I have negative desire to get a phone billing itself around AI and LLM features. I turn off every AI assistant feature on my existing devices, I actively don't want a phone that ties Gemini and AI photoshop even tighter into it. If Google wanted to actually improve their phones they would add basic software functionality they're still missing instead like, say, a per-app volume mixer that half the 3rd party Android phones I've used have added but is still missing from AOSP and Pixel.
> I have negative desire to get a phone billing itself around AI and LLM features
Google has been tastefully integrating AI into phones for a while now using opt-ins. The now-many-years old phone screening feature ensures the fear of spam won't lead to unintentionally missing calls from the doctor/dentist who call from unknown numbers. Screening suspicious calls instead of declining them is a massive quality of life improvement, and having an AI assistant answer your phone and do a live transcription is straight from the Jetsons.
There is also "hold for me", where the phone listens to hold music for you, then rings when the operator arrives.
And there is a feature now to show you how busy a customer service line is at a particular time, and to give you a text transcript with clickable buttons for the phone tree.
Am I the only one who thinks these features really don't add much to the experience?
If an annoying phone tree is going to take 3 minutes to navigate by listening to the prompts, then it will also take 3 minutes to navigate by letting the AI listen and write little buttons for me.
I didn't really save any time.
If on the other hand it could say "other users have seen this phone tree before, so here is the whole searchable tree with no waiting", that would be a noteworthy feature.
Hold for me is pretty good. I've never used the phonetree feature, but I think it's often the case that I don't know which button I need to press: I have to listen to them all first, then decide which one. Commonly I have to listen to the tree twice: once to decide, and once to find out what to click. I'll probably look for the phonetree next time, so I can just read over it and find what I want. I agree it would be much better to preload it, but that might not be plausible due to privacy concerns or legal reasons.
There are probably only ~10,000 phone trees that cover the vast majority of calls in the USA.
If a phone tree is seen by many users and is identical, there is probably no privacy reason not to publish it. Even moreso if the total number of digits typed in quick succession is < 4 (ie. user hasn't entered some password to get in). A human operator could be the final check.
I recently discovered that you can Google "{company} phone number", and in a number of cases it will offer to call, navigate the phone tree, wait on hold, and call you when a customer service agent is on the line. Delta, Allegiant, etc all seem to work.
> Am I the only one who thinks these features really don't add much to the experience?
Probably because it's just bolting more shit on the ends of a shitty, outdated relic of a system. Like, we have two different computers, one of which is playing back a pre-recorded voice, to a computer which is transcribing that voice into text and buttons, so it can play a generated voice back to the other computer, which will then interpret that voice into text, then perform an action based on that text. The action probably being repeating that process a few more times.
This is remarkably bad. I'm remembering the last time I had to deal with Apple Support. I didn't sit on hold for hours, I told them I needed a call, told them what the issue was, gave a brief summary, and then their support person called me, I was immediately on the phone with a human, she sorted out my problem, and the entire thing took probably 10 minutes tops, including filling out the form.
It feels like these legitimate challenges to businesses to manage their customer service lines, support lines, etc. have actual solutions that:
a) don't require two different damn computers talking over a shitty low-baud connection to one another, and
b) result in a better experience for all parties involved
If they'd just be willing to spend a little goddamn money, like they actually care to provide good service, rather than just paying lip service to it while offering the same garbage system they've offered since the fucking 1970's.
> result in a better experience for all parties involved
Yu are mistaken in assuming businesses want better experiences for everyone, including workflows that may lose them revenue (like cancelations).
The friction is intentional and part of a wider dark pattern strategy employed for "retention" - even Apple does this when one tries to get them to stop an unexpected recurring Apple Music subscription that only shows on ones credit card and nowhere else (apple.com or the Music app). The support number is not provided on amy of the support pages, and ine has to get their bank to stop the outgoing payments. Guess how I know this...
In light of this, I'll gladly take any client-side agent assistance I can get to make to reduce my cognitive burden; the "hold for me" emulates the support agent calling you as you described.
, and the experience is more important than implementation details.
I can empathize. I recently tried to cancel Adobe Indesign. Every human stuck to the same script despite me stating 'no' up front after the first time it offered. They would confirm my intention, then when I stepped away they would cancel the chat because I was 'away' and did not double confirm that I wanted to cancel. That happened to me twice. By the third time, the sandbag was - 'You signed up for a yearly subscription, if you don't take those two free months, you will incur a early cancellation fee.' I never signed up for a yearly subscription and told them 'not accepting that'. As a gesture of 'goodwill' they waived it.
I could not understand all the Adobe hate before, but they made a neutral person negative with that experience.
> It feels like these legitimate challenges to businesses to manage their customer service lines, support lines, etc.
Wrong. These are not challenges. The customer service lines work exactly as designed: as cheap as possible to operate, as effective as possible in preventing majority of the callers from engaging support staff and starting any kind of support process. And the magic, most people who try and fail to get support believe it's their own fault - they're not being patient enough, or persistent enough, or maybe the problem isn't that big a deal, etc.
The companies don't want you to work around the phone tree and hold time. And once most people have tools that are able to, the companies will adjust their support channels to compensate.
Correct, I've had it show all the phone tree options as soon as the phone tree starts playing. So, yes, it will reduce time to navigate the tree in that way.
Also, it often prevents me from having to listen to the tree twice, if I am looking for a better option and then decide a previous one was actually the better fit.
Really? I mean it 'saves your time' by not having you to keep waiting so that you can do something else in that time. I don't know how that is not useful. Even if I'm not doing anything world changing in those 3 minutes, it will save me some stress.
i googled this; looks like it means "Interactive Voice Response" menu, describing automated phone systems where the user navigates a series of options using either their phone buttons or their voice.
That's what they are called in India, at least, where I live, and where I am from, although the term would not have originated in India, since it would have been brought in by mobile phone companies.
Although I have a good amount of exposure to, and familiarity, with US terms and slang, due to older relatives up to grandfather level having visited the US for more than short periods, having visited the US myself, and having worked in US-based companies (but in India), the exposure is not complete, that's why I was not familiar with the term phone tree.
I've worked at call centers and contact centers whatever the hell you wanna call them places for 15+ years. have you legit never heard the term phone tree before? I'm on the east coast in case its a regional thing, that's like literally what my dad who wasn't an uneducated person called them. totally just curious here!
> If an annoying phone tree is going to take 3 minutes to navigate by listening to the prompts, then it will also take 3 minutes to navigate by letting the AI listen and write little buttons for me.
If it's a common number for a support line it actually shows you the options before they're stated by the robot. Say for example if I call bank of america's support line, it will show the not-yet-said options as greyed out, but selectable. If the call robot accepts early inputs you can actually navigate a phone menu quite rapidly. Pair that with the estimated wait times or "hold for me" you can save yourself the headache of "actively" waiting.
All of that would be great if it was actually available to me in the smaller country/market I live in, which is less of a priority for Google. I still paid for them as part of the phone.
You can, and I did, but at some point I must've accidentally fumbled one of the many 'would you like to back up your data to...?' requests as I recently had a warning that my Google drive was nearly full. This was perplexing as I very rarely use it, so I check and lo! A years worth of photos off my daughter there. Not happy.
This happened to my mom too. She told me she can't do any more photos because her storage is full. So I checked her android phone a and somehow the cloud backup got activated (we explicitly turned that off!!) and our family photos were uploaded to google cloud..
Heck, Google is removing Location History storage from their side and making it device side only. Users in the past few weeks are getting notified to trigger the migration to device storage or all data is deleted.
Except Google Photos, which every couple days starts up telling me my phone is backing up (it isn't yet, not until I confirm it on the screen) and presenting an opt-out for uploading photos to Google. That's in Poland, EU, so I'm not sure how is that even legal. Next time, I'll ask my local DPA.
If you refuse to upload all your photos, Google Photos randomly sometimes pops up a second request to upload your 200 most recent photos instead.
I declined the first request that interrupted my task, then tried to select a photo to continue my work, but the "Yes" button for uploading recent photos appeared over top of the photo just as I clicked. Google Photos immediately began uploading my photos without my true consent.
eh? Two years ago they didn't allow MRU in GMaps if you weren't logged on.[0]
And with every new phone I always power on it without an account, update, reset and only then add an account; I had my share of 'I did disable that thing'
EDIT:
[0] and they claimed what there is not enough storage for it. On a fresh phone with 128Gb on board. For the small array of ~30-100 letters. Fuckers.
The AI editing tools in the Google Photos app (https://blog.google/products/photos/google-photos-editing-fe...) also feel like magic and have been very useful/convenient for me, so honestly I can't agree with all the negative comments. It feels like there are plenty of ways to incorporate AI that add value for users and don't require a weird ChatGPT-like interface.
Despite also having no desire to have an "AI" phone, this feature is incredibly useful; however hard I try to avoid it, there are organisations who will insist that they contact me by telephone.
Luckily it's available on older devices so I can keep my 6a going for another year.
I dislike the bundling of hardware and software alltogether.
In the world of laptops, we have a wonderful situation. I can select the hardware that I like, then wipe the whole disk and install the software I like. Which in my case is a Linux distribution and then exactly the applications I prefer.
You can kinda do that with Pixels and Sony Xperias only, because last I recall, they implement Android Verified Boot correctly (or non-draconianly), specifically avb_custom_key.
From a security and freedom perspective, I actually like the restrictions of the Android platform if implemented as Google intended, which means allowing you to roll your own ROM and relock the bootloader with your own keys. Android itself has among the strongest security models for a consumer platform, again if implemented as Google intended (which is why GrapheneOS only supports Pixels). You're actually not supposed to root your phone because that opens up a large attack surface.
It's inconvenient for customization, sure, but you can still wipe the phone and roll your own system. It's a matter of the workflow to do it.
Certainly they're much more complex. More susceptible to malware, too.
But they're also much more powerful. I can get tasks done 10x as fast. They're much more open, too. They have well-defined interfaces for most things, which means I can automate tasks. Can't do that on a phone.
This is the correct answer. Grapheneos is basically the minimum acceptable security standard anyone should put up with from a device they carry around all day.
Same for me, I feel all those AI assistants are most of the time hit or miss (even though they improved very much in the recent times) + UX is most of the time not that good because of the network latency.
But on the positive side i like the new 9 pro because of its smaller size + hardware improvements (better ultrawide, ultra sonic finger print sensor, 16GB RAM...)
I'm with you that AI is overhyped but your suggested feature is "per app volume mixers" like in Windows? What's the use case on a mobile phone to warrant the extra complexity?
An example I can think of is when you're listening to a podcast or music that has been recorded on low volume. Without a volume mixer you're forced to increase the general volume, resulting in overly 'loud' sound notifications from other apps.
That can be fixed with Garmin notification sound being treated as a notification sound.
Adding per app volume control is IMHO a really bad UX. It means there's a master volume and then per app volume is like a coefficient the app volume is multiplied by.
My car has its own volume control separate from the phone bluetooth volume and I hate the experience of having two volume knobs interacting with each other when all I want to do is to increase or decrese volume
The use-case is the exact same one that is on a desktop. System-wide setting for a comfortable max volume, application specific volume because different apps handle audio differently. Youtube videos are loud, voice chat is usually moderate, some recordings are quiet.
Samsung/OneUI has a good few addons like this. Ability for multiple apps to play sound is good too (same addon) and the ability to output different apps from different sound devices at the same time (built in)
Recent Pixels support Android Virtualization Framework, which theoretically allows Linux or Android VMs alongside the primary Android OS. Could be good for experimentation.
why? AI is very useful in day to day life, and having a phone with on-device capabilities is crazy useful even for those that like their privacy and are paranoid about big corpos stealing their data. I don't see any reason to hate these features.
I'm glad they finally went this route. I can't be the only one who usually wants the specs of the Pro but always opts for the smallest phone (p1, p3, p5 & now p8).
Pretty much in the same boat here. The P9P is around the same size as my P8 (0.1" shifted from depth to width), which is great news. I would pay more for a better camera, but I care more about compactness than camera quality.
As likely anyone on HN is to hold: I have a bunch of old phones.
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 long for the days of being able to reach all four corners of my phone screen with one thumb. I had an iPhone 12 mini which was a wonderful respite, but apparently us small phone fans are a small enough demographic to not warrant serving.
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.
iPhone has this accessibility feature ‘Reachability’ that can help. On the SE you double tap (but not click) the home button, I think on others you swipe up and down quickly from the bottom centre.
Reachability is useless and no substitute for a smaller screen. It just slows you down, obscures the bottom half of the screen and makes a lot of gestures impossible.
I believe that sort of feature got to Android first, and they're still there, but in reality they are no substitute for actual reach. They add cognitive and time overhead to the gesture.
> 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.
Small display sizes used to mean "cheap phone" for so long that people still won't pay more money for a smaller device.
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'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).
For the majority of the population, their phone is their main computing platform. It makes sense beyond "vanity" that people want the display on their main computing platform to be large.
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.
I had the opposite experience. I've been using a larger phone for the last 3 years and to be honest, I'm ready to go back. Too many times I had to look up something in a hurry, one-handed, and just couldn't. It also fell off my hands way too often, and the choice between a sturdy one (that makes it even more unmanageably big) and a flimsy one (that will only protect from light scratches) is just depressing.
Yup. I had a Pixel 4a, which is 5.8". I thought it was a great phone and still perfectly usable, but it stopped getting security updates. I'm now using a Pixel 8. It's fine, but too large and no headphone jack. I'd buy a new Pixel tomorrow if they released a smaller one.
Yes, this too! The in-screen fingerprint reader on the Pixel 8 is distinctly not as good as the dedicated one on the Pixel 4a. I'm surprised they shipped it.
> the Zenfone 10 is also 5.8” and is adored for it
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.
There's usually a #a model like that around April/May. I think they stagger the release as many(most) would probably just opt for the a model most of the time.
The Pixel and iPhone are really seeming homogenous with each other. The marketing seems similar, typefaces used, the naming conventions are close to the same, the airbrushed image generators, the photos app marketing that's turning your personal photos into a photoshoot with editing capabilities.
On top of that you've got the same earbuds form factor, smart watches, etc.
>> On top of that you've got the same earbuds form factor, smart watches, etc.
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.
I wish we had more than two phone giants. This is aggravating.
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.
As far as the phone hardware goes, Google isn't much of a giant worldwide: Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Huawei and probably a few more outsell Google. The pixel is downright rare outside of the US.
They don't even sell Pixels in most places, the Pixel 9 series is launching in 32 countries, except the Pixel 9 Fold which is only launching in 19. Believe it or not that's a significant improvement from the Pixel 8 series and first Fold which debuted in only 20 and 4 countries respectively.
This might be misleading. I've got a Japanese model Pixel -- except that I bought it in Chile, from a Chilean supplier. (Had to root and tinker with some hidden partition just to disable the camera shutter sound.)
Also Samsung has been innovating with hardware. I'm not the hugest fan of their flavor of Android but I absolutely love my flip phone and would not consider switching back to iOS or pure Android unless Apple or Google were to make a flip.
Samsung + Universal Android Debloater rocks. You get great hardware and you can remove as much or as little of the Samsung\Google nonsense as you like.
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.
Tangentially related, but I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by how well Airpods (at least the original ones) worked with Android phones.
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).
Oddly enough there is an official Android app for Beats headphones, which use the exact same Apple SoCs as AirPods ever since Apple acquired them. They surely could extend that app to work with AirPods too but they've seemingly made the arbitrary decision not to.
That's not exactly true, unfortunately; because Apple's product line-up would be too easy to understand otherwise.
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.
Equalizer config, shortcut button config, and firmware updates mainly. There isn't a standard way to do those on Android without a manufacturer-specific app. As for why you might want to update the firmware on your headphones, well...
Why would you want an app for bluetooth headphones.
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.
> Unfortunately due to their market dominance and muddling of (hardware, OS, software distribution, and platform ecosystem), it's almost impossible to disentangle.
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.
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.
Yes, but then all apps would be poorly-written webapps in a single-threaded language with a bunch of performance kludges bolted on (like WASM, which STILL inexplicably can't directly edit the DOM).
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."
The video game industry has already solved this problem with engines like Unreal that can compile to PC, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo. There's certainly no reason why you shouldn't be able to just compile the same phone app from the same IDE to both iOS and Android. I believe the architectures are basically the same but with different operating systems.
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.
It isn't just the barrier to entry, Microsoft famously paid the cost to enter the smartphone market.
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.
If AGI ever becomes a thing and you can simply spend electricity to write the new operating system, that would be pretty insane, and it seems like it would disrupt duopoly.
Would there be competition though? Take the mobile app stores: consumers are going to demand that prices are consistent across storefronts (or preferentially buy from the cheapest option), so that market will inevitably race to the bottom. Is that better for consumers than Apple and Google operating them and demanding a high enough margin to support moderation and review? Or hardware; if Apple was mandated to support Android on their devices, who do you think is going to pay for the additional testing burden? Apple's certainly not going to take it out of their profit margin, they're going to forward the expense down the line, as will everyone else.
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.
>Is that better for consumers than Apple and Google operating them and demanding a high enough margin to support moderation and review?
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.
They certainly improve the situation for shareholders. I am banned from the Google app store for making an app which was labeled with the service it interacted with, which was trademarked. (Example: If you make a Reddit app, Google won't let you put "Reddit" anywhere in the label without Reddit's legal permission, making it impossible for anyone to discover your app through search, which is the way people discover apps)
I would rather have a better phone than more options, apple's 800-pound gorilla-ness gets me a phone with:
- 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
There's that old saying that a benevolent dictatorship is the best and most effective form of government, right up until the dictator dies.
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.
if the antitrust actions actually harm the consumer, then the government can take action
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
> 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.
Apple's monopoly margins suck the air out of the innovation manifold, so who actually knows? Maybe we would have cured cancer already or something without the Apple Tax. All that money goes to a whole lot of incrementalism rather than bold new ideas and diversity.
Thanks for highlighting! If anything, based on compare page, it seems that camera setup is closer to previous gen Fold rather than Pixel 9. Barely any changes.
I have a zFlip 5 and love it. I was pretty hesitant about switching (Pixel user before) but I like the smaller size in my pocket when folded and there seems to be a psychological effect of closing it when I'm done that results in my mindlessly fiddling with it less.
My dog sleeps most of the day. I get about 10% of the amount of sleep that he does. I'm fine disturbing his sleep once in a while, especially when he's the one that wakes me up early almost every day. I love my dog, but his comfort comes second to mine.
The dominance of the negativity in these comments is noteworthy. Personally, I thought it was a exciting update with major hardware improvements, some compelling AI demos and use cases at a similar price point as the past. Top tech reviewers e.g. MKBHD has similar impressions.
Mostly just curious as to why there are ~0 positive comments here. I suspect could be:
1) anti-google HN bias - perhaps deserved?
2) it's simply more tempting/satisfying/rewarding to complain about rather than to praise big companies
3) any other ideas?
I'm guessing the 95% negative comment proportion isn't representative though so I was curious if anyone had any explanations for the HN skew
Simple AI fatique I guess? Personally I'm immediately turned off when yet another product announcement mentions AI gimmicks, especially when there's no other features to get excited about. It's like the time when each new TV came with "3D support".
I don't really think there's bias, it's just that HN these days predominately attracts negative ranting comments.
It's not really Google specific either - if you look at any other topic, even Linux or OSS related, there's going to be bunch of highly upvoted people ranting and raving. That pushes out any kind of positive discussion and normal people leave.
We all know negative content drives more engagement, see: Facebook. But I've also noticed this trend and for me it makes sense seeing as most of the content on the internet nowadays is negative content. Social media is used to belittle and criticize other people/ideas, the news has never been positive, we've passed the stage where content creators that are positive about products are seen as trustworthy, because an overly positive attitude has been linked to a "shill" mindset. We've seen the evolution of big tech from trying to destabilise old/existing industries and giving us a new, improved service to trying to squeeze as much profit out of their users as possible. Other big companies have dominated their competition and have used that power to boost prices, limit access to media, decrease the user experience,... In a lot of ways I feel like the toxicity that we are experiencing online these days is a direct result of noticing all these negative patterns and realising that most of what is being advertised to us has a large chance of being too good to be true. Games that look good pre-release but then get released full of bugs, software that was once a good deal becomes a subscription, series that get cancelled too soon, products that look good on release but have issues not long after without a chance to repair them, companies completely changing their objectives after a CEO change, the list goes on. So instead of trying to be positive and finding ways to get excited about something it is now a "safer" bet to be critical and negative about anything that is being announced because of the cycles of dissapointment we've all been through. At least to me, this makes sense, eventhough I would like to see it be different.
I've been wondering if Reddit has always been this cesspool or if I just got older. When I'm logged in it's not too bad because I curated the subreddits, but the default subs it shows me when I'm logged out feel like half the content is angry people complaining about politics and immigrants.
My personal pet theory is that the Internet is aging.
20 yrs ago, most of the Internet users were teenagers and very young adults.
Most of these people are in their late 30s to 40s now.
Did new kids join too? Sure! But if you look at the birth rates of our societies, you'll notice that it's a bell curve. Consequently, the average age is going up.
