What Google gets wrong about hardware
Quick, what's the coolest product Google has ever unveiled? Oh, and software doesn't count.
Right, exactly -- there isn't one. Google's software services are immensely popular and permeate our daily lives. It's hard to imagine the world before Gmail or Google Maps, but on hardware it's usually the same story: a swing and a miss.
Certainly there have been successes. The Chromecast streaming dongle is one of the best products in the category you can buy, and I'd still recommend it today. But for all its virtues as a cheap and efficient video streaming device, the Chromecast isn't something you love like you covet an iPhone 7 or an Amazon Echo. Heck, it's not even really a Kindle.
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Look at the roster of Google hardware: Chromebook Pixel, Nexus Player, OnHub router, Pixel C, Google Glass -- even the products that aren't outright failures are either capable but lacking in some key way or priced too high to have any real impact. And none is a household name.
Even if you extend your query to the extensive lineup of Nexus phones and tablets over the years (so far all made by third-party manufacturers), there isn't a breakout. Some were notable releases and garnered good reviews, but none has really advanced the Nexus brand to a point where it's comparable to the iPhone, Samsung's Galaxy or even second-tier players like HTC and Motorola.
This all may seem rude to point out on the eve of the company's big hardware event, but it's also instructive. It's not like Google's hardware was all terrible. Some of it, such as the excellent Nexus 7 tablet, was arguably best-in-class. So what was the problem?
Something fundamental is amiss with Google's sales pitch as well as its product design philosophy.
Part of it is Google's refusal to openly acknowledge it's a hardware company, at least in part. There's good reason for this: With Android and Chrome OS, Google has depended on hardware partners to carry the platform torch. Even when Google makes a good or potentially superior competitor to what its partners are offering, the product is never backed up by comparable marketing or PR. Whereas Apple and Samsung tend to announce sales records and report units shipped in quarterly reports, Google does not.
But that's not the whole story. Something more fundamental is amiss with Google's sales pitch as well as its product design philosophy. Tuesday's event notwithstanding, Google hardware launches are rarely, if ever, epic keynote unveilings. Quite the contrary: The company typically prefers the efficiency of a blog post for new gadgets, occasionally seeding the announcement to a few news sites. If there is an event, it's usually a more casual affair with virtually no theatrics to speak of.
In short, Google's product launches aren't the least bit cool. There's a lot of information and often genuine enthusiasm for the device, but there's very little in the way of stage-setting (telling potential buyers why they'd want this in the first place) and almost never any drama. Say what you will about Snapchat's Spectacles, but the way Evan Spiegel unveiled them to a select few before the announcement -- literally unveiling them and saying "Boom!" when he did, according to the Wall Street Journal -- garnered exactly the reaction he was looking for, that this was a big deal.
This stolidness and lack of cool also permeates the products themselves. Google's hardware is rarely bad, but it also often lacks that "last mile" of user experience where a gadget transcends itself and becomes cherished. I've owned an iPhone 7 for only a couple of weeks, but already I am starting to understand why Apple prioritized things like the so-called Taptic Engine over the headphone jack. The tick-tick-tick I can feel when I, say, rotate the dials in the Timer app is pleasing in an intangible but very real way, one of a thousand tiny details that Apple has engineered and perfected specifically to trigger a mental reward in my brain.
Taken together, all those rewards add up to a powerful force that shapes my perception of the product. They turn a mere utilitarian device into something more akin to a jewel -- coveted, caressed, missed when it's gone.
Google's hardware efforts have hardly been embarrassments (let's just not talk about the Nexus Q), but looking at the pattern, you feel as if they're being built for the same kinds of people who work for Google: smart, practical, probably an engineer. They work fine -- often incredibly well, in fact -- but they're not something you hold in your hand and think, "I've gotta have this."
That's the bridge Google needs to cross if it truly wants to compete with the likes of Apple. If, as Google's head of Android has teased, we're going to be talking about this event in eight years, Google needs to drop its nerd act and put on a show -- both in the presentation and the product.
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Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
