Thinking About Google’s Smartphone Problems (Premium)

Google’s smartphone problems are easy to identify and hard to fix: They’re too unreliable, too expensive, and too hard to obtain. This business, which was built to rival Apple’s iPhone, is nothing short of a failure, despite its reputation for computational and photographic excellence.

Sound familiar? It should: I’ve been harping on two of those three issues ever since Google moved from the Nexus brand to Pixel, and about all three of those issue for the past two generations of Pixel handsets.

But now, with a somewhat stunning admission from Google, others are finally starting to wake up to the failed realities of Pixel. And are starting to question whether Google should even be in this business in the first place.

I believe, and strongly, that Google needs to make its own smartphones. But the Nexus lineup satisfied this need, and the last Nexus products---the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X---were wonderful in ways that no Pixel has been since. This truth is what has weighed so heavily on me as Google moved on to the Pixel Lie, as I called it, raised prices, and then proceeded to experience self-inflicted Surfacegate levels of reliability problems over two generations of handsets.

So, let’s go back in time and remember what was so great about the last Nexus, which was released in late 2015. At that time, Google’s flagship handset, the Nexus 6P, started at just $500 for a 32 GB configuration, and you could upgrade to 64 GB for just $50 more; a fully-loaded, maxed-out Nexus 6P with 128 GB of storage came out to just $650. Apple’s flagship, the iPhone 6S Plus, was fully $300 more expensive. $300 more.

That the Nexus 6P was better than the iPhone in some key areas, most obviously its best-in-market camera, was the icing on the cake. It was the “sweet spot” in flagship smartphones, as I wrote at the time.

A year later, Google released the first Pixel-branded handsets. And the Pixel XL that replaced the Nexus 6P was an affront: The base price, again for a 32 GB configuration, had jumped by $270 to $770, completely erasing the lineup’s pricing advantage over iPhone, given that a comparable iPhone 7 Plus was the same price. That it was blandly styled---remember, the original Pixels were obvious iPhone clones from a look and feel perspective---would have been acceptable at the Nexus pricing levels. But not at iPhone prices.

And then Pixel 2/2 XL and 3/3 XL happened, bringing with them an entirely new problem: Reliability fell through the floor with both product lines. So not only were they too expensive, and for the most part blandly (or, in the case of the Pixel 3 XL, bizarrely) styled, but now they were unreliable too. It’s no wonder they haven’t sold well.

And they have not sold well. Not at all.

The Pixel 2 lineup was one of 2017’s high-profile failures. Google sold only 1.7 million units in 2017, good for .26 percent marketshare. Not 26 percent. Point two six. (Nokia sold 4.4 million handsets in the ...