The launch of Google’s Chromebook Pixel has been the butt of endless derision around the blogosphere, and rightly so – the point of Chrome OS was to provide a cheap and cheerful alternative to the netbook, back when the netbook was a thing. The Pixel is basically a Chromebook with a MacBook Air case and a touch retina display…and a price tag of $1300, or $1500 with LTE. And the Google VP talks about how nobody has brought touch and high definition to web browsing until now.
Um…except for the iPad on which I am typing this, which is a year old and has the same 32 GB of storage and LTE as the high-end Pixel, for literally half the price. If you think you can sell a browser with a keyboard strapped to it for $1300, then God bless you, but you’re going to lose your shirt. The whole point of the Chromebook was to be cheap and accessible, and once it costs more than an arguably far superior ultrabook that can run, you know, software, where’s the unique selling point?
More interesting is the re-hype of Google Glass, the presently-$1500 connected eyewear device. The best way to think about this is as if it were the 21st century Bluetooth headset – it’s meant to pair with a phone for its pervasive data connection. But it has its own camera for quick photo and video work, and responds to voice command and to a touch-sensitive strip on one side. It also has its own GPS, which becomes interesting when you factor in something like Google Now – if it’s location-aware and can provide relevant data contextually, that becomes far more interesting.
Lets face it, what I want out of something like Google Glass is JARVIS. I want the heads-up display with time and temperature and instant Wikipedia on whatever I stare at, plus response to voice commands and inquiries. Between Siri and Google Now, we’re actually getting close to viable voice-directed computing, and with Glass – deftly machined into a tasteful pair of Warby Parker frames – you have the potential to do everything you’d want to do on the fly without taking the phone out of your pocket.
It’s the same deal as the Pebble watch, which intrigues me, or the notional iWatch – what’s the use case? The use case is an extension of the phone: location-aware time and temp and weather alerts, incoming texts and notifications and caller ID, remote control of the music with the ability to flip through playlists in a way the headphone remote can’t and Siri frequently won’t. And with the Pebble, it’s waterproof enough for the shower, so you can literally get your text messages anywhere now…
Seven years ago, the state of the art in cell phones was a Sony Ericsson candy bar phone with 3G, a simple proxy browser and rudimentary video calling. Today, the median bar to meet is a touchscreen phone with LTE networking, Wi-Fi, 8 megapixel camera with 1080p video capture, a full HTML5 web browser and natural-language voice control. In another seven years, the likes of Pebble and Glass will probably be a natural and accepted part of mainstream mobility computing. And Apple and Google are already ahead of the game in a way no other tech companies have proven able to match…yet.