As someone who needs a wheelchair, I can let everyone know a secret — if you have to use one, you'll spend a lot of time sitting down. All jokes aside, there are a lot of things that are no longer easy to do if you substitute wheels for fully-working feet or legs. An interest in tech and a love for tech products, like smartphones or Chromebooks, is not one of them.
Rubber feet aren't much help unless you have your laptop on a table of some sort.
That means I use a lot of them. And so far they all have one thing in common, and it's that the little rubber nubbins on the bottom don't do a lot of good when you're using them on your lap. And I don't mean just cheap laptops here, either. My Pixelbook or my MacBook Pro like to slide around after a bit of time perched on my knees and neither are what you would call cheap. After fidgeting around for 30 minutes or so, it's usually time to find a table or something so I can get this laptop off of my lap because I'm tired of keeping it in place.
Right about now most people are probably thinking I'm crazy. That's OK because chances are your legs work a little better than mine and you can adjust them to keep your laptop from fighting you. It's not that easy for everyone, and finding a design that lessens the problem, even if it happens to be a side-effect, was awesome. And with the Pixelbook Go (opens in new tab), I've found that product.
The ribbed bottom was meant to make things easy to carry. Lapability is a great side-effect.
Like everyone else that wrote about it recently, I've been using my review model for about a week. there are some things I love, some I don't. But the thing I needed and had no idea I needed it, was the ribbed bottom. It was designed to make the Pixelbook Go easier to carry around but a side effect of not being a smooth flat surface with tiny rubber bits at each corner is that it slides around a lot less than any other laptop I've used. Because it's not fighting me about staying in place, I can spend more time using it to do whatever it is I wanted to do with it.
I get the luxury of taking a bit more time before I write up my full impressions of the Pixelbook Go. Daniel Bader worked hard and wrote a great review to give you an idea of what he thinks about it for the first wave of initial product reviews so I get to keep thinking about what I love and what I hate about google's latest Chromebook. What I can say right now is something that isn't going to change no matter how long it takes — I've never used a laptop that is this comfortable and stable on my lap. And when you're in a chair and always have a lap in front of you, that's pretty damn important.
The Pixelbook Go isn't like other laptops when you look underneath. And those ribs make it great for spending more time on your lap.
