Fascinating story, and explains why the product is so odd and rushed.
It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars, muddle your overall branding/product lines (Nexus vs. Pixel), and compete with your own existing products (Nexus 9)?
Microsoft canceled the Surface Mini at the last minute, because it was clear that WinRT had no future. Once the touchscreen Chrome OS got canceled, the Pixel C should have been too.
Perhaps the question was "Why not?" After all they had the hardware in a state where it could be shipped, so maybe pushing OS updates to make it better was a way forward out of a deadlocked product marketing group.
In a completely unrelated company the Lenovo Intel tablets were a lot like this. They came out too early, Lenvo discounted the hell out of them (with Intel's help) to get them into people's hands, and then it took a year of Android on x86 updates to get them into something resembling a usable product.
I don't think it was very confidence building in the Lenovo tablet brand but I also don't think Google is very invested in the Pixel branding either. Its more a "yeah we have something like that too."
Had you told me that Surface would be driving feature / design decisions at Apple and Google a year ago I would have considered you ill informed :-) but here we are, Apple inventing using a pen type cover with your tablet and Google building "2 in 1" hardware.
It just reinforces my experience with how dynamic technology trends can be.
Why not? Because everytime Google ships a failed product there's one more joke out there about how "Google sucks at making physical products". And it also reinforces that idea with each new product launch, as people stop being excited about a "new Google product", which they "know" it will fail.
Remember that whole thing about "oh, I wonder when Google is going to kill this new service" after the Reader debacle? Yeah, it's like that.
With Apple it's the other way around. Because it has reinforced the idea that each new product they launch will sell in millions in the first month, now everyone expects Apple to sell millions of whatever new product they launch - even if they don't like it personally (such as the Apple Watch).
It's okay to experiment. For instance, maybe the Chromecast seems like genius idea in hindsight, but perhaps when they were first working on it they thought maybe it will succeed maybe it won't.
However, some products are just dumb - like a $300 Google TV, or a $300 device that only streams music from your phone, or the n-th attempt to take the phone/tablet Android interface and try to put it on a notebook-like device.
Google should've known better by now that that doesn't work, and not just because it failed with Android, but it also failed with Windows 8. I'm actually very much in favor of Android on PCs, but they need to actually optimize it for PCs because they push it like that.
Perhaps there were contracts with manufacturers that would have been more expensive to back out of at the last minute. It's also hugely demoralizing to a team to work on something for a couple years and then see it never ship because of mismanagement many levels above them. They probably ran the numbers and saw it was cheaper to pay X million to ship a shoddy device vs. a greater Y million to back out of contracts, perhaps lose team members in frustration, etc.
See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48 days later.
Speaking as a hardware engineer, I can't see it being more expensive to pay a breakup fee than to ship a product. Shippings products of that scale takes many people across many different organizations working together. There is a lot of pressure involved and many late nights. Hardware projects gets canceled all the time. People on the team would rather it get canceled than do all the extra work to see it ship and not sell. No one wants to work on a dud.
These are all good points. Google clearly wants to build and maintain an internal hardware development team, and it might be easier to ship this not-ideal device rather than risk a mass exodus of the hardware team they've been building for years.
The dichotomy between (Android phones/tablets->Nexus->outside OEMs) and (CrOS laptops/tablet->Pixel->internal) is very odd though, and I wonder how confident the Pixel team is in their place at Google. Chrome OS is finding success, but the future still looks like it'll be Android.
As for the Pixel C specifically, the problems are all in the software--maybe rather than making another Nexus tablet for Android N, they'll build it for the Pixel C.
I had the feeling several times at MSFT that sometimes projects go all the way to completion for the sanity of the team.
Kin looks like an example of this. The Kin team were mostly from the SideKick acquisition and they worked really hard on it. Kin had the social angle and it would have been interesting if it had sold to the target audience (teenagers). WP7 picked up on the social aspects in Kin and that was probably final blow to it as a product (before it even shippet). It was ahead of it's time and pitched at completely the wrong price point.
Huh? In the AMA they hinted that the thing can boot other OSes.
Whatever the convergence plan is, Pixel C is the test hardware. The bootloader bits are in the ChromeOS tree. It uses Coreboot.
It's a ChromeOS device and I suspect it's future will include a return to its roots.
ARC in Chrome will be a better way forward for Android than trying to fix all of Android's insidious problems on the "desktop" and making mobile Chrome more fully featured. It just seems painfully obvious that Chrome is going to win.
This (well, *BSD) is what I'm interested in. It'll be interesting to hear from the Linux/BSD pioneers what the networking, gfx, and touchscreen support are.
> It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars, muddle your overall branding/product lines (Nexus vs. Pixel), and compete with your own existing products (Nexus 9)?
From the standpoint of the whole company it doesn't make much sense.
From the standpoint of an individual manager responsible for the product and his CV, however...
Google (Alphabet?) mostly does "fail fast", where they are funding a plethora of products in a myriad of different fields. So it's not surprising that some products appear to be half-baked. So they threw this one out there. If it gets traction, then fine. If it doesn't, it will be terminated quite quickly.
This is a strategy adopted by many other companies. It's the antithesis of the oft quoted Steve Jobs philosophy:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
Why can't Android run a full blown Chrome browser able to run the web versions of Docs and Sheets?
I need a cheap and lightweight computer with a keyboard for work traveling and personal use. I now use an iPad with a logitech bluetooth keyboard, but it is not ideal. The main problem is that it cannot run the full version of Google Sheets (with filters), which I need for work. There are many other problems, as iOS does not support keyboards well (even though it is improving).
