Pixel 8 Pro
store.google.com
store.google.com
There is so much time, effort, and physical waste that is generated by slightly redesigning phones every year purely for the sake of making sales (as opposed to meaningful improvement upon the existing design or introduction of a new hardware feature). Think not only of people upgrading for the sake of it, but all of the cases, screen protectors, and other assorted accessories cast in plastic for previous models that are garbage now.
It would be nice if we could just space these things out to 5 years or so now, because that's probably how long it takes for anything to change enough to justify a new model.
I don't entirely blame peoples' consumerism; As somebody who once worked in cell phone sales, the mere act of visiting a carrier store is likely to land you in front of a salesperson who is incentivized to sell new phones and lines indiscriminately. Not to mention the incredible amount of advertising that goes into phones - if people only upgraded when they needed new phones, I don't think Apple, Samsung, or Google would feel the need to advertise the new ones so aggressively.
HN is likely a much more tech-literate crowd than the average person, so I think to a lot of us it seems silly to buy new phones every year. But I know that every time Apple releases a new iPhone, I get a call from my dad asking if it's worth upgrading from last year's model. I say no, nothing has changed, but the next time I see him he has it. Why? Because the salesperson made such a convincing case, not only about the merit of the new phone, but the fact that they could give him such a "deal" on it.
It might just be your “bubble”, but even if not, is it really that bad of a deal? If you resell your previous phone at 2/3 the original price each year, you can use the latest phone for like 200 bucks for a year, or $17 monthly. For a device that is with you 0-24, and is probably the most often used item a typical person owns — they have it on them more often than even their shoes!
Somewhere along the way, you pass a threshold where it's uncool to have a certain version of phone and judging from what you hear about the waste problem with phones, it's above the reasonable moment to get rid of it because it's broken or not usable.
I mean, sure it's a nice lie you can tell to yourself, but in the end, it's not good.
Incentives exist on the part of the person who, being human, definitely want the new shiny thing, regardless of the logic behind it.
They exist for the salesperson, who will get a commission for selling the new shiny thing, regardless of whether this makes the customer's life any better or worse.
They exist for the carrier because the customer is on the hook for 2-3 years of service when they buy the shiny thing.
Finally, they exist for the company that made the phone because they make a profit on the sale price of the shiny thing.
1 year from now if you sell it for 2/3 the price, you get back $720. A year's use cost you $360. About $1 a day. This is very worth it for some but not quite as cheap as $200 a year. This is without factoring in time to sell.
You could trade in but that means you are locked in contract with service provider.
I have a Xiaomi 10 or something I bought in 2020 I paid 279$ for, almost 4 years later it comes at 0.18 and I see like 0 reasons to upgrade.
I admit I'm not the most social (media) person out there, I'm not into connecting my phone into every other device on this planet (as Apple people consistently remind how easily they interoperate their devices), but it does everything great: camera, battery, messaging, games.
To me to see people thinking it's normal to spend so much money for a phone is borderline crazy.
Alternatively, you could buy a second-hand iphone 11/12 pro and use it for 5-6 years easily, with proper software support. That’s what I do, and don’t yet plan on updating - maybe the iphone 16 would be worthy for me.
[1] https://www.apple.com/mt/iphone-15/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/16h13z3/why_are_the...
I know people who lease a new car every 3 years. And often, if there's no redesign, they're getting a nearly identical vehicle. It's strange. Whereas, I upgrade my car every 10 years, and am thrilled with all the improvements.
People lease for many factors, not just to avoid tear and maintenance.
Somehow that works for clothing vendors, though.
What other reasons do people lease?
Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl.
And faster phones are nice, but I think it is worth considering how valuable that really is to us as users and a society, especially if the process involves making loads and loads of ewaste and consuming tons of new resources, and all the emissions their mining and transport involves, when we could simply keep our software slim and our old devices functional.
And the big companies will never do this. Do we need to force them to allow open software to run on these devices, so that clean builds can be patched and maintained when the company over bloats them or abandons them?
The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean nothing to make them sound like a dramatic improvement despite the fact that we've reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of diminishing returns on the user experience for smartphones in their current form. More megapixels don't matter anymore, CPUs are hardly a limiting factor and yearly gains on their performance are marginal at best, and we have more than enough RAM for pretty much all use cases.
My point is that if these companies insist on re-releasing the same phone every time, maybe they could space it out a little.
It makes perfect sense that five non-significant changes can add up to a significant change.
So the suggestion would be 1 or 2 releases instead, after more of the changes build up, instead of 5 releases.
Personally I think yearly is fine for manufacturers that only have a couple models. But they need to actually support things for a reasonable lifetime, and should be mocked for having frequent releases if they don't have a good support lifetime.
For me, the addition of satelite SOS introduced on iPhone 14 is a game changer. I do enough out of cell range activity that I carry a SPOT device.
The ability for one more device (and pricy subscription) to be eaten by my phone is fantastic.
For others it might be onboard ai capabilities.
Each incremental hardware update to an iPhone tips the utility scales for someone, and is a completely ignorable change for others. Some people don’t care a bit that the new iPhone has a 2k nit brightness, for others, that is the feature they’ve been waiting for to upgrade.
I don’t pay attention to androids much, but it is pretty rare for iPhone full number bumps not to have a hardware feature that is new.
This is not a replacement for a SPOT device. It's a backup. You might need to move around reportedly, point it very carefully to find a satellite, coverage isn't great, even minimal tree cover is a problem, etc. Plenty of cases where a SPOT device would be a life saver and where this would not.
I too would like to ditch mine. But I'd rather be alive in a real emergency than die because I broke my leg and can't walk around in a circle pointing the phone right.
A phone with upgradable parts and minimal bloat would be better than any recent phone I've had, but it would also be less profitable for Google so obviously they will avoid that as much as possible.
Middling specs. Huge battery.
I'm still on a Pixel 4a 5G now, because I haven't seen any reason to upgrade.
But I'm a "I want to be able to accidentally run over my phone with a car, shrug, and go get another one" type of person. (Despite the fact I've never actually cracked a screen...)
Battery lasts forever and a day and there's never been a situation where I've felt prevented or limited by the phone.
The initial SailfishOS phone from Jolla was supported for 7+ years and was also a really nice experience.
In my experience of years working in agile and scrum methodologies all cadence does is it makes developers release unfinished code to tick boxes and show that they are productive every sprint.
Even just on the iphone the improvements in software have been dramatic over the past 10 years. Go install one of the early versions of ios on the simulator some time to see how far we've come.
I feel compelled to bring up this tweet from John Carmack I just saw a few hours ago. The most popular editor on the planet feels laggier than stuff Borland made in the 90s, on hardware probably a thousand times as fast. I don't know how anyone can say software is great with a straight face.
We have supercomputers in our pockets and on the slightly aged phone my dad refuses to upgrade from four years ago many apps lag. They display like 5 widgets or 20 rows of items at any given time
As someone that used all their products from MS-DOS, through Windows 3.x days up to switching to Visual C++ 6.0, I clearly remeber code completion, syntax highlighting and macros, three features that Notepad isn't capable of.
As easily proven, by reading the manuals available in Bitsavers.
So replace Notepad with Notepad++ in my previous comments. There are definitely fast editors that do the same thing as Borland editors did back then the ones like VSC do a whole lot more and support a whole lot more.
It was a DOS, Turbo Vision application.
Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The modern C++ one does crash, often.
Much like with old IDEs old DAWs did a lot less. If you truely prefer it why aren't you still running Cubase on an old Atari or emulator?
Besides that there is the whole rose tinted glasses thing. My early experiences getting FreeBSD and Slackware running on my computers, and setting up X for example were something I'd never trade and taught me a lot about debugging systems, configs, etc. But that whole process was objectively worse than today.
As for curated/opinionated, most people don't want to be power users. Most people never did it was just in the 90s you had little choice. If you want to be a power user today the options are still there.
nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.
The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.
My Tesla phone key takes 15+ seconds to connect bluetooth and unlock the car, making me look like a goddamn idiot while I keep yanking the car handle while bystanders stare at me as if I'm a car thief.
This stuff should take <0.01s in 2023 by Moore's Law. Computers should work imperceptibly fast by now for the same high-level tasks.
2003 x86 laptop: 1-2h battery life, fan ~always on, annoying tonal fan noise
2023 x86 laptop: 6-10h battery life, fan off in idle, some kind of wide spectrum whooshing sound when on
And my work Microsoft Surface laptop fan never shuts off.
It's almost like there's a spectrum of PCs.
My former work 16 inch MacBook Pro could easily make it through a day and half of decently heavy work and conference calls doing presentations over Chime (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked) on battery when on site at a customer. Some of their team couldn’t make it.
My personal MacBook Air (M2) can make it 16+ hours with a relative light workload and there is no fan.
Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?
> Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?
Because your workload isn't compatible with MacOS, and Apple makes no effort to remedy it at a software-level? Docker should not be more energy efficient on Windows than it is on Mac... and that's really just the tip of the incompatibility iceberg. Unless your workload is explicitly compatible with ARM, it probably Just Works better on x86.
The real killer-app for me was just switching to Linux as my base OS. I can leave containers idling while watching YouTube at a cool 27c internally. I'm using a 6-7 year old T460s, but honestly I feel like I could get away with even weaker hardware if I wanted. A Macbook Air running Linux might be a candidate if I didn't need to wait for basic functionality to get reverse-engineered. As-is though, you can count me among the people who doesn't quite need an upgrade yet.
By the requests of the luddites here, I should not be able to do better than a 5 year old camera to appease them.
[1]: I also have a DSLR for special occasions, but I do not carry that round with me generally...
I mean, it is a bit unfair against Apple - some of the reason behind the OS getting more heavyweight is actually backporting new features in 7 year’s distance, many which actually has dedicated hardware in case of the more modern lineup.
Also, there is a big aspect which is independent of Apple: every app is getting more and more heavy, the same phone now has to open a 500MB facebook app, not a 70MB one (just random numbers).
