Over the last couple of years, Chromebooks have quietly infiltrated the computer market. Google’s affordable “just a browser” devices are the best-selling computers in schools, and they’re percolating around boardrooms and cubicles. Last fall, more people bought Chromebooks than Macs—and that’s not going to switch back anytime soon. Now Google’s out to convince you, regular human, person of sound mind and reasonable budget, that you ought to buy a Chromebook.
Samsung Chromebook Pro
6/10
Wired
Lighter, thinner, and better-looking than most laptops this price. Screen works great for touch and pen input. The battery truly lasts all day.
Tired
Buggier than I thought a Chromebook could even be. Android apps don’t quite mesh right with Chrome OS. You can barely hear the speakers.
The consumer Chromebook onslaught starts with Samsung’s Chromebook Plus and Pro, which are on paper the most well-rounded Chrome OS devices ever. The Plus starts at $450 and is available next week, and the Pro will be $550 when it ships in March. Both fit right into the normal-person laptop budget. They do all the Chrome OS things, have great and flippy touchscreens, and even support pen input. And best of all, they run all of the millions of apps in Google’s Play Store. They’re part smartphone, part tablet, part laptop, combined in a way that feels like the computer of the future.
I’ve been using the Pro for the last couple of weeks. Like I said, it sounds great… on paper. In reality, this brilliantly polymorphic computer still feels more like a science experiment.
The Good Kind of Cheap
It shouldn’t be that hard to make a good laptop. Most people want the same things: A relatively light and thin body, attractive enough you don’t mind being seen with it in public. Well-spaced, clicky keyboard, and spacious, smooth trackpad. High-res screen, and enough power and battery to get you through even an extra-long day at work. Pretty straightforward, right?
According to your average $500 Best Buy Special, this is very hard. The Chromebook Pro proves it’s at least possible. At about a half-inch thick and 2.38 pounds, it’s smaller than almost every laptop not named MacBook. It doesn’t ooze class and wealth every time you open the lid, but the magnesium alloy body (mine’s silver, but yours will be black) at least won’t look out of place in Economy Comfort. Even more so once you peel off the unsightly Energy Star sticker. The rounded edges and exposed hinge give it a decidedly utilitarian look—you’re not holding a future Smithsonian exhibit in your hands, you’re holding a laptop. And that’s just fine.
The 12.3-inch, 2400×1600 display is excellent, and works well as a touchscreen too. But it really shines when you pop the tiny stylus out of the body of the Chromebook Pro. The stylus matches the one in Samsung’s Galaxy Note phones, and works just as well: you can draw, doodle, take notes, the whole nine. Google’s Keep note-taking app supports the pen as an input tool, and works fabulously. Trust me: there’s nothing quite so futuristic as signing a contract right on your computer screen.
The whole kit runs on Intel’s Core M3 processor and four gigs of RAM. (The Chromebook Plus, which comes out next week and costs $450, runs on a lower-powered OP1 chip.) It has 32 gigs of internal storage, plus a microSD slot for adding more. None of those specs really matter, because power’s not an issue here and rarely ever is one on Chromebooks as a whole. The Chrome browser is so stable on these machines that it can handle more tabs and apps than my MacBook Pro. Not to mention, I get upwards of ten hours on the battery before I have to charge it. I used it basically non-stop during an hour-long train ride and six hours of flights, and still had plenty of battery left to watch The Good Place before bed.
When you open the Pro’s lid, you’ll notice it never really stops opening. You can flip the screen a full 360 degrees, turning your laptop into a tablet. An awkward tablet, since the keyboard’s sitting right there on the back underneath your fingers, but a tablet nonetheless. It also sits sturdily like a teepee or like a digital picture frame, keyboard-down, both of which I used a lot—I sometimes watch Netflix while I cook, and it’s nice being able to hide the keyboard and trackpad from splattering olive oil.
The downside of the 360-degree screen is that in order to accommodate all the ways you can hold it, Samsung had to make some weird layout choices. The power button’s on the right side, for instance, where I guarantee you’ll hit it by accident at least once a day. The headphone jack’s in the right place in laptopping (left side, at the rear) and thus bizarrely positioned for every other mode.
Those are all necessary compromises for this form factor. I like it, so I’ll take the compromises. I only have two true hardware problems: the speakers are terrible, and the keyboard isn’t backlit. Which is just stupid. But even with those issues, you won’t find better laptop hardware for this price. It’s thin, it’s fast enough, it’s long-lasting, it looks like a laptop made this decade. For $550, that’s a minor miracle.
Harder Than It Looks
The hardware works, but the Chromebook Pro’s software doesn’t. Google says everything will be fine before the device formally launches in April, and I have no reason to believe that’s not true. But from what I’ve seen so far, this hyper-versatile software trails way behind the hardware. Evidently combining Android and Chrome OS wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Some apps don’t recognize the keyboard and trackpad; others seem unable to handle a touchscreen. Some apps steadfastly refuse to connect to the internet. Most crash constantly, when they even open at all. Games beyond Solitaire-level complexity won’t run at all, not even on this more powerful model. Three times so far, the Chromebook Pro has crashed so spectacularly that I got a dozen error messages and the whole machine shut down. The whole point of a Chromebook is that things like that never happen.
Evidently combining Android and Chrome OS wasn’t as easy as it sounds.
Then there are the bugs. Oh, the bugs! Like the one where you flip the screen over to put the Pro in tent mode, and all your browser tabs disappear for no reason. Or how when you’re in tablet mode and try to put it to sleep, you just can’t. My favorite is the one where you open an app, and it just sits there flickering on the screen, forever trapped closing and opening. Again, Google seems well aware of these problems, and most appear to be fixable bugs. I’ll revisit this review closer to the launch, and I hope the story gets better.
Right now, if I use a Chromebook Pro like other Chromebooks—tabs not apps, and laptop not tablet—it works great. It’s a light, thin, long-lasting, slightly expensive Chromebook. That’s just a much smaller vision than what this thing could be. It should let me play Netflix on one side and keep my dinner recipe up on the other. It should let me check Instagram and Snapchat right next to my work email. I should be playing Candy Crush and Asphalt 8 while I’m pretending to work. Instead it’s still just a web browser.
That’s frustrating, because the Chromebook Pro was supposed to be the shape-shifting future of computing, Google’s answer to everything from the iPad Pro to the Surface Studio. It was supposed to be the first Chromebook that made no compromises, that was both secure and powerful, fast and feature-rich. Android apps and Chrome OS were a match made in heaven, a perfect way for smartphone owners to get into the laptop world. The hardware’s there: Samsung proved you can make the right kind of laptop at an attractive price, and I hope every other PC manufacturer is taking notes. But on the software side, it’s clearly unfinished.
Luckily, you get to wait and see if Google fixes the Pro’s many problems. I’ll be back here to let you know how that goes. But for right now, know this: the dream of the just-right Chromebook is alive inside this machine, but it’s still just out of reach.
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