Furthermore, there is a strong selection bias with this demographic: the happier they're, the less likely they're going to be on these platforms, because they'll prioritize family, hobbies or whatever else over ... Well... "shit posting with random strangers".
Ultimately you're left with a significant chunk of people that are often disgruntled, jaded or outright mentally unwell.
It's not really new, even going back there were flame wars and shit-posting on BBSes before the internet was common. It tends to come with relative anonymity.
It takes curated communities in order to overcome. Some places do better than others. It's also all to easy for biases to become policy in some of these communities/sites which can wind up almost worse than the shit posting to begin with.
I guess mostly because the only thing new smartphones offer is faster cpu, more memory (which I don't really need, a 10y old smartphone handle my current load correctly) and a better camera and an always bigger footprint.
The only thing I like is the possible better camera sensors, but that won't make me shed thousands of dollars for it. If I have the choice I'd rather have a more compact model with the camera quality of the previous iteration which was already great.
I can understand it will sell because a lot of people have the feeling they live a crappy life and wants to cheat by taking crappy pictures and videos and have a some magic inventing a better imaginary life that they can share on instagram and tiktok but I am not one of them. If I take a picture, I want to get the moment, with all its imperfections including the sad face of a stranger or dog peeing leg up against a wall in the background.
And yes I understand I am not everyone, but I really don't care what everyone want because I am not the one trying to sell that phone.
I just had a samsung galaxy s6 edge die one me, probably because of heat.
I do the usual stuff, navigation, whatsapp, music, video...except I tend to avoid installing apps when the corresponding website works well (but I still have lots of different apps) and the only social media I am connecting to is the fediverse through the browser.
I'm using a Pixel 4a myself, prior to that was a Pixel 2XL and I had about every third Nexus and a few other phones before that as well as a One-Plus phone somewhere in there. My current phone still runs fine, and I'll probably upgrade when the 9a comes out, I do think they're priced more than I would like.
I've tended to like the close to stock experience, but I do turn off all. the assistant features that I can.
I was happily using an iPhone 6S (which is very nearly 9 years old) until recently (when I dropped it and smashed the screen). It definitely wasn't as fast as a modern phone (but it honestly wasn't bad), the camera was much worse, and the battery life wasn't as good. But it some ways it was better: it had a fingerprint reader (modern iphones don't), and it was much smaller and lighter.
> I guess mostly because the only thing new smartphones offer is faster cpu
The next killer-feature in the race to the bottom is probably software, not hardware, and is near realtime translation. Samsung is airing an advert for that right now, but it's not real time.
Better "AI" with a faster CPU and everyone has their own Babel fish.
I think it's because Google could make a great phone, but choose not to. They keep adding gimmicky features that myself and apparently many other HNers don't care for, while core functionality is neglected and often regresses.
I own a Pixel 8 Pro and it is without a doubt the worst phone I have owned in at least a decade. The amount of bugs for such an expensive product is mind boggling.
One of main features is the camera but I've found myself taking far fewer photos with the phone than I expected I would, mainly because the camera UX just kind of sucks in a 100 small to medium ways that add up to an unpleasant experience. Just for example: you need to reenable the manual focus slider after ever picture, focus peaking is flawed and impossible to disable, there's a very noticeable lag with the telephoto mode when adjusting the camera, setting are buried in several different menus, and more.
The only reason I would even consider another Google phone after this one is that the phone landscape has gotten pretty bad as a whole. Samsung phones have their own list of flaws and I won't buy a phone that Apple dictates what I can do with; and those are the alternatives for buying a nice phone that I'm aware of, but if anyone has other suggestions I'm all ears. I loved LG phones and wish those were still around.
Out of (genuine) curiosity, what major hardware improvements are you referring to?
On paper, it’s largely the same as prior years for the SoC at least. I think the fold has the most obvious upgrade but nothing I’d consider really major. Other than that, it seems like mostly a camera bump year?
- Much brighter screen
- Next gen tensor chip
- 50% ram upgrade
- Better camera + battery
- SOS functionality
- Better ultrasonic fingerprint sensor
Holistically felt like meaningful improvements across the board to me, but I understand where you're coming from. I think maybe I have lower expectations for improvements year to year
Ah, fair. I usually don’t include form factor too much because it’s so subjective.
I think perhaps one of the reasons for the negativity here is that the price is approaching flagship from other companies, but that Tensor G4 performs like chips from four years ago.
I think that overshadows a lot of the improvements. Perhaps if the whole package was significantly cheaper, the reception would be more balanced.
First sentence of the current top voted comment. What's constructive about that?
You could argue the rest of the comment makes up for it, but I don't agree. It reads like a standard negative rant against change to me. I don't see much constructive here.
> I just hate modern phones, all of them. I want an adequate one-hand screen size (~6"), a headphone jack, and an even camera bump (just so it lies flat on the table).
I love the pixel 8a, the size, curvature and camera bump seems ideal. Ofc they removed a freaking 3.5mm jack, but I can make a compromise here and buy 100 type-c to 3.5mm adapters, but I'm super disappointed with the new 9x series, they are now even more blocky and square-ish which i really don't like, plus no "a" model which is usually looking much better for me than the main one.
> Does anyone know the phone which is small, has a headphone jack, even camera bump and is still buyable to this day?
A release of the 9th model of a phone is not "change", the change lies in the past for devices like this. I believe general statements like this increases the cynicism of those that don't really feel invested in the soft- and hardware landscape of current-day smartphones and there is a lot of reason for that in my opinion.
Essentially get the same product with improvements that are only another iteration. The Pixel 9 might be a good device comparatively, but I would be more surprised if people were too hyped about it. The larger context of hype and Google is relevant here as well.
First question I had when hearing about a Google phone is, if they try to make it harder to block advertising. I don't believe the thought is too unreasonable, is it?
„Top“ in the sense that a lot of people watch them. Please don’t take seriously what they say. Luise Rossman did an excellent video on marques apple propaganda.
Or people resent the major privacy issues, inconsistent UX, and deprioritization of what they see as needed features, all to add a few hugely hyped but minimally useful AI features.
My biggest worry is that everyone complaining about hamburger menus will soon be wishing they could use a hamburger menu instead of being forced into chatting with an AI for menu settings.
What qualifies someone as a “top tech reviewer”? It’s a phone for gods sake and some random YouTubers opinion isn’t anymore valid than a random Hackernews commentators opinion.
If we were getting opinions on the latest PhD paper on attention mechanisms than I’d trust someone with a PhD versus a random person, but for getting opinions on the new Google phone? Think for yourself.
Joe Rogan has a lot more subscribers and listeners than this guy, does it mean I should listen to his opinions?
Valuing someone by reach makes no sense at all. Most professors at MIT have no social media reach at all, I still value their opinions extremely highly.
In fact, valuing someone's opinion purely based on the size of their megaphone is partly why we're the world is in such a bad state politically (and in other ways) these days. E.g. people listening to social media influencers opinions on vaccines.
I think this is a fair take. The parent comment shouldn't have added subscriber count as one the qualifications. But for MKBHD's qualification, simply use point number 2.
Call it disappointment I guess. No phone from any manufacturer has felt totally “right” to me in years in the way that phones from a decade ago did. It makes sense from a business perspective since smartphones were effectively complete way back then. The business needs a way to justify selling me a new one so it's been a long slow downhill of shit-I-don't-care-about ever since. I especially miss the era of HTC flagships. HIGH TECH COMPUTER!
The software is disappointing too even though today was not really a software announcement. To me it feels like since they're both from Google the Pixel hardware direction also signals what Android itself will prioritize. I used to be a huge Android-the-OS fan but found that my enjoyment of the platform peaked at 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Version 4.3 was the first version to remove something I loved (the “Phablet” UI layouts that were great on my Galaxy NoteⅡ). Announcements like today's push that point of Peak Android even further away in my mind, and I'm sad about it.
Yeah, exactly. Phones aren't going in a positive direction at all. What I want is a phone with excellent battery life, a great OLED screen, a great camera, plenty of local storage (and expandable with a microSD card), durable/rugged, and fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy. I don't want AI bullshit, stupid features that tie me to cloud services and help advertisers build profiles of me, can't-delete bloatware, stupid features that spy on me, etc. I also don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two when there's nothing wrong with the old one.
You're describing an iPhone. I've switched from Android to SE2 in 2020, and bought 15 last year on release day to get the type-c charging. I feel it ticks most of your boxes:
* excellent battery life - can't complain about it. I'm not streaming YouTube on 5G on the phone, and I've found out that it can last about two days per charge with light use - messenger apps, phone calls, emails. YMMV of course.
* a great OLED screen - it's bright & crisp. I haven't seen a better screen in person yet.
* a great camera - it's a very good camera IMO. Takes good shots of people and nature and shoots impressive videos of music shows in dark basements.
* durable/rugged - not sure about 15, but my SE2 was abused and dropped. The metal sides were dinged, the screen had a few nasty scratches, but the phone held up together very well.
* fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy - iOS is much nicer and snappier that any of the Android phones (HTC Desire S, Galaxy Note II, Xperia Z3, Xiaomi Mi6) I've had.
* don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two - I think iPhones do last a few years, given the fact that my wife uses 13 and has zero desire (or reasons, really) to upgrade.
The only requirement the iPhone doesn't fit is the storage - Apple charges an absurd price for storage upgrades on all of their devices. I went with the cheapest option and pay for a large iCloud subscription, and it seems to work well - the photo and file sync between the phone, Macbook & even my Windows machine is seamless and quick.
It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat. Apple are not saints, they collect a lot of data and telemetry that I'm not a fan of, but at least they are not a corporation that is built on advertising.
It's not an option: I can't block ads on it with uBO and Firefox. Also, I can't connect it by USB to my Linux machine and download photos. You also forgot about the expandable storage. The lack of headphone jack also sucks.
>It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat.
That's funny, because you're giving money to a company that actively wants to prevent you from blocking ads on, for instance YouTube, by restricting your app and browser choices. Meanwhile I can install any app I want on my Android phone, including apps Google won't allow on the Play store such as SmartTube.
I share this sentiment which is why I'll be passively-aggressively going for a Sony Xperia 5 VI once it launches.
Not because it's particularly great (it's not), but because it's the only somewhat mainstream manufacturer to retain the headphone jack on their flagships as well as microSD card slot.
My only gripe is that it's mostly likely going to be a 180+ gram brick.
The snappiness (yet) and camera are not great, but Librem 5 might be relevant here. Headphone jack, ability to run anything without tracking (FLOSS GNU/Linux by default), microSD, smart card. If you install SXMo, it will be snappy, too.
Looks great except for the eMMC. That's the part that died on both of my previous phones (Galaxy NoteⅡ and Galaxy NoteⅣ; currently still using an iPhone 7 that's on its third battery and literally falling apart) so I am very wary of getting another phone with that type of non-replaceable storage. I know that people have replaced them but it takes some awfully fiddly soldering just to end up with another part that Will Die At Some Point.
I'm very bullish on genAI, and I bought the new phone, but I really don't think the features shown are that exciting yet. It feels like they're laying the groundwork for more powerful AI to be ready to do things in your phone apps, and the current features are just paving the way.
The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
Being able to order food is only useful for those who live in an area where there is food to order. Here in rural Michigan I can count on one hand the number of times I've ordered delivery in the past 3 years.
AI has been totally useless to me in my life. Give me a headphone jack and better SMS spam filtering. No new phone has better features than my Pixel6a and it isn't even that great.
> The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
If this were a "killer-app", then Amazon would still be selling those quick-buy Amazon Dash[1] buttons, and Alexa would be making a profit[2]
> The killer-app is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
What you're actually going to get is a None pizza with left beef from a ghost kitchen at the least competitive price you've ever seen with the branding of a YouTuber.
> I'm very bullish on genAI, and I bought the new phone, but I really don't think the features shown are that exciting yet. It feels like they're laying the groundwork for more powerful AI to be ready to do things in your phone apps, and the current features are just paving the way
That was Assistant right up until they killed it for a new thing.
> The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
This killer app of yours can be stealthily enshittified, you aren't privy to its decision-making process.
What’s killer about that? I order food once every 2 weeks, I like to browse the different options myself. Almost all the ‘killer’ AI functions are already here: smarter photo retouching, auto-replies, searching, and text summaries with some reading comprehension to ask questions. These things I use daily.
The only thing I’d like is a better integration with ALL actions possible on my phone.
HN has relatively high Graphene OS proportion, and those who use it are those who likely comment here. From Graphene OS user perspective, this does not – on the surface – add much new value. Thus negativity. Other factors ALSO.
It's also roughly a ~month before next iPhone, which is significant. I doubt many people will switch, but getting ahead of hype cycle is probably valuable. Or maybe Apple will see what from Google marketing has not landed and adjust decks accordingly.
b) foreseeing technological progress -- say two iterations down the line.
c) mass adoption of features
On an average, they tend to be elitist and don't represent the average brand popularity (e.g Google, Meta, Amazon). They only mildly upvote technology that helps their extremely privileged life.
E.g Current AI / Metaverse features helps plenty of poor, underprivileged people around the world, especially non-english speaking. But HN is the first to mock such features.
Because of this, they tend to be poor individual stock pickers. They are highly risk-averse and typically bring an SRE mentality to the world.
> They only mildly upvote technology that helps their extremely privileged life.
Your bias is heavily US centric. HN is not SF or SV. Plenty of users in Serbia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, Vietnam, in war thorn Ukraine.
Arguably the average user is above average for their area's COL but to claim everyone is swimming in VC money is as dilusion as the people you want to portrait in your comment.
>E.g Current AI / Metaverse features helps plenty of poor, underprivileged people around the world, especially non-english speaking. But HN is the first to mock such features.
AI features in phones from Google are English only or maybe a few languages, even if you know English try to use "AI" to set a route using your voice when the locations are not english words. Sure, some free AIs on the web will help poor people but the best ones are under payment wall and not only that you need a specific way to pay, what I mean for example is Netflix, Steam do not need my credit card, they have alternative ways to pay like PayPal but Google, Microsoft, OpenAI they only allow credit card , so I conclude they do not care for my money they really need that credit card for some reason.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You have no crystal ball. You have no high ground nor do you have privileged knowledge to back what you're saying.
You are personally invested in those technologies being game changers. It couldn't be more clear given your aggressive, substance-less posts.
* apparently coming with android 15, but they are shipping android 14
* turning on satellite sos later, but this year
* us only
* free for 2 years on pixel 9 phone, but probably would cost more later?
If you go on a lot of backcountry trips, maybe you already have something like a Garmin device with paid in-reach service with texting and emergency service button - no voice support. I have this, it works well. You can do 2 way texting, also you can have your location uploaded as you travel if you wish.
It wasn’t in the initial release. Needed a software update 2 months later or so.
You were only supposed to get 1 year (?) of service. But they extended that by a year.
Because of that everyone with a qualifying phone is still in the “free” stage so we still don’t know what it will cost. Or when that will start.
If ever.
I’ve never used it but I like that my iPhone has it. I would never carry a Garmin (city/suburb life, no point) but I know the satellite is there if needed.
I think Apple is expanding it to iMessage this year (text only) though for all we know that will cost extra.
It's doubtful they'll ever charge for SOS. The "one year, one more year" thing is likely to make the accounting and liability work out. If they had just said "free for the life of the phone" it would have locked them into providing the service for many years, and required revenue deferral for many years. Easier to just under-promise.
That’s kind of what I expect. It will simply be free forever but maybe the other services that they might add in the future, such as iMessage over satellite, will cost extra.
“A man got lost in the woods and died because he didn’t pay Apple two dollars a month“ is probably not a headline they want to see.
It’s also possible they didn’t know how often it would end up getting used and so they said that is a hedge in case it ended up too expensive on their end. Now that they know it’s not they don’t really worry about it.
I mean they they don't have to choose between "100% free forever" and "not free and literally kill the people who didn't pay in advance."
They could just leave it enabled for everyone, and then retroactively charge them for a (moderately hefty) 1 year subscription if they end up using it.
> You were only supposed to get 1 year (?) of service. But they extended that by a year.
I suspect they wanted to gauge what the usage (and therefore cost to them) would be like before making any promises.
I would not be surprised if satellite messaging ends up costing after the first year, but that satellite SOS remains free forever. After all, who wants the reputation hit when someone ends up dying in the wilderness because they didn't keep up their satellite payments?
Even if you managed to charge people (or their SAR insurances) tens of thousands of dollars per rescue, I'm not sure that would entirely pay for running such a service.
But I suspect their actual business model will be to charge for non-emergency messaging, which might just be able to subsidize the emergency use case.
Are there cases of people actually being charged for their backcountry rescues? I know it's theoretically allowed many places but I'm not aware of anyone actually being billed.
Generally, SAR teams would rather the R continue to stand for Rescue rather than Recovery (of a body).
As soon as SAR involves a helicopter, I remember hearing you're looking at a hefty bill in many places, even if the SAR teams themselves don't charge anything. (Not sure why/how that is the case – maybe the helicopter is often operated by a for-profit company, essentially taking the SAR crew as passenger?)
As someone who’s been rescued via helicopter, I can state at least in my case there wasn’t a large bill. The only thing I was charged for was the out of network ER visit.
Yeah, I'd imagine the helicopter is where the big expense lies and those are mostly private hires. The SAR teams around me are first responders already on duty or volunteers. They still have expenses when launching a mission but driving a dozen people to a trailhead is cheaper than a chopper.
But “iPhone saves man’s life after he fell down a mountain” sounds a whole lot better than “worlds richest company charges man who nearly died $25 to save his life”.
I just used iMessage via satellite on the iOS public beta this past weekend. I forgot it even existed. The phone prompted me to update my location for "Find My" via Satellite, which I've done before. So I accepted, and got a screen that gave me the option of sending iMessage via satellite to. Sent one to a friend as a test. It's a pretty cool UI. It shows "Satellite" as the message type when writing messages, as you might see "SMS" or "iMessage" or "RCS". And then when you're in iMessage and connected, the dynamic island shows a green indicator. When not connected, the dynamic island is larger and shows you which way to turn to reconnect to satellite; presumably if you want to see if there are replies to your message, or whatever.
Thanks for the review. I have a Garmin inReach device that I connect to my phone when I go up in the mountains, but I would love to get rid of it. Sorry Garmin.
When you're in SOS mode, you can use the satellite connection to manually update your location—separate of the emergency response service—so anyone who you've chosen to share that with can see it, as well as in Find My. I'm often out of cell service in the mountains and will usually push the location once I'm in the general area I plan to be for a while.
Oh that’s right. That’s the other thing you can do. I’d forgotten that.
Thanks.
While I never needed the satellite SOS it’s fun that there is a demo in settings that shows you how to find the satellite and everything just as if you used the feature for real.
Plus Garmin devices use the Iridium network which has truly global coverage (as opposed to Globalstar which is only in select areas of the world) as well as other features useful for non-emergency backcountry travel. I won't be dropping my Garmin InReach any time soon.
Correct. Globalstar is a "bent pipe analog repeater" network. They have ground gateway stations that provide connectivity from their satellites to the public switched telephone network and internet. In order for your handheld to work, you need a satellite in view and that satellite must have a ground gateway station in view. Iridium doesn't have that latter requirement. I won't be getting rid of my InReach Mini anytime soon.
On the other hand, that "bent pipe" nature is what allowed Globalstar to support a (presumably) completely new type of protocol and modulation over existing, decades-old satellites!
Apple has also been adding new ground stations as part of their agreement with Globalstar, which has, among other things, added coverage to Hawaii. I'm pretty sure they have much larger plans for this than just emergency texting.
I do a lot of solo hiking and use a Garmin with InReach in case of emergency and to reassure my wife, it can also send my position every N minutes (I usually set it for 20 when on the trails in an area with limited or no cell phone coverage). I wouldn't mind if similar functionality becomes common on cell phones.
I know someone on our local SAR team that had mentioned they were having issues with folks using the Apple devices for SOS that resulted in long delays. This is for coastal British Columbia, so perhaps not a universal experience - but something to keep in mind.
Personally, I'd stick with the better known option, and like another commenter said - the battery life on the Garmins are pretty amazing, and it doesn't weight much.
And I rather depend on a PLB, whose signal can be picked up by an international network of receivers on 406MHz, and even transmits a homing beacon for first responders.
No subscription required either. You simply register the beacon with a government agency (in the US, its via the NOAA, and distress signals are handled by the coast guard or air force receivers)
That's Google for you. I bought Pixel 8 Pro when it came out, after I had Samsung (never was into iPhone, my wife has those though). I regretted pretty much right away. Heavy AF compared to Galaxy, cool features US-locked, EU means nothing to that company since it looked like they haven't even applied for licenses for cool shit in EU - had to fake my SIM to be in US just to unlock thermometer etc.. I will not buy any device from them anytime soon.
> had to fake my SIM to be in US just to unlock thermometer
IIRC that's also available in some EU countries, the issue in this specific case isn't google but the fact that devices which could be construed to offer medical info tend to require certification varying by country
you're right, the issue being google hasn't even applied for certification. Aside from that, try buying anything google hardware outside of select core market. Somehow, Samsung and Apple (and a ton of smaller players) are able to have global availability with no issues.
Apple was able to make it work in most "developed" countries (do we have a better term for these countries now?). I guess they're just better at the regulatory game?
