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I purchase all expensive electronics on my AMEX card. They offer an additional year on all manufacturers warranty at no additional cost, along with 90 day purchase protection for any accidental damage. Its fantastic.

Visa Signature offers similar coverage, however making a claim with Visa vs Amex is a much bigger headache.

I've submitted multiple warranty and purchase protection claims with AMEX and its about the easiest process imaginable. Highly recommended.

Just to clarify: does it extend an Apple warranty from 1 to 2 years?

Yes, if you purchase the item using the card. It's an extended warranty. Quote from benefits section of the gold card:

Extended Warranty can extend the terms of the original manufacturer's warranty on warranties of five years or less. We match the length of the original warranty if the original manufacturer’s warranty is less than one year, and we provide one additional year if the original manufacturer’s warranty is between one year and five years. Shipping and handling costs for the purchase will not be refunded. Certain purchases are not covered, e.g. items with physical damage, damage as a result of natural disaster, software, motorized devices and vehicles and their parts. Other important exclusions apply. You will only be covered up to the amount charged on your eligible Card; coverage is limited up to a maximum of USD $10,000 per occurrence; not to exceed USD $50,000 per Card Member account per calendar year. You may be required to send the purchased item to us, in which case we will reimburse you for shipping cost. This product is in excess of other warranty plans that you have in place for the eligible item.

Just to be clear - it doesn't actually extend _Apple's_ warranty, Amex provide their own warranty on top.

I feel obligated to mention, that although I was happy with my AMEX card while I had it... When I lost some physical copies of my statements that I required for tax purposes, I called up AMEX and asked them to send me copies.

They did so, at the cost of $10 per month. I paid $120 for them to print out about 40 sheets of paper and mail them to me snail mail.

I did the same with my Visa that I had at the same time, and they only charged me $2 per month. Still abhorrently expensive for paper transcripts imho, but 5x cheaper than AMEX on that respect.

What were you doing such that printing out statement pdfs wasn't sufficient? Just curious.

That wasn't an option for me a few years ago when I tried. I'm not sure if their arbitrary cutoff date (~18 months?) had passed or if it simply wasn't available back then.

I download all copies of my statements every year now though, that's for sure!

I always recommend getting a warranty through your insurance company. My wife got a surface pro, and in her hands I give it a 2 year half-life. We got a personal articles policy on it that is about 45$ a year, and it covers any situation except terrorism or government/cdc seizure. Those policies are a good read. Squaretrade was over 100$ a year and did not cover theft etc. Oh and no deductible. She broke the 60$ charger a few weeks ago and got a new one fully covered.

I cannot endorse this more - I bought an additional 3 yr everything-covered warranty on an Elitebook, and it ended up saving me $1100 in repairs to the laptop. Even Squaretrade warranties are better than nothing.

Perhaps I am just lucky but I out of principle never buy any insurance if it is not required by law. If something breaks I either try to fix it myself or buy a new one. I never calculated it but I don't feel that I miss out or pay more in the long run. Quite the opposite, I have almost no running expenses and can invest the money others pay the insurence companies into new stuff.

The only exception of that rule are insurances which cover stuff I might accidentally do to other people.

I use a similar approach. The insurance companies are in business to make money, so (on average) they don't sell policies that lose them money.

I buy insurance if either:

1. I believe I'm significantly more likely to break the item then their estimates (ex: you use your phone at your construction job, and are significantly more likely to break it).

2. It's enough money that it would cause significant problems for me (home insurance, renters insurance, etc).

Otherwise, I figure I am 'self-insuring', and will come out ahead over the long term.

> The insurance companies are in business to make money, so (on average) they don't sell policies that lose them money.

Not necessarily. Insurance companies on average lose money from policies and make it up by investing the float. Think of the money they lose on policies as the "interest" that you get paid for lending them your premiums.

> Perhaps I am just lucky but I out of principle never buy any insurance if it is not required by law. If something breaks I either try to fix it myself or buy a new one.

Insurance companies know the odds better than us, they set the premiums, and they still manage to make a profit every year (billions of dollars in lots of cases)

It glaringly obvious that "on average" the average person should not get insurance when not required, because otherwise you're just paying for the profit of said insurance company.

