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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

...this had me concerned for a minute, then I read the article and realised that 'Pixel' now means a phone and not a Chromebook. Panic over!

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Yeah, it makes no sense to me for Google to throw away their Nexus brand and all the good will they built up behind it. If the Pixel (phone) was really made by Google, it might make a bit of sense to keep the Pixel branding in the sense that it's manufactured by Google vs Nexus where it's not. But the pixel phone is made by HTC, just like the Nexus phones. To add to the confusion, they already had the Chromebook Pixel (small laptop), the Pixel C (tablet), and now the Google Pixel (phone). I half expect their next device to be the Pixel Potato, given their numbering sequence.

Nexus kinda ran out of numbers, since they already used 7 for the tablet.

Google experimented for a while with weird model numbers like 5X and 6P, but seems to have decided against continuing it. It's the version wars all over again. Who wants to be stuck at 5 and 6 when Apple is at 7, Samsung will soon return with an 8, and Microsoft already played the "we'll skip ahead to 10" card?

Where is SemVer for hardware models?

SemVar is alive and well for hardware, every revision is incompatible with the previous.

Since Google likes to release new phones every time there's a new major version of Android, they might as well match the phone model number with the Android version.

i was hoping they'd continue with the 'nexus 7 (2013)' and 'nexus 7 (2014)' trend. it was concise and easy to remember.

Gah, I dislike that. I even more dislike Apple's "late 2012" stuff. Please give me a specific name that refers to a specific hardware design. Things can get so confusing otherwise, especially when trying to buy something used.

Yes, I know that there are specific model numbers... in tiny print... but if people don't know them or use them it is no help.

I wouldn't be so sure there's no code shared between different versions of chrome.

Which also happens to run the same Android 7.1.

All the other ChromeOS models from Google are no longer on sale.

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