Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Pixel Problem”.
Thanks to kamikodo for sponsoring a portion of this video, so google just wrapped their best quarter ever for pixel sales, due obviously to the pixel 6 and the pixel 6 pro they’re selling very well. But it’s still just starting to address the problem of the pixel overall. Why aren’t there more of them out there, and maybe it’s just me and the phones that i see? Maybe you are different, but there is a pixel problem, so the whole history of the pixel phone to me is interesting, and i love talking about the history of phones, but the pixel one in particular. Bear with me on this analogy seems like it’s a freshman in college.
It’S changing its major every week, one week it’s gon na be a doctor. Next week, it’s gon na be a lawyer. Next week it’s gon na find itself in travel europe. It doesn’t quite know what it wants to be in you know: we get one year, there’s a budget pixel with a great camera. Next year we get mid-range specs and now, with the pixel 6 and 6 pro we are back to the flagship competitor that can compete with the likes of samsung apple and the rest. And, despite all that, history and google’s money, at least to me, there’s a feeling that google is kind of like the underdog in the hardware world, and i think that’s kind of interesting like how does google the company that basically runs the internet, make the phone that Somehow feels like it’s losing the hardware race, i think more importantly, what can google do to fix it, and this is in a series of videos where we take conversations that we have here at the studio and take them to you guys. These are things that we just generally talk about here out of interest and love uh for the space. So when it comes to the pixel six, when i say six, i’m talking about six and six pro google took a giant leap with them uh. I think it was their sort of a hail mary sort of the year when google takes a stand plants their flag and takes control of the narrative of the pixel and that’s super exciting, and that’s exactly what i think a lot of people are hoping. Google was going to do sure the phone still feels in a lot of ways like an experiment, but this year each of the changes that they made feel intentional and not like they were reactionary to what was going on in the market, like google made them for A reason other than well, i guess we got to put out a phone. The biggest reason is tensor, and at least to me that signals that google is in this for the long haul, which, prior to the pixel 6, never seemed clear. They always seem like they had kind of one foot on the exit.
So unless you’ve got an overarching plan, it appears that there would be no reason to switch away from a qualcomm made processor to make your own processor, and there are a few different levels of looking at this uh. One is at the level of the phone itself, of course, having your own hardware and software means you can make more crease of experience, that’s tailored to exactly how you want it to be we’ve seen. Let’S say other manufacturers be pretty successful with that approach, and google was pretty successful at doing that, but with snapdragon, but with tensor.
They can take that whole stack to – i guess the next level, so you can also look at it at like the ai level, and i think this one is the more subtle but like bigger play for google. It’S all about data and just a reminder in case you forgot, google is an advertising company and the best tool advertising company can have is data and one of the best ways to collect that data is through the thing, that’s in our pocket that we are using More hours in a day than we should whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing, a topic for a different video, but it doesn’t change the fact it is true. Google wants your data so what better way to gather and analyze that data than to use their own hardware and deploy it to millions and millions, hopefully of devices uh. It makes the whole process more streamlined and optimized, and please do not misinterpret google wanting your data as your phone is not secure or private, it is randomized, they don’t know who you are. They just know broadly the things that you are doing watching and, more importantly, the things that you are interested in buying tensor is there to make the ai experience better on your phone and google says as much well, they introduced tensor. Most of the presentation was: was all ai, focused and performance and machine learning.
The speed of it like for day-to-day stuff was the point that was surprisingly like left in the background. That’S good for us, because our devices can do things never were possible before and it’s good for google again a happy hazard company. So we take a break from the pixel for a minute to kind of cut through the bs and i’m going to cut through it with a beautifully built japanese steel knife from kamikodo. Now you might think all these are created equal right. They got a blade. They got a handle and they cut stuff, but once you hold something of this quality uh it just straight up feels different. Each knife is individually inspected and comes with a full lifetime guarantee so chop away. These things are nuts, sharp and because they’re so sharp and because they’re so precise, these knives are used by michelin, star chefs all over the world.
So it’s good enough for those people to be good enough. You know for me mostly cutting up grilled cheeses for my kids, so all the steel, if the kamikota uses sources from japanese mills and each blade is crafted using techniques that have been honed and perfected by generations of knife. Smiths and their quality extends to the beautiful heavy duty ash wood box that it comes in to make sure the knifes are stored safely and all that can be transported safely. If you want to check out kamikoto and step up your kitchen setup, uh they’re, actually giving you fifty dollars off your order, which is a pretty nice discount, just use code, john written otherwise, we’ll have all the links down below a processor aside.
