Google Pixel 6 Launch [video]
pixelevent.withgoogle.com
pixelevent.withgoogle.com
And what's with all the flat design, we need skeumorphism and warmth back in industrial and UI design.
I prefer the soap bar design which seems to have been forgotten. And no more glass backs please. I don't get the appeal of glass, they shatter so easily, finger print magnets and just add unnecessary weight.
Though ultimately I get why slate/phablet phones won out with their larger screens.
FWIW, the iPhone mini at least fits in my hand, so they get bonus points regardless of sharp edges. It does kind of stink needing a case to prevent it flying away.
I might just be a curmudgeon, but a lot of the newer tech products (iPhones being the exception) look really ugly to me. Pixel 6 and MacBooks being the most recent and serious offenders.
I think I’ve just accepted that we’re in a weird time for design and as long as the function is fine I’ll overlook the looks. Pixel 6 looks to me like it was deliberately designed to be so ugly people would talk about it. Same with new MacBook notch, which I wouldn’t mind if it looked exactly like the iPhone notch but larger. The curves are just off.
I guess this is karmic justice for me being so in love with Metro and flat UI ~8 years ago. I take comfort in knowing it’s cyclical and in a few years we’ll wrap around to Fisher-Price XP-style UI.
I’d be interested to know your general age group.
I have a theory that skeumorphism is a cross-generational design trend that serves a purpose to articulate a radical new technological paradigm in a language that makes sense to people that have never experienced it (i.e. A radio app that looks like an actual radio because that’s what everyone grew up using). I think once people are fully immersed and familiar with the tech, though, skeumorphism is limiting and ugly. We don’t need radio apps that look like radios anymore because everyone should now know how digital interfaces work. We can abstract away dials and knobs and make better use of the space for something that fits better with the constraints of a screen rather than the constraints of the physical world. This harkens back to the old discussions around the save icon and how there is an entire generation clicking an abstract symbol that holds no meaning to them while the generation prior comfortably recognized this symbol as “equivalent to archiving on my floppy disks.” Skeumorphism is really only intuitive to the first generation. Everyone that comes after just sees another (possibly ugly) abstraction that makes just as much sense as the next one. Screens don’t need metal dials, plush felts, and eye-popping gauges where a simple shadow would otherwise suffice.
I mean this with no disrespect. We all have our own sense of aesthetic. Just a thought I’ve been ruminating on. Personally I find neumorphism [1] to be a pleasing blend of the positives of both skeumorphism and flat design and I hope to see more of it going forward.
[1] https://uxplanet.org/neomorphism-the-hottest-design-trend-in...
I felt this way too. I recently (and reluctantly) switched to an iphone 13 pro max. I've dropped it unto asphalt from > 2m without a case twice now (not on purpose) and neither front nor back has shattered. Whatever apple did to that glass is working! Maybe everyone else just needs to do the same thing to their glass?
Only weight is valid statement. Matte glass on iPhone is unbreakable.
"Glass is glass. And glass breaks"
Dropped it from pocket height and is completely shattered.
Overview: https://store.google.com/product/pixel_6_pro?hl=en-GB
Buy: https://store.google.com/config/pixel_6_pro?hl=en-GB
Weirdly I kept seeing an internal MOMA login page asking for an @google.com login. So clearly something is broken (I do not work at Google).
Edit: Past all of those problems... error R013 when trying to check out.
Edit: Oh well... I missed out. Sold out before I got past the R013 error.
Edit 1: Store back up now but still getting order errors...
Edit 2: An hour after launch, back to having store page errors...
Edit: Product available every 10th refresh or so, but hangs on "trade in" screen. Bypassing trade-in and I now receive Error R008 when trying to check out.
Edit: Trade-in appears to be working again, but back to Error R013.
Edit: Neither Cart nor Checkout screen will load, website returns 500 Error. Not the best purchasing experience I've ever had. lol
Edit: Cart has been emptied again, and now Store website is returning 500 error. Oh, Google
New year, same shit again.
I wonder who are the target of these phones really are? Never seen anyone using a Pixel out in the wild
Feels like a pet project of Google to me. Like "we make Android so we better make some phones too otherwise people don't take us seriously" idk
Marques Brownlee on YouTube generally gives them good reviews. They're good for the ~vanilla android flavor vs manufacturer skins.
Maybe you just haven't met anyone with one or even noticed people who do own them. I've owned almost every pixel phone. In my opinion, they're some of the best Android phones available with great cameras and less crapware pre-installed.
But this presentation, with the potato chips 1 hour long ad... and i can see that more effort went for the video than the engineering effort of the phone with that amazing selection of genders, skin color and ethnicity, not to mention the sexual orientations of the actors. And that not taking into consideration the order in which to present them - imagine the wars that were waged in the planning room.
The recent camera bevels are bad enough.
And honestly it will sit in a stable way, so it's probably not that big a deal in that sense. It getting caught on my pocket would probably be my biggest concern!
It was like every phone was "controversial". I miss those design days.
https://store.google.com/product/pixel_6_pro?hl=en-GB
[EDIT] On https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705 it says, "Guaranteed Android version updates until at least: October 2024" and "Guaranteed security updates until at least: October 2026" for Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro
Will all the features of the phone and the Titan M2 chip still work with another Android build like grapheneOS or LineageOS?
I don't think those were covered in the video.
I think this is another classic bit of Google branding. Tensor is their custom SoC with CPU, GPU and an ML co-processor (think this was codenamed Whitechapel). Not the ML processor itself. Whereas Google's Tensor Processing Unit is a large scale ML accelerator. Why they've decided to use the same name for two totally different chips with different functions is anyone's guess.
