News broke this week that Google may, at some point in the very near future, stop making and selling the Nexus 5.
That's no surprise as, in keeping with the general ebb and flow of modern capitalism, existing things tend to stop getting made in favour of newer and better things all the time.
Keep it down
So why the rush to super-size the Nexus range? Is it a reaction to the arrival of the iPhone 6 Plus, with Google wanting to be seen to having an enormous flagship phone of its own?
Or is it, more likely, because bigger phones come with bigger price tags, so for each £499 Nexus 6 Google sells directly on behalf of Motorola it's able to channel yet more cash off to the safety of its offshore bank accounts.
If it's not as simple as wanting more upfront money Apple-style, perhaps it's about the failure of advertising to become fully integrated in Google's OS. We've been expecting Android phone prices to come down in exchange for more invasive advertising for years, but that's not yet come to pass.
Even Android, operated by the king of internet advertising, doesn't have much in the way of ads onboard inside the core experience.
Perhaps by releasing a Nexus with a £500 asking price, this is Google admitting that the ad-funded, or at least ad-subsidised model isn't working?
After all, you could fit an awful lot of banner adverts and paid slots atop the search results of a phone display with a 2560 x 1440 resolution output, so it's strange that Google's saved ads on Android for just the odd frame inside Gmail. Maybe they just don't work.
Perhaps the only way to make money from phones these days is to sell them for £500, then leave the advertising and penny pinching to the app developers.
So maybe that's why the Nexus 5 is probably getting the chop. Why would you sell something cheap that can do the same job as something expensive?