Why Amazon's hardware makes more sense than Google's Amazon doesn't make a smartphone — after the Fire Phone debacle, it's hard to blame the company. But it does make a bunch of stuff in categories where the competition is less fierce or where Amazon can more easily make some money without anybody getting in a tizzy about how successful (or not) it is. It invented the smart speaker market, it makes cheap earbuds, it makes smart cameras and Wi-Fi routers. With so many commodity parts for Android phones around, those Fire tablets are probably way cheaper and easier to make than you might think. And since nobody's bothering to make Android tablets now that phones are so big, there's not much competition. And people who buy Fire HD tablets are more likely to use Amazon's other services. We all know the score with Amazon products: they're made in part to keep you in Amazon's ecosystem. A lot of the first iterations of Amazon's hardware look kind of junky: the first Echo, Echo Auto, the Echo Show, and even the very first Kindle looked like internal prototypes the company decided to just up and release. Refinement only comes later, after the market is proven. (Every now and then Amazon proves it can make something lovely on the first try, as with the Echo Studio.) Point is: nobody stresses about Amazon hardware (unless it involves Ring cameras and the social issues they raise). We know what Amazon hardware is for. It's there to support Amazon's content services: Prime Video and Kindle and Alexa and the retail store itself. Amazon's hardware gilds the lily, and the lily is made out of money. But Google's hardware inspires more angst. A big part of it is simply that the company that literally makes Android seems incapable of creating a successful Android phone. Its Wi-Fi product does well and its smart speakers are fine. Nest, though, hoo that was a wild ride there for a minute and it only recently settled (mostly). Fundamentally, it's too hard to explain what Google hardware is for. It used to be that you could say that it was for platform experimentation. You couldn't build Android right without new stuff to test new versions on, so Google built Nexus. It wanted to take a shot at TVs again, so it made Chromecast on what felt like a lark to see if it worked. But now, when you ask its executives (and I have), they'll tell you hardware is intended to become a real profit center, a real business. In theory, that makes sense. Diversifying its incoming revenue streams is nearly an existential need for Google. Amazon has several ways to make lots of money and its hardware products participate in a virtuous cycle with some of them. Google has advertising. But in practice, it's hard to think that Google is really that serious about it all. Google will tell you to stop calling it a hobby, but it's hard not to. We're rolling up to the release of the sixth Pixel phone, the Pixel 4A. We're also less than a year away from the five-year anniversary of the creation of Google's hardware division. If Google were serious, you'd think we'd have seen serious phone sales by now. What is Google hardware for? Hardware isn't existentially important to either Amazon or Google, but it feels more existential for Google simply because its successes and failures cut more closely to the core of what Google aspires to be. It aspires to be directly "helpful" with the Google Assistant and various other assorted services. And its hardware is mostly a vehicle to showcase that AI. When it's not on a website, most people's experiences of Google are mediated in some way. They happen on Dell laptops or Apple tablets or Samsung phones. If I had to say what I think Google hardware is mostly for now, I'd say that deep down Google knows that mediation is a huge problem. The cynical take is that Google is hedging its bets by keeping a hardware division at a subsistence level just in case it needs to ramp it up quickly if one of those other companies decides to cut it off. The charitable take is that Google wants to make sure the best possible experience is at least an option for people who want it. The cynical and charitable takes aren't mutually exclusive. | 
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