The Pixel Tablet is just a few spare parts in a half-empty body | Hacker News Reader

The Pixel Tablet is just a few spare parts in a half-empty body

arstechnica.com

57 pointsakyuu79 comments

I'm a bit puzzled by the tone of the piece in that the author frames it as a critique yet also points out how much easier it is to repair. I was anticipating some literal 2.5" SSD-like empty husk.

He tends to write only negative things about Google. So it's par for the course.

It's really really bizarre when you look at a teardown of a competitor like the iPad Air and see a similar amount of empty space.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+Air+(5th+Generation)+Te... looks full, area around the edge for thinness I suppose

No need to actually read any Google articles by Ron Amadeo. They are all cut from the same smug, snarky dismissive cloth.

Ars can and should try harder.

As soon as I started reading the article, I knew exactly who wrote it. The guy is a complete hack.

I did enjoy his lengthy article on the history and debacle of Google's many chat systems: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

I couldn't get through the first two paragraphs, this tried so hard to make a problem out of nothing. "Miles between", "never seen" - why do I care what this guy has seen before? The specs are what they are, it's not a scam (well, the article is anyway).

Tech news sites post shitty takes. More news at 11.

Really though, in Poland spidersweb.pl is a meme just from it inception a decade ago. It's the same everywhere.

Isn’t the reason for the empty space just because it’s a tablet — by which I mean that the dimensions are determined by a large screen? Phones are dense inside because they have to be small.

I mean, if you have space left over you could just pack it with more battery? For example if we look at the iPad [0], there is some empty space inside, but mostly it's all battery.

[0] https://youtu.be/uCYUZQGjm8I?si=D-fpaRSSCkbOdReo&t=75

Might as well keep it cheap, though

the amount of stuff you cram in also affects the weight (as well as the price)

^^^ I don't understand how's that sentence controversial or rude

I mean, what's the difference of how you distribute empty space in a product, either having a few high density components and empty space visible by naked eye, or using less dense material where empty space is between molecules

what is 'less dense' component, is the battery full of air?

No, my point is that the battery has the density it has.

I mean, you have a weigh budget, you have cost budget, you have a width/height budget, you also have a thickness budget chosen for many reason including the material the case is made of (which is determined by your cost budget); you take all those things into account and if it turns out your component have the density they have, it may just happen that you have some free space in the box.

The fact that a competitor's product doesn't have as much empty space in the case must come down to them having a different tradeoff in some of those design dimensions.

by that logic there is no such thing as bad product, they just took different tradeoffs.

there are different ways a product can be bad:

1. it could have had good requirements but badly executed 2. the chosen requirements could be bad and despite flawless execution the product is crap

I just think that the quantity of empty space inside of the encasement, is not a reason to label something a bad product. It makes no difference to the end user except for the "feeling" that something could have been added to it. But as I said, the moment you add something into that empty space you make the device heavier and thus perhaps you turn an otherwise good product into a bad product because it's too heavy.

You could, but that adds weight and cost.

The basic iPad costs $449 and the Pixel Tablet costs $499. The iPad weighs less than the Pixel tablet, 477g to 493g. The iPad battery is 28.6Wh and the Pixel Tablet has a 27Wh battery. I don't particularly care that the insides are 'emptier' in the Pixel Tablet, but to say they didn't do something because of weight or cost doesn't really appear to have any bearing considering it's the heavier, more expensive tablet.

>but to say they didn't do something because of weight or cost doesn't really appear to have any bearing considering it's the heavier, more expensive tablet.

So they should have made it heavier and more expensive? I don't understand your argument.

And what am I paying for, an empty shell?

You're paying for a tablet based on the utility that it gives you. If we could shrink every component except for the screen down to the size of a pin head, then, yeah, you'd be paying for a mostly empty shell, and that's not a problem in the slightest.

Cooling.

That's not what the inside of a good tablet looks like though right?

Well, no, but how would a good tablet bring them a large enough increase in ad revenue to make it worth the investment? That’s what the difference in business models naturally leads to, right? There’s no indication that Google is trying to change what kind of company they are, is there?

Exactly.

This question strikes me as bizarre. What is the causal relationship between the goodness of a tablet and what its inside looks like?

imagine someone wrote something this silly abour a car - "what is the casual relatio ship between how the performance of the car and what it looks lile under the whood? So what if the engine is a mess, surely thst does not affect how it drives"?

There's nothing that's a mess about the inside of this tablet, it's just not filled to the brim with stuff that it doesn't need. That's normal, good design.

