Based on using some various "view site from different locations" websites, Brazil can't see it, Italy and Japan get "we aren't in your region", and Sweden gets a list of other products.
Yes, it is region locked. I would call it region hidden, as google go the extra mile to make it look like nothing is there. It is possible to get a link to the actual page, someone further down in the comments shared that.
I'm very happy to see better competition with Apple's AirPods. And visually, these look fantastic -- distinct but just as tasteful.
The lack of active noise cancellation still seems to leave Google a "generation behind" here, but playing catch-up is still a great thing.
But more than anything, I'm fascinated by the "Adaptive Sound" mode. Seriously, for years I've wanted my headphones (and laptop speakers) to auto-adjust their volume based on both the signal and ambient noise. If it works well, I hope to see the concept spread pretty much everywhere as an option.
Yeah, no active noise cancellation or "transparency mode" equivalent is just a massive bummer. It's hard to compete with the AirPods when you're missing the two most impressive features.
My read is that they're fundamentally like "open backed" headphones. It's not controllable, it's just that they don't actively block the air, so they let outside sounds in.
From a social-acceptance perspective I'm not a fan of "transparency mode". When I see people walking around with earbuds in all the time, even when they're not actually using them, I have a -- probably unfair -- visceral negative reaction.
Apple Airpod Pro includes active noise cancellation at a $250 price tag. The Apple Airpod with Wireless Case is the 'equivalent' Apple product at $200. The Google Pixel Buds include passive noise cancellation (silicon sleeves) which the Apple Airpods lack.
Lacking active noise cancellation doesn't leave them a generation behind. They're aimed at the Airpods not the Airpod Pros given both feature-set and price. Honestly, these are between the Airpod and Airpod Pro in terms noise cancelling and sound. Google can add a Pro model at a higher price point to compete with the Airpod Pros if they'd like.
Google Pixel Buds: $179, passive* noise cancellation
Apple Airpods: $200, no noise cancellation
Apple Airpods Pro: $250, passive* + active noise cancellation
* For the confused, passive noise cancellation in earbuds is when they form a seal with your ear canal to block external sounds. The Google Pixel Buds do this with the different sized silicon sleeves they include, just like the Airpod Pros do. Active noise cancellation is when the headphones have microphones that sample outside noise and feed an inverse sound wave to your ears to cancel out the external sounds.
Something I've noticed recently as I'm watching all of these specials on TV with celebrities at home.
Almost every one of them is using an AirPod.
I was shocked at just how many celebrities are using AirPods for these (theoretically) high production shows.
I noticed that SNL seems to have switched from AirPods in week one to pro lav mics this week, but otherwise it seems like everyone already owned the AirPods.
It'll be interesting to see if Google can eat some of their market share.
Motorcycle helmet speakers have adaptive volume, at least at the quality end of the market.
You can't quite walk around everywhere with a helmet on, but I do give it a good try with my flip up - I'm rarely stopped when shopping etc. - twice in 13 years.
It would be cool if it could (somehow) detect a person speaking directly to you and automatically lower content being played while raising the external microphone volume—assuming it has a feature similar to AirPod Pro’s transparent mode.
Even humans cannot understand if something is directed towards them until non-verbal signs say so or your name is called. (Which depending on the name might have a lot of false positives)
Maybe some combination of: comparing average recent audio levels and detecting a sudden spike in the average human speech frequency range, using far field mic tech these companies have been focusing on to check against direction the audio source is coming from (ie, only focus on someone right in front of you), maybe auto adding the first name of the phone owner to a watch word ala “hey Siri”, etc
I’m not an expert at all on the “how”, just thought could be a useful “what” that solves some friction with current tech (similar to how these automatically adjust noise cancellation settings vs needing to set manually as with competitors)
IMO the real killer feature of AirPods is that they seamlessly "just work" when pairing, switching devices, taking them out, etc., and it's vanishingly unlikely that Google got this right.
Not at all a fanboy comment. Apple uses proprietary extensions to Bluetooth in order to facilitate very quick and easy device pairing.
If you open an AirPods case while it’s near an unlocked iPhone, iPad, or Mac, an alert pops up asking if you want to pair to it. (Or, if necessary, letting you know that you grabbed the wrong AirPods case, and it’s paired to someone else’s equipment).
Then, the action of pairing causes Apple to associate the AirPods themselves with your Apple ID. If you have more than one device signed into the same iCloud account, all of them will effectively be paired to those AirPods, and you do not need to actively do anything in order to connect to them, and standard system volume controls gain the option to switch output devices (with the AirPods listed).
What non-AirPods headset pairs and switches devices that seamlessly and easily?
> and it's vanishingly unlikely that Google got this right.
this is the fanboy part. I'm not a google fanboy (I own none of their products), but you can frame your comment differently (aka more neutrally). Just say what it is about the air pods you like, ask if google's pixel buds do the same, or just research it yourself and provide information as opposed to speculation. What makes it a fanboy comment is the bias, and you've still done nothing to dissuade me from believing you possess it.
That comment was informed by my experience with Google devices more than by my experience with Apple. I don't own airpods and have only owned one Apple device in my life (my current iPhone). But Android devices - across various OEMs including Google, and both stock Android and CM - have always seemed to make simple things far more annoying than they need to be, in my experience. Same with Chromecast.
(FYI, I'm the GP commenter but not the one you're replying to directly.)
"Get real-time translations right in your ear". This immediately made me think of the babelfish from Hitchhiker's Guide. Looking forward to reading some reviews of these.
Had a Google hangouts meeting with a US and an AU participant, and I'm from Sweden, and amazingly enough Hangouts (or is it Meet now?) can provide close to real-time closed captions (subtitles), with a very high degree of accuracy. It also shows who is saying something, so subs may be,
PartA: Who's going?
PartB: I'm going.
PartC: When is it?
What boggles my mind is why it doesn't immediately after the meeting end, Hangout would send you a transcript of the meeting. This would be a crazy USP.
My experience with captions is that it fails hilariously when the person speaking is not a native speaker and not completely fluent. You will understand the point they're making with reasonable accuracy, but if you only read the captions you would not have anywhere near the same understanding it at all.
I checked the online documentation again and there is no mention of recording the live captions now. I am very confident that, a few months ago, this option was there for the call organisers.
People expect there to be no log for phonecalls, and that extends to video calls. Google might well keep a log for themselves, but if they sent it to participants, they would alienate many of them.
People take notes in meetings all the time, and this Google product is for professionals in meetings, not the consumer product. Sorry for being unclear.
If it's anything like the previous generation of Pixel Buds, then the real-time translation comes with a bit of a caveat.
It's the same as using Google Translate in conversation mode, but without needing a phone to understand what the other person is saying. For two-way communication you do still need your phone though, because that will display the translation of what you just said back to the person you're speaking to.
It's still pretty cool, but it's not the futuristic technology it makes it out to be.
I guess if both have the pixel buds then you don't necessarily need the phone?
I get that its not quite the smooth experience (yet?) that we want it to be but that we're approaching this previously unbelievable futuristic thing is amazing to me!
> Listen all day long.
> Get up to 5 hours with a single charge,
If quarantine has taught me anything, it's that 5 hours is not all day lol. I've switched to wired headphones because my wireless weren't working for me working/walkingaround/etc all day, unlike when I was working and I'd only wear them during the commute in, gym, and commute home.
It's a different mindset. The buds charge in a case so whenever you're doing anything else you just drop them in. They charge very fast so I can go days without realizing the battery is draining just by habits. It's only when I don longer session that I hit it.
I recently gave in and picked up a Fiio BTR3. 11 hours, decent quality, and I get to continue using my nice, comfortable IEMs. I'll probably wind up getting a better-quality unit in the future. Even though it's still one more thing to charge, at least the sound is decent (not on the same level as a desktop amp, but I wouldn't expect that).
I have a pair of the first generation Pixel Buds in my draw. One of my most frustrating product experiences of recent years. They didn't last that long in use (~5 hrs IIRC) so would frequently have to go back into the case to recharge, if I was lucky. The connections to the charge points in the case were so flakey that it was hit and miss if they would charge at all. Sometimes I'd pop them in at night, think it was ok as the LED was pulsing. But come the morning they'd be as flat as they were the night before. This happened SO many times I really started to hate them.
And they didn't block any ambient sound, so were pretty much useless in noisy environments.
Eventually I gave up, went in a different direction and purchased a pair of SONY WH-1000XM3 over ear headphones. What a world of difference. Gorgeous sound, comfortable, noise cancelling (or ambient sound) and 30 hours of battery life. My buds have just sat gathering dust ever since. Don't want to use them ever again, and it's put me off buying anything like them in future.
I'd routinely get on a plane only to discover the Buds had nearly dead batteries after they decided to wake up in my backpack and connect to my phone because the case was slightly ajar.
Does anyone else really struggle with comfort when using headphones which go into the ear canal (IEMs)? I know there is better sound isolation, but for some reason I cannot stand the minor pressure of them in my ears.
I've always used in-ear headphones but also always felt fatigue from the pressure.
But the AirPods just don't have it. It's more like they sit at the edge of your ear instead of burrowing inside it, and they explicitly use some kind of vent to equalize pressure as well.
Visually, these look like they operate in roughly the same way.
I've tried them, it's definitely an issue still. If I place them at the edge of my ear they just fall out. Tried the different sizes too. I never used in-ear prior in my life, so I assume I'm just not used to it.
I've tried everything including the Airpods Pro, and the only earbuds small enough to not cause my ears discomfort are the Klipsch X11i and X12i. They use some of the smallest balanced armature drivers made by Bosch.
Have you tried comply-style foam tips? I feel pressure with the standard silicone tips that iems tend to come with, but I've been able to wear foam ones for hours without discomfort. The only issue imo is that the foam tips do wear out and break down over time. I haven't actually tracked how long they last, but from memory I think I get about 6 months out of a pair of foam earbud tips.
I don’t like them either. I also don’t like the sound isolation. It makes me feel sort of numb and out of touch when I walk around with such headphones.
I really dislike trying to have conversations on a mic that uses a closed design. I can't really hear myself so I feel like I end up talking very loud.
No earbuds fit me, though I don't see anything immediately wrong with my ears.
I use IEM because the regular old plastic ones that sit in the ear give me actual physical pain after 5 minutes of them just sitting there, it's incredible. And the only brand of IEM that don't fall off are BOSE ones, which are oval shaped and have that little stability wing like these ones from Google.
Do you realize how insanely hard that actually is to do?
It's not like you just localize some webpages and add a currency option to your payment.
You've got to deal with certification, taxes, customs, warehousing, shipping partners, warranties, refund, and all with wildly varying levels of government agency cooperation and efficiency.
Apple is the only consumer company I know of who does this well, because it's their main business and they have the money and have gigantic teams of people who do this as their main job. And even then people complain about the sometimes vastly higher worldwide prices.
Now Google obviously does manage to eventually get these products out internationally. But it's pretty understandable that they sell in the US as soon as they can, and also can't necessarily predict the exact date they'll be available elsewhere.
(And yes you can work with local distributors, but that doesn't solve all problems, presents its own set of complex challenges, and sometimes may simply not be economically viable -- e.g. their cut will make the product non-profitable, and there isn't a market to sell at a higher price.)
> (And yes you can work with local distributors, but that doesn't solve all problems, presents its own set of complex challenges, and sometimes may simply not be economically viable -- e.g. their cut will make the product non-profitable, and there isn't a market to sell at a higher price.)
Cry me a river. I can buy a $150 Nokia at the electronics store down the road, but somehow it's too hard for Google to sell its Pixel lineup (which is not cheap by any means) and make a profit?
They bought a chunk of HTC 3 years ago. HTC has known how to distribute their products for nearly two decades.
They bought only parts of HTC, and the parts the purchased didn't include their distribution as far as I can find. We don't even know how HTC achieved their distribution to begin with. Did HTC own the entire supply chain or did they offload that to a 3rd party?
Either way, HTCs supply chain is way different than Googles even with acquisition. And there is no way to know if Googles pre-existing processes would allow them to leverage HTCs distribution effectively if they own it (which I doubt).
You're comparing different things. What Nokia phone are you buying for 150 in your country? Nokia isn't a US company like Google. Nokia if Finnish. So it'd seem likely they'd have figured out EU distribution because they exist in the region and align with EU processes before NA.
Nokia has basically always produced hardware they've needed to ship. Google started as a software company that just so happens to deal in a few hardware projects. When they first bought the Motorola patents they crashed and burned hard on their hardware. And this was after their initial Nexus launch.
If you cannot get a Pixel in your country it's probably not because Google decided they can't make a profit on the phone. It's likely a restriction in shipping they don't care to get around yet, the demand for their devices aren't high enough for them to solve distribution issues, or they just don't care that much about their hardware businesses.
HMD is hardly a European company, but you can replace Nokia with Xiaomi in my argument if you prefer.
Why should I care about how Google's hardware business operates? They sold their first Nexus phone 10 years ago, how many more decades will they need to learn?
> or they just don't care that much about their hardware businesses
Then they should just stop pretending. The Pixel branding and pricing is a joke. At least American customers can wait until the phones inevitably reach $400-450 six months after their launch.
It's not rocket science. It's what every other company making consumer goods for the international market is capable of handling, and many of them are 1/10000th the size of Google.
Google has the resources to do better, so let's stop making excuses every time they fuck up the execution of a product launch because they're too cheap to do it right.
Even ignoring the fact that google has the resources to pull this off easily. In countries where they already have all of that set up, because they sell other products, these issues still exist.
Selling a newer version of a product in a country where the old version is already being sold is not an issue for small companies, and it shouldn't be for google.
I have never had any issues buying Samsung, OnePlus, Apple, or any other brand devices no matter the device category.
In fact last time I wanted to buy a google device (the original pixel phone) I was on the waitlist for almost 2 months before I walked to the apple store and bought an iPhone - and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Yes, this is very annoying. Personally I have a Pixel 2(which I might consider swapping for 5 later this year, depending on what they throw in it) but this is a pure joke. I got mine about 2 months before the Pixel 3 was released and even then, almost a year after it's official launch, it was nowhere to be found in most countries. My phone before that just gave up and I happened to be on a holiday in Poland and by pure coincidence the Pixel 2 was available in one of the large retailers. Mind you, it wasn't available in any of the shops they had in Krakow(second largest city) so they shipped it from Warsaw.
I can understand it not being available in small countries like Bulgaria in my case. There are one or two shops where you can find them for almost double the price which is a joke to say the least. And yes, in all these years I've only seen 2 or 3 other people rocking Pixels. But come on.... Poland? They have a population of almost 40 million...
