All-In on Pixel (Premium)

Thanks to a variety of factors—a better-than-expected experience with my Pixel 8 Pro, a free Pixel Watch 2, and an incredible 40 percent off deal on Pixel Tablet, not to mention my Google Drive shift and the growing capabilities in Chrome OS—I’ve dived more deeply into the Pixel and broader Google ecosystems than ever before this year. And that means that my day-to-day in 2024 is going to look very different than my 2023.

To be clear, nothing is ever final in the life of a tech reviewer and none of this precludes my normal testing and use of alternative platforms. That is, among other things, I will continue to keep up with what Apple is doing with hardware, software, and services, and I still have a lot of Linux exploration ahead of me.

But … it’s impossible to ignore that there’s been a shift. And as I prep some of my end-of-year recaps for such things as new apps, favorite podcasts and books, and the like, it’s very clear that Google, which has held a solid place in my life for decades now, has grown in importance this past year. And that this shift involves both my personal and work-related lives. It’s not something I would have predicted or expected even a year ago. But there it is.

That this mini-revelation comes in the still-raw wake of Google’s Epic antitrust loss is entirely coincidental, but it’s also personally interesting. My opinion on this loss is rock-solid and certain: Google, like Apple, is a monopolist that abuses its dominance to harm developers, competitors, partners, and customers, but it also makes products and services that I rely on every day and recommend to others. These two seemingly contrary positions aren’t mutually exclusive, and if there’s a New Year’s resolution that I’d recommend to everyone reading this—and to the broader world—it would be to open your eyes to the nuance and complexities in life. There isn’t a single Big Tech company that doesn’t do exactly what Google does in some areas. I’m looking at you, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. They are all horrible in some ways.

Getting past that, you probably know that I write and speak about workflows, tools, and efficiency a lot. I test things constantly, probing to see whether some app, service, or other product might somehow be better than what I’m currently using, “better” being a bit of a moving target because my needs are specific and perhaps different from those of you and others. I try to balance that with how these things might benefit non-technical (“normal”) people, like my wife and friends. And no matter the outcome, this testing is always useful. When I do make a change, which is semi-rare, I celebrate it. When all I’ve done is prove that what I’m using or doing is still the right choice for me, I celebrate that.

And this has been an interesting year in which blockers, those things that prevent me from switching, have fallen by the wayside more frequently than in any year in the past. This will come up in a coming post about my favorite new apps of 2023, but here I will just focus on the Google and Pixel hardware, software, and services that have exceeded my self-imposed bars this year to become more important in my daily life.

The Pixel 8 Pro is no surprise, and while my review is forthcoming, I will at least say that this is the first Pixel phone in several years to offer no meaningful compromises. That is, itself, a stunning development, given my long-time love-hate relationship with this product family and the many, many times its betrayed me in the past. Generally speaking, I’ve always loved the idea of Pixel more than the reality, and as I think back on previous generation iterations, I can easily pick out those issues that ruined the experience, undermining the phone’s photography and other functional advantages.

There’s no reason to dive into my long history with Pixel phones, though I have owned almost every model that Google ever made. But looking at the modern Tensor-based era, you can easily see that Google amped up the product quality and design of Pixel with the Pixel 6 Pro in 2021 and that it has evolved the product line over the next two generations, eliminating complaints in each version.

For example, the Pixel 6 Pro had a lousy in-display fingerprint reader, but the Pixel 7 Pro version was faster and more reliable, and the Pixel 8 Pro version features a more secure Face Unlock feature that can now be used with Google Wallet. The Pixel 6 Pro and 7 Pro both had sub-standard battery life and woefully slow charging speeds, but the Pixel 8 Pro mostly overcomes these issues with much faster charging speeds. And the previous two flagships had awkward and impractical curved displays, but the Pixel 8 Pro finally delivers the flat display we all deserve.

I’ll save the rest for my review, but you get the idea: With the Pixel 8 Pro, Google has finally delivered the no-compromises flagship smartphone experience I’ve wanted for so many years. And instead of getting this close by not quite closing the deal as it did with the Pixel 6 Pro and 7 Pro, the Pixel 8 has no major downsides. And all the wonderful and helpful Pixel-specific features that make this product family so much more desirable than other Android phones.

Pixel Watch 2 is not a significant upgrade over its predecessor: I never had any performance issues with the OG version, and the battery still needs to be charged once each day, as is the case with Apple Watch. The user experience is solid, and it’s simpler and preferable to that of Apple Watch, but I still feel that I’m best served by a simpler wearable like a Fitbit.

