First thing in the morning, the second your head pops off the pillow, you reach over and grab your Pixel off the nightstand. You check Twitter, thumb through email, poke at the New York Times app to make sure we're not at nuclear war. You stand, stretch, and say, "Hey Google, good morning." Your Google Home Max (because you wanted the best-sounding one, price be damned) reads out the weather and traffic conditions, lists off the day's events, and starts playing your Discover Weekly playlist as you turn on the shower. While you're toweling off, you remember your kid’s soccer game tonight. "Hey Google, remind me to get orange slices." This time your Pixel perks up, taking the memo.
Eventually, you make it to the office, and plop down in front of your Pixelbook. "Keep playing Discover Weekly," you type into your laptop, and the tunes pick up on your laptop where your phone left off in the car. You spend the next few hours toting your Pixelbook to meetings, flipping the screen around to doodle on mock-ups and show everyone the latest analytics. All the while, you're pressing on the earbud in your right ear, dictating messages and reminders to Google Assistant. People look at you suspiciously, but screw them. Late in the day, a notification pops up on your Pixelbook: Don't forget the orange slices! "Hey Google, navigate to Safeway," you whisper to your phone as you walk out the door.
That, more or less, is Google's vision for the future of hardware. The company announced a series of new devices at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, broadening and improving its gadget lineup. Many exist for the same purpose: to bring Google Assistant everywhere, so you'll use it instead of Alexa or Siri or Cortana or whatever else joins the market. Taken together, these devices offer the clearest vision yet of what you might call The Unified Theory of Google Hardware, which goes something like this: In the future, you'll own and use lots of gadgets. Every single one should have access to the same data, the same settings, the same assistant, the same deep knowledge of you and your life. They all do the same stuff. All that changes is the screen.
Take the Pixelbook. On one hand, it's a laptop: keyboard, trackpad, 12.3-inch screen. But it runs Android apps, has a touchscreen, supports pen input, and flips 360 degrees so you can hide the aforementioned keyboard and trackpad. So it's a tablet. But! It can automatically connect to LTE through your phone, looks just like a Pixel, and runs Google Assistant and Snapchat and Instagram. So it's… a phone?
Google's overarching message seems to be that all those categories are just words. "We don't think you should have a device for this, and a device for that," Matt Vokoun, a product manager for Google, told me after the event. "If you're not on Chrome OS with Android apps, you kind of live in a world where there's things I can do on my laptop, and then I have to switch to my phone to do other things." Eventually, Google imagines a world where you switch gadgets because sometimes you want a pocket-sized, handheld device, and other times you want something with a keyboard and trackpad. But you should never have to switch because some app or feature doesn't work.
This ethos applies even to the new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. "Feel free to choose whichever size Pixel you prefer," Google's Mario Queiroz said on stage, "because you'll get the same great experience on both. We don't set aside features for the larger device." He got big applause for that last line, a clear dig at the Apple's big-phone-only features like Portrait Mode. Largely because it can do so much with software, Google's able to bring its very best features to all the hardware it makes. Don't be surprised when your Pixelbook webcam becomes an AR machine.
In many ways, Google's actually executing on an old idea about how tech should work. In 1999, Mark Weiser, the chief scientist at the famed Xerox Parc research lab, wrote a paper called "The Computer for the 21st Century." In it, he outlined a world in which technology became mostly invisible, electronics and computers running for our benefit but without our constant attention. He also imagined a different kind of gadget. "Ubiquitous computers will also come in different sizes, each suited to a particular task," Weiser wrote. "My colleagues and I have built what we call tabs, pads and boards: inch-scale machines that approximate active Post-It notes, foot-scale ones that behave something like a sheet of paper (or a book or a magazine), and yard-scale displays that are the equivalent of a blackboard or bulletin board." These things would adapt and interact, allowing people to use any device they could find any way they wanted. Some things worked better on small screens; others on large ones. But anything was possible.
The idea's on the mind of many people in tech. "I do think we have too many screens in our lives," Gadi Amit, the founder of design firm New Deal Design, told me earlier this year. "And the screens are not unified enough, and not clear enough."
He's betting eventually we'll all have three: a big, home-theater-sized screen, something about the size of a phone or tablet, and a small screen for all your short interactions. Software runs near-identically across all of them, because with Alexa or Google Assistant, the screen becomes less important anyway. But when you want to watch a movie, you pick the big screen. When you're writing a long email, you pick the middle one. When you're just checking the weather, you choose the small one that's always with you.
There are already glimmers of this all over the industry. Amazon makes every shape and size of Alexa gadget because even though it's always Alexa inside, an Echo Spot fits where a Plus might not. Even though the Apple Watch can do so many of the same things as iPhone, the shape and size of the thing change the way you use it. Same with the iPad and a MacBook. But while Apple believes firmly that different devices need different apps, different operating systems, and different interface models, Google's trying to strip out as much difference as possible between devices. The Android apps on your phone look just like the ones on your laptop, and for better or worse (some Android apps are rough on the big screen) that's how Google wants it.
Some things don't require a screen at all, which is where Google Home comes in. As Google Assistant and its competitors continue to stake their place at the heart of your computing life, they'll be the same no matter where you go or what device you use. More than anything, they'll be the computers. All that changes is the size of the window you see them through.