And this is their flagship hardware product, I'm not talking about things which are much more trivial, like buds or whatever.
I had to wait a month for a Pixel 2 XL here in Latvia couple of years ago. Some small shop only ordered 1-2 every month. 99.9% of people don't even know what Pixel is.
Oh, they absolutely are. And it would be fine if they were clear about it(which they aren't). You know, "this is our first market, we are currently in the process of negotiating/developing the feature for other regions, stay tuned" is perfectly understandable for me.
I'm aware many people would freak out about something like that but as far as their hardware products, they are not aimed at the marketing-manager-with-a-macbook-pro-on-the-front-table-at-Starbucks types. In 99.999% of all cases, those people wouldn't care about a Pixel or it's existence. And in reality the only people who would make a deal out of it. I'm 100% certain that the average Pixel user would be perfectly fine with it.
The Pixels are absolutely brilliant products and I am in love with mine, even if it's almost 2 years old now. But imagine my reaction when I opened Google play and I saw the text "This app is incompatible with all of your devices." regarding Android pay... On a brand new Pixel? A text which is still there mind you. Their support was very open about it and they did say it's a regional restriction and nothing to do with the phone itself but still... This is just one example but there are plenty of others on the list.
C. Support products after launch (Still annoyed that they abandoned the Pixel C tablet after an Android update that broke the graphics drivers, leaving GLES games/apps very unstable)
I actually got to hand that one to them in a positive way. I had a Pixel XL and now a Pixel 2XL, and the support is amazing for me. I've received two times a new Pixel 2XL over time (okay, not good that it broke) and that support was really good. I also have the Pixel Buds 1st gen, and there the support is also great.
I think he is talking about the tablet "Pixel C" and not the phones.
Owner of a Pixel C myself for the price it was a superb product, it is really a shame they've stopped following android updates.
Still digging smalls features like the magnets to put it almost anywhere is the kitchen, or battery status check with a tap on the back...
Very OT, but I can't wait for this web design fad to go away, where every element is animated and stuff flies around and fades in from every direction. It's like 90's GeoCities, but with more whitespace.
Also, I have a Radeon 5700XT GPU, and scrolling is somehow still choppy.
I don’t think it’s going away. A better question might be why are browsers still so slow that it can actually be slowed down by pictures and dom elements triggering re-layouts, or scrollling, or animations?
Maybe let’s just give up on browser apis and start building websites with DirectX/OpenGL.
I’ve seen amazing UIs in a lot of pc games that do all sorts of interesting things with the UI, and I’ve rarely seen those UIs have jank, or stutter.
If you try to buy a product from the US Google store via VPN to have it shipped as a present to someone who lives in the US, it still doesn't work at all unless you have a freaking US credit card with a US billing address to pay with.
This has been going on for years, and what happens when you hand over a project to a PM who has apparently never owned a passport.
To be fair, very few companies even try to launch products worldwide, or even in a majority of countries. A lot of the time, they can't even launch in the entire EU. Apple seems to be doing better, but Microsoft, Google, Sony and Nintendo are all very bad at this (to name a few I've had problems with).
They could easily work with local distribution channels (electronics stores, online retailers, carriers, ...)
They somewhat do that already in some countries.
I don't understand why nobody at Google cares about the image of their hardware lineup when you can buy cheaper products from 2nd-tier Chinese brands pretty much everywhere in the world. Even if I want to spend a premium to get the true Google experience, I can't!
I wonder if people signing up to that waiting list will start seeing a lot more adverts for headphones across YouTube and Google Search. I'd wager entering an email address on the site doesn't just put you on a mailing list for Pixel Buds.
Pretty sure that'd be in violation of things like GDPR and risk netting them fines. Also, why would they add you to a list of "people interested in other brand headphones" when you sign up because you're interested in theirs?
Is there a reason they announced this a few hours before earnings?
They look good, but I don't see it on par with the AirPods that have noise cancellation, sweat and water resistance. And given Google's inability to support their hardware products past a few years, doubt these would take off (but I hope they do).
Probably an attempt to offset the bad news of this quarter’s revenue. “This last quarter sucks, sure, but look at what will boost our revenue next quarter!”
I recently bought an iPhone SE after entertaining the thought of maybe waiting for the new Pixel phone. For reasons already mentioned by others here, I feel like I'm done with Google hardware. The iPhone is by no means perfect and sure, it restricts me in what software I can download and use, but at least it works. I don't want to run obscure adb commands, follow online tutorials or try other roms from xda-developers anymore for basic functionality to work because my device software is badly done, abandoned or both. I'm too old for that, and the SE is decently priced too for what you get.
Agreed. I tried the HTC one and samsung galaxy S4 back in the day and came right back to an iphone as their custom software they put on it was horrible and made it way less fluid than iphones did. I tried a pixel 2 to see if google did it better 2 years ago and it works just as well as my iphones did and I see no reason of going back.
The last Android device I bought was a Nokia 7.1 which is an Android One device. Presumably this should mean a "clean" Android experience but I still experienced frequent crashes and reboots, apps not working correctly etc.
Of course this is anecdotal but that's how I (and probably most) people decide what to buy. There are many things that aren't ideal about iPhones but I've never had one crash on me and most apps are way more polished and work better -- not that this latter part has anything to do with an inherent weakness in Android, but it's just reality as I perceive it.
I've had many Android devices in my life and I loved many of them, OnePlus 3 being the one that stands out. Still, I just feel it's not for me anymore.
Yeah, I really don't get why they don't just release them everywhere. The same for all their products btw. In the Netherlands they still sell the old Google Wifi (1st gen), which is apparently their main product as it is the first thing you see when you go to the store site here.
Google: we made release!
Rest of the world: ... In America
Google: awesome profit!
Rest of the world: our market is like 10x the US market
Google: but we made release!
I would hazard a guess that the majority of people who can afford these outside the US are already very proficient with both English and their local language(s), and wouldn't care much about this feature.
The question is, is the battery replaceable? As with Airpods, I won't buy any product that automatically becomes trash after 2 years, and I hope others will too. It is not sustainable and it is time for consumers to refuse this notion. Sure, these little pods won't tip the scale very much, but the practice is sending all the wrong messages.
You know it won't be. Wireless headphones are disposable.
My wired Sennheisers are 10 years old. I've replaced the foam pads on them, which are still available from 1st and 3rd parties. I know someone who just replaced the pads on her Sennheisers which are 25 years old now.
I was basically called a luddite here the other day, because I thought firmware updating headphones is madness, but I stand by what I said. Wireless headphones are a solution to a manufactured problem, because Apple started removing the headphone port, and everyone copied them, as they always do. Now everyone is selling their own crappy AirPods.
> Wireless headphones are a solution to a manufactured problem,
You can think that, but getting rid of wires is an improvement over nearly any situation other than sitting at a desk. And even then, I still sometimes slide away from the desk and yank on the cord.
On the face of it, no wires seem like a good thing, but it brings with it a range of drawbacks.
Compatibility: Bluetooth isn't supported on all devices. And Bluetooth setup and pairing can still be a mess. Analog means round peg goes in round hole and it always works.
Sound quality: Bluetooth, as far as I know, still doesn't transmit PCM, so audio is compressed, which may or may not be perceptible to you.
Latency: Unavoidable, and may or may not be important to you.
