Google is getting better at what Apple does best faster than Apple

And you know why this works? Because Apple puts sufficiently high specs in their machines so the user doesn't have to think about it, because it doesn't stall or perform tasks slowly.

Besides, this is HN. It's an objective discussion, not a marketing one.

>beauty and slickness and the UX of its software which is where the Pixel does indeed shine

I can't speak for the Pixel here, but OSX is the best OS I've ever used so I would be surprised to see a browser-only OS match that.

As for hardware, the Air is by far the best-designed laptop I've ever seen. I know people are praising the Pixel in this regard but to me it just looks like another ThinkPad. And as far that grey bar jutting out? Come on.

>As for the 32 GB, the Pixel comes with 1TB of google drive

I knew this would be brought up but I didn't want to bash Drive in my last reply. But here we go...

Somebody shared a single .png imagine with me this morning on Drive. I went into the Drive folder they shared it in, it's empty. I reload the web interface, folder is still empty. I try to search for the file name, it's not there. I reload the page again, still can't see the file in the folder, type the file name in the search box, and it finally appears in the search bar and I can open it. When I'm done I go back out, and it still doesn't appear in the folder it's in. The only way I can access this file is now to memorize the file name and search every time.

Not somewhere I'm willing to put hundreds of GBs of data just yet.

And something that's not brought up enough: data privacy. Google employees can view hundreds of GBs of your personal files, photos, documents, etc. on Drive.

With an SSD you know exactly who can access your files, and you can still choose to back up to a cloud service that actually offers encryption if you so wish (which I do).

Drive will most likely never offer encryption because Google makes its money from knowing as much about you as possible.

(It's Google's 'Chrome')

Mail- Google has gmail, Apple has iCloud mail. Both have "web 2.0" UI's. I think here Apple wins hands down. Apple's support of sproutcore (what became ember.js) has given it a great lead in the ability to do great web apps. And apple's iCloud.com mail app is a good example of this.

Google "Office" vs. Apple Works - Apple wins again here in my opinion. Numbers, Pages and Keynote are much better experiences than using google's products thru the web, simply because they are native and can take advantage of better APIs. Both products provide ubiquitous storage of your data, so you can access your documents from your iPhone or your laptop. I wouldn't say Google is ahead on services there, but before Apple released iCloud they were.

I really don't think Apple has done a bad job with online services. Certainly not when compared to google. IF you look at iTunes Store-- which is actually an web service-- it is larger than anything google has, except maybe google search, depending on what metrics you use.

It's been stable and robust and usable with great UI since the store was first launched. It's certainly sold more goods than google and made more profit than amazon, I bet.

Apple took the lead with web development way back when it was NeXT with webobjects which was the first modern web development framework. They again have had the best product with sproutcore, dashcode, etc, though they've been a bit inconsistent. Its only recently that google's really tried to produce web development tech, and while go is a good attempt at a language it is written by people who felt comfortable enforcing a religious design choice on every programmer! (namely where the brackets go. I'm fine with people putting them in the "wrong place", I can still read their code. Let them do as they like, but forcing me, at the language level, to do as the language designers like? Well, that's just being assholes, and I won't use the language because of that (not to mention its crap design in some key areas.)

Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers.