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The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature
- ryeguy 14y agoHow big of a difference is this though? 16:10 is 3.2:2.
- t0 14y agoLots of different comparisons here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)#Visual_comparisons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)#Visual_com...
- NateDad 14y agoMost modern monitors are 16:9 to match HD movie aspect ratios. If it was 16:9 it would be only 1440 pixels tall, a reduction of 15%.
- tsm 14y agoBetter put: 3:2 is 15:10. 4:3 (my favorite) is 13.33:10
- t0 14y agoThat's a very interesting point. I remember when we had 15 and 17" LCDs back in the day that were always nearly square. Now it seems rare to find a computer screen even remotely square.
- panacea 14y agoI find this (oddly) most pronounced on the iPhone 5. On previous models, landscape browsing was a valid option, but once you get the extra length vertically in portrait, the limited landscape view feels completely uselessly constrained.
- NateDad 14y agoAbsolutely. I hated when everyone started making 16:9 monitors. The 16:10 ones weren't quite as bad, but seriously, give me some vertical pixels. Especially true for coding where it's useful to see as many lines of code on the screen at possible.
- devilcm3 14y ago3:2 used to be the standard screen ratio. just look at your 15 inch CRT monitor. the industry then went for 16:10 the so called "WIDESCREEN" at that time, and now 16:9
- jsnell 14y agoI don't remember seeing 3:2 in widespread use. What you used to have was 4:3, a vastly superior aspect ratio especially on laptops.
- Lagged2Death 14y agoActually the old-school CRT monitors were much narrower even than 3:2 (1.5) - they were 4:3 (1.33), just like NTSC television, and very close to the very-old-school "Academy Ratio" in the movies. Which is the reason the movie business invented wide-screen: To make their movies darn near unwatchable on standard television. HDTV went wide-screen to chase the movie business, which has in response pursued ever more extreme ultra-wide ratios (12:5 or 2.40 in not-insane notation) for their blockbusters, so even with a brand new wide-screen HDTV, you get letter-boxing and only partial vertical resolution when you watch the latest Batman movie or whatever. Now there are some small movements in the direction of ultra-ultra wide-screen in the computer business, and it doesn't bode well. [1] So it's Hollywood's fault that your computer screen has a stupid shape, just as its Hollywood's fault that it has a stupid interface (HDMI/HDCP), too. [1] http://www.cnet.com/laptops/toshiba-satellite-u845w-s410/4505-3121_7-35323824.html http://www.cnet.com/laptops/toshiba-satellite-u845w-s410/450...
- antidaily 14y agoThe 13" retina Macbook Pro is 2560 x 1600 at 229 ppi - about the same.
- shurcooL 14y agoThey use 16:10 screens. The 13" rMBP has 2560x1600 resolution while Pixel has 2560x1700, 100 pixels taller.
- shurcooL 14y agoI agree. I really dislike 16:9 on productivity machines. It's not wide enough for 2 windows side by side, and too short for a single window. Even Lenovo has recently switched to 16:9 (probably from the incentives of Microsoft Windows 8), leaving Apple as the last one standing making 16:10 laptops. 16:10 is the maximum wideness I can accept, but 3:2 (i.e. 15:10) would probably be slightly better.
- shoopy 14y agoI feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I talk about aspect ratios with average consumers. Most people really do believe--probably through HDTV marketing--that wider screens are better. The lion's share of most people's time on the Internet is spent reading and scolling vertically, yet our devices are optimized for watching little sixty second movie clips at a time. Why wouldn't you want to make the 95% case more pleasurable at the expense of a few black bars on the top and bottom of your movie? Besides, most Internet videos need to be upscaled to fill the screen anyways, the detail is mostly interpolated anyhow.