Longevity: Wireless means more complexity, and higher price and another battery I need to charge and that will only last N cycles before it dies.
Stallman-ity: Wireless headphones run proprietry closed sourced code that you have no control over.
On the face of it, no wires seem like a good thing, but it brings with it a range of drawbacks.
Which does not make wireless headphones a "solution to a manufactured problem". You're fine with wires, fine, but others don't have the same use case you do. Your list of drawbacks? There's your "manufactured problems", none of those things matter to me when I'm out for a run.
I could argue for example that wires also bring a lot of problems. E.g. cables die, and the connectors tend to wear significantly depending with use.
I am yet to see a TRS 3.5'' connector last me more than a decade. This includes the headphones connectors on expensive TV, and believe me, it is about as annoying to replace a headphone connector on a ~2010 "superglue manufactured" TV as it is to replace a battery on a 2010 "superglue" headset.
Wireless does not have this problem, and batteries I can change (I only buy headsets with replaceable batteries, even when they cost triple or quadruple of "superglue" products).
That said, wired USB-C doesn't have the problem either, and it's also uncompressed PCM to boot.
Latency is such a killer for me. Admittedly android phones have bad audio latency anyway IIRC - because of this only iOS has decent music creation software available for it (I don't think my knowledge is out of date here?), so it's more a sin on iOS than Android to not have wired support built-in.
cheap bluetooth headphones were the best workplace quality-of-life improvements I have ever made. I don't have to deal with my headphone wire getting pulled out, cord routing, untangling cords, etc.
I'm currently saving up to buy some nice bluetooth headphones, probably either the Pixel Buds or Airpods. Absolutely 100% worth it over wired. A headphone jack wasn't even a consideration for me when I upgraded from my Pixel 1 to the Pixel 4, and I don't regret it.
I'm guessing you mean earbuds? Wireless or not, earbuds don't seem to last long for me. I've owned multiple Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic buds over the last years and not a single one lasted a year.
Bought a pair of "true" wireless ones this time around which seems a lot more durable, but time will tell.
I have a 5 year old pair of etymotics, and just recently replaced a pair of Shure IEMs due to a broken stem. I was able to buy the exact same model, and re-use my 3rd party cables and eartips.
> I won't buy any product that automatically becomes trash after 2 years
I think you overestimate how quickly the battery will deteriorate. I have a pair of bluetooth headphones with a rechargable battery that have been working perfect for 4 years now.
Yep. I've a pair of Somy XM3 headphones that were bought on launch (Jan last year). I'm still getting 25+ hours of battery life out of them (charging them every 3 days, with 8-9 hours of use most days).
> Wireless headphones are a solution to a manufactured problem, because Apple started removing the headphone port, and everyone copied them, as they always do. Now everyone is selling their own crappy AirPods.
I wear wireless headphones all the time when I am working in the yard, garage, garden, organizing my outdoors gear, cleaning my house, doing laundry, etc. I used to wear QC35s but they are hot (particular issue if you are mowing the yard) and top-heavy. I disliked the aesthetics of AirPods and the fashion-y aspect of wearing them in public, but when they gained noise cancellation, I bought some and now I use them all the time. Battery life sucks, but the overall experience has been excellent.
Prior to this, I had some $40 jbuds wireless earbuds and they were not bad, honestly. They were a little heavy and the sound quality was not great, but they were a great proof of concept that gave me the confidence to drop the money on the airpods pro. I still use the QC35s when I'm coding.
In true google “organizing the world’s information”-fashion this page is not available in certain countries and you are not even informed that you have been blocked or that you tried to go somewhere “you shouldn’t”
This silent blocking makes me unreasonably angry.
Why is it a secret that google is selling a phone or a set of earbuds? Why can’t they acknowledge that it exists?
I'll be looking at the reviews with interest. I wanted to like the original Pixel Buds but the first pair I got were duds (though support was good about shipping me a new pair) but then the second pair eventually died and wouldn't charge. I'm hoping these work better. I looked at reviews for the originals after I bought them and the reviews weren't great, so maybe I should have looked at them before...
I like the auto-volume adjustment as long as you can put a max volume on it. If the ambient noise is loud, I don't want my music to get even louder so I can hear it over the noise; I worry about protecting my hearing. If anything, I'd rather the buds decide to just turn off if they decide the noise is too loud to play over.
I will always have a difficult time deciding to buy a new hardware from Google (maybe except Pixel phone because I have read some good things here and there on HN about it and my wife have been using it for about six months now and does not have a major issue so far although she said the UI is really confusing/annoying at times) after buying two Google home minis at two different times only to end up with both only being half-functional after just about a year of light use.
Good: I have Echo and I can tell that the AI in Google Home (mini) is more advanced than that in Alexa.
Bad 1: Every time my wife (who uses Pixel phone) and I (I have an iPhone 6) connect via Bluetooth to our Google home minis, it drops after a few minutes consistently even when we are using YouTube, which is Google's own app. We tried all kinds of ways that we can find online to reset these Home minis, and still that connectivity issue still persists. That went on for about 8 months and now, both of these minis (bought separately 3-4 months apart) are no longer connectable through Bluetooth. I really wonder if other Google Home owners face the same issue.
Bad 2: Google Home app is very confusing to use. Another bad example is--I have the temperature metric set to Celcius (I grew up in a non-US country) and both of these minis no longer read temperature in Celcius (after reading it for about the first six months of use) despite how many times I attempt to reset it in the app connected to my Google account. I don't know if it has to do with the firmware upgrades or the app upgrades that has failed to update the parameters within, but even as a relatively tech-savvy person, I still have trouble understanding the UI and worse, how to get these minis do such simple thing as reading out temperature in the metric that I want to use.
Wife and I both have a mini (mine in the office, her's in the kitchen), and we haven't had the Bluetooth issue. The Google Home app is hot garbage though, I agree.
Marvellous! Another product with non-replaceable batteries. Hostile to both consumers and the environment. Really sad to see that all these big companies don't care even to the smallest degree about all their own environmental pledges.
And this is where government needs to step in, imo. We can't let peoples shopping habits decide what environmental damage is done.
edit: Interesting downvotes. I would appreciate clarification and discussion.
My opinion is such that people will not choose to better the environment. People have let the oceans fill with plastic for years. What faith do you have in the the population as a whole to adapt to environmental impacts before they become a massive problem? If people were capable of this, would they not already have adapted? Hell, people have to be forced to wear seatbelts for their own safety.
I don't care about replacing the batteries myself, I care about how much it will cost to get them replaced. For my AirPods the price reasonable is so I don't really care.
It's the same as my car. I buy a based on the cost of maintenance not how easy it is to maintain myself.
I think that the issue here is it would be very hard to create a product that has replaceable batteries of this size and:
* Is waterproof
* Is small enough to be comfortable
* Has a battery large enough to be useful
* Has easy battery replacement - this is a really important one to me here. Remember that not everyone using these has the manual dexterity of a healthy 20 year old. These products have to be designed so that almost everyone can use + maintain them. If replacing the battery is a fiddly and hard thing to do for elderly and less dextrous users it is a hostile design and I'm okay with it not being done on accessibility grounds.
It doesn't have to be easy to replace, there just needs to be an intended way to do it. Even if it requires you to bring them to a shop and let them do it (e.g. how most phones handle it). There's absolutely no reason they can't be engineered that way, don't be foolish. The problem is priorities. It is 2020, and some still haven't realized how important these issues are becoming?
