One Google Product Is Breaking Major Sales Records
Google finally hit a home run with one of its core products.
This article is more than 2 years old
The Pixel 6 has earned itself the label of being one of Google’s best phones to date. A quick look at the market shows just how generously the phone is profiting the company. Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google, recently mentioned its hardware sales according to its Q4 2021 earnings report. CEO Sundar Pichai said the report revealed the highest quarterly earnings for the Pixel phone. His statement technically includes both the Pixel 6 and the lesser Pixel 5a, but the Pixel 6 is only in its first quarter of availability, and the Pixel a series doesn’t change much from year to year.
Pichai made the following statement during the earnings call: “In Q4, we set an all-time quarterly sales record for Pixel. This came in spite of an extremely challenging supply chain environment. The response to Pixel 6 from our customers and carrier partners was incredibly positive.”
Google has never provided exact sales figures for the Pixel, and it appears that it hasn’t changed its policy. According to IDC, Google shipped the most phones in 2019, the first year the Pixel a series was released. For the entire year, Google only shipped 7 million units. It is believed the company would do a lot better if it actually tried to be a worldwide manufacturer. Pixel distribution is currently at an all-time low, with the Pixel 6 accessible in only nine countries and the Pixel 5a available in only two. A Samsung or Apple phone is sold in over 100 countries, and both companies sell between 200 and 300 million phones every year.
For those wondering whether to buy a Pixel 6, there are several reasons to go ahead and make the purchase. After a couple of years with just two cameras, the Pixel 6 Pro adds a third — a telephoto lens with a 4x zoom — to the mix. Both models also have a new main lens, which has a 50MP sensor. The Pixel 6’s beefier camera catches some pretty impressive-looking photos. Many phone critics have been impressed to the point where it could challenge the iPhone 13 for best camera phone honors.
The new Pixels, like previous Pixels, come with a slew of new computational photography-powered features. If you take a picture of someone moving just as you hit the shutter button, the Pixel 6 will be able to un-blur their faces. You can also utilize the phone’s new Motion mode to transform static photographs into action shots. The Magic Eraser feature can even go so far as to remove unpleasant people from the background of an image. And all it takes to use the feature is a single press. It truly is as simple as letting Google’s computational photography and technology do its job and then accepting or rejecting the results.
The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro can sport these new features thanks to the new Tensor system-on-chip. The chip itself is what enables machine learning-powered antics. Instead of the Qualcomm Snapdragon silicon that has powered previous Pixels, Google is now creating its own chipset. The chipset has an emphasis on artificial intelligence backed by the chip’s Tensor Processor Unit.
As a result, the Pixel 6 has a lot of capabilities that other phones don’t. In fact, it’s capable of doing a lot of things that luxury phones can’t. The Google Assistant is especially impressive when it comes to dictating text messages on the Pixel 6. It can even recognize when it needs to add punctuation to a message or when a user is just sending and clearing commands instead of speaking.
The best part of the Pixel 6 is that the increased intelligence does not detract from performance. According to our Pixel 6 benchmarking, the Tensor silicon gives performance similar to that of a Snapdragon 888-powered device. All in all, the phone is slower in some places, faster in others, but generally what you’d anticipate from a top-of-the-line Android device.
