Google discontinues the Pixel 4, nine months after release
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> That's right: it's another marketing email from the robots at dbrand. That means it's time for another email footer. Here are a few ground rules if you're reading this on your shiny new Pixel 4. First, make sure the battery is fully charged - you don't want it dying while you're reading this, do you? If you need to scroll to keep reading, you'll have to use your greasy, gross thumb to do it. No hand-waving allowed. Lastly, consider turning off Gmail sync - your photos are going to burn through that non-expandable storage very quickly. With that preamble out of the way, here's our footer: dbrand is having a 10% off sale - masking your $800+ mistake has never been more affordable.
It also raises and interesting question in me for the folks who think of themselves as "product" types. Has anyone measured the effect of platform denigration on improving or diminishing a brand?
I am trying to imagine ways you might A/B test this. Set up two brands with products in the same space with comparable specifications, and have one that is "product focused" in their outbound messaging and one that is "platform hostile" in their messaging. Then compare customer loyalty and margin support in the two brands.
Curious to know if anyone has done this.
Also AndroidOne so I'm still getting updates for it which is the longest after purchase that's ever happened on an android handset.
At least I would except the Nokia 6.1 does literally everything I need out of a phone still so I'll likely wait another year at least.
There are two problems with it:
- Within 2 weeks the top of mine was covered in thousands of tiny scratches. It seems like maybe it was a manufacturing defect in the screen coating or something but Google wouldn't replace it. They did however do a great job of fucking around in their support emails to exhaust the 30-day return window.
- The body is plastic but the glass goes all the way to the edge. Dropping the phone on its corner caused the screen to crack and die completely (and this was with a screen protector on).
All of the used ones I've bought have huge scratches on the screen making me believe it's compromise glass at a cost reduction. I buy phones used because I like recycled instead of new, and usually there are small scratches like swirl marks in a car, but never huge scratches like all of my 3a's so far. That's fairly anecdotal however.
I keep buying them though, they're absolutely excellent value for a Pixel device and I do recommend them. A 4a is on my radar.
I really don't want to ever buy a phone without a headphone jack. At least the 4A still has one. Only reason to buy a 4A now would be to get 128 gig storage.
It took a lot of good drops to crack my screen, and I think I'll be able to go for a month or two before I swap in a replacement. (No screen protector or case)
I don't really see why the glass needs to go so far down. There's a large buffer of space before the screen actually starts
I tried looking for replacement screens and they are out of stock all over the place and relatively expensive starting at $100ish from places I would consider more reputable and maybe 10% less elsewhere. I'm not sure if the lack of screens lends credence to how easily they break, but it certainly can't be used to disprove it.
I am really pleased with how well the phone works for the $150 price tag.
I don't use my phone all that much, but I can't imagine a situation where I'd justify paying 3-5x that amount for a phone. The Moto G line seems to be perfectly adequate.
Is is really that expensive to add NFC, or is it a marketing thing where it's considered a premium feature for product differentiation?
The Pixel 3a is hands down the best phone in terms of value for money. I'll get the 4a 5G later this year provided it has the headphone jack.
The thing I like about the Nokia is the chassis is aethetically gorgeous and a single piece of aluminium coated in unobtainium, isn't a mark on it after nearly 2 years.
So quite literally, Pixel 4 is what caused Google to lose me as an Android user.
Techcrunch is using double redirect trick via https://guce.advertising.com/ to plant cookies in your browser as first party ones.
That's right, thats a reason of mozilla firefox ETP 2.0 which you read about today, WHILE most of users and us are currently NOT protected from it: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll...
Why would any self-respecting website redirect everyone through a domain called advertising.com on each visit? Who thought that was a great idea?
Probably the overlords mandating tighter integration.
they didn't even put in the effort to obscure their platform even a little bit, huh? not even trying to hide it.
The term "advertising" has become a euphemism for a much more insidious group of activities which, as it turns out, are useful for advertisement (among other things).
I have that domain blocked at the firewall so all I see is
guce.advertising.com refused to connect.
I don't know how I could have gotten it, uMatrix would certainly have blocked advertizing dot com for me. I'll check on that computer and then edit this post.
Edit: I'm definitely not sending this cookie, in fact I have cookies completely disabled on this domain via uMatrix. I notice that a guce.js is blocked by uBlock origin. Since I'm not getting redirected, either this is a regional thing, or else they're redirecting using JS as I suggested previously.
available in Safari since 2018. it's part of the ITP feature.
This is something I just don't understand. As phones get more powerful, there is absolutely no excuse to not support them for longer. When did the standard for supporting consumer devices get so low? Love it or hate it, Apple still supports the iPhone 6s Plus. A phone which is almost 5 years old now.
anyway in Pixel case the phone will have already after 2 years completely unusable battery, not that it would be satisfactory for heavy user even out of box
just because it gets YOU through the day, doesn't mean it gets others, people use phones differently, for starters their phones have different Screen on Time per day, so while 1-2 hours is fine for you and gets you through the day, for others 7hrs is not enough and phone will die for them before dinner
Perpetual donations to debian and apt update; apt dist-upgrade keep it in tip-top shape. The same cannot be said for a growing drawer of phones/tablets that are no longer supported/updated.
(I was glad to see that partial postmarketos support is present for at least some of those devices now. Looking forward to trying that out when I get a chance.)
What's amazing about the PII is it's the oldest "modern" computer in a few ways. USB came out around the same time, and i686 is the oldest x86 architecture still supported by modern distros out-of-the-box. i686 will be 25 years old in November. The fact that it's still supported is incredible.
In terms of security updates for motherboards and other hardware, they're very rare. For my phones/tablets, some are literally pinned to ~Android 6, with just oodles of known security holes.