Also why would regulations prevent them from operating in Alaska, for example? I'm sure the Alaskan government would be happy to provide better emergency connectivity, highly doubt regulation is the issue. People are already being rescued, this here happened in 2022:
Google presumably uses Skylo, and that's only available in some regions.
I believe they currently only use Terrestar-1 and Terrestar-2, with Inmarsat to follow some time this year for almost global coverage.
Terrestar-1 covers the lower 48 US states with one spot beam, and Alaska and Hawaii with another one each, but I believe the latter two ones are relatively new, so maybe Google isn't using these yet?
I suspect this because I've used a Motorola Defy Satellite Link for the past year, which uses IoT-NTN just like the Pixel's baseband, and it's only been available in Europe and the lower 48 at launch (i.e. also with Hawaii and Alaska missing).
It's available in 17 countries so far. That's a long shot from "all developed countries" by most metrics.
And this really does seem to be largely due to regulations (and probably also integration with local emergency services), as there is no geographic pattern to availability.
How much is the subscription for the Garmin device? I'm curious because I bought my parents a personal locator beacon, since they are retired and hike constantly. It costs more up front but has no subscription, and I didn't want to gift something with a high recurring cost. There's no communication option, it's all or nothing - if it's activated they send the helicopters. On the plus side, it has a fixed 7 year battery life, so no need to worry about charging or it dying when you need it (if you remember the expiration date). I'm curious what Google will charge for their SOS feature and how it will compare to PLV or a satellite communicator.
One thing to bear in mind is that the iPhone based satellite connection is highly directional, meaning whoever is using it needs to be conscious and able to follow the on-screen instructions to align the phone with a certain point in the sky (within a few angular degrees.)
Whereas, in contrast, the Garmin inReach devices need "only" a clear sky view.
It's not cheap, about $12/month is cheapest plan, https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/837461. Pay 0.10c for tracking points, you have 10 text messages a month.
If you use it a lot, you'll start to increase your fees, I'm on the next higher plan which I think is $35/m. I should revisit that, it's a lot over a year ;-)
They have the basic devices (connect with phone, or emergency button), I have the one with maps built in. That one is awesome, it has worldwide city and trail maps. Maps works without a subscription, but I do use it for trips where there is no phone service more to get text messages.
They also charge you for time spent with service suspended. We finally canceled ours when my wife got an iphone with satellite SOS - it was pretty expensive for something we would typically use (activate, not actually use - we've never had to SOS) one or two months per year.
I bought the Ocean Signal RescueME PLB1. It was the cheapest model I could find at REI. Not what I would necessarily choose for myself, but since it was a gift I wanted to buy it from a major retailer. I also got a basic model since all PLBs work in the same way and have similar capabilities. Higher price models only add features like strobe lights or additional test functions.
You are supposed to register it with the local government org. In the US, that is the NOAA. When the PLB activates, the receiver which is either the Coast Guard or Air Force will attempt to contact you before they send the distress call to whatever local S&R there is. Obviously if they can't reach you, they will send help anyway.
I'm aware they will attempt to call you, I still think it is fair to call it all or nothing because the only reasonable response to a PLB activation with no response from the phone call is to assume someone is in mortal peril. If you do respond to the call, why did you activate the PLB when you could have called?
What's going to be more interesting is what hardware is added for this, and what it can be made to do other than this service that's obviously part of Google Play Services. Can it be made useful in some way on AOSP?
Google really needs to improve the core offering of what a phone is supposed to provide instead of using half baked AI as a selling point.
I have been using Pixel 7 for almost the past 2 years. But the amount of basic core issues are crazy. Recently,since the July update, every place where the phone cannot catch network signal, it shutdowns. And with the update, somehow i feel it cannot catch network signal as strongly. That is such a crazy thing. Last year, my friend got locked out of all his valuable pictures with Android 14 upgrade on Pixel 6.
My experience of Google is so bad with hardware that it has finally pushed me towards buying an iPhone for the very first time in my life after having been exclusive with Android OS for over 10 years.
I had the Pixel 6 Pro and everything was amazing... except for signal and battery. Which are two of the most important things in a phone.
The battery was quite bad from the very beginning, barely lasting a day of normal usage, but I thought "well, at least they seem to have taken lots of care to avoid battery aging - slower charging than other phones, intelligent charging speed, etc. - so it won't degrade much". Two years later it wasn't even making it to 6 PM, or 3-4 PM on heavy use days (such as trips). OTOH my previous phone (Huawei P30 Pro), with much faster charge and no "intelligent" anything, still has amazing battery after more than 5 years of use (now in my wife's hands).
That was my first and last Pixel. A pity because the software was amazing, but that's no use if you operate under constant battery anxiety and can't even use Google Maps and camera on a trip without spending hours charging at the hotel.
I'm using a Pixel 4a, it does everything I need well. I upgraded from the Pixel 2 only when it started malfunctioning. I plan to buy a newer pixel when I can no longer use this one, but I'm concerned they're not being made to last through a few of Google's frequent release cycles. Seems to be a problem with most manufacturers. I just want something durable and stable
I've had a similar sentiments with Google hardware and nearly every device I've purchased, including several generations of phones and a Google Home Hub, had to be returned at least once. This has left me with a less-than-favorable impression of Google's hardware quality. Given that I don't see much need for premium phones these days (I don't play games on my phone and am unsure about the value of AI editing features), I'm inclined to wait and explore midrange alternatives as they become available. (and not going for iPhone myself...)
My Pixel 6 and Pixel 8 have worked remarkably badly as cellular devices. I may well not re-up. The last straw is the aggressive Doze mode. Notifications regularly come in very late, 30+ minutes or more.
Especially frustrating because they've tuned that to try to improve battery life, rather than fixing what causes poor performance (battery life) in the first place.
Meanwhile, I'm getting pushed away from iOS when I can't customise basic things and the Phone app (you know, the main use of a phone) takes 30s to open, even after restores.
I like how just in this thread you can see the way marketing leaves a permanent mark on its customers.
Your comment is one of few where people report unrelated problems with their Google Phone. Different versions, different problems, no problems, all kinds of things. Open talk.
You've however brought up an Apple device and the comments under your comment are all Apple customers telling you that you either don't use your device properly since using your phone as a phone is "no longer the primary means of communication" or that it might be your fault (perhaps you have too many contacts in your phone book).
So while problems with the Google device are something normal, problems with the Apple device seem to be something extraordinary.
I don't even know where my phone icon is(don't even remember the last time I used it), but I just searched for phone tapped the phone app and it launched instantly. So it's probably something unique to your phone. I suggest you wander it into Apple and see if they can fix it.
As for customization, that's sort of Apple's main feature set: It will always work the same everywhere on every device.
As much as I want to agree with you, saying the main purpose of a smartphone is to make calls is like saying the main purpose of amazon is to sell books. Only in the beginning was it so
While the phone app remains important for some, it’s no longer the primary means of communication for most folks, especially with the rise of messaging apps and social media.
that seems like a hardware failure or perhaps you have too many contacts in your phone book? For 'fun' I created 50k iCloud contacts and it broke my account / phone. I had to call apple support to delete them.
Pixel 8 Pro has been fairly solid. Some occasional battery life issues at first and some flakiness in recognizing the charging cable but otherwise it's the best Pixel since.. Idk.. the 5 or before.
I'll also vote for this. It worked great for stock operation including things like Android Auto. I had to switch back due to a need for some BS Microsoft software for teams that needs to pass safety net which my work uses for paging.
Why iPhone? Why not another Android—not Google's one? For me, it looks like you wanted to switch to iOS and looked for an excuse to blame something else for your decision. You blamed Google, not Android. In this case the rational decision is to switch to another Android brand—not switch to iOS. So, you seem a bit dishonest here. Maybe even dishonest with your own self.
I'm kind of sad that the world seems to have given up on the smaller phones. The marketing of the masculine hand holding the larger phone is amusing to me, and I can understand wanting to have a larger screen. I do not like the amount of space these things take in my pocket, though.
Yes, that is also my anecdata (women with giant phones in their purses, or even wearing the phone as a purse). I have an iPhone 12 mini, really don't want anything bigger, but perhaps I'll go for a good watch and buds that can be online without a phone and also leave the giant phone in the bag most of the day, that would mean great battery life, less phone in hand, less distraction perhaps?
I've wanted to ditch the iPhone/Macbook and go watch/airpods/ipad for years now. They need to decouple the requirement to own an iPhone to get a watch up and running (this should be something an iPad can do), and make the iPad an actual pro dev machine. Not sure I'm ever going to get my wish, sadly.
Apple could sell $200 "indulgence" NFC dongles secured by T2 enclaves.
Tap enough sacrificial indulgences on a neutered iPad or Watch, and it will software-unlock obvious convergence functionality, whose artificial absence now proliferates physical devices and environmental expense.
Straight facts. I have a purse, hip bag, or small backpack on me everywhere so the size is pretty much irrelevant so long as I can type on the keyboard with two hands. I would use the hell out of a 3DS XL sized folding phone.
I will say that the folding screen seems like a gimmick on the "2.5 phones taped together" size. For compact flip phones it makes sense tho.
Sure, for some women, but let's not generalize. Personally, I hate carrying a purse, and the new phones don't even fit in the pocket inside my purse.
Plus, I miss being able to reach the entire screen with one thumb, with the phone held in one hand. I do admit to typing two-handed, sometimes, but damn I wish I didn't NEED to! I can barely reach the left side of the screen reliably, much less the top left corner. :(
Unfortunately the market has consistently spoken - small phones simply don't sell. Nobody could sustain it. Whether or not it's because the generalization is accurate or not is moot.
I have pretty average man hands (although my fingers might be a bit long) and I use a Note 8 one handed without really any problem. Honestly, I like it even if just for the fact I tended to drop smaller phones a lot more.
Based on that, I would expect half the men to be able to use even the biggest non-fold phones one handed without any problem.
What really annoys me is that that there are like dozens of Android phones on sale in major stores right now, from different manufacturers, and they are all the same. All featureless ~6 inch slabs where the only difference seems to be the arrangement of the camera lenses on the back, even on the software side they are all pretty much the same.
I understand that we have found some kind of an optimum, that it is the form that sells the best and what most people want, but with so many manufacturers and models, there should be room for some niches. Where is the craziness from the early days? All the gadgets Samsung was known for, the physical keyboards, the small phones, the huge phones, the styluses, etc...
It seems the only exceptions you can find are overpriced folding phones, and some rugged phones. You may get a few more options from brands most people never heard of, usually only available online, often directly from China. But even with that, if you want something that doesn't have the iPhone form factor, your options are very limited.
If 100 different phones are available, it would be nice if one of them was for 1% of the people who want something different.
For many years - I don't know whether it's still the case as I'm out of the industry now - the major mobile operators in the US had (increasing) requirements about the minimum fraction of the front of the phone that was covered by the screen. They also had requirements for battery life. Given geometry and minimum-practical bezel sizes, both of those factors led toward larger phones.
I broke my iPhone 12 mini and part of me died that day. A tired dad moment – set the phone on the trunk lid when getting my kid in the car and then later opened the trunk. It slid down and crunched in the hinge.
I could replace it with another mini but have been holding out hope for another updated version. I love the small form factor, even at the expense of battery life and camera quality. I just want a reasonable phone with solid hardware that fits in my pocket.
In the beginning, smartphones were all tiny, because it was universally agreed that smaller cell phones were better.
Then there was a huge, neverending push to make phones as large as possible, or larger. Sometimes smaller phones have been offered as an unpopular option, but more often "enormous" is the minimum size.
And as long as that's been going on, people have been complaining that they want their phone to fit in their hand.
Stipulate that a majority seems to feel that there's no need for a phone to fit in your hand. Why are the manufacturers so insistent on not providing small phones? Shirts come in all different sizes. How much does it cost to design an additional size of phone?
(Related: ever since the switch to 16:9 laptop screens, everyone has been complaining to no avail about the inferior dimensions of the screen. Why are manufacturers still cramming them down our throats? This one isn't even a case where people prefer 16:9 to 16:10.)
The best form factor of any smartphone I've owned is the first one, the Nexus S: 63mm wide, 124mm tall, and the back popped off to make replacing the battery convenient.
Phones have gotten steadily worse, as far as usability goes, ever since. There's more computing power, but I have trouble believing that's what's driving the shape.
>Why are the manufacturers so insistent on not providing small phones?
They don't sell.
Apple killed the iPhone mini due to low sales. Asus replaced the universally lauded Zenfone 10 with a very large Zenfone 11. Google increased the size of the Pixel 6 when compared to its predecessor. Sales also increased.
It's weird though that there apparently isn't a market for even one high-end small phone, from any manufacturer.
I wonder if to some extent they're not different enough. The iPhone mini has a 5.4" screen. Not so long ago we managed well enough with 4" iPhone screens. I wonder how a 4.5" version would sell - call it the iPhone Nano.
Unfortunately a lot of apps don't support those smaller screen sizes so well anymore. But people who want a small phone that's easy to carry around, who won't be using it for hours a day, don't always need many apps.
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll occasionally re-introduce a mini phone like McDonald's does with the McRib.
Somewhere there's gotta be numbers that show "there are people who buy minis, but they only buy a phone every few years, so let's make a mini every third model year" or something.
It costs a lot of money to make multiple versions of something, compared to having just one version. The amount of profit they were getting from the mini wasn't enough compared to the regular model, and they correctly deduced that if they eliminated the mini, everyone would just buy the larger model instead so they could decrease their manufacturing and design costs.
If you're an Apple user, would you switch to Android just to get a smaller phone? Or would you just bite the bullet and get the larger iPhone after the mini is discontinued? Apple knows that 99.99% of Apple users are in the second group.
> If you're an Apple user, would you switch to Android just to get a smaller phone?
I would never be an Apple user.
And that's relevant here, because this argument doesn't apply to Android users, and yet Android phone manufacturers are just as insistent on not making smaller phones.
> It costs a lot of money to make multiple versions of something, compared to having just one version.
I really wanted a 12 mini but the shortened battery life made it a no-go for me. Ended up with a standard 12 and am still happy with it years later aside from it being slightly larger than I would like.
16:9 is a compromise ratio for content viewing.
It fits both 4:3 TV content and 2.40:1 movie content.
Once 16:9 widescreen was popular media started adopting it natively
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16:9_aspect_ratio#History
That link is quite explicit that the idea of making 16:9 screens is to save money because they're smaller than 16:10s:
> In 2011, Bennie Budler, product manager of IT products at Samsung South Africa, confirmed that monitors with a native resolution of 1920 × 1200 were not being manufactured anymore. "It is all about reducing manufacturing costs. The new 16:9 aspect ratio panels are more cost-effective to manufacture locally than the previous 16:10 panels".
> since a 16:9 is narrower than a 16:10 panel of the same length, more panels can be created per sheet of glass
This is why people complain. "We've decided to charge the same amount for a worse product" isn't a winning message.
It also does some weird editorializing:
> By July 2022, 16:9 resolutions are preferred by 77% of users (1920 × 1080 with 67%; 2560 × 1440 with 10%). [In the Steam Hardware Survey]
Steam's hardware survey, of course, doesn't even address the question of what users prefer.
I keep an eye on sites selling refurbished iPhone SE, the first one! : )
Shipping with new battery for extra (...unsure if I'd trust that battery though).
That one I can still use for phonecalls and occasional practical things I need when away from desk and computer.
And the irony about decent hardware is that all have decent hardware from the past 10-15 years, only the software that is crap on garbage and can't use hardware that could have been excellent mainframes some decades ago in some secret nuclear research laboratory. Need a powerstation now to present and scroll bitmaps and some text.
bought a 15- bearing in mind that the 12 mini was also too large for me (5s was perfect).
15 Pro has been dropped many more times, can’t be operated with one hand at all. It’s the first time I had to have a replacement screen actually- after owning iPhones for 15 years.
Anyway… I’m considering going back to the 5s. I would only miss wireless charging and apple wallet I think. (and apps are now made for the larger screen and will have elements that are inaccessible due to going passed the edges of the display).
I ordered and sent back a Pixel 7 because it was so large/heavy compared to what I was used to. Ended up buying a refurbed Pixel 5 (the model before Google introduced the new camera bar design) that's still kicking, been very happy.
Looks like they've gotten the Pixel 9 a bit smaller than the 7 but still the same weight. It's still larger than the Pixel 5 too.
This has been brought up in the past and Apple did try to cater to that market with their smaller phone and it seemed the market response was not great, they ultimately had to drop the iPhone mini because it was not worth it.
I’m sure there are many out there like me, but I used to prefer smaller phones until I used a larger phone for one generation; after trying to move back to a smaller phone, I just missed the real estate of a larger screen.
I am male with large palm and fingers but a 6.5" phone is simply unusable for being a phone. Pocket? Haha, probably a small sachet, weights 0.2kg, comedic on the face for calling, all the folks lost their minds completely giving 1000$ for such a parody?! It can't even sit stable on the desk for f's sake. Pretentius fragile money pit garbage all.
Just set up a new Android with 6.5" size and I am in a particularly bad mood now. Wasting my hours on ...this! The process itself is infuriating, zillions of 'features' just wasting my time reading how über-user-focused are so set it up NOW! while tap-tap-tap-tap-tap for seemingly into eternity, beyond comfortable by an ocean plus a half, but watch for this and accept that and log in and register here and connect that and you will be amazed, allow us to take your data, don't worry, we care, we say it repeatedly so it must be like that, right?, here are two dozens of icons be amazed about, wow how many icons are there it is amazing, amazing multiplied, word-editor-assistant-presentation-maker-tv-communication-console-education-news-pretty-sleepwithme-and-tap-me-tap-me-day-and-nigh-oh-yes, into eternity, but first allow this and allow that, just one more, read that, we improve your experience so do it do it, do it again and again, soon we get there, oh wait, camera MUST have discovery of nerby devices otherwise closes itself, hmmm, not something on my old Pentax, that's new kind of development in the history of photography, watching for nearby bicycle or toaster or whatever...
Users have no self respect nowadays, none!, and swallow whatever manufacturers stomp down their throats in the dozen, repeatedly. It is good this thing was the cheapest, I did not dare discovering past 8 years' development on high price, and will only be used as a small tablet at home apart from being a guinea pig, not good for anything else (without satisfying its attention hungry distracting barrage of time wasting functional nothingness). Maybe navigation from time to time, but unsure, heavier than some travel books!
I know that eventually I'll need to replace the 4a (security) but every time I look at phones I just can't find anything that I would actually want to use instead, and I also resent price increases that remove features I use (headphone jack).
I discovered about the Unihertz Jelly Star the other day which is allegedly the smallest android phone with a 3 inch display. People over /r/dumbphone seem to like it as a mean to make doom scrolling less appealing to them while the phone can still be used to do all you need like use Uber (although android auto on this must be horrible).
At 309 CAD on Amazon, I'm tempted to give it a try.
At this point it's probably irreversible. Even if someone will release small phone, apps developers will ignore it and their apps will not be very usable on those phones.
I guess only Apple can pull that, but they're not interested either. Their latest "Mini" model is still huge.
I'm curious about those Samsung flip phones that, instead of flipping open like a book, flip shut into a square like a 90s flip phone. I don't really want to buy one, but I like the idea a lot.
I can see wanting a smaller phone. That is an underserved market segment. But implying that phone marketing is patriarchy-driven is laughably absurd. Marketing for phones is probably more diverse and carefully balanced than for any other product category.
I read that they need to use gigantic manly man hands for the gigantic phones, because otherwise people would realize that it's a "two-handed" phone for most of us mere mortals, that's impossible to use with one hand for anything but the most basic tasks.
> Marketing for phones is probably more diverse and carefully balanced than for any other product category.
How can that be true when there's only 2 phone OSes of note and one single company sells half the phones in the US? There's not enough diversity in the market to create the conditions for diverse marketing.
If anything it's a race to the middle. When there are 2 shops in town, they tend to become more similar not more diverse.
Apologies, I meant my comment as a dig on the old idea that the larger phone is for men. It genuinely amused me that they used different hands to hold the phone. Especially since I have no real concept looking at that page on how big it would be in my hands.
And note that this was a serious criticism a few years ago where it was a complaint that all things are designed for 6' men by default. I don't know if that is still the general belief, but it got a ton of traction for at least a short while. I would be surprised if there aren't a fair number of folks that still think that.
In the Google Pixel 2024 Keynote, one of the presenters, Dave Citron, had to try three times to get Gemini to perform the preapproved, practiced demonstration task - 33.3% success rate for something that Google KNOWS will work.
Most of the demo fails they had during today's keynote felt more like beta supporting software and bad network kinds of failures. The only failure I saw that felt more like a generative AI-level failure was one of the hot air balloon image gens they tried which generated a circle of garbage in the sky; which was one variation presented among five or six which the AI spat out in seconds.
At https://www.youtube.com/live/N_y2tP9of8A?t=4119 in the Google Pixel 2024 keynote, the generative AI in Magic Editor still produces wacky objects - a hot air balloon that looks deflated?! The gen AI did produce two decent-looking hot air balloons.
at this stage, I'd be happy with google assistant "only" understanding what I'd like to play on youtube (+music) while driving. Far-fetched dream would be to understand streets I'd like to navigate to via google maps (not US, not english). Barrier is so low compared to rest.