- lenazegher 14y agoThe author dismisses the possibility of side-by-side windows on a small screen, but I no problems using multiple windows on my 1080p 15" laptop screen. Therefore i find a wider screen much more productive--it's much harder to intelligently fill a screen with a narrower aspect ratio
- petsos 14y agoI'm guessing most of the wide screen "haters" are windows users that are used to the "one maximized app at the time" workflow.
- pwthornton 14y agoYes. I use Windows and OS X on most days of the week, and Windows has never been that well suited for wide screen use, whereas OS X's window management makes it much easier to put screens side by side. I'm often doing this, and it's one of the biggest reasons I'm more productive on OS X. The idea that an app would take up my entire screen, unless it was something like a video editing app, is crazy to me. A widescreen laptop monitor allows me to copy and paste data from an email into a spreadsheet for instance. Doing that on a 3:2 monitor would be maddening. I agree that for single window use, 3:2 is better for many things, but we don't really like in a single window model anymore.
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- s0rce 14y agoWho makes the panel, is it custom?
- pfraze 14y agoThe oculus rift is going to be an unbounded monitor. It has no screen size!
- mtgx 14y agoGoogle should make Android tablets 3:2, too, if they aren't going to make them 4:3 like Apple. It should be a bit better than 16:10, which I think still turns a lot of people off from using Android tablets vs iPads, knowing they can't really use them in vertical mode.
- randomfool 14y agoI think the 16:10 works very well for the Nexus 7 which is primarily used in portrait mode.
- barrkel 14y agoThe Nexus 7 viewport feels very book-like as portrait. The iPad is the one that looks "wrong", too fat.
- zevyoura 14y agoThis is a matter of opinion, and I imagine probably highly correlated with which device you own.
- omaranto 14y ago"book-like" seemed spot on, maybe it's also correlated with how much time you've spent holding print books in your hand?
- majormajor 14y agoReading in portrait on the iPad feels like US Letter sized paper; reading in portrait on my Kindle Fire HD feels like a paperback. Meh. You get used to either one extremely quickly.
- helloamar 14y agoCurrently they say the battery comes upto 5hrs. If they could double it up, it will be great,
- taligent 14y agoReally. The only thing not making it a 'great' device is the battery life ? You do realise that ALL it does is surf the web ? I don't understand why anybody would buy it over an iPad or a refurbished MacBook Pro. I personally think it is one of the most pointless devices released in the last few years.
- Cieplak 14y agoIt can boot Linux. In that regard, it has the potential to be a general purpose laptop. Although you have to keep your files in the "cloud" because it only has 32gb of storage.
- taligent 14y agoIt can boot Linux but the trackpad and touchscreen doesn't work. Again. Why wouldn't you buy a MacBook Pro that is usable out of the box ?
- snotrockets 14y agoI ran into warranty issues with the last Mac I owned, and swore never to buy one again. But even if I did, I'm not sure it would run a sane Linux distribution out of the box (from what I'm reading, it's a bit touch and go,) and I don't consider a computer usable unless it can run the setup I need, which depends heavily on Linux -- developing on Mac OS X and deploying to Linux never worked for me: I could never keep a "sane" environment with the former.
- BitMastro 14y agoIt can boot linux just fine https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/21/378 https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/21/378
- edmundhuber 14y agoUse xmonad, reclaim your space.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Cieplak 14y agoIt is a great machine crippled with 32gb hard drive.
- skore 14y agoWell, obviously it's marketed as a device that is supposed to have the lion share of its data in the cloud. In that regard, 32GB is plenty. I like to think of it as something that could make a pretty neat remote desktop workstation. I've actually thought about putting my main linux workstation on the LAN, somewhere else (it's a bit noisy) and logging into it from a thin client. The Chromebook Pixel does make a rather attractive option for that. Of course, you'd have to slap a proper OS on it, but that may be an intentional hidden option. I'm also not up to date on how well modern day RFB/X11 performs in terms of i/o latency, so I have all this marked as "potential weekend project".