No one is the average person. Even average people are not likely to be the average insured person. So it depends how much and in what direction you deviate from the mean.

For example, I kill cell phones regularly from dropping them; for me, insurance might be more cost effective; for the people who keep cell phones turned off except for emergencies it probably isn't good value. But, anecdotally I would say that these are the very people who have insurance. They are buying 'peace of mind', a very expensive product created by Madison Avenue.

Or you live in Europe and 2 years of warranty on new electronics is the law, not the premium.

Warranty and insurance are slightly different things. Warranty in Europe does not cover the cases where you brake something accidentally, for example.

It does in America? You buy something and if you break it "by accident", you get another one for free?

If you get that kind of insurance, then yes, you will. Most likely the 'insurance' company, like Squaretrade, will attempt a repair, though.

I've found it far cheaper to go with a rider on top of my renter's insurance than with a device-specific policy (and with better service, since they just deferred to the Apple Store re: repairs, vs making me send it to them like back when I had a computer-specific policy in 2007ish).

I've got my DSLR and my MBP covered for $60/year—I got it mainly for the camera, in case I dropped it in a lake or something, but it was cheap to throw the laptop on it too and then that saved my ass when I spilled water in it.

Correct, but you will find that type of insurance is covered by general home and contents insurance. No need for device specific insurance.

And the electronics cost much more...

Either way you pay for it.

Not necessarily. Making extra units to replace broken ones (or spare parts to replace broken parts) is typically more expensive than simply making units or parts more durable so it makes the two year mark.

Also, insurance companies are not non-profits. They take a cut as well. The factory already makes a profit, but that's not going to increase simply because they have to lawfully offer two years of warranty. They'll have more costs but it probably wouldn't affect the profit margin as much as an insurance company would.

If a company doesn't even trust their own £800+ product to not develop a defect in under two years I don't think I want it.

If they make a solid product a manufactures warranty shouldn't cost them anything.

Do they have complimentary lunch in Europe, too?

Yes, except that it's not really the case(not always). Personally, I come from a EU country where it is the law(Poland) so everything has to come with 2 years warranty, but living in the UK, it's really hard to exercise the 2 year warranty given by the EU law. Basically it protects you from manufacturing defects within those 2 years, if you buy a laptop with a 1-year warranty and a hard drive dies after 1.5 years it's still up to you to prove that it died because of manufacturing defect, which in all likelihood you won't be able to do.

Technically you have even longer rights if you're in the UK, at 6 years, where under the a Sale of Goods Act 1979, if a product was not fit for purpose you can send it back.

http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/regulation/sale-of-go...

I don't know in which part of the EU you live in. I am from Germany and I can tell, there is no such thing as a 2 year warranty required by law.

What most people mix up is, that there are two different types of warranties. One that is given by the shop and the other one is given by the manufacturer.

The warranty given by the shop is required by law and is 2 years. It covers _only_ that the shop gave you a device without defects at the time you received it. After 6 month you as the customer has to prove, that a defect was there when you received the device, which is hard to prove.

The warranty by the manufacturer is a free given by the manufacturer. Apple give you a 1 year limited warranty. If something breaks during usage, than Apple will replace it within this 1 year.

That basically means, if something breaks between 1 year and 2 year, then you can't use the manufacturer warranty. You could try the by law required shop warranty. But then have luck in proving to the shop, that the defect was there when you bought it.

No UBS-C port was one of your complaints? I didn't even know it existed until two days ago!

USB-C has been "a standard" since August last year [1]. The new MacBook and, now this Chromebook, are amongst the first devices to support it. This is actually pretty quick adoption of a new port standard. I think the industry is really going to get behind USB-C as it has almost all of the advantages of the competition, and is a compatible upgrade path for older peripherals. Thus we only need one port to support the new devices, as well as the old.

[1]: http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/

Computer World says it no longer gets hot, and the fans are quieter: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2895014/new-chromebook-...

Why do you say Google will "never fix" the "lack of apps"? What do you call adding support for running Android apps? Clearly they are working on addressing this, even if they're not there yet.

That's what you want to run on your laptop? Android apps?

IMHO, these chromebooks are not laptops - they are large screen tablets with the bluetooth keyboard attached to them.

