Problems Persist in the Pixel Ecosystem (Premium)

I love Pixel and everything it stands for, but Google still has a ways to go before it can match the quality of the Apple ecosystem. This makes me a bit nervous because we’ve been down this road before, and Google now faces the same challenges that have dogged other would-be ecosystem providers like Microsoft and Samsung. And given Google’s flighty reputation, I’m further worried they’ll just pull the plug at some point and give up.

I started writing this ahead of publishing my Pixel 8 Pro review, but I’ve held off publishing it for a few weeks, in part because I don’t want this to come off as overly negative. I hope it’s clear that I want Pixel to succeed. And that I’ve invested a lot in Pixel recently: In addition to buying my Pixel 8 Pro—after having purchased almost every Pixel phone that Google’s made—I leaned heavily into the Pixel ecosystem in recent months.

More specifically, I’ve been using the Pixel 8 Pro alongside a Pixel Watch 2, a Pixel Tablet, and Pixel Buds Pro earbuds, and I’ve amped up my Chromebook usage. (Google no longer makes its own Chromebook, so I alternated between an HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook Plus and an IdeaPad Flex 5i I reviewed and then shipped back to Lenovo before leaving for Mexico.) I’ve also somewhat coincidentally escalated my use of Google services, most notably by moving from OneDrive to Google Drive—via a 2 TB Google One subscription—for my day-to-day work. (I was already using many Google services, like Gmail, Maps, and Google Photos, heavily.)

My Pixel experiences aren’t entirely negative. But I also wish I had better news. The relative success and quality of these products and services vary quite a bit, and the resulting mishmash undermines the value of the broader ecosystem.

As noted in my review, the Pixel 8 Pro is a terrific smartphone and perhaps the first Pixel with no real downsides or issues. And that reality has been driven home in dramatic fashion by my experiences with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra I’ve been using here in Mexico for a coming review. Samsung is so irritating. It counters every useful change it makes to Android with 4 to 5 frustrations, and I am pining to return to the Pixel, which is much lighter in my hand and offers a cleaner and more coherent user experience. I miss it every day.

If only the other Pixel devices were this good.

But they aren’t. Instead, each falls short in key ways, much like earlier Pixel phones often did, and I can’t imagine that Google or its fans will give these products 8 or 10 years to catch up, as the phones required. The collective disappointment of using these devices runs contrary to the “better together” promise of any ecosystem, where good experiences with one product can lead customers further into the fold with complementary hardware devices and services. Even something as simple as two devices with matching color schemes can be desirable, but the real value is when using two or more devices/services together feels more advantageous than the sum of the parts.

Put another way, when ecosystems are successful, customers stop thinking about alternatives. They stop worrying about ideals like openness and portability, and they simply enjoy the warm, soothing joy of an interconnected system that just works. Ask any Apple fan. Or, don’t, they’ll probably just tell you about it regardless. But when ecosystems fail users, they ask questions, do research, and experiment with alternatives. And then they move on.

I want Pixel to succeed. Not just the phones, but the whole enchilada. And I want Apple to have viable competition that offers similar value across a wide range of products and services. I want for there to be choice, in other words, but also rough equality where the alternatives to Apple don’t require compromise.

The problems with delivering on such a thing are many. And Pixel today offers what I can only describe as a second-class ecosystem that requires its fans to compromise. Google’s unique corporate culture probably plays a role in this. As does its reliance on partners to fill in the gaps, a problem for any company seeking to provide an alternative to Apple’s monoculture. But Google, like Microsoft and Samsung, is unable—not unwilling, just unable—to pull the pin on Apple’s go-it-alone strategy for themselves. Where Apple plows forward with a Terminator-like determination, all Google, Samsung, and Microsoft can do is dabble. Because in the end, they are reliant on others. And Apple, largely, is not.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Apple’s ecosystem successes are the culmination of earlier market defeats, lessons learned, and the corporate culture that evolved as a result. It started with Steve Jobs, obviously, and it continues almost maniacally under Tim Cook, despite him vowing that he would never make decisions based on what his predecessor would do. Yes, Cook has done his own thing at the product offering level. But from a broad strategy perspective, nothing has changed. Why would it? This strategy has worked and it keeps working.

For Apple, at least. But there is a big difference between being Steve Jobs and acting like Steve Jobs. Jobs was unique, and he would step boldly over lines that most others would not, and that included screwing over those who supported him and Apple the most, whether it was literal partners or independent software developers who created things Jobs and Apple stole. And now Apple is unique. Its corporate culture can’t be taught because it can’t be learned or emulated by others successfully. In Apple’s experience, the world was once allied against it, and now there is only one path forward: Unilaterally.

But Apple isn’t everything. What does the rest of the world—about 50 percent of people in the U.S. and over 70 percent worldwide—have that in any way emulates the ecosystem that Apple provides?

Not much.

