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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

So the Nexus 4, which is just under 2 years old, won't support Lollipop? Considering the device is from Google and not through a carrier I would expect better. No pricing on the Nexus 6 but I would expect it will cost a lot more than Nexus devices have in the past. And at only 1 inch less than their Nexus 7 tablet it seems ridiculously large. At what point is it a tablet that makes calls and not a phone?

Nexus Player is very interesting though - but again it all depends on the price which they haven't mentioned.

Edit:

As people below have pointed out they changed the page to include the Nexus 4 after my post.

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They might have changed the page since your comment but this is on the page :

"Android 5.0 Lollipop, which comes on Nexus 6, Nexus 9 and Nexus Player, will also be available on Nexus 4, 5, 7, 10 and Google Play edition devices in the coming weeks."

They did. Well good then.

Am I missing something? The Nexus 4 certainly does appear to be supported.

Android 5.0 Lollipop, which comes on Nexus 6, Nexus 9 and Nexus Player, will also be available on Nexus 4, 5, 7, 10 and Google Play edition devices in the coming weeks.

More importantly they were still selling it less than a year ago.

Just over a year ago, actually. It disappeared from the Play Store in September 2013.

Nexus 6 is $650 for 32GB.

http://motorola-blog.blogspot.com/2014/10/nexus-6-from-googl...

Thanks. Can't see the Nexus 5 US price so basing this off the UK price. Looks like between $200-300 extra.

What have they done? They've killed the single biggest feature of the nexus program, getting a great phone for an affordable off-contract price.

Yes, but before you couldn't simply get a good mid to high-range phone for $400. That's not true anymore nowadays, the Moto X 2014 will probably go down to ~350USD/Euro off-contract like last year's generation. Heck, even the Moto G is a great phone for most people and is $179 off-contract for the LTE model.

Quite affordable compared to iphone 6+, which has an off-contract price of $750/$850/$950 for 16GB/64GB/128GB - on a 5.5" display. The 4.7" 16GB iphone - lowest end model available - is $650 off-contract.

In contrast, the $650 Nexus 6 has a 5.96" display and is presumably 32GB.

I agree that $650 seems like a lot of money for a phone - but that doesn't mean it's not a good value.

https://plus.google.com/+MatiasDuarte/posts/haoy5nDv6yr

It's all kind of absurd. I skipped the Nexus 5, but was surprised when they didn't release L Preview for the Nexus 4. If that trend holds, then whatever OS update they pre-release at Google I/O 2015 will only be available on the Nexus 6. Does that mean I have to buy a Nexus 6 as an Android developer even though I don't like the size?

Hmm, as an Android developer you pretty much HAVE to buy a few Samsungs, not Nexuses.

That is - Nexuses actually work and run new OS, while people out there you're developing for are using Samsungs with their buggy and broken firmware.

That's the thing - we buy our devices in line with what our customers use. So I have about a dozen devices, but I don't think the Nexus 6 will crack into the top 10. Is it worth buying solely for whatever new developer release comes out next Google I/O?

Regardless of being officially supported (which it is) it's still a popular phone still in use by a lot of developers.

You might have to wait another month for it to hit AOSP and some of the ROM developers to merge it in, but I generally count on a Cyanogenmod release within a month.

Physically, the Nexus 7 is just over 2 inches (51.4mm) larger diagonally then the Nexus 6.

This has happened for every single Nexus device, since the Nexus One. I don't know why people keep talking about the Nexus as somehow having fresh OS upgrades; they do not.

The Nexus 4 has been nerfed since shortly after the Nexus 5 came out - just like the Galaxy Nexus was nerfed just after the Nexus 4 came out. Based on their history, a Nexus device needs to be replaced once its successor comes out, so it's not a big surprise (but still a shame) that the Nexus 4 won't support L.

As an aside, I don't think you are using the word "nerf" correctly here. "nerf" is a gaming term that means turning a powerful weapon into basically a nerf gun. It means to make something cause less damage or make something less dangerous. I'm not sure how the Nexus phones were ever causing damage to anyone. I think the terms you want are "made obsolete" or "planned obsolescence".

It's also come to mean, in general, to make something less useful. You can "nerf" an alchemy or farming skill in an MMO, even if that doesn't have any combat ability.

Still, I don't think it's super appropriate, because there's nothing making the older phones worse, they just aren't getting better in the ways they obviously could.

> Still, I don't think it's super appropriate, because there's nothing making the older phones worse, they just aren't getting better in the ways they obviously could.

They released an update to the Galaxy Nexus that literally halved performance across the board and never addressed it. The Nexus 4 has had similar woes.

I don't think it's necessarily planned obsolecence so much as allocating less resources to testing and fixing issues on older devices, but to an end-user the result is similar.

If something's effectiveness is destroyed, it has been nerfed. I think being made obsolete is an appropriate time to use the word nerf, though I don't think the phones were in fact made particularly obsolete.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nerf

To "nerf" means to weaken or make less dangerous. Google's forced obsolescence of Nexus devices is clearly making the devices weaker and less capable than they can be. I think the use of the word "nerf" was accurate and justified in this case.

The Nexus 4 will be supported by Lollipop.

Galaxy Nexus was going to be supported by Android 4.2 (I was really annoyed that it wasn't!) but the fact that it's not has to do with TI refusing to update their closed-source drivers for their OMAP 4 chip to be compatible with the Linux kernel used in 4.2. By the time people figured out how to update them, Google had given up on providing support. I'm still pissed about that.

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