Google wanted to release 3.5 Pro last month but because of the trouble Anthropic got with Fable they might have wanted to wait a bit for the dust to settle I could imagine. And now there is quite some competition. 3.5 Flash for me is a replacement to 3.1 Pro. It's more like a 3.2 Pro. It costs about the same (or more!) than 3.1 Pro, is a little bit smarter in many cases and a little bit faster. 3.5 Pro will be a lot more expensive and I expect it to juuuust be able to hang with Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.

I wish Google was able to actually push the industry further, either in terms of quality (intelligence) or quantity (price) but they've been playing catch up a lot.

They are playing the game a bit differently than all the others. The others have useable IDEs etc. while Google has a boatload of half-assed products.

Google better come out with a banger 3.5 Pro because who would have thought that Grok and GLM would be beating them?