Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult. We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide? Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.
I thought this years XPS 13 from Dell looked really slick. When it comes out in Sputnik mode it will definitely be the Linux notebook of the year.
I really wish this didn't look like a bad imitation of an Apple product. Surely it's possible to build a nice looking laptop that doesn't look so similar to a MacBook. If you're going to do something different, just be different. I think these things are actually kind of sweet, but I can't stand the way they look.
It's just a seamless metal rectangle, and much more squared-off and flat than Apple products. It's also a different color, has different speaker placement, different screen aspect ratio, different hinge... I hope we don't get into a situation where every metal slab notebook is considered an Apple knockoff. I prefer that basic design and want more choices than just metal and Apple or curvy, wedgey, plasticy PCs.
Indeed. My last laptop purchase was for a rMBP (Late 2014) because every other laptop I could get my hands on had so much plastic flex, I just couldn't bring myself to buy it. (I'm sure someone is going to list a dozen that don't, but if I couldn't try it out, I didn't consider it.)
I had no great desire to switch to an Apple product, but macbook pros are solid. I wish more laptops were made with metal than plastic; I would love the choice.
You can install linux on it. I own the previous version of the Pixel and I run ubuntu on it and its close to perfect. Two things I would change are 1. Improve thermal cooling or move to a underpowered cpu. I have worked around it by rate limiting my CPU to not go over 800 MHz. With a few tweaks, it sips ~8.8W and gives me > 6 hrs of battery life. 2. Make the hinge a bit stiffer. My only other complaint is that it ref…
was FreeBSD your first choice, then after abortive attempts you installed Linux?
I have been a Linux user for sometime, so when I got the laptop I first installed linux on it. Subsequently I have grown rather fond of dtrace, so I like to use FreeBSD when the environment permits. So I tried installing FreeBSD on the machine in November last year.
I'm not sure why this is better than the cheapest macbook air?Similar battery life, similar processor. 4gb more memory, smaller hard drive. And the cheapest pixel is $100 more. What do I get for that $100? For me the downsides are: can only use apps from the chrome web store, no unix command line (maybe it exists and I don't know?). I'm really happy someone is trying to compete, but not sure why I would buy this.
Hmm, this is a great point. In my mind, the only reason to get anything running ChromeOS is if it's dirt cheap. You would get so much more value out of something that can run OSX.
I'm sure it's a fantastic machine, I just can't understand what niche this is aiming for... there seems to me to be a better alternative to this machine for anybody... Chrome OS developers?
From what I understand the pixel is basically built by and for Google employees. They use it to SSH, VNC, etc. into remote servers and development machines to get actual work done.
Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult. We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide? Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.
Google's marketing strategy for the Pixel isn't geared towards the "hacker" and developer type, it's more geared towards students and people who solely use their computers for simple web browsing and document processing. Offering 1TB+ of online storage is enough for all your office/school documents and all the photos you could ever want for the average person. If Google were making hardware only for developers and the hacker type, you bet they'd put more local storage in it and make it more "offline" friendly.
What most people have missed is that USB allows charging and data over the same port. So you can easily get a power adapter that has a charging tip which has on the same cord another USB-C port (socket) which you can plug into your display chain, or port replicator or what not. In Apple's case I fully expect they will make it so that when you plug your Apple display into your laptop it also charges it since the charg…
> In Apple's case I fully expect they will make it so that when you plug your Apple display into your laptop it also charges it since the charger is permanently connected to (or built into) the Apple monitor/display. Except that this display does not exist.
Adapters will exist for now. I think a solution to a single port (though, having more than 1 is probably better) is great. Why do we need 8 different port types? We should have one and it should do everything. But we should have 2 of them.
Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult. We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide? Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.
What most people have missed is that USB allows charging and data over the same port. So you can easily get a power adapter that has a charging tip which has on the same cord another USB-C port (socket) which you can plug into your display chain, or port replicator or what not. In Apple's case I fully expect they will make it so that when you plug your Apple display into your laptop it also charges it since the charg…
Right. Because my desire is to spend a fortune, only to have to spend another fortune to make it all just work.
How is ChromeOS? Can you get a decent terminal or terminal app? Install and keep up to date the basic terminal utilities (ssh, tmux, vim, rsync, etc)? What about other software? Is the browser like the regular Chrome? Can you play regular media files (flac, x264 mkv)? Are there any unpleasant surprises?
I've used Chrome OS off and on since it released. There is a terminal that you can get to, but it isn't great. The best solution I used was to use the Secure Shell [1] app to SSH to a Linux box. This actually works quite well.
The other solution is to just install a flavor of Linux on it. Ubuntu worked well, and you can even install it to a chroot and run both at once.
The browser itself is pretty much regular Chrome, but I have no idea about the media files.
I'm not sure why this is better than the cheapest macbook air?Similar battery life, similar processor. 4gb more memory, smaller hard drive. And the cheapest pixel is $100 more. What do I get for that $100? For me the downsides are: can only use apps from the chrome web store, no unix command line (maybe it exists and I don't know?). I'm really happy someone is trying to compete, but not sure why I would buy this.
If you want a full featured local linux command line, you can switch to developer mode and install one in a chroot via something like https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
This does sidestep some of the security features of the device, but it's fine if you really want it. Or you can just ssh somewhere.