UX-wise, I'm not sure why everyone is so keen on voice commands for AI.
Why let everyone in earshot know what you're up to? Sure, it's easier than typing all that text given crappy feedback of these smartphone onscreen keyboards.
If you show a pic to Google Lens app, the app will proceed to identify text and highlight those text passages.
In the AI-verse, Lens could detect the concert tour.
- if the tour was in the past, Lens could look up in Photos any media with GPS locations at those concert locations/dates and show them.
- if the tour is now/in the future, Lens could detect the dates and locations, and look up in your calendar to find when you are available. If you are available when the tour comes to your town, Lens would show a big green checkmark next to that date/location pair or highlight that date/location. Otherwise, it goes into search mode and crosses out dates/location when you aren't available. For out-of-town locations when you are available, Lens could start up Maps to search for flights to those locations. Perhaps a search of your contacts to see if you have friends/relatives in/near those out-of-town locations. or look in your calendar to see if you've been to any of those out-of-town locations before, etc. etc.
I mostly agree, but partially because I can't tell (even though I'm paying $20/month) what tier of Gemini I am getting. I know most people won't care, but because they won't tell me, I will assume I'm getting Gemini Flash from 6 months ago, and I'm not paying $20/month for that. I'm sure if they were honest about the model people wouldn't pay for it.
They're making the mistake of optimizing for general case users (who don't care about model version) when they need to attract power users so that they can find product-market fit.
There's a vanilla 2TB plan for $10/month, the plan with 2TB and Gemini is $20/month. You could say that Gemini is $10/month then, but if you don't actually need 2TB or the other benefits then you're effectively paying $20/month because you can't unbundle Gemini from everything else.
Wait, where's this $10/month plan? I don't see it. I see it at https://one.google.com/about, but I can't actually choose that.
Edit: I found the answer on Reddit, as usual. You need to go to your plan settings and only then is the plan available under one.google.com/settings. That's the only way to downgrade.
I have Gemini Advanced but I can't tell which model it is, yeah. Same problem. Whatever it is, it's useless. GPT-2 level. Can't do anything reasonable.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet and ChatGPT-4o are roughly the same with the former pipping it for me and then out there is this shitty Google product that is worse than Llama-3 running on my own laptop. Even Llama-3 is better at remembering what's going on.
Fortunately, this time I managed to look it up and I have it for free because I have Google One 5TB, apparently. And there's no way to spend more money so that's what I have. It's so bad that when Claude and ChatGPT run out of messages for me I just use local Llama rather than use Gemini. Atrocious product.
In my experience, the latest experimental model is a bit better than the latest Claude/ChatGPT at creativity, but a little worse at general reasoning. They're still mostly comparable and certainly of the same generation.
Where it truly stands out is the 2M context window. That's game-changing for things like analyzing publications and books.
Yeah, in practice, for the tasks I set it. High hallucination rate. Low context window. Frequently refuses to act and suggests Googling. If the other guys didn't exist, it could be useful, but as it stands it's as useful as GPT-2 because neither of them hit the threshold of usefulness.
I'm sure some benchmarks are decent but when Google finally shutters the chatbot I'll be glad because then I won't constantly be wondering if I'm paying for it.
It's a shame because Google's AI features otherwise are incredible. Google Photos has fantastic facial recognition, and I can search it with descriptions of photos and it finds them. Their keyboard is pretty good. But Gemini Advanced is better off not existing. If it's the same team, I suppose they can't keep making hits. If it's a different team, then they're two orders of magnitude less capable.
It doesn't actually work. I pasted in a House Resolution and asked it a question and it immediately spazzed and asked me to Google. I used Claude and it just worked. That's the thing about Gemini: it has a lot of stats but it doesn't work. With Claude I could then ask it the section and look at the actual text. With Gemini it just doesn't do it at all.
This feels a lot like when people would tell me how the HP laptop had more gigahertz and stuff and it would inevitably suck compared to a Mac.
The output from an LLM is like the path a marble takes across a surface shaped by its training data and answers to “why” questions just continue the marble’s path. You may get good sounding answers to your why questions but they are just good sounding answers and not the real reasons because LLM’s lack the ability to introspect their own thinking. Note: Humans do not have this ability either unless using formal step by step reasoning.
I pay for Gemini Advanced and it's much better than GPT-2, I think. I often search the same thing between Gemini and GPT-4 and it's a toss up which is better (they each get questions right when the other gets it wrong, sometimes).
But recently I asked Gemini "Bill Clinton is famous for his charisma and ability to talk with people. Did he ever share tips on how he does it?" and Gemini responded with some generic "can't talk about politics" answer, which was a real turn-off.
Bottom left. Settings > Manage Subscription. It turns out I have it included till the end of the year because of the 5TB Google One sub https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41237943
Some VP of AI wants to become an SVP? And some marketing director on phones wants a "SAVE $250" sticker on all the new phones and is happy to play along?
Phone with scuba glasses and the woke AI. In fact it looks like Bender from Futurama, only with a nondescript personality. Thanx but no. No need for an AI to lecture me or avoid questions because it thinks it might remotely offend a hypothetic alien civilization.
Can't stand the iPhone either. At least it has a good camera and audio, but most of the apps are either junk or you have to pay for Apple rent seeking. A lot of shady Chinese apps. I spent hours trying to find a decent calculator like the stock one on Android. And the on screen keyboard is outright annoying. Couldn't turn off haptics either.
So I'm still using my Pixel 4a until it dies. The iPhone is garthering dust on my nightstand.
I'm surprised that no media outlet is seriously talking about its on-device inference capability, which is the biggest next thing for LLM. Apple did a better job on its PR here, but they didn't also get all the attention that it deserves.
On-device inference improves not just its latency, this also removes a huge chunk of LLM's economical constraints from software companies. The biggest advantage of software is its marginal cost being nearly zero. LLM hasn't enjoyed this luxuries but the dynamic is going to change.
People are getting pretty tired of AI. Just about every tech company is shilling "AI", without actually selling anything which is useful for most consumers. On the other hand, just about everyone is being drowned in AI-generated garbage. To a lot of people, "on-device inference capability" is identical to "FlarzBuz engine to power Garbage Generation".
Also, I'd disagree with it going to change the economics behind it. Sure, offloading the hardware and power cost of inference on the consumer is going to make it cheaper for the AI companies, but they're still going to have to spend an absolute fortune on training. And how are they going to sell it if it runs on your device? The tech industry has been trying to push everything away from on-device code in order to sell subscription-based cloud services! Who's going to pay a subscription or per-query fee simply for the right to run a pretty mediocre app?
For years, Google has been promising me a high-performance voice assistant. I find that in 2024 it still can't understand "call mom" and "call my wife's name" unless I'm in a perfectly silent environment. And it usually takes several tries.
I'm not going to get carried away with technical announcements.
Telling my Pixel 8's assistant to "set an alarm for 10 minutes" fails when it's not connected to the internet (after spinning for a few seconds.) That's crazy to me. I thought offline voice for basic things was working back in the Nexus days.
I travel a lot and often find myself in areas with poor or no connectivity, and things "get a little freaky" in those scenarios. Even things like Google Maps (which has downloaded/offline mode) often fail or spin for 30 seconds. I think Google/Android engineers don't test these scenarios enough (or at all), and they're usually bathed in perfect connections.
Siri seems to be better at the voice recognition in my experience but it has these crazy bugs where I see it perfectly transcribe the text, and then un-correct it into something completely different. Piping the raw text into a 90s Perl script would be better, and it amazes me that the same team can do on-device transcription so much better.
I dont want to use the voice assistant on my pixel but the function is so baked in that if I connect a headset, despite never setting the assistant up, it will interupt any music or playback after 15 seconds to tell me the assistant is ready now and there is no way to make that message go away or resume my media playing.
What's even worse for me is that it regularly "forgets" how to respond to queries that it could serve perfectly well before, especially related to smart home things.
"Play <local radio station x> on living room stereo" has been hit and miss for my parents to the point where I regret setting them up with a Chromecast-supporting AV receiver and Google Nest speaker. They now just use the regular remote and listen to the station via FM.
If you're unlucky enough to be bilingual, it's a complet joke.
It's a real shame, because it makes this function useless for the people who need it most, those who can't type easily on a phone (visual challenges), or have difficulty transcribing names in a foreign language.
It could help millions of elderly people stay independent a little longer. But no instead, they were trying to sell us generative AI and photo filter.
The weird thing is that they just don't seem to care about improving it. WhisperX can process my speech just fine, but Google assistant can't. That's the lowest bar to clear and they don't need to invent any new tech for it - there's a number of solutions ready to go right now.
For me, this recently started working! Do you have both Portugese and English configured as languages in your iOS settings? I believe that that's what motivates Siri to try and interpret a message in the other language as well when reading notifications.
It's much much worse if you're trying to call someone without an Anglo-Saxon name too. It just outright refuses to call anyone I know with a Thai name, regardless of how I pronounce it.
The same goes for French and Romanian, I call it Starwars name problem. You have to make some sort of strange variation like the name in Starwars so that the device recognises it.
Yeah, I think the LLM for everything crazy is stupid, but I do wish there were a little more of it in the Google Assistant. Then I could finally say "Text Bob 'Home in 5'" and not have it reply "Sorry, I don't have a 'Home' number for Bob."
Let's wait until it actually ships and if it'll work offline. Last few times Google sold Pixels on dedicated AI hardware it wasn't even used and instead offloaded to their cloud services, making them slow and often blocking app UI until it's either finished or timed out.
Not only does it free the device manufacturers but it's something they can offer to app developer for free without costing them anything. Personally I think this is what will be the biggest impact (When/If they open raw "api" access to 3rd party devs). There are whole slews of apps that could make of that in small or major ways if it's not something the developer has to price into the app/subscription (especially with usage being something that can vary greatly user-to-user).
Some random examples I just came up with:
* Podcast app does STT for transcriptions/"subtitles" as well as episode summarization (Even cooler if the podcast provides chapter markers)
* Games getting new and interesting types of NPC's, level generation, etc
* Filters that do more than keyword matching (for news/social apps). I can technically filter out political Spam SMS messages but only with regex/keyword matching.
* Catch-up on 3rd party chat app conversations
I know LLMs will make plenty of mistakes and are far from perfect but there are things they can do very well that are very hard or expensive to do (sometimes just for indie-level devs but also for small/medium businesses). To be able to do those for free and offline would be a gamechanger.
> On-device inference improves not just its latency
this is a nuanced thing. sure you save the network hop, but you are running inference on a much more underpowered model on an underpowered device. at the end of the day you want to get the lowest time to first token and highest tokens per second. on-device optimizes TTFT at the expense of Tok/s. i think there are many usecases where Tok/s dominates in overall latency considerations.
How useful is it really? It s a novelty, and as language are going to get truly useful and reasonable, the small llms will be nothing but a novelty item that drains the battery.
They don't say it explicitly that it's running LLM on phone. Built in Gemini could just mean pre installed and configured app that works with a connection.
I fell for the Google Home, and it has gotten significantly worse over time. My only hypothesis is they found ways to reduce the cost of running the server-side, and it does not benefit the consumer.
My Consumer Report: Do not fall for hardware backed by software that costs the seller money to keep running.
It’s internal culture that devalues maintenance and product improvement. Launch gets you promo, maintaining gets you laid off.
I saw a lot of humble and dedicated engineers get laid off in the first round and it was a lot of people who put systems stability over their own promo. There used to be a place for those people, which is part of what made Google a decent place. That’s gone now, things will continue to break as long as fixers take the brunt of lay offs.
I think the point was that it used to be different at Google in the past(I saw it first hand). People ensuring services functioned correctly after launch were valued and rewarded appropriately.
Over time, the value given to maintenance and smooth operations decreased in reviews, esp for 'non core' services, which inevitably led to engineers doing the rational thing and prioritizing launching features, getting credit and moving on before they got saddled with pesky things like maintenance.
This also had the unintended consequence of politicizing work assignments quite a bit with more savvy political operators getting the most opportunities to launch featu ... er 'deliver impact'.
I have a smart home gym that does not run unless it successfully reaches the servers first (I found out after the return period was over, while my WiFi was down for a week). This really shoved this issue to the forefront of my mind and I am now trying to understand the packets it sends and receives with the hope of running a fake host on my home server, redirecting the traffic to a local destination and returning fake data to trick it into thinking it succeeded the fetch and finishes bootup.
The idea that I can't work out because of an internet outage upsets me greatly. Also their recent updates have added more ads into the gym interface which I am not a fan of, so I might just never have it connect to their servers ever again if I get my workaround working.
What device is this? I wonder if Pihole could block the ads for you. It was able to completely remove all of the ads on my LG OLED TV and the UI now looks perfect.
Same, I have nest cameras and nest wifi (now discontinued 2 years later, so can't buy compatible wifi points anymore). Software + Google voice assistant is so goddamn buggy!
I have the Google Wifi pucks because it was only mesh system at the time that offered both wireless and wired backhaul for mesh networks, which was great because I could wire most of it.
I used it as wired until I moved, and my current house I started using it wireless. That's when I discovered a bug in the wireless mesh that requires me to basically restart the network every couple days.
I also wish I didn't need to app to connect to it. I really don't understand why I can't manage it directly from my PC or phone via IP Address like every other system I've used. I regret it, but it is better than having an upstairs and downstairs network I needed to keep switching between with my netgear routers I had before.
I switched from Google Wi-Fi to Eero a few years ago and discovered that almost everything I’d thought were network limitations was some kind of non-obvious problem with the Google Wi-Fi system. Random daily 20 second hangs for iOS devices disappeared, the DNS proxy is now reliable, etc.
The Nest cameras are infuriating. I’ll get an alert, only to tap it and get “This video isn’t available yet. Check back later.”
After all these years, my devices still are split across the Nest and Home apps, and the Home app is still missing features Nest had from day one. Oh yeah and presence sensing doesn’t work since switching to the Google app [0].
I bought an iPhone last year and have been de-Googling since.
I thought it got slower because of Gemini. I have been setting alarms (yeah, I know!) under various conditions and it always worked like magic. It's something I have gotten really REALLY used to now and I'd notice any change.
Also, their AI photo effects never really worked any good for me but I do not own a pro model.
I've got a nest hub max that I use daily, for the most parts my family has learned the key phrases that result in the action we want. But randomly it'll play music from youtube when we only ever want spotify. Randomly it won't display google search results in a usable format.
So even the very simple use cases that we know work, aren't solid.
Then there's the massive disappointment when you just have a quick think about the types of interactions that it could do very well if google cared at all. Honestly, the failure to follow through on what could have been a house hold changing device is just sad to ponder.
Why they haven't rigged it up to gemini yet baffles me.
I abhor all these phones with a glass back, that look great in the store and then everyone puts an ugly back cover on.
I'm still rocking a Pixel 5, which is actually my second Pixel 5. I really like using it without a case. It's light, small, can handle a fall without the back shattering, and I like the matte finish.
All I want is a version with more modern specs, but every manufacturer keeps optimizing for the advertising shots, and people keep falling for this. Right now the camera is the only thing tempting me to upgrade, but I'll probably wait another year.
You don't need to put a case on phones. I've had an iPhone 11 since it came out, with no case, and quite a few drops onto hard floors. It's still fine.
Obviously there's some luck involved but the only time I put a case on a (in that case, Samsung) phone it shattered the first time I dropped it. So, I figured I might as well go without again. I've yet to have an iPhone break from a fall, only from leaning up against something with it in my pocket.
I can't remember the last time I held a phone without a case and didn't think "wow, I am going to drop this NOW". You'd think a $1000 camera would have, oh I don't know, some grips? A lanyard hook? Instead it's just shiny smooth nonsense all around.
Sure, I won't put a case on my next phone as well, even if it's glass, but most people do use a case, which keeps incentivizing manufacturer to get away with more fragile designs.
I'm mostly lamenting on how durability is a niche value for one of the most widely used objects in our lives.
Related: I use a 15 Pro with no case and this thing is an absolute beast. I've dropped it on concrete many times, no shattering. The newer glass they use seems to be doing the job. (This from someone who's shattered the front and/or back glass of at least 5 prior iPhones too.)
Not even a scratch on it either, titanium turns out to be a pretty fantastic frame material.
I don’t know what it says, but I managed to break a 15 Pro lens WITH a Tech21 case, dropping from about 3’ on concrete on the corner (not flat on the lens). It may be that Apple covers the actual lens with a cover, but whatever that outer surface was, it was replaced for $29 with Apple Care and didn’t require a new phone. Not a big deal, but makes me hesitant to carry it without a case.
Because most people would put a case on it, making it even thicker? I mean, I spent ~$1500 on my last phone, and while I treat it carefully, I'm not risking it getting smashed so I could never go without a cover.
I would totally use my phone without cover. $1500 or $300 I'm not going to resell it anyway, so scratches and wear aren't an issue. But I'm going to put it on a table a lot and I hate it when it wobbles.
I don't really know why I'm supposed to be upset that the phone doesn't lie flat. It's pretty rare I set it down on a table, to begin with. Even when it is...so what? I can make it jiggle when I poke it, I guess.
You’re right that a case does little against big drops - with or without case, either you’re lucky and the phone survives or it doesn’t.
Cases prevent scratches but, meh, I wouldn’t mind a few scratches on the back of my phone.
However the main attraction of a case to me is: grip. My iPhone 15 Pro Max feels more slippery than a bar of soap. Unless I exert a lot of force, it just slips out of my hand while using it.
I've used minimalist cases for my the last 3 or 4 phones, dropped them all plenty of times, and never suffered more than a minor scratch on the screen. I assume phones are just much tougher than 10 years ago, but the case isn't hurting the cause and I'm too scared not to use one.
I'm a pretty greasy person and while obviously it's not as good as rubber I don't feel the same way about glass phones. They're obviously smooth but glass on skin is pretty grippy, overall.
Many often cite the wireless charging argument, but often forget that there are many people who don't care about wireless charging and would prefer a durable phone.
I may switch this time since they're finally offering trade-in offers here in Ireland. I like my Pixel 6, but wanted a better camera for a while (to be clear, the Pixel 6 camera is really good, especially considering the price the phone was, but I still miss things like e.g. better optical zoom), so I may get a Pixel 9 Pro.
BTW, for those talking about issues: I bought my Pixel 6 at release, and yes, I had some strange Bluetooth issues during a few months. Not anymore, and for a while the phone is solid.
Also, this is probably the first phone that I have that I don't feel the battery got worse after 2+ years of usage, maybe thanks to the Adaptive Battery. My wife iPhone 12 (that she bought around at the same time as me) already had a ok-ish battery when she bought, but nowadays the battery is just plain sucks (battery health is 87%, that doesn't explain the whole story), one of the reason that she may switch to a Pixel too. Another thing I like from my Pixel is after those 2 years, the phone still feels snappy. I know people like to say that Tensor CPUs are bad, but I never had any issues with them.
I don't like the fact that Google increased the prices though: Pixel 6 was an amazing value for EUR649, but at EUR919 the Pro looks a more interesting choice since the gap reduced between the two. I think the reason is because the Pixel a series is such an amazing value that nobody care about the normal Pixel anymore, but if anything this is Google's fault.
Curious that you say this, because I had a 6 Pro and while all the rest was amazing, what ended up making me hate the phone was the battery.
My experience in that respect was just the opposite of yours: just barely OK at the beginning, and quick degradation in spite of the adaptive battery. In 2 years it wouldn't even make it to 3 PM in days of heavy usage. Definitely much worse than the batteries in my friends' iPhones, and of course also than all the other Android phones I've had, some of which lasted (or are still lasting) for more than 5 years with battery being a complete non-issue.
I wonder if it's a 6 vs 6 Pro issue or I just got a bad unit (I'm not the only one I know with the complaint, though, so if it's the latter, bad units were rather common).
> My experience in that respect was just the opposite of yours: just barely OK at the beginning, and quick degradation in spite of the adaptive battery. In 2 years it wouldn't even make it to 3 PM in days of heavy usage. Definitely much worse than the batteries in my friends' iPhones, and of course also than all the other Android phones I've had, some of which lasted (or are still lasting) for more than 5 years with battery being a complete non-issue.
How is generally the signal in your region? Because here in Dublin it is generally pretty good, being in 5G most of the time and generally with high speeds. And I think signal is the most important thing in Pixel phones, because of their bad Exynos modem. So if your overall signal is bad I can see the battery draining faster and your experience being much worse than mine.
I'm currently on the 6 and one issue it has is a pretty bad battery drain. Every so often it gets into superheating mode where the CPU is doing... something... and the phone gets wicked hot. I've even replaced the battery and the problem persists.
I don't care much about photos so the 9 really just doesn't have anything that would make me want to buy it. I'll probably be holding on to my 6 until it reaches the end of its security updates.
For me, when I am using the phone during roaming or in situations when the signal is bad, I can see increased battery drain and the phone itself sometimes gets hot. I assume this is the bad Exynos modem, but I heard the new modem for Pixel 9 will be focused in efficiency for the first time (still Exynos though), so I am hopeful that the situation is better because this is the only time the hardware from my Pixel 6 bothers me.