Another significant change to the pixel 6 was a whole design philosophy. Google spent a big chunk of the presentation talking about the thought behind the design behind the camera bar and design choices of the six, that’s something that they never really did before. Um design aside the important thing here, at least to me: it showed that google was paying more attention and users like me, have been asking google to create a pixel that felt high-end.
We’Re excited that’s exactly what they did and what we have. So that’s. We’Ve got the phone’s been out for a few months now and in that time i’ve had relatively solid. First, impressions definitely been some software growing pains and updates to address those issues, and certainly nothing has been perfect and your experience might vary from from mine what they did originally with one. Not that great camera sensor was magic, then they updated for pixel 2 and they kept that hardware for a while and it got better and better and better to the point where saying shot on a pixel became synonymous with this picture is going to look dope and They sort of redesigned and rethought the pixel 6 and made the camera a huge feature of the phone with that giant camera bar.
I think the perception was we in for some crazy magic um and we didn’t necessarily get that not saying that’s actually a bad thing. Either the pictures look ridiculously amazing, but coming from a pixel, i think everybody expected to be just heads blown away and probably those are unfair expectations. The camera and all the shots do look gorgeous and beautiful, just not the world’s better from what we had before. I think, like a lot of people were hoping for now.
There are some cool software tricks as well. Things like magic eraser are incredible and to the tech set that have been using. You know photoshop for a while. Maybe doesn’t seem that magical to do this.
On a phone, but for those who aren’t using photoshop daily, aren’t you know video editors? Circling a thing in the background with your finger and seeing it disappear does seem like total magic. So there’s a lot of hardware things and the software that goes along with it to like about the pixel 6 camera experience, even if didn’t blow everyone away. So aside from the camera, the other giant feature is the processor google’s own tensor chip that i talked a lot about earlier to me, this chip is everything that google claimed it would be and again i know other user experiences have been different, but to me, while Google said this was going to do well, it has done well, it’s plenty fast for everyday use. It still feels as fast now as it did on day one, but it also doesn’t feel like speed is the main point of this chip, and i think google made that pretty clearly introduced it um, and i can really feel that when i use the phone, this Is not the fastest phone in the world where it counts? It works and i think that’s a lot of behind the scenes.
Ai processing, even though the overall experience with tensor has mostly been positive, there have definitely been growing pains, there’s been quite a few bugs and issues that are clearly stemming from this being google’s. First attempt some users complain that there are screen glitches when the phone is powered off, which google states are software issue, not hardware. Fortunately, one big problem that almost everyone has me included with the fingerprint sensor. It’S just slow and fails.
Often that is not a deal. Breaker, but to give credit, google shipped a few software updates to address issues, even if they weren’t always on time and for the most part they’re, all relatively fixed, the flickering should be gone now. The cell reception should be better and the fingerprint scanner is, let’s say more usable now that it was before so. The pixel 6 is a solid phone all around yeah.
It’S obviously kind of quirks, but google took a giant leap with the six line and i think it’s going to pay off, especially when we look at the direction google is going with the pixel. The tensor chip tells me that google is serious and this isn’t just a one-off thing and i love to see that chip in other products we’ve seen rumors of a folding pixel for a while. I don’t think we’re actually going to see it or at this point who knows uh, this would again show google a serious about the space if it ever did come out and that they are innovators, not just a cog in the hardware machine i mean it seems, Like now, for eight years, we’ve heard rumors about a pixel watch. Apparently this is supposed to be released long ago, but instead, we’ll probably actually see it this year, and this is going to be a huge piece in google sort of perfecting and finishing the pixel ecosystem. That they’ve been building and the pixel problem of the past at least appears like it’s getting patched. It’S got direction now.
Is it going slow yeah for the trope that even google doesn’t know what the pixel is? Uh is fading. I think now it’s clear that google knows what it wants from its pixel line and it’s just a matter of time before they get there and again for the first time in years. I am excited to see what comes next from google and i hope the direction they started, the pixel 6, the direction they continue with the pixel 7 and beyond. .