Barry Collins
Now that they offer support for Android apps, can Chromebooks replace a conventional Windows laptop for both home and work? Barry Collins explores the pros and pitfalls of Chromebook life, reviews his pick of the pro apps, and explains how you can convert
What happens when you replace a hardcore Windows user’s main PC with a Chromebook? We gave Barry a Pixelbook to find out. See
“Ithink we can get this wrapped up in about ten seconds,” said Darien, introducing the Hot Hardware of the Week on the PC Pro Podcast. “Barry, it’s a Chromebook and it costs around a thousand pounds.”
“Cold.” That was my gut reaction to the announcement of the Chromebook Pixel. Yes, it looks fabulous and the screen’s lovely, but if I’m going to pay a grand for a laptop, I want more than a glorified web browser. I want it to actually do stuff.
Unperturbed, Darien kept going. These things run full-blown Android apps now, he explained, and it’s got a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM, so it won’t run aground the moment you ask it do something more than check your email. For another £99 you can buy the Google Pixelbook Pen, so you can scribble on the screen and annotate documents. And the screen and keyboard are lovely, as good if not better than any similarly priced laptop.
The more he kept talking, the more intrigued I became. Most of my home and work tasks can be done via a browser or apps. Almost five years since I’d last laid my hands on a top-of-the-range Chromebook, the original titanium Pixelbook, could this thing really be my day-to-day work laptop? There was only one way to find out.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Ten minutes after the courier had dropped off the Pixelbook, with the laptop fully set up and ready to rumble, my resolve was already beginning to wobble. “In serious danger of having to swallow some humble pie in front of @DarienGS,” I tweeted. “The Google Pixelbook is very good indeed.”
The editor of this organ always says that – after 20 years in this business – he can tell if a laptop’s going to be any good or not within the first 30 seconds, and he’s not wrong. The fact I could start working a few minutes after I’d first taken the thing out of the box was seriously impressive. Of course, it helps that
I’m already fully engulfed in Googledom: my primary email address and one of my work accounts runs off Gmail; my bookmarks, logins and passwords are all synced in Chrome (I know, don’t judge me); and I’ve already bought many of the Android apps that help the day job. But then millions of other people will be in exactly the same position.
My first tilt into proper work was to download the Office apps. The Google Pixelbook has icons for Docs, Sheets and Slides in the Taskbar, but I’ve never really got on with any of them. I’m sure part of that is Stockholm Syndrome: I’ve been kept captive by Microsoft for so long that typing in anything other than Word feels like sleeping in someone else’s pyjamas.
Even still, using the Word Android app isn’t quite like putting on an old pair of slippers. This may sound like a petty gripe, but when I’m using Word I use the “Single spaced” template for all my docs, as I don’t like the doubleline space every time I strike Enter. But that’s not available in the Word app and you can’t access the online templates library to download it. I’m sure there’s a workaround, but it’s these minor discomforts that begin to rekindle my longing for Windows. Ditto the way Word for Android hides the Ribbon. I like the Ribbon and I’ve got the screen space to accommodate it. Give me the Ribbon, dammit, or at least give me the option to leave it permanently in place, not an irritating click at the top of the screen away.
Similar irritations creep in with Excel. Yes, it’s brilliant to have your spreadsheets as the accountant intended and not formatted up the wazoo, as they often are when opened in Google Sheets, but there are other pain points. I open Excel and click on the payroll spreadsheet for one of my businesses, which is available from the list of recently accessed files on the Excel start screen. But when I click to open it, Excel warns this is a “readonly version” and that I need to save a copy if I want to make edits. For the mother love of God, why? If I go through the rigmarole of manually opening the workbook using the Open… menu it’s happy to let me edit the sheet. It’s these stupid little things that get in the way of the job at hand.
I’m also the kind of guy who lives for a bit of conditional formatting. I can’t look at data without a heatmap showing me which figures I should be
Lack of a CAPS LOCK KEY DRIVING YOU NUTS? You can switch off the dreaded Launcher/Search key, which is where the CAPS LOCK key normally resides. Click on your profile pic in the bottom right of the screen and select the settings cog. Scroll down to the Device section, then Keyboard and assign Launcher to CAPS LOCK.
worried about in a red background, but it’s not in the Excel app for Android – or at least you can’t create conditional formatting from scratch, you can only view it if it’s been embedded in a sheet. This isn’t the Excel I’ve grown awkwardly fond of. There’s no doubting that the Pixelbook is a fine piece of hardware. The keyboard is one of the best I’ve laid fingers on – with one notable exception. Google replaces the CAPS LOCK button with a dedicated search button, ruining somewhere in the order of 30 years of muscle memory. Every time I go to type a FULL CAPS HEADLINE I’m suddenly opening an app or searching Google, and I can’t stop doing it.
