
The Pixel C was probably never supposed to run Android - ingve
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-road-from-chrome-os-concept-to-android-adoptee/
======
mrpippy
Fascinating story, and explains why the product is so odd and rushed.

It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars,
muddle your overall branding/product lines (Nexus vs. Pixel), and compete with
your own existing products (Nexus 9)?

Microsoft canceled the Surface Mini at the last minute, because it was clear
that WinRT had no future. Once the touchscreen Chrome OS got canceled, the
Pixel C should have been too.

~~~
tdicola
Perhaps there were contracts with manufacturers that would have been more
expensive to back out of at the last minute. It's also hugely demoralizing to
a team to work on something for a couple years and then see it never ship
because of mismanagement many levels above them. They probably ran the numbers
and saw it was cheaper to pay X million to ship a shoddy device vs. a greater
Y million to back out of contracts, perhaps lose team members in frustration,
etc.

See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48
days later.

~~~
r00fus
Well the results are... this was likely the best way they could put a knife in
ChromeOS as a platform.

~~~
ossreality
Huh? In the AMA they hinted that the thing can boot other OSes.

Whatever the convergence plan is, Pixel C is the test hardware. The bootloader
bits are in the ChromeOS tree. It uses Coreboot.

It's a ChromeOS device and I suspect it's future will include a return to its
roots.

ARC in Chrome will be a better way forward for Android than trying to fix all
of Android's insidious problems on the "desktop" and making mobile Chrome more
fully featured. It just seems painfully obvious that Chrome is going to win.

It's better tech all around.

~~~
nextos
If so, I guess this would be a fantastic machine for running Linux ARM.

~~~
bch
This (well, *BSD) is what I'm interested in. It'll be interesting to hear from
the Linux/BSD pioneers what the networking, gfx, and touchscreen support are.

[edit: insertspace]

~~~
nextos
Except for the slightly odd keyboard (e.g. no Esc), this could be a fantastic
machine for a keyboard driven setup.

That's how I use my MBA 11''. XMonad, mutt and friends.

But this one could be better.

~~~
ant6n
At least the MBA is a clamshell. This I could not imagine working on.... Why
didn't they just do a Nvidia X1 Chromebook.

------
pqs
Why can't Android run a full blown Chrome browser able to run the web versions
of Docs and Sheets?

I need a cheap and lightweight computer with a keyboard for work traveling and
personal use. I now use an iPad with a logitech bluetooth keyboard, but it is
not ideal. The main problem is that it cannot run the full version of Google
Sheets (with filters), which I need for work. There are many other problems,
as iOS does not support keyboards well (even though it is improving).

Furthermore, I now own an Android smartphone, which I like, thus an Android
tablet with a keyboard would be ideal.

The Pixel C seemed perfect. The keyboard is very nice and it runs Android. I
thought that, being a Google product, it would be able to run the web versions
of Google Docs and Sheets. But it can't.

The alternative is a Chromebook. But I would like to run some Android apps
which I already own. A computer that can only run a browser is too limited.

This brings me to my question: why can't an Android tablet with 2GB of RAM run
a full Chrome experience? If it could, the pixel would be much better than a
Chromebook, at least for me.

~~~
beardicus
>The alternative is a Chromebook. But I would like to run some Android apps
which I already own.

I don't know the details, but it sounds like Chromebooks can now run Android
apps:
[https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088175?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088175?hl=en)

Maybe that's only Android apps that have been "ported" and placed in the
Chromebook app store though.

~~~
pqs
As you mention, just a few apps have been ported. It seems quite experimental
and it also seems that at Google the tide now flows the other way. Are we
heading towards the inclusion of Chrome to Android?

My question is: what prevents including a full featured Chrome browser in
Android devices with more than 2GB of RAM? If Google wants to position Android
as a productivity OS, Android should at least support the full versions of
Google's productivity tools, and today this means supporting the web versions.

------
RyanZAG
Google definitely needs someone to step up as a gatekeeper and say 'No, this
product is terrible, go make it better and we can think about a release'.

------
justinkelly
The Asus Chromebook Flip works great as a ChromeOS 'tablet' \- just assuming
that you use it in laptop mode 90% and tablet 10% of the time.

Trying to use ChromeOS 90% of the time in tablet mode just isnt going to work

Should of gone with a slimmed down Pixel with a flip or slide keyboard (with
trackpad) - that wold of been awesome and actually make sense

Pixel C doesnt work

Anyone whose tried to use Android as a laptop replacement - with keyboard
etc.. knows the pain - Android doesn't work as a 'work' device/laptop - wish
it would but it currently just doesnt :(

