Google Clips

» see store.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

google clips was a camera you were meant to leave on a shelf and ignore. it watched whatever was in front of it and decided on its own which seconds mattered, then saved those and threw the rest away. i build computer vision for a living, in Ankara, so the pitch did not read as magic to me. it read as a machine given the job of deciding what a memory is, which is a strange thing to hand over.

it was announced in October '17 and went on sale that January at $249. the whole selling point was that you would never again miss the good moment because you were digging for your phone. you set Clips down at the birthday party, and later you had a handful of short silent clips it had chosen for you. no shutter, no framing, just the machine's taste standing in for yours.

the trouble was that the model was not as good at knowing a moment as a person crouched with a phone. out of a whole afternoon you might get two clips worth keeping. that is a thin return for a device that costs as much as a decent phone and only does the one thing.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

this was a United States product, sold through the Google Store to people who would buy anything Google shipped. it never had a real life where i was. it was reviewed as a curiosity, praised for the ambition, then quietly set down by almost everyone who tried it. the phone in your pocket already took better photos and you already trusted your own eye more than its guesses.

~ what got buried with it ~

google withdrew Clips from sale on 15 October '19 and kept the software alive until the end of '21, then let it go. the odd part is that the thing it was trying to do did not die with it. the guessing-which-moment-matters logic moved into the phone camera itself, into the auto-captured stills and the highlight reels that just appear now. Clips was the awkward separate box for an idea that only made sense once it disappeared into the device you already carried.

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