I opened up the hood of a car once and there was loads of empty space inside there. Why are they not filling up every cubic inch of the engine compartment with more pistons, or making the compartment water-tight and then filling it with even more petrol to increase the car’s range? Admittedly I don’t know a single thing about car design, but surely all of that empty space is an indicator of poor design right?

Have you seen an engine compartment of the Tesla? It's empty! So much empty space. Am I paying for this space? Oh no!

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but: I bought a Pixel Tablet. It is good. The speaker/charger thing actually pretty useful (I have it on my desk as another screen, sound is decent).

I've owned a few Android tablets. This has been the best. They never feel as good as an iPad, but that's normal; hard to beat Apple there. But I have no desire to get back into the Apple ecosystem, I now actively avoid it.

The frustrating thing is that Google has made a tablet that had iPad-level or very close fit and finish, and that was the Pixel C. I had one. It felt nice to use. The problem with that tablet is that the software was awful, causing issues with accidental touch rejection, WiFi flakiness, somewhat frequent hard crashing, etc.

They had the hardware, all they had to do was fix the software. Instead they quit making Android tablets until the subject of this article was released.

>Instead they quit making Android tablets until the subject of this article was released.

Which is why I jumped on the Pixel Tablet when it came out. The Android tablet scene kinda sucks. I guess the Samsungs are good, but I'm not interested in their custom OS bloat and they're also pricey.

Again, the iPad is still the king here, no doubt. But this tablet is the best Android one I've used.

The reason that Pixel C was so uncharacteristically good for a google tablet is that the usual suspects in the Android team had basically no part in designing it and making it. It was a ChromeOS team project meant to run ChromeOS, until the 11th hour when an edict forced it to run android. This can be seen in many ways, including in the way it boots, the existence of the standard chrome ec, etc...

In most tablets the extra space is filled with more battery, better cooling, bigger speakers, SD card slot, more ports… lots of possibilities.

Here’s what the inside of a 2020 iPad Air (10.9”) looks like for example. Still a little empty space, but much more full. https://i.ibb.co/hRKhPRP/IMG-2853.jpg

And an iPad Air costs between $600 and $800. If you want to hit a lower price point, it makes sense to just put less stuff inside. "The case isn't full" is not a metric that anyone should give a whit about, as long as the size of the case is determined by other factors (in this case, the dimensions of the screen).

At lower price points I’d probably be looking for a smaller tablet where the battery is better matched with the screen size so battery life isn’t terrible.

The OG IPad: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Image/meta/y5HAM4cflO64B3QH

But it's Apple so it's perfect!

And that was in 2010, before they knew if the product category was going to work or not, which is a better use case for tossing mismatched off the shelf parts into a chassis. After tablets proved themselves a viable market, iPad parts became more custom-designed and closely fit together.

The iPad's aluminum-alloy case probably conducts heat much better than the Pixel Tablet's plastic case. For all we know, the designers of the latter left voids around the components to improve thermal management.

This looks like a gather what hasn't been completely destroyed after our failure to properly integrate Nest and try to throw it out of the door operation. It's clear at this point that acquisition didn't work and the companies were incompatible with each other on basically every level.

> It's clear at this point that acquisition didn't work and the companies were incompatible with each other on basically every level.

I agree that the companies look largely incompatible, but it looks like it does work? An acquisition that keeps releasing products after the merge is pretty rare and is usually considered a success

Early on Nest were really trying to assert themselves within the wider organization, but whatever remains of them now in new products is name only.

I'm not saying Nest were all good (this is an understatement) but Google have always overrated how far you can go if you cheap out on hardware.

A product like this is a sign of internal rot. It's not bad enough to be a clear swansong for whatever remains of Nest, but it's a bad omen for Google's (non-pixel phone) product development.

I have been in the trenches at a company that made a startup acquisition, then tried to take the startup's tech and integrate it with their own IP to make a new product. I got the hell out before I could be blamed for the imminent failure. It wasn't pretty.

Is the sparse interior really that strange, or just a result of components getting more compact and the screen remaining the same size?

The expected usage of any unused space in a mobile device is to add in extra battery cells, or perhaps to reduce thickness.

The fact that neither of these have been done is unusual, and indicates an intentional choice to not do an optimization that almost everyone does.

Eh, more battery adds cost and weight. If components are getting small enough that we no longer need to do gymnastics to cram everything in, that seems like a win from a design and repairability standpoint.

Yeah, I never viewed this as a "flagship device". Everything you could stuff into those voids is a choice with poor tradeoffs.

- Bigger battery: More cost, more weight. And who has battery issues with a tablet anyway? Mine lasts forever.