My daily driver desktop, from which I do all of the rsync.net CEO things - from terminal to VMWare - is an octo-mac-pro from early 2009.
Currently running el-cap. Nothing is ever slow. 11 years and counting ...
Nowadays 5 years is really not that old for a phone.
Phone manufacturers should release the specs and/or an open source version of the phone's os so people can provide their own support.
Do a lot of people ignore their carrier's emails about upgrading at the expiration of the contract? I know I do, but I always assumed most people just upgraded almost right away to the new version.
I still run iOS 10.3 on mine, and really don't care about the latest one, probably would run very slow anyway.
The performance of my personal Pixel 2 on the other hand has not held up nearly as well by comparison and my next personal phone will likely be an iPhone even though I'm not a great fan of Apple.
It's kind of a drag that once they finally got the fundamental hardware and OS good enough to really last for a few years, they also made it nearly impossible to do what should be simple maintenance.
Did you leave in plugged into the AC adapter overnight? anecdotally that killed my previous phones and there's also (anecdotal?) evidence that it isn't great for it.
Have you checked what apps are eating all the battery? On older phones, newer versions of certain apps seemed to turn them into pocket warmers, getting stuck in a tight CPU loop and efficiently turning 3000mAh into heat at about 5 watts
Don’t most people do exactly that with their phones? If that’s something that actually breaks a phone, that’s ridiculous and they should fix it.
Google's attitude to customer support and brand loyalty, on the other hand, is a different story...
My girlfriend's Pixel 4 screen cracked and was a huge PITA to fix even though we paid a ton for extra warranty. Trying to get that fixed was far more painful than any experience I've had with other brands.
Worse than that, there is a software bug that can / will irreversibly brick your Pixel 2 rear camera. You can find a ton of info on it by searching. It doesn't seem to affect everyone, but I was unlucky enough to hit it last week, presumably from a recent update. Google has been absolutely silent on this issue. Unethical at best, and probably worse.
There was a time where I would have scoffed at paying a premium for Apple or other brands that sell an experience more than just a device. That's completely changed now. I don't have the patience or energy in my life to deal with what I perceive to be Google's cold / impersonal / numbers oriented approach to customers. It's just not worth the stress. If anything, I'm willing to pay a pretty big premium for the opposite. If that means switching our household to Apple products, so be it and good riddance.
After it was stolen, I bought another Pixel 2 used and while the battery life is worse, it still runs perfectly well as far as I can tell.
But what I'm saying is that my iPhone 6 is still running mostly fine as well.
If Apple didn’t throttle, the phone would restart every time it’s power requirements outstripped the batteries declining capacity.
I think it’s pretty clear which use case is better.
Apple gives performance beyond what you would expect for a similar phone, in terms of battery life and responsiveness. Then, as you burn through your battery's age beyond what even other phone manufacturers would warrant, the OS slows down the CPU to let you continue using it. So it's actually giving you more than you would've gotten otherwise.
But all the complaints are that iPhone sucks, I guess.
Your standards are in the basement.
>the past couple of months have seen a sudden increase in Nexus 6P battery complaints, with many users reporting that their phones suddenly shut down, even though there was plenty of battery life remaining
It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger.
https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random...
That seems especially problematic if you are on the go and need to make an emergency call to summon help.
A working phone seems preferable.
This isn't an "Apple vs Android" discussion. Maybe that's where you got confused.
When users complained that their phones died while showing a 50% charge and would not work again until connected to a charger, Google did nothing to fix the problem.
>The processor easily overheated, a bootloop bug made quite a few units die prematurely, and lastly, a battery problem surfaced that led to early shutdowns anywhere between 50 and 0 percent. At least the remaining owners of this Nexus device don't have to worry about the latter issue anymore — according to Google, that is. An engineer just marked the early shutdown entry in the company's issue tracker as "fixed."
I don't know about you, but when I just retrieved my Nexus 6P from my junk drawer a minute ago, it didn't have an update pending.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut...
I'm not an Apple hater by any means. I understand they had their technical reasons, I was just pointing out the dichotomy between their perceived willingness to support older models and the lawsuit that says they are slowing them down.
>This seems like an odd thing to say about a company that was caught purposefully slowing down older models <END>
That is a half truth and considered lying through omission. It's misleading because as written it implies that they slowed down phones without a valid reason, AKA to force upgrades.
The irony is that early Android phones were built to last, but quickly got obsoleted by more recent models. Now, progress is much slower, but the thing that kept devices alive (removable batteries and community ROMs) are dying. Real obsolescence is replaced by planned obsolescence.
how long is "way beyond OEM updates"? one year? two years? three years? five years? The main problem is that third party roms can only update so much. Without OEM support, you're not going to be getting updates for the proprietary bits of your phone. This includes blobs, baseband, and even the kernel (technically it's open source, but all android phones run off a customized kernel that's specific to that SoC. When that SOC gets EOLed, the updates stop coming).
I have far less trust in a random community. Plus, their EOL could be completely unexpected.
I do not want my phone to be reliant on community updates, personally.
1: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-iphone-x-environmental-repor...
2: https://sustainability.google/reports
3: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-ways-smartphone-environment.ht...
Based on support period, one can easily justify the most costly iPhone over the seemingly temporarily supported Google/Samsung etc. flagship.
Unfortunately I still wouldn't be happy with an iPhone as I'm just not a fan of iOS
Also not a fan of face unlock and wish they'd implement a fingerprint into the screen. I usually block out the front camera and any sensors that I don't use.
Non-professional developers support Android Q on the original Pixel, but Google is too resource-starved, apparently.
