https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_9
https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_9_pro_fold
Usually the Pro is bigger than the non-Pro but this time they're exactly the same size, and they've added a bigger Pro XL variant.
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Google-Pixel-9,Google...
The Pro and Pro XL appear to have identical specs aside from the screen size/resolution and a slightly bigger battery in the XL.
How harvest sensors, cams, thingamathings and have a new cadre of people who can build plans to take sensor THING from PHONEA and CAMERA from PHONEB and etc... and build a thing where these already known devices can be harvested and incorporated into projects, products, etc... and not landfil.?
I've moved to FairPhone anyway because there are concerns more important than compactness.
6.3” is still huge. 5.8” is workable. And it’s not like there’s no precedent, the Zenfone 10 is also 5.8” and is adored for it.
Then they released the enormous 6.8" Zenfone 11 Ultra this March, with still no indication that there will be a smaller variant. The small Zenfone 10 might not have sold well enough to justify doing another one.
What's extra annoying is I never felt the need to use a case when phones were smaller, but one-handed corner reaching upsets the balance of the phone in my hand now to the point where it feels like a necessity—making the phone even bigger and bulkier.
Nexus 7: 198.5 x 120 x 10.5 mm, 340 g
Pixel 9 XL: 162.8 x 76.6 x 8.5 mm, 221 g
Not for lack of trying, since both Apple and Samsung tried in 2019 with their mini iPhones and Galaxy S10e respectively which were both smaller versions of their normal phones. Neither line continues today.
Apple has some precedent with their premium iPad Mini which costs more than their normal iPad and gets irregularly updated, but it might be hard to market an "iPhone Mini SE Pro".
It'll never happen but I'll keep dreaming.
It's actually the opposite - big screens inevitably mean "expensive", and phones are status symbols. Unfortunately, vain people outnumber practical people by various orders of magnitude, so the market goes where the money is.
The only way to correct this trend would be to coopt an inordinate amount of celebrities, and make them advocate for smaller phones. That's the only group that vain people will blindly follow.
I suspect in practice we're stuck with big phones until the phone concept actually manages to disappear entirely (turning into wearables or lenses).
My wife inherits my phones, and when I first switched to the iPhone "Max" size, she thought they were ridiculously, impractically large and was reluctant to switch. But after she had used it for a month or two, she couldn't go back, having that big screen is just too nice. For watching video, looking at photos, reading text, etc.
If they hadn't disabled the ability to root the device, I would've bought one.
Everyone keeps talking about wanting small phones, but when the time to pull the wallet comes, there's always an excuse.
Adoration alone does not pay salaries. At the end of the day the manufacturers are businesses looking to generate as large a profit as possible (some even want to build the best tech possible while doing so), so as much as any of us may adore one feature or another, the only thing that really matters is sales volume and the resulting profits.
On top of that you've got the same earbuds form factor, smart watches, etc.
Unfortunately due to their market dominance and muddling of (hardware, OS, software distribution, and platform ecosystem), it's almost impossible to disentangle.
It'd be amazing if the DOJ made these companies only offer one slice of those four things. There would be so much competition and a wild variety of new things being tried.
Whilst true, it's a bit misleading in the sense it's only best selling by a very slim margin. It's iphone and then everything else (by a huge margin).
https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-an...
https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/us-smartphone-market-share
The two big phone giants in the US are Apple and Samsung. Of which Samsung isn't muddling the hardware, OS, software distribution. Maybe platform ecosystem, but generally a Samsung smartwatch or headphones will work with any other Android phone just fine.
I got the original Airpods about a year before I switched to iPhone, and they worked pretty much flawlessly with my Galaxy S8+. I assume they missed Siri-specific features (which I don’t care for even after switching to iPhone), and the newer ones probably miss some other more advanced/iOS-specific features (like Apple’s implementation of spatial audio and speech awareness). But all the actual main functionality was there, and I never felt like I was missing out by not using Airpods with iOS.
Apple Watch is a different story though, but it kinda makes sense, given how tightly integrated into iOS it is with quite a bit of private health data (that I would never trust Android with managing properly).
https://blogs.gnome.org/jdressler/2024/06/26/do-a-firmware-u...
To change settings and to update the firmware. There are no standards for these operations, so you'd have to resort to an an OEM specific app (stand-alone, or integrated into a the OS, like Mac OS) to manage these.
Only the couple of first generations of Beats products after the acquisition have used the Apple-branded SoCs.
The current line-up uses unnamed Beats-specific chip that has ~most (but not all!) of the same features as the W1/W2 on iOS.
From the current line-up, only Powerbeats Pro (2019) and Beats Flex (2020) use Apple branded-chip, and I'm under the impression that the newer models have more Android-specific niceties.
I would expect next refreshes of those Beats model to lose H1/W1/W2.
- an SoC made on TSMC's latest process node, with a humongous die, and all the associated power/performance benefits
- because of how many phones apple can sell, they can divide the cost of R&D over more units, and can design things like their own CPU cores
- "Ask app not to track" that works, because of the app store monopoly
- I don't have to use 12342342345234 payment apps for each bank's credit card, Apple Wallet works with all of them (the EU wants to ruin this for Europeans)
As a consumer, I'm a huge fan of US antitrust law, where the test is harm to consumers
All of the antitrust shit Apple does largely benefits its consumers _for the moment_. It's worth acknowledging that, but it's also worth acknowledging that this is necessarily a temporary state, and under different leadership, Apple will make different decisions.