Also, the whole “yearly replacement” thing is just.. not an actual thing. People on average change their phones every 3 years, where the accumulated small improvements do add up. But everyone is at a different point in the cycle, so it absolutely makes sense. Add to it how apple devices hold their value to an insane degree, often living 2nd-3rd lives, and one would be really hard-pressed to actually pinpoint apple as a threat against our planet - compared to cheap androids that are barely good for a single year due to instantly obsolete software, has no resale value whatsoever, and are absolutely single-use.
I am not a proponent of extreme capitalism/libertarianism, but I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.
People in my circles seem to use their phones for 6-7 years atleast.
That is all gone now. Carriers have post-paid plans where the monthly device cost varies based on device. These are 0% interest loans from the carrier. At the same time, people have started holding their phones longer. Renewal periods when to 30 months, then 36 months.
Some people will never be happy but cellphone customers are never happy.
Why can't people just enjoy our pocket computers with their always on connections?
If by "bubble" you mean my family, nobody but the eight year old has seen a new phone since before the first COVID lockdowns. And the phones that my children use were are purchased with money they earned themselves - including the eight year old. He decided at six that he wants a phone, and saved for two years to buy one - not a grain of which was aquired through his parents.
I should mention that he also managed to buy two goldfish during this time - also with his own money. So he learned very well to budget, and that each thing that he buys along the way pushed back his goal.
As a father, I see the phone as an opportunity to teach limits from an early age. And wow, does he test those limits! In retrospect, it is better that him and I are going through this testing phase at eight, rather than in the rebellious teenage years.
And most of those that can afford it would still want to buy other things instead when they already have one, which means only the richest of the richest ones really do that.
Also, I remember a while back they did a specific optimised speed-up release of iOS with barely any new features and it _really_ worked. My iPhone 6S went from being basically garbage I was going to replace to like a brand new phone.
They can do it if they want to. It’s what’s needed now. My iPhone 12 Pro has started to feel super slow since I got iOS 17. I have a new battery. Even texting feels painfully slow. There’s no excuse for this. It’s either deliberate and bad, or lazy and bad. Either way it’s bad.
But that's a lot of maintenance burden, in exchange for slitting their own revenue throat. So hard to expect them to do it for altruism.
Sounds like you might have some buggy / bad app interactions going on? There’s really no reason for a 12 Pro to be slow at this point even if the OS was getting “heavier.” The 12 Pros have 6GB of RAM, which is now pretty standard across the iPhone lineup even years later. And the A14 SoC in the 12 Pro is effectively the same tech as the M1 processors that are still rock-solid at running full blown macOS, albeit with fewer cores running at somewhat lower clocks.
I can’t really think of much reason for you to be having a slow experience aside from the usual bugs that can accompany any new major release, and usually get ironed out over the course of a month or two.
FWIW you also don’t have to update. Of course they bully you to update. You don’t have to.
Also, ios 17 likely is a bit buggy - I’m on 17.1 beta with a 12 pro max and I can say that the performance is back to how it used to be.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-to-start-paying-out-5...
> I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.
Well this one might be good for business, but as you can see, it is extremely bad for the individual.
And yes they didn’t communicate it, that’s why they got sued. But this problem was real.
But if they were genuinely just concerned about battery health, and not about their sales numbers, then why do the throttling covertly? Why not tell the user that throttling was happening, that it was related to power issues, and that they should consider a replacement battery?
The only thing that has changed is they now tell you if it’s happening.
Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern, and not just a fabricated excuse... it's better for Apple's reputation for old phones to be slow than to be flaky.
With the former, people were assuming that Apple's shiny new OS required state-of-the-art hardware to run smoothly. It just appeared as if technology was advancing rapidly, and one had to buy the latest iPhone every year or two to keep up.
With the latter, there would be noone to blame but Apple, and they would develop a reputation for unreliable hardware, like Samsung or worse.
They still are. As a battery ages the internal resistance increases. This leads to brown-outs under high current. This isn’t unique to Apple, it’s just how batteries work.
Anything less is deceptive and anti-user.
The only thing they have changed is that they now have the OS level pop ups, the feature still exists.
Apple get phone sales from me because of this stance.
They make so much money, why should their business model have to be any better?
Flash storage doesn't last forever, and it's got a whole gradient of failure and wear experiences.
Too bad no flagship phones have removable storage anymore, because that would be a really easy fix to this problem.
And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.
There's unfortunately slightly different issue here: if the phone vendor puts the OS on an user-replaceable SD card, then the UX quality and reliability of the device depends on the SD card vendor, which is a bad position to be in, given how much fraud is happening in this space.
Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM.
Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined whenever there's an issue.
Apple/Google sell cloud storage subscriptions.
Aka the cockroach phone.
That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans.
And integrated batteries and flash memory happen to be a convenient "Oh well, we can't possibly design it any other way" excuse.
Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that.
They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
I realize it's mandatory from a marketing perspective, but how often is it used?
Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.
i've yet to be so unfortunate, but i've met a lot of people with a 'I dropped my phone in the toilet so it's in a bag of rice' story.
let's hope they throw that rice out at the end of the process.
Also, generally people spend an awful lot of money on things out of vanity and social pressure, regardless of their needs and if it is a good decision. Look at new cars prices and how most vehicles purchases are usually overkill for everyone. The most sold car in the US are the Ford F series , Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram trucks before a number of high end SUV. Sure people are free to buy whatever they want but a Honda Fit would be enough for large majority of them and be a smarter financial decision[2]. They mostly do it because they can, not because they need.
[1] which has become fairly decent for anyone accross all ranges in the last few years.
[2] I am not sure it is still sold in the US but I could have chosen another example of a smaller and more affordable vehicle.
Low end Android phones just plain suck when it comes to performance and battery life. Not to mention they rarely get operating system updates.
If you did force me to buy an Android phone, it would be the Pixel.
nor does she care about operating system updates.
I live in an area where's it very humid and rains a lot. My phones get wet, a lot, just due to nature. I had one die after I got caught in a massive squall line at an outdoor concert on what was supposed to be a sunny day.
So yeah I would have needed a new phone tomorrow if it wasn't for my phone being waterproof. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I've lost many things from water damage. So many people used to complain about Apple denying warranty claims from water damage from the device just being in a humid area for a long time, now that just doesn't happen.
I never once lost a phone to water damage, despite most of the phones I've owned not being waterproof.
My pocket made of regular fabric seems to be sufficient protection.
Screen on the phone died.
I see the point of waterproofing phones after that.
This is the main use case, but it's not to be dismissed considering this is a very common cause of phone failure. If this doubles the lifespan of your phone then it effectively ~halves the cost. Which is a big deal when phones are as expensive as they are.
How did they talk on their phone for an hour without realizing their phone was underwater?
The customer was probably talking on their landline phone for the hour.
There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large and create inefficiencies in the phone shell (even M.2 2230, when you take into account the mounting mechanism), and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
It's been a long, long time since I couldn't fit all the apps I wanted on the phone storage. My SD card is mainly for multimedia files, and it's plenty fast for that purpose.
The only performance limit I've hit in recent times was because it was exFAT, not because it was an SD card.
> There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large
Ignoring SD Express as a failure to launch, UHS SD cards can be plenty fast if they're designed to be. A hundred megabytes per second is not a significant bottleneck if individual IO operations are fast and it can do many of them.
Also there was that XFMEXPRESS form factor if manufacturers wanted to put an SSD socket into a phone. "card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm."
> and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
That's the real killer incentive, that you can charge huge amounts per terabyte and also force people to buy higher-end phones just to get the ability to buy more storage.
As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.
You have to remember that a current microsd cards is just a general purpose micro-controller and some (probably SPI) flash in a plastic case.
As mentioned, random I/O tends to fail, but the other tradeoff here is that fast microSD card slots tend to get extremely hot. Not necessarily "failure" hot (stuff like the ROG had issues from other parts), but uncomfortable to hold, depending on where the thing is going to go.
> As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.
The thing is, price anchoring is a thing, and people are going to look at a phone that costs $400 and needs a $40 Extra Thing and a $500 phone and go "the latter is easier".
Oh definitely. I would too. I dream of the price being only $200/TB.
The biggest storage upgrade for a normal iPhone is +384GB for $300 (Oof). If you upgrade to the Max model you can get +768GB for $400.
A Galaxy S23 can get +128GB for $60, a Galaxy S23+ can get +256GB for $120, and a Galaxy S23 Ultra can get +768GB for $420.
A Pixel 8 can get +128GB for $60, and a Pixel 8 Pro can get +896GB for $400.
If you include the price increase of better base models, to get access to bigger options, then $700/TB is a good ballpark figure.
I think this pricing is a little bit better than when I last looked, but it's still very bad.
The availability of >512GB is growing but still flaky and usually requires extra expensive base models. While in comparison microsd has had cheap 1TB for a good while, and 1.5TB for $150 becomes available later this month.
I like your idea but in the US at least most mobile carriers actually don't encourage yearly upgrades as they force you into a multiyear contract for your phone to get "the best deal". In fact, currently both verizon and AT&T have 30+ month payment plans for phones so you're locked into at least 2.5 years. consequently, most people hold on to their phone for 3 years now.
An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap.
Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS.
But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.
That said, unlike Pixels and OnePlus once the bootloader is unlocked you lose functionality and it's not relockable. It also almost always has some software quirks and I most recently found out that the Xperia 5 I've been eyeing will after 2-3 years of use randomly break and show vertical green or pink lines.
There you have another "well" manufactured phone with external storage that becomes almost unusable faster than the storage degrades without the user being responsible for it.
Microsd's used to suck(had plenty fail years ago) but it seems like they have gotten pretty good these days.
1: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/mmc-utils...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/apple-ip...
And in fact installing the first big OS update was one of the key points on the Nexus 7 that showcased its incredibly fragile storage. So we've definitely seen this happen in the past specifically with OS updates being the straw that killed the camel's back in flash storage performance.
