What you need to know
- Google Nest Hub owners are experiencing severe display issues.
- Users report display banding, as well as screen burn in on affected units.
- It's not clear just how widespread this problem is.
While Google makes really good software, its hardware is often no slouch. The company ships some of the most 'helpful' devices around, but sometimes little bugs creep in here and there to tarnish the experience. Some Google Nest Hub owners are experiencing a particularly debilitating issue on their Nest Hub screens. Particularly, the smart display begins to showcase weird fuzzy lines and fall victim to screen burn-in. For a device that's more or less meant to almost always be on, these would all but render them useless.
There are reports on this from Reddit on the Google Home subreddits as well as on the Google product support forums. Users are advised to reset their devices, but it appears to be a hardware fault, meaning that only a replacement can fix this. It also means users out of the warranty period are also out of luck. One affected customer, Henry Lim, who brought this to our attention, also compiled a selection of social media reports about the broken Nest Hub display going as far back as 2018.
It's not clear how widespread this issue is. It could be related to a faulty batch, or it could be an intrinsic fault that can only be fixed by hardware replacement, it could even be something else entirely. The only thing that is clear at this time is that it is an issue that affects many buyers.
We've reached out to Google for comment and clarification on this, but have yet to receive a response as of time of writing.
There are no reports of this afflicting the second-generation Google Nest Hub that just released, though there has also been no time for any such reports to even accrue, to begin with.
As we noted, Google products are no stranger to hardware defects, like with any other product. The Pixel Slate experienced failing storage, the Pixel 3 and Pixel 4 had swelling backs, and so on. The important thing is whether Google's ready to replace these products and do right by its customers. Hardware might be hard, but good customer service is even harder.
