It looks an awful lot like a Macbook: Just witness the aluminum-like color and the black bevel around the screen. Where it looks different, it's uglier. The hinge looks particularly bad. And judging by the pictures it's an awful lot bulkier than a Macbook Air.
Chrome OS strikes me as an underpowered OS. That is, there's a lot it won't do and it seems mostly suitable for underpowered machines.
UPDATE: this paragraph is wrong; I stand corrected! -- The ChromeBook Pixel has a 4:3 display. Now, I recently came across an old laptop of mine that had a 4:3 display and it looked off. I'm not saying that 4:3 aspect ratio a bad choice in an objective sense, but it strikes me as a bad choice from a marketing point of view.
For one hundred dollars less you can get a 13" Macbook Air. For two hundred dollars more you can get a 13" Macbook Pro with Retina Display. Both these machines seem better than the Chromebook Pixel in every way, including battery life (7 hours versus 5).
In conclusion, I think this is going to fail badly.
It seemed like a pretty safe assumption to make given the nature of the device. Google shipping a web-oriented device with non-square pixels would be very strange of them because of all the potential problems this would entail. Are there any modern portable computers with non-square pixels? For that matter, were pixel aspect ratios other than 1:1 ever prominent on LCD portables?
Last time I had to deal with non-square pixels on x86 was when programming mode 13h graphics for DOS at a 320x200 resolution (which was then stretched to 4:3). The only thing that comes to my mind that you could do now with modern equipment would be to connect your laptop/PC to a bargain bin plasma panel that has a 1024x768 physical resolution and achieves a 16:9 aspect ratio by virtue of non-square pixels [1]. My first encounter with one of those caused me trouble when I wanted to use it with a Linux PC some time ago.
I love that it has a taller/squarer aspect ratio than the vast majority of laptops on the market. I find the current crop of ultra-short screens completely unacceptable for the text-heavy tasks I spend the vast majority of my computer time doing.
I'd rather have 4:3, and my current laptop is a semi-custom Thinkpad I built by shoehorning a newer motherboard in to a T60p just so I could have a decent 15" 4:3 screen and 8gb of memory in the same laptop.
Unfortunately, this particular machine is a little pricey for what it is and not a size I'd like. It should diminish the "these are the only screens we can get" excuse that PC makers keep trying to give us though.
So now Apple has a patent on aluminium color and black bezel?
Most laptops (and for that matter tablets) have a black bezel cause it provides a good contrast from the content on the screen.
When I saw the picture i thought "At least they won't say it looks like a macbook. It has a hard-edge look, from the pictures i looks like it has a dark tone aluminium color and it has that (admitetly awfull looking) hinge thingy.
But hey, it's a laptop and and it's small and silvery, Google made a Macbook clone...
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I agree that it looks too much like an Apple product, but I think the differences they made are nice and the machine over all looks better than the Macbook Pro.
I am disappointed though. One of the images they showed was in low light and it made it look like the whole surface of the keyboard area was charcoal sort of shade. I think that would look way more sleek and professional looking, and at the same time it would help to differentiate it from Apple products.
I wasn't being entirely serious, but fingerprints everywhere did bother me on my iPad. They bother me even more so on my laptop, despite there being significantly less, and it'd be worse with a touchscreen.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/21/4013480/google-chromebook-...
It looks an awful lot like a Macbook: Just witness the aluminum-like color and the black bevel around the screen. Where it looks different, it's uglier. The hinge looks particularly bad. And judging by the pictures it's an awful lot bulkier than a Macbook Air.
Chrome OS strikes me as an underpowered OS. That is, there's a lot it won't do and it seems mostly suitable for underpowered machines.
UPDATE: this paragraph is wrong; I stand corrected! -- The ChromeBook Pixel has a 4:3 display. Now, I recently came across an old laptop of mine that had a 4:3 display and it looked off. I'm not saying that 4:3 aspect ratio a bad choice in an objective sense, but it strikes me as a bad choice from a marketing point of view.
For one hundred dollars less you can get a 13" Macbook Air. For two hundred dollars more you can get a 13" Macbook Pro with Retina Display. Both these machines seem better than the Chromebook Pixel in every way, including battery life (7 hours versus 5).
In conclusion, I think this is going to fail badly.