The Chromebook Pixel is the most expensive Chrome OS laptop released to date, and it has much of the hardware to justify the $1300 starting price, including a high resolution 2560 x 1700 pixel display, a solid aluminum case, a backlit keyboard, and more.
But you’d better be happy with the amount of memory, storage, and other components under the hood — because as CNET discovered, upgrading the Chromebook Pixel is pretty impractical.
The good news is that the case is easy to open. The bad news is that pretty much every important component is soldered to the motherboard.
Want to upgrade from the 4GB of RAM? Tough. There’s no space to add extra memory.
Need more than 64GB of storage? No dice. The solid state storage is also soldered to the board and there’s no simple way to add more (unless you count inserting removable storage like a USB flash drive or an SD card).
I suppose it’s nice to know that you can at least get at the insides by removing four screws — it means that it shouldn’t be too tough to replace a dying battery or tighten a loose wire if you know what you’re doing or know where to get spare parts. But like many other thin and light laptops, Google’s Chromebook Pixel clearly isn’t meant to be upgraded.
You can find more details, as well as a video at CNET.
There is the hidden dig in what is otherwise a pretty nice piece of hardware.
It is what it is, and that’s all it will be.
Followed the link. There’s a Mini PCI Express slot for the (absent) WWAN card in the Wi-Fi version. That slot might support mSATA as well (some Lenovo laptops support mSATA in their WWAN slots, for instance), which means its not out of the question that you could add internal storage. I can’t see many use cases for that kind of upgrade, but it might be worthwhile for some Linux users who want a Pixel.