I've experienced it on devices before as well. Play around flashing different ROMs on Android, eventually each flash keeps getting a little slower and a little slower, and suddenly just copying files directly off USB gets incredibly slow and the device becomes nearly unusable. I've seen it happen on a few different devices.
This is beyond stupid how fucked up the phone market is. I'm still using my 2008 laptop with newest LTS (x)Ubuntu, but my 2018 Android phone lost official support in 2020... Thanks to that, now I have iPhone (longer support) and Fairphone 5 (I like how they try to upstream everything for this phone and promise really long support).
About your question: Should be fine. As long as browser is up-to-date, she doesn't connect to unknown WiFi networks/Bluetooth devices and she is not targeted. The easiest security fix is to not have anything worth anything on the phone :D
Realistically what exactly could it be doing more on startup, that would slow it down so much?
I wonder if there’s code that simply intentionally slows it down. Like the Camera app calculating the value of PI for some number of digits before opening up.
There would be a massive financial incentive to do something nefarious like this.
But haven't those anecdotes been debunked already? A counter-anecdote is my non-plus iphone 7 with whatever the latest ios it supports (15 something IIRC) that opens the camera as quickly as when it was new. Apart from Apple Maps, which never worked well for some reason, the apps I use don't lag. Google Maps is fine. My motorcycling mapping app (scenic) is fine. Lightroom is fine. Hell, even MS Teams works like it does on newer devices.
If you don’t believe me, there are paths hardcoded in the kernel (I’m not joking: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple-oss-distributions%2...) to very quickly reclaim memory for Camera to launch.
These companies virtue signal about climate change nonstop, but still manage to produce disposable phones and light up their data centers for advertising and user tracking
It's very rare that there are any updates at all within the same generation. Year in model designation is just "ha, look at his looser driving last year BMW" and to show when car left assembly line.
There are some examples where the same generation had a significant upgrade without a facelift, but those are rare. One example I could think of is MX-5 (ND): between 2015 and 2018 there were no changes at all, but in late 2019 there was nearly complete overhaul of its powertrain and then a small update in 2021.
Everyone can tell the age of every car [1] simply by the license plate (used to be in 1 year increments, since the early 2000s it's been in 6 month increments).
[1]: Yes, yes, before some is pedantic, imported cars don't come under this scheme, and self-assembled cars also have a unique form that mean you can't tell their age.
Maybe Pixel has a yearly release cycle, but it doesn't mean I have to upgrade every year, that would be crazy. And they can iterate more often to try some ideas more often than once every 5 years.
That could have probably been mitigated if the s20 remained relevant for more than a year or two and there was a mature parts market that made it feasible to upkeep rather than scrap.
Incremental annual hardware refreshes are great, because everyone who is in the market for a phone can always get the latest and greatest and can be set for several years. For those that give in to the marketing and throw away perfectly usable devices and a thousand+ dollars – well that's nobody's fault but their own.
- Advances are mostly software.
- Massive quantities of e-waste (and plastic waste via cases, screen protectors, etc).
- Perverse incentives by companies to not properly support the user experience on older devices.
- Tons of money spent pointlessly.
My android phone is more than 5 years old, the tech in my laptop is similar.
I'm doing just fine and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I run up to date advanced software just like the whole world
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-debuts-iphone-1...
Isn't this why we're struggling to build nuclear in some countries because they weren't building it regularly, and now it's difficult to scale, let alone build new ones?
I understand that it's wasteful, but maybe it's necessary to sustain itself? Especially from a feedback perspective from consumers?
Some waste is the cost of resiliency. But with phones (and other electronics and appliances), we're talking about extreme amounts of waste. Way more than is needed to keep around and develop the capacity and know-how.
> Especially from a feedback perspective from consumers?
What feedback? Unless they screw things really badly, they're just listening to the echoes of their own marketing departments. This is a supply-driven market with high natural barriers to entry. Customers buy what they're told to, and are happy about it as they're told to.
My pixel 4a5g takes photos that are on reasonable standards, obviously they won't match match, but it doesn't make a serious difference either to me. I need three things from my phone - battery, camera and lag free user experience. I don't need thinner bezels for gods sake, I can't understand the craze and demand for thinner bezels over a two day battery life.
I noticed that my old Pixel 5 felt really slow for the first 30 minutes or so, but it seems to be returning to normal now.
Wait. If they are making phones that get bought up every year because of people like your friend, then where is the waste?
No one is forcing you to buy anything you don’t want.
Also, the OS and apps need to take advantage of new hardware, so it’s not a surprise if your seven year old phone becomes slower.
If you don’t like the status quo then I would go with a non-iOS and non-android phone like pine phone, Mairena, librem, or anything else that based on a more open Linux distro.
With video game consoles, you have a single device where micro-optimizations are constantly done, new features are added, and all software can be purpose-built to work really well on that specific hardware. All of that for ~7 years means a really fantastic user experience and a massive community of people that have collectively worked through solutions to common problems and forced the company's hand on defects (joycon drift, for example). It also means tons of high-quality hardware-specific accessories, both from the company that made the console and from third parties.
For about five years it seemed like every flagship spanning generations was the same SoC
Yes they are, by refusing to release security updates for older models.
I don't want to buy a new phone, but likely will have to due to support ending so they can sell more high margin hardware.
If you don’t like the terms, go with a Linux distro phone. There is choice now.
Also Linux distro phones aren't practical ways to participate in society unfortunately.
Old phones that have economic life get cleaned up and re-sold. The fact that manufacturers tweak phones annually does not change this.
The ad I keep seeing doesn't even hint at why Titanium matters. No matter, the point is, evidently the technical aspects don't seem to matter.
Titanium sounds cool, it sounds luxury, it's a marketing hack. Like <strike>"aircraft-grade"</strike> "space-grade" aluminum. Nobody is launching their aluminum phones at escape velocity. It's 100% for marketing reasons.
I have some titanium spoons, I feel into the trap too.
The previous iPhone Pro's have a stainless steel shell, not aluminum, and the ~30 gram difference is noticeable.
Of course, they caused this problem themselves by using stainless steel rather than aluminum like the regular iPhones, but they are nonetheless solving a problem with the titanium frame.
I rely on my smartphone for work, I'd rather buy a 4y old model known to be reliable than a brand knew one that ends up preventing me to call 911 or whose screen die randomly and unexpectedly.
The phone on the other hand is connected to every facet of your life and has a software stack that absolutely contains security flaws waiting to be found and exploited.
Apple has always worked to keep devices secure longer, at least up until now having the best long term support. My favorite part of the Pixel 8 is that Google is attempting to match and exceed what Apple's done so far.
Phone performance and features are definitely not changing fast enough for older devices to no longer be useful, even for affluent audiences. I hope support windows continue to get longer so that folks who must use or choose to use older devices can remain secure.
This is an entirely different subject. The software can be upgraded/updated during the life of the mobile phone. And when it comes to chip makers mistakes, which led to vulns like Spectres, they are likely to affect several generations of chips anyway.
Obviously the first clue is cars are not phones.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183713/value-of-us-passe...
Most people don't care about waste so I know I am part of a small fraction.
Even the image processing for high resolution images can benefit from better hardware. Modern smartphones are heavily dependent on image processing to improve camera quality. Without the right hardware, performance and energy efficiency could be unacceptable.
Because it simply isn't true. FP has been around for 10 years now, making phones, learning, scaling up. They sold close to a million phones every year since 2020 (last year over 1100000 phones). And while a million phones isn't much compared to iPhones or Pixels, it's bigger than many other small phone companies (Chinese or not). They've been diversifying with headphones, and earbuds. And with t he last edition, they finally felt confident with supply chains to guarantee spare parts for decades to come.
Small, incremental improvements each year means that whenever you buy a new device, it's modern (not using 4 year old components), and substantially 'better' than the previous one.
The annual incremental release cycle is fine—what’s silly is thinking phones need to be upgraded every year.
Try that and monitor your quality of life. See if you can avoid therapy.
It's not that people think they need to upgrade their phones every year, or two, or three. It's that the phones are designed for short usable life on hardware side, and on software side, neither first-party nor third-party developers give a damn about performance.
Currently I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Last year when I compared its “lesser camera” to the latest and greatest, I couldn’t tell much of a difference so I kept the old phone.
The specs they throw out are always better on paper, but practice upgrading each year will yield very little improvement in quality of life.
My wife just got to a place where her iPhone got unusable because it's running out of space - mainly having to do with her massive Messages history and photos/videos. We didn't even know until I checked, her phone is the iPhone X which was released 6 years ago and technically nothing is stopping her from using it longer except the lack of desire to prune her message history/photos/vids.
My wife is someone who's not going to suffer with a poorly functioning piece of technology nor someone who is going to work hard to optimize it or prolong its life, so the fact that her 6 year old phone works just fine is a good sign that it can, in the average case.
What is the point of me having 256 GB of storage on the phone, if the phone starts slowing down wholesale once I take 50% of it? I get that there needs to be some buffer for swap and flash magic and whatnot, but I'd thought it would be closer to PC / Windows, where everything is fine until ~90% storage being used.
That's on top of bloated software doing background magic. Can't speak for other phones and brands, but my experience with Samsung flagships (S4, S7, wife's S9, now S22) is that the camera and gallery app are bloated, and their performance degrades rapidly with the amount of photos you take - around 50% worth of storage is when camera starts having delays on the order of seconds, interfering with its core purpose of taking photos.
(And it's not that it couldn't be better - Samsung just isn't investing effort in making core system apps performant enough. It's hard to find efficient apps these days on the Play Store, but there are rare exceptions, like e.g. Aves gallery, which is FLOSS and manages to be leaner, faster and significantly more feature-full than just about anything else, stock or third-party.)
My parents are running 12 year old Apple devices just fine, which blows my mind.
I used to be excited about technology. I no longer am. I may consider upgrading to something with a 4" screen however. That would truly be an upgrade.
