Refresh, Refresh, Sold Out: My Nexus 4 Saga Continues

So I've now missed the Nexus 4 restock three separate times, and I'm starting to take it personally.

If you haven't been following along (why would you, honestly, unless you're also stuck in this loop), the Nexus 4 has been essentially unbuyable since it launched back in November. $299 for the 8GB model, $349 for 16GB, no contract, unlocked, and by most accounts one of the best phones Google's ever put its name on. The catch is actually getting one. Google Play has been doing these restocks every so often, and every time, the thing sells out in what feels like minutes. I had three tabs open on three different computers this week trying to beat the crowd and I still lost.

I get why people are annoyed. I'm annoyed. But I also think there's something almost impressive about how badly Google underestimated demand here. This isn't some boutique accessory, its a flagship phone from the company that makes the operating system running on something like three quarters of the smartphones on earth. You'd think the supply chain planning would be a little tighter. Instead we've got a phone that's cheaper than an iPhone with no subsidy, running vanilla Android, that you basically cannot buy unless you're sitting at your desk refreshing a page at the exact right second. Every time it happens the story is the same: restock goes up, Twitter lights up, forty minutes later it's gone again.

Part of me wonders if this is on purpose, honestly. Scarcity is good marketing whether you mean it to be or not. But mostly I think its just LG and Google not being ready for how many people wanted an unlocked phone that didn't cost $650. Which, fair, I didn't see it coming either.

Anyway. I'll keep trying. If anyone reading this actually managed to get one, I want to hear how, because at this point I'm ready to write a script that just hammers the page for me (dont worry, I probably won't actually do that, I have a day job).

A quick aside on Mars

Completely unrelated, but I have to mention this because it's been bugging me all week. Remember a couple weeks back when the lead scientist on the Curiosity rover mission went on NPR and basically said the data coming back from the SAM instrument was "one for the history books"? The internet did what the internet does and ran wild with it. Life on Mars. Organic molecules. The works.

So NASA finally presented the actual findings at the big geology conference earlier this month, and it was... soil chemistry. Interesting soil chemistry, sure, water and some sulfur and chlorine compounds in there, real science that real scientists will get real papers out of. But it was not the world-shaking announcement half the internet had been quietly hoping for since Thanksgiving.

I don't blame NASA exactly, I blame the hype machine that builds itself around anything with the word "Mars" in it these days. But it is a good reminder that "history books" from a scientist mid-interview and "history books" from an actual press release are two very different scales of claim. I fell for it a little too, if I'm being honest. I had a tab open that whole week hoping for something wild.

Two things, same lesson maybe

I hadn't planned on these two stories sitting next to each other in one post, but typing it out, there's a weird overlap. Both are about the gap between what gets promised (implicitly or otherwise) and what actually shows up. A phone that's supposedly available for purchase right now, that isn't, not really. A discovery that was supposedly going to rewrite textbooks, that wasn't, not yet anyway.

I don't think either of these is some big scandal or anything. Companies oversell, hype outruns reality, that's basically the entire tech news cycle in a nutshell and always has been since I started writing this blog last year. I guess I just notice it more around the holidays, when everyone wants their gadget news to be exciting and their gift-buying to be simple, and neither one is cooperating this December.

I'll update this space the second I actually manage to buy a Nexus 4. Might be a while.