One of the things that honestly surprised me most the day of the announcement was how polarizing curved glass is in the online community. It’s got a size and a heft reminiscent of the Galaxy line, an aesthetic quality only enhanced by the curved glass edges. The handset feels more like something produced by Samsung than of its Pixel predecessors. The Pixel 6 isn’t a cutting-edge, overclocked spec machine, by any stretch, but it stands as an example of what Google’s ever-impressive software can do when given the proper hardware.įrom the moment you grab the Pixel 6 Pro, it’s clear there’s something different here. It stands in opposition to Google’s spec agnosticism as a testament that great software still requires great hardware. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are, undoubtedly, growing in importance, but camera lenses, displays and processors all still matter. There’s something to the idea, but in its current state, at least, it’s simply not possible to be hardware agnostic. It’s an interesting thesis, to be sure, that Apple, Samsung and the like are essentially wasting their time waging a war of specs. Adding to Google’s troubles is a long-standing insistence that the true breakthroughs are all happening on the software side. And it’s doubly difficult to make a dent when, on the whole, flagship smartphones are all pretty good and continued dominance in the space is largely the result of forward momentum. It’s frankly been strange to see the company struggle to make waves, though entering a field as crowded as smartphones was never going to be easy. The devices have largely felt like, at best, a showcase for some of the cool stuff Google is working on in mobile software and ML and, at worst, a kind of also-ran. But the Pixel line has never had the major hit the company needs to justify the resources spent on the category. Some earlier false starts aside, Google’s mobile hardware ambitions have been - on the whole - more successful. Even a $7.2 billion acquisition of the once-dominant Nokia couldn’t buy the company a place at the table with Apple and Samsung. Take a look a Microsoft’s long-standing mobile phone ambitions. You only get so many Hail Mary passes in consumer electronics.
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