The Made by Google event is a major annual milestone for Pixel and Android fans, but it could be so much more than that. Where Apple\u2019s fall iPhone event and even Samsung\u2019s two big smartphone announcements each year are greeted with widespread interest and mainstream media coverage, Made by Google comes and goes with hardly any mention.<\/p>\n
Case in point, The New York Times, which apparently thinks so little of this event that the term \u201cGoogle\u201d only appears on its Technology page today one time, in a story about Google Flights. Or, The Washington Post, which sort of covered the new devices in a single article about how AI might make for better phone photos.<\/p>\n
You may point to the tech and gadget blogs and YouTube channels, which, yes, excitedly covered Made by Google just like they excitedly cover everything, that day, before quickly moving on to the next shiny bauble like cats distracted by a laser beam on the wall. And to the Android-focused blogs and channels that will linger on these topics because that\u2019s all they do, in their curiously myopic ways.<\/p>\n
But I find all this to be frustrating. Just as I found it frustrating in the late 1980s that no one seemed to be buying the Amigas I knew to be superior to the PCs and Macs of that era. Those who still hold a candle for Windows Phone can relate. Everyone around you is choosing inferior products and it\u2019s maddening.<\/p>\n
We need to be honest with ourselves to some degree. One thing these platforms all have in common is that each is (or was) as deeply flawed in as many ways as they are (or were) superior. They\u2019re all wannabes, undermined in some ways by the companies that make (made) them, these little bursts of innovation that thrill the true believers but never rise to meaningful success in the market. For example, the Amiga\u2019s ability to multitask in a single floppy disk configuration still stands as a technical achievement for the ages, though that experience was miserable and, thanks to the cheapness of Commodore\u2019s drives, slow and loud. But this innovation never helped the platform overcome a PC market inertia that continues to this day. You know the drill.<\/p>\n
Android is far from perfect, we all know that. And the Pixel, which is very much not \u201cclean\u201d Android but rather a highly customized version of that system, still has some big issues despite its many niceties. But Pixel, which could mean something, stand for something, if Google would just figure it out, deserves better. Certainly, its fans and users do.<\/p>\n
I feel like Google tries, in its own half-assed way. One of the themes of this year\u2019s Made by Google event was a celebration, of sorts, of the Pixel\u2019s 10th anniversary, with Google glossing over 10 generations of Pixels that advanced in fits and starts rather than in a single, logical, and cohesive year-by-year evolution. But this anniversary is perhaps more notable for how rare such a thing is in this part of Google, a truth highlighted by its pre-announ…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Made by Google event is a major annual milestone for Pixel and Android fans, but it could…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2306,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-83230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-mobile","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}