So the idea, and if I recall correctly, proof of concept, of ChromeOS running Android apps isn't a large stretch.

edit: I just watched the promotional video, and I was right about their interest in ChromeOS running Android apps, I was just wrong about its maturity level. The video states that ChromeOS runs "select" Android apps.

Think of them as Chrome OS version of "Modern apps".

You sound surprised. Are web apps better than Android apps?

I think on a computer with a Core i5 and 8gb of RAM, choosing between web apps and Android apps is kind of a false choice. Windows or Linux both offer you far more applications that are built to take advantage of that form factor.

Android apps will help fill some of the holes, but how likely is it that we'll ever get an Android port of the two apps I had mentioned previously, like Sublime and/or Eclipse? I suppose it's theoretically possible, but there are some programs that are, frankly, unlikely to ever leave the "desktop" OS's (i.e. Windows, OSX, Linux).

Of course, I'm happy for Google to prove me wrong. I would have firmly thrown Photoshop into that category until Adobe announced they were making a ChromeOS-compatible version of it. I happen to quite like my Pixel, so if the Chrome Apps can one day let me do everything I need to do without needing to go to a Linux chroot, I'd be thrilled. Until then, however, I need Sublime (Caret is pretty good, though), I need git, etc.

Android port of the two apps I had mentioned previously, like Sublime and/or Eclipse

I believe the Eclipse folks think that Orion (http://www.eclipse.org/orion/) is the path out of that jam. I'm super stoked about that project, and think it may have real legs if they don't lose focus.

That is their solution to your git need, also, unless one requires a dedicated git client to do rebases or other ninjary: https://github.com/creationix/js-git

What about the compile stack or webapplication stack like node or rails? I'm mostly just curious how this would work on such a OS.

I'm only speculating, and/or it could even differ per organization since in my mental model deploying Orion is only one step of many, but I would guess the two stacks you mentioned are famous for their watch-and-refresh development model. Thus, the coder presses "Save" (or perhaps "Commit", if "Save" is not atomic enough for deployment) and then either the CI system pushes out files or deploys for you or Orion pokes the development server to grab the latest files.

I am 100% positive it will take some mental and maybe even logistical reorganization to switch to a cloud-based coding environment. Almost every change I can think of in a professional capacity is evaluated in a cost-benefit analysis.

But today I am home sick, and thus have no access to my properly configured PyCharm, nor access to the local feature branches on my machine and it would be a bunch of ssh hoop jumping to deploy anything that I did write while at home. My interests are pretty much in descending order of that list. I would love a copy of cloud-PyCharm.

Look it sounds like you need a 'regular' laptop. If you're hooked on the hardware, buy one and install linux on it.

Exactly what it's the advantage of an "írregular" laptop, which sells at the same price point of a "regular" one, while crippling most of the things you can do with it and offering basically nothing in return ?

Great question!

I have 4 chromebooks, the original pilot program, 1st Gen Samsung, Acer c720, and the Pixel. Totally love the pixel, pilot book and Acer, hate the 1st gen. AdmiralAsshat's criticisms are valid about the pixel but it works well for me since it has a lot more memory than the other chromebooks. Crouton linux makes even the smaller chromebooks quite useable for most situations. Sometimes I have a hard time deciding which chromebook to use. Mostly it's come down to the Acer for travel, and the Pixel for home. The Pixel has poor battery life compared to the other chromebooks though, but glad to hear that's been taken care of.

I know a beta tester of the new Pixel, and the battery life of 12 hours is absolutely for real. I've been pretty impressed from the bit of it I've seen.

Google will never fix the lack of apps? I thought they were making progress towards enabling most Android apps to function in ChromeOS?

I think that is here now.

Or you can get an Apple notebook and install Linux. Apple makes really solid gear. This is a clear imitation.

How much does Apple charge for something with similar weight/size and the same screen resolution?

Comparing similar models at exactly the same price, similar weight and form factor (top of the line Pixel vs. base Macbook Pro 13), information taken from Apple Store and Ars review of the Pixel:

The Pixel has:

Better processor (i7 2.6Ghz vs i5 2.7Ghz)

Slightly better resolution (2560×1700 vs 2560x1600)

Double the RAM (16GB vs 8GB)

The Macbook has:

Double the SSD storage (128 GB vs 64 GB)

Better integrated GPU (Iris Pro 6100 vs HD5500)

So I would say there is no clear-cut winner.

