"How many people does it take to change a light bulb?" goes a version of the old joke, best told in a thick German accent, like Klaus Myers. "None, if properly engineered," is the punchline. 

That joke speaks to us geeks who look beyond the "it just works" mentality, into something that approaches a harmony of function and purpose. And it's why I simply hate criticizing products that aspire to a higher form, just because something simpler, cheaper and more straightforward will do just as well.

Like the Chromebook Pixel.

Quite honestly, I feel guilty about panning the Pixel. As Dan Lyons notes, Google designers have quietly taken their efforts to another level. But, as virtually everyone who attended Google's Pixel press conference noted, the Pixel simply prices itself out of the game. For now, very little within Google's cloud - whether it be its 100,000 Stars app or the upcoming Photos enhancement - justifies the 2,560 x 1,700 multi-touch display, not to mention the $1,300 price tag. Google's Chromebook has established a niche as a wonderful companion PC or netbook: as long as you want to work on the Web, a $250 Chromebook fills the bill. So what the heck does anyone need Pixel for?

Still, there's so much in the Pixel that feels like an homage to notebooks I've loved before. On the outside, the Pixel is the aristocratic, well-bred child of a MacBook Air and the Lenovo ThinkPad: a solid, lightweight, rectangular slab of aluminum. A thin light bar on top glows blue when powered on, then cheekily flashes the Google rainbow as the lid closes. Google eliminated the icons on top of the I/O ports, correctly reasoning that most users would identify them by sight. No, there's no magnetic connector holding the power cord in, but a large LED glows yellow, then green, when the Pixel is fully charged. Vents push air to the side, somehow, presumably through the ports. The "piano hinge" attaching the display to the frame slowly glides shut. There's even a third microphone buried beneath the keyboard to eliminate typing noises during Hangouts.

And, of course, there's that jaw-dropping display. Don't be afraid about the Web moving to a touch model; I tried out Internet Explorer's showcase touch-enabled Web app, Contre Jour, and it runs just fine.

Google Is Not Alone

The Chromebook Pixel doesn't stand alone as an example of marvelously over-engineered hardware. Say what you want about Google's Nexus Q - as the odd hybrid of an audio amplifier and media player, the fact that it only played back YouTube and Google Play videos eventually doomed it. But from a hardware standpoint, the odd little sphere with the LED strip around its equator and an amplifier inside was a revolution, just one that failed.

I feel the same about the Lytro post-focusing camera, which many heralded as the evolution of consumer photography: terrific technology, but one that the world never needed. It didn't help that the first iteration of the product looked like a spyglass, contained a woefully inadequate LCD viewfinder, and required the photos to be stored on the company website for best effect. Lytro has its fans, but the company's status as the next "it" thing has long vanished.

Everyone has their favorite examples of well-designed, yet ultimately irrelevant technology; the $1,699 Hitachi IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC, for example, which doubles as a high-definition Monopoly table. The Microsoft Surface, possibly, a marvelous piece of hardware that still prices itself out of some tablet conversations. Some lumped Apple's "retina display" MacBook Pros into this category when if first came out, although over time the MacBook has developed a wealth of graphics apps supporting it that could help justify the high-resolution display.

(See also Apple's Brilliant Boondoggle: MacBook Pro Retina Display.)

When Technology Trumps Product

I don't review products for a living, but anyone who does do must constantly wrestle with a dilemma: How do you inform readers that a particular product may not be ready for prime time, but whose underlying technology is so innovative that it deserves commendation and even preservation? Two years ago, I wrote this piece about the Lytro, partly as a reaction to a generation of young bloggers who too-often seemed to naively accept the promise of any new technology.

These days, the tech press seems to revel in asking the tough questions. If anything, the press pendulum has swung back toward cynicism.

At the same time, though, crowdsourcing sites like KickStarter have become unabashed celebrations of entrepreneurship, bypassing the press to connect products directly with fans and backers.

That's a big difference: By exposing their plans and pricing, young start ups can work hand-in-hand with prospective customers. The risk of secrecy, as larger corporations sometimes discover, is that you can lose touch with the very customers you're trying to court. And end up with a powerful, beautiful but over-priced, over-engineered product that isn't well suited to meeting the needs of actual customers. 

It just hurts, sometimes, to have to be the one to break it to the folks who worked so hard to create something really cool that doesn't have a clear place in the world.

Google launched the original CR-48 Chromebook as a companion device to a full-fledged PC. With the Chromebook Pixel, that slate has been wiped clean: Google is now challenging traditional computer makers with a high-end, $1,299 Chromebook.

