Google Pixel Popularity
Re: my question earlier today asking what’s the best new consumer product from Google in recent years, their Pixel phones came to mind as my personal answer. I last bought a Pixel 4; I might buy a Pixel 7 this fall. But while successful, in some sense, that success is clearly very much as a niche product. I’m linking here to a story from Ars Technica a few weeks back about Pixel market share hitting … 2 percent in North America:
That sounds incredibly successful, but this is Google’s tiny
hardware division we’re talking about, so it’s all relative
success. The company is now at 2 percent North American market
share, having shipped 800,000 devices for Q2 2022. Along with last
quarter, Google is now regularly hitting whole-digit market share
numbers. That’s good enough for fifth place, behind Apple (52
percent), Samsung (26 percent), Lenovo/Motorola (9 percent), and
TCL (5 percent).
When you need to more than double your market share to catch TCL, you don’t exactly have a hit product line on your hands. 2 percent market share in North America is not a Google-scale success story. Yet the Pixel phones really do seem to me to be the most interesting consumer products (or services) Google has released in years.