The screen, too, is magnificent. I’ve no idea – when the web is still far longer than broad – why the 3:2 aspect ratio fell out of fashion. But it’s back here and the touchscreen is flawlessly responsive, although Chrome OS still feels a long way short of being optimised for tablets when you flip the display round into tablet mode.
However, once again, practicalities afflict the hardware. I sit here in my office with my laptop plugged into a massive desktop monitor and external keyboard and mouse. That’s going to be something of a challenge with the Pixelbook, because this thousandpound laptop is thinner than a cheese slicer and can only accommodate two USB-C ports, one of which is needed for the charger. I’d have to somehow daisychain the screen, keyboard or monitor (which I’m not sure the Chromebook has the drivers to cope with) or rely on wireless accessories. That said, my Logitech wireless keyboard has no problem pairing with the Chromebook, which is more than can be said for the Windows laptop, which took a deal of finagling before it would accept the wireless connection.
But then I’d come to plug in the camera that I use (oddly enough) for my photography work, and we’d be in a whole new world of pain because the camera doesn’t come with a USB-C cable, there’s no card reader in the laptop and wireless solutions are troublesome. Canon does have an Android utility that can transfer images using the camera’s built-in Wi-Fi, but this doesn’t want to work on the Pixelbook and, anyway, I’ve used it before on my iPad and it’s a desperately inefficient means of transferring a big batch of images.
PRACTICAL PROBLEMS
However, let’s assume that I can find a cable to dump a batch of RAW images onto the Pixelbook for editing – what would I actually do with them? I could edit the photos using Adobe Lightroom CC, the app equivalent of the Lightroom Classic application I use for editing on my Windows desktop. Except everything’s a bit slower, more cumbersome, more restrictive. All of the images must be uploaded to the cloud, as it takes a good 30 seconds for only one imported image to appear: how long would it take with a batch of hundreds? The editing tools are more rudimentary; there are fewer presets and I can’t save my own; and the export options – to deliver a set of finished edits to a client – are pathetic. Lightroom CC is simply not ready for this kind of heavy-duty work, and, as a result, neither is any Chromebook.
THE IN-BETWEEN MACHINE
If all this sounds like a pre-ordained smackdown of the Chromebook, it genuinely wasn’t intended to be. The Pixelbook is a hugely capable machine for a number of tasks: dealing with email, using web apps, banging copy into a web CMS, communicating with colleagues (Slack, Skype and other apps all work fine) and dealing with documents. I estimate that about 75% of what I do could be done quite comfortably on a Chromebook.
But it’s that 25% where the resentment builds, where you think a £1,000 machine should do more than this. There’s no Photoshop or InDesign for Chrome OS and no credible equivalents; the Office apps are undercooked; there’s no easy way to take advantage of that stylus and mark up a PDF in freehand like I can do in Windows. And while those apps and activities may be specific to me, I bet there’s an equivalent 25% in most jobs where the Chromebook won’t have the tools to cope, or at least not as well as a similarly priced Windows or Mac laptop.
Attempt to download a Netflix show for offline viewing using the Chrome browser, and you won’t see the option to download shows. Instead, install the Netflix Android app and the option becomes available. To take advantage of the resolution on devices such as the Pixel, go into Netflix’s app settings and change the default download video quality from Standard to High.
Wondering why the touchpad isn’t offering right-click options, even though you’re tapping on the rightmost part of the pad? Chrome OS’s version of the right-click is activated with a double-finger tap.
There’s no way I could or would replace my main Windows laptop with a Chromebook, even a Rolls Royce of the genre such as the Pixelbook. Even with the riches of the Google Play Store to pick from, it just doesn’t do enough, although I’m willing to concede that it might be ample for some.
Which leaves me wondering what the modern, Android-enabled Chromebook actually is. It’s akin in functionality to an iPad Pro, but the Apple App Store has a far richer library of tablet-oriented apps to choose from, not to mention games for the downtime. The iPad feels like a companion device to my laptop; the Chromebook less so.
If I’m going to lug a laptop form factor round with me, I might as well take my laptop itself. It’s not much heavier and bigger than the Pixelbook – and it will do everything I need, not just a fraction of the job.
The Chromebook’s edging closer to a pro-grade device, but it’s not quite there yet.