Just as a point of reference (not that you'd necessarily agree) but I still get regular security patches for my Nexus 5 which is 3 years old. It's not the same as entire-OS updates but in my time with iOS, I found that trying to run newer OS versions meant to leverage newer hardware on older devices was a generally negative experience.

I have an older iPad that ran smoothly and wonderfully when I got it but after taking enough system updates, it now run so slowly that I only use it as an ebook reader. Opening more than one or two browser tabs slows it to a crawl and I've found no real way to just flash an older system image to get it back to a more usable state.

At the same time, security updates are crucial so I do want to have those. The setup where I can get security patches every month or so but keep running a base OS version that the hardware can handle is ideal. Again, this isn't quite the same as the Nexus 5 is only 3 years old but it still runs surprisingly well with only major slowdown if I'm switching between lots of running apps due to memory limitations.

I guess my point is that in some cases, it's more important to get the core security updates (which Nexus has a fairly good track record of) than the latest bleeding edge OS features. May not be as good as a device that seamlessly runs the latest and greatest for 3-4 years but I find that after a point, you can't really use those newer features if your hardware is outdated so it's been less of an issue in practice for me.

It's just marketing. People latch onto the 2 years + 1 year of security updates, but drop the second half of the sentence. Google could have just said 3 years of updates and just had an asterisk to describe 2 + 1 years.

The last supported OS version on a given iPhone version runs like a pig. iOS 9 is noticably slow on an iPhone 4s, and iOS 10 on an iphone 5-no-'s' is no exception, so I'm not sure how much that fifth year of support really counts for.

Unfortunately, Android devices will likely never see significant support past 2 years because of the Linux kernel. The maintainers of the Linux kernel are openly hostile to maintaining ABI and API compatibility with drivers which is necessary to allow binary blob vendor drivers to work with newer kernels. Ideally this should encourage vendors to simply open source their drivers and integrate them upstream into the kernel. However, in practice it means that most phones are stuck with whatever kernel they shipped with pretty much forever.

Personally, I'd like to see Google switch to a BSD-based kernel, at least as an alternative option. Most of the interesting parts of Android live far above kernel space anyway.

That sounds like your typical slashdot comment. By the law of large numbers, one of them is bound to become infamous.

I was not an early fan of the Ipod. I was already on my 2nd generation of MP3 player at that point. I wanted SPACE. I wanted to be able to carry all my music with me. I have never been able to do that. The best I have at this point is the ability to stream all my music. But that requires an internet connection and unlimited data. Additionally, I found iTunes to be atrocious--still do.

I will say I have an ipod nano that is about 10 years old that is useful for when I am working outside.

People harp on that line, but in retrospect it was spot on. First generation iPods were slow sellers and little more than a novelty/fashion accessory.

Remember that when it came out the killer feature (iTunes Music Store) was still 2 years and two hardware revisions away. What you had was a very expensive player that tethered you to a Mac if you wanted to load music.

That said, it had a significantly better user experience than contemporary competitors, but that's mostly because MP3 players back in 2001 were universally horrible. People sold devices with 8 Megabytes of storage for the music, and horrible DRM laden monstrosities for managing the music (see: Sony) that made them just miserable.

The iPod had basically 2 big wins: It had enough capacity to store a reasonable amount of music and a well designed interface. Certainly nice, but not enough to make your average person shell out the $400 Apple demanded for one.

The iPod wasn't a huge hit until the price came down and the iTunes Music Store gave people an easy way to get music for it.

No sdcard at least is pretty much a choice by google.

As a dev I would really like to see them disappear.

Just put enough memory in these phones by default and people won't have to use a shitty sdcard

The price was always one of the most compelling factors in the Nexus line (at least around Nexus 4/5).

The Pixel is 32 & 128, and +$100 for the 128GB option. A MicroSD card does not cost $100, and offers far more space.

Almost everyone that I know that isn't comfortable putting private data available for the world to see when there are security exploits.

Also, not all of us live in areas where the Internet is available 100% of the time at cheap connection rates.

> I mean seriously pretty much everything is cloud hosted now days

You're really OK with cloud hosting? Why? Do you have a quota? I do. 2GB a month.

> 64-128GB is not enough

No? Not really? Not when some apps think it's OK to be 10s to 100s of MB in size? Not when I care around detailed off-line maps of a majority of the US. Not when I care around a a good portion of wikipedia offline. Not when I use my phone as an impromptu camera. Not when I want to carry around a large variety of music so that I can listen to what when I'm in the mood.

I mean 128GB is getting there, but it would be nice to be able to expand that, or start with a budget phone and expand it. Or, be able to swap cards if I'm on a long trip with various documents on one or the other.

I can compress my music collection down to mp3 and get almost all of it onto a 128GB SD card. It's nice to have.

Can't tell if you being sarcastic. If not:

A) Charging an extra $100 for a little extra local storage is the biggest scam in technology right now, some are worse than others, but anything less than a TB for $100 is infuriating.

B) 64-128GB is not nearly enough for the ridiculous resolution the cameras work at, especially video.

C) Not everyone wants their stuff in the cloud.

Until I get unlimited LTE traffic for free/very cheap, available all over the world, having my data cloud hosted is a lot more expensive and annoying than having it locally. Even if I shell out for a plan with a lot of included data, I still can't rely on actually having useable reception.

Google and Apple both charge $100 for an upgrade from 32 to 128 GB of storage, but a 128 GB microSD card is only $40, and prices will only go down on that with time. Five years from now, a $20 microSD card is likely to far exceed 256 GB, but smartphones with no microSD card slot are doomed to be stuck at their original size. If you've fully bought into the consumer mindset and always have to have the latest and greatest, great, but some people are still on iPhone 4s'.

The cloud (around harddrive island) is great and all, but for those times when you're out of internet range, the local mp3 collection you can actually listen to is far superior, and some people have amassed sizable collections over the years.

Depending on the country, SD cards may be used to share media, like photos, music, videos, etc., and to also copy media from others and play them on one's phone. Yes, it's very slow, but many people who use them don't know and don't care as much about the speed.

SD cards are also not very reliable, but again, many people who use them don't consider that to be critically important.

> I'm really unclear about why this is exciting to people... it seems like an iPhone that runs android.

That's exciting to me. There are some people who highly value Apple's HW engineering but don't want to deal with the closed ecosystem.

I tried an iPhone for a week and went back to my old beater Nexus 4 because the notifications were so painful.

I much prefer vanilla Android to any of the carrier OSes.

To finally have that in hardware that rivals the iPhone plus has some interesting VR capabilities is pretty compelling to me.

Wow, that's a pretty nice phone. $770, though.