 This is the new Chromebook Pixel. It looks just like the old Chromebook Pixel, but it's better, way better. And you're probably going to want one, but you probably shouldn't buy one. Two years ago, Google introduced a ridiculous laptop, the original Pixel. It had a gorgeous screen, incredible hardware, mediocre battery life, and it only did one thing, ran the Chrome browser. Oh, and the Pixel was also expensive, crazy expensive. This time around, Google is fixing most of what was broken with the first model, but let's get that price out of the way first. It starts at $999. That's still crazy expensive for a Chromebook. It's more than twice as expensive as most other Chromebooks, and it's the same price as a really good PC or Mac. It's really hard to justify spending this much on a machine that only runs Chrome and a precious few Android apps. The design is almost completely unchanged from the original, and I'm totally fine with that. It's all boxy corners and clean lines, metal and glass, like something out of a high concept sci-fi movie. The Pixel is its own thing, not a Mac clone, not a PC clone. Everything feels well built and even dense at 3.3 pounds. Most of all, the design feels considered. The keyboard has been tweaked, the trackpad improved, and you can even knock on top of the laptop to check the battery life, which is a nice touch. Google is sticking with the three by two aspect ratio on this 13-inch touchscreen, and it's a choice I'm fine with, even though I know a lot of people aren't fond of it. But it's still a great screen, with a slightly wider color gamut and 239 pixels per inch. But if we're talking hardware, the biggest deal here are the two little oval-shaped ports you'll find where the power jack usually goes. Those are USB Type-C ports, and they're a very big deal. Yes, just like Apple, Google is jumping on board with USB Type-C. These fancy new ports can be used for basically anything, power, display, connecting to a camera, whatever. The idea of being able to use the same plug for everything has been a crazy dream for basically as long as people have been making plugs. Google uses it mainly for charging, and I should say that having a power jack on both sides of your laptop is surprisingly convenient. And yes, the old-style USB plugs and SD card slot are still here, so you don't have to carry around a rat's nest of adapters. Battery life on the Pixel is stupendous. Google rates it at 12 hours. Our battery test clocked it at 14. Real-world use over a few days bears those numbers out. The thing just lasts and lasts. Google says it wants you to charge the Pixel at night and just use it all day without bothering to plug it in. I don't know if I really think anybody should do that, but the fact that it's not patently ridiculous to suggest that you could do that is pretty amazing. And it's fast, really fast. Stupid, crazy, why isn't my laptop as fast as this fast? The only thing that comes close is Safari on a top-of-the-line Mac. It loads pages fast, it scrolls fast, heck, even pinch-to-zoom is fast. The $999 model comes with a Core i5 processor, eight gigs of RAM, and 32 gigs of storage. You can also spend $300 more to get an i7 processor and double the RAM and storage. Google calls that the Pixel LS, which stands for ludicrous speed. And no, it doesn't come in plaid. If you haven't used Chrome OS in a while, you might not know that it's come a long way in the past year or so. No, most people shouldn't use it as their only laptop, and no, it's not to the point where you can really do a ton of multimedia work easily. But I have a dozen or so apps that I depend on, and all of them have either web or Android versions that work great on the Pixel. And you can work offline with most of them, open Microsoft Office, and even play a few games. Look, the Chromebook Pixel is great, but at a thousand bucks, it had better be. And Chrome OS has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go before it makes sense as most people's primary operating system. So after all that, I don't think buying the Chromebook Pixel is a good idea, unless you think $999 is impulse purchase territory. But I also think that this speedy, long-lasting, beautiful machine is one of my favorite laptops of the year. Google should have called it the Chromebook Paradox.