Google Pixelbook hands-on: Stunning hardware with the usual limited OS

SAN FRANCISCO—The Google Pixelbook is the latest in a line of flagship Chrome OS laptops that are extremely nice and extremely expensive. If it ran anything other than Chrome OS, it would be a top-tier laptop, but it does run Chrome OS, so for $1,000, it's kind of a hard sell.

Boy, is it a sharp piece of hardware. It's wrapped in aluminum, like previous Chromebook Pixels. The palm rest is covered in a rubbery silicon pad, which feels fantastic to rest your wrists on while typing. It also serves as a great gripping point when you fold the laptop into its various modes. Hopefully this surface can stand up to the wear and tear of a laptop palm rest.

The back has a top glass panel, just like the Pixel Phones, which serves to let wireless signals in and out. The screen has a glass cover, too, along with the trackpad. The Google Hardware division is clearly working hard to make its products look like a cohesive family, and you can tell the basis for the Pixelbook's back design is the white-and-silver Google Pixel. Just like the phone, the laptop has a silver-colored metal body with a contrasting, white-colored glass back. The only problem is that the silver/white color scheme only matches last year's Google Pixel. This year, a silver body is not an option on the Pixel 2. So close, Google!

The hinge folds all the way around, letting you use it in laptop, tent, and tablet modes. Tent is a great mode for watching a video without using too much desk space. But the 1kg, 12.3-inch device is pretty unwieldy to hold with one hand, and I never got used to having an exposed keyboard on its back side. Like I said in the announcement post, it's 60 percent heavier than a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. It's just as heavy in person as it is on paper.

The buttons are all designed around the tablet mode, so just like a phone or tablet, you get a power button and volume rocker combo on the left edge of the device. A side-mounted volume rocker would be very awkward to use in laptop mode, but thankfully the volume controls are duplicated in the usual spot in the keyboard function row. You'll also find a USB-C port on the left, and—take note Pixel 2—a glorious 3.5mm headphone jack. On the right side, you'll find another USB-C port. The Pixelbook comes with a USB-C charger, and just like on the Chromebook Pixel 2, either port can be used for charging.

What kind of shallow-laptop keyboard can you expect?  The travel isn't as paper-thin as an Apple butterfly switch, but more like the previous Pixel keyboard or a last-gen Macbook Pro. I tested the Pixelbook keyboard after using my 2014 Macbook Pro, and I found the keyboard instantly comfortable. There are a few new keys in the Chrome OS layout. Chrome OS famously demoted the Caps Lock button in favor of a "search" key, but this key has been changed to a small circle label. Like on current Chrome OS devices, the search key opens a hybrid web-search/app-search panel. In the top right is a new settings button labeled with three horizontal lines. The most important new button is probably the "Google Assistant" button, which lives on the bottom row between "Control" and "Alt," right where you'd find the Windows key on a Windows laptop.

Tapping this brings up the Google Assistant, which makes the Pixelbook the first laptop ever made with Google Assistant built in. The interface looks and works just like the phone app, and I swear it's even in a window with a 9:16 aspect ratio. The window pops up in the lower left, just like Windows Start Menu. You can ask questions by voice or type right into the window, and the Assistant will return the usual results. Like the Pixel C, the Pixelbook has a suspiciously powerful microphone setup, with four far-field microphones. This is two more than even the Google Home, and theoretically this will allow you to talk to the laptop from across the room.

They problem with an across-the-room use case is that I was told the Pixelbook wouldn't have always-on "OK Google" hotword support at launch. For now, the hotword only works when the screen is on. The laptop apparently has a low-power DSP (digital signal processing) that is designed for always-on listening, but for now, Google needs to figure out how to it wants to manage voice commands with a multi-user lock screen. This is something it has figured out on Google Home, which can identify and authenticate users just by their voice, but that hasn't come to Chrome OS just yet. When (or if) it does, you'd have a portable Google Home of sorts.

Speaking of oddities, the Pixelbook has a whopping 128GB of storage as a standard option. Chrome OS devices typically get by with just 16GB of storage, as these are designed as "cloud-first" devices which require minimal local storage. Sure, there are Android apps, available through the Google Play Store, but 128GB is still a lot of storage for the small handful of apps you'd actually like to use on a Chromebook. 128GB is just the starting storage amount, too. The Pixelbook goes all the way up to 512GB. But if you want to store massive amounts of media—movies, music—locally, the Pixelbook gives you that option.

If you want to spend another $99 on your $1,000 Chrome OS laptop, you can buy the Pixelbook Pen. This is an aluminum and metal stylus with a 10ms lag, 60° of angular measurement and 2,000 levels of pressure sensitivity. Most of the time it works just like a finger, scrolling web pages around and rearranging windows. In a drawing all the low latency feels great. There's basically zero delay between writing and the line appearing on the screen, making it feel just like a real pen. If the right kind of app support for the Pixelbook Pen were to show up, this could be a serious device for artists.

There's a button on the pen which will allow you to perform a visual search with the Google Assistant. Just hold the button down and you'll begin to draw a blue line. Circle whatever you want to perform a search on, and a snippet of the image will be sent to the Google Assistant. This can do things like recognize people or landmarks.

You won't find any complicated charging setups here. The Pixelbook Pen is powered by a AAAA battery. Yes that's a quadruple-A battery. I had no idea these existed until today.

It's hard to justify the purchase of a $1,000 laptop that can only display web pages and run unimpressive Android phone apps. You can't really use the Pixelbook for the kind of things that typically justify a $1,000+ price tag, like gaming, photo processing, development, or video. Chrome OS defenders can come up with some janky web or Android apps that roughly emulate some of these use cases, but none of them are the kind of industry-defining programs you get on other platforms. This is the third generation of these premium Chrome OS flagships, though, so Google must be happy with the presumably low-volume sales of a device like this. If you liked the other Chromebook Pixels, you'll like this one, but nothing here closes the gap between Chrome OS and other laptop OSes.