When you see "guaranteed support" by a manufacturer, you can be sure that it actually means "guaranteed end of support" timeline. Which Google follows exactly.
While Google may end support as soon as they can, not all manufacturers do.
This is sort of true.
It is true that Apple dropped support for older devices much faster in the past. But it is also true that the older devices were way underpowered.
As an example: when Apple introduced home screen backgrounds on the iPod Touch, they released the same software upgrade for all iPods. However, since the older generation didn't have enough compute power (most likely GPU), they disabled the feature for older generations. I thought they were trying to force people to upgrade, but after a jailbreak and force enabling the feature, I realized that it was not the case. It was not smooth, so this is why they disabled it.
Same goes for, say, iPads. The first iPad quickly got obsoleted, but it was also very underpowered compared to subsequent devices.
They will not hesitate to drop hardware if it turns out to be insufficient, but they are just as likely to disable a feature if there is insufficient hardware support and allow the OS upgrade anyway.
https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...
The Android phone market is distributed. You can get almost anything there you can get from Apple, in particular wherever the competition regulators had done their work.
The stuff Google itself is participating in is a different matter. Honestly, with respect to consumer products and UX Google is generally a failure. It's like Google is full of engineers and analysts but lacks talent in every other profession. Even Microsoft which has been so often a late-comer and the death for so many brands seems to be better at it.
It's just not a priority for them.
Meanwhile, I have a Samsung Note 2 phone which is 8 years old. It's fast enough for what I do (browse the internet for 10 minutes a day, send a dozen WhatsApp messages, book an Uber). That thing was released in 2012 and could no longer upgrade to new Android releases in 2014. That's pathetic. I need to replace it this year, not because it's too slow, but because it's insecure and no longer supported by anything. I was going to buy a smart scale the other day, but the app doesn't support my Android version. Also wanted an app for syncing the time with my Bluetooth GShock. Not supported. Sonos speakers? Not supported. It's a garbage phone now not because of the hardware, but because of the lack of support.
Embedded development is hard. Really hard. And much of that difficulty is intrinsic to the problem space, so it isn't going away anytime soon. But much of it is just embedded developers being masochists and embedded tool developers being sadists. For phones, the pain is probably 90% avoidable. 90 percent!
No, I don't know why we live with it either.
The reason your phone is different than your PC is that the PC's OS has all the drivers for everything built in, then loads whichever drivers your specific machine needs. Embedded Linux images are built specific to one model of hardware, with weird crappy OEM-provided drivers baked in and nowhere else available. It doesn't _have_ to be this way. But it is.
So to support your phone, the vendor basically maintains a custom-patched kernel with a bizarre build process. And that's done more or less independently for every model they're supporting. It's a huge headache!
Why deep embedded is this way is a little more understandable. (It's also where I prefer to work if I'm doing software; I don't like embedded Linux. It's just not my thing. So if I'm wrong when talking about it, that's why.) Deep embedded is often working with very limited hardware, custom circuits, and general strangeness. It also can serve the industrial, automotive, or medical markets, which naturally tend to longer product cycles. So the product is generally less standard, meaning it makes more sense (at least to me) why the support flow is so bespoke.
Done. You don't have to support the device for an eternity and, as a bonus, you can benefit from OS improvements to your drivers/etc. Hell, you and other manufactures using the same broadcom SOC (and hear me out... this might sound crazy) wouldn't have to spend the same engineering effort building drivers!
Of course, that would require manufactures to actually give a damn about driver quality, whereas the current situation allows them to push out the most broken patch imaginable to pass whatever conformance tests google asks for.
That would also cut into manufactures bottom line which is why I suspect they've not gone down this route. Gotta sell them phones every year... (they'd cut support to 1 month if they could)
"If only the bad people would just stop being bad!"
This mantra continually assumes goodwill from people who continue to show that they have none. At some point one needs to stop gaslighting themselves and their users and make the system more robust to bad actors. Manufacturers don't want to mainline their drivers? Fine. You can work on getting drivers mainlined while also stabilizing the interface so that it doesn't injure a billion customers when they don't.
Google seems like the natural point for that. Maybe a law is needed? Too bad most law makers are completely tech illiterate.
But I agree, it won't change without some central force to kibosh it.
They could force the OEM to play ball, like they require Google Play Services to be pre-installed.
I think Google really has to walk a fine line here. Android OEMs are already not thrilled with their lack of freedom when it comes to changing the experience on their phones. The more restrictions Google adds on, the closer some of them (especially Samsung) will be to cutting ties with the Android name and forking.
They are not powerless. They simply made the decision to treat carriers and device makers as the customers they cared about and not the people using the devices.
Huawei only stopped shipping the Store because they were legally obligated.
> Yup, and to that point, the fix is really stupid simple, push the drivers into the linux kernel mainline and give google (or whoever) a kernel build profile for your device.
Yeaaaaahhh... I don't see most companies doing that.
1. It is a lot of work to clean up your driver (that will only ever be used on one product) enough to be accepted into the mainline kernel. It takes time, effort and skill. Companies don't want to pay for that, because it doesn't contribute to bottom line. The MO is: get the product out... yesterday so we can sell it and make some money.
2. Even if it was accepted, does that mean it is going to work forever afterwards because the Linux kernel fairies / pixies / whatever will maintain it? No. If you're going push out a new release to end users, you'd better make damn sure it works. So that means each Android release has to go through a long round of QA. Who's going to pay for that?
There's only a couple ways out of the current mess we are in. Only one is likely to actually work.
Option 1: Release the IP! Have basically all phone SoCs (system on chip) use the same IP blocks for the display, I2C, SPI, memory controllers, GPIO, various sensors, power management, etc. Then you can be more like a PC where the system can basically boot up, and you can then download additional drivers as needed. This will never happen.
