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Comment by LarryDarrell | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought my wife a Pixel 8 ($500) and myself a Moto G Stylus ($175). The Pixel has a better camera, but that seems to be about it.

Something I like about my Moto is that it has a sdcard slot. That means I can sync up my entire music library (~600GB). That means I only need a small phone service plan ($15/mo). It also means I get to listen to all the Wilco I want while riding my bike down by the river where there's shoddy reception. There's also a headphone jack, which still comes in handy.

My lament is that as phones get more expensive, they seem to get less useful/interesting.

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The 2010's were an exciting time because every year new phones would come out that would be double the power of the previous generation (I still remember trying out an iPhone 3GS when it came out and it was noticeably faster than my iPhone 3G). But I would say starting in like 2016, the progress slowed down and it's now much more incremental.

I now recommend to my friends and family to get lightly used phones that are 2-3 years old. Personally I recently upgraded from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 15 and the only reason I did so was to go down in screen size from a "Pro Max" to just a "Pro". I imagine I will keep this device for the next 5-7 years and by then the reason I'll be getting a new phone probably won't be because they are noticeably faster.

But I gotta say I like where phones are now. I remember in the 2010's you had to plop down some serious money to get a super fast phone, nowdays I can buy a $150 phone on Amazon that would probably be a great phone for at least 4-5 years.

3 year old phones often have degraded batteries, which is a large part of the reason why they're so available and so cheap. You can put a new battery in for ~$50 and get a fabulous value.

I haven't seen a worthwhile innovation in phone design in at least 5 years. Everything is such a marginal gain for a smaller set of use cases. I got my kid a $150 Moto G Power like 4 years ago because it had a giant battery that lasted 3 days. That's an actually useful feature. It still runs everything just fine and has a fingerprint reader. Not much need for anything else.

I have the same phone. SD card AND headphone jack is basically unheard of on so called "flagship" phones. The camera is definitely a step down though.

The phone even has a stylus with a built in slot, although the screen itself is not presssure sensitive, the experience is like tapping on a Palm PDA.

Motorolas seemed cool when I was looking for a phone recently but their update support policy was very short. Whether it matters is another question but still..

Pretty much the same story for me. I have a Motorola, wife insisted on a Pixel costing 3 times as much. I don't see anything like 3 times the value.

There are trade offs going both directions:

- The most irritating is the Magnetometer and GPS are both better in the Pixel.

- The Motorola comes with headphone jacks, dual SIM and SDCard, better battery life.

- Fingerprint reader on the Motorola is better.

- Both use the Googles phone app, but Google turns off the call recording on Pixels but it works on the Motorola. Go figure. I use that feature when getting avoid from people like the tax office, so that's a hard no go for me.

- Cheap Motorola's don't have wireless charging, but USB cables are everywhere, wireless chargers not so much.

- I suspect the Pixel's camera is better - but I've never noticed.

Add that all up and for me the Motorola is the better phone; at 1/3 the cost of a Pixel. The "unbeatable value" claim in the headline did cause an eyebrow twitch.

$175? Was it with a carrier plan?

Unlocked. It was a 2023 model I bought in 2024. There are some screaming good deals if you don't mind buying one model older at the right time. I cannot stress enough how much I don't care about OS updates as long as my apps continue to work (not many, mostly from F-Droid).

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