Do you think this is recent? I've been using a Pixel 6A for over a year, this current one only a few months. In the last few weeks it has started (seemingly) randomly getting quite warm.
I don’t know how anyone could possibly trust a premium product from Google, regardless of how good the specs are. Their entire approach to QA and privacy is anti-premium.
When Google bought HTC the idea was the best of Google software and the best of HTC hardware, but we have Google level hardware and HTC level software. The glory days of the HTC One were a decade ago.
Reminds me of that old joke: "Canada could have had British culture, French food, and American industry. Instead they ended up with American culture, British food, and French industry."
Reminds me of an issue I had with the Nexus 6P: when I wanted to get it fixed (I think it was an issue with the ambiental microphone) Huawei said it was a software issue and Google said it was a HW issue.
In the end, none of the two companies fixed the problem, and my 6P eventually died randomly one day.
So, this Google software and X hardware story is very similar to yours w/ HTC, except that if they don't buy the company it's better for them as they can just throw the problem over the fence to the other company. What a clown show
HTC software wasn't bad at all IMO, it was among the less bloated Android layers of the time.
I had three HTC flagships back in the glory days and they were amazing machines, their only problem was that most people preferred to buy the likes of Samsung despite being much worse in almost every respect (software, camera, design, durability, etc.). I don't know if due to bad marketing by HTC or just because they bought reviewers less (they used to have a blatant pro-Samsung bias).
Then of course quality actually degraded when they had to make huge personnel cuts due to bad sales.
Bit of advice I'm looking for, if my question resonates for you: I've had Pixels in the past (pretty distant past at this stage) but I generally found the experience to be too "beta" or "experimental", in that various features would not carry over to a new Pixel, and I'd have to get used to something entirely different all over again. In contrast, I've enjoyed the Samsung approach, and I love the Fold. (I also carry iphones, I like gadgets)
Should I try the Pixel Fold, might I like it? (looking for opinions from people who recognize my story; no need to tell me things like "nobody can answer that for you")
I think I've never had this few issues with a phone. (I only had Samsung phones before this)
It feels even better than the Android that the Pixels ship with, I used it for a day before I flashed GrapheneOS, and I can completely understand why one would not buy a Pixel again if they only experienced the Stock OS.
I'm always interested in trying things like that, but I'm not that into playing some sort of "jailbreak cat and mouse" over time. If I install GrapheneOS, is it automatic after that for security updates and whatnot, or do I have to do some weird two-hands-three-fingers reboot and manually download, etc?
Speaking as a Calyx user since 2020, the install experience was a bit finnicky, and it required no ongoing manual maintenance. My understanding is the web installer is pretty easy now though.
One caveat: Unlocking the bootloader deletes the disk. This is a reasonable security measure, but it means you don't want to use the phone for anything important before installing Graphene.
Probably the top reason I wanted to get GrapheneOS was the privacy/security aspect of it, this includes: no google play services by default, multiple user profiles (more than the Stock OS can have), a network permission for apps (this normally can't be toggled), disabling all usb data connections (can easily be activated in the Settings if I need it), Bootloader can be locked again after flashing the ROM and much more.
It also has very frequent updates, and my phone will get them for a long time (also true for the Stock Android on Pixels, but that one really sucks), which was also very important for me, as I want to be able to use my phone as long as possible.
What made this even more appeling is the possibility to install sandboxed google play in a seperate profile/user for apps that really need it, which works surprisingly well, and even then the google play services don't run with elevated permissions like they normally do, but with the same permissions like other apps.
And the battery life is insane, if I don't use my phone it basically does not loose any battery, and even with heavy usage I don't need to charge it daily.
So GrapheneOS was the easiest way to start degoogling (kind of ironic using Google Hardware) my mobile phone, while still being able to run nearly all of the Apps I need.
Oh right! I think I have that on a tablet. I was confusing it with the alternative to Android that Google is developing when I asked you about it. Thanks for the info.
I'm not sure why you think you'd like the Pixel fold more than the Samsung Fold. Their dimensions are similar, but you've already said you dislike the software experience.
I had the Nexus 5, Pixel 1, 3a, and now 7a, with a couple other phones in between which each time drove me back to Google hardware and their flavor of Android. If you didn't like the software in the early days of Pixel, or even in the Nexus days before, you probably still wouldn't.
i probably write in too parsimonious a style compared to how people read: my complaint was not about the pixel experience, it was about the experience moving from each pixel version to the next back in earlier days, it was about the deltas.
I can learn any system, but I want one and done. I don't want to keep having to learn all the time when it comes to things like muscle memory.
i hate gestures, for example. If I could configure/control them, alright, but I don't like when some touch that used to be unnoticed or neutral suddenly starts wiping out what I'm doing. my mantra when it comes to coding UIs: job number one is never ever lose anything the user has typed
i used to think that too. but then ss fold device changed my mind.
the problem mostly come from the tensor chip where apps/games are not optimized for it. can't imagine using a top flag phone (pixel 8 pro) at the time with sub-optimal performance.
the fold is so much money that I never even considered it. For what they're charging (where I live, I guess) I can get a macbook air or an ipad pro and still buy a nice pixel with the change from the price of the fold. Not really worth it to me.
>I'm not sure why you think you'd like the Pixel fold more than the Samsung Fold.
a hypothetical answer to my question could be: "yes, worth trying the Pixel experience again, but stay away from the Fold." my question had two dimensions.
but thank you! very informative. yes, I had most of the Nexuses, then into the Pixels
I've never used the fold, I'd be a bit concerned about the screen wearing at the crease. Damage is another thing to be worried about.
As for the pixels, my advice is to hold off buying the latest until like Feb or even May. Google pretty aggressively drops the prices after release so waiting just a little bit will save you several hundred dollars. By Feb, generally the phones have been pretty stable.
Black Friday usually gets a couple hundred $ off as well. Only risk is that if the phone (or watch, etc) is selling well then they won't discount it, so you might end up waiting a long time or waiting a couple months and still paying full price. I always try to hold out for Black Friday though unless my old phone is broken.
Hm... difficult question. I got a Pixel Fold at half price second hand. What MKBHD says about the Pixel Fold is absolutely true: it has the best outer screen/folded experience of all the foldables. Most of the time, I use it closed. And, apart from the abysmal screen brightness, it's a perfectly fine phone when folded.
There are still very few apps that support the full screen properly and while you can force apps to run full screen on the big screen, their automatic UI layout will simply blow up the lower and upper portions of their interface so that you don't see that much more.
Most Google app, obviously, have proper support and YouTube is definitely the primary use case for the big screen. Insanely, Google Maps loses features when viewed unfolded (WTF?). But even among the Google apps, though, most don't really use the space in a useful way. They often just put some hamburger menu permanently on the screen. Nice, I guess, but you won't bother unfolding the phone just for that.
Web browsing/reading is great on the unfolded screen. That's where the near-rectangular aspect ratio works best.
Honestly though, while I'm keeping an eye on what's happening in the foldable space, I think my next phone will be a boring old slab phone again.
I'm an iPhone guy, but - there _are_ other designs for phones, right? The squircle corners, the shiny metal band surrounding the matte back, the aqua-pill-shaped buttons, the colors - Google is a $2T company, there's gotta be an industrial designer somewhere in the building or some process for phone design that doesn't take place in Cupertino, right?
That phone isn't a squircle, it is a rounded square. Those rounded edges seem to be inspired by google material design. Also phones have converged to the metal band, glass back before the iphone did it. Mobile phones are a mature technology and their designs have converged to the designs people are buying.
I have 5 year old Note9, and recently broke my display where small part of it is just black. I have been searching for a phone to replace it with, with very few criteria: modern SOC, non-folding, not ugly looking.
Its breathtaking how many phones just go nuts on their backside, stuff Id be ashamed to pull out in public (oneplus 12, oneplus open, xiaomi 14 ultra). When theres finally some normal lens housing that isnt protruding on a side making the phone wobble while laid flat on a table (like almost every remaining phone), it almost doubles the phone width.
And then when theres finally a phone Id like to buy thanks to its big battery, sleek design and no front camera cutout (Nubia Redmagic 9 Pro), the must fuck it up by adding a freaking fan to it. And ofc their Z60 Ultra has again huge and uneven camera housing with red accent around main camera.
Its as if every manufacturer is either conforming to herd, or going batshit crazy.
The reason people are buying those phone is because theres no choice. Not that theres no choice because people are buying it.
I really wonder if consumers have any influence on phone designs. People generally buy phones for completely different reasons, the design just has to be "not bad" which generally means just take whatevers available that meets your actual criteria (OS, camera quality, etc). After all you'll probably have to slap a case on it anyways.
Its super frustrating how the entire industry follows Apple; incapable of original thought. The Pixel 8 had somewhat rounded edges, which is fantastic for a comfortable grip. Apple killed rounded corners and converted to the squared-off design with the iPhone 12; and everyone has followed suit since. Galaxy phones used to have curved edge displays; now they're squared off, because Apple. Samsung's watches are generally circular, but they had to go squircle with their Ultra variant, because Apple. Apple does Titanium; Samsung has to do Titanium; no one gives a flying shit about titanium!
I would bet every dollar in my pocket that Apple is intending to convert back to a more rounded design with the iPhone 17, and the S26 and Pixel 11 will follow suit.
Begging+pleading for the googung corpodrones to have just one original idea, even if its only "we're gonna do it this way simply to spite Apple" (they won't).
There is a vibrant Chinese Android scene, with their own fairly stand-out design trends. One design that's pretty popular right now is the "large circle", as exemplified by Xiaomi 14 Ultra. My favorites in this theme are the ZTE Z50s Pro (IMHO just a gorgeous phone) and the Honor Magic6 Pro.
Pixel 9 design language is iPhone 4 design language from 2010 -- which was original iPhone design language from 2005, that didn't ship!
Apple calling back to what was considered their most iconic design language for the iPhone (and now iPads) long before others imitated it, doesn't mean Apple is now copying the imitators.
But those were Apple having fun with Sony fanfiction applied to an earlier Apple design ... turns out the iPhone 4 language was in their design repertoire in 2005, before even the original iphone shipped:
Profitable products attract copycat designs. Samsung copied no removable battery and the metal used. The first Google phone was a Blackberry style layout until Apple popularized the all touchscreen design.
It could be worse, it could be TV where back rarely seen and only gimmick after maximum bezel thinness is display thinness until samsung decided to add a frame. At some point design gets optimized to death. Have to look towards niche segments like gaming phones with extra buttons, ventilation, ports etc.
That said, I just want a phone with a modernized 5 way switch rocker to scroll with thumb.
My favorite phone design is the Meizu 16 series, especially its white variant (search for Meizu 16s Pro unicorn, it's just gorgeous). The 16 series is the last series before Meizu also succumbed to the "mainstream" designs such as big screen size, punched-hole screens, and weird camera layouts.
No problem, no one will use squares with rounded corners as long as iphones go back to the "perfect" design with a small phone and small screen that apple forever insisted was the perfect phone design, instead of larger screens that android had and apple now uses.
I like the small radius corners of my Pixel 6a. I hope it will last because I can't see myself switching to a recent Pixel with those huge squircle corners.
I love Google Pixel phones because of Google Fi for traveling; unfortunately Google Fi is facing major service downgrades/outages for travelers (including me) who go on 3+ month trips out of the US. Google Support tells me the Google Pixel 9 Pro has the same limitation. For comparison my iPhone works fine on Verizon.
The issue is now described in the Google Pixel T&C, and I hope Google will eventually offer a way to buy a Google Pixel phone and Google Fi that offers full functionality for longer trips.
I used to be a Google Fi fan (early adopter at that) for European trips ... but nowadays, with multi-ESims, it is trivial to get a local SIM card and use that.
The local data plans are typically more broadly useable and cheaper than the $10/GB that Fi offers.
When it comes to Europe (and this might apply to other destinations as well) Fi is a bad deal.
Definitely applies to many Asian countries as well.
Often, eSims get significantly better latency too, since you get an IP from close to where you are instead of your data having to cross one or more oceans. A VoIP call between two US SIMs/phones roaming in Asia is not a great experience.
Note that's not always the case: eSIMs I got from Nomad and Airalo in Europe/UK last year were routing things via Hong Kong, so things like DDG and google search using the SIM geolocated me to Hong Kong all the time, and the latency was noticeably bad.
If you read the reviews of some of the eSIMs there are quite a few mentions of this happening.
Definitely – you need to be aware of that when picking one. Some vendors are pretty transparent about their "IP location" these days, fortunately.
Some, like Truphone, even have multiple gateways that are dynamically selected for lower latency, which is very neat (but they're generally more expensive).
Fraud? One needs a Google account to use FI so they for sure know who you are to any degree necessary
Also, defrauding ... what, exactly? If it's a US phone number, there are a bazillion ways to get an SMS enabled US phone number that is either anonymous or pseudoanonymous due to people not wanting to get sexting or pig butchering spam when Yet Another Breach leaks every marketing db in the world
It sucks about google fi after 90d, but Verizon is $10/d or $100 per billing cycle, no? It was easy and cheap for me to get a local sim (in Barcelona and London, at least). Does verizon still lock your phone? I had a bad experience traveling with Verizon to Munich. It was one of a handful of reasons I dropped them as my carrier. This was many years ago though.
It's just an anecdote, but from my one-time experience the 90 days restriction isn't a hard restriction with TMobile. Service worked fine for 5 months for a family member abroad (in a single country) with no issues or messaging from TMobile about an overstay - although this was on a family plan with other phones in the US for the majority of that time.
Google Support tells me it's a Google company policy, not a U.S. policy. And for comparison, Verizon works fine, just by paying a bit extra for extended roaming.
people in the rick steves link say you just tell tmo when you get back in the us to reset it/turn it on for the us. This should not have unclear limits of course.
The issue with having an explicit threshold is super heavy users will use right up to the limit and recommend it to other super heavy users. This MVNO then gets a disproportionate percentage of unprofitable roaming costs. The solution is for them to pass through the costs so there’s no dancing around the costs by suddenly cutting you off.
Interesting. I likely won't be in a position to take a 3+ month trip for a long time. But I just came back from spending 1 month in China and Google Fi worked flawlessly in China and Taiwan. I had better 5G coverage in Shanghai than in the US.
My main complaint is once you go over your data limit and opt into the $10/GB there's no way to restrict your speed. It may sound silly, but I was hesitant to click some links as they may start loading tons of pictures and videos below the fold and cost me a dollar or two per click. So I pretty much limited my browsing to HN!
I know it's not a good solution, but I wonder if you can send the Google Fi eSim to a friend back in the states to "reset" the 90 day counter then have the friend send you back the eSim.
I also love Google Fi, but FYI there are substantially cheaper phones that are still compatible. For example they will sell you this one for $60 right now: https://fi.google.com/about/phones/moto-g-5g-2024. No idea if that's a good phone, just saying that if you're mostly in it for the international coverage there's no reason to pay $800+ for a brand new Pixel when you need a new phone.
The keynote seems to only focus on the Pixel 9 software capabilities.
Honestly, why is this important? Aside from all the AI hype, I don't see why the event should be so focused on features that are purely software updates that will most likely propagate to other non Pixel devices.
It's just a bummer that the event focused so much on the AI features instead of the HW capabilities: probably they don't have much to show this year.
I just hope they fixed the numerous HW issues the previous Pixel devices had (e.g: overheating, radio, ...)
It's happening because nobody cares about phone hardware anymore. The iPhone 15 became a bit of a meme because of how similar it was to the 13 as it pertains to most people's use cases.
Phones are like laptops now, most phones regardless of make or model will do what you need it to.
I disagree with my Exynos S22 Ultra... Battery life is abysmal and it heats up instantly, a thing that got extremely better with Snapdragon S23 and S24. Hardware is still important
Right now basically you are forced to buy a Pixel phone, because if you don't buy an iOS or Android device you don't have apps, if you buy an iOS device you lose your freedom, and if you don't buy a Pixel phone you don't have timely updates and GrapheneOS and thus don't have an open source, frequently updated and well-engineered OS.
If you're a Google Fi member, they have a nice discount on the price of the phone - but the trade-in value of your existing phone looks to be halved. I can get the Pixel 9 Pro XL with 256GB of storage for $750, but I only get $150 towards my Galaxy S22+.
Not bad, really. My Pixel 6 was being flaky a month ago (not playing sounds reliably), and I needed to fix it right then, so I bought a Pixel 8 from Best Buy for $549+tax and got $220+tax back (described as $70 valued price + $150 promotional) for trading in my Pixel 6. If you consider the $70 as the true value of my flaky Pixel 6, you could say I only paid $399 (plus tax) for the Pixel 8, and now Google's offering me $490 for it if I buy a Pixel 9.
Even so I'm not sure the Pixel 8 -> Pixel 9 upgrade is worth $799 - $490 = $309 (plus tax) to me when the Pixel 8 is brand new and working well.
I think it's a good deal. After-tax price is ~$1082, trade-in is $699, with a $200 store credit ($300 with a Google 1 sub), and $21 back from 2% credit card rewards. So ~$162 cost, which is not much more than the increase in trade-in value. Plus the 1 year of Gemini Advanced and maybe some YouTube premium months.
The main downside is that store credit expires in 1 year. Also I hate buying new phone cases.
Yeah, that sounds perfect. To go from my 256GB P8 to a 256GB P9 Pro would cost me about $610 + 10% tax after trade-in which I don't think I'll have the stomach for.
Lots of comments about the camera bump. I'm glad they at least went for a symmetrical bump so the phone lays flat rather than iPhone's "off to the left" style bump. I don't mind a non-flat phone, but at least make it symmetrical.
This is a valid point, but in my experience, the further the camera is from the side, the most annoying to use it is.
Like sometimes you want to take something in picture with a difficult angle or small opening. Or for example being in the middle means that there will not be space for fingers when holding the phone for a picture.
>when done correctly, the Pixel 8 Pro's temperature readings are very accurate. Clinical trials revealed that the Pixel 8 Pro could successfully calculate body temperatures between 96.9°F and 104°F to within a margin of error of ±0.54°F.
The "human body measurement" test in that article seems flawed. When you launch the Thermometer app, there's only two buttons: Object temperature and Body temperature.
So I'm not sure why the author tried to measure body temperature by using "Object temperature" mode with "default" setting and measuring the temperature under the tongue. The Body Temperature test has always been accurate for me and matches my higher end forehead thermometer.
Looks like the body temperature update came out a couple months after that article was written, so I guess it works better now. Very cool, I would love to have that on a phone.
Could be the article is written by someone outside the US. If you aren't in the US (I gather—at least in the UK I can speak to personally), the app just doesn't offer body temperature at all because they haven't bothered to get it certified for medical use.
(You can work around this by spoofing your location, but it's not obvious to do.)
What's the selling points here for upgrades? Comparing my five year old A50, I'm not seeing it. Presumably a better camera, and more RAM (why?). I felt compelled to upgrade in past years, but I feel like phone tech reached a plateau. The AI features, front and center, feel like hype. Haven't found them useful at all.
But its Google Play Services (which includes WebView) + Chrome all receive regular updates independently.
People put a lot more weight on the Android security updates than they perhaps should. Unless you're installing random crap, there are very few OS vulnerabilities that you need to be concerned about if you have an up-to-date browser. Things like StageFright are very uncommon (and I can't find evidence of that actually being exploited in the wild)
There's a limit to that. Kernel/middleware updates see a steady flow of security patches on basically all devices. It's true that real world exploits tend to involve some bug higher up the stack (in still-updatable software, e.g. apps or the services layer), or at the very least to be susceptible to workaround fixes there. But nothing is perfect and relying on an out-of-service device is IMHO pretty questionable.
To be clear: the A50 is an end-of-life device. It's not that the latest security fix was a year and a half ago, it's that the update pushed a year and a half ago will be the last one for this phone.
I wish there were more options for people who don’t care that much about the camera in their smartphone. I remember the non-bump camera in the 7.6 mm thin 2016 iPhone SE was perfectly fine for many situations, I took some impressive vacation photos with it.
Unfortunately those come with extremely weak hw. I got one of those phones (there are no high end, small, 3.5, rootable phones). I struggle to use background apps.
> I wish there were more options for people who don’t care that much about the camera in their smartphone.
Just get a cheap phone? If you're paying $500+ for a phone, I'd estimate most of that money is going into the camera. Judging by the marketing, anyway.
> Either way people are throwing a case on to make the back straight again.
Alternatively it's just exploiting "everyone uses a case" to get a mm or two of space for the camera lens that can very productively use it. Thickening the whole device only makes sense for people who don't use a case, which is basically no one (well, me, but most people love their cases).
Indeed, at this point my workflow is pretty mature. The camera bump ends up unnoticeable to me because I'll throw it into a Spigen case anyway. Seems like a lot of people are doing that.
I love the camera bump on the Pixel 6. I made a leather belt pouch¹ for it for use on trips and hiking, and the camera bump sits neatly on the edge of the front of the pouch (the back part curves around as a flap over the top). It gives my fingers exactly the right grip to grab it and get a solid grip on the whole device as I lift it out of its pouch.
