The Pixel 2 is one of the best pieces of hardware Google has ever produced. The aluminium chassis is beautiful, hiding a spacious keyboard and a high-resolution, touch-friendly display. The impeccable build quality, combined with some decent performance and battery life, make it a sublime canvas for Chrome OS. The problem is the price -- at $999 it's an expensive piece of gear, and hard to justify against a similarly-priced MacBook or Windows laptop. But then, it was never supposed to be a mass market seller. The Pixel, like Google's Nexus phones, is a showcase for the operating system.

Earlier this year, Google put out a job opening for a Chromebook Pixel Quality Engineer. While it doesn't guarantee a new model, the position would indicate that Google is still interested in building its own high-end laptops. In the meantime, there's always the Pixel C, a Surface-style hybrid that's now considerably more useful thanks to Android 7.0 (Nougat).