Option 2: Fuchsia style microkernel. Create a device driver API for the various SoC hardware blocks, and make it good and flexible enough that you never, ever have to change the API. The device driver binary is written once during initial product development, and can be carried into newer OS updates with no changes at all.
People need to realize that the SoC world is not like the PC world. Hardware interfaces change all the time, with every release of a new family member. Some stuff doesn't change much, like a USB host controller, because the SoC world has standardized that somewhat. Other stuff like power management is a total pain.
After TI left the Android SoC space, most OEMs and Carriers are beholden to Qualcomm, who write their own drivers and will never mainline them, if they can help it: long upgrade cycles will hurt Qualcomms bottomline, planned obsolescence via kernel incompatibility is how they achieve that. I don't think customers will upgrade from Snapdragon X05 to Snapdragon X20 for the minor gains in performance, if their old device could get the latest Android features.
1. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/11/an-update-...
Not incidentally, "Qual" is german for "torture".
You know, your PC has BIOS/UEFI and PCIE busses and other ways for kernel to discover what it is really running on, which drivers to load and so on.
ARM devices have none of these (except for servers, where Redhat had enough clout to say, that if your ARMv8 server has no UEFI, it will have no RHEL). Not only they add up to energy consumption (it is extra hardware, after all), they add up in the BOM as well (again, it is extra hardware). So we are stuck with kernels targeting only a known hardware (which today devicetree describes to some degree) and where a poke on a wrong port could mean that the entire device hangs. And after all, no consumers base their decision on whether a third party can replace the operating system, so why make a worse (=worse battery) and more expensive (=more BOM) than the competition?
Not really, Google applies the same disposable approach to supporting ChromeOS on bog-standard x86 hardware. I have an x86 Chromebox that Google suddenly dropped all support for - including security patches - with a generic message that "your device is out of its support window". This basically rendered it useless as a ChromeOS device, because you can't browse the public web with an unpatched web browser. Yet I can run up-to-date Linux in Crouton.
I don't see how this is technically any different than Microsoft deciding to stop all Windows 10 patches on PCs older than a certain age not because of any blocking compatibility issue, but just because they've passed a certain age threshold and they don't want to do it anymore.
I used to evangelize ChromeOS as a great, simple solution for non-technical users who just want to browse the web without the hassle of maintaining a full-fledged PC, but I won't do that if Chrome devices are part of the smartphone "time based support model" rather than the "compatibility based support" model we've had on PCs for decades. A PC for basic use can easily last 10 years, OEMs who arbitrarily shorten that are not helping their customers.
Maybe it's the profit motive.
If companies are not incentivized to change, then nothing is going to change. If companies pushing OS and hardware refreshes every year means people are going to buy more phones, I'm not sure why they would have any reason to stop.
Anecdotally, I needed a new phone because my Pixel XL was getting 4 hours of standby time and was constantly overheating. I had just gotten back from an overseas trip and was nearly stranded several times from finding myself in remote places with my backup battery dead. In the end, I settled for a OnePlus 7 (ironic, I know). I would rather have used the Pixel for many more years. hate not having a headphone jack or bezel, and I know that some product manager is going to use my purchase as evidence that those "features" were the correct move and continue to propagate the belief that nobody wants headphone jacks or bezels anymore. But I was in serious need of a smartphone that was actually reliable over one that had a headphone jack or bezel, so I got one without those features anyway.
People like me are now reliant on smartphones to do things like make calls, navigate unknown places or look up things on cellular data. In my book, if people need to have a cellphone in order to function in modern society, or are at least strongly incentivized to have one, then planned obsolescence only increases profits. Companies can market this as "upgrading" to new phones with a festureset that doesn't have to be a significant improvement over the last generation, and if people are used to this and don't mind spending the money to upgrade, then this will continue. And there are surely a lot of people who will buy the lastest model anyway even if they don't absolutely need to upgrade.
Still probably worth the trade off though - Lineage OS is great.
Always check exact version/model (US model, Indian Model, etc) before flashing ROMs
Full Guide to unlock - https://gearallnews.com/how-to-unlock-the-bootloader-of-sams...
Your phone's XDA page - https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-note-2
Check out what Custom ROM you want here https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-note-2/orig-developm...
Use TWRP to flash ROM - https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1938733
So of course you can upgrade to windows 10.
Phone hardware has. Very much so.
Compare the best PC from 1990 with the best one from 2000. That change makes 2010-2020 look like it was standing still.
Phone evolution for maybe 5-10 years after 2007 was more like the nineties, though it's definitely starting to slow now.
And Windows 2000, from 1999, for instance, only supported ~4 year old hardware. Windows 10 has it much easier!
The OP was claiming that there’s barely been any change in performance in the 2010s, which is just not true.
The biggest improvement, from a most people perspective, in the last 5 years is power usage. They run cooler, and batteries last longer.
The laptop was bought in 2011. It was a fairly cheap one then, and has a dual-core i3 with hyperthreading, and it came with an SSD. I added another some RAM I had laying around so now it has 8GB.
After getting a fresh copy of Win10 on it, it's surprisingly usable. Webpages loads just fine, YouTube is accelerated so is smooth. I could totally use that for my daily laptop had it not been for the rather lackluster 1366x768 screen.
This was my work laptop in 2010 with 8GB of RAM and a 2.66Ghz Core Duo. They let me keep it after the company folded. Until late last year, it was my Plex server and I used it occasionally since it sat right by my work computer.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/
The only time that it felt slow compared to a modern computer was disk access. I could have upgraded it with an SSD if I wanted to.
