Google Pixel 5a Jony Ive Apple parody video is strangely out of time
The video you're likely about to watch was produced by Google to make you giggle. It was made to promote the Google Pixel 5a, sure, but less because it's a great phone and more because you love to watch ads during the Super Bowl. You might even forget what the video is about by the time you get to the end of it.
The last time Jony Ive was in a promotional video for Apple, it was the year 2019, and it was all about the Mac Pro. In our first look at the Mac Pro (2019) we saw the following video that included Ive. Ive, at the same time, was not present at said event. It was that same month (June, 2019) that Jony Ive's departure from Apple was first announced.
So it's been a while since we've seen Ive speaking in the manner that's parodied in the video released by Google this week. Google's video includes a speaker with a very similar voice to Ive, complete with the inflections and affectations that made Ive's descriptions of industrial design elements so good – and ripe for parody.
The best bit comes at around 52 second in, when a whispering voice follows the main speaker saying "aluminimum" with a silent "fancy pronunciation." The rest of the video makes the most of the fact that the Google Pixel 5a does, indeed, come with a standard-issue 3.5mm headphone jack, almost certainly the sort that's so standardized that Google's engineers had next to no options other than location for placement in the larger phone model.
Meanwhile, the joke almost instantly backfires, as the Google Pixel 6 has no headphone jack. Google has been sort of wishy-washy when it comes to including a standard 3.5mm headphone jack in smartphones it releases with the Pixel brand over the past few years. The Google Pixel 5 has no jack, while the Google Pixel 5a has a jack, and the Google Pixel 6 has no jack once again.