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00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here, and today's video is about the Pixelbook, the new Chromebook
00:07from Google. And there's a lot of good reviews about this thing, but I wanted to do something
00:11that was a little bit more encompassing, because I feel like some of the reviews out there
00:15are a little misleading. Not intentionally so, they're just not looking at the bigger
00:20picture of what this product is or what this product isn't. So I kind of wanted to go through
00:25its paces. So let's just talk about the hardware first. The hardware is fantastic. Everything
00:29you've read about how good the hardware is, is exactly that. It's literally the best built
00:34Chromebook available on the market. It's expensive, it's $1000, but it is really good. The keyboard
00:40is excellent, backlit, way better than most other Chromebooks. I would say it's better
00:43than a lot of other regular laptops even. The trackpad is pretty good, it's built really
00:48well with great material choices and a good button mechanic, but there's a little bit
00:52of a stutter in Chrome OS. The white rubber pads are nice, they're supposedly quite resistant
00:57to dirt or any kind of staining, and they position them all over the device to kind
01:00of protect it when you have it closed, or just give it a little bit of grip so when
01:04you're using it, you just feel more confident in its ability to not get damaged. The tablet
01:09mode is less awesome to me. It's not super bad, it's just not as comfortable as I'd like
01:13my tablet to be. The keyboard's on the bottom, so you kind of touch that every time you use
01:17it, and it's a little bit thicker and heavier than a dedicated tablet would be, but any
01:21kind of 2-in-1 foldable device is going to feel like this, and as a tablet, it's not
01:26bad. One thing that seems a little bit buggy right now, though, is that you can't run the
01:29apps in split screen, so if you're in tablet mode, you're running it in full screen all
01:33the time. Hopefully they'll be able to fix that with a software update. There's an optional
01:36stylus called the Pixelbook Pen, which I didn't bring into work today to film, but it basically
01:41works as intended. The lag is very minimal, as long as the apps have been recently updated.
01:45It's a good stylus, as you would expect, but there's this feature where you can circle
01:48things in Chrome and Google will search for it, which honestly feels really gimmicky.
01:52I tried it a bunch of times, and just the accuracy isn't there. For whatever reason,
01:56it's just pulling up stuff that is somewhat related, kind of, to the thing that you circled,
02:00but it's just never something that I really wanted to search for. Performance is good,
02:05it's running some 7th Gen Intel chips, but it's a Chromebook, right? I feel like the
02:09average person that's going to be using this Pixelbook probably won't be able to text it
02:12all that hard, and the battery life is okay. I mean, it's good, but I just expected it
02:17to be better, considering how low demand this whole system is. I'm getting around 8 hours
02:22of battery life. Okay, I want to talk about the OS, and Chrome OS is probably where this
02:28whole thing starts to break down. I like Chrome OS. I think it's a great system. I think a
02:33lot of people call it a limited operating system. I disagree. I don't think it's, I
02:37mean, limited is just the wrong word. I would kind of want to approach it, it's just a different
02:41way of using your computer. I think a lot of people out there can use Chrome OS perfectly,
02:46and just get through everything that they need to do, and they don't even realize it.
02:50They think that they need Mac OS or Windows to do what they do, but they don't. They actually
02:55could do everything that they need to do with Chrome OS. The problem, however, and I think
03:00this is where I think everything breaks apart, is the price tag. This thing is $1,000, and
03:05when you look at the price of any kind of competitor product, so a 12-inch MacBook,
03:10a MacBook Air, an XPS 13, Razer Blade Stealth, iPad Pro, all of these things can do what
03:17the Chromebook does, but more. Much more. And I feel like that is why, that's why this
03:24product is so hard for me to recommend to people. I think it's a good product, I think
03:28it's good for what it is, but it should be priced at like $700 or $800. See, I did a
03:33video a while ago called The Best Chromebook, and this was sometime in the spring, I think,
03:37or like early summer of 2017, and to me, at the time, the best Chromebook was a product
03:42that was $500. It's the Asus C302, I think, and that's a great product, but it's very
03:48expensive for what it is. A Chromebook for $500 kind of took people aback. I mean, you
03:53can buy Chromebooks for $200, $300, that are really, really good. A $500 Chromebook was,
03:58whoa. Easy now, Dave, like, are you sure you want to recommend a $500 Chromebook? This
04:03is a $1,000 Chromebook, and it is better, this is the new best Chromebook, but, like,
04:09who's going to buy this? And the thing you have to keep in mind is that if you're going
04:12to spend $1,000, and that's so much money, you have to justify its purchase. Like, you've
04:17got to be able to use this and prefer it over any of the other devices that I've mentioned,
04:21and I think for most people, that's just not the case. If you want better battery life,
04:25there's other options. If you want the ability to play games, there's other options. There's
04:29just so much more versatility with the other choices over this. Even the iPad Pro can do
04:34more than this can, just for the average person. And it sucks, because this is such
04:40a good device, it's just overpriced. And four or five years ago, when this original Pixel
04:45came out, like the original Chromebook Pixel came out, it was really impressive, because
04:49the hardware looked so amazing for its time. But nowadays, everybody who's got a hand in
04:55the laptop industry is making really good hardware. Dell has good stuff, HP, Razer,
05:01there's so much good hardware to choose from, that it's difficult for this thing to stand
05:05out just on hardware alone. I think a lot of the reviews out there are so impressed
05:08by the hardware, they're like, ooh, shiny, pretty. But the usage experience is still
05:13very, it's just not there. It just doesn't have the versatility that a $1,000 device should have.
05:19Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it.
05:22See you guys next time.