Google I/O happened Wednesday, and my timeline was wall to wall with Pixel Watch renders by that night. I watched maybe forty minutes of the keynote live over lunch (turkey sandwich, if it matters, it doesn't) before giving up and just reading the liveblogs instead, which is honestly the correct way to consume these things now. Two hours of Sundar Pichai is not appointment viewing, no offense to Sundar.
So yes. Google made a watch. An actual round-faced smartwatch, the first properly "Pixel" one, running Wear OS, syncing with Fitbit (which Google bought back in 2019 for $2.1 billion and has been slowly folding into everything since). It's not shipping until the fall, no price announced yet, and the units on stage were clearly not final hardware, a couple of the hands-on writeups mentioned the screens looking dim under the venue lights.
Here's my problem with it, and it isn't the hardware. The hardware looks fine, actually kind of nice, a rotating crown-style button on the side, a domed glass face instead of the flat slab every other smartwatch has settled on. My problem is Google's track record with anything that requires a multi-year commitment from the person using it. I've been running this blog since November 2011, and in that time I've personally used and then lost: Google Reader, which I ran my entire information diet through until they killed it in 2013 and I had to migrate everything to Feedly in a weekend panic. Google+, which I half-heartedly posted to for maybe eight months. Inbox by Gmail, which I liked better than regular Gmail and which got shut down anyway. Hangouts is currently being slow-walked toward the grave as I type this, half my contacts already bounced over to Google Chat without noticing.
A watch isn't an app you can quietly stop maintaining. It's a purchase that sits on someone's wrist for three or four years if it's any good, and that's a much bigger ask of trust than "please keep using our RSS reader." I genuinely want to be excited about this. I've wanted a decent Android watch option since my old Pebble finally died on me, and I still miss that thing more than I probably should, the e-ink screen, the week-long battery life, things no current smartwatch even attempts.
The announcement I actually cared about more was the Pixel 6a: $449, same Tensor chip as the regular Pixel 6, shipping July 28th. That price bugs me a little if I'm honest. The Pixel 6 launched at $599 and routinely gets discounted to $500 or under, so a "budget" phone at $449 with a slightly worse camera and no wireless charging is a narrower gap than the keynote made it sound like. I get that Google has never really made money on phones and needs the margin somewhere, but as a pitch to someone deciding between the 6 and the 6a, it's underwhelming.
Pixel Buds Pro also showed up, $199, active noise cancellation finally, which is the exact thing every review of the last two Buds generations complained was missing. That one I'll probably just buy. Low commitment, no multi-year trust exercise required, and my current pair is two years old and the left one has started cutting out mid-call in a way that makes me want to throw it into traffic.
There was a pile of AI stuff too: a new AI Test Kitchen app, more LaMDA demos, a Maps feature that overlays walking directions onto your live camera view so you stop walking the wrong way out of the subway. All neat, all very keynote, all things I'll actually believe are good once I've used them for a month instead of watched someone demo them on a stage with perfect wifi and a rehearsed script.
I'm not buying the watch on day one. Ask me again in the fall when there's a real price and reviews from people who've worn the thing through a full charge cycle and a run in the rain. Until then it's a nice-looking render from a company that once got close to killing off Google Tasks, a to-do list app, within a few years of launching it. I'll take my optimism in small, replaceable doses, like earbuds.