It’s been years since Google released the Chromebook (and in tech years that’s like a millennia), but now the wait is over, as Google announced at it’s NYC Pixel 4 launch event on October 15th that they are finally releasing the Pixelbook Go, successor to the Pixelbook.
The laptop is designed to be presented at a more affordable price, to be more accessible to more customers, and as for performance, Google is promising up to 12 hours of use time on a single charge, with a battery inside that can draw up to two hours of use from just 20 minutes of charging.
Designed to be, well, a Chromebook on the GO, the Pixelbook Go is 13mm thin and just 2 pounds light with a magnesium alloy body, complete with quiet “Hush” keys. The chassis is also surrounded in a “grippable,” magnesium alloy chassis painted in a matte plastic texture for easier and more secure handling. Google is offering the Pixelbook Go with an Intel Core m3 processor (CPU) to start, but it will be available with up an Intel Core i7 CPU at the top end (more on that in pricing).
This is a 13.3-inch laptop including a touchscreen starting at Full HD resolution that can go as sharp as 4K. The Pixelbook Go also features a 1080p webcam that films in 60 frames per second as well as an ambient light sensor. And as for ports, the laptop includes two USB-C that both support charging and display output, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack. Google has included only 802.11ac Wi-Fi, or Wi-Fi 5, in this laptop, as well as Bluetooth 4.2. This is unfortunate for a late 2019/early 2020 product, as both Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 are practically here right now.
The laptop starts at $649 (about £520, AU$930) in the US, and will be available in “Just Black” and “Not Pink” colors, with pre-orders available right now. While the release date is still forthcoming, if pre-orders are available now in the US, and those in the UK in early 2020, it’s safe to expect a US release date sometime in late 2019. By that logic, we should expect a UK release date to follow sometime in late January or early February.
And about that list price. The Pixelbook Go will launch in the U.S. starting at $649, that base price will get you an Intel Core m3 CPU with 8GB of memory (RAM) and 64GB of flash storage behind a Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) display. Now, this is considerably less expensive than the current Pixelbook laptop, which starts at at a $999 list price, and it makes it much more approachable to a wider amount of people, putting it in line with the likes of the new Surface Pro 7 tablet from Microsoft.
But that’s just the base price. For $849, the laptop upgrades to an Intel Core i5 processor and doubles the available storage to 128GB. If you want double the RAM (16GB) and double the storage (128GB), that will cost you $999. Finally, a model with 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and a 4K Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160) “Molecular” touch display will cost a cool $1,399 in the US.
It should be noted that these are fan-less processors inside the Pixelbook Go, which will color performance to be a bit less robust than laptops with full-fate Intel Core chips inside. That said, Google has included its Titan C security chip inside, which is said the securely handle your personal information.
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