Perhaps there were contracts with manufacturers that would have been more expensive to back out of at the last minute. It's also hugely demoralizing to a team to work on something for a couple years and then see it never ship because of mismanagement many levels above them. They probably ran the numbers and saw it was cheaper to pay X million to ship a shoddy device vs. a greater Y million to back out of contracts, perhaps lose team members in frustration, etc.
See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48 days later.
Speaking as a hardware engineer, I can't see it being more expensive to pay a breakup fee than to ship a product. Shippings products of that scale takes many people across many different organizations working together. There is a lot of pressure involved and many late nights. Hardware projects gets canceled all the time. People on the team would rather it get canceled than do all the extra work to see it ship and not sell. No one wants to work on a dud.
These are all good points. Google clearly wants to build and maintain an internal hardware development team, and it might be easier to ship this not-ideal device rather than risk a mass exodus of the hardware team they've been building for years.
The dichotomy between (Android phones/tablets->Nexus->outside OEMs) and (CrOS laptops/tablet->Pixel->internal) is very odd though, and I wonder how confident the Pixel team is in their place at Google. Chrome OS is finding success, but the future still looks like it'll be Android.
As for the Pixel C specifically, the problems are all in the software--maybe rather than making another Nexus tablet for Android N, they'll build it for the Pixel C.
I had the feeling several times at MSFT that sometimes projects go all the way to completion for the sanity of the team.
Kin looks like an example of this. The Kin team were mostly from the SideKick acquisition and they worked really hard on it. Kin had the social angle and it would have been interesting if it had sold to the target audience (teenagers). WP7 picked up on the social aspects in Kin and that was probably final blow to it as a product (before it even shippet). It was ahead of it's time and pitched at completely the wrong price point.
Huh? In the AMA they hinted that the thing can boot other OSes.
Whatever the convergence plan is, Pixel C is the test hardware. The bootloader bits are in the ChromeOS tree. It uses Coreboot.
It's a ChromeOS device and I suspect it's future will include a return to its roots.
ARC in Chrome will be a better way forward for Android than trying to fix all of Android's insidious problems on the "desktop" and making mobile Chrome more fully featured. It just seems painfully obvious that Chrome is going to win.
This (well, *BSD) is what I'm interested in. It'll be interesting to hear from the Linux/BSD pioneers what the networking, gfx, and touchscreen support are.
See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48 days later.