Inside Google’s new hardware

Rick Osterloh has been on the job as the senior vice president of hardware at Google for just over 17 months now. In that time, he’s had to repeatedly answer the same questions from reporters like me: just how serious is Google about making its own hardware? Is it a hobby or is it going to genuinely affect Google’s financial bottom line? Is the company sure it won’t repeat the same mistakes it made with its ill-fated Motorola acquisition and subsequent sale years ago?

He’s heard it all before: Osterloh was actually president of Motorola for a time under Google. In an hour-long interview, his answers to those questions haven’t changed since last April. They might not stop us from asking them over and over, but the consistency of the answers is important. And if there was any doubt about Google’s ambitions in hardware, the company definitively put it to rest by acquiring 2,000 or so phone engineers from HTC last month, along with some IP and equipment.

The first thing I noticed about Google’s new Daydream View VR headset is the pink controller.

In the original View, all plastic parts were beige or gray, even if you got the model wrapped with rich crimson fabric. Now, they’re coordinated: if you buy the colorful “Coral” edition, you’ll get a coral remote, too. It’s not a big change, but it’s emblematic of Google’s overall goal: re-creating last year’s carefully engineered mobile headset, undoing a few mistakes, and making its individual parts a little nicer.

Chromebooks mostly exist in two camps. The first is the education market, where an entire generation of students have been using cheap, low-end laptops to get their schoolwork done. The second camp is the direct-to-consumer market, where manufacturers like Samsung and Asus have been introducing higher-end models that creep up into the $500 range, but don’t have the power or flexibility of a proper Windows or Mac laptop.

Now, for the first time since Google discontinued the Chromebook Pixel last year, it’s back in the top end of the market with the Pixelbook, a laptop that starts at $999 and can be priced all the way up to $1,649. And if you want, you can spend $99 more on the Pixelbook Pen, a stylus designed specifically for this laptop.

Google is making wireless headphones that are specifically designed to be the first and best option for people who buy Google phones — just like AirPods are designed for iPhones.

The new Pixel Buds borrow a lot of ideas from Apple’s AirPods: they have a new, easier way to pair with your phone, they come in a little battery case, they use touch controls, and they have tight integration with an intelligent assistant. They’re also priced exactly the same, at $159, and are coming out in November.

Unbeknownst to me, at the very moment on Monday morning when I was asking Google CEO Sundar Pichai about the biggest ethical concern for AI today, Google’s algorithms were promoting misinformation about the Las Vegas shooting.

I was asking in the context of the aftermath of the 2016 election and the misinformation that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google were found to have spread. Pichai, I found out later, had a rough idea that something was going wrong with one of his algorithms as we were speaking. So his answer, I think it’s fair to say, also serves as a response to the widespread criticisms the company faced in the days after the shooting.