Regardless what people thinks, the base specs for the Pros are quite fair for the price.

EDIT: I was forgetting that the Pixel has a touchscreen display, somehting that Apple doesn't offer at all, at the moment.

Also you wouldn't need to use crouton for Linux on a MacBook.mOS X would offer a better applications and offline support.

MacBook had much faster Processor, Chromebook Pixel use UltraLow Voltage CPU which tends to have much lower TDP and much less sustained clock. In this case 2.2GHz for Chromebook vs 2.7Ghz for MacBook.

I´m comparing the top end Pixel model (the same price as the base macbook), which mounts an i7 at 2.6Ghz, with more cache than the 2.7Ghz i5 of the base Macbook pro.

Cpuboss gives the edge to the i7, but if you have some source with benchmarks comparing the two CPUs (or similar ones) I would be really interested in seeing them, in particular how TDP affects performance.

In my opinion the recently refreshed 13´Macbook Pro is one of the most interesting machines on the market, for the price.

Apple's Linux support is spotty, at best. It is certainly possible to find more suitable hardware.

Sometimes, you want to spend your money supporting a company that supports the development of Linux.

Dell and Google have a better record on this front, and the XPS 13 and the new pixel are "solid gear".

About your Acer Aspire remark: I've had some bad times with Acer in the past, and I bought a new one in January. Pretty good specs, low price, clean design, but very, very plasticky. Wouldn't call that a high quality alternative.

Engadget says it's STILL impractical - http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/11/chromebook-pixel-review-2...

It depends on the user. The first-gen Pixel is my only laptop for the last 2 years.

Out of curiosity, is it also your only computer? (Aside from a phone / tablet)

I have a bunch of ARM boards around, as well as, a headless x86 server for personal media archive, plus some number of rented virtual servers in the cloud.

Basically, Chromebook is a terminal + a browser for me.

How do you do development?

SSH + emacs on the remote part.

For embedded programming, where I need to run a programmer to flash a microcontroller, I use an ARM board as a host.

I managed to work on a Chromebook for a few months. I was doing a mixture of web frontend (Angular) and Go based backend. I was using terminal for most things tmux, shell, vim, git, ssh which is how I work on my MBP anyway. Postman for api testing and I found some chrome apps for screenshots and other little things. It was all quite good. The only apps I really missed were Inkscape and Gimp and I could run those under Crouton if needed but my Chromebook was a bit memory constrained. I guess Skype was a bit of an issue as well. In the end I stopped because the hardware had reliability issues and the screen wasn't all that great.

I could see myself working on a Pixel fulltime.

>In the end I stopped because the hardware had reliability issues and the screen wasn't all that great.

That's not exactly a glowing endorsement, considering the price, why would you want to work on it full-time then?

Notice he said "Chromebook", not "Chromebook Pixel". Considering the Pixel's screen and keyboard were supposedly top-teir, I am presuming he had a normal $200 chromebook.

For what it's worth, I've been using a Acer Chromebook for awhile now. It's been an excellent machine, when you consider I only paid $180 for it and threw Arch on it before its second boot. It can't hold a candle to the Pixel or an XPS, but I never expected it to.

Chromebooks, like Netbooks before them, cut a lot of corners to get under a price. That is why a halo model like the Pixel excites people as it is a rare opportunity to see what the platform can do without the price constraints. Imagine what it would do to quality if the only Macbook you could buy was sub $400?

ChromeOS is not for everyone but I wouldn't dismiss them outright as some people don't need much more than access to a shell environment and web browser to be productive. There are a few small frustrations, openvpn limitations etc. And they could do a bit more to make them friendly to devs/linux users.

That review is actually incredibly (and somewhat surprisingly) positive.

It mostly comes down to what everyone here already knows: Chromebooks don't run all the apps many people need, like Photoshop:

> Personally speaking, I wouldn't buy one -- but that's mostly because it won't run Photoshop, and it doesn't play nice with certain peripherals like my running watch. Barring that, though, I love the Pixel. Between the design, display, keyboard and battery life, it's among the finest notebooks I've had the pleasure of using. I'm sad to have to give my review unit back.