The Nexus 9 is out today and I'm still stalling

So the Nexus 9 officially went on sale this morning, the HTC-built one with the Tegra K1 chip and Lollipop already loaded on it, and I've had eleven tabs open since about 9am trying to decide if I'm actually buying one. Spoiler: I'm not, at least not yet, but let me talk myself through it anyway because that's what this blog is for.

Sixteen gigs and wifi-only starts at $399. Bump to 32GB and it's $479, and if you want LTE on top of that you're at $599, which is a real number for a tablet from a company whose whole pitch used to be "cheap and good." Remember when the Nexus 7 was $199 and everyone lost their minds because it was actually good at that price? This is not that. This is Google (fine, HTC, but Google's name on the box) deciding the budget-tablet era is over and they'd rather compete with the iPad Air 2 on price instead of undercutting it. iPad Air 2 16GB is $499 for comparison, so the 9 is cheaper, but only by a hundred bucks, and Apple's tablet doesn't have people already complaining that the back panel creaks when you squeeze it.

That's the thing that's actually stopping me, honestly, more than the price. The early word out there this morning is that some review units have a flexy, creaky back cover, like the aluminum band isn't seated right, and there's mention of light bleed around the edges of the screen on certain units. HTC of all companies. The One M8 is one of the best-built phones I've ever held, all that machined metal, and now their tablet supposedly has more give in the chassis than a $50 case from a gas station. Maybe it's early units and it'll get sorted, maybe I'm reading too much into a handful of forum posts on launch morning, but it's exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to wait a month rather than order at 9am on day one like a chump.

My actual tablet situation is a 2013 Nexus 7 that I bought used off a coworker for sixty bucks last spring, and it is, charitably, dying. The battery drains about four percent an hour just sitting on the nightstand doing nothing, which means if I don't charge it every single night I wake up to nine percent and a sad little red icon. I've restarted it, I've cleared cache partitions, I've done all the forum-recommended nonsense, and none of it sticks for more than a week. So there is a real, non-hypothetical case for me to go buy a new tablet today. I just can't quite make myself click the button on hardware that's shipping with day-one creak complaints.

What actually has me curious is Lollipop itself, since the Nexus 9 is the first thing out the door running it. Material Design has been in preview builds and developer previews for months at this point, so I've seen screenshots, but seeing it live on a device that isn't a rooted Nexus 5 running some sketchy nightly build is different. The card-based multitasking view alone looks like it'll make my phone's task switcher feel like it's from a different decade, and my phone is a Nexus 5, which is not old.

I keep coming back to the fact that the Nexus line used to be the thing you recommended to your cousin because it was cheap, stock Android, no bloat, done. Somewhere between the Nexus 5 and this the pricing crept up toward flagship territory across the board, and I get why, margins on cheap hardware are brutal, but it does change what the Nexus brand is for. It used to be the budget-conscious nerd's choice. Now it's just another premium option competing on specs instead of value, and I'm not sure that's a worse tablet, but it's definitely a different pitch than the one that got me buying Nexus stuff in the first place.

Anyway. I'll probably cave by Thanksgiving. I always do.