The Google Phone (Premium)

Oh, Google.

With every generation of Nexus and Pixel handsets, Google has teased that this time, finally, they’ve gotten it right. And they’re doing it again with the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, starting with a marketing wave that’s happening months ahead of their release.

We can debate why Google decided to pre-announce the Pixel 6 family, but I suspect it’s some nexus (see what I did there?) of leaks, falling sales due to a lackluster 2020 lineup, and timing, with Samsung and Apple both poised to announce new smartphone generations ahead of the Pixel 6 release. But the reasons don’t really matter. What matters is that Google is once again shaking up its smartphone business in a major way. And pretending, again, that this is the first time it’s done so.

Google announced its Nexus One handset in January 2010 with a “web meets phone” marketing tagline. In keeping with the open nature of Android itself, the Nexus One was a partnership: HTC created the hardware and T-Mobile marketed it to its wireless customers. It would follow that same trend across multiple generations of devices, with some highs---the Nexus 4 and 5, both of which were based on LG internals, plus the Nexus 5X (LG) and 6P (Huawei)---and some lows, most notably the Motorola-made Nexus 6.

Nexus always made sense to me, as it combined the best of Google with the best of its hardware partners, and those firms obviously had the experience Google needed to get phones into the market in the first place. But by the time the Nexus family gave way to Pixel in 2016, Google was playing a new tune, no doubt because its Nexus efforts had done nothing to shake up the Android market and convince other hardware makers to stop making their own skins and more cohesively take on the iPhone.

The Pixel was then marketed as Google’s “first” smartphone, a description that should have raised some eyebrows in the tech blogging community but didn’t. (And let’s not forget that Google actually owned Motorola’s smartphone business for a while; it’s now owned by Lenovo.)

Google never publicly made this connection, but I did: Where Nexus was marketed much like Microsoft’s now-defunct Signature PC series---a clean OS image on third-party hardware---Pixel was marketed more like Microsoft Surface: Hardware that was designed and made in-house. And that strategy comes with the same problems we see in the PC space: Google is now competing with its own partners.

There’s just one problem: Pixel was a lie. As I noted one year later alongside the launch of the Pixel 2 family, Google had marketed Pixel as “a new phone made by Google,” but the first generation devices---recall there was a bigger XL model too---were made by HTC and LG, not Google. So Pixel was no different from Nexus, it was just marketed differently.

But right after launching Pixel 2, Google acquired HTC’s key smartphone assets, including about 2,000 employees, for $1.1 billion and brought t...