The rumors were true: the Pixel marries a gorgeous, high-resolution 2560 x 1760 display with a touch interface, tucked inside specs that look and feel like a high-end laptop: a dual-core, 1.8-GHz Intel Core i5 processor, Intel HD 4000 Graphics, 4GB of RAM, and either 32GB or 64GB of local solid-state storage. The 64GB option is included with the even-more-high-end version of the Pixel: for $1,449, you get the larger storage option as well as an integrated Verizon LTE 4G wireless capability, that you'll will have to pay for separately. Oh, and you get a whopping 1 terabyte of Google Drive cloud storage, too.

Other connectivity options include a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a mini-display port, plus a 2-in-1 card reader with SD and MMC support. In addition, the Pixel supports Bluetooth 3.0 and dual-band Wi-Fi, 802.11 a/b/g/n. It weighs 3.35 pounds.

Customers can preorder the Pixel Thursday from Google Play and Best Buy, where Google will have a limited number of kiosks to show off the device. 

It's a far cry from Samsung's $249 Chromebook Google announced last year. The Pixel is built by an undisclosed Taiwan manufacturer.

"There is no high-resolution laptop with touch available available today in the market," Sundar Pichai, the vice president of Chrome at Google, said in a press conference Thursday in San Francisco. "I think the hardware shines, and if you're living in the cloud, this is the best experience you can use."

And he's exactly right. With an all-aluminum design, a full piano hinge and sweet little touches like a back-lit keyboard, the hardware does shine. And for users who already reside within the Google cloud, the transition is seamless: I took notes during the press conference on a Macbook Air, via Google Docs; after the Pixel was officially unveiled and devices were handed out to test and evaluate, I simply logged in and continued writing from the new Pixel machine.

(One hardware detail that Pichai called out was how Google had optimized the mechanical dome underneath the keyboard to facilitate typing; the keyboard does feel a little less mushy than the more recent Samsung Chromebook Google launched last year. Google has also added a third microphone underneath that keyboard, in addition to two it has mounted behind the display, in an attempt to isolate the noise from typing within Hangouts and other applications.)

Google said that the new high-resolution display should consume slightly more power than older Chromebooks; the device itself seems to expect about 5 hours of battery life, according to the built-in battery meter. On the other hand, the robust performance of the Intel Core i5/graphics combination should allow multiple HD video windows to play smoothly; this seemed to be borne out in my quick hands-on tests.

With the touch-enabled Pixel, Google has approached the problem of touch from two separate directions: on the one hand, phones and tablets that use Android include touch capabilities. Until now, that has been separate from the touch-enabled ChromeOS. Chrome product managers said they have taken what they've learned from running Chrome within touch-enabled environments and added little touches, such as swiping down the shortcuts bar at the bottom of the screen to hide it. 

"There are two viewpoints," Pichai said. "We are enabling both." Pichai said that he switches back and forth between his Nexus 4 phone and his Pixel Chromebook.

Not Enough Software?

Eventually, however, consumers are going to have to make a choice: Do they wish to buy a 13-inch Apple MacBook Air, which is actually priced less than the Pixel, at $1,199, along with the rich ecosystem of apps that Apple offers? Or will they turn instead to the Chrome Store, with a much smaller, less robust set of plug-ins that only rarely includes big-name developers?

Google has developed new apps to take advantage of the Pixel, including a new Photos app, and the lovely 100,000 Stars app, which allows users to zoom in and out on a virtual Milky Way. But while those two may be stunning, they don't have much company. And Google's Pichai said that QuickOffice would be integrated with ChromeOS in a few months, allowing true Microsoft Office compatibility.

My suspicion is that most consumers will go with the tried and true. The Chrome Web store, though well-stocked, just hasn't quite attracted the kind of attention lavished on, well, Android. Google obviously hopes to change that by seeding the Pixel among its high-end developer base. But until it does, my advice would be to stick with the more budget-friendly Chromebooks Google and its partners offer.

Images via Google and Mark Hachman.

People are buzzing about a supposedly leaked video (below) that supposedly shows the Chromebook Pixel, a touch-screen laptop supposedly designed by Google. It's gorgeous. And coming on the heels of the Nexus 4 smartphone, and the very slick work that Google did with Jelly Bean, this product furthers the impression that Google has started to get really good at design, as some people have been noticing lately. 

TechCrunch has the whole story of where the video might have come from and how it made its way accidentally onto YouTube. It's not worth repeating other than to say that there's a company in Mountain View, Calif., that seems to be run by a former Google engineer and maybe makes videos for Google, and apparently they got hacked and this video got leaked. 