Samsung is the world’s biggest and most successful maker of Android smartphones by far. And it has built its Galaxy ecosystem around those phones, with its own complementary and customized devices, software, and services. And there are Samsung people out there, of course there are, people who associate with the Galaxy or Samsung brands and buy Samsung earbuds, tablets, and other Samsung products and services because their positive experiences have led to brand loyalty.

But Samsung’s success hinges on a strategy that I find deranged. It partners and competes with Google, the company that makes the Android platform on which it depends. It undercuts the user experience by building its own interfaces on top of Google’s, by duplicating Google’s apps and services, and by overloading its devices with a collection of crapware and bloatware that would be impressive if it wasn’t all so depressing and hostile. The Galaxy ecosystem isn’t just a compromise, it’s an affront, and as a user, one needs to perform a lot of mental gymnastics to ignore its bad behaviors. I can’t do it. I hate almost all of it.

Which is too bad, as the Pixel ecosystem today is in some ways even worse. And for entirely different reasons.

Google could fix this, and still may. The jump in quality that I see in the Pixel 8 series phones is an object lesson in meeting real user needs without compromise, and I hope this is a lesson the rest of the Pixel product teams take to heart. It’s not enough to be less good and less expensive than the competition, we have companies like Amazon for that. The value, the sweet spot, comes when a product is magically better than its competition and, somehow, less expensive too.

My heart breaks a little bit when I think about the Pixel Tablet, Pixel Watch 2, and Pixel Buds, products that in many ways come quite close to the related experiences we find on the Apple side of the fence. But each fails, sometimes subtly, sometimes profoundly, to live up to the quality we get from the overlords in Cupertino. And so all I can do is point out how that is so. And hope that Google not only keeps going, but also improves each product enough to warrant another try.

I’ve been reviewing hardware for 25 years now, and there are all kinds of ways one can evaluate these products. You can compare them to their competitors, of course. But you can also compare them to their predecessors, when possible. If you miss anything from a competitor or predecessor, the new product is at least a partial failure, and if you miss using the new product when you leave it behind, it is at least a partial success.

The Pixel 8 Pro scores big in these comparisons. As noted, I miss it now that I’m using a Galaxy S24 Ultra, and I cannot wait to switch back. Likewise, I brought my iPhone 15 Pro Max to Mexico as well, and using it from time to time here hasn’t triggered a single regret. The iPhone is wonderful, for sure. I prefer the Pixel.

The Pixel Tablet is a new device, so all I can fairly compare it with is my current iPad, an iPad Air, plus my years of experience using many other iPads. I’ve owned two Apple Watches and the original Pixel Watch, plus numerous other smartwatches and fitness trackers, and so that informs my Pixel Watch 2 opinions. And I’ve owned more earbuds and headphones than I can count, including several high-quality Bose models and, perhaps as important, various Pixel Buds versions. So there’s my context for Pixel Buds Pro.

And I don’t know. I want to love each of them, and I just don’t.

I’ll start with the freebie: I got a Pixel Watch 2 for free when I purchased the Pixel 8 Pro thanks to a Google promotion. Had that not been the case, I would have returned it. As with the Apple Watch Series 8 I used for many months, you have to charge its battery every single day. But I got used to that with both devices, I developed a schedule where doing so wasn’t particularly disruptive. And it’s not all bad, of course: The Pixel Watch 2 offers a simpler and superior user experience to that Apple device. But it’s also too much for my needs, too big. It doesn’t utilize my phone’s nighttime routines, which makes zero sense, so I have to manually put it into Bedtime mode each night, and when I forget, it’s like a spotlight in the otherwise dark bedroom that wakes me up as I move around. Then I have to manually disable this mode when I get up. That’s not smart, it’s stupid.

Worse, the dial on the side presses in when I lean on a table or other surface, as I often do, initiating a reboot. I’ve rebooted the watch too many times to count, I do it in the elevator here in our building all the time, and it takes agonizing minutes to reboot.

Even worse still, Pixel Watch 2 is an unreliable, buggy mess. I’ve had to factory reset it twice since we got to Mexico, and I wonder how much worse it would be if it wasn’t continually rebooting accidentally. I hate how it interacts with phone notifications, I hate the sounds it makes, and I hate that about once every three times I look at it, it’s on some screen that is not the time. For some reason. I don’t get it.

And I will stop using it. I brought my Fitbit Charge 5 here to Mexico specifically because I didn’t think I could make it through the entire trip without giving up. I’ve avoided that so far, but I also have my eye on an interesting coming wearable, the Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 Pro—yes, a Samsung product, God damn it—that I think will better straddle the line between full-bore smartwatches and more traditional Fitbit-style trackers. We’ll see.

At least the Pixel Watch 2 was free (to me). I spent real money on the Pixel Tablet and Pixel Buds Pro.