Windows works on 10 year old hardware because hardware manufactures don't get to modify the windows kernel. Instead, they have to push out drivers which work with the windows kernel.
It's really that simple.
There are several solutions here.
Google could make their own kernel which is closer to the microsoft kernel methodology (Fuchsia is basically just that)
Google could ban devices that with custom kernels from the play store (They MIGHT be able to do that now, then again, Android could be forked).
Google could create a private kernel repo and have manufactures submit to it. They could have their own kernel build profiles. (if getting things into mainline linux are deemed too difficult).
I use the 5s as a Spotify player and when I wiped it and set it up for the task, I was pleasantly surprised at how snappy it still felt and how everything I tried with it continued to work.
The hardware doesn’t have to be incredibly fast to support most of the functions supported - it’s only a small subset that really benefit from extra CPU speed and hardware acceleration.
On the other hand, comparing the useful life of this to the iPhone is entirely reasonable, particularly since its the price of a mid-high end iPhone. It's pretty sad when you realize that the new iPhone SE released just 6 months after the Pixel 4 will almost certainly be supported for 2-3 years after Google has abandoned the twice-as-expensive Pixel 4.
> Love it or hate it, Apple still supports the iPhone 6s Plus. A phone which is almost 5 years old now.
You're comparing what Google guarantees up-front for all devices to what Apple has done for the one device. Did Apple give a guaranteed support date for the iPhone 6s Plus at launch? In a quick search, I couldn't find one. I did find articles (eg [1]) from January speculating if Apple would include the iPhone 6S in the iOS 14 update or not.
Google still may support the Pixel 4 for longer than three years.
edit: forgot to add the disclaimer earlier that I'm a Google employee. I don't work on Android or hardware.
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/ios/story/don-t-ditch-y...
Apple (in my observation) tends not to say what length of support will be given, but offers it well beyond when an average person would throw away a device 2-3x over.
When Google says 3 years guaranteed, you can be damned sure you're done at 3 years.
No, they say at least and have extended support dates before, eg: https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebook-end-of-life-extended-13... (That's Chromebooks; I'm not sure about Nexus/Pixel phones in particular.)
(1) Battery life goes down while wear and tear build up. After ~3 years you are looking at spending money replacing a battery for a banged up phone. Or you can spend another $200 and get a new phone.
(2) Cameras are still getting better. Going from a Pixel to the Pixel 3 was a phenomenal upgrade in the camera.
I'd guess people aren't replacing a ~$500 phone with a ~$200 phone, but I get your point. Who wants to replace the battery on a phone worse less that the battery?
That's fair. I buy used/refurbished 1 model behind the current flagship. For me it was ~$140 more to get a lightly used 3 XL than replacing my battery.
I owned an iPhone 5S, my phone terribly slowed down in just a year to the point of becoming unusable. Opening the camera app would take 10 seconds. It would randomly freeze during calls and in the end, started having random shut downs. At the time, I didn't know they were throttling the phone. Funnily enough, my battery was replaced a couple of times and had no impact.
I paid $1000 at the time for it. I wrote it off in a year and a half due to all these issues. The manufacturer DID support with updates, but in the end, it didn't really matter because they just kept introducing more bugs and did nothing to address the throttling until very recently when they were caught in the act.
In contrast, I still own an Android 2.x HTC Desire that works flawlessly as a backup phone till date. I got it 8 years ago and is absolutely stunning - be it the beautiful OLED display or usability, and solves my needs perfectly.
I would say, software support for older phones is overrated. If you thought I am lucky with the HTC, then how about my other Android - Xperia X. I've dropped this thing so many times and not once had the screen gotten a single scratch. Supports dual sim and camera is great for low light. Still fluid to use. Again, software support for long term is really overrated in my opinion. As long as you can make calls, surf the web, check emails, take photos, I'd say the purpose of the phone is complete.
My 5S is still very usable.
-Download offline google maps files on it and use it as a gps in my car. Smooth as butter map animation and everything. -Use it when I'm doing yard work, Podcasts, audiobooks.. The latest overcast app is a little bit hiccupy.. but very usable. -Take pictures with it once in a while...
Still on original battery... On the latest iOS that Apple is currently supporting the 5S with.
My pixel 1 is basically stuck on a 3.18 kernel forever, even if I go and compile AOSP myself, because of Qualcomm's nom-free drivers.
At a certain point, companies like Google have to decide how much they want to backport fixes to older systems. Apparently they've decided on 3 years.
Wait...
These are issues totally within their control. These excuses shouldn’t be acceptable.
Even in their datacenters they use third party CPUs. It's not surprising that they haven't made their own for phones.
They don't even need to design the chips themselves. They could partner with Samsung / LG / Motorola to form a hardware consortium.
They need more like 5/6, but no one seems to be willing to pay for it.
- One got stolen
- Two broke while hiking/kayaking
- One was a lemon and the battery started working funny after a year and a half, it's one of the pixels that came with a high capacity battery and the replacement one is lower capacity so I didn't risk spending money on servicing it
I'm on my fifth phone now.
It's disingenuous for Google to start counting when the product is released. As the buyer, I don't care when it was released, I care when you sold it to me as new. I could buy a Chromecast Ultra (the current-generation 4K Chromecast, released November 2016: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_ultra) and, by this standard (which may not even apply to Chromecasts, FWIW), they could discontinue it and drop support for it tomorrow.
That doesn't mean OS support. Apple sold the iPhone 6 until September 2018¹ but it did not get iOS 13 only one year later.
