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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

Currently, switching to GrapheneOS means giving Google money. Next year's Motorola-based alternative is also likely going to be several price classes above the Pixels you can currently put GrapheneOS on.

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Then buy a Pixel second-hand or when they hit rock-bottom prices, which usually happens after 6 months or so. At some point Google is probably not making a lot of profit from the devices anymore and they want to sell it to you for tracking and to sell Google One subscriptions, which are mostly irrelevant if you use GrapheneOS.

I followed Pixel prices for the last year, and rock-bottom for a 256gb version (the current absolute minimum for a device without an sd, to my eyes) meant 450€.

There are occasional good deals for (unused) older models on eBay, but they're surprisingly rare.

I wonder if Google demands stores to give the old models back, after the release of newer ones; they disappear from every store extremely quickly.

Interesting, here you can still buy the P10 and P10P for hundreds of Euros off and the prices are still trending down. Also many stores still have them. This is not surprising, because Google still sells them themselves, just in fewer colors and storage tiers.

Yeah, the 10 are still sold, but hundreds off, so at what price they're sold?

I don't want to pay more than $150 for a phone, though. And installing an alternate OS is a real hassle.

If the current $500 pixels are too expensive you're going to hate the $1000 motorolas.

Not really, GrapheneOS has a nice web installer that makes all the job for the user.

Stretching that budget to about $350 would get you a new Pixel a-series, on sale. It's well worth it.

I've tried $1000 phones before and found that they don't do anything different than my cheap phone, other than taking better quality pictures. But at least my cheap phone has an SD card slot and a headphone jack.

you can get a pixel 7 good condition for that

There's zero reason to buy a last year phone.

The latest pixels are a complete downgrade from the previous year (worse components). That's one huge reason to buy a last year phone (as opposed to a current one).

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