I was tempted to get a MacBook Pro instead of the original pixel, but at that price point at the time the only one available was the 13" non-retina model (possi

I was tempted to get a MacBook Pro instead of the original pixel, but at that price point at the time the only one available was the 13" non-retina model (possibly even with a HDD, can't remember). The trade-up to SSD/High-res and the curiosity of the 'new shiny laptop from Google' sold me. In terms of upgrading to one in 2015, Google are claiming 12 hour battery life and The Verge said it got 14 hours in their testing - which is more than enough for me. I personally just don't like OSX, although I'd be happy installing linux on a MBP. ChromeOS is fine for a few quick browser tasks (Amazon, Booking Flights, etc), but it's not worth keeping around really. So at that point it just boils down to personal preference on the hardware, and price. The build-quality of the keyboard and touchpad on the pixel are on-par with the high quality of the MBP, and they've made the hinge more solid this time around, so with an i7 processor and 16GBs of RAM at $1300 I'm pretty happy! The 64GB SSD is definitely a major buzzkill, but considering I won't be using this laptop for gaming, and I stream all of my music/tv/movies, I don't actually need a whole pile of local storage. With my current pixel's 64GB I never ran into any issues - the only thing that I feel is a threat to my diskspace is VM images for virtualbox, which I luckily don't have to use much anymore as I now have remote access to windows servers should I need them. The touchscreen (for me) is pointless, I'd much rather have a 128GB/256GB SSD, but it's not the end of the world.