My Fling With The Chromebook Pixel

I shelved my 13 inch Macbook Pro Retina display last January on a foggy day. I had lost my job in a startup that was dealing with the unfortunate but all too common Serie A crunch. I did something rather childish, I wanted something new, something shinny to make me feel better. I wanted something that would all and all improve the crappy predicament I found myself in. I bought a Chromebook Pixel on eBay for $800. I bought the 64gb with LTE, not that I cared much about the LTE part but more because I though I could not really go from my 128gb mac to a puny 32gb hard drive.

The Honeymoon Period

The first months were nothing but exhilarating, the beauty of the hardware, the crisp-more-beautiful-than-a-retina display that made my eyes so happy, the somewhat more rigid keyboard that at time made me feel like a a true writer, the kind that wears beat up leather clogs, sweat pants and a classic coffee stained sweater that could write a story of its own. There was also the novelty of touching the screen to scroll, zoom and point at stuff, an especially useful trick when using google maps.

I really enjoyed the 3:2 screen ratio that is a true delight when consuming massive amount of written content while online, a daily occupation of mine. I was in heaven. The one thing that bugged me was the temperature of the thing, you could quite often cook breakfast on it. But all and all the glorious laptop was making my office shine like having Pegasus reside in my own stable. It brought elegance and good design vibes while making me, so I thought, the most good looking job seeker in the galaxy. I might have exaggerated a tad on the previous bit, but you get my drift.

Reality Check

After a couple of months of confinement spending my days networking on LinkedIn, writing emails, reworking my C.V. for the 1 millionth time and ignoring the fact that I was on a sinking financial ship, I decided to get away from my home office to explore the nearby Starbucks and use it in an “outside world” environment. I did get some gazes from the Apple crowd at Starbucks, probably wondering what that sexy gunmetal laptop with a blue pulsating bar a la Knight Rider was. Unfortunately, the first public wifi experience was brutal. The damn 16 bits jurassic T-rex appeared constantly on my browser to let me know that I could not connect to the Starbucks internet. My Chromebook was completely useless but for using it as a timer to boil the elusive soft boil egg, “3 minutes” according to Chef Gordon Ramsey.

The Financial Crisis

As my premium Chromebook experience kept improving with the wonderful updates coming from the MotherGoogleShip or MGS as I like to call it, I figured my computing life was to stay on the Google side of things, after all I had an android phone, used Gmail and Google docs on a daily basis, and my Chromebook had pushed me to put everything in the cloud. I really enjoyed the cloud life especially when I messed around with installing Linux — the really good bad idea — on my machine and crashed my Pixel.

“No problem everything is in the cloud!” I exclaimed myself in a rather busy Starbucks.

As my relationship with my Pixel grew happily my bank account suffered the unbearable reality of being jobless for over 4 months. Sadly I could not justify the luxury of owning not one but two high end laptops. I was to sell one to refill my account enough and hopefully survive until the gods of HR smiled upon my resume. Note to the reader: I was also working on multiple ventures and a startup while looking for a job, I am writing this so you don’t feel like I was the kind of guy that sat on his derriere to wait and see if someone picks up his resume.

Closure

Well you might have figured, I sold the Pixel. It was sad to let go of this incredible machine, but it made sense to keep the Mac for three, even four, major reasons.

The first one is battery life, the Pixel is a joke, I barely managed to get 4 hours of battery life while having the gorgeous display readable, sure I could have dimmed to the point of hurting my eyes, but it does not make any sense for this kind of premium device. My Mac easily go over 6 hours without a magnetic refill, and I don’t have to dim the gorgeous retina display that much to save battery and get up to 7 hours.

The Chromebook Pixel even though better at connecting to public and Starbucks wifi since the last updates, still is quite capricious with most wifi’s that requires a pop up to accept the connection. The Mac handles wifi in all flavors almost seamlessly.

Finally the most important one for me is editing video. It just sucks on the Chromebook, it is just not meant for it. I have FCP on my mac and often deal with some video editing. I also have Applecare on my mac until 2016, while the Pixel is backed by not much, if any, Google love. I am glad I sold the Chromebook Pixel, it was like a great summer fling with a gorgeous girl with some major family issues, I only remember the good times but would have never married the girl. I married my Mac instead, it just works.