First real-life Pixel 9 Pro pictures leak, and it has 16GB of RAM | Hacker News Reader

First real-life Pixel 9 Pro pictures leak, and it has 16GB of RAM

arstechnica.com

23 pointsLorenDB26 comments

I'd have a tough time trusting Google enough to buy another Pixel. They fairly recently removed long term features (and selling points) from previous models to make them exclusive for the Pixel 8+, and generally made the camera difficult to use while also way over-processing photos. On-screen exposure controls are now a Pro feature.

It currently holds well earned 2.9 stars in the Play Store, and its one of the few apps they won't respond to reviews for anymore

Does installing graphene OS help?

Pixel "small Pro"? This is fantastic news if true. I absolutely hate how large phones have become. I bought the 6a mostly because its small(er).

Edit: or by "small pro" did they mean the non-XL pro? Awh shucks... I got my hopes up

Yeah seems like no smaller than usual phone, but it's still a great thing if I understand it correctly: This way people can get the "pro" features with the same screen size as the non "pro" model.

Ugh, the camera tumors are getting ever more bulky and protruding. Can we have a decent phone with a flat back again for those of us who don't use their phone as a camera?

My new 2023 Razr has cameras that barely protrude from the external screen. It's clearly doable, but perhaps more megapixels requires a physically larger camera module.

more megapixels/better pixels require bigger sensors, thus, the optics have to scale accordingly too.

There's plenty of phones like this available: just go look at the ~$50 Android phones. They're cheap and the cameras are barely adequate, and don't protrude from the case.

If you're not interested in using the camera feature of your phone, then high-end smartphones aren't for you. It's like buying a Ferrari and complaining about the fuel economy and lack of passenger space.

So you're saying that a powerful phone needs to be a good camera? Can you think of a counterfactual?

The only other reason I can see for a powerful phone is for playing video games.

If you're just using it for communications, you don't need a flagship phone; every phone works fine for that these days. There's tons of mid-grade phones now that have excellent large screens (even OLED) and plenty of power for normal tasks (including all but the most demanding games), and quite decent cameras, without cameras protruding far out of the case like on the the top-end flagships.

I take it you're senior management? The only technical requirements are always whatever you need for your daily life?

OP made reasonable points; not sure what your disagreement is. I think speaking in questions is detracting from your argument.

And this is why I stopped chasing newest, flagship phones. I mostly use phone for Whatsapp, email, and social media. My good old Pocophone F1 and Pixel 3 still handle my needs.

If I want a good camera, well I prefer something from Sony/Fuji, for example.

This Chinese made gaming phone is flat, has good design, and powerful specifications. I have no idea what its customized android is like or what their security and updates are like. But it is very cheap!

https://na.redmagic.gg/pages/redmagic-9-pro

The parent company is Nubia which in turn is part of ZTE (see the bits about FCC and EU): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE

Review here: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/redmagic-9-pro

It's a good looking phone but... it has a fan on it! That seriously puts me off of it unless the fan can be permanently disabled in settings or firmware.

yes, very nice indeed, but it is 2024. Why I cannot install linux to my phone as easily as i can to my lenovo laptop? I am just so tired to android and ios. They are stagnated and do not offer anything special to me.

There are several reasons, but let's start with the most obvious. The reason why you can insert a random liveUSB into a random x86 laptop and expect to successfully boot up a Linux installer is that every x86 laptop on the planet implements the same standard firmware interfaces (UEFI, ACPI, legacy BIOS) which abstract over hardware differences, at least well enough to boot a machine. By contrast, in the Arm world (including phones), there is no universally adopted firmware interface; so almost every phone model requires its own bespoke OS image.

and more importantly there aren't software vendors imposing demands for abstraction and standardization across all of the hardware vendors a la Microsoft, various unix vendors, etc. Handful of real OEMs, and only a couple of real players in the OS space, all of whom can do what they want their way.

It feels wildly absurd that mobile phones have so much RAM these days in comparison to even client desktops and laptops.

Why have we gotten to that level of memory 'bloat' in mobile operating systems?

For large language models. If you want a LLM daemon permanently running (which the article says they want to do), that means an extra several GB of memory needed on top of whatever else the OS the and apps are using.

Hope this "feature" is disableable..

What is it with SV tech companies having this terrible habit of thinking not getting a no is the same as consent, then making the ability to express your choice as contemptible and difficult as possible?

When Digital Wellbeing rolled out, users widely reported disabling it restored the sudden decreases to performance and battery life they were experiencing, and the response to that from the Pixel/Android teams was a little bizarre.

First, they issued a base denial. "Digital Wellbeing has no measured impact on the performance or battery life of your device, and if you think disabling will help, it will not."

Later, they made that true by removing the explicit toggle to disable it, doubling down on integration and lumping it into "Digital Wellbeing & parental controls". There's also no mention or warning of its purpose - data collection for metrics and usage.

There's now a "manage data" sub-menu that leaves the collection service running but gives a few options to turn down how much of what kinds of data are sent, but you've got to manually remove all permissions and stop it in adb if you want it "off".

boring boring boring

no different to all the previous phones

Its got a camera, a screen and apps! SO WHAT!

Over identification with a product.

Identification is a psychological process whereby the individual assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other (PHONE) and is transformed wholly or partially by the model that other (PHONE) provides.

Any of you heard of autonomy????????????????

What’s autonomy?

It's a phone, why does it need to be anything else? I need a device that can place and receive periodic calls. That's it.

Phone calls? Eww.

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