
Granted, poking around on tiny hyperlinks is monumentally easier on a tablet or a device like the Microsoft Surface that you can hold steady with both hands, but the Chromebook still has the size, shape, and dimensions of a clunky laptop. That's why half-baked mobile editions exist for websites in the first place. Most of the web isn't optimized for touchĪnother sad fact is that the internet isn't optimized for touchscreens. Aside from a few select Chrome apps, the Pixel's only piece of real software is, well, Chrome. A 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display is $1,499, and lets you run Microsoft Office, iTunes, Photoshop, iMovie, Spotify, StarCraft II, and whatever else your heart desires. Same functionality trade-offs as other Chromebooks, five times the price. That's what makes the Pixel's asking price so puzzling: $1,300 for a WiFi-only Pixel when it goes on sale next week, and $1,450 with LTE when it ships in April. Stuff you do 70 percent of the time on a normal laptop anyway. (We have one underneath the coffee table.) They're astonishingly inexpensive - Samsung's WiFi-only model is just $249 on Amazon, or as cheap as a Nexus 7 - and they let you browse the web, watch YouTube clips, check your email, and do some light document editing in Google Docs.

Other Chromebooks are great additions to households that already have a main computing rig. Here's why Google's Pixel, as it stands, is a product you should stay away from:

And yet, for all the glowing praise heaped on the Pixel by its design team, the device still faces an uphill fight if it hopes to compete with the MacBooks and Ultrabooks of the world.