Furthermore, I now own an Android smartphone, which I like, thus an Android tablet with a keyboard would be ideal.
The Pixel C seemed perfect. The keyboard is very nice and it runs Android. I thought that, being a Google product, it would be able to run the web versions of Google Docs and Sheets. But it can't.
The alternative is a Chromebook. But I would like to run some Android apps which I already own. A computer that can only run a browser is too limited.
This brings me to my question: why can't an Android tablet with 2GB of RAM run a full Chrome experience? If it could, the pixel would be much better than a Chromebook, at least for me.
As you mention, just a few apps have been ported. It seems quite experimental and it also seems that at Google the tide now flows the other way. Are we heading towards the inclusion of Chrome to Android?
My question is: what prevents including a full featured Chrome browser in Android devices with more than 2GB of RAM? If Google wants to position Android as a productivity OS, Android should at least support the full versions of Google's productivity tools, and today this means supporting the web versions.
The Asus Chromebook Flip works great as a ChromeOS 'tablet' - just assuming that you use it in laptop mode 90% and tablet 10% of the time.
Trying to use ChromeOS 90% of the time in tablet mode just isnt going to work
Should of gone with a slimmed down Pixel with a flip or slide keyboard (with trackpad) - that wold of been awesome and actually make sense
Pixel C doesnt work
Anyone whose tried to use Android as a laptop replacement - with keyboard etc.. knows the pain - Android doesn't work as a 'work' device/laptop - wish it would but it currently just doesnt :(
What are the main pain points of using android with a keyboard? People have mentioned not having split screen, however IOs just got that a fee months ago, and people used it with keyboards Lal the time before that.
Mostly slow application switching on my case. It's significantly better than on iPad due to OS having better keyboard support (yes, even the Pro keyboard is awful to use), but it doesn't really compare to proper desktops.
I think this article is very fair and probably on the money. The Pixel C is a tablet I really, really want to like but the fact that Android is very ill suited to being a tablet OS plus the fact that the keyboard connects via bluetooth (and, as they always do, suffers from input issues as most reviewers have pointed out) is just a bad idea.
One thing to point out however is this article and many others continue to say how odd it is for the Pixel team to develop Android hardware but I think many forget that Google positions Pixel hardware as hardware designed and manufactured in-house versus Nexus which has hardware designed and manufactured through partners. The Pixel C did a reddit AMA just two days ago and one of the answers made this distinction https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3w3x7p/hi_im_andrew_h...
Though I'll admit that distinction isn't always black and white considering things like the Nexus Player.
It's a damn shame, as I have the Pixel C for review purposes and really want to like it. Android does feel well suited to run on the device, but the software support for heavy lifting (again, proper split-windowing) just isn't there. It's disappointing, though Google claims that it's actually working on it.
It is not just a claim, you can already see a lot of work on that in AOSP.
Obviously it was not ready for M, but I would not be surprised to see it announced with N.
If Google starts mandating better adaptative layouting for its own applications, we could have a really nice tablet experience relatively soon.
About the keyboard being hidden behind a developer flag - actually it looks like the keyboard that pops up when using the ChromeOS accessibility options. Handy when interacting with the device from a distance with only a pointing device.
Since it is Core boot and all open source drivers, I imagine it won't be hard. However given it's just started shipping, I don't think anybody have much experience with it yet.
It is interesting how a community that's probably installed their own software on their hardware for the last 20 years, suddently care so much about if it ships with one or another open source operating system.
Coreboot isn't the issue. You need a payload for Coreboot. For x86 architecture, people use Seabios, but that won't work with the Pixel C, because it's ARM based.
Some people suggest you might be able to get Tianocore working, but I've no experience with that (I'm running Xubuntu on a modified HP Chromebook 14). ArchLinux has a Samsung Chromebook guide - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Samsung_Chromebook_(ARM.... So it might still be possible with a lot of effort.
Incidentally about your closing comment - when PCs were towers it was a simpler matter to install your own operating system and make sure you choose compatible parts. It becomes a lot more difficult when they're pre-packaged laptops - you can't really build one yourself. Google doesn't want you to switch away from ChromeOS because their business model centres around their apps (Google Drive, etc.) and ads for their searches. So that's why people have started caring about whether it can run a certain OS easily.
He takes a while to address/spin Apple debacles. Maybe there'll be something on Monday.
I've found it more interesting that Gruber has been directly critical of Apple lately. When even Gruber says "If this hasn’t set off alarm bells within Apple, something is very wrong", then something is very very wrong:
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/12/01/sketch-leaves-ma...
You have to read carefully to find critical opinions on his blog.
Another one where he had to admit the sneaky choice of a 16 to 64gb storage (for obvious $$ reasons).
"But I don’t understand why the entry level storage tier remained at a meager 16 GB. That seems downright punitive given how big panoramic photos and slo-mo HD videos are, and it sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at the three storage tiers together: 32/64/128 looks natural; 16/64/128 looks like a mistake. The original iPhone, seven years and eight product generations ago, had an 8 GB storage tier. The entry-level iPhones 6 are 50 times faster than that original iPhone, but have only twice the storage capacity. That’s just wrong. This is the single-most disappointing aspect of the new phones."
It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars, muddle your overall branding/product lines (Nexus vs. Pixel), and compete with your own existing products (Nexus 9)?
Microsoft canceled the Surface Mini at the last minute, because it was clear that WinRT had no future. Once the touchscreen Chrome OS got canceled, the Pixel C should have been too.