No one wants that weight. A thicker battery puts the phone out of comfort for everyone. A thicker camera bump puts the phone out of comfort for only a few.
I think the bulges are because everyone’s using a case anyway, so they may as well bump out. Unless someone’s doing the “I care so little about protecting several hundred dollars that I use an expensive phone without a case” thing.
I never used a case in my life, owned like 6 phones since my first Galaxy back in 2012. Much rather deal with a few scratches than touching some cheap case instead of the premium metal/glass.
My reason is that I never sell phones anyway, after 2 years I get a new one and give the old one to a cousin or something like that.
I used to say the same thing, then one day I tripped and shattered my phone. It was nothing I did that caused it. Just a small bit of uneven pavement was enough to ruin the whole device.
I have dry hands and can't hold my Galaxy S23+ with glass back at all. It slips out of my hand all the time. No way I can use without a case. It'd break on the first day.
I never use cases and I haven't had a phone break from physical damage in over a decade. Phones these days are pretty dang durable. I really don't want a giant brick in my pocket.
I just pay the extra $30 or whatever for accident protection. That's about the same price as a case and accomplishes the same goal. I think of it as a zero-ounce case.
Where do you get $30 accident protection for the lifetime of a phone? I've looked into Apple Care for this in the past, and it was about 10 times that for two years, with a deductible for broken screens.
I've never used a case and never will. It's not that hard to not drop your phone, and unless you get a heavy duty case (like an OtterBox) they aren't adding much protection anyways. It's not worth the added expense, ugly look, and crappy plastic texture.
My wallet case is indispensable (to me). In other words, I'd rather use the "space" of the camera's bump-out for my own purposes (ID and credit card) than a worse camera or even more-er battery life (for some time now "more than a day" is indistinguishable to me from "more than a day and a half") or some other gadget. Probably. Um, maybe put some more gadgets on the phone and I'll get back to you on that one...
I really liked the "visor" style of camera bump since the Pixel 6. I like symmetry so the square corner bumps always bothered me, plus it didn't give it a corner wobble when sitting on a table. I wish they would have gone full width on the new Fold :/
My main criticism with the camera bump on the Pixel 9 are the sharp edges. It makes it difficult to slip into pants without catching, and also collects dust.
I was hoping they'd chamfer the edge in future models but it doesn't look like that's happening.
Using a case solves this, but it shouldn't be required.
Mobile phones are a mature technology. There aren't any opportunities to differentiate designs. For cars, they all look the same and differentiate brands with headlights and grills, phones only have the camera bump to differentiate brands.
I’m still bitter about my last Pixel with the stuttering display (no real-time thread for the graphics), the settings all over the place (I counted 4 different addresses for my home, and 1 was deeply hidden in their assistant), and the debug strings in UPPER_SNAKE_CASE in the Google apps, which is unacceptable for a device that is sold to everyone.
My Pixel 5 is an amazing device, but it's slowly falling apart, software-wise. Bugs bugs and more bugs! It's also no longer getting software updates, and its successors have a laundry list of issues.
The alternative is Samsung, the company that doesn't understand privacy nor consent, or Apple, whose phones lack uBlock support.
Kagi’s Orion browser for iOS actually supports ublock and other browser extensions.
It’s a bit wonky and on iPhones there’s a lack of configurability, for example there’s no way that I know of to bring up a dialog to block elements in ublock, or adjust the settings in dark reader, but they do seem to work well enough in their default flavor.
The reading list functionality is less ergonomic, but tabs/pages are more ergonomic imo, and it seems to work better with webpages that safari spins it’s wheels on.
Unfortunately it doesn’t help the forced zoom that Apple forces on everything when a text box is loaded, that is then compounded when giving it focus with a cursor for writing (yes, I’ve already tried all system systems that could potentially disable that. Nothing works, Apple’s text input continues to be straight up burning garbage on multiple levels)
I’d say it’s worth trying, and sending feedback to.
If uBlock is the only thing holding you back from an iPhone, you can use the Orion browser, which can install many Chrome extensions (including uBlock Origin)
how do we know the orion browser isn't somehow spying on you? I want an opensource browser, that's where I do so much financial and other transactions (as well as like bank company apps).
That browser should be something like a fully opensource de-googled chrome browser, but it doesn't seem to exist on mobile.
Hold strong! I replaced my 5's battery about a year ago after it started bloating. I usually draw the line though when security updates cease. Staying with the Pixel line is easier but I'm trying to divest from Google in general and moving to a different phone would be a big step.
FWIW, I use a Pixel 8 with an aramid fiber case (Thinborne), and it's pretty much a strict upgrade over the Pixel 5. Only real downside is that it's ~1.6mm thicker than a caseless Pixel 5, but on the other hand the added protection of a case comes in handy.
Does the case make the candybar-style camera feel less bulky? I'm in the market for a new phone, and the Pixel form factor is really nice, but the protruding camera makes me hesitate.
I personally don't mind the candybar-style camera and think it looks kind of cool. It's definitely not something I actively notice or think about while using the device, and I like that when I set the phone down the entire screen is tilted slightly upwards rather than just one corner.
Having said that, if the camera bar is an issue for you, the case wouldn't make a difference one way another. There are cases that are flush with the camera bar to mask the protrusion, but those obviously extend the total thickness to be at least as thick as the section of the device with the camera bar, whereas the aramid cases are more like a few sheets of standard office paper.
I had similar issues with my pixel 3a about three years ago, and I switched over to Pixel Experience. This got me up to Android 13, and everything just works great to this day. I'm pretty sure there won't be an Android 14+ Pixel Experience build for this device, though.
You can install all kinds of extensions on Firefox on Android my friend. Firefox for Android is one of the killer apps now IMHO. Termux, Tasker, KDE Connect, and NetGuard are some others.
I read "debug strings" as something more hidden than "user-facing error messages", but perhaps you're right. Of course, a snake case error code is more searchable, so objectively more useful in at least one sense.
No thanks to anything else coming from Google (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix ...). Have you noticed how they improved their Youtube recommendations in the last year? Creepy, how well it works. Unfortunately, all this tech paired with state of the art psychological research is not used to help people, but to make them media junkies. Everything AI follows the same pattern. The tech is amazing and can be indeed helpful used the right way, but at the end of the day it's used to gather data to make us using their services more and more and to than extract money from us (mostly still via ads). Decades ago, this industry was kind of innocent. Today, they all know exactly what they do and what damage they cause in esp. younger peoples brains. Healthy kids and young people need to be creative, explore the real world, be proactive. Not muted screen zombies. The extend of emotional and general mental illness in young people is heart breaking. We all see it. They don't care.
I hate you, Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, TicToc ... the world was a better place without you.
I dunno about your carry situation, but when I first lost access to the headphone jack on a Pixel I tried that USB-C stunt and the phone's edge came right to the top of my pocket causing the adapter to fulcrum back and forth, sometimes dislodging the plug and 100% worrying me that it's going to break my USB-C port
Yeah I can definitely see that being a problem depending on your particular phone + headphones + pants situation. For me, I use the smallest phone I can buy (iPhone 13 Mini, currently) so it all tucks into my pocket, for the most part. The adapters still regularly break after ~6 months anyway.
Sony flagships fit these requirements (micro SD card slot, swim, flagship chip, esim, etc) but they unfortunately don't feel as polished in the software end. Not to mention Sony phones being very difficult to find.
I'm looking at either a 5a, or one of the Samsung budget phones since I don't care about the flagship chip. But I wouldn't be surprised if this is the last time getting a new phone where headphone jack is an option at all.
I personally found Best Buy's Insignia brand to be the most reliable one. I usually get 6-12 months of heavy use out of those, while Apple's usually broke after only a month or two.
Still no dedicated fingerprint scanner, as it was in Pixel 4a :(
And it was awesome! Super-fast, tactile feeling, right under the finger, doesn't blind you at night. Cannot understand why they removed it, cost-cutting?
I also detest that screen based reader with all my heart, but as a point of observation if you have your phone in a car holder it masks access to the physical fingerprint reader, making a situation where your phone locks while on the road some nonsense to unlock it. I'm aware of the plethora of "keep phone unlocked" settings, but my life experience has been that Google's gonna Google about when it wants "extra sekurity!1" even with all the "smart unlock" toggles on
I'm not saying that's a good reason to make the other 99.9% of my life terrible pushing on the glass like I'm trying to suffocate it, but I did notice the one tiny UX improvement with the front reader
Now that Google is offering 5-6 years of updates, you can get a 7 or 8 loaded with Graphene OS and be good for the long haul at about half the price as when they came out.
Looks great. Really nicely designed except that camera bump is intense. I like having nice cameras on my phone, but I wish we could go back to the flush camera design. I guess they know you will put a case on it anyway.
One day, the pixel and the stock android will have the ability to hide the navigation pill/ gesture bar[0]. On that day, the screenshots of these products pages will be of the complete screen instead of the top half.
I didn't realize that wasn't available in stock Android until your comment! I'm guessing you know, but for everyone else, it's been available in Lineage OS... Maybe since the switchover to the "thin pill" format?
Genuinely, you gotta love those altOS nerds. 'Giving you stuff you didn't even know you needed.
Don't get me wrong, I've been using custom ROMs for years, and even I didn't know about this issue until I switched to GraphineOS where the pill cannot be hidden.
I went through many moto/samsung/google phones. Every single one sucked ass after about a year or two. Wasn't a big deal when the phones came with contract renewals. Became a major deciding factor to abandon them when I had to hand over my own cash.
If I'm paying 500+ for a device it needs to you know... last more than a few years.
This hasn't been a problem on Android in 7-8 years. I bought my S10+ brand new in 2019, and it still works flawlessly till today (well, except the battery).
The S7 Edge was the last time I experienced slowdowns after 1-2 years.
It’s to run on-device LLM models. They require a lot of RAM. That is one of the reasons why only iPhone 15 Pro (only model with 8GB) is getting any Apple Intelligence features.
That’s a gross misrepresentation, and far from the whole truth. (Besides, ref counting is also a garbage collection algorithm)
A huge chunk of the OS runs native stuff. Add to it that android is less strict at putting apps/processes to sleep, it’s become a much less black and white question.
You are missing the point here – garbage collected languages (the "allocate it and forget about it" style, not refcounting like Objective-C) require much more memory to perform at the same level as a language where memory is explicitly allocated and deallocated.
Yes, I’m fairly familiar with garbage collectors and these are called tracing GCs. My point is that a big chunk of the system doesn’t use these, so you can’t just put the blame on one thing.
Would one percent be responsible for a system’s bad performance if that is “slow”?
Yep. I still use the iphone 7+ as a backup phone, it still gets security updates and runs modern apps fine with 3GB! Slow compared to modern phones, but that's not down to the RAM, the memory management is amazing, never had an issue.
So, if I understand correctly this “built-in” Gemini is 100% just calling to the Gemini cloud backend?
Honestly, Apple Intelligence is looking much better than this. But I suppose it’s no wonder, I don’t think Pixels are a large market for Google, while iPhones kind of are for Apple.
No, it's not all just calling to a cloud backend. The newer Pixels have hardware to do some stuff on-board, including non-trivial stuff like realtime audio cleanup (that works amazingly btw). STT and TTS are done mostly locally as well (with some cloud processing used when network connection is available), but can work all offline. The Gemini Advanced stuff is going to the cloud though.
Yeah I was primarily speaking about the LLM part, as apple is doing that (smaller LLM models will handle simpler tasks on device and hand over to cloud when necessary + apps will be able to efficiently deliver fine-tuned LORAs for the already-available local models).
I do remember a lot of other typical "AI" stuff being done locally and well when I had a pixel a couple years ago.
I fail to see what is much better about a system where you don't know when it sends your data to the cloud or not (and is likely to do it 90% of the time).
I just hate modern phones, all of them. I want an adequate one-hand screen size (~6"), a headphone jack, and an even camera bump (just so it lies flat on the table).
I love the pixel 8a, the size, curvature and camera bump seems ideal. Ofc they removed a freaking 3.5mm jack, but I can make a compromise here and buy 100 type-c to 3.5mm adapters, but I'm super disappointed with the new 9x series, they are now even more blocky and square-ish which i really don't like, plus no "a" model which is usually looking much better for me than the main one.
Does anyone know the phone which is small, has a headphone jack, even camera bump and is still buyable to this day?
I'm still salty about my Pixel 8 dying out because of the "green screen" bug (basically, screen just progressively turns greener until it stops working). Very common according to reddit, and the ubreakitifixit guy acknowledged it's a common problem as well.
My Pixel 5a also had some shenanigans and my dad's pixel 6 as well
No idea why they don't do proper Q&A. Looks like a good phone but yet fails in ways my work iphone never has.
It's still a running theme that their in-display fingerprint readers are uniquely terrible for many people, even 3 (now 4) generations after they started using them instead of rear-mounted capacitive sensors. I don't know why they struggle so much with that compared to every other manufacturer using exactly the same sensors from the same handful of suppliers.
I held on to my Pixel 5a for as long as I could, primarily for that rear-mounted fingerprint reader. Such a wonderful implementation. Fast, accurate, and fingers just fell naturally into place when picking it up. I'm still dreaming that someday they'll return to that.
I had some issues with this very early when I got mine, but I think this went away completely. I feel like this was a software issue, and is now fixed (well, at least part of it).
I don't think these anecdotes (yours or the guy above with the green screen issue) are useful.
Fwiw, I haven't had either issue with my P8 Pro and it's definitely the best phone I've ever used, both on Android 14 and running the Android 15 betas.
These anecdotes are useful to highlight the low quality of Google devices. Certainly case reports cannot replace defect rates and other meaningful statistics, but if manufacturers are deaf about the issues then it doesn't bode well for instance for security related issues.
I had similar bad issues with the fingerprint tech and would assume that the issue has at least 20% prevalence among the affected Pixel models.
I had this exact issue on my Pixel 6 Pro! I thought it was done for but it seems to have recovered over the last few months and I don't see it anymore.
Where did the “{our, the} most {adj} yet” marketing thing come from? I remember apple using it for a long time. Did everyone just decide to copy it? It sounds so lame to see it during every tech product announcement.
My current Android phone was free from the provider in exchange for buying around 3 months of service in advance. It is no speed demon but certainly does all of your average phone stuff just fine.
I have only two reasons to buy a high end phone (which I buy used, of course):
1. Taking good photos. I like my DSLR, but for memories a phone is handier. And cheap phones take crappy photos in low light (i.e. indoor) conditions. I don't want to look at family photos 20 years from now and say "Boy, I wish I paid $200 extra".
2. Lasting longer. My current phone was launched in 2017 (bought in 2019). It had a powerful CPU and a lot of RAM. It's still running fine.
I absolutely refuse to pay for a phone; call me old-school, but I am still stuck in the memory of the days when they came 'free' with service contracts.
Me? I will happily take a slightly outdated phone with a new provider/contract where I don't pay anything on top of the expected monthly fee. I have 8 months left on my iPhone13 mini (128GB) w/VZW and will happily change to one of the other Big Threes to make it happen again.
A regular Verizon plan with tethering that supports the "free" phones costs the same in three months for what I pay for a year of service on Mint.
But sure, the phone was "free".
$2,880 for a Verizon plan with a "free" phone (3 year commitment after all), $720 for three years of my current Mint plan. I could spend $2k on a phone over those three years and I'd still have spent less money.
I pay $20/mo for Visible, and it works great. The average phone plan with a "free" iPhone from a major carrier is $100-120/mo with a minimum 3 year contract. So yeah, paying for your phone yourself is always significantly cheaper. You can even get a device payment plan if you want, and the payment plan + phone bill will still be cheaper than the bundle AT&T or Verizon offers you.
Historically I have never used carrier commitments and paid for phones outright but did it for the first time earlier this year with a targeted offer to get a iPhone 15 Pro from Verizon for basically a couple hundred bucks in taxes. Mostly because it felt like I was getting worst of both worlds paying for a single line Verizon post paid plan without taking advantage of any upgrade offers after my BYOD deal expired.
But I'm now regretting it especially because I'm getting tired of constantly missing notifications on my iPhone being so used to persistent notification indicators on Android. Planning to use T-Mobile to buy me out of my device payment plan once I get around to 800 dollars owned on my 15 Pro because being I hate how I'm locked in to a premium plan I don't come close to making full use of. I still have an unlocked S23 Ultra I can switch back to as my main phone if I decide to.
Based on the Mint website, it appears to be $360 up-front + $360 or $720 for their 'unlimited' annual which I don't know if it includes tethering. I pay ~$684 for VZW for the year, for unlimited w/tethering and HBO Max + Netflix.
And I already get Max through my home ISP anyways, so really only $8/mo extra value. But I wouldn't watch Netflix With Ads anyways, so really $0 for me.
But that $80/mo plan I quoted doesn't even include the streaming services. That's just the regular data plan rate for a single line. Adding Max + Netflix (With Ads) is another $10/mo, so $90/mo compared to the $20/mo I'm paying now.
Note, when looking at Verizon's website, the big advertized rate numbers show the per-line rate with four lines.
Mint's unlimited is $30/mo when purchasing a year up front. The only "plus" is taxes and fees. It includes tethering. So even with whatever deal you've got going on its still $324/yr cheaper, $972 cheaper after a three-year commitment (if applicable in your case).
The "free" phone only applies to Unlimited Plus and Unlimited Ultimate. At a single line for Plus that's $80/mo. $960/yr. $2,880 over that three-year commitment.
But either way, I don't bother with the "unlimited" plans. You're going to get de-rated after 30-40gigs anyways on Verizon.
> Unlimited data is restricted to on-device smartphone usage. After exceeding 30 GB/mo of 5G Ultra Wideband, 5G, or 4G LTE mobile hotspot data, mobile hotspot data reduced to speeds up to 3 Mbps when on 5G Ultra Wideband and 600 Kbps when on 5G / 4G LTE for the rest of your monthly billing cycle.
"Unlimited" plan you're paying $80/mo for that you're going to get 600Kbps if you really treat it as "unlimited".
I personally don't even use all of my 15GB a month. I get lots of people live different lifestyles, but a lot of people don't need "unlimited". So really, I'm not even spending $360/yr, I'm spending $240/yr. $444/yr cheaper than your plan. $1,332 cheaper after three years.
I think you misread, that throttle is for the hotspot data.
And honestly that's a lot better than most throttles. Though it seems silly they even bother to throttle 5G Ultra Wideband. Are those antennas ever going to be heavily loaded with how short their range is?
It's the other way around for me. I refuse to get a phone from my carrier.
Phones "free" with a contract are just disguised loans. The loan is hidden in your monthly sub, which is why you have to be locked from anywhere from 1 to 2 years.
Also I don't want to have carrier bloatware on my phones, and I don't want my phones to be locked to a carrier.
I pay my carrier only for the network. I pay for my phones.
This is literally still how it works. Instead of a contract you have a device payment plan where you're defacto locked into the carrier because if you leave you owe the balance on your smartphone.
The trade-in and switching deals are all done as bill credits so that you are locked in for 2 or 3 years.
If you are using a big three cell carriers with the unlimited postpaid plans and aren't getting a brand new latest model Pro phone for free you are throwing your money out the window, because you're still paying for the phone in your higher plan price.
You will almost certainly save money if you buy the device yourself and use an MVNO instead of the big three postpaid plans. Especially if you buy the device used after it depreciates for a year or two.
Conversely, maybe it's a European thing, but I couldn't imagine having my phone in thrall to one provider. So I buy a phone and then pick whichever monthly-contract provider is offering the best package at that moment.
> I will happily take a slightly outdated phone with a new provider/contract where I don't pay anything on top of the expected monthly fee.
At least for Android, the main issue you'll face is the lack of Android updates. Which eventually leads to apps no longer working because they don't support your Android version.
My phone (2017) still runs everything fast, but I can't install several apps merely because they don't claim to support my old Android version. I have to go online and find apks of the app's version that last supported my Android version.
How is a phone different to a TV or other electronic device? Also, providers are giant assholes, one of the only good things about apple and google becoming a duopoly and their gripes getting tighter is that they can say f** you to providers that just install bloatware on our devices with no concern for privacy, or even basic functionality.
I find it super annoying that the base model's camera doesn't offer RAW photo support. Surely this is just a software limitation since the Pro version shares two of the same cameras.
I'd buy this if it had USB4 that - when plugged into a dock with a monitor, keyboard and mouse - put up a complete desktop OS (preferably full fat Linux).
I could then use my phone as a thin-client for work or gaming, perhaps even experimenting with proton locally.
Apple already demonstrated that mobile hardware is capable of workstation workloads so I'd see this as a natural step forward.
Beyond that, there isn't any compelling reason to upgrade my Pixel 6a.
If I broke my 6a, I'd probably upgrade to the 7a for the better screen.
One of the big problems with Pixel phones is their lack of thorough testing. You upgrade and suddenly you encounter strange Bluetooth issues, call problems, or other features that were working fine before but suddenly stop functioning. Tons of people will be complaining about this in forums, and you won't receive any updates to fix them for months. IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers. Adding more AI features won't help unless they start taking their customer service seriously!
>IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers.
I've had Pixel 3XL, Pixel 5, Pixel 8, and Pixel Tablet all without issue. I realize that can't be everyone's experience, but the idea that you can't "seriously use" these devices is untrue.