EU-style antitrust regulation foists shitty products on customers for the sake of ~~extracting their pound of flesh from US big tech~~ allowing businesses to compete
Sorry, are you an EU citizen?
Because I am, and despite the fact that I work in tech, am absurdly happy that they are actually doing antitrust (even if I dislike some of the specific actions).
Big, monopolistic companies are problematic (from my perspective) and I welcome all and any actions that make markets more competitive, both as a citizen and as a capitalist.
As if you're benefitting from that with apples margins.
For now. If Apple suddenly take a 20bn hit to services revenue, then I'd expect them to dial their advertising way, way up.
So yeah, FB won't track you but Apple definitely will.
You'd be right that there'd be a lot of new ideas floated and a lot of competition, but it's hard to see how that plays out in a way that benefits the consumer and make smart phones a better value. I'm no fan of the duopoly, but it's hard to imagine how forcing them to break their services apart winds up anywhere other than the services becoming noticeably shittier and only like 5% of people bothering to change from the defaults anyway. I also think that the innovation around smartphones has all but died, and if there was some killer innovation to be had, it would probably be worth much more in this market than an open market. The market is harder to make distinctions in than even electric cars are, and a distinguishing innovation would surely trigger a bidding war between Apple and Google at this point.
It's a rough case of what I want philosophically (break them up with great prejudice) and what I think is best for the user experience itself being directly at odds.
Do their moderation/review processes meaningfully improve the situation for users?
Both app stores are replete with scam/spam/spy/malware apps. I'm not convinced that the app stores are able to materially affect the quality of apps that go through.
I think it is more complicated, and nuanced, than this.
I have a theory that the world can only support a maximum of 2 consumer computing platforms at a time, due to the cost of writing and porting software. Therefore causing a natural tendency towards either a monopoly (seen in the 90s and early 2000s) or a duopoly (the current smartphone era).
The fact is writing software is expensive. Developing cross platform frameworks is also incredibly difficult and in the case of Mobile, has taken a massive 3rd party entity (Facebook) the better part of a decade (React Native) to get even close to "working well" (with other solutions also being decade long projects). One can argue that during the first decade of Android vs iPhone, (2007 to 2017) that the cross platform solutions were all pretty terrible, thus the massive shakeup that React Native (for all its warts) caused.
Then there is the fact that developing a consumer OS is hard and expensive. Very few companies have the resources needed to make a consumer OS. Not just writing software, but localization, documentation, SDKs, UX work, security, update infrastructure, and so on and so forth.
Honestly I'd say today's current duopoly may even be a bad thing for small software companies, basically doubling development costs. Compare this to the 90s when releasing consumer software just meant compiling for a Microsoft OS and never worrying again because Microsoft handled forwards compatibility for you!
Contrast that to now days where you see applications to control smart appliances apps being discontinued left and right because companies cannot justify keeping 2 dev teams staffed so they can patch an app once every couple years when app store guidelines force changes.
HTML
If we adopted standards instead of making walled gardens, things would work. If the onus was on Apple and Google to make their platforms standards compliant, and that the egg would be on their face if they didn't, they would be the ones doing the rigorous testing, bug fixing, and optimization.
If Microsoft can make their platform work for 20+ years of software, Apple and Google can be on the hook for HTML, WASM, and a standardized UI and hardware abstraction layer.
There's frankly not much of a technical reason why Android phones and iPhones can't run each others' apps except for the malignant IP enforcement of both Google and Apple.
This is a business problem - take away Apple's 30% cut and see how quickly they change their tune on "security."
There's also no good reason why you should have to distribute your software on iOS through a monopoly app store or why Android should hide the ability to install software from non-Google app stores or the internet behind a scary "security" warning. That "security" warning, while better than what Apple does, is itself a monopolistic practice that should be illegal.
Honestly, even outside of gaming, we could probably go back to web apps again, now that hardware is better. Zuck's famous quote about the company's biggest mistake being going with HTML5 instead of native for mobile is 12 years old.
Any market that has an extremely high barrier of entry will and ends up only supporting one or two company. ASML and TSMC being a prime example.
It is how many platform ecosystems a market can support problem. Creating a platform ecosystem creates higher costs and lowers profits for everyone building in the market (the market in this case being "all smartphone users").
1 more platform is going to be at least a 30% increase in dev costs (if not a full on 50% increase, and for large complex apps it can be even worse), and now if that platform gains market share, that is less sales on the other 2 platforms for anyone who doesn't support all three.
So to make the same money as before, a company now needs to spend 30%-50% more on development expenses.
There is a natural limit to the number of platforms that can exist when the cost of building across multiple platforms is non-trivial.
This by the way was why even the tiny European market was able to support so many different 8-bit platforms back in the day. Porting costs were minimal, one or two people for a couple of months, and developer costs were much lower back then. Jump to the 90s and now suddenly you have just 2 consoles, and with Xbox losing market share year over year, we may soon be down to just one in another decade or so.
You should go watch the Flossy Carter videos he's done on the Pixel watch. Dude has huge arms and the Pixel watch looks like a Barbie watch on his wrist. He normally rocks the Apple Watch Ultra or the Samsung Galaxy watch which look more normal on his wrist.
I think Google has a ways to go before they're competing with Apple and Samsung in the watch department.
Seems like a decent choice, given that the average person has average arms by definition.
When I close mine, my dog immediately jumps up because he knows I'm done sitting down messing with my phone.