Previous Pixels worked great but then inexplicably lost OS updates after only a few years.
AFAIK it's not inexplicabile, it's just Quallcomm stopping driver support for newer Android versions a few short years down the road, since they're in the business of selling as many chips as possible and can't monetize the users keeping their phone longer like Apple and Google can with their software and services.
Google uses LTS Linux kernels for Android, and once upstream stops supporting a version, the phone usually stops getting support shortly after.
Qualcomm (and MediaTek, etc.) fork the latest LTS kernel or android common kernel, hack it up for that SoC, and dump that on vendors as the msmXXXX kernel.
They'll rebase on top of upstream or android common kernel patches (of that version) for the contracted lifespan, and then pretend that SoC didn't exist.
Qualcomm thrives off of the trend of people expecting new phones every year (or every 6 months in some cases). Since they target the mid and high cost devices, all they have to do is make the phone work for a two or so years, and most people buying those phones are going to have gotten bored of their phone by then.
This is one of the main motivations for Project Treble, which is to completely disconnect the phone's userspace from the kernel version it runs on. It's a hard challenge though. Qualcomm and the other vendors for these high turnover products aren't all that interested in supporting it, because they benefit from replacing phones frequently. If you've ever looked at one of the phone kernels, they shove way more into them than upstream would ever accept (the entire radio stack, graphics stack, quick charge logic, etc.). This tends to make the software running on Android phones heavily coupled to the vendor kernel.
I just wish batteries become replaceable again, my phone is 3.5 years old and the only thing that is noticeably worse is battery life. If we are gunning for longer update cycles, batteries should ideally be replaceable. I sincerely hope some big country takes up this as an environmentally friendly/right to repair thing and forces all manufacturers to do this.
I think more than software updates, iPhone has an aspirational value in many parts of the world so there is good demand from people who can't buy a new one. Pixel in itself doesn't hold that value and there are manufacturers who will have an Android phone with Pixel's specs in half the price of Pixel within a year of its launch.
Weirdly my 3.5 year old phone actually has about the same battery life as it started with. As android 3.5 years ago was terrible at battery management, so software updates have compensated for battery degradation.
Also, are original spec batteries available easily? I don't want to put something which is not the same as it might cause some battery related accident.
First they have the Nexus 7, Nexus 4, Nexus 10, and then ... Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, ... oh wait they aren't versions, they are number of inches ... -____- and most people in this world don't even think in inches -_____-
And then they have Google Hangouts, Google Hangouts Meet, google Meet, Google Chat, Google Hangouts Dialer, Google Duo, Google Uno, uh ....
And then now TensorFlow and then Tensor ... is that like TensorFlow without the flow?
> Osterloh did explain that the SoC is an ARM chip designed around a TPU, or Tensor Processing Unit