Google isn’t a company known for its humor. To be honest, can anyone name a Silicon Valley company not being run out of a basement that does have a sense of humor anymore?
Perhaps the funniest thing Google has done was to remove its pledge to never develop AI for deadly weapons, and that wasn’t so much ha-ha funny as sad funny. Anyway, the iPhone 17 rumors going around—and I’m underscoring that they’re rumors, for now—are that the Apple device will be taking design cues from the Google Pixel line of phones.
Well, Google decided to have a little fun with it, and so they released this lighthearted video.
google twists the knife
Not a huge fan of the computer-generated audio in the video, if I’m being honest. I know it’s on purpose, but I feel like I’m trapped within a memory, reliving my life as an eight-year-old in Raleigh’s science museum, listening to the “exciting” development of text-to-speech technology, which just made everything sound like a depressed person being forced to work at a drive-through window.
The video features two talking phones, an iPhone and a Pixel, having a conversation. Here’s a snippet of Google trying to not-subtly drive home the message that Apple has been a copycat of Google’s Pixel design for years:
“It’s crazy. Can you imagine me doing the same thing you did first years later?
“Sounds pretty far-fetched.”
“I mean, there was that one time where you launched Night Sight and then a year later, I got Night Mode.”
“Total coincidence.”
“And that one time where you launched Magic Eraser, and then three years later, I got Clean Up.”
“Oh, yeah, I think I remember that.”
“And that one time when I, like, got widgets, but you’d already had widgets for like…”
“Since my first version nine years ago?”
“Yeah, exactly!”
And it goes on from there. You’re free to watch it, although it’s not the most entertaining thing I’ve seen lately. It’s just Google gloating without trying to seem like it’s gloating.
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