[5] Sundar Pichai, the senior vice president of engineering in charge of Chrome and Android at that time, said that the goal behind the high-end Pixel model was "to push the boundary and build something premium.

[12] Priced at the upper-end of the laptop market for its release in the US on February 21, 2013, the machine featured a touch-screen which had the highest pixel density of any laptop,[13] a faster CPU than its predecessors in the Intel Core i5, 32 GB of solid-state storage, an exterior design described by Wired as "an austere rectangular block of aluminum with subtly rounded edges",[14] and a colored lightbar on the lid added purely for its cool factor.

[15][16] A second Pixel featuring LTE wireless communication and twice the storage capacity was shipped for arrival on April 12, 2013, and had a marginally higher price tag than the base model.

[18] Linux inventor Linus Torvalds replaced ChromeOS on his Chromebook Pixel with Fedora 18, employing Red Hat engineer David Miller's work.

The unusual aspect ratio was probably an easier decision for Google to make, because web pages comprise the entire operating system, but I wish every laptop offered a 3:2 screen.

However the review also noted, "Web-based Chrome OS requires you to be online to do most tasks; Web apps can't yet compare to most Windows or Mac software, especially for media-centric activities like video.

[16] The Register and PC World saw the Chromebook Pixel as a concept machine, a bid by Google to push its hardware partners into producing more feature-rich devices.

[3][32] When interviewed by the BBC, CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber said that "Chromebooks have struggled for relevance", stuck between tablets used largely for entertainment and more functional PCs.

The Pixel "won't transform [the Chromebook's] prospects but Google will hope it serves as a flagship device that has a halo effect for the broader portfolio.