- jrkelly 14y agoI held onto my 3:2 thinkpad until it died for exactly this reason. You literally couldn't buy a new 3:2 laptop. Especially on small screens it is so much better.
- raldi 14y agoThe Pixel's best feature is the touchscreen. The first time you tap a tiny onscreen link with your finger, instead of trying to aim for it with the trackpad, or the first time you pinch to zoom out on Google Maps, you'll never want to use a non-touchscreen laptop again.
- nsp 14y agoMy understanding (source: most recent verge podcast) was that the touch screen doesn't support pinch to zoom - is that incorrect? I'd love to be wrong
- taligent 14y agoUnless Google has done a lot of work with WebKit then it is going to be a pretty awful experience. You only have to compare the native Google Maps with the web version to know that "touch" is poorly handled by browsers. It is an order of magnitude slower that apps which like it or not are the benchmark Google needs to compete against.
- wbkang 14y agoActually Google Maps in IE10 with touch screen pretty well and I am assuming Chrome will handle it well if not better...
- taligent 14y agoChrome and Safari both use WebKit and it handles it terribly. So again. Unless Google has added something magical in recent builds of WebKit that hasn't yet made it to the iPad then it will equally be terrible.
- kylec 14y agoInteresting observation. I don't particularly care if the Chromebook succeeds or not, but I wholeheartedly agree that the trend towards wider and wider (i.e. shorter and shorter) screens was terrible. In addition to all the valid points I'm seeing other people make here, it's also worth noting that the move to widescreens has enabled manufacturers to ship displays that, based on their diagonal measurement, a customer would think are larger than their non-widescreens when they're actually the same size or even smaller. For example, a 47" 4:3 screen has the same area as a 50" 16:9 screen.
- js2 14y agohttp://tvcalculator.com/ http://tvcalculator.com/ has been around forever and is good for comparing these things.
- abat 14y agoPersonally, my preference for aspect ratio varies by screen size and how I'll likely divide it up. On a small laptop screen like a Chromebook, I agree with the author that a wide aspect ratio can be annoying because a maximized window often feels to short. On a large monitor (ie 27+ inches) though, I think wide aspect ratio is good because a common use case is multiple side by side windows, and it's also a good fit for full screen video.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI find the aspect ratio an interesting choice. And I agree that 'wide' isn't necessarily "good" with laptops. Although, as the Ubuntu for Tablets demo showed, you can do some interesting things with the extra space to the right of a 4:3 (or 3:2) chunk. I would really like to see some interesting really wide and short touch screens as the 21st century replacement for 'function' keys along the top of the keyboard. Sure there are keyboards with LCD screens on every key but a nice 1920 x 480 bar that was as wide as the top of my keyboard, three rows of 12 "160 x 160" 'super tiles' I could put status in, or touch to activate, or what not, but below the screen where its easy to press my finger. Won't happen for a while though I'm afraid.
- rjzzleep 14y agoanyone knows if i can just replace it with a custom ssd and put on a random linux distro? i have a feeling the answer is no. also 4 gb? not for me ;/
- antiterra 14y agoThis blog entry presents a single argument: aspect ratios should favor a more narrow width because they should aspire to the readability of a page. That's a single bullet point in a long pro/con list and you'll never reach consensus on the definitively correct aspect ratio. Plenty of people watch movies on their computer screens, others like having an IDE with frames on the side, others want games to spread across their horizontal field of view and some just think it looks modern. Why on earth does that make the screen ratio 'boneheaded?' Be excited for your preference, argue the use cases that it suits, that's all fine. Maybe toss the prescriptive attitude that your opinion is categorically correct for everyone else who has not yet discovered it.
- snotrockets 14y ago(author here) I would have written that as a one line, but to quote Pascal, "that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is." Thank you for doing that for me. I don't call for a single aspect ratio: I just call for more variety: there is a good use case for more squarish laptop screens, but they are gone from the market, the main reason for that mistake being copying TV designs.