I agree though that the physical design should stay the same, so that cases and accessories don’t need to be thrown away. Apple more-or-less does this with the iPhones, eg a case should work with any iPhone 12-14.
It's not like the incremental physical changes just automatically happen independently of designing, mass manufacturing, and releasing new phone models. The incremental physical changes happen because companies are trying to develop new phone models.
You don't have to get the latest phone all of the time.
But never scaling up the damned battery above and sometimes even at demand. It's ultimately my number one request, and I'm sure that of many others.
With yearly, incremental releases, people will evaluate what's new from their phone and most people will update on their own cycle, probably every few or several years.
Meanwhile, with gaming console "generational" releases every few years, that is a strong incentive for everyone to upgrade.
If I have a 3 year old phone which I'm on the fence about updating, then I might pass on this year's model and go for next year's. But if there won't be another phone for 3 more years I guess I might as well get this one.
(And don't many plans come with some sort of discount, if you don't upgrade your phone?)
We could look at the total amount of years any phone is used and abstract away from who uses it. Slightly stylised, if we have four people, Alice, Bob, Charles and Dave, and Alice gets a new phone every year, Bob buys Alice's old phone, Charles buys Bob's old phone, and Dave gets Charles' old phone, then everyone changes phones every year, but each phone is still used for a full four years.
Imagine if they only released a new design every 5 years. They'd have to manufacture another billion iPhones in a relatively short window of time to handle all of the upgrades.
Among the people I know, there's more people living paycheck to paycheck and getting annual phone upgrades than people with FU money doing upgrades. That said, the percentage of FU money upgraders is higher than the percentage of paycheck-to-paycheck upgraders.
Google/Samsung/Apple/etc may be making more total money from the not-well-off than the well-off, at least thinking about people I know.
There is no reason to release flagship phones each year.
So every maker has to have the best they have on sale at all times.
The car release cycle is pretty much exactly what flagship phones do too. They get a major redesign every few years with incremental improvements in between.
The biggest reason is obvious: if you didn't your competitors would and they'd eat your lunch. Modern mobile devices are only 15 yrs old, they're where PCs were in 1995. I'm already seeing people who used to upgrade every two years switch to 3, and before you know it that will climb to 4, 5, etc. as the tech matures. In 1997 your PC was obsolete after two years, now they're fine a decade later, and phones will get there too.
Great many containers filled with stuff from rich countries find their way to poor countries, some include stolen goods (like cars), others include garbage, most include goods that still have some value for other people, including tech.
Maybe the problem should be looked at from that angle, and maybe there's no problem, really. One's garbage will always be another one's treasure.
A better example of waste is when local governments funds things which people don't use.
I think the root of this sentiment is misunderstanding or lack of satisfaction at the system level.
I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max that is three generations behind now. While there is nothing I have to have, the always on display, the USB 3 speed, and video out to my portable USB-C monitor on the iPhone 15 Pro would be nice.
I just wish they kept the pixel 4 design and only improved the battery life. I would pay more for it than this new design.
My 98% of the usage is to read something. Some website, email or ebook. Why do I need 120 Hz display for that? Gaming? That's always going to be inferior to even a console let alone a gaming PC.
My reasoning was better camera.
I honestly was going to skip upgrading but the camera and some other minor features were enough for me to make the upgrade happen.
I feel if these companies worked together to cut back on the waste of yearly release cycles, there’d be better environmental results. But every year we have a new feature because tech has caught up with demand.
Not sure what the middle ground is.
I have a Pixel 6 which takes excellent photos. In two years time, it will still take excellent photos, regardless of what the Pixel 8 or 9 or 10 does.
Yet, can you really look at your old photos and say "my God, those 2017 photos. Could you imagine taking such crappy photos with such a bad phone?" I doubt it. That hasn't been true in more than a decade even for challenging environments like in low light.
They're selling you on a better camera each year because there's basically no useful way to measure its impact anymore aside from in really technical conditions that don't affect anyone practically.
Personally, I have a proper camera, but I am not carrying it around with me at all times. My phone takes excellent pictures (I have a pixel 6) but I do feel the lack of zoom.
The quality of the main cameras hasn't really gone up in a few generations; but I do think there's been significant improvements in the photography department in phones in the last 5 years. Wide lens, macro photography, zoom lenses. These are genuine innovations.
It does make me a bit angry when software is kept locked into new models when older models are perfectly capable of running it though. But there's been hardware innovation for sure. Don't really see much of a reason to go from a Pixel 7 pro to a Pixel 8 pro, and probably not going to be the case for a few years. But who knows.
A bi-annual release cycle should cut waste in half.
Companies keep polluting the world, as if we had another alternative to live on.
This is actually a very small part of the market. Virtually no-one upgrades their phone every year. 3-4 years is more typical.
It’s for people who bought their phones 2 or 3 years (or even more) ago.
The question is how does this phone compare to the Pixel Pro 6 or 5, not how it compares the 7.
But the software development is driven by the profit from hardware sales. Why would they improve the software if it doesn't make money?
I guess in the ideal world the phone's software should be pay-to-upgrade but free-to-stay-as-is.
So far, I only owned 2 phones in my life (didn't need one before the smartphone era), an iPhone 4S and a Google Pixel 3. For now, the Pixel 3 is doing great, battery life is not so good but holds the day.
If you work in software, think of it as normal SDLC versus once-a-decade waterfall style total respec and rebuild. Which is more efficient?
It also spreads demand more consistently, rather than having 90% of demand landing in the first year and 10% spread over the next four. What would that mean for production capacity?
Continuous processes beat batch processes every time. See also: Tesla’s ideas about model years.
Enterprise computers get refreshed every 3-6 years, usually (I'd probably do shorter for most laptops, longer for desktops). Monitors can do 5-10 years. Until they became active electronics, headphones/speakers/microphones which were decades old were fine.
Biggest boost on a lot of new mobile device refresh is getting a new 0-cycle battery and a clean OS install, and for a lot of people, "buy a new one" is the main opportunity for that kind of upgrade.
Many (without much conscious thought maybe even) are doing this too.
Simply replace when needed. That’s all there is to it.
Consider how long it took PCs to reach the same stage (with a fraction of the adoption). It was like 20 years from Kenbak-1 to the 90s PC era.
By 2014, everyone had a smartphone.
One barrier to innovation here is that most of tech has shifted to think of empowering users as not the goal, but rather, empowering users is an occasional necessary step towards the company exploiting those users harder.
We could use better thinking.
IMO the iPhone was the 90s PC era where these things got a lot better and more ubiquitous and less fragmented.
And (also in my opinion) coincidentally 90s led into an the era where overly dominant OS vendor(s) were crushing the fun and freedom out of computing. Phones are harder to escape from that than with PCs though.
It was a great mobile computing experience but terrible at being a phone.
I was disagreeing with the claim that PCs took longer than smartphones did to reach that plateau. They did take longer to reach the initial (Win95/iPhone) take off point though. Smartphones spent less time in the primordial phase - probably more a case of better internet availability though.
I think people are not yet ready to accept the exact same thing is about to happen to cars. Some company will have a perfectly usable electric self-driving vehicle and will produce tens of millions of them a year. They will be an appliance, like your toaster, and nobody will care anymore.
I'm sure it will happen to other things in our lives too.
I do believe the future you outline will happen but IMO the timeline is very far from clear. Significant challenges remain for self driving cars.
1. Dialing in the dumb phone. No dumb phones support CardDav syncing.
2. Very few dumb phones can function as wifi hotspots for the e-ink device.
3. Few dumb phones can record calls.
4. I forget what eight was for... seriously I had one or two other issues but I don't remember what they were.
I think PCs still have revolutionary improvements, not only tiny incremental changes: huge core counts, tensor cores, ray tracing, SSDs, etc.
But I'm someone who is still using a pixel 3, so maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better about purchase I need to make because my phone's battery is pretty close to useless.
As in, this one is debuting the new Samsung GN2 cam sensor and I think the SoC manufacturing process node, ahead of whenever Samsung and the others post their new updated devices. So for a few months this is probably the one to get, until a competitor drops the next set of updates from the HW supply chain, and so on.
Three years of updates and iFixit are great and could be differentiating for now, but hopefully the rest of the ecosystem will catch up to that standard.
It's a lot less exciting without a sensor upgrade and would be mostly playing catch-up otherwise.
https://www.gsmarena.com/newscomm-60107.php - comments tipped me off; then googling for "pixel 8 GN2; last hour" gets me links like https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-8-pro-release-... where the cache has the reference but the current page doesn't.
Damn, it may be time for me to move back to Android. Do Pixels require the updates to be sent by your carrier, or do they allow direct download?
https://9to5google.com/2023/01/12/google-pixel-t-mobile-upda...
My daughter's Pixel 5a update, for example, was delayed but it was purchased from Google.
To be clear, the update _does_ come directly from Google but the device won't show that the update is available until the carrier gives the green light. The factory image can still be sideloaded.
The P7P is the first phone that I've not purchased outright, and that's because TMO was willing to give me a ridiculously generous offer to trade in a OnePlus 7t.
edit: another link -- https://www.androidpolice.com/pixel-t-mobile-update-delayed/
You can also just update the phone using the OTA Google provides on a page and ADB to side load it.
The OTA image worked great.
unlocked, carrier-agnostic phones are the way to go.
With the Pixel updates, at least, the updates come through Google but the carrier (at least TMO) can prevent this from happening even if the phone is unrestricted.
IIRC you can download the images from Google via web browser and flash manually, but not sure if you can still do that, and I've never tried it myself.
Yes you can still can. https://developers.google.com/android/ota#cheetah
In fact they even host all the images dating back to the Nexus lines still.
My pixel 5 just stopped turning on one day about 2 years in, and my pixel 7 pro had the volume and power buttons fall out about 3 weeks in (not due to a drop, after googling it's apparently a very widely seen issue).