- Performance: More cost and doesn't actually require much more volume

- Storage, RAM: Much more cost and not really how Pixels operate, sadly.

- Better camera: Who does this on a tablet? Really?

So okay, we're mocking the empty space but what do you want to put there that you're willing to pay for?

And to add to that list:

- Different versions with any combinations of those things: I'm sure they did the analysis and determined the market wouldn't support that.

> who has battery issues with a tablet anyway?...Better camera: Who does this on a tablet? Really?

I do need both of those things.

If you don't need any functionality of a tablet, maybe you dont need a tablet at all??

I think when you design a new device from the ground up you make them fit in a way that allows the remaining space to be a single large rectangle to be entirely filled with battery. This might require custom PCB to have some L shapes. Instead it looks like they took pre-existing components from other devices such as Pixel phones or the Google Home and put them in a larger case.

Yeah, I thought the same thing without even reading the article: it has the same innards as a phone, with 3 times the screen size. Of course there's going to be some space. I imagine this gets more prominent as components get smaller.

So google openly partnered with iFixit, and one of the products in that lineup is made primarily of glue.

Yup, that feels about right.

I think this design make sense when you treat the tablet as a home fixture that happens to be able to move around. Of course you could take it with you but it isn't what the product is designed around.

The larger screen makes sense when it is used as stationary cast target while docked and allows for larger home control touch targets when your hand is floating above a stationary display.

The smaller and lighter battery makes sense because the device gets maximum value when its always returned to its dock so that its available to serve its smart home control purpose. Is it really worth having a heavier device to go beyond 12 hours straight video playback without ever going back to the dock?

What's wrong with this? Isn't it great that miniaturization can achieve this? It's the screen size that dictates the amount of room.

I also prefer a larger desktop PC case to have spare room to make it easier to work in it.

> What's wrong with this?

Missed the opportunity to put in a bigger battery

But for increased cost to the consumer. I'm sure they businessed the idea.

Do we want repairability or not? This makes it much easier to repair.

Except for being basically impossible to take the lid off

It’s glued shut.

Ok. That's cheap AF.

I was strongly considering the Pixel Tablet to run it with grpahene os as a sort of secure terminal for banking, mail, some chat messengers. But the weird decision to include that useless speaker stand instead of a keyboard case and stylus and the price kept me off it. Seeing the insides shows that was a good decision. That is chinesium tablet level of design. I cannot fathom why Google is so unwilling to take the Android Tablet Market seriously.

Products this strange are an indication that the company has become so large and stagnant that its products are shaped largely by internal political battles.

They used to - back in the android 4 days there was strong competition and a number of flagship devices.

I’m assuming it’s somewhat of a chicken and egg combined with googles inability to invest in growing products. No one makes good android tablet apps, so there’s a no reason to make android tablets, so there’s no reason to invest in android tablet apps.

You'll be better off with a galaxy s6 lite in this case. It's just a product for different categories of consumers

A Galaxy S6 Lite will never be even remotely secure enough to be considered by the Graphene OS Team as a viable device and is already so old that Samsung barely provides security updates for it. It's not even close to being acceptable for my purposes

>But the weird decision to include that useless speaker stand instead of a keyboard case and stylus and the price kept me off it

I thought the same thing. I owned a Lenovo tablet with some gimmicky speaker that I never used.

However, I bought the Pixel tablet and I'm actually enjoying this speaker. It's useful as a desk stand, sounds alright, it's super easy to pop the tablet on there for charging, the transition between speaker to tablet sound when you grab it works flawlessly.

Sure, it's superlative for some people, but it's actually not a bad addition. I use it every day to watch YouTube or listen to music while I work.

It seems like a good case for enforcing open hardware architecture in tablets. If manufacturers were required to expose a unified connector and design hardware in a way that allows installation of expansion modules (think PC expansion cards, but in smaller form factor) we'd see more innovation and more use cases for tablets.

Can someone eli5 the problem? It doesn't sound like they are criticizing the feature set or functionality of the device.

If it has the specs it's supposed to have, who cares if there's empty space inside?

It reminds me of the original iPhone. That didn't have much empty space, but it did look like a box of random junk haphazardly slapped together.

I'll grant you that it's not as packed as current iPhones but it still looks pretty dense and layered https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+1st+Generation+Teardo...

It's not empty space, it's deformation zones

Pet peeve: these parts are not spare.

Doesn't look half-empty to me. Maybe 10% empty.

I'd love to watch this guy take apart an old CRT TV.

Am I supposed to care? My laptop is also mostly empty by volume. That's why it weights 1kg. This author's daily crusade to say something, anything negative about a Google product is really obnoxious.

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