 I remember when Google Chrome came out of nowhere and completely pulled the rug out from under Internet Explorer and Firefox. Then, Android stormed from zero to half of the phone market in almost no time at all. Then, we got Chrome OS, a Google polished version of Linux, for the low-power machine that you let your kids use when daddy needs the real computer, and not much more. Could that change though? The Pixelbook is a laptop with main rig specs and premium design with a price to match, but is Chrome OS ready for that kind of responsibility now? No. No, it's not. And our argument for why is brought to you by TunnelBear. TunnelBear makes it easy to privately and securely browse a more open internet. To try TunnelBear for free, go to tunnelbear.com slash LTT linked below. Right out of the gate, the Pixelbook's design is polarizing. Some people really like the two-tone back, while others think it is outright ugly. But what I think everyone can agree on is the build quality. It is excellent, and it's super portable too. It's only 10 millimeters thick and 2.4 pounds. Honestly, the list kind of goes on from here. The screen and the hinge feel solid, the aluminum chassis is rigid, and it stays firmly planted where you put it down, whether it's on the table or on your lap, due to the large rubber surface on the bottom. IO-wise, yeah, it's pretty good for something this thin. I mean, yeah, you'll need USB-C dongles for your well, most of what you own, but they both charge the device, giving you the option to plug into either side, and it also includes a headphone jack, which is no longer a given on Pixel devices. Spec-wise, our config is pretty much perfect for web browsing and light productivity. It's a Core i5 dual core with 8 gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD, but you can get it with up to a Core i7 and 512 gigs of NVMe solid-state storage. And the quality of the hardware extends to the glass top trackpad, which has an excellent feel, and after a bit of sensitivity tuning, it's actually pretty close to MacBook level good, and the keyboard, which is solidly built with a light, crisp feel to the switches that I really enjoyed. I was easily able to get up to speed, and typing on it would be amazing, except for three things. One, the lack of a dedicated delete key and home and end keys can be worked around with alt backspace and this handy remapper tool, but are still annoying omissions. Two, while the rubber wrist rest material feels nice, it is easy for the heel of your hand to end up on the corner between the rubber and the aluminum, making it uncomfortable after a pretty short time. And three, the inclusion of a Google Assistant button seems pretty cool in theory, but unless you operate a keyboard and trackpad pretty slowly, voice recognition might not be faster for a lot of things, so I'd have personally preferred a function key with secondary functionality for some of the others. The Pixelbook has a productivity-oriented 3x2 aspect ratio IPS display with a bright backlight and vibrant colors. Its 2400x1600 resolution gives you nice sharp text, and there's lots of room for vertical scrolling content in your web browser, which is good, because it basically runs a web browser. And there are great big bezels that give it a bit of a 2016 rather than 2017 look, but I understand why they're there, since you've got to put your finger somewhere in tablet mode. Which I guess brings us perfectly to tablet mode. It's a tablet, I guess, but like, not as good as a regular one. So anything that you would do in the Chrome browser on your Android tablet is fine, but while theoretically you can install Android apps on Chrome OS, a lot of the ones that we installed had issues ranging from not rescaling correctly for the display to just not working at all. So we'd strongly recommend an Android tablet if you want to install Android apps, and it'll run Chrome too. And furthermore, this one might seem like a pretty petty complaint, but the included touch keyboard issues made the tablet experience markedly worse. Like, why would I ever want to type like this? The shift key inexplicably defaults to some stupid Jaden Smith capitalize all the first letters mode, and why would I want two spaces when I go back and change a word? I assumed that it would just be the same Google keyboard as Android, but it's not. And making matters worse, at this time third-party keyboards like SwiftKey aren't supported. And, I mean, while we're at it, the camera is a bit of a disappointment too. It's not unusable, but I was expecting something in line with the front shooter on the Pixel 2. For, you know, crystal clear video calls. Isn't that the whole Pixel branding? Instead what I got was a very soft image, some exposure issues, and an included app that doesn't support recording video. We had to do this through some janky website. It also lacks cool features like face recognition, like Windows Hello, or a fingerprint scanner for easy unlocking. Though, if you have a supported Android phone, you can use that to unlock it instead, unless, like me, you find it faster to just type in your password than to pull something out of your pocket. And the frustrations just keep coming. This script had to be written in Google Docs, because our template for Word crashes Office Online for some reason on this device. File system navigation feels like an afterthought. There's no back or upper level buttons. The hardware back key doesn't work, and copy-pasting our network drive wouldn't work. The display scaling is weird and doesn't actually report useful things like the resolution or scaling percentage. Honestly, the rest of this video could easily be just a boring list of other nitpicky things that I think will wear on you the same way they did on us every time you try and be legitimately productive on your Pixelbook. So I won't bore you with that. Instead, I want to talk about the possibility then of using a different OS on this device to address them, because the hardware is dope, as the kids say. Windows is locked out at a BIOS level, so no luck there. But I found this great lifehacker tutorial for some kind of kick-ass Linux switching functionality, where you can actually have both OSes booted even, and then just switch between them. And it works, sort of. So you switch by hitting Ctrl-Shift-Alt-Back, so we're good so far. But then, in Linux, the trackpad sucks, and because of the high-resolution display, the icons are super small with, at least in this distro, fairly limited scaling options. So, with this guide, for free, by the way, you've got the option then of a polished, but somewhat knee-capped experience, or a kind of broken, or requires a lot of tweaking, Linux experience that at least lets you do whatever you want, which would be pretty cool on a $200 Chromebook. The issue I have then is that for $1,200 US dollars, you could have a Surface laptop, a MacBook Air, a ThinkPad, a Razer Blade Stealth, I don't know. Any number of things that come with a real operating system. So, overall, the Pixelbook is a sexy piece of hardware, and, in my opinion, design, that is unfortunately let down by an OS that just isn't versatile enough to justify the price tag. We love Google around here, and we think that they're doing a lot of cool things right now, but this just isn't one of them. Speaking of cool things, though, Squarespace! Squarespace has 24-7 support via live chat and email, so if you've been thinking to yourself, gee, I'd love to set up a website, but it looks kind of complicated, give it a try. They've got a free trial for 14 days, and then after that it is just $12 a month, and the whole website creation process is cloud-based. So you take one of their gorgeous templates that'll scale great across any device, be it a desktop, a Chromebook, a phone, whatever the case may be, you plunk in your photos, you plunk in your text, you, you know, use their logo designer to make a cool-looking logo, you create a blog that you can publish content in, in Apple News format, making it available to millions of potential readers, and, oh yeah, they've got a store module included with every Squarespace site, and it's off to the races! So head over to squarespace.com slash LTT and try it out, then use offer code LTT to save 10% on your first purchase. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.