I’ve said before that ChromeOS tablets might be the future of “productivity”. But the Duet’s performance and RAM were just too weak, so I eventually sold it. Not long after, I saw this new product: HP Chromebook X2 11 A 3:2 screen, 8GB of RAM, a Snapdragon 7c processor, a detachable keyboard, a magnetic charging stylus… This was exactly what perfect “productivity” looked like. Doesn’t that seem cool… I forgot the rest.

I remember once saying, angrily, that Android tablet productivity is all shit. And then I went to a Xiaomi store and tried one out, which only confirmed it. Even on the “Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro,” productivity is still a pile of shit. My biggest complaint is that the IME on Android still can’t do proper cursor-following; in a lot of cases you still get the idiotic “type up here, pick characters down there” setup. Not to mention the browser being unusable… In the end I decided to try the Chromebook Duet. I picked one up on eBay, plus a USI stylus. Bought before the price went up — the seller listed it at 50, realized the next day he’d undersold, and jacked the price up in a hurry. But I’d already bought mine.

I sold my year-old Google Nexus 9 and, as a replacement, imported the latest Google Pixel C. The reason was honestly that I wasn’t all that satisfied with the Nexus 9—screen too small… build quality so-so… maybe that was it. More than that, though, I think the Pixel C just appealed to me more. The import went smoothly, but Google still shipped the keyboard and the tablet separately, which meant I had to deal with two forwarding orders. The keyboard ended up getting taxed too. I don’t think it should have been, but the forwarding company declared it proactively. They had a tax receipt, so I let it go. I’ve used the Google Pixel C for a fair amount of time—not short, but not long either. I’ve honestly written quite a bit on it: reports, and every blog post from the last one of last year up to now. I figure that gives me the right to have an opinion on this thing.