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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.
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).
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.
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-...
As soon as I started reading the article, I knew exactly who wrote it. The guy is a complete hack.
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
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.
Might as well keep it cheap, though
You could, but that adds weight and cost.
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
That's not what the inside of a good tablet looks like though right?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Do we want repairability or not? This makes it much easier to repair.
It’s glued shut.
Except for being basically impossible to take the lid off
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.
>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.
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
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.