Don't want to single out Google, and this little product launch too much, same goes for Apple, and all the others who still think it doesn't matter. And before people say, well the little amount of plastic and metal inside the pods is insignificant compared to all the other stuff we throw away daily, I'd say the message is equally important.
There is no reason to not make these lasting. Only priorities.
Agreed. Most people can't replace a wristwatch battery, but wristwatches are not considered disposable items. I don't see why similar approach couldn't work here. Non user-serviceable does not have to mean non-serviceable. Unfortunately large companies consider serviceability a bug not a feature, and not enough consumers vote with their wallets to prove them wrong.
A screw and gaskets would keep it waterproof, add little weight and size, and if the screw is has a Phillips head, it will be sufficiently easy to replace.
But, it requires more work to assemble, and does not create an end-date on the existence on the product, so there’s really no reason a mainstream company will do this on their own; they’ll leave it to niche providers.
How much weight and bulk would that add? Not to mention that the battery package itself will need to be larger and more robust. These things are barely small enough to use as it is.
So you're basically saying that wireless in-ear headphones shouldn't exist then.
Everything inside of them is already so miniaturized, there simply isn't space for a replaceable battery, not to mention how you'd maintain waterproofing since, you know, you run and sweat with these in.
Have you seen X-rays of the AirPods Pro for example? Can you figure out a way where the battery would become replaceable?
That's fascinating to see that it's technically possible, so thanks for that.
Though it does note that it will lose its original waterproofing capabilities, which seems like a pretty big deal.
But also... it's not like they were designed to be replaceable. This is electronics surgery that I know I could never attempt personally. But it is interesting that you might get electronics shops to do it for you.
Is this true? Can we say that the extra parts needed for the user replaceable mechanisms and user being responsible for the disposal of the replaced battery is definitely more environmentally friendly than replacing the whole device by the manufacturer?
This got me thinking. Are there _common_ standard consumer rechargable batteries of the tinier sizes? I know of the little watch batteries but never perceive those as having high quality rechargable options.
The website seems to want to be an Apple website. But this one just murders my phone. Does anyone know of any blogs that do an in depth look at how popular pages are implemented or is that impossible with modern minification?
I'd kill to learn why two very similar sites are just so different in performance.
I will never understand why Google continues to invest in products they fail miserably at. They were late to the market with the first Pixel buds, and this doesn't seem any better. That battery life is terrible.
I did like that, especially the ability to take one earpiece out without worrying that it will get lost, but overall I prefer it without the wire. I've had mine for about 2 years and the wire has gotten stiff (probably through work hardening) and that makes it more uncomfortable to wear and makes it harder to fit in the carrying/charging case.
Off-topic but this website is such a blatant rip-off of the AirPods Pro landing page[1] (EDIT: Discussed at the time [2]), and I _hate_ the UX. I'm not sure what device this is optimised for, but it requires a tonn of scrolling, it's janky, you end up scrolling past the info you want, it breaks basic functionality like Ctrl+F. Why not just make a video instead of a webpage, since that's clearly the effect they're going for?
But you know what? I'm fine with that. That's how competition works, and competition is what brings down prices.
And I personally find the scrolling page design (both Apple's and Google's) pretty cool. It would drive me nuts if a site I used daily implemented something like that, like if it became a trend for news sites. But to show off a new product where I'll scroll through once in my life? It's pretty slick as far as I'm concerned. (Provided you've got the CPU to handle it.)
How are they a copy of the AirPods? The AirPods, to me, look hideous. You take the original Apple headphones and cut off the wire. But putting that aside I'm finding it hard to see how these headphones resemble anything like AirPods. I mean, they're wireless headphones...? Is that the issue?
The (rounded, white, shiny) charging/carrying case is definitely heavily inspired by the AirPods. While the headphones, visually, don't look a lot like the AirPods, in terms of functionality they're very similar, as they're wireless earbuds that don't have a wire even between the earbuds, and they feature noise cancellation that adapts to the environment.
Bragi did a Kickstarter back in 2013 for The Dash. They were fully wireless in-ear headphones, with included microphone, activity tracking with a heart rate monitor, built-in memory for listening to music without having to carry your phone, and a charging case. Oh, and they worked underwater for listening to music with the built-in memory while swimming.
IMO every wireless pair of buds I've seen released so far is a 'copy' of Bragi's Dash, and usually has only a subset of the features.
I still love my Dash Pros. Only downside with the experience is you can't pair to multiple devices. But the UX, the look, the in-ear seal, the sound quality -- all seem to me to be superior to anything that's hit the market, and they were designed ~6 years ago.
That's an interesting thought I hadn't considered. The AirPods do indeed seem like Apple accidentally invented (or at least popularized) a new product category while trying to reference the old headphones, which were pretty iconic in their advertising. All of the "copycats" are taking that same product category and designing around the formfactor. I agree that most of the copycats are more aesthetically pleasing, including the Pixel Buds.
The original AirPods looked hideous, so hideous I stopped wearing them outside of my home.
But the AirPod Pros have fixed up the dimensions a bit, now they look like a communication device rather than a piece of jewelry resembling a miniature cigarette.
Scroll-jacking is notoriously bad for accessibility. Can't tab through the sequences and maintain proper focus, using the down arrow key moves the screen 1px per tap it feels like.
From my abled point of view, it's a terrible implementation; if I scroll using mouse wheel it should not be so slow. I would rather see each flick of mousewheel anchor the next or previous slide in place rather than having to do all the scrolling to get there. And that's really what this is, a vertical PowerPoint.
I'm not sure how that's inefficient, it's pretty normal market dynamics. If the demand for a thing is high enough and the supply is low (or artificially controlled), then the provider can just freely set the price wherever they want.
Enter a competitor, and now the competitor has incentive to undercut the original producer to capture their market segment, and then it's a battle between the two between the cost to produce, market price, and value of the good to consumers.
I suppose there's 'inefficiency' in that both producers are now providing identical goods, but very rarely are the goods actually identical. In this case there's also the surrounding product ecosystem of Apple and Google, which is a significant difference at the very least.
If your mousetrap's very easy to copy maybe your mousetrap isn't good to begin with.
Patents, design patents, trademarks, and trade dress are all completely reasonable ways to protect your product. Failing the ability of any of those methods to product your product, I'd argue copying is fair game.
A mousetrap is still a mousetrap, though. They didn't copy the Air Pods, you should be able to see the differences for yourself if you just look at the product pages. Can you honestly not?
not in applied capitalism, no. ever wonder why there are three gas stations at a four-way intersection? Because someone saw two gas stations there, and said to themselves, "I want a piece of that action."
There isn't a strict motive to make something better than someone else .... there's only a motive to make something that someone will buy instead of something else. Big difference.
To me, the biggest thing that makes AirPods unique is that they look pretty weird. The Google ones don't, so I see them as clearly differentiated from AirPods.
The easy pairing / switching between devices. There are cheaper wireless headphones out there, ones with longer batter life, ones with better sound (haven't tried the pros yet myself), but none pair as easily. Supposedly the next version of bluetooth will enable all devices to do that, but we're not there yet.