Who knows and who cares. Our own Jon Mitchell believes it's a real product, and he's a leading authority on Google. Check out the video of a world "where all your things are always wherever you are, and your computer actually gets better over time." If this thing is for real, I want one. 

Android Authority has snagged an intriguing video that purports to show a sleek, new Chromebook with 2560 x 1700 resolution touchscreen called the Chromebook Pixel. The video claims the machine is "designed by Google, down to the last pixel."

Is this for real?

There's no smoking gun, but I have subtle yet compelling evidence that it is.

New ChromeBook - Next Generation Concept... by androidauthority

Where Did This Video Come From?

The video came from Android Authority, as far as I'm concerned, because it has disappeared from its original sources. Bogdan Petrovan at Android Authority tells it like this: A developer named François Beaufort, who spotted exciting upcoming features in Chrome last week, posted this video on Google+. It disappeared shortly thereafter, but not before Android Authority could snag it.

The description made it sound like the clip came from a company called Slinky.me, which makes some kind of visual guides to things. The company posted on Google+ claiming that its servers were attacked by hackers and apologizing for "the fact that many projects have been shown previously ! ! ! Please re-share ! This is very important" [sic].

Now, that sounds like classic tech blog trolling to me. "Whoops! You've never heard of us, but we accidentally lost control of a sexy new Google product video! We're really sorry!" And then the company gets press. That's a win for some companies, even if it means getting blackballed by Google forever.

But I've been dealing with Google PR for a while. I've covered ChromeOS device launches and had briefings with the team. And there are some clues in here that seem totally legit to me.

Smells Like Google

First of all, we've been seeing evidence of touchscreen Chrome OS for a long time. My instinct was always that this meant a development in the other direction, a Chrome tablet, rather than a touchscreen Chromebook. And I wouldn't rule that out, either. When I interviewed the Chrome OS people in May, VP of engineering Linus Upson said to expect "a number of different form factors." A touchscreen laptop would qualify under that description as well.

But the telltale sign about the Chromebook Pixel to me is in just one line from the narrator in the video. "Your computer actually gets better over time," the disembodied voice says. This was straight out of the Google PR playbook. The Google PR folks intoned it over and over again when I talked to them ahead of the Samsung Chromebook and Chromebox launch.

The translation is that Chrome OS devices get better because they're just a browser in a box, and whenever Google improves Chrome, the machine's whole OS benefits. But it's a subtle point, a geeky point. One Googlers would care about more than anyone else. It's one you'd have to be very familiar with Google's party line not to miss.

So I'll go out on a limb here and say this machine is real. A high-spec Chromebook is definitely what Google needs to prove the worth of the Chrome OS idea, and a touchscreen is icing on the cake.

When the world's largest PC manufacturer starts making Chromebooks, what does it mean? Does it reveal a degree of uncertainty about the direction of the PC? A response to the perceived complexity of Windows 8 machines? An underserved market it can exploit?

Why not all of the above?

Early Monday morning, Hewlett-Packard announced the Pavilion 14 Chromebook, a $329.99 netbook boasting both a larger screen - 14 inches - than rival Chromebooks, as well as a new pricing tier. HP's Pavilion 14 brings the total Chromebook count to four: the $229 Samsung Chromebook, the $199 Acer C7, the $449 Samsung Chromebook 550, and the Pavilion 14. HP's screen may be the largest of the bunch, but its processor - a dual-core Intel Celeron - sits below the Chromebook's 550's Intel Core processor.

More Of The Same

The new HP Chromebook is essentially the same as the others: it runs Google's Chrome OS, a bare-bones operating system that, on the surface, does little more than launch a Web browser. (Some games, such as the indie hit Bastion, also have been ported over to the OS.) Each of the four Chromebooks, aside from the C7, includes a 16GB solid-state drive, and connects to the Web via a Wi-Fi connection. HP said that the battery life  for its version is a disappointing 4.25 hours, rather than the 6 hours or so offered by some of the other Chromebooks.

Google has positioned the Chromebook as "companion devices," the same tack HP took as it launched the Pavilion 14. In my own use, I've found that Chromebooks and Chromeboxes are a simple, easy and effective way of accessing the Web - although a dearth of apps and a complicated approach to printing mean it can't quite compete with full-fledged PC functionality. But there's something to be said for a "PC" that boots up and resumes almost instantly, downloads patches in the background and offers a managed computing experience better than anything Apple or Microsoft offer.

A Slap To Microsoft?

