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Comment by lacoolj | Hacker News Reader

Title is super misleading. I have 3 different pixels, all different versions (4, 5a, 7a) and none of them are "unusable" after the update. I'm sure others are having issues, but this isn't something that's bricking everyone's phones.

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FWIW, I'm a Pixel user (who drags his ass installing these updates, so I haven't updated yet) and I naturally assumed reading the headline that this didn't actually impact all Pixel phones. Reason being that we would've obviously heard a loud uproar if every Pixel phone was suddenly bricked.

Pixel 8 pro and pixel 6 owner here. no issues so far, both devices are up-to-date

> Reason being that we would've obviously heard a loud uproar if every Pixel phone was suddenly bricked.

Many people (most?) have more than one device... computer... etc.. either way, there are many other ways to contact someone.

Totally agree, this headline is misleading and the article isn't useful. It's just blogspam for a reddit thread where some users report issues that coincide with receiving this update.

When you have an installed base as large as Google, some users are going to report problems after every update. These problems may not even have anything to do with the update contents, perhaps the update is what the user associates with the onset of their issues. It's entirely possible these "storage issues" are hardware and the i/o and reboot cycle of the update just caused it to manifest in a user visible way.

By all means I want users to hold Google accountable for mistakes but I feel like there's basically no information in this article beyond the speculation on reddit. The standard for HN should be higher than this IMO.

Are you sure they all got the Google Play system update, and that you're not confusing it with the Android security update?

I'm sure. I have two in my house and they're purring right along.

Same. 8p, 6a and 6p all working fine

With three phones and a one-in-eight chance of being unaffected (assuming 50% for each phone) that still leaves a very large number of phones out there that are potentially affected. 100's of millions of devices. The article is pretty clear that it doesn't seem to affect every phone, but that there are numerous complaints.

I'm always imagining 'Some' in front of headlines like these unless it says 'All'.

That's probably a good policy, but it isn't good English. Any formulation of X has Y characteristic where X is a group implies all members of the group unless the "some" is explicit.

It's a total clickbait headline, but you already knew that hence your policy.

> With three phones and a one-in-eight chance of being unaffected (assuming 50% for each phone) that still leaves a very large number of phones out there that are potentially affected.

Sure, but isn't it the primary job of journalists writing about subjects like this to figure that stuff out before publishing? This is a headline that clearly implies "all" phones. Now we're in a subthread where it seems like the fraction is "<12.5%" (actually we have four in my household, so that gets us to "less than one in 12" I guess).

Do you genuinely believe that "Pixel phones unusable" is a correct characterization of the situation given the data at hand? If you were an editor, would you have published that headline?

No, I wouldn't have published that headline, I would have put 'Some' in front of it, because that's the part that I could be reasonably sure of.

> a one-in-eight chance of being unaffected (assuming 50% for each phone)

Where are you getting 50/50 odds of being affected? Is that cited somewhere, or just a random possible percentage?

(I own one unaffected Pixel.)

Out of thin air...

> With three phones and a one-in-eight chance of being affected (assuming 50% for each phone)

1/8 would be the chance to have all 3 affected. The chance of having at least one affected would be 1-1/8.

Correct, I meant to write 'unaffected'. I'll fix it, thank you.

6a user here. No issues.

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