SAN FRANCISCO—After a year of hibernation, Google's flagship Chromebook offering is back. At the company's hardware event in San Francisco Wednesday, Google announced the "Google Pixelbook," representing a new generation of Chrome OS devices.

The Pixelbook is full of "firsts" for a Chrome OS laptop. It's the first Chromebook with a seventh-gen Intel Kaby Lake processor. It's the first Chromebook with the Google Assistant built in, in the form of a hardware button and an "OK Google" hotword when the screen is turned on. And the Pixelbook is the first Chromebook with a pen: an optional $99/£99 Active Electrostatic (AES) stylus called a "Pixelbook Pen."

Like the Chromebook Pixels, this is a premium Chromebook with a premium price tag: the Pixelbook starts at $999/£999. That money gets you a 12.3-inch 2400x1600 3:2 display, with an Intel Kaby Lake Core i5, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a backlit keyboard. You can upgrade to a 256GB SSD for $1,199/£1,199, or you can jump up to a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB NVMe SSD config for $1,699/£1,699.

All of these devices sport outrageously high storage tiers for Chromebooks, which often ship with just 16GB of storage. Chrome OS is still mostly a browser-only OS that stores everything on the Internet, so you don't really need a lot of storage. Sure, you can run Android apps now, but the Pixelbook starts at the highest available Android phone storage tier, 128GB, and then doubles and quadruples that amount as you move up the pricing tiers. Is this much storage on a Chromebook a total waste, or does it indicate that Google expects Chrome OS to grow into more of a storage user somehow?

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo





The Pixelbook follows the same design motifs as in a Pixel phone, with a metal body and a top glass section in a contrasting color. At 10.3 mm (0.4 in) thick and with a weight of 1.1 kg (2.42 lbs), Google says it's the thinnest and lightest laptop it has ever made. The hinge folds all the way around, allowing the Pixelbook to work in "laptop," "tent," and "tablet" modes. The 12.3-inch Pixelbook is over 60 percent heavier than the already-massive 12.9-inch iPad Pro, so start bulking up now if you plan on using the tablet mode.

Pixelbook Pen is in the same realm of functionality as the Apple Pencil or Microsoft Surface pen. The $99 AES stylus has 60 degrees of angular measurement and 2,000 levels of pressure sensitivity. Google says it used machine learning to cut the drawing latency down to just 10ms and to build a handwriting recognition system that turns your scribbles into type.

Certain apps, like Google Keep, are allowed on the lockscreen now, so you can turn on the device, whip out the pen, and immediately start taking notes. Both the Android and Chrome OS app frameworks have pen support, but as this is the first AES stylus on either platform, proper support in an app is going to be tough to come by.

There's no hard specs on the battery yet, but Google is promising "up to 10 hours" on a single charge. The included charger has a fast-charge feature, too, so 15 minutes of charging gets you up to two hours of usage.

Despite source code commits that stated fingerprint reader support was coming to Chrome OS, the Pixelbook is not equipped with any kind of biometric authentication. With Windows focusing on camera-based biometrics and MacBooks shipping with a fingerprint reader, Chrome OS is the only major laptop OS without any kind of biometrics.

The Pixelbook is up for preorder today and will be sold at the Google Store, Best Buy, and "other major retailers" in the US, Canada, and the UK. Preorders start today, and it will be available in stores on October 31.