The service with iFixit was unhelpful, they told me "We keep seeing this and Google says this is wear and tear. We can't submit it for a warranty repair, and if we try we end up eating the cost". After finally complaining on twitter I was contacted by some support person who said to give iFixit this email and they would fix it. They still refused, and after a few more rounds of interactions like that I eventually bought some replacement buttons on Amazon, popped them in, and put a case that covers them on it. I'm fully expecting this to randomly die some time before 2 years is up.
Combine that with Google's extremely strong tendency to abandon everything, promises like these seem well, worthless.
Meanwhile my daughter is using my wife's old iPhone from 8 years ago. My Samsung note 3 and my s8 still boot up and work just fine (though I cracked the screen on one about 5 years ago). It's just so obvious that these phones are very low priority to Google, while other companies base their business around their phones.
The problem with all these phones is that they're kind of built to be disposable. They're just glued together plastic. And even if you can repair the phone or it survives 5 years or so, the vendor is just going to stop supporting the chipset anyways.
Just got a fairphone 4, optimistic but the build quality is shit and they're already rolling out a fairphone 5 now... whatever, I use AOSP. I can't stand samsung anyways with all the crapware they put on stock android.
In general samsung and others (huawei, etc.) are trying to get a grip on android, and open-source seems to oppose that.
I don't know what motivates google to lean in so hard with open-source ( maybe trying to prevent fragmentation or avoid future antitrust or set a "clean" example standard for stock android with their pixel brand ), but we do currently enjoy its fruits.
flashlight, overheating, extremely slippery which mandates a case, small chance of screen lines, no personal need for SD, weird camera choices e.g. focal length of telephoto, notification LED, waterproof but unusable in the rain, I think one vendor sells a screen protector that isn't total garbage, no personal need for Qi charging, basic photography mode has always been awful, antenna/battery/amp/side sense/night mode is nothing special, previous gen microphone config had echo and/or gain problems on Signal calls, and the list goes on and on...
Biggest selling point: photography, right? Sony continues to develop amazing hardware and then takes the most leisurely and conservative approach toward camera firmware/software. Both auto modes on an a6000 are head-and-shoulders above this year's Xperia auto mode, despite being nearly a decade older. The fanboys continue to defend manual mode photography as if every serious picture taker wants to dial in focus, white balance, shutter speed, etc. all on a touchscreen while their toddler hangs from a branch for his/her first time; as if every photo should go straight into Lightroom Mobile before getting sent to grandma or the friend group or onto social media.
Beyond that, the update schedule is suboptimal (Hello, Pro-I!?) and so fast-paced, you're always hoping the next generation or surprise mid-year model fixes most of the details you dislike.
The 5 V comes out and totally eliminates the telephoto which you loved and frequently used. Not only that, everyone compares it to the 5 IV (60 mm) when Gen. II had a 70 mm shooter and Gen. III had a 70--105 mm (which, as most non-prime lenses, was quite soft at the longer range). "You get literally the same detail because 52 MP!" Sure, dude. Now explain why every comparison review of the 5 V telephoto has significantly less detail than even a lowly 3x zoom, even factoring in how 1/9th of 52 is 5.8 MP? (Notebookcheck.net supposedly lets you downscale its comparisons to 2 MP and 4 MP, and the closest-to-Xperia-quality but still better shot belongs to the 3x Galaxy S23.)
You remember being disappointed when the 1 V bundle was WH-1000XM5 and you already owned well-worn WH-1000XM3s. You're even more disappointed when the new 5 bundles inferior cans rather than buds or something wired from Sony's Pro Audio division. The 5 price is always the same as the 1 price when the 5 drops in September, so you wonder why not get the 1, which is superior in nearly every way?
Oh, right, because you know it only gets one more OS upgrade (Material You: Yuck!) and you probably won't get whatever new APK comes standard in the next gen's Xperia 1, plus you've already missed your chance to order and resell the bundled headphones, so the now-300-off price of the 1 is just the same that you would've paid by selling the bundle plus a little depreciation.
Also, where the hell IS this Pro-I successor? Is _that_ going to have a real telephoto and less of Xperia 5's wacky design changes and 4 to 7 years of software support and a screen bright enough to use as a flashlight because, let's face it, Sony will close its mobile division before letting its users put more current through the rear LED. Plus, who knows, maybe next year they finally release crimson or that same sweet shade of orange that sits at the base of their true flagship full-frame mirrorless??
-----
Cost, within reason, is not an issue for me. I would get another Xperia---any model---if it ticked most boxes. My main reason for ignoring Sony as a serious contender? Sony continues to nerf two peripherals or APKs for every one feature they improve, and then I continue to wait for actual improvement while my Zenfone 8 and a6400 slowly age. Every few months, I wonder what phone I would get if I needed a replacement today, and Xperia drops further down the list.
I miss some of the nice touches LG added on top of stock Android, but the hardware has met all expectations so far.
Subjective, I am at my third Pixel phone in six years and I never had an issue.
My GF is still using a Pixel 3 pro every day.
With that being said i've only had questionable build quality on 2 occasions. The Huawei 6p which was covered under a recall, and the Panda Pixel 2XL where there was some lamination issues.
That being said, the build quality and materials (mostly) really stepped up initially in the Pixel 4, and then noticeably again in the P7. They are quite nice. I don't really find them lacking in quality, fit, or finish these days.
Don't you think that three phones in six years is the issue?
I'm still on 2019 Galaxy S10, i.e. fourth year, single phone. The hardware is still in great condition, no malfunction of anything.
One (P3) ended with me having it in the back pocket of my jeans and literally jumping in the backseat... yeah, not smart.
Another (P4a), I tried to open to swap a new battery in and it did not end well. I'd still happily be with the 4a if it was not for my dumb self. It's perfectly working and I use it to listen to some music while biking or at the gym. I just did not reattach the speaker cable.
Having said that, I'm still using my 4-year-old Pixel 4, and it's in great shape. I'll probably get a new phone this year since it's no longer receiving security updates. Which is stupid, because I'm otherwise perfectly happy with the phone. And hate that they get physically larger every year.
The reason is that it is much, much more compact and it's perfect to carry around when on the bike as it does not wedge into my quad when pedaling. And it's easier to hold with my gloves on. Well, it's living a second life full of music and OsmAnd maps.
But the lack of security updates makes the XL and the 3XL, though still functioning as expected, not acceptable. This thing has far too much access to my life to actively use it on the Internet every day.
I'm getting the Pixel 8 not because the 6 Pro has any problems (personally I've had none), but rather because I have a bit more disposable income to spend on my tech enthusiasm and I'm excited about a phone with a 7 year software support window (with incidental coverage to support 5 years of accidental damage). If all goes well, I hope to take advantage of more than 3 years of that, assuming some insane new development doesn't happen in the interim.
For my contribution to this anecdata the only Pixel phone I've had die is my Pixel 3 XL that started having weird charging issues and refuses to turn on and charge unless I let it completely passively drain then recharge it after that it only works for a bit, that happened after about 2 years maybe. Tried having it looked at by uBreakIFix and they had nothing. Other than that my Pixel 6 is doing great but I keep it in a case 99% of the time and don't abuse it.
Get a new phone every handful of years. Stop being surprised when old hardware starts to fail.
And by replaced it, I mean they sent a different phone that had lots of wear and she lost all her non-cloud data.
With Asahi Linux I'm now considering going back to all-Apple hardware after 12 years away.
Nexus 5 had already quality issues. Pixels went downhill completely, while simultaneously bumping up the price.
I switched to Pixel 7 so that my partner can get the 4a 5G to replace their aging device. But this 7 is clearly heavier and while a good device, I just don't like it quite as much.
My Pixel 3 stopped working because Google fucked up it's kernel boot and mechanical design. They placed a laser focus IC, that's a bare die mounted on a tiny FR4 shim to get it closer to the backpanel, on top of the main PCB. When this tiny laser focus IC inevitably breaks off or loses contact with the pads due to mechanical forces on the back panel, the Pixel 3 linux kernel ends up panicking during boot because the driver can't communicate with it.
I could see this because I had the bootloader unlocked before it bricked and could get the boot logs coming out. In fact it could boot into recovery just fine too but what a PITA to fix this at that point.
I've been a long time Pixel user, and have had the Pixel, Pixel 4 XL, and currently have the Pixel 6 Pro.
On every device, there has been one or several glaring software bugs that haven't been fixed for months, or have required a really, really nasty workaround.
A good example was the bluetooth stack on the Pixel 4 XL. We got a security software update one day, applied it, and then found that the bluetooth connection to loads of devices was suddenly broken. Google took months to get the issue fixed, despite a few hundred pages of complaints on their forums. Instead someone (not from Google) worked out that if you went into developer mode, you could swap out the bluetooth stack for a previous version, and it might work again.
Is this sort of blasé approach to quality assurance and lack of urgency around fixing user reported bugs that really, really irritates me about Google's hardware devices.
The 6 Pro is an ok phone but also has it's problems (painfully slow and somewhat unreliable fingerprint unlock). I think I've had enough and I'll probably give a Samsung device a try.
Something like this could have kept me on Android for a longer so I am thankful it did not show up until I had left Android behind.
After years of phones that became slow after a few weeks, having a phone that is still fast after 3-4 years is incredible.
I assume it's standardization that prevents any notable competitors to them from popping up. Since others can just sell tools/parts.
Trade-in in Germany on Google Store page:
- Pixel 6 Pro 256gb ($999 on release) - 235€
- iPhone 13 Pro 256gb ($1099 on release) - 730€
While I am partial to Googles line of phones (had pretty much every Google phone since the nexus one), the loss of value is something I cannot really ignore any more when deciding to buy a phone.
I am probably going to trade in an old Pixel 3 (64GB) that I had sitting in a drawer. They will give $200 trade-in for it for a Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro. Only $30 trade-in for the other phones they sell.
My hot take is that the vast majority of Android users are not specifically looking for an Android; they just want "a phone." There's a minority of hardcore Android fans who are committed to specific models like the Samsung S23 or Pixel. In contrast, there are many people specifically want an iPhone, whether it's for iMessage, the ecosystem, or even just for the status symbol. This seems to hold a lot more value.