I’ll keep a windows desktop for gaming, but once Apple settles down through its processor changes I might just get a personal iPhone and a MacBook Pro
Google stack ranks employees regularly. Lowest of a group is always fired. Doesn't matter how good you are or how much satisfaction you give to your customers, you're basically asked, "what have you built that could be the next billion customer thing?" If you're not answering how you're part of the next big thing, you're going to lose. So, once something is acquired or released, consider it deprecated.
The sliver of truth is that Google's once-or-twice-yearly performance evaluation system asks colleagues to stack rank folks they are reviewing. I wish they'd get rid of it, but it's not used for much. It's only a partial order of folks they're reviewing, nothing really enforces that people actually do it, I suspect some people just rank all the people trying for promo this cycle above the people who aren't, and the many reviewers' stack ranks are never reconciled into one authoritative stack rank of the folks in a group. I don't know why it's still around.
I think you may be confusing the stack ranking at google, that doesn't result in dismissal (Google were in fact, right up until Covid, still on a hiring spree with a shortage of engineers); with what Microsoft historically did (and stopped doing in 2013).
If the company high prioritized environmental concerns, stack ranking would reward those who figured how to keep products in service longer.
This seems incredibly dubious as an excuse (for a variety of technical and business reasons), but has been the Google get out of jail card for a decade+ now.
More likely Google loses interest, the devices no longer make them any money and they want to wipe their hands of them.
It is now possible to use a decent[0] 3rd party keyboard on them and the XR is actually not that expensive compared to a number of other phones.
And for the first time since Samsung SII I'm happy with my phone :-)
[0]: the Apple keyboard doesn't support autocomplete while showing Norwegian letters, and it is also hilariously bad it seems wrt autocorrecting correctly spelled sentences into embarrassing ones and even going as far as autocorrecting one medicine name to another at some point. On SwiftKey one can at least turn of autocorrect.
(On my iPad). User error?
Not user error. Bad QA from Apple and/or third party keyboard.
Unfortunately, you have no options at all for having a modicum of control / openness over your firmware if you want to use a smartphone. Gotta use/build your own odd device if you want that.
Or an aggressive business model that is fair only to the top 10% of customers who are not concerned with spending $250 per month in effective charges to have a wireless handheld computer with 4G.
A lot of stuff on Android is delivered directly by the Play store/services, for many years after the end of OS updates for a particular device.
Even expensive phones are cheaper than their wireless service contracts in the US. A good rule of thumb is they depreciate about 50% in their first two years (at least for iPhones).
That means your $800 phone is costing you less than $20/month: A $1400 phone less than $30/month.
Right now I’m paying over $40/month each for service for four phones right now.
Also the form factor and screen to size ratio are very important criteria for a lot of people, if not the most.
From our perspective, sure. From the manufacturers perspective, it costs money to port, build, and test new releases. And if people are happy with their up-to-date 5-year-old phone, they'll be less likely to buy the latest shiny new one.
Not saying those are good excuses -- they're explicitly customer-hostile -- but they're completely understandable.
Bump up the price of Pixel by additional $100, and you get an 5 years guarantee upgrade.
Not to mention the Pixel isn't that powerful. iPhone 6s despite being 5 years ago, is probably as fast or still faster than some of the sub $300 Android Phone released today. ( Excluding Chinese Brands )
Apple makes their own, so...
Pixel 4a looks decent for the price, though.
A friend recommended Android One to me [1]. Basically, it's pure AOSP on third-party hardware.
I bought a Nokia 5.2 just to try it out, with the intention of getting the 7.3 when it comes out and I liked the Nokia experience. And I do -- it's simple AOSP.
Nokia promises 3 years of software updates and 5 years for security.
So AOSP is basically pure android without googles crap.
Well, whatever the official name is, I meant the most pure version of Android but including the Google apps (which I haven't managed to get rid of yet entirely).
That's not AOSP. AOSP has no google apps at all.
I'm getting a Pixel 5 on day one, for the camera, camera app and security updates.
[0] https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/
Links or it doesn't exist.
Edit: I specified Android, but really, I just want a phone with a standard port (USB C) and my apps (WireGuard, NextCloud, Google Photos, etc.)
Bathtub notch aside, the 3 series are excellent phones and hope in a few years when they need an upgrade that the 6 or 7 is equally good.
I am thinking about switching the family to iPhones later this year.
(I also feel like I live in fear of waking up each morning to find out the my Fi service will be shut down in three days.)
The short support cycle, quality issues, and dropping the unlimited Google Photos backups have me seriously considering an iPhone. While I really love Google Fi, the service hasn't kept up with the competition in terms of data pricing and coverage.
They're not the only ones, though; Apple has announced already that the new iPhone is going to be delayed.
I think Google is just bad at inventory management (that, and selling a previous generation Android phone is probably much harder than it is for iPhones, where even Apple routinely continues selling models for years after introducing their successor.
Or they have different goals. No big sales on the Pixel 4, and they sold all the units they made. Of course, nobody is overproducing flagships and then firesaling them anymore, it was a nice run between the Nexus 5x, the Nextbit Robin, and the Essential PH-1.
Not from Google itself, but for the past months third party resellers can't seem to lower the price enough to get rid of their stocks.
Also the Nexus 5X was not a flagship, and was plagued by LG's mainboard/bootloop issues.
An old Android phone will have to compete with newer ones at the same price point.
I really can not overstate how happy I was with how long Apple supported that device - I used it from end of 2014 to early 2020 - yep! Every single day, new iOS supported till late 2019.
Google - well they are famous for killing things.
edit: typo
It connects to Mi servers every 4 seconds and just constantly sends logs. I noticed it and immediately switched.
That is do you have the EU version, Indian model or the Chinese version?
If you have trouble finding it, look for MIUI version in settings.In the 'About' section of your phone.
