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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Classic Google: Clicks the "Try in Gemini" button from the Gemini 4 page, gets a page that defaults to Gemini 3.6, with no option to try Gemini 4 without upgrading.

If they don't want to make it available even for small tests for free, that's fine, but then don't put a button suggesting I can try it without qualifying it...

EDIT: It's actually worse: The page then shows "Look what you can do with Gemini 4" and a "Let's go" button that leads to a bunch of links to examples, all with enticing pictures. Except if I click on them I get a box stat strongly suggests it'll run with Gemini 4, except the dropdown shows "Flash" and if you click on it, it shows as Gemini 3.6 again, and if you run it, the results unsurprisingly end up looking nothing like their pictures.

I don't know if that page was built by humans or AI, but clearly nobody tested it properly.

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Ha, same experience here. It opened my Gemini and gave me images like “Design a terrarium with Gemini 4” - proceeds to pick 3.1 Pro from the picker because 4 just doesn’t exist in the dropdown. Typical Google.

I really can’t believe how bad the Gemini experience is. I have personal paid workspace account, and meant to have some better AI Google features I think.

So, I connected my Gmail to Gemini. 3.6 Flash kept telling me it doesn’t have any Gmail connnection, and then proceeded to hallucinate instructions for me to enable it, all bogus. At least 3.1 Pro realized that my Gmail is connected and then searched.

I have given up on even trying. Last time I checked, I could trivially get better integration to Google Docs from Claude than from the Gemini chat box in Google Docs. Maybe that's changed, but given the usability issues I run into and how smoothly it goes with every other AI provider, it feels like a waste of time to even check. They'll probably remove or break any functionality I start depending on anyway.

I spent like 40 minutes trying to figure out how to sign up and try Gemini 4. I am a GCP user; it is so convoluted to do a simple sign-up.

I have $6 free credits from Google. The hoops you have to jump through are insane. $200 free credits from Anthropic are stupid simple to use. I know which one I’m using…

> I don't know if that page was built by humans or AI, but clearly nobody tested it properly.

...or Gemini 4 is being gradually rolled out and is not available to everyone all at once.

Sounds like no one tested the rollout plan properly then.

Unfortunately, no company can afford entire data centers for staging, and sometimes you hit an unexpected snag while scaling up tht delays the rollout beyond the initial estimate.

You don't need entire data centers for staging to achieve that.

Sure, most all major changes get gradually rolled out.

But you don’t create a broken or confusing experience for the people who haven’t been added to the rollout group yet.

> But you don’t create a broken or confusing experience for the people who haven’t been added to the rollout group yet.

It's an unfortunate downside to conflicting requirements for release-engineering and marketing urgency. In a perfect world, rollout would go from 0-100% instantly, coinciding with the release of marketing material.

In the real world, the trade-offs are either the marketing lands first for some/most people, or delaying marketing is until after rollout reaches, 100%, at which point you're scooped by tech blogs, Twitter AI influencers, and regular media, and immediately lose framing the release from the jump.

All you'd need to do would be to make some of the messaging conditional. The page already restricts the dropdown to the older models when Gemini 4 is not accessible so all the information is already client side and they could grey out a box and display a message.

It is just sheer incompetence that this isn't near the top of their QA checklist.

Heck, even just a message saying it may not be available for all users yet would go a long way. Instead the way it currently works a lot of people will think they're testing Gemini 4 while they're in fact using Gemini 3.6 Flash and getting awful results.

> All you'd need to do would be to make some of the messaging conditional.

Ah, that's so simple and elegant since the state is in one place -the page - and not in multiple sub-systems and products! Thank you for clearing that up.

There is no "or" there. If they are rolling it out gradually, then they failed to test that the page handles that.

Mine does exactly this and I pay for Pro too

lol. It’s easily accessible in cursor rn.

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