So yesterday Google did their hardware thing at the Nikko in San Francisco, and if you read anything about it today it was probably all Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, USB-C this, fingerprint sensor that. Fine, those are the headline items. LG built the 5X, Huawei built the 6P (first time Google's let a Chinese phone maker anywhere near the Nexus line, which is its own small story nobody's really talking about), and both of them ship with a fingerprint reader on the back called Nexus Imprint. $379 gets you the 5X at 16GB, $499 gets you into the 6P at 32GB. Both run Marshmallow out of the box. I'll probably write about the 6P once review units are actually in people's hands, because right now everyone's just repeating the press release with different adjectives.
What I actually want to talk about is the $35 dongle that got maybe ninety seconds of stage time.
Chromecast Audio. It's the same little puck as the redesigned Chromecast (round now, not the flat-USB-stick shape, and it comes in this weird fabric-pattern finish that photographs better than it looks in person, in my opinion), except instead of HDMI it's got a 3.5mm jack plus optical and it's built to plug into speakers you already own. You cast to it the same way you cast to a regular Chromecast. Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora, whatever, straight from your phone, no pairing dance, no app that only half works like most of the Bluetooth speaker apps I've fought with over the years.
I have a pair of decent bookshelf speakers hooked up to an old receiver in my living room that has done nothing but sit there looking dusty since I stopped buying CDs. This is exactly the kind of dumb-simple fix that turns a piece of furniture back into something useful, for the price of a decent lunch for two. Compare that to the Pixel C, which also got announced yesterday and which is, near as I can tell, a tablet with a magnetic keyboard and no confirmed price or release date, just "holiday season." Cool concept, I guess, but I can't get excited about a product I can't buy yet and don't know the cost of. Google's done this before (remember waiting around for the Chromebook Pixel? Nobody bought that thing) and I'd rather they just tell us the number.
Now the annoying part, and this is the bit that actually affects me personally: both new phones ditch micro-USB for USB-C. Which is the right call long-term, sure, faster charging, reversible plug, all of that. But I've got a drawer full of micro-USB cables at this point, in the car, by the bed, at my desk, one taped to the wall behind the couch because I am apparently incapable of losing that one. Switching means buying new cables for basically every spot in my life that currently has power. It's a small tax, I know, and it's the price of actually moving forward instead of everyone pretending micro-USB was fine forever (it was not fine, the connector direction was always a coin flip), but it's still a tax, and I'll be paying it in $8 increments for the next year probably.
Anyway. Back to the Chromecast Audio thing, because I think it's the sleeper of the whole announcement. It doesn't need its own charger, it doesn't need you to replace anything, it just makes the speakers you already have act like they've got Spotify built in. I ordered one this morning, should show up sometime next week if the Google Store estimates mean anything (they usually don't, in my experience). I'll report back on whether it actually sounds as good over optical as the marketing implied, because "CD quality and beyond" is the kind of phrase that means nothing until you've actually A/B'd it against the same song played off a laptop headphone jack.
The new Chromecast itself is worth a mention too, not because the shape changed but because it finally lets you plug it in with an included extension cable if your TV's HDMI ports are jammed together behind a wall mount, which describes literally every TV setup I've had in the last four years. Small fix. Somebody at Google clearly got tired of customer complaints about exactly that.