Google’s Biggest Pixel Failure Was Not Unit Sales (Premium)

As you may have heard, Google only sold 3.9 million Pixel handsets in all of 2017. But the erstwhile hardware maker has a bigger problem than that. Its flagship phone, the Pixel 2 XL, was one of the most unreliable devices ever released to the public.

This is a problem because Google is trying to establish its hardware credibility in order to more effectively compete against Apple. Suffice to say that it has failed miserably: No one with experience with both devices, like me, would ever hold up the Pixel 2 XL as a viable competitor to Apple's excellent iPhone X.

But there is an interesting response I routinely get from Pixel 2 XL owners: Their devices are just fine, thank you very much. So what am I always complaining about?

If this sounds familiar, you've been paying attention. This was the same response I got from Surface users over a year of complaining about Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 reliability issues. Some owners of those PCs simply didn't understand why I kept carrying on about the issues since they weren't seeing them with their own hardware.

Here's the thing. While I certainly do have my own opinions about things, I don't base them purely on anecdotal experiences. As a reviewer, a reporter, and an analyst, I must also take into account what the wider world is saying too. My opinion counts, sure. But only so much.

With Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, the reality of the situation was clear: There were far too many reports of problems, and I had insider information, which expanded greatly over time, that proved there were endemic reliability issues with those PCs. That Consumer Reports' own reader data later bore that out is semi-meaningless to me, though I hope it proves the point to my own readers. I already knew that those devices were failing at an alarmingly high rate, and that Microsoft knew this too and was covering it up.

The issues with the Pixel 2 XL are tracking in a similar manner to those of Surface Book and Surface Pro 4. That is, the problems are almost comically numerous, they impact a wide range of users, and they clearly represent an endemic problem. Something is wrong with the Pixel 2 XL.

That some readers might not have noticed or experienced any problems with their own Pixel 2 XL handsets doesn't change that fact. (Some Surface Book and many Surface Pro 4 users likewise claim to have had no issues too.) The tricky part here, and this is common to both Pixel and Surface, is that these problems are sporadic across the devices in the market. Some phones will have one of the issues, some will have several, and some will apparently have none. The unpredictability of the unreliability, if you will, is part of the problem. It makes troubleshooting difficult.

Before Google can even pretend to compete with the iPhone, before tech bloggers can write yet another story about how "this year, Google is finally getting serious about competing with iPhone," the firm needs to right this ship and demo...