Samsung's Galaxy Chromebook lands next week packing MacBook Air-level features

Samsung announced today that its new Galaxy Chromebook will go on sale starting April 6. The high-end Chrome OS laptop will cost $999 and be available from Best Buy and Samsung's own website. That might sound like a steep price tag for a laptop that doesn't run a full-blown operating system and that requires a reliable internet connection for most of its apps to function of most apps. But this isn't your average Chromebook.

Chromebooks are typically intended for classrooms or casual web surfing and usually cost a few hundred dollars. They also don't tend to have particularly impressive specifications. But there are some diehard Chrome OS fans out there who've been looking for a premium update to Google's own Pixelbook, which hasn't been refreshed since its 2017 release. They're likely very pleased, indeed.

The spiritual successor to Google's Pixelbook — In our own testing we found that the Galaxy Chromebook is basically the Pixelbook 2 that Google should have made but never did. It's sleek and super thin for starters, coming in at 9.9mm, which is even thinner than the Pixelbook, which is an already very slim 10.2mm.

Like the Pixelbook, the Galaxy Chromebook has a touchscreen that flips 360 degrees so you can quickly throw it into tablet mode. And because Samsung loves styluses, there's one of those included so you can take handwritten notes just like on a Galaxy Note smartphone. Did we mention that the 13.3-inch screen is 4K OLED? And it's touch-friendly, which not even the latest MacBook Air's can boast.

Internal specs don't matter as much when it comes to Chrome OS laptops because basically everything you're doing happens within a web browser. But a lot of Chrome tabs can get any computer chugging, so Samsung has thrown an Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM into the Galaxy Chromebook so you can go to town on the tabs with reckless abandon. Samsung previously planned on releasing a variant with 16GB of RAM, but we're only getting this one for now. Nonetheless, with those sort of numbers Samsung's Chromebook should be able to handle much more than mere web browsing, which could broaden its target market.

A port selection to make a MacBook blush – The Galaxy Chromebook is similarly impressive when it comes to ports. The laptop comes with two USB-C ports, a microSD card slot, a headphone jack, and even a fingerprint reader for authentication.

When it arrives next week, the Galaxy Chromebook will be the best Chrome OS laptop money can buy. Is it the Chromebook you need? Probably not. But that's because you probably don't need a Chromebook, and $1,000 can buy you a Surface or MacBook that will be far more flexible. But assuming you're a Chrome OS fan is this the Chromebook your heart wants? Absolutely.