Apple actually has custom SoCs that they build, so they very much depend on TSMC.
Whereas the 865 was already happily producing last year. Not only that, the Pixel 4 sony camera sensor was actually in 2018s flagships. Pixels are kinda old, overpriced and outdated. The 4a seems okay for the price.
The Face ID like thing they replaced the fingerprint scanner with in the Pixel 4 actually caused a lot of people to skip it.
Every smartphone I've had since the gnex days has been Google. I really want Google to make the best Android phones. The appeal of Nexus was that it was so cheap. With Pixel, prices have gone up, and the increase in functionality between generations has gone down. Maybe that's a general smartphone trend, but I think for the first time in a long time, my next Android phone won't be from Google.
I haven't had to downgrade, but I imagine that (like you) I wouldn't miss it :)
[1] https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/pixel-4a-4a-5g-pixel-5-exp...
Then there are several big improvements. It's faster with more RAM, of course. I will never go back to a 60 Hz screen. The speakers are a million times better. I use the telephoto camera. The screen to body ratio is better. Face unlock works incredibly well for me; it's significantly more reliable than the fingerprint sensor ever was. Of course the mask thing is unfortunate but I stay at home and need a mask very rarely so it's not an issue for me.
But should we accept this as a consumer? I don't think so, with current hardware, the 3 year limit is artificial and just part of forced obsolescence. More over, an utter disregard for environment; smartphone recycling is unheard of in several markets where these flagships are going to be sold.
Alternatives?
[1] Smartphone manufacturer who cares for people and planet - https://www.fairphone.com/en/
[2] 10 Year smartphone OS - https://postmarketos.org/.
[3] Smartphone with user replaceable parts - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
[4] Privacy focussed Linux phone - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
[5] Alternate privacy focused android OS with longer support - https://e.foundation/
[6] If you like Sony devices - https://shop.jolla.com/
P.S. I haven't included LineageOS, GrapheneOS and other aftermarket android firmwares as although what they do is commendable, once the manufacturer stops updating the device, the binary blobs remain outdated with the old kernel, even though Android itself gets updated via these projects unlike the other projects I have mentioned above.
Discontinuing the 4 means that Google will be without a flagship phone until whenever the new one is released.
I switched from iPhone 6 to Redmi Note 8 Pro recently (early 2020) as I lost my iPhone. I have been an Android user before the iPhone.
I really can not overstate how happy I was with how long Apple supported that device - I used it from end of 2014 to early 2020 - yep! Every single day, new iOS supported till late 2019.
Google - well they are famous for killing things.
and hey, it cost a fourth of an iphone, so I can have extremely short replace cycle to work around the chronic android updates issues.
Only if you exclude the cost of one’s time.
My main positive is this thing, so far, has survived more than a few drops that would have killed other phones I have owned.
That said I agree about the battery but even before COVID I was reliably near a charger so it didn't matter that much. Hand gesture feature fell flat for me and I don't use the song recognizer.
What it has convinced me of though is I no longer care about customizing my phone or the extra geeky things I can do with Android like I did when I was a bit younger so my next phone purchase will be an iPhone. A reliable, incredibly responsive, secure, more private experience for the 4 apps I use and phone calls I make.
The Pixel 4 has automatic call screening, live transcription of voice recordings, instant translation, the Google Assistant works in my native language (which Siri doesn't understand), there's Soli chip (which is gimmicky, but I'm a developer, I enjoyed making apps which use the Soli chip), Google Lens built into the camera, the Google Assistant is leaps and bounds beyond Siri, etc.
Tasker on my phone is something I wouldn't give up for more years of support, and I really enjoy all the customizability Android phones offer as well.
Anything you can do on iOS/MacOS I can do with my Pixel. I can text from my desktop, receive notifications on both screens, send files and share clipboard between phone and desktop. And I can share files with anyone (Apple or Android device) over LAN using my Pixel because I can open a shell on my phone and start up a mini one-time file server which closes once the file is downloaded. And I can do all that with a push of a button.
IMO Androids are fun phones that also boost your productivity. That's worth having to change them out every 3 years.
However I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. It is not uncommon it hear of stories where raising the price lead to more sales and people regarding the product as of a higher quality.
4XL - take it out, and 80% of the time it works, the other 20% I spend time moving it up and down, and just entering the pin.
It is a lot more than just "password manager == sorted"
That said, I still like it better than face.
My point is instead of wearing gloves you can just avoid touching your face until you wash your hands or use hand sanitizer, which you can't do wearing gloves.
Your skin does not.
If you're concerned about touching things when out wash your hands when you get home (and anything else you've touched while out).
Face ID continues trying to find a face for a few seconds if the sensor is pointed elsewhere.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21265019/apple-ios-13-5-o...
Edit: That's kind of possibly concerning for you. It may be totally fine. Still seems weird.
Why aren't you using an ad blocker?
I am. I'm using uBlock Origin, but apparently this redirect got through. Then the DNS lookup of guce.advertising.com failed because of the filter I have set up on that end, so my Techcrunch experience ended on an error page.
I guess it's an http redirect but I haven't checked because I prefer to write comments than debugging crappy websites.
To the people behind this : Go to hell.
What? By far the Pixel 4's battery life has been the best out of every smartphone I've owned. Unless I'm using it unusually heavily, a single charge lasts around 30 hours for me (and that's still the case, after owning it for 8 months or so).
Previous phones lasted much shorter, sometimes barely giving me 12 hours. Even the Pixel 2 only gave me 16 hours or so on one charge, with moderate use. For the first time ever, the Pixel 4 has taken away my late-in-the-day charging anxiety.