"W1 chip makes for seamless pairing: Apple's custom Bluetooth chip, the W1, is designed to allow for automatic pairing with Apple devices running iOS 10 or later, WatchOS 3 or later or MacOS Sierra or later. And it totally delivers: Just place the headphones near your compatible device and they'll automatically be detected and ask for pairing, no diving into settings menu needed. You can also transition easily between Apple devices, toggling between the sound of your computer to that of your iPhone or iPad. For Apple Watch owners, that seamless transition between Watch and iPhone is critical, and it's one reason that AirPods are something of an appealing accessory for Watch owners. "
> They only work perfectly with Apple devices
You're correct that the seamless pairing feature only works on apple devices. On non-apple devices, they work equivalently - no worse or better really - than competing headphones. That doesn't mean that the pairing feature isn't very valuable for those of us willing to own more than one apple device.
When you're selling a luxury good, one of the important aspects is it being recognizable. Other people in the target demo need to be able to see and understand that your customer owns and uses a status symbol without it being tastelessly obviously flashy.
I 100% agree with the point you're making but at least Apple's landing page is scrolling smoothly on Firefox (76.0b8 (64-bit) on Windows 10) unlike Google's which is "jumpy".
Apple's page also features way more animations which are more extensive and complex than a total of may be three on Google's page? And also seamlessly flow into each other.
Apple doesn't want to expose itself to the still somewhat murky situation around patents which might or might not be covering WebP (which is basically a still frame encoded in VP9).
Aside of the potential risk of a lawsuit, what makes this worse is that as a partner of the MPEG-LA, they might even be in the position of compromising the MPEG patent pool itself.
Apple not supporting formats which are available in the wild. They don't have to promote it or advertise it in any way. But not being able to play webp at this point is kind of silly if the alternatives are worse.
Also, Chrome does support AAC which was popularised by Apple pushing it onto iPhones.
Safari's list of supported video formats is pitiful.
> Safari on iOS supports low-complexity AAC audio, MP3 audio, AIF audio, WAVE audio, and baseline profile MPEG-4 video. Safari on the desktop (Mac OS X and Windows) supports all media supported by the installed version of QuickTime, including any installed third-party codecs. [0]
Despite that probably being written many, many years ago, it's pretty accurate from what I can tell.
I do agree, but do serve webp when I can to save bandwidth. Webp has been around over 10 years now, so it's not exactly new.
As a somewhat interesting aside, Apple don't even support their own HEIC in Safari, so maybe they just don't have a team working on this area of Safari!
Photoshop doesn't support webp, barely anything supports webp.
Although I'm not trying to defend Safari but webp is not a widely used format and absolutely shouldn't be being pushed at this point until I can save an image from a site and actually be able to use it in applications.
On Windows 10 on a Surface Book (high-DPI): both are utterly unusable in Firefox Nightly, and lousy (but just barely usable) in Chrome. I despise such sites. It’s fundamentally impossible to do such scrolljacking well, and I wish they’d all agree to just stop trying.
Take a look at the AirPods Pro page with JavaScript disabled. After a very slightly suboptimal start (consuming too much vertical space for fairly meaningless content), it’s actually pretty great. That’s what they should have made for everyone.
But far more of the time, what you request is impossible, because such fancy scrolljacking sites are normally utterly broken with JS disabled. The Pixel Buds page is basically just blank, for example.
Things like this make me feel the accusations about Google are true.
A bunch of brilliant engineers with no sense of how to develop a product around the said technology.
I used to be a huge critic of Samsung for blatantly copying Apple back in the early Galaxy days, but Samsung has come a long way at differentiating themselves and carving an identity for themselves that isn't all that terrible.
This is a good reminder that if you want good design, don't just rip off another site, implement it, and ship. Build a prototype, user test it, and when they say this sucks, try something else.
I'd love to see some more tech companies go the Berkshire Hathaway route: https://berkshirehathaway.com/ Metrics for load time, readability, usability, are great. :)
Well... strangely enough, this kind of no frills design is open only to some people/businesses. You need at least one of the following:
A) to not care how other's will perceive your website
B) enough people know who you are so well that it doesn't matter how they perceive your website
If you don't fall into either A or B, I'm sorry but you will need at least a "professional looking" website. Within that of course I agree there's still ample room for good UX and fast load times
You might like that website, but do you really think most consumers would have faith in your product if the landing page looked anything like that? People use external markers like that all the time--the bathroom at this diner is nice == the kitchen must be clean.
My suggestion is to user test your site. I agree most consumers would not like such sites (and that you'd learn that in user tests). I also believe consumers hate scroll jacking, janky experiences (anecdata elsewhere in the thread). My personal taste is just one data point.
Scroll-jacking is a scourge. I appreciate what Apple and others are going for, but it's way overused and is better suited for a splash screen in a retail store than the main product page.
Everything about the pixel buds is a blatant airpods ripoff, it appears. That’s fine by me, though. I’d love to see a third company/platform try to get in on the act, too.
Exactly. If Google has come out with "true wireless" before the the market was flooded they might seem relevant. This is just sad. And you can really look like a dork with G in your ear.
Like any Google product, however, we have to enter it in the deadlock at launch time since it is only a matter of time before they see some shiny...
It's mind-boggling. A company with Google's resources should be able to come up with unique designs. They should be making top-tier competitors, not shit that looks like a generic brand knock-off.
Why does it sound like people keep disregarding Samsung ?
Samsung has a lot of first with true-wireless headphones.
Wireless charging, IEM style buds and first android to have Apple style seamless pairing. They pair to multiple devices too. They also have much better battery life than both the pixel buds and air pods. Lastly, the android app itself is pretty great with decent customization and information, without looking half bad.
Both the product and the landing pages are so generic that I would have a hard time calling them a rip off. Every major audio/smartphone company has a product with very similar featurset in their lineup, and this is just Google following suite.
The products and pages look the same since they all copied Apple. The same thing has happened with packaging. I guess you could technically call it standard now, but it all originated with Apple.
I don't know how so much people believe that AirPods were the first of their kind of product. This isn't the first time I had to make a similar comment.
Bragi crowdfunded "The Dash" in early 2014 (to much publicity) and released them in late 2015. To my knowledge this was the first high-profile pair of "disconnected wireless earbuds".
AirPods were released late 2016, so a full year later, so they were not the first with this kind of a product by a long stretch. By that time, Bragi already released a second stripped-down version of their product. The Pixel buds also much more closely resemble "The Dash" than AirPods.
As for product pages, I sadly don't have paper trail, but I'm sure people more into the topic can find examples dating back ~10 years for pages where the product twirls around the page while scrolling (and there is nothing more connecting the product page for the Pixel Buds and the AirPods).
Bragi crowdfunded "The Dash" in early 2014 (to much publicity) and released them in late 2015. To my knowledge this was the first high-profile pair of "disconnected wireless earbuds".
And they had so-so reviews.
There were smartphones before the iPhone, there were tablets before the iPad, there were smartwatches before the Apple Watch. However, in general when Apple enters a category they set the bar for the rest of the industry (with some exceptions, e.g. HomePod and to some extend the Apple TV), because they nail the experience and the category becomes much more popular. Moreover, Apple generally dominates the categories they enter when it comes to profit margins. (And no, it is not only because people pay to carry an Apple logo.)
So, it is not strange that people compare Google Pixel Buds to AirPods. The now-iconic AirPod is what Google wants to emulate or compete with, not "The Dash" or many of the other less-visible competitors.
> because they nail the experience and the category becomes much more popular. Moreover, Apple generally dominates the categories they enter when it comes to profit margins. (And no, it is not only because people pay to carry an Apple logo.)