Still, the fact that the largest PC maker in the world began offering a Chromebook just months after Microsoft launched Windows 8 might be seen as a slap in the face to Microsoft. And long-term, HP's Chromebook may blossom into something more. For now, though, analyst Bob O'Donnell with IDC saw the announcement as nothing more than HP dipping its toe into a new market. 

"I think they're trying to offer an even lower-cost notebook option with this and trying to stand out with a larger-size screen," O'Donnell wrote in an email. "But ultimately, I think it's testing the waters and filling out their price range."

ReadWrite reached out to both Microsoft and HP for comment, but we haven't heard back. In the meantime, a statement from HP indicates that it believes the market for Google's ChromeOS is growing.

"Google's Chrome OS is showing great appeal to a growing customer base," said Kevin Frost, vice president and general manager, Consumer PCs, Printing and Personal Systems, HP, in a statement. "With HP's Chromebook, customers can get the best of the Google experience on a full-sized laptop—all backed up by our service and brand."

HP & Chromebook: An Odd Couple When It Comes To Printing

It might be a bit odd to think of Hewlett-Packard and Chromebooks together, if only because of the awkward approach Google takes toward printing. You can't connect a USB printer directly to a Chromebook or Chromebox; instead, you either need to connect to a network-connected printer through a service called "Google Cloud Print" or use a Chrome extension to a traditional PC or notebook that is itself connected to the printer via a USB cable. (Of course, if your home doesn't have a dedicated desktop PC hooked up to a printer, the latter approach may not work so well for you.) Apparently, wirelessly connected PCs and multifunction printers are now common enough so that HP felt that there's enough of a critical mass to make this approach feasible.

But as far as the direction of the PC market is concerned, the impact of an HP Chromebook is clearly muddy. That is, no one quite knows the direction the venerable PC will take over the next few years. The conventional thinking seems to be that minicomputers gave way to desktops, desktops to notebooks, and notebooks to... where, exactly? Tablets are one answer, and HP's Windows 8 convertible notebooks fill that niche. But there may still be profits to be extracted in cheap netbooks, and Google's Chromebooks may answer that call.

Market Research?

In addition, by offering its own Chromebook, HP can gain invaluable market information. Instead of hiring IDC or Gartner to provide  sales forecasts on the expected success of the Chromebook category, HP can use the Pavilion 14 to generate real data on which way the wind is blowing. If over time we see HP announce a refreshed or additional Chromebook, we'll know that the Chromebook's sails are filling out.

Images courtesy of HP.

Two hundred bucks for a laptop with a 320GB hard drive and 100GB of free storage space on Google's cloud sounds llke a steal. But will it be enough to get normal people to start using Chromebooks instead of traditional laptops? Google is hoping so.

Monday morning, Google's Chromebook team announced the Acer C7 Chromebook, a 3-pound notebook that is one inch thick and boasts an 11.6-inch high-resolution screen. The Chromebook runs Google's Chrome OS and Chrome browser. It's meant to be used online. You can get all the specs here.

In the "good news, bad news" department, the C7 boots up in 20 seconds (good) but has only 3.5 hours (huh?) of battery life.

The Acer unit comes on the heels of Samung's $250 model announced last month: See Finally, A Properly Priced Google Chromebook. 

The Affordable, Connected Computer

The notion of a lightweight computer that's constantly connected to the Internet has long held appeal, in theory anyway. Others have tried it, including New Internet Computer (NIC), a startup funded by Larry Ellison and run by my pal Gina Smith more than a decade ago.

But nobody has ever been able to make this idea work in real life. Customers just don't seem to want these machines.

Google positioned the original Chromebook as a low-cost and low-hassle solution for busineses. Why dish out big bucks for a bunch of Windows PCs or Macs, and then spend even more money paying techies to keep them updated, when you could just buy a low-cost Chromebook that had all its apps in the cloud and could keep itself up to date?

Great pitch, but it didn't work, partly because initial models were far too expensive. And partly because the hardware itself lacked polish. Many units went out with faulty trackpads, for example. All that improved somewhat this spring with the introduction of new Chromebooks and Chromeboxes - but even those machines got mixed reviews: See new Chromebook & Chromebox Are Good Enough To Grab Minds & Market Share and Why The New Chromebook Still Doesn't Cut It.

Aimed At Entry-Level Consumers

Now Google is focusing the new Chromebook as a machine for mom-and-pop home users who just want a simple way to get online, where "your stuff is always available and everything just works." 

Google is touting a feature that lets you create multiple accounts so that mom, dad and kids can share a single machine. 

Will this thing take off? Is the world finally ready for a network-attached computer? For $200, it seems like a no-brainer.

What do you think? Would you buy one of these? Let us know in the comments below.

Image courtesy of Google.