Move over, Pixel 10 — The star of this week’s Made by Google keynote was Jimmy Fallon.
In a delightfully surprising move, Google tapped The Tonight Show host to run its fall hardware event. Usually at events like these, they are kicked off with the company’s CEO and we get a series of product updates and, if we’re lucky, live demos. They’re always interesting, but Fallon did what I had previously considered impossible: He made a tech event fun.
In the first 10 minutes of the keynote, Fallon brought his iconic energy and excitement, poked fun at the absurdities of a tech event and ushered in an authenticity that is, frankly, usually lacking from the tech CEOs who typically kick off these kind of events. As a Swiftie, he had me almost immediately when he called today’s Pixel hardware drop a “Taylor Swift album announcement for nerds.” (He’s right, by the way.)
At the Made by Google event, the company dropped a whole lot of new hardware, including the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro Fold, Pixel 10 Pro XL, Pixel 2A earbuds and Pixel watch 4. All the new Pixel devices are available to preorder now.
Fallon wasn’t the only celebrity to make a surprise appearance. The show kicked off with a star-studded “I’m passing the phone to” video that began with Alex Cooper and included Lando Norris, the Jonas Brothers and Steph Curry. Curry apparently uses Gemini AI for basketball, as does Norris, and the Jonas Brothers debuted their new music video filmed entirely with the Pixel 10’s new cameras and AI tools.
But none of these guests compared to Fallon, who acted as possibly the first ever hype man for Pixel hardware, shouting the names of features as Adrienne Lofton, Google’s VP of product marketing, introduced the new devices. We also got a taste of Fallon’s late night show in an intimate living room set with two chairs and a podcast mic, where he kicked off the event interviewing Rick Osterloh, Google’s senior VP of platforms and devices, about the future of Pixel phones.
Google’s decision to include these people is one of the smartest keynote redesigns I’ve seen. Having Fallon host the keynote meant we got so much less jargon. While tech enthusiasts and experts are fluent in AI buzzwords and concepts like walled gardens, Fallon gave Google the opportunity to explain why these updates matter for real-life Pixel users — something that can sometimes get lost as product reps run through all the new upgrades in traditional keynotes.
All of the new hardware and software drops during the last few years have focused on AI. It got to the point where CNET and other tech outlets started counting how many times the company said “AI” during its developers conferences. That number was regularly in the triple digits. While tech companies, including Google, push us to integrate AI in our daily lives and delegate our mundane tasks and some critical thinking, it was refreshing to bring back a little humanity to this next generation of tech.
Jimmy Fallon, if you or one of your employees ever end up reading this, allow me to speak on behalf of all of us tech nerds and say: Thank you.
And Apple, you have one month to nail down Stephen Colbert for your iPhone 17 event.
