Those original Chromebook Pixels were awesome machines.
I wish they'd had open bootloaders, but I seem to recall you had to keep it in developer mode which required a nag screen, or something along those lines, if you wanted to run your own OS on it.
You can easily remove the nag screen by opening the device and unscrewing a screw and running coreboot with SeaBIOS. Pretty neat security approach (not too hard to do, not too easy for a layman to fall for instructions to self-compromise). I have two that work just fine today.
When I was actively hacking my chromebook, there was tons of advice like this, and 90% of it didn't work on both arm and intel-based chromebooks, and the advice-givers never mentioned which category it worked on. Sometimes it was buried 5 paragraphs into the webpage you were sent to for downloads, sometimes not.
Has any of this changed?
Also, I tend to take with a grain of salt any comment that starts with "it's easy/simple/obvious", especially if it doesn't provide details or a link.
I was talking about a specific device on a specific dimension brought up by the GP, i.e., "freedom to tinker for the owner while preserving security for the masses." Whether that became a standardized process is a different story. By and large it has changed across models, but nevertheless it was a good balance of ownership/hackability without compromising security that can be emulated by other devices if they choose to.
I wish they'd had open bootloaders, but I seem to recall you had to keep it in developer mode which required a nag screen, or something along those lines, if you wanted to run your own OS on it.