Google Pixelbook: Pen support and phone tethering could seal the Chrome OS deal

When Google released the first Chromebook Pixel in 2013, many tech journalists (myself included) saw the Chrome OS-based laptop as more of a fanciful intellectual proposition than a viable consumer product. It was a halo device that illustrated what a Chromebook could be--in a broad, sweeping romantic sense--if designed with complete disregard for consumer pricing sensitivity. Indeed, would anyone spend almost $1,500 on a computer that can't even run Windows applications? The world generally scoffed--and then scoffed again when Google updated the Pixel in 2015. But now we have the Google Pixelbook, which starts at $999 for a Core i5/8GB RAM/128GB SSD config, and goes up to $1,649 for a Core i7/16GB RAM/512GB SSD config.