Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2017
I have to update my 5.9 star review, based on battery life. It's great for email and casual browsing, but watching videos of whatever kind, it gives you about an hour. That's a pretty catastrophic battery fail. Can't watch a movie on Netflix or Amazon on this thing, off the wire.
-------------------------------
It would be hard to overstate how nice a piece of hardware this is. Admittedly I'm buying it four years after the fact and for a fraction of the original price. I thought it looked great and was incredibly cool but hard to justify the price given the OS when it came out. But after reading more and more reviews from pros and consumers alike which just incessantly benchmark every new Chromebook - or even laptops generally - against this, invariably saying, "not as good as..." "not as solid as..." "not quite as beautifully engineered as..." the Chromebook Pixel, it was worth a couple hundred bucks for no other reason than seeing what all the fuss is about.
I popped it out of the box, booted it, and just thought - wow. Holy crap. They weren't kidding.
It boots almost instantly, it's incredibly quick to set up, and beyond that:
- The display is spectacular, crisp, bright, inky black blacks, and it's a touchscreen that works INCREDIBLY well. Sensitive and accurate.
- The CPU is blazing fast. Everything opens instantly. Crisp and responsive actions. This is what you wish your stupid $800 Android phone would behave like - zero lag, instantly responsive to every action.
- The keyboard is full-size and spectacularly good. Great key travel and feel, backlit, just spectacularly good. You can spend as much as, or more than, this laptop originally listed for, and come up with a laptop with a FAR inferior keyboard. Dell and HP generally do well but Acer and Asus are categorically inferior; and, my Macbook Air's keyboard, unfortunately, also completely inferior. I've never tested or owned a laptop with a better keyboard than this.
- The trackpad is the best I've ever used on a PC, period. Very comparable to Apple quality, only it's bigger than Macbook Air in a case with a smaller footprint - figure that one out. Its sensitivity is simply perfect and it understands multi-touch gestures flawlessly.
- The chassis is solid in a way I've never seen. Macbook Pro is probably the closest, but at the expense of heft. This truly the best-feeling laptop all around. As I read in other reviews, this thing is pixel-perfect, feels great when you pick it up, feels great when you open it, and is really built to impress.
The solitary weak point here is, battery life is pretty mediocre. Fully charged it says it'll get just over 4 hours. Perhaps I could convince it to try for 5 if I turn the display brightness down considerably. But, it's hungry...
It's a Chromebook. So of course, you're largely tethered to the Google ecosystem. Can't play PC games on it. For me, that dovetails with my usage anyway. I back up all our media and use Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar and Keep exclusively, whether on desktop, laptop or phone. I haven't tried playing Android games / apps on the Chromebook but it's theoretically doable, which obviously exposes you to a MUCH larger app ecosystem than Chrome OS.
From my perspective, but for the lack of ability to play PC games (at least, not without getting too clever, like trying to install a VM or dual-booting it or some such nonsense I don't have time to figure out), this is the single best laptop I have ever experienced, and would be my preferred travel mate over anything. Best thing to carry around the house, use in bed, next to the couch.
Was it worth what it cost? At the time, probably not. Chrome OS was too early. The ecosystem too small. Android apps didn't run on it. Now? I'd argue yes. The same folks who'll fork over a premium for a Macbook would be better served with something like this - an even more stable and responsive OS that does everything you need it to do, loaded in a piece of hardware that's equally responsive, well-designed and well-made.
What blows my mind is that this was 1st gen hardware. They improved even on THIS in 2015. I haven't tried the new one, but they say, better battery life, shaved a millimeter off the thickness, better trackpad (I can't imagine what that even means relative to this one). Then... stopped abruptly. This first-gen thing, for what it's now selling for, new-old-stock, is absurdly good. You can't get any Chromebook, nor probably any laptop period, this good, for any price, so the price it's now fetching is nuts. I spent an hour with it and liked it so well I went right back online and bought one for my wife. And honestly, I'm thinking about buying one or two to put on the shelf, for the simple reason that one of these are bound to get dropped, or otherwise broken by the kids, and within the next few years I'm not sure I'll be able to find equal or better hardware than this for any price, much less what these are selling for right now. Altogether, I'll have spent less than a single top-spec PC laptop from the likes of Asus, HP or Dell.
I certainly can't claim to understand the competitive landscape, but if Google could design and build THIS thing four years ago, dear god, what could they do now? Maybe it simply can't be improved upon. But it CERTAINLY should be in the market. I've yet to come across anything as credible as an Apple killer as this. It is simply perfect. It does everything most people need/want to do with a laptop, does everything it's capable of spectacularly well, and wants for nothing. I really wish Google could use the huge investment they made in the learning curve engineering and manufacturing this thing, and its successor, and use that to build a laptop that's even better, and perhaps sell it for under $1000. Could still be incredibly profitable, and at the same time, snag some well-deserved market share.