The Pixel C was probably never supposed to run Android
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48 days later.
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.
It's better tech all around.
[edit: insertspace]
That's how I use my MBA 11''. XMonad, mutt and friends.
But this one could be better.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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...
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.
I don't know the details, but it sounds like Chromebooks can now run Android apps: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088175?hl=en
Maybe that's only Android apps that have been "ported" and placed in the Chromebook app store though.
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.
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 :(
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.
Deleted for not being a question I guess.
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.
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.
[Source](https://plus.google.com/115981076197658979302/posts/2QXBZ16G...).
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.
Maybe if you use crouton, but it won't have proper permissions, and you'll have to boot ChromeOS first.
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...
"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."
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/apples-99-smart-batte...
1) Apple putting out an aesthetically ugly product
2) The stupidity of not just keeping the phone 1mm thicker and thus having a higher mAh battery in the first place, necessitating this accessory
Google IO 2016 will be interesting.