My last flagship phone was a Google Nexus 6P where the base model was $499. Amazing phone, too bad after 3 years it had a battery issue but the manufacturer gave me a new one.
But the thing is: it was $499.
That was the greatest thing about the Nexus lines - good hardware (maybe not the latest SOC) with regular updates and a good OS experience. I miss those phones.
Google with the Pixels went full goofy mode. I'm not paying 1.140€ for a phone. I have a Huawei P10 that's still running smoothly, just the battery is getting tired... so maybe ill get one of those Pixel 6 Pro :)
But Google pushed away a lot of the Nexus user base, who were hyped every year for the new Nexus.
This was back in the day where a flagship phones base prices were like 600/700€.
Now it's double.
In 2018 the Samsung Galaxy 9 was 700€. Now a Samsung Galaxy S23 is 1.200€.
Also, inflation.
Comparable to ~$450 a year after the release of the 6P.
I guess the 6P might be relatively higher end?
Yet every nexus phone had major hardware issues. that's not good hardware. It wasn't premium, it wasn't supported long, and it wasn't high quality. I LOVED the nexus line, as a broke college student that prioritized bang for the buck and customization, and speed, and android was getting great new features every year, but things have gotten so bad at google.
I won't argue with that. But I'm right there with you, Nexus phones and android releases were exciting - and you knew with Nexus you'd be the first to get the new stuff.
When Google sells a Pixel 8 Pro for $999, they’re sending a signal that says “our phone is just as good as the iPhone.”
I think your story points to how the Nexus line was basically an unfinished product where Google wasn’t even willing to attempt to sell it at a profitable price point until they could buy a hardware designer (HTC) and integrate that company into Google to produce a comprehensive product. Your Nexus phone had to be entirely replaced and yet you only gave the company $500. So they just sold two flagship phones for $250 each. That’s not a business, that’s a charity.
My Nexus 5X bootlooped right in front of my eyes with no user intervention.
The Nexus lineup wasn’t as good as an iPhone (nor a Samsung or Huawei phone for that matter) and that’s why nobody paid iPhone money for it.
In Android, browser, messaging app updates and many even system updates are delivered through Play store (long after system/OS updates have stopped for the phone), so attacks will have to be much more sophisticated.
I am not defending unpatched phones just to be clear, but its not end of the world if you use unsecure device, just keep all your money and other important stuff away from it. Which is fine for many people.
Correction: 4A does not receive _some_ updates, namely OS level updates.
Other things like the recent 0days for Chrome are handled via the store and have already been updated.
I understand you aren't selling this in my region, but not even letting me look at the product is super frustrating.
Here's an archive.is link which has most of the info [1]
Price increase. 875€ in Europe. The Pixel 5 was 630€. Do you really get 40% more phone?
The Pixel 6 is 6.4"
The Pixel 7 is 6.3"
The Pixel 8 is 6.2"
If the trend continues we only have to wait 3 more years for a < 6" phone
Use your other hand.
Pixel 8 - 150.5 x 70.8 x 8.9 mm
Pixel 6 - 158.6 x 74.8 x 8.9 mm
Pixel 3 - 145.6 x 68.2 x 7.9 mm
S10: 149.9 x 70.4 x 7.8 mm
S20: 151.7 x 69.1 x 7.9 mm
S21: 151.7 x 71.2 x 7.9 mm
S22: 146 x 70.6 x 7.6 mm
I had a Pixel 6 briefly, at launch, but returned it almost immediately in exchange for a 6.0" screen Pixel 5 because the 6 was ludicrously too large for daily use on the go and uncomfortable in my pants pocket. Hopefully they keep shrinking the non-pro models and we settle on 6" as an ok size.
If I travel and have to use GPS most of the day / take hundreds of photos, I carry a small 5000 mAh battery to charge up on the go. I think it's a reasonable accommodation for a phone that's perfectly fine day-to-day.
Besides I was tired of buying “old” phone. While 14 battery life is good, nothing compared to the Android word though, it’s a brick. Unlike everybody told me I am still not used to it after 4-5 months. Still hate it when I look at it or hold in my hands or is in my pockets. The problem is that in Android there’s literally no phone smaller than 14 now.
So next is not going to be an iPhone for sure unless a smaller and lighter iPhone comes up.
Pixel 5 has a 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 85.9% screen-to-body ratio Pixel 8 Pro has a 20:9 ratio and 87.4% screen-to-body ratio
So the difference is ever so slightly less impactful than it sounds, but it's still a much bigger phone.
I might consider the non-Pro since it now has a 120Hz screen and is smaller.
From a friend who used to use GrapheneOS and flashed back.
You want that guy pushing code to your phone?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36089104 https://youtu.be/4To-F6W1NT0?feature=shared
I suggest you examine the baseless claims against the (former) lead dev more closely - they are fabrication.
(He has been harassed so much, with death threats and the like, that he has recently stepped down as lead dev).
Louis Rossman was a supporter of the project until he and Daniel had a failing out in which Daniel behaved inappropriately [1], all over a Youtube comment. There's proof for that and other claims [2, 4, 5].
Daniel can be a talented developer, privacy advocate and asshole at the same time.
It's sad to see him (and others, like yourself) say stuff like "examine the baseless claims", without providing any sources.
After all the drama with Calyxos, Techlore, Louis Rossmann etc, at some point one has to notice a pattern of behavior.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx7CZ-2Bajg
3: https://github.com/AOSPAlliance/README/commit/cbd2a95cba7c2a...
4: https://web.archive.org/web/20210403012439/https://freenode....
5: https://web.archive.org/web/20210818110434/https://sethforpr...
I think you are engaging in Whataboutism [1]. This does not make for a constructive discussion.
But lets take what you said in good faith.
I imagine most products I buy have a not so amazing CEO. That does not prevent me from criticizing one of the products I use most often. Furthermore, as the (former) lead developer, he had or has control of the signing keys, simply deleting (as he has done in the past) them would cause significant damage.
So what if he has the signing keys? You can always build Graphene yourself
If I had the time, knowledge and money. Which I don't.
So, I rely and support others that do to ensure I have a functioning and constantly running system without much maintenance work, except donating one a year.
But I am thoroughly on his side when it comes to the CalyxOS and Techlore drama. However I wasn't aware of any of the Louis Rossman stuff
Sure, that could be argued either way. To be honest, it's too complicated for me to really care about. I think GrapheneOS is a solid project, currently.
My biggest problem is that Daniel refuses to apologize or even acknowledge these issues. I try to judge people not by their mistakes, but by their responses to these mistakes.
My worry with GrapheneOS is that the same thing to Copperhead might happen to it. I don't know or care who was right/wrong in that situation. But the end result was that Daniel deleted the signing keys, so I am worried that if Daniel is pressured form either real or imaginary attacks, he might do the same to GrapheneOS.
I want the project to go on for as long as possible, and part of that requires honest reflection.
I think this is very fair, and very unfortunate as well.
The issue with Copperhead was that they wanted to make it proprietary against Daniel's will (an oversimplification). I'm on Daniel's side on this issue.
The way they're currently in the process of setting up a "GrapheneOS Foundation" to ensure it stays open and not-for-profit _should_ ensure this never happens again. But the issue they are having is that a public figurehead is likely to get harassed and Doxed by malicious parties like what's happened to Daniel - but a real name is required to be on paper legally (also an oversimplification).
> I want the project to go on for as long as possible, and part of that requires honest reflection.
I agree. And I think this is very hard to discuss in official graphene circles with official graphene members+devs because they always always always shy away from discussing meta-issues and comment threads, forum threads, etc are removed once conversations go too far into it. I see both sides - they want to focus on development and the project itself - but also, these discussions need to be had.
I've followed, from a safe distance, the CopperheadOS saga, et al the other dramas and bullshit over the years.
The product is still good and I will continue to use and evaluate my usage of it. Until the product materially changes, I will stick with it.
I was going to wait for Pixel 9 (currently also on Pixel 5).
If I stayed on Android I would probably be looking at an Asus Zenfone 10. Similar form factor and battery life to Pixel 5. Pretty good reviews. Check it out as an option.
Edit: is that price for pixel 8 pro? A Google search is saying regular pixel 8 is 799€, so basically the same price for the base model.
Because ... that's worth 12% and then some.
No, but euros are worth ~30% less.
Give me 380USD phone which lasts for next 5-8 years, feels premium, is repairable, camera is decent, replaceable battery, OS is just Vanilla Android with atleast 5 years(more years of Software updates would be welcome) of Software Updates and when you can't provide it, make it hackable enough to install Custom ROMs.
I literally couldn't care what a phone was made out of/how it feels since I just put a case on it before I even use it for a day in most situations.
I've always been of the feeling that I'm buying this lovely, well-designed piece of hardware, why would I want to cover it up in an ugly plastic case?
No replaceable battery, sadly, but those don't really exist at this point.
I just looked up the battery replacement procedure, and it is not horrible for something you want to do once after 4 years.
People pay that amount or more for apps that help manage their fantasy football team...
Comparitively that would be an insane bargain for a phone and it's absurd for that to be your requirement.
I do wonder what the right price point would be for a subscription model. At the moment the average replacement time is every 2 years which would be the equivalent of $30 a month basic and $40 for pro.
Could they afford $30 a month sub but you got the yearly upgrades rather than every 2 years?
If the price of the parts is quite low compared to the R&D that could be feasible.
But I actually have no idea.
The Moto G Play is just $170 list, currently going for ~$110. It has a rather pathetic 3 years support, but that's $4.72 per month at list, or ~$3.95 at current list rates - assuming you throw it away when the support contract ends. The Samsung A14 5g is $200, and gets 4 years' support, which is $4.15/mo, again, assuming list price and discarding when security updates are over.
