think that if their developer machine was the de-facto thing for Google to use in house then that would make the machine aspirational to developers. If one were to be using the same hardware that Google designed for their developers then you would feel that you had the best going for Android/web development. A Dell machine doesn't quite have that kudos because nobody at Dell writes a lot of code.