Are we sure they're making much of a profit from sale of the phone? Google literally pays Apple billions to be the default search engine on the iPhone. If they can chip away at Apple's market share, every user they can convert to Android will save them money and thus generate profit but indirectly. If your goal is to simply convert an Apple user to an Android user you can price the phone very competitively or even afford to take a loss.
Yes, I think we can be pretty sure. Like Apple, Google will drop the price of the phone over time. And other manufacturers who must make a profit to survive (like Nokia) sell similarly speced phones for less.
You are paying a premium for Google phone, a premium Google pockets. They are justifying that premium by ensuring some of their software is only available on the Pixel. The outstanding low light performance of the Pixel camera is all done in software, as in the speedy voice recognition (they run the neural network locally on Pixel's because Google has the best neural network compression).
I think it's safe to say Google is leading software engineering company on the planet now, and here are leveraging that to charge a little more for their phones. As they should. Good luck to them.
It’s got to be worth something, as Google didn’t grow into a hundred billion dollar company from phone sales. Their fortune is almost entirely built from targeted advertising.
There’s a reason they make pretty much all the profit in the phone selling business. If people are willing to pay it, why not charge it?
The XS might be excused for being a luxury model. But the 3a really makes you wonder about the XR, which is smaller, made of aluminum, uses an ancient LCD screen (same quality as iphones since the 5 with incremental improvements -- that must be a bargain compared to the XS's OLED), and even has a worse camera than the 3a. In fact the 3a even has a larger, nicer screen. Where on earth are those margins going?