Before launching a new best-selling game, the brand must have a process of exploring and testing the market. We said before that there was a failed work “Macintosh TV” before the launch of Apple TV. In fact, now we see the best-selling Chromecast Before the launch of the new generation, Google also had a similar black history work, and it was called “the most failed hardware in Google’s history” in the mouth of critics.
Looking back at the unbearable black history, this product is the most failed hardware in Google’s history
At Google I/O 2012, a product called “Nexus Q” was announced, and looking back at it now, you can see the familiar early concepts and foundations of Chromecast. Let’s start with a video of Google’s marketing for the Nexus Q. It wasn’t until 2 minutes into the whole 4-minute video that I could see what this thing was doing, and yes, it was a tiny computer powered by Android. , to play music or movies from the cloud. Overmarketing aside, the Nexus Q was unpopular with critics, and while the hardware was impressive, it didn’t reach a price point that justified much higher than the Roku or Apple TV priced at the time (the Nexus Q was priced at the start). at $299) is reasonable, but for many more users it’s just too impractical to use the device only with Google services.
The Nexus Q is actually cool in appearance, with a spherical design and glowing ring LED lights that give it a sci-fi vibe. Unlike other Nexus products that are co-developed with other brands, the Nexus Q is Google original from head to toe, and Designed and manufactured in the USA. The most special thing in the sphere is that it is equipped with a 25W amplifier, which can also be connected to other speakers; it is also equipped with optical fiber, Micro HDMI and network ports on the body, especially the banana jack on it ( Banana Plug). According to the official statement, another Micro USB port is used to encourage people with development skills to make modifications on the Nexus Q. The Nexus Q is powered by the same smartphone chip as the Galaxy Nexus, and you can rotate the top half of the sphere to control volume, or tap it to mute whatever’s playing. All the amenities of a great living room device are there. But software limitations destroy that potential.
The Nexus Q only supports Google services, including Play Music, Play Movies & TV, and YouTube, no Netflix or Hulu, and certainly no Spotify. While Google goes to great lengths to add an amplifier to it, audiophiles can’t get true lossless audio from an analog connector. The Nexus Q doesn’t have any screen, user interface, or remote, so you can only control it with a dedicated Android app. Some of this may sound familiar to Chromecast users, but there are pretty significant differences between the Nexus Q and the Chromecast, which launched a year later as a $35 streaming stick and became an instant hit, going from stubbornly only Learning the hard way in supporting its own software, Google corrected its course and pushed hard for mainstream third-party apps, and more importantly, Chromecast also supports iOS.
In addition to the Nexus Q’s core functionality of playing music and videos, Google is also trying to use the product to enhance the social experience. Multiple people can contribute to a music playlist without passing to a single person’s phone or grabbing control of a bluetooth speaker, while friends can share YouTube or play movie content on a TV screen in a similar way, all built on Users must be on the same Wi-Fi network. It sounds good in theory, but in practice the entire so-called “social” process has some problems and is inconvenient. If you really want that “everyone at the party can be a DJ” situation to happen, all your friends will also need to download and install the Nexus Q app before they can add songs to their playlists. At the time, critics also pointed out that the proprietary software was not intuitive enough to manage music playback, and could easily ruin an ongoing collaboration list by accidentally playing a song. It wasn’t until a few years later that the most popular streaming platforms found themselves able to solve this problem, and now, you can make shared playlists on Spotify (or YouTube Music) without special equipment or dedicated apps.
Due to the overwhelming amount of negative reviews, in late July 2012, Google announced that the product would be delayed to consumers and work to make it better, only a month after the release, as for early pre-order consumers. Thank you for receiving this device free of charge. But the Nexus Q never really hit store shelves, and by the end of 2012, Google quietly removed it from the official website, and in 2013 the company’s apps started breaking compatibility with the device, as the Nexus Qs scattered around the No, Google didn’t put it on the follow-up support list. Until Google completely abandoned the hardware product, some DIY enthusiasts and mod developers spent a few years trying to bring the Nexus Q back to life, but it didn’t make much of a splash and disappeared in the torrent of history.
The Nexus Q was a complete flop, and it shows that consumers expect more living room entertainment than tech companies thought, but Google isn’t wrong about the future of consumer electronics, making “heavy use of cloud computing.” To maintain audio-visual entertainment” is very close, and we can see this in play almost everywhere today.