35k

Google has a shade more than 35k permanent employees apart from Motorola. Apple has about that many full-time-equivalent employees in their retail division.

That's almost the worst way I can think of to compare the two. I mention it because much of the negativity surrounding the recently revealed Google Pixel laptop.

If you have walked into an Apple store any time in the last four years and whipped out your plastic rectangle in exchange for one of their aluminum ones, it was probably met by an Infinite Peripherals Linea Pro. The Linea Pro is a $500 sled that transforms an iPod touch into a handheld barcode scanner and credit card reader. I've never seen this particular device used anywhere but an Apple store and I was honestly surprised to find out that it wasn't a bespoke Apple gadget. I bet Apple owns ten thousand of these things.

If Apple decided tomorrow to turn the iTunes store into a Square killer and distribute a small business kit exactly along the lines of the one Square released this week, nobody would blink if it was $1300. They might blink at a 30% revenue share with Apple, but not at the idea of of professional hardware that costs money.

Google's $1300 folding Chrome terminal might not be for you. It might not be for the Gizmodo crowd or most of their readership. It's probaby not for me. Neither is a cash register, though.

If somebody told you that Google thought hard about building the perfect workstation for its thirty five thousand employees, had the guts to build it, and are now sharing it with the little folk for only $1300 then we would probably be celebrating our good fortune.

I have no idea whether the Pixel is a thoughtful machine built for a market Google cares about (its own employees) or some aluminum crap flung at a wall. I earn my living with a computer. That computer is almost never the one I'm touching. It's the AdSense computer or the Wikipedia servers or the blogspot hosting machines or a VM in the cloud or Google itself. What computer should I buy? How much should I pay? You can't buy one with even a tiny fraction of the power and capacity of the ones that bring you bread. Don't bother. Buy one that is nice to touch. Google apparenty sells one. It's $1300. Apple sells some too. Even Dell might. Perhaps even Microsoft will.

Each of these firms is large enough that it might make sense for them to build good workstations for their employees. Even Bunnie is building himself a workstation. I bet Herman Miller employees don't park on bad chairs. Google's Pixel terminal lists for about the same as an Aeron. That chair, for all its Aer, doesn't even have WiFi.

Google used to build good terminals for themselves back when they were called Bell Labs. Bell Labs took the guts of their own AT&T 5630 terminal, added a Motorola 68030 (sort of like an Intel Core i5) and their own wacky networked operating system, called it a GNOT, and saw that it was good. For them. If the Pixel is, in part, a spiritual successor to the Blit and the GNOT then I applaud it.