Google Pixel Buds
blog.google
blog.google
Maybe they're region-locked?
(Note: Not redirected. It's that same URL, but only lists other products).
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.
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)
They sure look cool though.
I wouldn't say a generation behind compared to AirPods, but they're definitely a class below AirPod Pros.
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.
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.
Also you can add passive sound filtering sleeves to them.
Unless you're talking about the lower-end ones without wireless charging which are $159: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MV7N2AM/A/airpods-with-ch...
The Google Pixel buds include wireless charging, so they're matched up against the higher end Airpods.
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.
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?
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.
(FYI, I'm the GP commenter but not the one you're replying to directly.)
It’s precedent.
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 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!
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.
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.
Which we'll all be working on when the surface of the planet becomes inhabitable and the survivors have to live underground.
/s
I think it could work for me given the case provides 24 hours of listening time. I sure don't mind taking 10 minutes break every 2 hours or so.
Disc: Googler.
2 hours sounds like an absolute nightmare.
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.
https://blog.google/products/pixel-buds/pixel-buds-now-avail...
Most of this thread is complaining about the original site, but let's give it a try.
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.
http://tinyurl.com/yb6qfpes (Koss over-the-ear headphones example)
In my case, the most comfortable tips came from a no-name cheap pair. So I guess it is one area where fit is more important than anything else.
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.
A. Launch products, both software and hardware, worldwide (or at least majority of countries).
B. Launch products with clear dates and not just "Join a waiting list". At least in German store that's the only option.
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...
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.
Found this page https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_buds which links specifically to the US store where I can see the price (for the US) and specs.
Also, I have a Radeon 5700XT GPU, and scrolling is somehow still choppy.
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.
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 still don't understand how google cannot just improve their hardware branch.
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'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.
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.)
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.
You should treat their brand the same way. In the USA, the perception isn't of Google as a quality brand. More of an also-ran.
PS: I love their cloud services. I just don't know why they keep insisting on trying to make their hardware happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The above link works, but just shows other products.
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).
Android One makes a big difference.
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.
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.
Bought a pair of "true" wireless ones this time around which seems a lot more durable, but time will tell.
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.
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.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
It's the same as my car. I buy a based on the cost of maintenance not how easy it is to maintain myself.
* 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Thanks for the info.
I'd kill to learn why two very similar sites are just so different in performance.
Also aesthetically the embossed "G" is a bit garish to me.
I wonder if the Find my device feature works on iOS (even if only through Safari)?
It's the same as airpods, and people love airpods.
Also, Chrome does support AAC which was popularised by Apple pushing it onto iPhones.
> 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.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Au...
And eventually AVIF: https://twitter.com/mathias/status/1248135249663574017 & https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207750
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!
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.
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.
I don't need all site owners to stop trying, I just need one usable browser that ignores the attempts.
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.
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).
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.
Why not agree that both Apple and Google we’re inspired by the Dash?
If this were academia, they would probably be required to site them as a source.
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.
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.
A third company making wireless earbuds? There's an absurd number of companies doing that :)
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...
Eh, as near as I can tell like 10 brands came out at once in 2015, so it was always like that. More options aren't a bad thing.
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.
Idk why they get left out of the conversation.
Must be a subtle reference to their mobile operating systems.
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
Meanwhile Apple's scrolling pages work great.
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. :)
Are you really suggesting that Google doesn’t do user tests? Google likely has a larger headcount on UX than most tech companies have employees.
My reply is to the BH thread.
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
Designs like this persist for a simple reason - it’s that people who like spending a lot of money on high end tech products like them.
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.
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.)
as if airpods were the 1st rechargable wireless earbuds anyway
All I can come up with is the look. These ones from Google look way different. Are they really clones in some way?
Think the Birkin bag.
"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.
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.
Wow, Apple has some serious brainwashing in the PR department for you to think that they actually invented true wireless earbuds.
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.
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.
You could say Apple took an idea and made it better, and that's exactly how it should work. Google is simply trying to do the same thing here
No. Competition is you inventing a better mousetrap, not copying someone else's mousetrap.
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.
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.
So it is competition, for sure!
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.
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.
Maybe it's because I'm on firefox?
Edit: it works in chromium, what a piece of junk.
Google is what Google does.
And it’s not webstandards.
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 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?
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.
#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.
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.
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.
No rhyme or reason.
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.
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.
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.
Here is a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ICwIgxH.png
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.
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.
If your business units can't cooperate on something as simple as passing a language variable, then the business is broken.
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.
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.
Also nobody really looks at accept language headers anymore, I feel.
Which is funny, because Google is always coming up with better, more effective ways to track users.
It is pretty annoying that I get redirected away from the site because they don't have them in Denmark.
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".
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.
https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_buds?hl=en-US works.
So, 'introduced' in this context means "mentioned we would sell at some point" rather than the more conventional meaning of introducing to the market?
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.
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.
I'm not sure why I'd want it to stand up-right on my desk either. It'd just accidentally knock it over.
To each their own.
What about the (again, non-ionising) EMF coming from the cords in your wired headphones?
Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...
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?
:-P
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?
The important factor for cancer is how much energy penetrates the outer layers of the skin and is therefore able to damage DNA.