If I'm buying a great looking and powerful laptop worth $1300, kneecapping it with ChromeOS is the last thing I'd want. This device never really made sense. Google needs to stick to the low end in this segment if they want any success.
I’m kind of curious if Microsoft Surface makes money. I always thought it was more or less a loss leader. Unlike Apple, Google or Microsoft does not have control over the hardware. Microsoft surface IMO really pushed PC OEM to design out of their typical status quo designs. I thought Pixelbooks were the same idea but I guess Google was looking for the same success they have with pixel phones.
Seems very shortsighted for Google to move away from hardware, might seem smart to cut costs and stop bothering today but it'll seem an extremely poor choice when they find themselves in Microsoft's OS position down the line.<p>Systems are only going to get more and more locked down, Google will be struggling to make enough money on iOS in 10 years when it gets even more restricted and 30% cut of ad sales will be the norm. Current Android OEMs are gonna throw more and more custom stuff on top and begin to deviate to systems they fully control.
wish they would have made a separate chromeos that is a full blown well supported linux distro. the implementation of chromeos is quite impressive and so is the google hardware. it’s not like they were making money on these things anyway
I saw one in the wild for the first time the the other day on an airplane. It looked pretty snazzy (though I prefer my Thinkpad...). Wonder how many they sold... probably not that many if this is my first sighting.
These were great machines. I would wait till they were 4 years old and then buy them super cheap as my daily driver. 3:2 aspect ratio screens and solid build quality, great battery life from their second device onwards. I got a 2013 pixel in 2017, a 2015 pixel in 2019, and last year I got the 2017 pixelbook. It's a shame that even as a fan of the product I wasn't willing to support it at MSRP or in any way that would have contributed to its success.
This isn't a huge surprise. Google was never really a hardware company and, as the article in <i>The Verge</i> points out, Pixelbooks were rather niche pieces of hardware. That said, I still have one of the original Pixelbooks. When I was using it regularly, I found it to be a solid piece of hardware.