Really my only complaint with the P4 has been that I miss the fingerprint scanner.
I was eyeing it as a replacement of my current phone, a mi a2, mostly because the android one landscape is really limited
In fairness I picked it as a great "carry-around camera" with a phone attached and it looks like it might work well in that regard, photo quality is very good from first impressions.
Otherwise I do find myself somewhat underwhelmed, first Android "upgrade" I've ever had that's not head and shoulders better than the handset it's replaced.
I'm furious that they are shuttering Google Play Music. That's the singular Google product I enjoy, and now it's going away. I had a bunch of purchases too.
When Brin and Page left, the company entered its Ballmer era.
I hope another company outdoes them on search. It can't be that hard with all of the AdSense spam these days. I'd love to see their golden goose go away and have them face an existential crisis that causes them to refocus and start giving a damn.
Edit: why the downvotes? People are frustrated with this company.
They discontinued the sale, not the product support. Not sure what the outrage about. Am I missing anything?
They don't seem to be treating it with the level of care and attention that perhaps you'd expect for what seems like a key part of their business.
Stupid stuff, but an example is with the closing of Play Music, Wear OS won't have a first-party music player until the new Youtube Music app is ready. Couldn't imagine that happening to watchOS.
See:
At this point marginally improved devices at premium price point.. might further leave iPhone as the leader.
iPhone sales are up this year while samsung/Android is down.. Part of it is iPhone will last longer have updates for far longer than any Android device.
I'm an Android user considering switching to iPhone not out of boredom, but wanting my phone to be an appliance instead of a source of innovation, as that seems to be largely gone in this Form factor
I was talking about astrophotography.
My reference is to the thing that's more important than cameras or any feature - Android One is about ongoing and meaningful security updates that are available to the devices in the same month that they are released.
I think google is just really bad at making flagships, I'm really interested in how the 4a will perform over time.
The Pixel 3a and the Pixel 3 go for about the same price in the used market.
And I bet the Pixel 4a will go for MORE than the Pixel 4.
The Pixel 4 was a huge dud. I owned Android phones (mostly Pixel/Nexus) for a decade and that one didn’t interest me at any price.
Yeah I went through six of them because the fingerprint scanner and the touchscreen had some kind of crosstalk that touching the scanner even accidentally meant it fired screen multi touch events. Also, Motorola stopped supporting that device in like a year, explicitly saying they will never update it to a newer version of Android AND you couldn't unlock the bootloader. And it was dog slow for any newer apps because of course it was running a stupidly old OS.
I know Android got better since, but between Samsung cramming more bloat into their devices and making that standard and Google dropping support for their devices like they have been, I don't miss any of that.
If iOS wins, we have a single corporation in charge of our mobile device experience.
If I had to choose the philosophical winner of this competition, it's pretty objectively Android for not existing to create a monopoly over the entire industry, even if Google makes questionable decisions regarding their specific hardware releases.
What would be ideal is more of what we have with Linux distorts: an extremely solid base and distributions that can run on any modern phone. Why can’t I run the Samsung OS on my HTC phone and vice verse? Why are bootloaders always locked? Why are updates only handed down when the company execs deem it to be necessary?
I agree that the Apple system is problematic. But their UX is superior in so many ways. I hate how iMessage is Apple-only but I love using it vs traditional SMS. I hate the lock in, but I have been paying for iCloud storage to handle all my photos and backups and such for years and have had zero problems from it. I like choice, but I really hate when the device I use almost more than all others combined on a daily basis doesn’t work because some marketing stuff prevented it from getting an update. Like it or not, Apple does UX better, and as long as they do they’ll keep getting my money.
At least the Pixel 4's software updates don't render your phone unusable.
uhhh... that happened. like, several years ago.
The phrase "mobile first" started appearing on HN in 2010.
iPhone ------ iPhone iPhone 3G -> iPhone 3GS iPhone 4 -> iPhone 4S iPhone 5 -> iPhone 5S iPhone 6 -> iPhone 6S (and plus sizes) iPhone 7 (and plus sizes)
Android ------- Nexus One Nexus S Galaxy Nexus Nexus 4 Nexus 5 Nexus 6 Nexus 5X & Nexus 6P Pixel & Pixel XL
(till I use to track)
move fast; break all the things.
A LOUD, constant hissing and crackling noise when nothing's playing (also audible during podcasts or quiet music). Like 3x worse than my $40 truly wireless buds.
They are buggy. They would sometimes disconnect with no way to reconnect, requiring a factory reset (which you need the case to do).
It's too bad, in a lot of way's they're better than the AirPods. I prefer the "open audio" design to the transparency mode even, and they're more comfortable and secure in the ears.
not that pixel 4a would be much better in this aspect - when others are moving already to centered punch hole Google releases fugly asymetric punch hole and combine it with 3100 mAh battery, good luck with such battery as heavy user or even average user after year or two wear
It is both painful and hilarious to see how lack of long term vision for this supposedly industry leader.
Google is losing and probably already lost
Meanwhile my 'very old' 2016 iPhone SE is still supported and will be running the new iOS 14 update very soon.
All I can say is I hope you read the HN guidelines [0]:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
This has basically no effect for existing owners.
But then starting the 3rd , everything declined. Camera became average, they stop the unlimited storage, battery became really bad. They went backward, and couldn't keep their competitive advantage or stay ahead of the innovation. Original early adopters starts getting disappointed seeing better cameras[1] and battery life flooding the market.
Hopefully the 4a will help them regain the heart of us (and me)
Is it saying that Google will just no longer sell the phone just nine month after release? (which IMHO would be ok) or that they also will stop giving it Os/security updates? (which IMHO is a total no-go for any company, especially Google).