Google has released its first touchscreen display computer, Chromebook Pixel, competing with similar offerings from Apple and Samsung. Already available for $1,299 at the Google Play store in the U.S., the laptop has a multi-touch 2560 x 1700 screen, 12.85-inch display, a 3:2 photographic format, 4.3 million pixels and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. In addition, Google offers the Chromebook Pixel owners the immersive 1TB of Google Drive cloud storage for free for the first three years.

With the new product, Google wants to write a new big chapter in the history of Chrome-inspired laptops. For the previous incarnations of Chromebooks, Google teamed up with Samsung, Acer, Lenovo and HP, and these collaborations were successful. For instance, the $249 Samsung Chromebook turned to be #1 on Amazon’s list of the bestselling laptops for 155 days.

“The philosophy of Chrome has always been to minimize the ‘chrome’ of the browser. In much the same way, the goal of the Pixel is to make the pixels disappear, giving people the best web experience,” writes Linus Upson, Vice President, Engineering at Google, in a blog post.

Chromebook Pixel with the weight of just 3.35 pounds is believed to become the major rival of the 13-inch MacBook Air ($1,200), which doesn’t have a touchscreen display. In terms of the picture quality, Apples laptop’s display with 128 pixels per inch falls behind the latest Chromebook with its 239 ppi. Plus, the new device has both Wi-Wi and LTE (this version costs $1,449) and a higher-capacity battery (still, Pixel’s display uses more energy than Apple’s laptop, so the latter works longer).

In addition, Google has released a new, updated version of its Chrome browser, which includes support for the Web Speech API. Now, app developers will be able to integrate speech recognition into their web products to deliver a better consumer experience.