I upgraded from a Pixel 3XL to a Pixel 7 Pro XL. I've been generally happy. But...
Back in September 2019, my Pixel 3XL had a problem doing an OTA update. I spent hours with Google support (both live and over email). Their only suggestion was to reset the phone and restore from backup.
The problem is...
I had had the 'backup' option in settings enabled, the whole time I had the phone. I thought it was being backed up regularly. But I could not create a backup from my phone. I tried rebooting the phone, but the 'Backup Now' button was still greyed out. Based on some information from the web, I disabled my PIN. That caused my Google accounts to be logged out, but DID enable the 'Backup Now' button. However, the backup failed. I tried doing a backup via adb, which also failed.
IIRC this was before Google Authenticator had the ability to transfer 2FA codes from one device to another. So, without the ability to restore from backup, a reset would mean I needed to recreate 2FA codes for tens of services, which is pretty time-consuming.
Really? The Pixel 8, my first Pixel, shipped without working USB webcam support, which was one of the advertised launch features. To actually get that feature you had to switch to the beta release track, which of course broke lots of the other things on the phone. Notable things that have been broken for a month or more on the beta track since I owned a Pixel 8 include tap to pay and the unlock screen.
They're not good data, they're some of the worst. Your idiosyncratic one-off experience should be addressed, but not necessarily generalized from. I feel like this is an important, perhaps even the most fundamental prerequisite for information literacy.
tbf this is abusing the word anecdote a bit. Anecdotes are unreliable narratives and hearsay, not facts or data.
An anecdote is "I forgot to pray before bed last night and now I have a headache. See God is punishing me." and other people agreeing with this happening to them.
Saying, "here is a documented pixel bug that was released on day x but wasn't fixed until day y" is evidence and data.
Once its documented as a real bug then its no longer in the land of weird anecdotes.
How you categorize that is up to you. You can be dismissive of what that bug broke as an "unimportant feature" but its no longer an anecdote.
Good luck with that. Sure it's data, it's the worst possible data you could choose to make an informed decision. If you want to gain insight by selectively reported, highly biased reports of a tiny sample size, go for it.
So the fact that my iPhones wifi failed means that they're all terrible products and we shouldn't look at engineering practices like failure rate statistics?
Or do we just do that for brands we're not fanboys of like __true__ engineers?
anecdotal evidence is what I usually base my purchases on, which is why I've never bought a Google device after being burned (literally) by the Nexus 6P battery issues.
you can pretend it doesn't matter, but bad word of mouth is all it takes for me.
A quick search turns up problems, enough so that, as a consumer, I'd be concerned. Is that hard enough data to reach a conclusion in a major scientific journal? No.
Is it enough data so that, as a consumer looking to purchase one, I would be concerned? Probably.
Is it enough data that I'd expect some engineer at Google (or wherever) to pay attention and address? Certainly, I would expect some engineering team to pay attention to public forums and address issues as they arise. It doesn't seem to be happening. If these phones are supposed to be a flagship items, and I think it's reasonable to claim that they are, it's also reasonable to expect flagship support.
But who is going to have the data that we need to assess this?
The firm that has an interest in everyone thinking there's no data, and that we should withhold judgement.
There's not a lot of good choices here, either you assume that because there's no info, everything is fine, or you assume that the one guy complaining is one of many.
I'm sure we could also find anecdotes of some iPhone users having features necessary for them blocked or non-functional. It does not mean that the vast majority of people cannot still use the device without incident as a "daily driver."
I used an iPhone from launch to the iPhone SE3 and I can't recall there ever being a feature printed on the box or hyped by Steve Jobs on stage that did not work out of the box, or that later stopped working.
You must have had that single magic version of Apple Maps no one else got for a long time on release.
They lost the batterygate lawsuits, right? Guess you missed that fiasco that resulted in Apple paying out over half a billion. In this case Apple deliberately degraded previous user experiences on older phones, which means previous behavior (in this case performance) stopped working, done deliberately by Apple.
yes, it didn't go to zero, but it didn't do what it once did as decided remotely by Apple).
Apple also promised user data security, sold user data, and got hauled before Congress in 2011 for that. But I guess your user data was safe in offshore data silos.
I could go on, but I think your recall on iPhone downsides stopped working.
The only thing they did on purpose was run too close to the limits of the battery.
The battery degraded because it was a battery, and the performance had to degrade along with it because of physics.
Apple didn't decide remotely to weaken performance. That performance was on borrowed time. What Apple did wrong was not making it clear upfront that the performance was on borrowed time and wasn't sustainable.
> The battery degraded because it was a battery, and the performance had to degrade along with it because of physics.
> Apple didn't decide remotely to weaken performance.
It's amazing when people just make crap up without even looking something as simple as this up. Apple lost the "batterygate" lawsuit because they specifically did slow down performance on old phone with an update.
A quote [1]: "Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a class action lawsuit that accused the tech giant of slowing down older iPhones to encourage people to buy the latest model. Apple faced a wave of criticism -- and lawsuits -- after acknowledging in 2017 that its iOS software slowed down the performance of some older iPhones."
All the court docs [2]. Knock yourself out.
If you're going to shill, at least take a moment to google a claim before making up nonsense.
Okay there's an asterisk on the "had to", which is "unless you want an unstable phone". There's plenty of evidence for that.
Apple lost because they did a bad thing, but I disagree with your characterization of what the bad thing was. In particular I will note that your quote says that they settled and what they were accused of, which is very different from a verdict.
Simply read the court docs, which I linked. Or go read proper legal sites where the case is laid out with evidence. Stop making assumption you want to be true, which has been this entire thread.
They settled because discovery pulled out docs showing they knew full well what they did, on purpose, and they settled for a half billion dollars because they stood to lose far more in court if a jury saw that evidence. There is no "we were trying to be nice" defense that would counter their internal documents and discussions demonstrating otherwise.
Apply doesn't hand out half billion payouts for touchy feely reasons.
Of course they made the update on purpose and knowing what it would do, but that is not the bar for being malicious and causing truly unnecessary slowdowns.
(If it's unclear, when I wrote above "The only thing they did on purpose" I meant the only relevant problem they caused on purpose. Obviously they do a million things on purpose.)
I'm not going to read a thousand pages of documents to look for maliciousness, if you're not going to point to a specific one, and you're not linking to a news article that has any relevant quotes of those documents.
Reading all of that is not "simple".
Can't you show me the specific evidence that made you so sure? I'm not asking you to search through, just for the information you already had.
> Apply doesn't hand out half billion payouts for touchy feely reasons.
I keep saying they did a bad thing. That is not disputed.
> They lost the batterygate lawsuits, right? Guess you missed that fiasco that resulted in Apple paying out over half a billion. In this case Apple deliberately degraded previous user experiences on older phones, which means previous behavior (in this case performance) stopped working, done deliberately by Apple
Let’s not share this absolute misinterpretation of what happened.
Apple fcked up big time on communication, that’s for sure, but it was an absolutely well meaning feature for an old device, lengthening their lifespan. They saw a bunch of random poweroffs due to degrading batteries not being able to output enough power to the CPU, and pushed an update that decreased the CPU clock down a bit. This of course degraded performance, and not having informed the buyers, making it a choice, they lost a lawsuit. But if they would actually do the communication well, it could have been an excellent positive PR, them fixing a bug for a 4 or so years device!
> Let’s not share this absolute misinterpretation of what happened.
Let's not spin what happened, which has concrete and irrefutable evidence. Here's all the court docs [1]. Apple got caught, most definitely did degrade performance without warning and on purpose, and certainly people at Apple knew some of those device owners would upgrade. That they spun it as a feature once caught is classic spin. Apple is no idiot at marketing - if they thought people would see this as positive PR, they would have announced it and touted it. They did not. The 7 million+ pages of Apple discovery made all this clear. This is why Apple settled for a half billion - they were certainly going to get hammered in court.
So you think there should be more testing so the testing track is stable?
I worked on Pixel, left Google in October. I agree vehemently with what you're saying, its just, you're barking up the wrong tree on a couple different levels, the easy one above, and a more difficult one below.
Management did what you wanted a few years back, #1 and #2 and #3 priorities were "stability above all else" since Pixel 6.
This unfortunately didn't do anything in practice, other than enable newly minted middle managers to punch down, hoard work[1], and hide poor decision making and lying easily.[2] Net negative effect on product of course.
What managers wanted to legislate was "care about your features", but I observed over years that you simply can't enforce that. Ironically, given the above behavior from the new management layer, people got more detached. Unit test coverage went up, I'd bet, which is also a lesson in unit tests have significantly diminishing returns. E2E tests are hard and flaky, but they pay 100x dividends in these situations.
What you want to legislate is the truffle hunting that lowest level management does is bad. i.e. say we can definitely do whatever pet thing some guy 3 levels up says we need to copy from iOS this year. Then, hold it back because it's not done, but still announce it. Then, layer on a special process to get you on the betas to get the feature you thought you were buying. All of this keeps each individual happy and yet, remarkably, leads us directly back to the initial situation we were trying to fix.
From all this, you can also derive why things only launch, and never improve (tl;dr: management has 0 incentive to do anything other than latch onto the latest vague ask / iOS copying from above)
[1] Estimate everything takes 3-5x engineers it did 3 years ago. it's a huge win: I'm managing this team because I did it myself 3 years ago, so this makes clear what a talented engineer I was/am. When I solely listen to the vague asks from people 3 steps above, they'll want to give me the headcount I need to get their pet project done, so this gives me more reports. My compensation scales with report count. And if the estimate is questioned in any depth, well, we're making sure we have enough to deliver this Priority™ at high Quality™. Also, no one is going to question it anyway, my manager made me a manager because they trust me.
[2] it's very easy to work around blatant irresponsibility by flipping it into "the guy lower on the totem pole is insufficiently committed to quality and collaboration [taking forever to do anything]"
Yes, I think the dogfood stage before the beta release should be more thorough. For the record, I was also adamant about this while I still worked at Google. Google, especially Android, is way too eager to release to beta. You should not release to beta until you have stopped generating new defect reports in dogfood. If you do, you just annoy the beta testers and get a huge number of duplicate reports. That is exactly what happened this year with the lockscreen bug. If anyone in dogfood had even touched the phone once the problem and its severity would have been obvious. And breaking Wallet generated 13000 duplicate reports, breaking a core use case for beta users.
That's actually the policy as I understood it, though, it was being enforced starting in an OS cycle, and I was only there for a month of it. When I think of institutionalized maladaptive dysfunction, I think of the lock screen.
> IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers.
While there's a lot you said that I agree with, I find this statement quite an exaggeration. I've owned Pixel phones for the last 7 years, both with stock and custom ROMS, and as much as Pixel seems to always have weird quirks, it's been reliable enough for me that I don't see why it couldn't be a daily driver.
That said, I share your view on upgrading so far that I really hesitate to upgrade anything, whether it's my Pixel phone or something else. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been legit hacked, but I don't have enough fingers to count all the times that software bugs did things like get me stranded, cut me off from my finances, almost get me killed on the road, and so forth.
Although I've never been an iPhone user, Pixel is the best Android phone I've used. I'm a bit biased since it's developer-friendly I'm a software engineer, but I've had the least catastrophic issues (and less crapware) with them compared to other phones like Samsung's line. The strange thing about Pixel is that updates seem to always destabilize the UI, and I'll get weird things happening like the lockscreen coming up and remaining frozen for some time.
>I've been legit hacked, but I don't have enough fingers to count all the times ?>that software bugs did things like get me stranded, cut me off from my finances, >almost get me killed on the road, and so forth.
I hesitate to defend apple on Hackernews but I have never experienced anything like these issues with any iPhone. Major problem is battery life, other than that I can say the core features of every iPhone I've owned have 'just worked' pretty consistently.
Neither have I on all my android phones. Only device that failed me was an iPad 3 (yeah 12 years ago) that I got replaced in the store due to it crashing right in their hands. But hey, anecdotes.
Sure, though in the past when I've had problems with phones they've either manifested within the first few months, or it's been 4-5 years down the line when I'm fine with replacing it. I'm not being complacent: it's true I've not had a major OS upgrade yet, and this is of course anecdotal. My main point is that I'm really happy with my first 10 months with the phone, and would recommend it so far.
For the majority of Android phones, two to three years was also the length of time you got software updates of you bought the phone right when it was released, if you were lucky. I would have loved to pay somebody 80 EUR to replace the battery in my Samsung S10, but that wasn't an option since it was EOL.
Upgrading a phone also doesn't mean that the old phone goes to the bin or the new phone wasn't used before. Lots of people upgrade from one hand-me-down phone to another, others buy on the secondary market. Longer software support also extends the lifetime and viability of that market.
Sure, eventually the battery dies and the screen breaks. For many devices it's cost-effective to have somebody repair it. Having user serviceable batteries would make it much easier still.
Phones stopped having any meaningful reason to update since a decade.
My 2019 Xiaomi Note 8 Pro is still perfect and capable of answering posts on HN like this, going on YouTube or answering WhatsApp. Pics are also great and battery life is too.
It's actually the same of the average consumer class, people are updating phones less and less, as there's really little reasons to do so. New phones are marginally better, at best, but not in any meaningful way.
"As of 2023, the global average replacement cycle length for a smartphone is 3.6 years."
I'm not disagreing on a technical level. I agree. I use a pretty cheap ass phone myself that I bought off the rack.
I think it's clear though that phone makers and telecom companies are more than happy to sell people a new one every few years and intend to continue doing that.
Is that really a large subculture, or is that mostly car rental places cycling vehicles through their fleet?
The rental companies typically buy vehicles from the manufacturer at such a volume discount, that they're able to flip them onto the used market a few years later and come out even with taxes benefits factored in.
There are also private and corporate leases. In the UK at least 20-30% of new car sales are leases (it's a tax efficient way to get a new car, particularly EVs), and these usually run for about 3 years, after which they're sold off at trade auction.
You are talking about the auto market like Japan didn't come in and devastate Detroit. No problems means things about TCO to 16 years and how that plays out.
Mid tier Android makers that couldn't secure chipset support beyond 3 years began to realize they have to exit the market a couple years ago, a guaranteed outcome of Apple fixing their story long enough for resale values to impact purchase decisions.
I don't think it's an unrealistic expectation for a hunk of bleeding-edge electronics that costs ~$1k and you interact with for a couple hours each day at minimum.
I've had an iPhone XS since 2018/09 (equidistant to 2030 from today), and have had no significant issues – my upgrade cycle is ~6 years, there is at least one of us!
I had a Pixel 4XL that could not do basic phon calls. 7/10 tries I would get no audio but the other person could always hear me. I wiped the phone and it magically started working, then about a week after that it was back to not working again. Also the back cover started peeling off the phone since all they did was use a tiny bit of glue to keep it on.
> IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices
These were the Nexus. Pixel phones are definitely consumer devices. Nexus phones were designed to be rather generic, meant to be used as a model for other manufacturers and as a test platform for developers. It was when Android really was open (or at least more than it is today). They were usable phones, even good ones, but without any "personality".
Pixel phones on the other hand advertises exclusive features, and is mostly picture-focused, hence the name, and also AI, but who isn't nowadays. Nexus advertisement was little more than its spec sheet.
The fact that more than once, you could not call 911 due to a bug, should be enough to convince people that Google doesn't test their products or have any quality control.
I would seriously hope that 2 instances of a certain bug, no matter how critical, would not convince anyone that the manufacturer "doesn't test their products or have any quality control".
Any other service wouldn't have bothered me. This was a reoccurring issue across different releases of the Pixel line... If there is a single thing you should be able to do with a cellular device, it's call 911... Not acceptable.
I switched from pixel to iPhone because I was fed up with bugs. I’m going to switch back to pixel for my next phone because I’m fed up with bugs on iOS. It’s really not better, just a different set of bugs.
I've had a dozens od Bluetooth devices (of both computers and headsets), and have never not had Bluetooth issues. I would not isolate "Bluetooth issues" to Android.
Especially BLE, a startup I worked at had a device that broadcast every 500ms for 375ms. We tested over 100 android devices and the best phone had a 40% chance of detecting the device within 5 seconds…
Any interesting observations with respect to different brands? What does the overall distribution look like and how does it compare against other devices you tested, e.g. iPhones, laptops?
We didn’t test anything other than androids, my work laptop, and software defined radios.
Different brands, I recall Samsung devices being the worst on average. I believe the better Bluetooth devices were actually nexus/pixel phones… I think the top, by far, was the nexus 9, but it’s been a while.
The product was pretty cool that we built. It was essentially tile or Apple AirTags before both of those were around and ruggedized for usage in commercial usage to keep track of items (dumpsters, underwater diving equipment, mining equipment, portapotties, etc). You’d be surprised how easy it is for some of these companies to lose a dumpster or something else of considerable size and mass.
Building the mesh network and algorithms to determine if someone passed by, moved, etc the item the beacon was attached to was pretty cool stuff.
We also didn’t want to use data as much as possible, but the final determination of “what happened” to the item needed to be server side to ensure we took into account scenarios like 2 unrelated items traveled together for 2 miles, then went their separate ways. So we had to optimize for data, geo, temporal, spatial data, etc.
Given the speed a vehicle might travel and Bluetooth range, you could have 1-5 bbroadcasts to detect a beacons presence and update its location so missed detections were critical.
Well, on the contrary, we’ve worked extensively with Bluetooth since we're in the business of creating wearables. Unfortunately, we've had to compile a list of unsupported Android phones that exhibited unusual behaviors, such as sudden disconnections.
I must say that both Samsungs and iPhones have always been rock solid in terms of stability.
> One of the big problems with Pixel phones is their lack of thorough testing. You upgrade and suddenly you encounter strange Bluetooth issues, call problems, or other features that were working fine before but suddenly stop functioning. Tons of people will be complaining about this in forums, and you won't receive any updates to fix them for months. IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers. Adding more AI features won't help unless they start taking their customer service seriously!
I've been using the Pixel/Nexus phones for over a decade, and I find this complaint bizarre. I've had issues with the phones (just like I have with my Apple hardware) at times, but nothing like what you're describing.
The real issue with Pixel phones is not that their software or hardware support is worse (it isn't) but the customer support. If my iPhone breaks under warranty, I can walk into an Apple store and get it fixed or replaced immediately. When my Pixel device breaks, even though I live near the flagship Google store, the best Google will do is send me a replacement phone "within 5-10 business days".
The customer support experience is a huge issue, and I wish Google would do something about it. But the other points don't resonate at all.
> Just imagine, you are in a life or death scenario and your literal phone has a bug preventing you from calling help.
> All other issues are minor. I cannot forgive a bug of this nature.
Does that mean you will never use Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, all of which have had carrier-wide 911 outages? Will you never visit the state of Massachusetts, which had a state-wide 911 outage, affecting all carriers, just six weeks ago?
This type of failure is bad, but it's unfortunately a lot more common than you think.
It looks like a valid question to me. Obviously it's rhetorical, but it makes a reasonable point that the hard-line stance of "cannot forgive a bug of this nature" is probably not viable. These are not strawman examples, these are similarly horrible failures.
First adopters are now the beta, or even in some cases alpha, testers and will continue to be for as long as there are enough people willing to sacrifice stability for having the newest tech.
I have a Pixel 7 Pro, and my Bluetooth has been fine. No issues there, ever, but I do have complaints about features suddenly not working and it mostly revolves around Google Assistant. It is utterly inconsistent with what it does, and it is maddening.
It randomly wants me to unlock the device to play music, but I'm using voice controls because I'm driving. It has my car's bluetooth device set as "trusted" so it shouldn't even require it to unlock to continue, and it's not like asking it to play something on Spotify would reveal any information about myself. Additionally, sometimes it just leaves the screen on in the off chance that it _does_ start to play music, and I feel my pocket getting warm but there's nothing that I can do because I'm driving and I don't want to mess with my phone.
If I knew that it was going to leave the screen on I would just queue up music before I leave, but it doesn't always do it and it drives me nuts. I don't think that my next phone will be a Pixel.
Nice to see they haven't changed anything from the Nexus 5 days. I purposely stayed on the official firmware in the hopes that I would have a seamless experience. The day before an epic trip around Europe, I upgraded to the latest version. It broke video recording so that all videos had garbled audio. Ruined priceless memories. Meanwhile my friend's iPhone 5 was operating perfectly fine and wasn't always running out of battery like the Nexus was. After the trip, I had enough and bought a used iPhone. That was the last time I ever considered Android. This also turned me into a die hard Mac user. Can't believe I wasted years of my life trying to make Linux and Windows work when I could have just used a Mac.
The win-win solution is to only buy Pixel phones that are several generations old. The kinks are ironed out, they're less than half the price, and for 95%+ of users, they're just as capable as the latest-and-greatest.
Phones are really rather secure. Even a 2 year past security patches android rarely has any of the most severe vulnerability (remote code execution with no action from the user).
The common security issues (app can get permissions it shouldn't have) are nowhere near as important if you don't download random APK's from dodgy sites.
Overall, my fully patched linux laptop has far bigger security holes than a 2-years-unpatched android.
