Only one Chromebook has truly gone against that grain—the Chromebook Pixel. It was the polar opposite of every other device bearing the name. The Pixel was high-quality hardware where others are low-rent, but even though it cost five times what you could pay for a regular Chromebook it didn’t really do much more. It’s a laptop as nice as it is niche.
Now, two years later, Google is back with a second Pixel. The outside is mostly the same, which is a good thing. The inside gets a big upgrade courtesy of new Intel Broadwell processors, also a good thing.