Pixel 8 – Who Should Care

The Six Five Team discusses Pixel 8 – Who Should Care.

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Transcript:

Daniel Newman: If a company with 1% market share of devices, cell phones, mobile devices, puts out a new device, did it really happen?

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. No, I got a lot of response on that, LinkedIn and on X. And you know what? As I look back as a former product guy, it was a crappy thing to say and maybe it was… I don’t think it was out of frustration, but it was more about it. And by the way, I did add to that, after seven years of pounding their heads against the wall. And by the way, I just want to let you know I brought my pixel just to show off this last generation. But Google has been in this market for seven years and I believe that the stated strategy has changed, but it’s never really talked about not driving volumes. Right? Surface from Microsoft is very clear now. They are above 1% after more than a decade. But they make a big deal out of smartphones and they talk about it every earnings. You never hear it.

So what is Pixel 8? Out of the other side of my mouth, I do want to say I was impressed by some of the technologies of the Pixel 8. First thing is they brought out a new Tensor G3 chip, which it looks like, on a lot of workloads, is slower than its predecessor, but it does some really amazing photography tricks on there. They upped the camera resolution, they improved low light, they improved Magic Eraser, they improved the display, the battery, the design with punch hole. So there’s a lot of good stuff there. They improved, I think, Real Tone Night Sight, stuff like that. They also added Bard. Now, Bard is not integrated, it’s being driven very quickly out of the cloud, and it’s not being done on the device itself. But with this new chip, the G3, with some oversized… It’s either oversized AI or oversized ISP versus, let’s say, what Qualcomm might bring to the table, I’m interested to see what they do with this.

Now I don’t crap talk to get people to reach out to me, but the head of enterprise mobility at Google did reach out, Jesse Vizcaino. I hope, Jesse, I said your name correctly. And we had a dialogue. Jesse used to work at Samsung, and I’ve been researching them for 12 years to have this discussion. And my goal with the first conversation is to better understand their strategy. Is it a growth strategy moving outside of the US or is it a, “Let’s do this as a design for Android, the best of Android, and the best of Google services,” if nothing else, to keep out there in case folks like Samsung don’t play ball with Google?

Daniel Newman: Yeah, I’m going to keep my thoughts here pretty short. I think it’s an opportunity, Pat. I actually think that as you see vertical integration, as we see the AI feature sets, one of the things we’re seeing in cloud is increasingly companies saying basically, “If you want the best of the features, you got to be in the cloud.” Well, Google, and this is a little bit of what Surface has always struggled from as well, has always been really… Philosophically, I’m not in the room in the negotiations, but fair about the Android devices all having some level of parity. And I’m sure there’s some antitrust reasons that has to happen as well.

But having said that, are there going to be features in the AI era that could truly allow Google to make its device the penultimate experience? I mean, Apple’s been doing this for a long time, while it doesn’t actually have the best features, but by basically increasingly vertically integrating and closing architectures, making theirs better, at least to its audience. I don’t feel like Google’s really capitalized necessarily on the opportunity it has. I mean, it is the Android creator, so could it have a stronger, more compelling device story? I think it’ll always be a bit of tug of war, though. It’ll always be a bit of a tug of war with their policy and antitrust requirements. So let’s see how that one goes, Pat. But I think it stays relevant because we need competition and Google… It is a good device. This isn’t a fire phone. This is a good device. It’s just not that popular.