I want this phone badly, I want to be part of this inclusive camera experience, but due to systemic issues in the ordering process, I am still unable to checkout.
Wait, no face unlock? Thats a dealbreaker.
If I'm unlocking my phone, I have my hands on my phone, so using my fingerprint isn't a hassle. Plus with COVID and needing to wear masks, I can still unlock my phone easily without needing to pull down my mask.
Fingerprint sensors stop recognizing after about a week - so I prefer Face Unlock.
On the other hand Face Unlock works always (well, unless I wear a mask, then it works just like fingeprint - doesn't).
Tried fingeprint sensors on iOS devices and Pixels.
https://www.theverge.com/2011/10/18/android-ice-cream-sandwi...
Apple worked on it, don't know if they released it with iPhone 13.
'The best', 'our most powerful', 'The most advanced', 'Most hardware security', 'most light ever', 'most fluent', 'most layers of hardware'.
Seriously?
EDIT: This felt familiar, apparently I noticed something similar in the previous launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24641965
If you doubt that, here are some quotes from Apple's new product pages from yesterday: 'most powerful', 'scary fast', 'scary faster', 'best display ever', 'super fluid'
Not to mention the product names: 'pro' vs 'max', 'liquid retina', ...
Yet I don't see people complain about those.
In google fashion, it'd fail in very diverse ways: 1) mostly 'OR_PCVH_01' "unexpected error occured". 2) sometimes a troika of codes with the label "your purchase has expired". This would be ~5% of the time. 3) sometimes no error at all, just a blank page.
I was rather afraid to attempt going back to 'store.google.com' to checkout my cart again and find the items sold out, but I courageously overcame my fears and decided to stand up for myself. Consumer me went ahead, created a new tab, clicked the basket and pressed 'checkout'. And after the one or two 'OR_PCVH_01' and some blank page, boom, it went through.
Long story short, i suspect that error message 2 is misleading in what it means. It doesn't mean 'try to click this comfirm purchase' button later, it means try to "checkout your cart again".
I have yet to get the AI assistant to book anything for me. The only related function I do use is the call screening piece, but that's hardly AI...
Well, it's getting scarier by the second. For example, 'Magic Eraser' was a requested feature by Stalin.
You cannot believe any image on the internet anymore these days. This time it is getting much worse.
what a joke!
Let people stand the way they feel comfortable. Tim Cook yesterday appeared like his feet are glued to the ground in the process of squatting. Naturally people never stand with feet this far apart. But the trend continues and shitty directors at Apple don’t get it.
This type of production gets zero points from me. It’s just terrible.
When I was at Google the cloud unit, there is always a vibe that "we are the best" without much substantiated from the products and etc.
At least they realize that something better is done for the phone department. Although I guess it's so much more obvious than cloud.
Are cores the main thing to count? So that's better than an M1 Pro with a measly 16-cores?
/s
Really they aren't even comparable across a single vendor (the capabilities of a single "SP" on an Nvidia GPU has drastically shifted over the years - and not always in the "more capable" direction)
At best you can roughly compare GPUs from the same generation from the same family (eg, M1 Pro vs. M1 Max). But that's about it, and even that can be deceptive (most commonly in desktop GPUs where other differences can drastically alter scaling across differing "core" counts)
Is a core something that has its own program counter? Does it need its own floating point unit to count as a core? What about cores that only do a few ops? Are the cores even all the same, or do they have access to the same resources? For example, a few older Nvidia GPUS have some portion of their cores that have only a single crossbar port, and so perform much worse.
The M1 gpu core could very well be equivalent or better than 16 tensor soc cores internally.
They do indirectly increase value of the Android ecosystem by providing new features and benchmark for other manufacturers to copy, but it is not essential.
1. Make products that work.
2. Make sure that your website does not crash when someone tries to order your product.
3. Make sure you do not allow to customers to put more devices into the carts than you can ship. This has been a solved problem for at least a decade. You may want to outsource this to Shopify as your software engineers clearly can't figure out how to build ecommerce platforms that actually work.
Fuchsia/Zircon is going to be optimised to run on Google Tensor chips most likely this decade.
I'll probably end up linking this comment in a few years.
Exactly. Wonder why they didn't do it in the first place and why the reason Fuchsia had to exist? I guess we'll never know. /s [0] [1]
I'm not interested in sharing moments, I just want to see a picture of the damn thing without having to watch the stupid video.
Who started this camera bump movement the past decade? it's very ugly... and not practical at all..
It keeps the back glass from getting scratched all over by turning it into a tripod.
It's ugly and annoying though but it's not there just for fun.
The bumps in one corner of the phone are the worst.
But realistically, even those don't matter because protective cases are effectively a standard part of any modern phone.
Then you buy a thin phone on paper and make it fat with a case, better if they would put more battery and less glue in. But as always designers/marketing complicate everyone life so they push their new idea: "Form over Function"
I would give up the bullshit sleek look for more battery and ruggedness in a heartbeat.
I've been holding back on both Samsung and Apple's latest phones just because of the asymmetric bump. It is so annoying. Sticking with my old Note 8 for now even though it is out of support and receives no security updates.
I looked through the announcement and didn't see an answer to this question: does anyone know what the display technology is? LCD or AMOLED or...?
If I were Google what I would do is make a more open phone. One with side loading, customization, repairability, and transparency as first class considerations. Otherwise it all comes off as a second class offering that’s just like anything else.