I'm currently typing from my Moto G6, which came out in April 2018. I bought in July of that year for $100 (it was a BOGO with a buddy's $400 Moto One Zoom, they were literally giving them away as a backup to promote their more expensive phone because the BOM cost was so cheap). I plug it in on my desk at work because the battery sucks now, but that's no great hardship. By that math, I've enjoyed the use of a smartphone for $1.62 per month (would be $3.25 at list). Yes, it's only running Android 9 and not getting "security updates" anymore, but I have my phone app, messaging app, a camera, and Firefox, and that's about all I need.
I think it would be ridiculous to spend $30 or $40 A MONTH for a smartphone. It doesn't matter what some people pay for a fantasy football team app, that has nothing to do with buying hardware. Other people are buying 3000 lbs used cars for the same price others are paying for a flagship 200g slab of glass!
I know the Samsung phones come with a fair bit of crapware, cuz I used to have one. How's the Moto?
It barely had any non-android, non-Google apps. If there were any, I uninstalled them all except one from the Apps list without having to root my phone or anything. The last one is called Moto, which is disabled (can't be uninstalled).
But they already do? I used my Oneplus X for 6 years and that was $249. Battery is the main reason I stopped using it. That's $3.50/month, maybe an outlier, but I wouldn't pay 10x that to check my messages and get directions.
It would be nice to be able to pop batteries in and out on the fly, but I suspect that would make it a lot harder to waterproof. I've lost more phones to water damage than I have to battery death.
IMO smartphones peaked around that era, and we've only seen incremental improvements and enshittification ever since. I used to be excited about every new device, but these days all manufacturers are grasping at straws trying to differentiate their rectangular slabs from the competition. AI is the latest gimmick in this trend.
I cannot imagine Apple doing that.
> The issue was traced to Microsoft Teams
I want to know how a crappy app from Microsoft can break the dialer on my phone. What the hell?
I have several apps with their own dialers on my phone... I just never realized they could break the system dialer in such a way.
The issue is the pixel/aosp dialer framework tries the apps first for emergency calls instead of going straight for cellular.
I say Pixel/AOSP because I’m not sure if it’s prevalent in AOSP since other Android phones have had the same issue but nowhere near the same scale.
is like we developed this new amazing inter-connection network. and then due to politics, decided it was much too good... far too much freedom without national barriers, so we've gone on to reintroduce these barriers.
as if the internet was restricted by the same geographical (physical) realities that we commonly encounter.
but nothing will ever be as dumb as the re-introducing material scarcity (DRM schemes) back into the 'cyberspace' just so a few can keep making money out of what they already did; possibly for several generations of descendants
It also seems very arbitrarily limited to the newer ones, 7/7pro seem like they should be more than capable of driving these features.
Is software limiting going to be the norm going forward for phones?
Because, I don't think this is worth upgrading from last years phones from a hardware basis.
Perhaps, we've reached a point in smartphones where the development cycles will be more iterative, instead of truly groundbreaking.
So I doubt there are really any limitations on the hardware themselves or that you absolutely need the new version. Google just paywalling the features.
I bet you all those will be available very soon for Google One subscribers.
Also, the temperature sensor in the Pro, if it worked as expected, should be a cool addition.
The planned obsolescence conversation seems to revolve around Apple (the only self-interested greedy company on the planet according to the detractors) but they hold the record for software updates on smartphones - 10 years for the iPhone 5s. Here we are, in 2023, and Google is coming around to seven years of support. Apple has done at least seven since 2013.
In any case I applaud this move and at least five years should be mandated by law. I wonder how many "random manufacturer drops a cheap Android on the market and walks away on software and support" Android devices there are sitting in landfills across the globe. Of course there are plenty of Apple devices as well but it's not due to lack of support.
iOS system apps release with the OS on an annual cycle, but in Android system apps are upgraded independently. Meaning, even without Android OS upgrades the device would get new system apps.
It is almost as people in these Apple vs Android arguments have no idea how Android actually work...
That said, I do know this and your reply is based on either a misunderstanding of my point or optimism/enthusiasm for some kind of argument you seem to think we’re having.
I’m not talking about the built in calculator app, browser, etc.
I’m talking about the operating system version used and targeted for by applications.
Compare an Android fragmentation chart to an iPhone/iOS fragmentation chart.
It’s painfully obvious device support, updates, etc are still a mess in the Android ecosystem.
Talk to any team deploying Android applications and the first pain point you will hear is how ridiculous the fragmentation is compared to iOS.
It’s gotten better but it’s still a mess. Announcements like this are heading more in the right direction but I think it’s painfully clear that Apple got at least this one thing right from the start in their overall approach.
You are making incorrect assumptions in a discussion and don't like to be corrected.
For the record, Android can also update system libraries via the store. The two platforms handle security updates very differently. If you want to get into a debate and criticise the one you are not using, at least try to learn how it works.
For many it absolutely is. It's vi vs emacs on steroids - a bunch of very technical people debating intricacies the general population is either unaware of or doesn't care about.
> You are making incorrect assumptions in a discussion and don't like to be corrected.
Naturally I don't think I am and I get corrected all of the time. It happens. Overall I think what happens in these kinds of discussions is the general tendency for HN users to live in very small technical bubbles, often very far removed from the general population. Generally this is a very good thing and it's one of the reasons we like and appreciate HN.
However, we're a tiny portion of the population. My viewpoint here is an attempt to put on my "Joe average walking down the street" hat. I understand what you are saying, I do understand how it works, but for the vast majority of the market these distinctions don't really matter. There is data all over the place that shows huge portions of the iOS user base running the latest iOS release within days of release. This is a result of the iron-fisted domination and control Apple exerts over its users. Sure, we don't appreciate that but clearly a substantial portion of the market does - and the actual data backs it up.
As I noted, all one needs to do is look at a fragmentation chart representing real world Android vs iOS users/devices to see how this manifests in the real world for the overwhelming majority of the user base of these devices.
At every organization I've been in that develops mobile applications when you talk to the Android team vs the iOS team the Android team is constantly grumbling and running into problems supporting the bewildering array of Android devices, screen sizes, releases, etc. Sure this applies to iOS devices as well but it's a night and day difference. It's actually one of the many reasons iOS tends to be the "lead" platform for new applications - they're early and they just don't want to deal with it yet. You can target and test on a handful of devices and releases and push an iOS app with some confidence it's going to "just work" on the large majority of devices with access to the App Store.
I’m talking about the operating system version targeted for applications, functionality, etc.
Take one look at an Android fragmentation chart compared to iPhone and I think you’ll see what I’m saying.
This is such a disingenuous comment. Claiming that it got 10 years of updates because it received a recent security update is not telling the complete story. It's a phone stuck on iOS 12 and Apple chose to release a recent security fix.
The Pixel 8 is going to receive 7 years of OS Updates, 84 months of monthly security updates and quarterly feature drops. This blows the iPhone away.
Now, starting in 2023.
I’m very happy that Google wants to compete. Hopefully they will manage to follow through.
The demo video of their AI photo editor was kind of mind blowing but ultimately not a feature I would use. I've seen a few complaints about their automatic photo processing as well, which you can't disable in the official camera app.
Overall the majority of their features seem to be software which is tied to Google apps/services, which doesn't sit well with me.
Yup. I've been clinging to my Pixel 4, but it hasn't gotten security updates in a year, which I'm not particularly comfortable with (been lucky so far, knock on wood). I might pick up the Pixel 8 (not Pro, god that thing is huge) mainly due to the support lifetime. And it does seem like their non-Pro releases are actually decreasing in physical size for the past few years. Still a couple/few mm larger than the Pixel 4, but that's doable, I think.
AI editor with "everyone smilling" trend reminded me Black Mirror :)
I have 2 Pixel 3s now (microphone died and battery swelled) but they run everything snappy! I might just keep buying Pixel 3s off eBay, its so much cheaper. My main worry is lack of security updates, especially with the webp vulnerability.
Her pixel 3 is also starting to shutdown randomly which is concerning since our last phones were the bootlooping nexus 5x.
My current Pixel 3 has done something similar twice, but it's going good so far so
The first tap to waken the screen often fails so I have to try one or two more times.
It's a small thing but, I have to tumble with it probably 100+ times a day given how often I check my phone for e.g. Slack. It should be the smoothest part of operation, imo.
If you go to Settings > Display > Lock Screen > "Always show time and info" and turn it on, it'll always show the time, notification icons and the fingerprint icon to show you where to position your finger. It does say that this reduces battery life.
I keep "Lift to check phone" on as if I need to unlock my phone, I'm usually going to lift it up into my hands. Unfortunately it and "Tap to check phone" are a bit buggy and don't always work correctly.
Sounds like Photoshop's image stacks, that "process the multiple images to produce a composite view that eliminates unwanted content"
Cool when applied to make a crowded place look empty. Useful, albeit creepy when you apply it to disembodied heads.
I'm sure there are reasons, but it stings a little.
I've never actually traded in any of my old phones, on the fear that the new one might break at some point and I'd need a backup. Granted I've only once had to take advantage of this in the 13 years I've had smartphones.
I didn't click all the way through, but I'm hoping you don't have to turn in the old phone immediately... I'd like to hang onto it for at least a couple weeks just in case I find the backup/restore process hasn't completely done its job.
Last I remember looking the timeline is within 30 days of receiving the new device.
Green bubbles can be worth a few hundred dollars. Or why some people keep a busted iPhone around just to manage the parental controls. Android doesn't have much of those restrictions or it applies less.
I'm sorry, but what? To whom? I have an incredibly hard time believing it's actually something which makes a concrete return on investment, but maybe I'm wrong and the world is even dumber than I thought.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/10/22876067/google-apple-ios...
My teammates for a university assignment let out an audible groan when they found out I was the only one on an Android. I do have an iPad, so thankfully I was able to maintain communication regarding our team project.
I do like the colors of the jpegs.
I hate that they removed ability to disable thair **ing HDR.
p.s: Pixel 6 owner
The Pixel 2 XL camera was better, I swear
In particular, shots of light-eyed people show as fine initially and then when the software processing finishes they have almost black eyes from all the contrast they add. If you choose raw you need a whole other processing pipeline, not to mention you get to see how shitty these sensors and lenses are without software doing a herculean lift.
