Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:
The most interesting tidbit comes from David Pierce, a senior staff writer at our sister site Wired. Speaking on the Wired Podcast, Pierce said he was told that the Pixel phones had a mere nine months of development time. After asking Google why the phone didn’t have the same level of water resistance as other high-end flagships, Pierce said, “their answer was essentially ‘We ran out of time.’ There apparently had been this plan for a long time, and at the end of 2015, they blew it all up and started over. So they essentially went from nothing to launch in nine months and a week.”
And:
Let’s examine this timeline. Why would Google “blow everything up” at the end of 2015? We can fill in the blanks with a report from Android Police, which claims that Google’s 2016 smartphone lineup was originally going to be built by Huawei.
“Shortly after the Nexus 5X and 6P launched, Google began talks with Huawei to produce its 2016 smartphone portfolio,” the report reads. “Google, though, set a hard rule for the partnership: Huawei would be relegated to a manufacturing role, producing phones with Google branding.” According to the report, Huawei balked at the lack of branding, and “CEO Richard Yu himself ended negotiations with Google right then and there.”
If we put these two accounts together, it’s easy to conclude that Google and Huawei’s talks ate into the development time of the Google/HTC Pixel. When the decision to go with a self-branded phone came down, Huawei walked away, which led to—as Pierce said—Google “blowing everything up” and switching to HTC.
To some, the Ars Technica headline might imply that the Pixel is less than excellent. I’ll leave that to others to judge, but the Pixel certainly has a lot of fans. To me, getting there with only 9 months of dedicated engineering calendar time is incredibly impressive. The backstory is interesting, though.
Regardless of the Pixel’s worth, I think it’s interesting that Google ended up doing roughly what a lot of fools believe every tech company—including Apple—does every year.
“To me, getting there with only 9 months of dedicated engineering calendar time is incredibly impressive.”
What is it that is impressive about this Pixel phone? (I’m talking about hardware, not software)
What’s impressive, right? Took them 9 month to try to replicate the iPhone. What is really new here? Worst case of grading on a curve yet.
So Google’s “first” phone, that they hastily engineered in only 9 months, and lazily copied from the iPhone 6/7 (which is already criticized as having an ‘old/stale’ design) is supposed to impress me? All it shows to me is a severe lack of imagination at Google.
When Apple continues to use THEIR design in the iPhone 7 (with beautiful refinements and new finishes), its called boring. When Google COPIES that ‘boring’ design right down to the size of the bezels Apple is oft-criticized about, with less features, its all of a sudden exciting and impressive? This isn’t a dig at Dave, more so at the general tech press that is having an orgasm over the Pixel.
I just don’t understand the logic that Apple is “not innovating,” but competitors lazily copying that stale design are somehow innovating.
Grading on a curve indeed.
this video reveals their design rush https://youtu.be/YpdnvFx__lI