~~~
thomasahle
What are the main pain points of using android with a keyboard? People have
mentioned not having split screen, however IOs just got that a fee months ago,
and people used it with keyboards Lal the time before that.

~~~
izacus
Mostly slow application switching on my case. It's significantly better than
on iPad due to OS having better keyboard support (yes, even the Pro keyboard
is awful to use), but it doesn't really compare to proper desktops.

------
BinaryIdiot
I think this article is very fair and probably on the money. The Pixel C is a
tablet I really, really want to like but the fact that Android is very ill
suited to being a tablet OS plus the fact that the keyboard connects via
bluetooth (and, as they always do, suffers from input issues as most reviewers
have pointed out) is just a bad idea.

One thing to point out however is this article and many others continue to say
how odd it is for the Pixel team to develop Android hardware but I think many
forget that Google positions Pixel hardware as hardware designed and
manufactured in-house versus Nexus which has hardware designed and
manufactured through partners. The Pixel C did a reddit AMA just two days ago
and one of the answers made this distinction
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3w3x7p/hi_im_andrew_h...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3w3x7p/hi_im_andrew_here_at_google_and_im_with_the_team/)

Though I'll admit that distinction isn't always black and white considering
things like the Nexus Player.

~~~
username223
I'm curious what the top-voted and now "deleted/removed" thread used to be in
that Reddit discussion, and who nuked it.

~~~
pja
[https://web.archive.org/web/20151210170144/https://www.reddi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151210170144/https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3w3x7p/hi_im_andrew_here_at_google_and_im_with_the_team/)

Deleted for not being a question I guess.

------
azernik
I love git archaeology when I'm in the organization producing the commits, but
it's even cooler as a window in from the outside.

------
danpeddle
About the keyboard being hidden behind a developer flag - actually it looks
like the keyboard that pops up when using the ChromeOS accessibility options.
Handy when interacting with the device from a distance with only a pointing
device.

------
cauliturtle
I m highly interested in Pixel C, is there any hack to install ubuntu on it
til now?

~~~
thomasahle
Since it is Core boot and all open source drivers, I imagine it won't be hard.
However given it's just started shipping, I don't think anybody have much
experience with it yet.

It is interesting how a community that's probably installed their own software
on their hardware for the last 20 years, suddently care so much about if it
ships with one or another open source operating system.

~~~
verbify
Coreboot isn't the issue. You need a payload for Coreboot. For x86
architecture, people use Seabios, but that won't work with the Pixel C,
because it's ARM based.

Some people suggest you might be able to get Tianocore working, but I've no
experience with that (I'm running Xubuntu on a modified HP Chromebook 14).
ArchLinux has a Samsung Chromebook guide -
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Samsung_Chromebook_(ARM...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Samsung_Chromebook_\(ARM\)).
So it might still be possible with a lot of effort.

[Source]([https://plus.google.com/115981076197658979302/posts/2QXBZ16G...](https://plus.google.com/115981076197658979302/posts/2QXBZ16GY4v)).

Incidentally about your closing comment - when PCs were towers it was a
simpler matter to install your own operating system and make sure you choose
compatible parts. It becomes a lot more difficult when they're pre-packaged
laptops - you can't really build one yourself. Google doesn't want you to
switch away from ChromeOS because their business model centres around their
apps (Google Drive, etc.) and ads for their searches. So that's why people
have started caring about whether it can run a certain OS easily.

------
smegel
John Gruber will get a huge kick out of this.

~~~
joezydeco
Already has:

[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/12/10/reddit-google-
pi...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/12/10/reddit-google-pixel-c)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
And, yet, not a single mention of the iPhone hunchback battery debacle. I
enjoy reading Gruber's blog, but his bias is ridiculous.

~~~
SyneRyder
He takes a while to address/spin Apple debacles. Maybe there'll be something
on Monday.

I've found it more interesting that Gruber has been directly critical of Apple
lately. When even Gruber says "If this hasn’t set off alarm bells within
Apple, something is very wrong", then something is _very_ very wrong:
[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/12/01/sketch-leaves-
ma...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/12/01/sketch-leaves-mac-app-
store)

~~~
rloc
You have to read carefully to find critical opinions on his blog. Another one
where he had to admit the sneaky choice of a 16 to 64gb storage (for obvious
$$ reasons).

"But I don’t understand why the entry level storage tier remained at a meager
16 GB. That seems downright punitive given how big panoramic photos and slo-mo
HD videos are, and it sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at the three
storage tiers together: 32/64/128 looks natural; 16/64/128 looks like a
mistake. The original iPhone, seven years and eight product generations ago,
had an 8 GB storage tier. The entry-level iPhones 6 are 50 times faster than
that original iPhone, but have only twice the storage capacity. That’s just
wrong. This is the single-most disappointing aspect of the new phones."

[http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/the_iphones_6](http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/the_iphones_6)

------
richardboegli
Android and Chrome unification wasn't ready yet, but the hardware platform
was.

Google IO 2016 will be interesting.

------
astannard
I bet the android fork, remix OS would run great on it!