The thing is, I didn’t pay for it: Google gave away Pixel Watch 2 to customers who purchased the Pixel 8 Pro at launch. So while I would never pay for Pixel Watch 2, there’s no meaningful reason for me to stop using it. Yes, daily charging isn’t ideal. But I got used to that with Apple Watch, and I did so again with Pixel Watch 2. And so I will keep using it, paying attention to the functional changes that happen as Google updates Wear OS and delivers regular Pixel Feature Drops.

I can’t say too much about Pixel Tablet yet: I took advantage of Google’s 40 percent offer, which dropped the price of this device from an unacceptable $499 ($399 on sale currently) to about $300 before taxes and fees, making it a far more interesting than it was at full price when I reviewed it this past June. But it won’t arrive until the first half of January for some reason. (I could have picked it up immediately if I could visit Google’s New York City retail store in person.) And so all I can do for now is tell you what I’ve been thinking and why I took this step.

I use my nearly three-year-old iPad Air every single day, but it’s experienced some weird performance issues this past year that become a daily annoyance. One of the worst offenders in the New York Times app, which stops responding to touches and swipes on an ever-more regular basis. A few months back, I finally factory reset the iPad and manually installed the few apps I use, and that actually fixed it. Until it didn’t: The performance issues returned and, as before, got worse over time. And so a few weeks ago, I started researching Android tablets, convinced that the issue I have would simply reappear on other iPads too. Maybe it was time to make a change.

My research was a reminder of how terrible the market for Android tablets is. I don’t like Samsung products because of their bloatware and non-standard user interface, but I considered various tablets, including a few smaller models. But the full-sized tablets were overpriced, while the smaller versions were underpowered. I considered Amazon’s Fire HD tablets, but they are of course garbage for the most part, while the only decent model (on paper), the Fire Max 11, would require some work to get the Google Play Store and the apps I want on there. And I browsed through the hundreds of no-name Android tablets on Amazon.com, looking for something with modern specs and the most recent Android version. And none of it seemed to make any sense.

When Google notified me that my Play Points Gold status qualified me for the 40 percent off offer, I had to go back and re-read my own review to remember what, aside from the 16:10 aspect ratio, had made me return the Pixel Tablet this past summer. And what I found was that it was mostly about the Dock, which you have to pay for when you buy the device.

“At $499, it just doesn’t make sense, and some of the Pixel Tablet’s design compromises pile on to make it a non-starter for me,” I wrote. “But if I could get a Pixel Tablet for, say, $379—the charging speaker dock is sold separately for $129—I might be swayed.”

Well, I could get it for $300 now. And maybe that would make sense. Maybe I would simply get used to the 16:10 in portrait mode as I read (my primary tablet use case). And … maybe not. If not, I could always return it. But we could also use a new smart display for the kitchen, as our current smart display, a smallish and now unsupported five-year-old Lenovo Smart Display, is having its own issues. I was kind of waiting for a new-generation Nest Hub Max—the current version is four years old—but one of the things I really liked about the Pixel Tablet was its smart display functionality when docked.

“The Google Pixel Tablet is a compelling Android-based alternative to the iPad, but it’s an even better smart display,” I wrote in my review. “In fact, I’d love to buy a smart display like this.”

Hm. And there you go. I’ll try to use it as a tablet. If it doesn’t work, its bigger display, more modern underpinnings, and more complete functionality make it a reasonable upgrade over the Nest Hub Max.

I’ve written about my Google Drive experiences already, of course, but what’s happened since then, aside from some Google Workspace extra storage pricing stupidity, is that I’ve transitioned to it fully since the article linked above. That is, all my daily work, from the articles I write for this site to my book work, now occurs in Google Drive. This service is more reliable than OneDrive and offers better sync performance, too, in Windows 11. And that’s nuts. As good, there are no annoyances: Google has never once nagged me to do anything differently, whereas OneDrive just can’t shut the f@#k up. I may be moving to a place in which I literally disable OneDrive in Windows 11. I literally can’t stand it anymore.

The Chromebook/Chrome OS thing isn’t as far along, as I can’t really move to this platform full-time: I write about Windows and Microsoft professionally and I really do prefer Windows to rival platforms regardless. But my shift to Google Drive neatly eliminates the single biggest blocker I have on Chrome OS because it integrates so deeply with the OS. And is the only cloud storage service that works so seamlessly on Chrome OS.

Chrome OS also integrates neatly with the Pixel phones I prefer and that integration is likewise more seamless and reliable than the integration Windows users enjoy (or deal with) with Phone Link. But the recent Chromebook Plus push is what’s really put this platform over the top, I think, for power users and others who previously found Chromebooks to be too cheap or functionally lackluster. So I plan to spend much more time with Chrome OS this coming year than I have in the past, and will explore how or if my other workflows can be duplicated in some way. For whatever it’s worth, as a Windows user, I find Chrome OS more natural and normal, if you will, than I do macOS. I think many of you will as well.

So there you go. It’s going to be an interesting 2024.