Pixel is a Lie (Premium)

A year ago, Google announced that it would finally make its own smartphones. And the press ate it up.

There’s just one problem. Pixel is a lie.

The original Pixel—which was really two different phones, the Pixel and XL—was introduced as “a new phone made by Google,” a statement, which, despite its short length, is wrong on a number of levels.

Like all other consumer electronics, Pixels are “made”—e.g. manufactured—in China by companies not named Google. Like the Nexus products they displaced, Pixels are really just slightly altered versions of handsets that were first “made”—e.g. designed and created—by actual smartphone makers not named Google. Companies like HTC and LG.

This is particularly obvious with the second-generation Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, in which a few components and the devices’ fascias have been swapped with pieces that Google only partially designed. We know this because Google announced that it will pay $1.1 billion to acquire HTC’s key smartphone assets. Included in this acquisition is about 2,000 HTC employees, among them the team that designed the Pixel 2.

To be clear, this is not semantics. This is not petty quibbling over language, or whether the important part of a product is its design (perhaps in California) or its manufacturing (always in China). This is about Google selling the same story year after year, and about gullible press and bloggers just eating it up. And then spreading it, without question.

And it bothers me. It should bother you as well.

The thing is, Google has long worked with handset partners to create clean Android phones that showed off the best of its mobile platforms. These phones, called Nexus, were somewhat analogous to Microsoft’s Signature PC program because the company took hardware made elsewhere, cleaned it up, and showed it off in an attempt to be aspirational. I’m sure it hoped that at least some Android handset makers would follow suit.

That never really happened. Just as it never really happened in the PC world. But Microsoft at least had the class to actually make its own hardware.

That is, Microsoft now does make its own Surface-branded hardware, meaning that it designs and creates these products itself. (Yes, they are manufactured in China and elsewhere, like all other consumer electronics products.) Today’s Surface lineup is truly aspirational and deserving of its premium pricing. These are unique products, and they are not based on hardware that was really made and sold separately by a partner.

If only Pixel was that good. If only it was as good as the Nexus lineup it replaced.

That last bit really hurts, too. I really liked the Nexus phones for the most part, though Google’s pricing structure dabbling, and some bad component decisions, meant that the devices ended up like the Star Trek movies, where only every other one of them was any good.

Many still hail the original Nexus 5 as a high-water mark for the series, for example, but the terrible (and Motorola-based) Nexus 6 was a disaster. The next year, Nexus got back on the high value train with the excellent Nexus 5X and 6P. And it seemed like the shackles were off.

But then Pixel happened.

Hailed, again, as something different, Pixel is just more of the same. It is a Nexus in Pixel branding, if you will, a set of phones made by Google’s partners, but with a few minor changes, and sold with a Google logo. Worse, Google has rejected the value pricing of the Nexus 5X and 6P in both Pixel generations so far, and is now taking on Samsung and Apple. As I’ve noted previously, this is a huge mistake: You have to earn the right to compete at that level.

The first Pixel generation was widely panned for its bland design, which was overtly copied from the iPhone. For the second generation devices, Google switched partners on the larger XL at the last minute, so only the smaller device still looks like an iPhone. The larger one looks like a Frankenstein Panda, I guess. But aside from looks, the phones are really just HTC and LG designs, respectively. They are what Google in the past would have called Nexus handsets. The only Googly thing about these devices is their quirky color names.

In purchasing HTC’s most key smartphone assets, Google is signaling, anew, that is finally getting serious about hardware. It is selling the same story all over again, and you can expect its compliant followers in the press and blogosphere to tell the same old story, yet again. Here’s Google. Finally getting serious about taking on the iPhone.

Spare me.

Google did briefly make its own smartphones, by the way. Many seem to have forgotten this, but the firm purchased Motorola’s smartphone business in 2012 for an astonishing $12.5 billion. And then sold it off, minus some intellectual property, for just $2.9 billion less than two years later.

Aside from being able to write a book called “How to turn a $12.5 billion investment into $2.9 billion in cold, hard cash,” Google’s time running an actual smartphone company appears to have been largely wasted on the company. And it’s unclear if Motorola, now part of Lenovo and struggling, will ever recover from the experience.

But hey. At least Google is finally getting serious about hardware. Finally getting serious about taking on the iPhone.

That’s the story, anyway. And it will be the story next year when we do it all over again.