The Google Phone (Premium)

Oh, Google.

With every generation of Nexus and Pixel handsets, Google has teased that this time, finally, they’ve gotten it right. And they’re doing it again with the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, starting with a marketing wave that’s happening months ahead of their release.

We can debate why Google decided to pre-announce the Pixel 6 family, but I suspect it’s some nexus (see what I did there?) of leaks, falling sales due to a lackluster 2020 lineup, and timing, with Samsung and Apple both poised to announce new smartphone generations ahead of the Pixel 6 release. But the reasons don’t really matter. What matters is that Google is once again shaking up its smartphone business in a major way. And pretending, again, that this is the first time it’s done so.

Google announced its Nexus One handset in January 2010 with a “web meets phone” marketing tagline. In keeping with the open nature of Android itself, the Nexus One was a partnership: HTC created the hardware and T-Mobile marketed it to its wireless customers. It would follow that same trend across multiple generations of devices, with some highs—the Nexus 4 and 5, both of which were based on LG internals, plus the Nexus 5X (LG) and 6P (Huawei)—and some lows, most notably the Motorola-made Nexus 6.

Nexus always made sense to me, as it combined the best of Google with the best of its hardware partners, and those firms obviously had the experience Google needed to get phones into the market in the first place. But by the time the Nexus family gave way to Pixel in 2016, Google was playing a new tune, no doubt because its Nexus efforts had done nothing to shake up the Android market and convince other hardware makers to stop making their own skins and more cohesively take on the iPhone.

The Pixel was then marketed as Google’s “first” smartphone, a description that should have raised some eyebrows in the tech blogging community but didn’t. (And let’s not forget that Google actually owned Motorola’s smartphone business for a while; it’s now owned by Lenovo.)

Google never publicly made this connection, but I did: Where Nexus was marketed much like Microsoft’s now-defunct Signature PC series—a clean OS image on third-party hardware—Pixel was marketed more like Microsoft Surface: Hardware that was designed and made in-house. And that strategy comes with the same problems we see in the PC space: Google is now competing with its own partners.

There’s just one problem: Pixel was a lie. As I noted one year later alongside the launch of the Pixel 2 family, Google had marketed Pixel as “a new phone made by Google,” but the first generation devices—recall there was a bigger XL model too—were made by HTC and LG, not Google. So Pixel was no different from Nexus, it was just marketed differently.

But right after launching Pixel 2, Google acquired HTC’s key smartphone assets, including about 2,000 employees, for $1.1 billion and brought that workforce in-house. We later found out the reason for this purchase and the Pixel rebranding: Google’s hardware partners had been undermining Google by shipping the same hardware, but with better features, than the Nexus devices that they had sold to Google. And now, with HTC in-house, we would finally see the impact of Google designing and making its own smartphones, surely. As important, perhaps we’d see an end to the rampant hardware issues that dogged the first two Pixel generations.

That never happened. Pixel 3 and 4 family handsets all had their own reliability issues, too, of course. Then, in 2019, Google saw rare success—at least for Pixel—with the release of the Pixel 3a family, which provided the core Pixel experience but in a much less expensive package. Google couldn’t compete with the Samsungs and Apples of the world in the premium end of the market, but maybe it could find new life in the low-end of the market.

So by the time 2020 and the global pandemic rolled around, Google was trying a new strategy. Instead of offering high-end smartphones of any kind, it released three low-end phones, the Pixel 4a, the Pixel 4a 5G, and the Pixel 5. None of these handsets sold as well as the Pixel 3a family—each was hobbled in weird ways—but they outsold Google’s previous flagship-class devices.

This weird low-cost strategy is again eerily reminiscent of Microsoft. When the software giant purchased Nokia in 2013, it planned to continue that firm’s tradition of releasing a mix of handsets with excellent camera systems. But Lumia sales had already fallen off a cliff, and two factors combined to prevent Microsoft from seeing any success in this market: Nokia’s only profitable phones were low-end and inexpensive, and its engineers had stopped developing high-end handsets in the time period between the acquisition’s announcement and finalization.

The result was a bizarre couple of years in which Microsoft sold only low-end Lumia handsets, one of which, the Lumia 520, sold more units than any other Lumia. But most of them tanked, and with the announcement of the fancifully marketed “affordable flagships,” the mid-tier Lumia 720 and 830, Microsoft had jumped the shark. And provided the template for Google to follow in 2020.

With that in mind, I figured we would simply see more low-end and mid-tier Pixel handsets from Google until the company finally gave up on the platform. And sure enough, 2020 was Pixel’s worst year ever, which is saying something given how poorly these handsets have sold in the past. I was ready to give up on Pixel myself, but I finally gave in and purchased a Pixel 4a 5G, which is about as close as we got last year to an XL model.

And now Pixel 6 is happening. Again, we’re seeing the same marketing, as if this was the first time that Google finally got serious about competing with iPhone. And this time, it has furthered its push to bring more and more of the handset in-house with the inclusion of its first-ever phone processor SoC, the Tensor. See? They really are serious this time.

I’m now wondering if last year’s holding pattern with the Pixel 4a, 4a 5G, and 5 was really just about buying time and saving as much money as possible until the Tensor was ready. In other words, Google couldn’t just skip a year, of course. But as a very small hardware maker, it also couldn’t afford to ship yet another generation of expensive hardware that no one was going to buy anyway. And so 2020, a boon to most hardware makers thanks to the pandemic, was even worse for Google than maybe is immediately obvious.

In the years since Google ceded its hardware leadership—especially in camera systems, which is the most troubling—Apple, Huawei, and Samsung have surged forward, with that middle firm since hobbled by U.S. sanctions. So it is impressive to me that Google is doing this about-face and trying to compete in the flagship space again. And make no mistake, the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro are premium, flagship-class devices, unlike their immediate predecessors. Think four figures, not three. $1000 or so.

Having spent the past year using the Pixel 4a 5G, I’m of two minds on this shift. This handset has suffered from exactly the same kinds of hardware issues that dogged previous Pixels, but the 4a 5G’s relatively low cost softens that blow a bit. What’s going to happen when the Pixel 6 family costs $1000? Will we simply experience another wave of unreliability? And if so, will that kill Pixel for good?

I don’t think so, given the investment Google has made in Tensor research and development and its revelations about its marketing expenses in the fourth quarter. But then again, there’s no reason why Google could offer its hardware partners this component in the same way that it offers them its software and services. If Tensor works and is powerful enough, it could help the Android market move away from Qualcomm’s overly expensive chipsets. Which, depending on your opinion of benchmark tests, either are or are not blown away by Apple’s A-series silicon.

But there’s no reason to get ahead of ourselves. For now, all you need to know is that Google is finally serious about the smartphone market. And that will be true until it isn’t.