For those of you who know me, or read the blog regularly, you know of my deep and abiding love for Chromebooks.

There has always been deep desire, really deep passion and attraction to one Chromebook above all the others, which is the Google premium Chromebook, now called the Pixelbook. It’s a Chrome OS device, but has a build like a mac book. It’s also a thousand US dollars. Who would pay that for a Chrome OS computer?

Well I have always wanted to, but felt like the price was well above what I could afford for a laptop (or what was appropriate to spend). Then there was Black Friday. $300 off the price. I had to do it. When would it be that cheap again?

Nevermind the fact that I’m surrounded on all sides of my life by computers. I have three chromebooks already, all were under 200 dollars, and two Windows machines – my 4k video editing and gaming laptop, and my University supplied Lenovo which is like a boxy sedan. I also have a tower I built that runs great, and another PC that I keep up at the University as our computer support person can’t figure out how to hook up the computers we ordered for that room. So if we want to have a video chat or whatever, we rely on the computer I supply. I know it’s ridiculous, but that’s the reality of where i work. Computer addiction isn’t a thing. It could be worse, I could be addicted to buying and messing around with cars. That would be really expensive and a big problem in a city where having one garage slot is often the same price as rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the rest of the country.

I can tell you now after using it for a week or so, nothing compares to this laptop. It’s the perfect size, perfect weight, the keyboard is absolutely dreamy for writers like us, and the screen is retina-display worthy. The icing on the cake is the USB C ports, one on each side for whatever you’d like to use them for, and the battery which I regularly get about 8 to 9 hours out of at work. This is playing music, typing a lot (email and writing), and surfing the web doing research, etc. I do not watch a lot of videos on the device nor do I use it often as a tablet.

This little computer just wants me to type on it all the time. It feels great. Also being a Chromebook I don’t have to worry about updates and viruses and stuff like that. The only difference in this one and the other’s that I’ve had is this one can run Android apps which is fantastic but takes some getting used to. I really like the productivity apps I have tried out, and most importantly, MS Word works perfectly. I’m still a Google Docs person at heart and just wish that Zotero would produce something for Google Docs that didn’t require the stand-alone Windows or Mac app.

So the machine met all my expectations and then some. I think it’s my go-to device from now on. I should have gotten it a long time ago and listened to intuition. I think if you are on the fence about it, just get it. It’s an amazing little device for writers, people who do a lot of research and reading online, or if your daily job requires a lot of attention to email. It’s a productivity beast.