Chromebook Pixel

The Chromebook Pixel is a laptop at the high end of Google's Chromebook family of machines, which all come preinstalled with Chrome OS operating system.

History

Sundar Pichai, the senior vice president of engineering in charge of Chrome and Android, said that the goal behind the high-end Pixel model was "to push the boundary and build something premium. Google engineers set out on the 'labor of love' project two years ago, asking themselves, 'What could we do if we really wanted to design the best computer possible at the best price possible?'"

The machine is assembled in China. Unlike its publicly announced partnerships utilized for the manufacturing of its Nexus phones and tablets, Google has not disclosed its manufacturing sub-contractor for the Chromebook Pixel.

Technology

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, 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", and a colored lightbar on the lid added purely for its cool factor. 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.

Pixel

In digital imaging, a pixel, pel, or picture element is a physical point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable element in an all points addressable display device; so it is the smallest controllable element of a picture represented on the screen. The address of a pixel corresponds to its physical coordinates. LCD pixels are manufactured in a two-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots or squares, but CRT pixels correspond to their timing mechanisms and sweep rates.

Each pixel is a sample of an original image; more samples typically provide more accurate representations of the original. The intensity of each pixel is variable. In color image systems, a color is typically represented by three or four component intensities such as red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

In some contexts (such as descriptions of camera sensors), the term pixel is used to refer to a single scalar element of a multi-component representation (more precisely called a photosite in the camera sensor context, although the neologism sensel is sometimes used to describe the elements of a digital camera's sensor), while in others the term may refer to the entire set of such component intensities for a spatial position. In color systems that use chroma subsampling, the multi-component concept of a pixel can become difficult to apply, since the intensity measures for the different color components correspond to different spatial areas in such a representation.

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil". In 2004, Google moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its interests as a holding company called Alphabet Inc. When this restructuring took place on October 2, 2015, Google became Alphabet's leading subsidiary, as well as the parent for Google's Internet interests.