There are only three meaningful things you can do with a computer with specs like this: development, design, or gaming. And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things.
Perhaps this is a vanity product for the wealthy. But wealthy people are going to just surf the web on an iPad.
I really don't get this product.
>And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things.
Am I just imagining all the posts I've seen on HN from people talking about being extremely happy using Chromebooks as development platforms?
People are happy using Chromebooks as development platforms because they're $250 for an ARM laptop with long battery life, and you can hack them to run Ubuntu, not because Chrome OS has any merit on its own.
Things that are cute on a $250 machine are not so cute on a $1,300 machine...
I believe it's much easier to hack this one to run Linux than any ARM-based Chromebook. It certainly has enough memory, storage and processing power to be a decent development machine (provided you avoid heavy IDEs).
It's likely possible to even run Windows on this machine.
It's already braindead easy to put Linux on the ARM Samsung Chromebook. One of the first things I did was to assemble my own personal Linux distro and besides having to copy some blob files out of the original ChromeOS image, it's all very straight-forward stuff and I pulled up about a hundred packages I wanted including an X.org stack without fuss. The compile speeds are adequate if you aren't cross-compiling, I've certainly put up with worse.
I personally have little interest in the Pixel based on the specs. I think X86 is excessively 'big iron' now for a majority of needs and I find the lack of USB3 is mystifying. The screen looks interesting, but it's nothing I actually /need/ and certainly not worth another thousand bucks. I've personally taken to just using X86 for storage/cross-compile servers for the rest of my cheap ARM/MIPS/etc. crap and I've made it a point to stop buying expensive hardware. What $250 buys you now is actually pretty ridiculously awesome.
'brain-dead easy ... assemble my own personal distro' :))
* Enable developer mode.[1]
* Drop Crouton[2] onto Chromebook to get a full dev stack and unfortunate Ubuntu/XFCE environment.
* Set up chroot and start building other people's crap.
* Write to SD Card/internal storage and reboot.
Which step here is hard? Tedious to roll your own I'd give you, but you don't even need to as there's stuff like ArchLinuxARM[3] which skips the middle two steps.
[1]: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/deve...
[2]: https://github.com/keyboardsurfer/Crouton
[3]: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung-chromebook