I was able to work around it on my 6 with a GCam APK but couldn't find one for the 7.
7 years of support! Now we are talking!
Or maybe Google finally learned it from Apple that all you have do is declared a phone flagship and bump its cost dearly - then enjoy sights of people in long queues.
GOOGLE ONE 10% CREDIT, FITBIT SUBSCRIPTION, 24 MONTHLY BILL CREDITS from GOOGLE FI. YOUTUBE PREMIUM. Wow am I pumped for all the SUBSCRIPTIONS I can now purchase.
Bigger screen (which for many is a minus not a plus), an extra 4GB RAM (still seems absurd to me that we need this much RAM on a phone) and more capable/additional auxiliary cameras.
I suppose the charitable take is that £700 feels like a pretty good deal for the non-Pro one.
I guess I'll stick with my Pixel 5A.
That being said I did want the better camera on the pro.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/11833075?hl=en
This just happened to me after 1.5 years of usage of my Pixel 5A.
Luckily Google extended the usual 1-year warranty to be 2-years to give free replacements (which I took advantage of and in fact was given a free upgrade to a 6A)... But be prepared for your phone to die out of nowhere.
"This feature allows devices to have dual SIM support using a single eSIM chip, which can have multiple SIM profiles and can connect to two different carriers at the same time." https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/esim-mep
COVID basically ended and they still won't bring that back, I was hoping that Apple push for that will make Android phones also with a nice and secure face unlocking (for us that have issues with fingerprint sensors not recognizing their fingerprints)
Pixel 4 had dot projector for security.
"Face Unlock on Pixel 8 now meets the strongest Android biometric class and can be used for banking app sign-in and payment apps like Google Wallet."
https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-tensor-g3-pixel-8/
This turned me off to Pixel phones indefinitely. I got the Pixel 6 Pro and it could not figure out what it should be connected to: WiFi, 5G, or 4G and of course rather than just choosing one it decided to not have any connection whatsoever unless I moved a few hundred feet to a different location or rebooted the phone. There was lots of discussion around this and youtubers even covered it but rather than fix the issue Google focused on releasing the next phone.
Maybe I've just been lucky but I've had very good experiences with pixel phones.
I'm sure the HN crowd could come together and form a list of 100 ideas that are truly innovative in the phone space. However, these ideas are quite risky to bring to market.
Some ideas:
1. Super Amazing Sound playback (next level) 2. Rollable display 3. More I/O (for 3rd party ecosystems)
What does this even mean?
5. Rear display, maybe eink
6. 3d lenticular display
7. Infrared camera
8. Mesh network for sms-like relay without service
The older Huawei model is so much better than the newer Pixel that it makes you think why they don't allow them to access the Play store anymore.
And wasn't the whole play store debacle part of some US ban on Huawei? Something outside of Google's control?
I don't miss the battling software ecosystems (Samsung vs Google) on that old phone, though.
Yeah it was a forced by a US policy on a wider Huawei ban, which I think is more a "protect our companies" motivation.
[0] https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/device-personalizat...
My wife, on the other hand, has a 5 which falls out of support this month. So, she's getting the 8.
The Android 14 I just installed on the P6P massively improved the dark light performance of the camera though. Not tried it on the P5
That said it's not worth me upgrading - I'll wait til the P9P.
Pixel 8 to have seven years of Android updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37766122 - Oct 2023 (269 comments)
Things are moving in the right direction (207g for Pixel 6 -> 197g for 7 -> 187g now), but I still value how light my 5 is at 151g, especially for one-handed use.
Zenfone 10 is closest thing to a modern Pixel 5, and only weighs 172g. It checks almost all boxes for me, except eSIM support.
I've use every single pixel from the Nexus line to the pixel to the 6, and the reason I skipped 7 is that the camera bar on the 6 is soo annoying.
It makes the phone 'negatively compatible with wireless charging, that is to say, when I put it on the phone spot in my car, it makes just enough contact with the wireless charger to go in and out of barely-in-range, causing my phone to heat up and lose battery charge.
2) Pixels going toward cloud based smartphones (Video Boost feature) - is really bad, no future proof. My fathers 2 XL works fine without updates, but with cloud based features Pixels gonna come crippled
A year old iPhone goes for maybe €100-200 less than the new model, but last year’s Android phone is now basically half price.
https://www.gsmarena.com/google_pixel_6-pictures-11037.php
Of course that's an incredibly dumb design, but unfortunately they are made like that.
For you
I drop my phone at least once a day lol
I actually dropped it more before I got a case on the Pixels because the back glass is ridiculously slippery and it'll even slide itself off surfaces that aren't perfectly level. Back glass needs to fucking die.
The insanely polished smooth metal frame doesn't help either when combined with the ultra smooth glass back in my hands.
I never go without a case now. The thicker and grippier the better. I also have a belief that phones these days are too thin, and I would gladly have a thicker phone with better battery life. The best feeling phone in my hand IMHO was my Palm Treo, which was almost an inch thick.
That being said, I like the look for the visor.
Could you expand on that?
I am curious because I have been using LineageOS on Pixel 2 / Pixel 2 XL phones for a while (and it works very well, I might add), but I am kinda clueless when it comes to Android security.
Here are the 170+ kernel CVE patches applied on top of what Lineage provides for Pixel 2 series: https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/divestos-build/-/blob/mas...
Plus it just provides updates quicker, eg. the recent WebP CVE was first fixed in DivestOS before other aftermarket systems. https://divestos.org/pages/news
And provides rapid out-of-band WebView updates: https://divestos.org/misc/ch-dates.txt
See my other notes here: https://divestos.org/pages/patch_levels#osSecurity
And also this independent table: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
Works great, minus the battery life. On first 'amazon' battery replacement and debating a 2nd. Broke the rear glass changing it last time -- but now I have a pixel 3 'panda'.
Was really hoping to see a similarity sized phone.
Also, do you use the squeeze feature of the phone? I use it all the time - to activate assistant in my pocket, squeezing through the pocket , and in headphones it pops up. Slick.
Guess I'm just replacing another battery.
Hope Google or some phone company is reading all these small phone requests. I understand the compromise may be battery life. I'm fine with that. It needs to fit in a pocket AND be able to bend around and do physical work without binding up or snapping in half.
Pixel 7 Pro also had 50Mpix sensor.
As a sidebar, you're all over this thread with negatively framed and inaccurate musings on features, so I'd recommend you give the product page or critical reviews a more serious look rather than letting other people do the work for you by correcting.
Bith have similar sensor with 50mpix, they don't mention what is mpix if actual jpegs in neither of the pages.
7 got 12mpix jpegs.
Face Unlock is also not that promoted as it should be, I didn't see the note about it being strong security from just the selfie camera. That's the single feature that will make it buy that phone and ditch Pixel 4.
All over? Just two posts, one which is still not decided until someone gets a hand on the phone and make some photos.
No, Google. Fix your shit. You're a global 1.70 trillion dollar company, not a local microbrewery.
If you try to click the direct link again, it will redirect you to "Change your region and language".
That's beyond broken.
I've got automated SMS texts for critical alarms. if something else is burning down, someone will call.
I miss email on my phone, but it just makes me use the phone for what it is for: Talking
If none of these are your use case, totally cool but it does make life better for a lot of people.
1. Why hasn’t Google pulled the plug and thrown in the white towel yet? People have voted with their wallets and chosen Samsung and Apple.
2. Why is the Pixel devices getting such a massive news coverage? Other smartphone ORM’s with similar market share doesn’t get the same treatment.
Pixel drives and creates the innovation like cut-out display support, notification APIs that support multi-media control for instance across multiple apps, sound multi-plexing between apps, how calls interact with multimedia apps, foldable display support, app switching, fingerprint unlock support, the android API, etc.
Samsung takes that, twists it into their own.
In that essence, Pixel is the standard experience that Android is meant to be whereas Samsung is a customized experience built on the backbone of Android and in some ways in opposition to Android Open Source Project & Pixel Launcher's ideals.
Samsung android phones are the Ubuntu whereas Pixel is Google's Debian.
You are mixing pixel with AOSP, but those are completely separate projects.
Sure, aosp development is sponsored and managed by google, but that doesn't make it synonymous with pixels.
I assure you that people who develop AOSP work with all the major vendors and definitely aren't just driven by what pixel team wants and nothing more.
>foldables Seriously? Samsung had first foldable 4 years ago, while first foldable pixel launched this year. In what world does pixel contributed to foldableAPI more? I mean, I guess in the world we're you treat AOSP and pixel team unanimously maybe, but that's not the real one.
>pixel is standardized experience
Just because google says so? Standardized experience of AOSP is AOSP. Everything else is addition.
Your debian and Ubuntu analogy fails to acknowledge that Google apps are NOT open source.
More apt comparison would be samsung being modern ubuntu 22 with all the bloat that it has, while Google being "only" 14.04 ubuntu with less bloat, but still far from the true purity
1. Pixel Camera taught Samsungs and iPhones about computational photography pipelines and Night Sight,
2. Recorder,
3. Photos + various editing features (Top Shot / Best take / Magic Eraser),
4. Phone + various features (Call Screening(US) / Hold for Me(US) / Spam Protection)
5. Google Pay (UPI - India specific)
6. Gestures - Flip to Shh / Double Tap to open Camera / Twist twice in camera for Selfie mode.
and many more that I have missed.
Question wasn't about if google apps are better, but how pixels contribute to the growth of AOSP differently then vendors like samsung.
Just because google sponsor AOSP, doesn't mean that any proprietary app they make (which is all of them btw) count as AOSP contribution. AOSP and Pixel are 2 separete things.
Just go to ASUS' industrial designer, who dreamed up the Zenfone 10 design, hand him lots of black briefcases with blood diamonds and greenbacks, plus strawberry cakes and beg him to come up with something.
And the colors... this is really the socks+sandals of the phone market.