The title is german for “outpixeled”. Because I sold my Chromebook Pixel in order to buy a new roadbike for the summer instead. Luckily, I didn’t even lose any money by selling it. It was also totally worth it, because of the incredible bicycle I got instead. But more on that in a future blog-post.
I didn’t part ways with it without a bit of regret, however, but considering that my Macbook Pro is already doing most of the work that I am doing with a laptop, the device felt more and more like a luxury. While stayting in Berlin at the end of February, visiting a friend and colleague, it was simply a jukebox during my stay and during my hours at our local hackerspace it rested peacefully in the cabinet. While I’ve grown quite fond of the basic idea of Chrome OS, it still feels mostly crippled, due to the lack of proper, offline-capable Chrome-applications. A fully cloud-enabled device is also still mostly useless as long as I can exhaust my monthly LTE-bandwidth within a few minutes. Chrome OS also lacked advanced tiling window manager-features that I’ve grown accustomed to on OS X and its handling of SSH-connections wasn’t to my liking either.
I do think that Google is on the right track with some parts of Chrome OS and especially the introduction of natively running Android-applications might just be the gamechanger it needs in the long run, especially when Chromebooks become even cheaper and better. I hope that Chromebooks with the Pixel’s build-quality will be the default for devices in the 300EUR-pricerange.