At some point it switched from people buying Apple as a premium brand to, as you said them just being "more popular" and leveraging that. A lot of people simply don't look much farther than they brands they already own, and this applies to Apple as well.
I wouldn't say that the AirPods were a "setting the bar" product. I'd argue that for the Apple ecosystem it was more of a "keeping the bar", with AirPods being the path of least resistance after they removed the headphone jack.
As for product pages, I sadly don't have paper trail
Good, I would hate for you to waste effort on something few but yourself care about. Because I doubt you'd find many that would agree that Google is really ripping off "The Dash" because they were "first!!11".
As much as it will pain some to admit, Google is ripping off Apple, not some Kickstarter project no one has heard about.
There were many wireless earbuds around the time Apple came out with the AirPods so you're really not selling your point here. Just because a company wants to get into that market now doesn't automatically make it derivative from Apple. The Dash was very popular, people have heard about it. Samsung Gear IconX earbuds were also popular and out before AirPods. Should we say that Apple is derivative of Samsung because they came to the market first? By your logic, yes we should.
None of my friends outside tech circles have heard of "The Dash". They all know and most of them bought or want AirPods. An estimated 60 million AirPods were sold in 2019, nobody else in the category comes close.
I had the same thought, having first viewed it on Desktop (FF 75).
On mobile it's much smoother (Oneplus 7T Pro), however, it doesn't come close to how in awe I was at the smoothness of the Mavic Mini mini-site on mobile: https://www.dji.com/uk/mavic-mini
The Mavic site is doing something different than the the Airpod and Pixel Buds pages. The Mavic looks like it's triggering the animations once they're on screen. The two other sites are tying those animations directly to the scroll position, on both the Google and Apple sites the videos and animations will play backwards when you scroll back up. The closest the Mavic site comes looks like some of the static images replay if you scroll back up and down.
That makes sense. I could "feel" that they're implemented differently, but as a non-web developer I couldn't tell what the difference was. I just recall being really impressed with how the Mavic site looked/felt on mobile when it was first posted here some months ago.
The site stutters a lot for me on Firefox on my 1+ 7 Pro. I had a hard time trying to read the text in the middle of the first scroll section because it also seems to override the scroll to have tons of acceleration & low friction - which does not combo well with stuttery input.
I don't know who actually ripped off who, if at all.
But in terms of product name, if we go based on public launch date, the first generation of Pixel Buds were released in Oct 2017 and the first generation of the Amazon Buds were released Oct 2020 IIUC.
Google Assistant was announced in May 2016, Amazon Alexa was launched in 2014.
Disclaimer: I work at El Googs but not on these products. These dates I just searched on the web within 30 seconds.
Lot of people have been raving about these new Apple product pages but really they're at the point where some of them are basically just video trailers that you scroll through, and that comes through in terms of information density too.
Please Google, just because my browser is in Berlin, that doesn't mean I speak German. I'd like to look at your product. I might even be interested. But I can't understand what you're telling me.
I have language preferences in my account, and you definitely know who I am because you're showing my picture in the top right corner.
So why does where I am take precedence over who I am?
I always wondered wtf the browsers language setting is for. Can a website not query this for the preferred language rather than make a language decision based on an IP address geo lookup?
I am English, my browsers language order is to set English (UK) then English (generic). No foreign languages. However I live in [redacted] and if I visit a site it will give me a [redacted] version due to my location rather than the language set within the browser.
I (apparently wrongly) assumed saying I want content in English would mean the website would query what language the user wants and then send that.
Could someone explain what the browser language preference is for?
It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem which is incredibly frustrating, I wish websites would start to respect it so users start to configure their browser properly.
Users don't configure it (and quite possibly don't know how) so many websites ignore it.
Many websites ignore it so it isn't that useful to learn how to configure it.
On my sites, the URL parameters wins. For example, when the user is explicitly changing a page's language.
#2 is the site language cookie from a previous visit. If that fails, #3 is the language the browser requests. If all those fail, English, because it is the most common language the company uses internally.
In our user testing, we run into a lot of situations where the computer's primary user, and the person who set it up, are a child, who speaks English. But our site is more geared toward their parents, who often will speak the language of their homeland. For this reason, I make it stupidly easy to change languages, and we have a policy that ALL content has to be translated into English, Spanish, and Chinese, which covers 99.8% of our customers.
You don't find out these sorts of things through modern "telemetry" gathering and such current methods of testing. You find these things out by going into the field and watching your customers use your products. But interacting with wetware is beneath people in the SV bubble.
Perhaps I am wrong but in my experience Chrome, Firefox and the platform included browsers all set the browser language to the OS language by default.
While not a perfection solution I feel if the user is able to understand the language of the OS they are using then giving them a website in the same language is much better than picking one based on an IP location.
I totally agree the browser language options are hidden with a pretty crappy UI that no normal user would find and use easily.
Even worse, GeoIP doesn't even have high enough resolution.
I'm currently in Switzerland. Different regions speak German, French and Italian (among others).
If you just use "this IP is in Switzerland" to try and guess the best language, you will definitely get it wrong. 25% of .ch pages I have never visited before start out in French, most others in German.
> Please Google, just because my browser is in Berlin, that doesn't mean I speak German. I'd like to look at your product. I might even be interested. But I can't understand what you're telling me.
Interesting. I'm in the same situation but I do speak German (as a third language) and it didn't even click with me at first the website is indeed in German.
Because Google is still really bad at e-commerce and doesn't distinguish content language from locale and local law. You should be seeing the store in your preferred language, asking for your locale's address format, and following German trade law. But alas, you are in Germany, you get the full German experience.
Also nobody really looks at accept language headers anymore, I feel.
This is an e-store page. It makes sense to follow the region instead of language preferences.
The problem is they ideally should separate UI language from region settings, but most sites don't.
And they may have some difficulties to do so because they could have specific products that they simply don't have info in languages other than the local one.
If you just want to read the description, you can simply change the region below.
If you visit https://www.apple.com/jp/shop/, it only has Japanese too. You can't use JP region store and have it in English at the same time.
This is a e-store page. It makes sense to follow the region instead of language preferences.
Makes sense to whom? Not to someone who's been using a company's web site in one language, and then suddenly gets shifted to another language simply because they want to make a purchase from the same company they were communicating with seconds before.
Imaging talking to someone at your bank's call center, and then when you get transferred suddenly speaking to someone in another language. "Well, you wanted the Fraud Protection department. It makes sense to speak {$xx__language}."
Computers are supposed to work for people, not the other way around. We have grown accustomed to half-assery, using the excuse that "everyone else does it."
Just today I received a package from Amazon. A simple cat food bowl. I had to put it together. I remember when it was so unusual for production burdens to be shifted to the consumer that such products were labeled "some assembly required." Now we're so used to companies not completing their work, that we make excuses for them. Enough.
There is no "sudden" change. Google as a web service (search, Gmail, etc.) can offer multiple languages for a region, but their store, as a separate business, can (so far) only offers local language for a certain region.
The point I'm trying to make is that there is an issue, but the issue is not they ignore user's language setting.
What it does is that
1) They detect store region based on user's region instead of language preference, which is reasonable IMHO;
2) However, they don't have English display language for their German store. This can and should be improved. For example, Amazon Japan offers Japanese, Chinese and English. Google can definitely do better since their products are much more limited and they have translations for most of content already.