Of these three devices, the Pixel Tablet hurts the most because I so badly want to move off the iPad. But it’s just not in the same league. Not so much from a hardware quality perspective—the Pixel Tablet looks and feels premium, and not anything like a low-rent Amazon tablet—but rather from a design perspective. I appreciate that Google wanted to differentiate this device, but in doing so, it compromised those features I care about most in a tablet.

The most obvious issue is its 16:10 display, which is too tall and thin in portrait mode. I guess you can get used to anything if you do it enough, and I guess I could live with this if I lived in a world that didn’t have iPads with 4:3 aspect ratios that look correct in any orientation. But Google was for some reason more concerned with side-by-side apps, I guess, than it was in portrait mode, and that is this device’s Achilles Heel. To determine this, I brought my iPad Air to Mexico, though I hadn’t used it until last night. And when I did, I realized I could never go back to the Pixel Tablet. That 16:10 display is a fatal design mistake.

It’s also not the only mistake. To further differentiate the Pixel Tablet, Google made it a hybrid tablet and smart display, and it is forcing customers to buy the charging dock that turns it into a smart display along with the device. This decision doesn’t just unnecessarily raise the price, it compromises the Pixel Tablet in ways I didn’t anticipate.

Consider the Pixel Tablet on its charging dock. The recessed power button and volume buttons are on the top right of the device, the front-facing camera is in the top middle, and the USB-C charging port, now superfluous, is on the left. Fine.

But when I pick up the Pixel Tablet to read on it, as I do every single day, I would normally position it such that the USB port is on the bottom because doing so with an iPad positions the power and volume buttons in logical places. But in this configuration, the Pixel Tablet power button—which is already hard enough to press—is on the top left, an awkward position for this right-hander. Worse, its integrated fingerprint reader is likewise difficult to use with the ridiculous hard-shelled Pixel Tablet Case I regret also buying or the third-party case I later replaced it with. Plus, I had to enroll my left index finger too.

The alternative, of course, is to flip the thing around so that the USB port is on the top in portrait mode. Dumb, but I can handle that. But in this orientation, the power button and its fingerprint reader are on the bottom right, and it’s a toss-up whether this is more or less awkward to use than the original configuration. Whatever: With my iPad Air, the power button (and its integrated fingerprint reader) is in the correct, easy-to-use position (upper-right top), as is the USB port (bottom middle) in portrait mode. Because the iPad, go figure, is a tablet. Not a hybrid that’s a better smart display than a tablet.

There’s more. Because Google needs the Pixel Tablet to connect magnetically to the charging stand I do not want, its first- and third-party cases are all compromised too. This one is difficult to describe, but consider an iPad case, where you open it like a book, from left to right, when you use the device. This is natural and intuitive.

Because of the awkward Pixel Tablet design, cases flip open from right to left when held normally (USB port on the bottom).

So you literally have to hold it upside down (USB port on the top, power/fingerprint on the bottom right) to use it like a human being. And then the buttons are all wrong. It’s weird and stupid and I hate it.

I almost brought the charging stand here so I could leave the thing in Mexico, where it would be used only as a smart display. But I would prefer that at home, and I may end up replacing our aging Lenovo smart display with this if I can find a suitable replacement, or, obviously, just go back to the iPad. I want a pure Pixel tablet, not this thing. And I want it to work normally in portrait mode, like a real tablet, and to have a square 4:3 display or similar. This is the basics, folks. The Pixel Tablet is too much of the wrong thing and too little of the right thing.

And that brings me to Pixel Buds Pro.

Yes, I want to love these earbuds. I won’t ding them for not fitting well in my ears, that’s a problem that can undermine any earbuds because our ears are all different and this is a hard computer science problem. I also can’t blame them because the third-party ear tips I bought to solve this problem don’t solve this problem. This is no one’s fault.

And there are things I do like. The spatial audio capabilities are terrific, as its seamless ability to switch between two devices—for me, the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Tablet—on the fly. Really neat. I love how small they are, and how small their charging case is. There are fun colors.

But its active noise-canceling (ANC) functionality is so lackluster it may as well be passive. And its conversation detection feature is beyond worthless because it often doesn’t work: I can’t count the number of times my wife has walked up to me, spoken, and not triggered it. And yet when I’m at the gym, other people talking nearby trigger this feature, and my quiet is invaded by the pounding noise around me. Hell, I constantly trigger it as I talk to myself when I work. In the end, I had to disable this feature.

Put simply, these earbuds are worthless to me: They let in too much noise, conversation detection doesn’t work, and they fall out of my ears too easily. Three strikes, you’re out.

And that’s sadly my takeaway, too. Three Pixel devices—Pixel Tablet, Pixel Watch 2, Pixel Buds Pro—and three strikes. Three devices with too many compromises and design mistakes. Three devices that emulate something on the Apple side … but not really. Three swings, three misses. How many tries can I give them? How much money do I spend? What’s fair?

I really don’t know.