Apple introduced its new AR headset, the Vision Pro, at WWDC on Monday. With its steep $3,500 price tag and measly two hours of battery life, this is a daring product to say the least. But for as dorky as it looks and as questionable as the use case for it feels today, I still think it has a lot more potential than many products Google tried to build — and failed.

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Google may have started out as a humble search engine, but the company has long grown to become so much more than that. It’s safe to say that it touches almost every part of our online lives, especially if you’re using one of the latest and greatest Android phones. In contrast to Apple (which, to be fair, definitely has its own set of issues) Google has a big problem, though: It managed to get a reputation as a company that is notorious for killing beloved products prematurely. Even the products that do get long-term support end up feeling less focused than Apple’s efforts.

This infamy overshadowed the launch of Google’s game streaming platform Stadia back in 2019, with many people vowing never to use the service, as Google would surely just shut it down. Fast-forward a mere three years later, and these naysayers were proven right, with Stadia’s death almost feeling like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stadia may be the crassest example, but even products that don’t end up quite so publicly executed aren’t always showered with love by Google. It’s clear that Google’s journey to tablets, wearables, and VR are littered with detours and dead ends, whereas Apple’s trajectory has usually been more straightforward.

With Apple launching its new headset yesterday, this issue becomes even clearer. Let me explain what I think is the key difference between Apple’s and Google’s approach to new products.


How did we get here?

That Google seems to lack an overall vision and often acts like a scattershot collection of disjointed parts is hardly a fresh observation. The company often makes big promises and presents big ideas it doesn’t keep: the demise of Google Reader, the end of Google Plus, and the high profile entry and exit from the gaming industry with Stadia — all things that may be related to a company culture that values new launches more than excellent maintenance.

Other companies also kill products, but when you look at Apple, you won’t see that many high-profile exits, or efforts approached with a poorly formed vision. Whereas Google products have a bad habit of feeling like betas that are never bothered with again after the first release (who remembers Google Clips?), Apple usually supports its stuff for the long haul.

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There is also generally more continuity on the Apple side of things. Google fully rebooted its smartphone lineup with its switch from the Nexus phones to the Pixel series, and then kept widely changing hardware design and performance in the following years, leaving customers scratching their heads as to what makes a Pixel phone a Pixel phone. While this has arguably gotten better with the new Tensor-powered Pixel devices, in contrast, Apple’s iPhones have always represented a much more clear lineage, with devices that may have become more iterative than anything, but you always knew what you got. This is even the case for commercially less successful products like the iPhone Minis, which enjoy the same level of support as their better-selling peers.

Apple is also capable of sticking with a product even if it isn’t an immediate homerun right from the start. The first iPad was laughed at as a device lacking a clear purpose, looking like an overgrown iPhone, but it has long evolved into a category of its own, with different tiers of iPads available for all variety of users — and most of them routinely outdoing even the best Android tablets out there. The first Apple Watch was also of questionable utility, with Apple itself seemingly unsure what to do with the form factor. Fast-forward a few iterations, and the Apple Watch is the smartwatch to beat.

A number of iPhones and iPods neatly laid out in a chaotic pattern on a gray backdrop

Of course, this strategy backfires at times. Apple stuck with its flawed MacBook butterfly keyboard design for way too long, only for microscopic specks of dust to permanently disable keys over multiple laptop generations. The company also took far too long to realize that people like having ports on laptops, with the Pro lineup only recently delivering an SD card reader again. On the iPhone side of things, Apple also had to acknowledge that its 3D Touch system was overengineered, with the company stripping it out a few generations later.

Across all these attempts — and yes, even through the failures — there is a clear path and a fleshed out ecosystem to be seen in Apple’s efforts.

Google’s wearable journey is a perfect example

Meanwhile, Google’s track record isn’t a straight line like that. Let’s take wearables, for example. Google entered, exited, and rebooted its efforts in the market multiple times. The company first launched Android Wear in 2014 to much fanfare, leapfrogging Apple by about a year. From the get-go, Google didn’t offer hardware of its own for the platform, leaving the playing field to partners like Samsung, LG, and Motorola, with the latter briefly existing as a Google subsidiary before being sold to Lenovo in early 2014.

Following the initial slew of new hardware, the platform was quickly held back by underpowered, old processors, further hindered by Google’s apparent lack of interest. Four years later, in 2018, Google attempted to refocus its efforts with the big Wear OS rebranding, though even then, the platform was mostly left languishing and without new features. Many of the original partners abandoned Wear OS altogether, leaving it to fashion brands like Fossil to fill the gaps — or creating their own solutions, like Samsung with Tizen.

Then, in 2021, Google finally teamed up with Samsung to basically fully relaunch Wear OS, with the best from Tizen coming over to integrate with the platform for version 3.0. Qualcomm also has newfound interest in Wear OS, with its latest chips much more powerful and capable of longer performance than what we had to deal with for years. In 2023, with the Google Pixel Watch representing the vision of what Google has in mind with its wearable efforts, the company is finally on track to create a better product.

A gray Google Pixel Watch laying on a blue plate

It took Google eight years to serve up its first self-made wearable

However, in the meantime, Apple just kept iterating and working on its Apple Watch and the accompanying watchOS — so much that it just utterly dominates the smartwatch market at this point. Google even had a head start of one year before Apple introduced its watch, and yet it feels like the company is only now getting serious about its wearables platform — almost 10 years later and only after a partnership with Samsung and acquiring Fitbit.