Google unveils Chromebook Pixel, expects you to pay $1,299

In case you haven't notice, Google is already expanding its market base. I won't be surprised if they start taking over the desktop market as well.

Its just a cloud laptop, for now.

Keep in mind that ChromeOS, just like stock Android, is easily upgraded. Which means that Google can easily integrate Google Play for the Chromebook. With that hardware, its the only logical path.

How good is the Intel® HD Graphics 4000 (Integrated)?

The screen doesn't do anything for me. Neither does the lack of a local hard drive. The sky-high price means I'm definitely not interested.

Where are they coming up with these prices!! Don't have high hopes for this model last one didn't do so well why would this one be any different.

It get up to five hours of battery time

Yeah, no need to worry about online storage, safe as houses. Nothing ever went wrong with data stored online :|

I would rather build a hi spec PC with the money. You could get a super CPU and graphics card and have money spare for twin monitors.

An i5 isn't much in a laptop. My i5-2430M (In my XPS L702x) is a great CPU but its nothing more then dual core with HT and turbo boost. 4GB isn't much these days either, I consider it to be the bare minimum.
It takes some power to fly around on the web now with many sites having advanced media and flash built-in ,and anything less then 900p for a resolution is trash IMO.

Yes, 4GB is not much these days for Windows, Linux, and OSX PCs. More advanced OS'-such as Windows-have more capabilities than Chrome OS, and therefore need to cache more processes and use more memory. The reason they bumped the memory from 2GB (from cheaper Chromebooks) to 4GB is probably because of the shared memory with the graphics.

According to this article, someone just out appled Apple. Never thought I'd see the day.

Every piece of data hitting the Cloud is replicated across several different locations making daya loss nearly impossible.

Not with the price tag. you can get a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro for $1500 and it has a much more robust system with more capabilities.

That was my point...

It should drive full HD Blu-Ray with no problem.

At least the desktop version will. It's all about home theater, not gaming on a grand scale.

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". (Edmund Burke).

So then,"good men", should buy something else. After all, Google can't expand into a market that that isn't open to them, now can they?

I feel like this is the issue with running at high resolutions it does it fine, but as for the 15 inch MacBook Pro, I dont get why apple only offers 1GB of VRAM when it should be 2GB @ those resolutions

The internals of the Samsung series 3 Chromebook are perfectly adequate for running Chrome OS, would have brought the price down massively, as well as running cooler and quieter and allowing a thinner form factor, so why they felt the need to lumber it with an i5 is beyond me. The logic behind the use of the 3:2 aspect ratio for the screen is similarly lost on me.

Yeah I hate square screens

Good thinking, but rather backwards. They're not trying to drive the price down, they're trying to drive it up with an i5. I think the children call it, "street cred"!

The "3:2" aspect ratio is, and has been for decades, the format for the 35mm camera. (1:66:1:00). Hi-Def aspect ratio, (IMHO) is useless below about 23" diag!

Common photo image ratios are as low as 4:5, (8" X 10"). You simply can't render them at 1:1 with 16:9 monitor smaller than about 22". So, you can't use a stinking hi-def laptop to show granny's 8 x 10 vertical portrait @ 1:1

If this is in response to our illustrious guest's post, 3:2 isn't square, 2:2 is. (Customarily this is given the LCD(*) treatment. So then "square" = 1:1)

Why does it need 2GB of Vram? It's not intended as a gaming platform.

Besides, the "Retina Display" is mostly smoke, mirrors, and bulls***. You can't possibly put enough graphics power in a laptop to drive the display at its native resolution. They're supplying the same information across several pixels. At least @ 2:1, possibly 3:1.

Think about it. 300 ppi, would be a total resolution of 3000px on a screen of 10 inches. At 15 inches, 300 ppi would 4500px. Now tell me where you're going to find a laptop VGA that will drive at a resolution of 3000 x 4500?

(*) "LCD", archaic acronym for "lowest common denominator".