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Comment by moca | Hacker News Reader

Since Hugo's departure happened right after Nexus 4 price cut, they are very likely related. It is embarrassing + losing money for Google to sell 16GB Nexus 4 at $249 while 16GB iPhone 5 at $649. As the product VP, Hugo did a poor job on Nexus product quality, marketing/sales, and inventory management. Not surprised to see him leaving the ship.

NOTE: Nexus 7 2013 recently had GPS and touch problem and required another OS update to fix them. In fact, Nexus phones never had good product quality ever since Nexus One.

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Since Hugo's departure happened right after Nexus 4 price cut, they are very likely related.

Yeah... no.

I have no firsthand knowledge of the situation, but from the outside, it looks difficult to call Nexus 7 anything other than a huge success.

Nexus 4 is built by LG, and a $249 price looks plausible without losing money. If you can identify one phone that did the most to push carriers to providing reasonably priced month-to-month plans with no overages it would be Nexus 4.

There is plenty to criticize about Android branding, OEM relations, and the Nexus program trying to take on too many issues at once, etc. But the products themselves don't seem to be the problem.

Do you have an evidence to back this up? They reduced the price on the Galaxy Nexus in a similar fashion last year, so I assumed this was a normal price reduction.

As an observer of mobile market, I don't think this is normal price cut. Galaxy Nexus was more reasonably priced, $399 initially, then $349, see http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/27/3120987/galaxy-nexus-hspa-.... There is no chance for Google to make any profit on Nexus 4 at $199, if warranty and customer service cost is factored in. If the product is good, price cut to $249/$299 would be reasonable. There is obviously serious issue to justify such aggressive price cut. NOTE: Microsoft wrote off $900M after Surface price cut.

Regarding Nexus product quality, it is well known problematic. I never saw any Nexus phone with good camera, battery life, wireless reception. The customer service is problematic at best. These problems existed ever since Nexus One.

Yeah. It's not possible that components this year could be cheaper than the year before.

#sarcasm

Cheaper, but not that cheap. Moto X, comparable spec with Nexus 4, has $210-220 Bill of Materials (BOM). Adding cost of sales, warranty, customer service, there is very little margin left, if any.

I wonder if they're trying to sell off remaining inventory before the rumored Nexus 5 later this year.

Well, then why didn't he leave last year? When they cut the price of the Galaxy Nexus by $100 at the same time?

It seems that is their plan. Release a phone that doesn't gouge the customer on price, then lower the price a few months before the next release.

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