Nexus Q

» see google.com/nexus/q as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard about the nexus q was years after it had already been quietly canceled, when someone showed me a photo of the black sphere on a coffee table as an example of how google had once tried to design hardware that did not look like everything else. by then it was a kept curio. it never went on retail sale. it never reached turkey. the only people who held one in their hands were google i/o 2012 attendees who had been given the device as a conference gift.

on june 27 2012 google announced the nexus q at i/o. it was a 300 dollar bowling-ball-sized digital media player that streamed youtube and google play media to a tv or to its own built-in 25-watt amplifier. the inside ran an omap4460 chip with android ice cream sandwich on top. matias duarte's industrial-design team made it spherical because the original idea was that you could sit it on a shelf and it would look like a deliberate object rather than another set-top box.

the reviews were bad. critics called the price wildly overbuilt for what the device actually did. you could not run third party apps on it. the streaming services it talked to were limited to google's own. four weeks after the announcement, in late july 2012, google quietly told the press that consumer launch was indefinitely postponed. the indefinite postponement turned into a full cancellation by january 2013, and the q's product page disappeared not long after.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the i/o 2012 attendees who got the nexus q in the conference gift bag opened it expecting either the chromecast era to start there or a serious living-room push from google. neither happened. the device shipped with one mode, which was queue-songs-from-your-phone-to-the-sphere, and that one mode was the whole product. people who tinkered found that the q was running ice cream sandwich underneath and could in theory be jailbroken into a proper android tv box, which a small modder community did over the rest of 2012.

~ the decline ~

the q was google's first real attempt at making hardware that was not a phone or a chromebook, and the company had not yet figured out that consumer devices needed to do a clear thing for a clear price. 300 dollars for a music-streamer that only worked with google play music was not the product anyone wanted. apple tv was 100 dollars at the time. roku boxes started at around 50. the press read it as google's premium positioning being wrong, which it was.

made-in-usa was the other pitch and the other premium-cost driver. the q was assembled in the san jose area as a statement, which added to the bill of materials. that part of the story aged into a kind of curiosity once the chromecast moved manufacturing offshore to hit its 35 dollar price.

~ what it became ~

the chromecast launched in july 2013 at 35 dollars and did the streaming part of what the nexus q had been trying to do. the chromecast became the actual google living-room hardware play, and the q became a footnote. google never gave the q's owners a refund, but the few thousand units in circulation became collector items for industrial-design fans who remembered when google still made round objects.

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