Today, Apple will announce some new iPhones. Before the year is through, it will sell tens of millions of these phones worldwide, with each sale averaging a price any other smartphone maker could only dream of. Around a month from now, Google will offer its retort, in the form of the Pixel 4. The Pixel 4 will not be the source of any grand claims about sales figures, because Google will probably be lucky to even crack a million units before 2019 ends, if the Pixel 3’s struggles are any sort of evidence.
After three years and soon four generations of Pixel smartphones, Google has failed to generate meaningful marketplace traction for its in-house smartphone brand. It has even reneged on its own promise to keep the Pixel brand “premium” by launching two mid-range smartphones, the Pixel 3a and 3a XL, earlier this year. Both offer comparable performance to Google’s much more expensive Pixel 3 and 3 XL in the Pixel’s core performance metric: photography. This has rightly raised concerns that the Pixel team’s desperation to expand its market footprint is now threatening to cannibalize what high-end sales it does generate, as well as undercut the launch of the next generation of its phones.
