Google caught many in the tech world off-guard last Thursday with the announcement of the Chromebook Pixel, a touch-based, super hi-res, Apple-esque version of the Chromebook. But while the looks and features turned heads, what really caused jaws to drop was the $1,299 price tag. A few pundits are calling it a mistake, while others are just left scratching their heads. To help clear away the confusion, we compare the new Chromebook Pixel to the Chromebook at the other end of the spectrum, the much lower-priced Acer C7 Chromebook (C710-2847)( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window).

The Acer C7 Chromebook
In many ways, the Acer Chromebook is the fruition of all that Google originally promised when the Chromebook was announced: a Chrome-powered netbook that sells for around $200. To make it even cheaper, Google briefly cut the price in half when selling it to schools. The goal of the cheap Chromebook is clear: Put access to the Web—and thus Google’s myriad services and ads—into people’s hands for as little as possible.

To do this, the C7 Chromebook is outfitted with the bare minimum of components. The 11-inch display has a basic 1,366-by-768 resolution, and a mostly standard keyboard with a couple of Chrome-specific quirks. The 1.1-GHz Intel Celeron 847 processor inside is just fast enough to keep you browsing at a reasonable pace. The 320GB drive inside is a boon to those who don’t yet embrace the cloud—though the Samsung Chromebook Series 3 (XE303C12) ditches the hard drive entirely. The C7 Chromebook’s construction is also engineered with price in mind, recycling the design of another Acer netbook (the Acer Aspire V5-171).

But behind the plastic construction and meager specs, the Acer C7 Chromebook still delivers what it promises: a full Web-centric operating system, and price that puts the experience in anyone’s reach.

The Chromebook Pixel
The Chromebook Pixel appears to offer something very different, dressing up the new Chromebook in a premium design with an anodized aluminum alloy chassis and Gorilla Glass covering the screen and touchpad. Setting aside the “ooh-aah” factor of the new minimalist design, the Chromebook Pixel still proves itself to be on par with other premium laptops and ultrabooks. This is the premium laptop, seen through Google’s Chrome-tinted lenses.

The most obvious new feature is the display. The 12.85-inch IPS panel boasts a 2,560-by-1,700 resolution, cramming 239 pixels per inch. It’s also got a touch screen, letting you go hands on with your browsing. And Google has gone its own way with the display size, opting for a 3:2 aspect ratio that it claims is best for Web browsing. With that display, Google is simultaneously taking on Microsoft’s Windows 8 with touch, Apple’s Retina display, and tweaking the very dimensions of the monitor for an experience truly tailored to life online.

The hardware inside isn’t quite as impressive, but it still rivals premium offerings from the likes of Dell and Apple. Instead of the Celeron and ARM processors found in the Acer C7 and the Samsung Series 3, the Pixel gets an Intel Core i5 processor with 4GB of RAM.

But the Chromebook comes with the usual Chromebook limitations. Local storage is miniscule—a 32GB solid-state drive (SSD) on the $1,299 Wi-Fi only model, and a 64GB SSD on the upcoming LTE-equipped $1,449 model. And, as with anything done through Chrome, it’s all dependent upon an Internet connection; the Pixel has dual-band Wi-Fi baked in, but it doesn’t have an Ethernet port.

The real question, of course, is whether those really count as limitations. For many people, Ethernet is the safety net for those times Wi-Fi conks out, a throwback—kept for emergencies, like a landline phone—rather than a feature for daily use. And the paucity of local storage seems a little silly when you factor in the free terabyte of cloud storage that Google is offering with the Pixel.

Let’s examine that last detail for a minute. The Pixel comes with 1TB of Google Drive storage for 36 months. How much would that same storage be without the laptop, you ask? At $50 per month, the price for 1TB of storage alone is a whopping $1,800. In this regard, Google isn’t charging too much for an underpowered laptop—it’s giving you a bargain on cloud storage and throwing in a free laptop.

Those who don’t see the appeal of the Chromebook will probably keep shaking their heads and wondering what Google is thinking with the Pixel. For those prepared to embrace the new paradigm—always connected, always online, and selling for a song—the Chromebook Pixel is just more of what Google has always promised.

For more, see PCMag’s Hands On With the Chromebook Pixel and the slideshow above.