I\u2019ve been rewatching this year\u2019s Made by Google event for fairly obvious reasons, and the video starts with a montage of all nine previous Pixel phone generations stretching back to 2016. There\u2019s also a nice bit early on in which Google senior vice president Rick Osterloh is reminded of his appearance at the original Pixel launch almost a decade earlier.<\/p>\n
Each time I see this, I think about how Pixel has evolved from year-to-year. And while I have some specific memories and many more vague memories, I don\u2019t exactly recall when many features or changes arrived for the first time. And so I\u2019ve wondered about the best way to assemble this information in an easily-accessible way.<\/p>\n
I could do this for myself, and just take notes in Notion or whatever. Or, better still, I could do it publicly, in the form of articles like this one that I publish to Thurrott.com. And if some of the history I needed to reexamine had occurred before I made the switch to Thurrott.com, I would need to root around in my archives and possibly republish some older articles here.<\/p>\n
But I started Thurrott.com with George and Blue Whale Web in early 2015, and Google announced the first Pixels in 2016. So the entire history of Pixel is documented, to some degree, on this site. There\u2019s no reason to republish anything. I can simply simply link to it.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s what I\u2019m doing. And here\u2019s part one.
\ud83d\udd01 The Nexus of hardware and software
Previous to designing the Pixel smartphones in-house, Google worked with its hardware partners on annual Nexus-branded smartphone releases that it sold directly to a small but ardent community of fans. I was one of those fans, and I purchased almost every Nexus model that Google created, with the Nexus 4 (2012) and Nexus 5 (2013) being notably good early entries.<\/p>\n
I skipped the Nexus 6, which I viewed as a rare miss for the company, in part because I wasn\u2019t impressed by the Motorola hardware. But then Google rebounded in 2015 with the best-ever Nexus phones, the 5.2-inch Nexus 5X and the 5.7-inch Nexus 6P, the first and only time it ever announced and shipped two Nexus models at the same time. The Nexus 6P was particularly impressive, thanks largely to its incredible camera capabilities. It represented a few personal firsts, including my first exposure to Huawei hardware, my first experiences with Google Fi as a wireless carrier. (It was still called Project Fi at the time.) And looking back on this device now, I will also point out that the 6P featured a phone-wide camera bar that previewed the iconic camera bars on today\u2019s Pixels.<\/p>\n
And then it was over.<\/p>\n
Though Nexus phones were often excellent, dealing with a different hardware maker every year was problematic for many reasons. For example, it was impossible to align new features each year with hardware designs that often took 2 to 4 years to create. And Google\u2019s partners would sometimes release slightly better versions of the phones that Google offered…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been rewatching this year\u2019s Made by Google event for fairly obvious reasons, and the video starts with…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":192501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[611,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-192500","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115131281849003898","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}