Awesome little machine but this brings up questions for me:
1. Do consumers want what is essentially a modern netbook? Didn't this market die once the iPad and tablets took hold?
It would seem from recent consumer buying trends that most prefer a touch screen/tablet form factor at this price point/screen size.
2. How does this compare to an Android tablet (Nexus 10) with a high quality keyboard? Or even some of the "transformer" products with keyboards/additional ports already available?
It seems you pay quite a premium for touch, I wonder if this machine will help sway people back into this form factor without touch/tablet mode.
As a Pixel owner I can confirm that touch on a laptop form factor is somewhat useless. There are precious few times I want to reach out to touch something instead of using the mouse.
The mouse really is a great tool. People need to stop trying to get rid of them.
I (27, UK) was at a hackathon late last year where there were schoolkids (~17). They were all developing on windows 8 laptops, one of them even had a surface, and they all had brand new nokia Windows Phones.
This initially freaked me out until I realised that they were all learning VB at school (shudder), and were just tooling up to use what they already knew. I was encouraged that one of them had had a look at another language (Perl, of all things) and encouraged him to take a look at Python instead; citing xkcd of course.
Anyway, they were all very excited by touchscreen laptops, and actually using them while trying to do development. It was weird.
1. Do consumers want what is essentially a modern netbook? Didn't this market die once the iPad and tablets took hold?
It would seem from recent consumer buying trends that most prefer a touch screen/tablet form factor at this price point/screen size.
2. How does this compare to an Android tablet (Nexus 10) with a high quality keyboard? Or even some of the "transformer" products with keyboards/additional ports already available?
It seems you pay quite a premium for touch, I wonder if this machine will help sway people back into this form factor without touch/tablet mode.