>Imaging talking to someone at your bank's call center, and then when you get transferred suddenly speaking to someone in another language. "Well, you wanted the Fraud Protection department. It makes sense to speak {$xx__language}."
A better analogy would be you're in China. Well now everything will be in Chinese and Chinese only to begin with.
> I don't think that within a company changing the user's language, effectively breaking the experience, is "reasonable."
And that's not what I said.
I said it's "reasonable" to switch to German store if you're in Germany (1), but they should still have a English display language for it if user prefers English (2). They failed at 2, not 1.
I live in Belgium; in an area of Belgium that primarily speaks French. I happen to speak French as well (though I'm not originally from Belgium, I am French), but given the places I've lived in my life that's more a coincidence than anything else.
I do not speak flemish (be-nl). Yet, my page of the store is in flemish.
My browser (a Google browser!) is configured to ask for pages in english, and as a fallback, in french at a lower priority. There is a French version of the store, and it's still not sending it.
And a lot of people here in Belgium speak exclusively English. German is also an official language in the country, though only actively spoken in a small part of it. (Map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Belgium)
I have no obvious way of changing the language, other than a flag which rather points to changing the region. Turns out, in the region picker (https://store.google.com/regionpicker), "Belgium French" is a region, separate from "Flemish". When I click "Belgium French", a warning appears. In Flemish.
In other words, almost everything about language that store page can get wrong, it does get wrong.
No, it will appear in two languages, top one being your current region/language, and bottom being your target region/language.
So in your case, it should show in nl-BE and fr-BE.
No, this is ridiculous. Being located in Germany/Japan doesn't make me suddenly able to understand German/Japanese. I can walk into a shop in Berlin and point at things until they conclude the transaction - there is nothing in German law that means I have to conduct the transaction in German. (Though because most Berliners' English is excellent, usually the entire transaction is in English).
If a retail store physically located in Germany can cope with my ignorance of the local language without ever meeting me before, then Google, with it's vast knowledge of me - and my specific choice of language preference - should be able to do the same.
In other words - there's absolutely no good reason why I can't use either the Google or Apple stores in the country I live in but using any language I choose.
Also - switching region to one that speaks a language I understand usually means I then can't select a delivery address in the region that I live in. It's like they refuse to sell things to people who don't understand the official language of the country.
The scrolling on that site is atrocious. What's up with the "Pixel" branding on the headphones? After the Nexus 6P, I'm never buying another of their phones again. I see "Pixel" and immediately think "not buying that". Do I need a Pixel for these to work? Will I be missing out on features of I don't have one? I can't find anything mentioning what makes these "Pixel" headphones. Google's marketing is awful.
Never had a Nexus, but I had the Pixel 1, liked it so much I got another after I broke it (dropped it so many times, it was very resilient). Then updated to the Pixel 3a. 0 problems whatsoever and it's the best phone I've ever owned. Although, I do much less on my phone these days, mostly web browsing and SMS/calls, definitely not a power user any more.
All of your questions are answered on the linked page.
You don't need a Pixel for these to work (they even say they support iOS), and you won't be missing out on features as long as you have an "Assistant Enabled device running Android 6.0 or newer".
Same here, I have a Pixel 2 and it has held up very well. I run GrapheneOS on it. I had issues with the back glass on the OG Pixel being extremely fragile, but no such issues with this iteration of the device.
I'm tempted to upgrade to a Pixel 4 for the wireless charging but it's not worth a grand. I will probably wait to do so until GrapheneOS no longer supports the 2.
AFAIK, Pixel is just the brand. I think there's may be minor features that only work with Pixel phones but they supposedly work with other Android phones, iPhones, etc. Personally, I bought a Pixel 2 about a year and a half ago and I really like it.
I'm in the same boat. Loved my Nexus 6P but they bungled the warranty response to the bootloop issue. I didn't buy a pixel because they were out of my price range. Everyone I know in real life that has one really likes it. The branding is confusing, I guess Pixel is just Google's phone hardware and accessories brand now.
I had a nexus 5, nexus 6p and pixel xl 1 before switching back to iPhone. The nexus 5 and pixel xl were both great workhorse phones. I switched away because I was sick of googles software ecosystem but the hardware was decent. However the 6p was an atrocious piece of machine, I hated that phone.
Pixel is just the replacement for Nexus as their in house mobile device brand. It's just a name and no it looks like all the mentioned features are implementable at the app level.
I've always wondered if they named it after tracking pixel technology, something Google is very familiar with. The idea that your 'pixel' can be taken anywhere and can ping back location etc to Google seems very much like a pixel.
These prices are horrendous. I bought some GoNovation Demi buds for $40 and they are ipx7 with aptX and sound amazing with great battery life. No way in hell these pixel buds are 4.5x better. Apple Google and Samsung are using propaganda to spread the lie that $150-200 is the price point of earbuds. Look at GoNovation, MEE, Anker, and other companies doing amazing work delivering quality under $50.
Not a new concept in marketing, but yeah these are not what I'd buy even if I were into wireless headphones. You're paying more for the name than anything else.
Another weird product from Google. I have an impression (I might be wrong) that decisions there are made by a) hardcore geeks, b) “politicians”/ideologues. It manifests in company’s complete inability to connect with real-world everyday people, to understand what consumers want, what they prefer or dream about.
Another possibility is “self-organization”, of course, or decisions made by committees where everyone us afraid to hurt others’ feelings and the responsibilities are blurred so much that the resulting products always turn out awkward and full of compromises.
Products that are totally devoid of fun, desire and in some cases common sense.
IMO this is a horrible case design - why make it round so it rolls around on your desk? Can't stand it up right, etc. It is not an object that you continuously hold in your palm, then why not make it a box? Add draft angles to help with the injection molding process.
Industrial designers are continually chasing organic forms for no reason at all from car interiors to headphone cases - functionalism takes a back seat, fancy presentations to executives impress and sexy curves appeal to the masses.
It is almost as if we've forgotten how to design things from the ground up - functional aspects should define the form. Earbuds are fine though - they need to be ergonomic to sit in the ear.
As an industrial designer I'd say you're strongly mistaken. Their case design looks like it lays perfectly fine down on a surface, and efficiently wraps around the buds, why the need to stand it upright at all? It's a classic error to think boxes are more efficient in every scenario, simply look at aircraft -- far from a box and perfectly suited to the usable task!
Maybe there's americium in the Buds to detect smoke coming out of one's ears? Or maybe they are painted with radium so that you can find them in the dark?
I wonder how much electro magnetic radiation they will emit...there were quite a few scaremongering videos out there about the airpods...or bluetooth headphones in general.
The issue is that most people (that I've noticed in the US) just have them in their ears ALL DAY.
The earbuds/airbuds/headhphones are connected to cellular phones (and hence transmitting just to stay connected).
That CAN'T be good for your ears/brain...Not an doctor myself but just common sense I believe?
Anyone has any idea...am I just tripping?
> That CAN'T be good for your ears/brain...Not an doctor myself but just common sense I believe?
Electromagnetic radiation sounds like a scary word, but visible light also falls into that category. Does this mean it's unhealthy to be in a room with light? Should we cover our windows, turn off our lights, and live in the dark to limit our exposure?
True, what needs to be emphasized is that the visible spectrum lies above bluetooth / 5G and whatever when it comes to energy, whereas x-rays and the like lie above the visible spectrum itself.