You could use only the banking websites or switch banks. That's what I did personally since I want completely control over any device I use, and more importantly over my data.
I've used Pixel 6 for the last few years and Pixel 3a before that. "As daily drivers" whatever that actually means, as I for sure don't have any other phone laying around.
I've had several Pixel phones and using the 6a currently. Never ever had any issues. My strategy is to delay updates for a few days to be not the first one bricking my phone. :)
Pixel phones are among the best, and getting better as Google gets more experience shipping hardware. I've had a ton of Pixel phones and there are definitely paper cuts here and there, but:
> IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers.
Is ridiculously hyperbolic.
OnePlus phones are also really good when new, although updates often introduce new bugs. When OnePlus was more affordable it was less of an issue, but with current prices I expect several years out of a device that expensive.
Nobody, you just have to chose which kind of bad you can tolerate.
Personally, I navigate the Android fragmentation mess to avoid Apple's control-freak tendencies. One is annoying, the other is offensive. But I totally see why you might prefer the opposite.
It's crazy that I'm the first person in this sub-thread to mention Samsung, when they are by far the market leader in Android phones. They have decent options at pretty much every price point.
For some reason, HN and Reddit just hates this company, and I don't understand why. People talk about "bloat", because Samsung ships with their own apps for things like phone, clock, calculator, etc. But it's trivial to uninstall those, and/or set the Google stock Android counterparts as your system defaults.
People get all weird about One UI, but my son has a Pixel and I have a Galaxy and I honestly don't see much meaningful difference between the two (other than his phone getting hot as hell because Google's own Tensor silicon sucks). I just recently switched back to Android from Apple, perhaps these UI skins were further apart in the past?
I think a lot of contrarians just hate Samsung because it's the market leader, simple as that.
They switched the home and back buttons... why? I can only assume it was to make competing android phones feel awkward such that those who step foot outside of Samsung quickly run back to "safety".
I've never seen any kind of UI where the "Home" button wouldn't be in the center. And you have the option of placing the "Back" button on the left and the "Open Apps" button on the right, or vice-versa.
Recent android versions have put more of this in the the hands of the app, for better or worse. So it's not especially material nowadays.
My point is just that it's an example of Samsung making design decisions which leverage the fragmentation to create confusion among the users.
I noticed it when my boss said that non-galaxy devices feel awkward. I ended up using his phone later and realized why: vendor lock in through muscle memory. It's the kind of monopolistic move that only the largest fragment can benefit from--anyone else puts themselves at a disadvantage by departing from Android defaults. But Samsung, since they control the majority, can bias the market in a way that makes the defaults feel weird. It's rather Apple-like if you ask me.
... which is why I use a Pixel. I hate Google, but they're what I'm stuck with, so I might as well not be messed with by anyone else.
I'm sorry, but this is absolutely nonsensical. I literally just posted a screenshot showing that this is configurable on a Samsung.
In fact, when I first setup this phone, I had to specifically choose to make the home bar visible at all. Because the current default setting on Samsungs is to use "gestures" only. The same as the default setting on a Pixel now. All Android manufacturers seem united in pushing this, to ape iOS.
There are plenty of reasons to choose a Google Pixel. And I wouldn't quibble with any of them. But it's absolutely bizarre to point to a default setting as a reason, when they are configurable and when both brands use the same default setting anyway.
So many of these discussion threads are like this. It's perfectly fine to prefer a Pixel over a Galaxy. But people so often seem to take umbrage against Samsung for some reason, and when you poke at a little it rarely makes much sense.
The umbrage comes from having spent a few years supporting these devices (or rather, failing to support them). I don't know how many times I've had to sit there and get yelled at because I abandoned a troubleshooting workflow once I realized that the user was in some kind of Samsungified experience that was 95% identical to the default Android one (and was therefore out of my scope of support here in the carrier call center, go call Samsung).
Once they got their yelling out, they would sometimes ask me why Samsung would bother recreating all of the Google stuff if it was indeed 95% identical. What's in that 5%, they'd ask.
How do you answer that question without seeing Google's influence on the software as a necessary evil and Samsung's as an unnecessary evil?
That's been Google phones even since the Nexus days. They review super well then three months after release there's some crazy-ass hardware problem no phone has ever experienced before. Screen discoloration, glass backs cracking while laying flat on a table, power buttons getting stuck, spontaneous camera glass cracking, etc.
The flaws were much more excusable with the Nexus phones since they were dirt cheap, but the price of the Pixels has crept upwards and now they're more or less at parity with Apple and Samsungs flagship prices.
This was a major issue that drove me away from Android. In addition to first party bugs, I got tired of 3rd party accessories not working correctly.
My theory was iPhone probably got tested on most 3rd party accessories. However, the fragmentation in the Android space meant I’d have no idea what devices they actually tested with.
This is further compounded by the fact that Android isn’t really an open platform, at least in a practical sense. I can’t just load up a patch for something (assuming it exists) without fully switching to some open source ROM that’s going to come with its own issues.
There's also only one Bluetooth stack on Apple's platforms (presumably shared), so testing is more straightforward. And if so inclined, there's also the Made for iPhone program that requires validation, but again that's with one device in two form factors. It's not a fair challenge comparing Android device support because the task is bigger, though Google could probably do some stuff to make that less painful.
As a consumer, I just don't care whether it's fair or not. Android and iOS are competing, almost identical platforms. They both do what I need, but only one of them doesn't always break.
Saying it's not fair to compare them is like saying it's not fair to compare a minivan to an SUV when making a car purchase. They're different, but similar enough.
Google could just say "Here is our official bluetooth hardware/software. Either use the official hardware/software, or use something else but we will kick you out of the android program if your implementation and ours ever have any kind of difference that is noticeable to a user".
It's almost like there should be a, I don't know, STANDARD test suite that peripherals, phones, and chips that want to use the Bluetooth STANDARD would have to pass in order to advertise being compatible with the Bluetooth STANDARD, as directed and administered by the Bluetooth STANDARD organization.
Bluetooth is so old that it was coming into use when Computer Shopper was still published. It's been a dumpster fire of compatibility since its inception.
There's one of two culprits on the Android side: either its the device drivers, or the OS itself. Device drivers should be capable of being subjected to stringent acceptance standards in order to advertise "Bluetooth". If it's the OS, that's even worse since it is higher up the abstraction stack. At least the device drivers being closer to hardware have an excuse.
Bluetooth is 26 years old. A 26 year old industry standard should be better than a coinflip as to whether some bluetooth thingamajig will work with a mobile OS. It's just sad.
How reliable is the Pixel fold? I jumped ship from Nexus/Pixel in 2019, and the only thing that could bring me back to Pixel would be the larger screen of the fold. But my personal experience with Nexus/Pixel quality 2010-2019 is pretty bad, and adding in the folding screen makes me think getting one is a Bad Idea.
Sadly, due to my employer, only Apple and Google are options, so none of the other folding phones are options. I wish Apple would do a fold..
There's no reason to upgrade a phone more than once in five years at least for me.
I bought a an iPhone 15 Pro Max few months ago and compared it to my S10+ which I bought in 2019 and still have. There's practically no difference for regular day to day stuff, except for the camera advancements which are notable (but not night & day either).
It was only the frustrating battery life, and desire to enter the superior iPhone camera ecosystem that forced me to upgrade.
Nah, it just looks ugly and too sterile. Nothing brave, just another double palm sized phone. A girl who tries very hard to look cool, but the bridge on her head just ruins the overall looks.
Maybe ask LG to make a cool looking phone. They have created a lot of brave designs.
Call summary is such a good feature. How many times has your wife snapped her fingers for you to jot something down when she's on the phone with the pediatrician? you go crazy looking for a pen or something
This is why I love my pixel. They build stuff that affects my life day to day. My biggest vote of confidence: since buying my wife a pixel, I've had zero tech support requests. it really just works.
None of the post involved a lack of clear lines of communication. Sometimes someone on a call could use help making a note and it can be tricky to find pen and paper. Communicating better with your spouse won’t make the kids put the kitchen pen back where it goes or make it easier to both listen and hunt for things at the same time.
You don't snap at waiters, you don't snap at your spouse or partner. If you think that's "projecting" you have bigger issues and internal-unresolved-trauma my friend. I think you need to follow your own advice here: Check yourself immediately.
Spouses and partners treat each other with respect, and no that doesn't involve snapping.
Seems like a pretty common gesture when you are on the phone, someone is talking to you on the other end, and you want to get another person's attention in the room who is not looking at you. You are reading way too much into it.
Does the launcher still steal an enormous amount of screen space at the top of the home screen in order to display the date? Maybe I can ask the AI...
Though seriously, just bought a pixel 8 pro for the camera as my cheap Samsung whatever camera took aeons to focus and had garbage image quality. Overall the default Google app experience is very unimpressive with frustrating quirks and pointless changes.
Though what do you expect from company where your work performance is based on feature visibility meaning useless feature creep is all that matters instead of a quality user experience. Google it's not at all about quality and will never be. AI bullshit being added is more feature visibility metrics so they will keep adding stupid crap and then turning it back on after you've disabled it because someone wants a promotion.
One should consider that Gemini will have a paid version "Gemini Advanced" [1] for phones and whenever one has a phone with free Gemini version, it will constantly be annoyingly reminding about and pushing to the paid Gemini usage. For some reason big tech decided that people want their AI assistants and force them on everybody including requesting to pay for their decision to invest in AI hardware. I really prefer not having AI, not having an AI chip in any of my devices, and not be bothered with AI intrusion into my life.
Very soon not having an AI integrated into a phone will be a very good positive differentiation for a phone or PC brand.
My current phone, a Pixel 6 Pro, is becoming unusable due to screen flickering.* I have an unopened Pixel 8 Pro on my desk that I got for ~$700 after cashback during Prime Day last month, and I've been waiting for this launch so I could consider the possibility of returning it and getting the new model.
So far, looking at this, I can't find any differences between the 8 Pro and the 9 Pro XL that I think I'd actually notice. It would be kind of nice to get the smaller 9 Pro for the sake of my wrists, but not enough to pay an extra $400 for.
Am I missing anything? Or is this just a heavily hyped release of a tiny incremental upgrade?
*I'd be more inclined to hold this against Google and not get another Pixel if my previous phone, a Samsung flagship, hadn't died in approximately the same way after approximately the same lifespan.
I was waiting for this to figure out if i want this phone. The answer is, I'm not willing to pay $1000 CAD.
I would like a phone with 7 years of updates, that's the reality. This is so annoying because I would go to LineageOS since it keeps getting updates, contrary to manufacturers roms.
My real criterias would be way more, but if I put all of them together, the answer is there is nothing.
I ABSOLUTELY need to be able to use a glass screen protector, because my phone falls a lot, so I'm really concerned about the fingerprint reader on the screen.
One criteria I won't be able to satisfy is: I like fingerprinting on the back. I don't think there are recent phones with that feature at all.
The upcoming 9a is where Google has to make some tough business decisions whether it's going to have all the AI features of the main line, at half the price.
It's rumored that Apple's new SE will have the full suite of Apple AI features, and that might put some pressure on Google to match.
I got a _spectacular_ deal on the pixel 8 when I called to complain on my phone plan, otherwise I would have still used a Motorola.
The phone was $200, and I got a pixel watch 2 LTE as well that I flipped for $250. The only thing I had to do was keep using the phone plan I have used for 8 years for another year.
Ugh, I can't decide what to do. I am moving to Denmark from the US on Sept 3rd.
Denmark does not have trade-in deals. But between my wife and I, we can get a whole phone free with the trade-ins in the US.
We can also do international shipping and such through forwarding services, and that would eat into the savings, but still do so.
Then there is bands. THey are almost identical, except a few here and there, and I can't find a concrete place to get info on Denmark bands (multiple sources have different info or lack of info).
Is it worth switching out and going through the hassle and getting US pixels, and just deal with the Denmark prices, and try to sell the Pixel 6s we have. It is annoying.
> Then there is bands. THey are almost identical, except a few here and there, and I can't find a concrete place to get info on Denmark bands (multiple sources have different info or lack of info).
Another avenue of inquiry: Use https://www.cellmapper.net/ to see what bands users have actually recorded in the wild in Denmark near wherever you're moving to.
Ya, Kimovil is my goto for most cellphone info, but unfortunately they are missing a lot of data on DK frequencies, primarily for 5G, and I would contribute to add them or suggest them, but they don't have an option for that. At least I couldn't find it.
But Cellmapper is not one I knew and it helped me a TON just now actually. Lots of great info and let me see all the bands currently in use, thanks for that.
Seems like a US phone will work mostly without issue in DK based on the 5G and 4G frequencies on Cellmapper.
At this point I just want a phone that takes unbelievably amazing photos and videos under all lighting conditions and a phone that can zoom WAY the fuck out when I'm taking selfies.
I don't even pretend to know what else I'm paying for at this point. I just scan reviews until it feels like I've found a phone that will reward my $1000 (or so) with a significantly better camera. Too soon to say if these Pixels will lore me away from my S23 Ultra. Though I will say I am beyond sick and tired of Samsung's bloatware and associated problems and miss the days when I had a Pixel (or, before that, a Nexus). That, plus the fact that my S23 is almost paid off, might compel me to upgrade.
I'm more accustomed to Google's software. And I don't recall ever having to follow elaborate tutorials to uninstall/stop notifications for shit I don't want, like I do with every Samsung phone.
Being accustomed to one over another is fine, but there is no objective reason one would prefer google's calculator over samsungs one, or calendar or whatever.
I have google's apps included on literally every android phone out there - why do we pretend like somehow it's the samsung that is the only one forcing bloat on people?
The objective reason, as I mentioned, is user control. Samsung makes it too difficult to uproot their apps. Never had anything close to that problem with my many Google phones.
Unfortunately, for PWM-sensitive people like me, Google hasn't taken the hint and improved its PWM rate. The Pixel 9 series utilizes 240Hz PWM dimming across the board, meaning the Pixel now has the slowest PWM rate on any major phone.
I bought a refurbished Pixel 3A for $150 and dropped Graphene on it. Has worked like a charm. Incredible 4-day battery life thanks to the absence of Google Play Services. Might move to /e/ soon now that Graphene has dropped support.
I'm very happy to see the good Pro camera setup in the smaller size. I've always gotten the non-pro Pixel, but missed the better camera. I might upgrade my Pixel 7 just because of this.
Ridiculous how a company the size of Google can only support such a small part of the world. What's even stranger is that they don't support most of the strong android markets.
I don't see anything that wants me to upgrade my four-year old iPhone 12. (TBH, it's not just about these new Pixel phones; I don't know whether I will upgrade in the next 3-4 years.)
Minor rant: All of this powerful technology, and yet the examples they can come up with are always about e-commerce/shopping, photos, calendaring etc. Why can't they talk about something more fundamentally useful, like a feature that would reduce your phone usage or budget better, etc.? I guess I can dream.
Do you think the inclusion of AI is some new departure? Google has declared itself as "AI-first" for the past 8 years[1]. There's been neural cores included in every Pixel since the Pixel 4.
It would be nice to be able to run llama.cpp on my phone but if I had the choice between that and a root shell and c compiler I'd definitely take the shell.
Heh I guess that's a good point. All I have is a ten year old iPhone just to run Cisco DUO for work and there seems to be no way to run llama.cpp on it even with a very small model.
Occasionally I'll use i.sh to ssh into a decent computer but it would be nice to be able to just run normal software on it.
The price is higher for two reasons, I think. One, so they can offer ridiculous incentives and trade-in values and discounts all over the place right away. Sadly, this strategy probably performs better than simply lowering the price without incentives. Two, because Pixel 10 is going to be more expensive (TSMC chip, maybe Qualcomm modem?) and they're trying to move the brand upmarket in preparation.
The Pixel 6 pro has had its screen break 4x and I have to pay every time despite having the insurance. Terrible, weak screen. The phone feels cheap too. Lots of software errors now. This is the result of Google moving away from merit based hiring.
Holy shit, they have moved the design in the right direction, but it still looks awful. Maybe not the ugliest phone on the market, but still bears the hallmark of designed by an engineer. Hire a friggin industrial designer or smack the current one in the head by a frying pan until something cool pops up.
The Fold 2, sorry Pixel 9 Pro Fold, is the most interesting one for me but the price is too high. I've been waiting for a while for these foldables to go down in price but they still haven't.
Other than that, it's all about the "AI". Which I don't have much interest in, plus, didn't they already said last year that the Pixel 8 was "all about AI". At this point, there's no use in buying a phone to have these features when the following year your phone that's supposedly made with AI in mind is phased for for a new phone that this time around for real is the one that's "made for AI".
I'm happy with my Pixel 6a. Think with my previous trade-in (some older pixel), it was like $299. Gotta time things right to get the next one at a similar price point. I def don't want that Gemini stuff on there though. The cheapest new phone being $800 seems to be a step up though.
They said they've rewritten the HDR+ image processing pipeline from scratch for the first time in their live event. Not sure about the Pixel 9 hardware... I think the Pixel 8 was the first new sensor in a while though.
It was Pixel 6 that made a big jump in quality. From 8 MP in Pixel 5 to 50 MP in Pixel 6. They also added ultrawide and telephoto on Pro. They have a big jump in sensor size to larger than most compacts. The Pixel 8 has even big sensor. The big sensor is the reason for the camera hump on the back.
It's incredible to me how much worse this web page is than a comparable Apple one. Just from a cursory glance, I've seen some late loading elements, weird and confusing pricing before I've even seen the whole phone, and a weirdly masked and slightly pixelated video.
Google is terrible at both UX and UI. I have said this for a long time that thank god Google search was a simple textarea. If they had done anything else, they would have blown it.
Definitely a page full of eye sores. Also the branding is all over the place, the page itself feels more like it fits BestBuy's branding than Google's.
AI phone… AI laptop… AI car… AI toothbrush… yeah nobody’s asking for this shit. It’s just uninventive, unimaginative marketing rubbish. Real innovation doesn’t need to go looking for use cases.
“An epic display of Google AI.
All the magic of Gemini on Pixel's largest screen.“
It is not only completely cringeworthy, but also nonsensical. How does having a bigger display affect AI at all? What sets it apart from other Pixels? Nothing.
I am honestly shocked that this company can keep putting out garbage like this. Any smaller company or startup would go bankrupt and cannot afford to be this sloppy and incompetent. This is only possible if your company has enormous cash reserves and monopolistic market position, where you can eat losses and fail repeatedly on epic scales.
Never in my life I will buy any Google product. They so easily kill products used by millions without second thought. This destroyed my trust in the company, they just don’t care enough, it’s all about profit and their monopolistic position.
I hope other smaller companies with better ethics will emerge
Well, from the phone viewpoint people buy them to get a less garbage-filled android experience. Most consumers don't really expect phones to last forever... because they seldom do.
My comment is still valid for software killed in the mobile space. I don’t know what other people feel but I have a strange feeling that, because they have so much money, anything other than search is built temporarily. All their software, their apps and services aren’t build to last. It’s built for now and later they will abandon to start from scratch. It’s easier to start over from scratch with a new team than to make what’s been built last.
That comes from a shortsighted vision that I dislike.
Wouldn't accept it as a gift after having several generations of Pixel phone. Half baked software. Also Apple has hammered Google on privacy and rightfully so. There's a 0 chance I'll use android handsets again regardless of the hardware.
I just want to put my vote in that I'm really glad they're making reasonable sized phones again. Pixel 6, 7 were oversized monstrosities. If pixel 10 is even smaller than the 8, that's fine by me
I will avoid google Pixel.
Two of it's souvenirs are in my closet currently. The hardware vendor they partner with screws customers and maligns brand google.
I'm still on Pixel 2XL. The battery is not that good anymore but has no issues with the phone. I'd definitely not spend 1k on a phone. A Pixel 7 Pro is now a much better deal.
Size Clarification: The Pixel 9 Pro is a new medium size. The Pixel 9 is a direct successor to the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 9 Pro XL is a direct successor to the Pixel 8 Pro.
Remember when Google used to do live benchmarks showing it beat the iPhone (and even the iPad). Those were the days. Now Tensor is bottom of the pack for high-end phones.
There's a reason Apple is doing so way. The A and M chips are a huge reason for that.
So sure, benchmarks don't matter, but performance does, and Tensor is way behind.
That's how you know that they're not proud of the CPU specs.
They went with the Samsung foundry so they could get a bespoke CPU design because Qualcomm doesn't have time for that type of stuff. Turns out that the Samsung ARM cores aren't as performant as the Qualcomm/Apple ARM cores. But at least Google has these Tensor thingies...
[edit] in Dave2D's video about the Pixel 9 Pro XL, https://youtu.be/67hVZOJDFxQ?t=323 , he shows a Geekbench comparison of recent Android CPUs, the new Tensor G4 is still slower in multithread GeekBench than SnapDragon 8 Gen2 & Gen3.
Is it approved for forehead use now? My recollection is it was a gimmicky thing because they could not add human temperature functionality without some kind of regulatory thing (FDA?).
i switched back to samsung after experiencing terrible performance of the tensor chip in Pixel 8 Pro.
To be honest, it's probably not their fault though if games/apps are not optimized for that. But I can't wait around, using a flagship phone with sub-optimal performance.
It blows me away that people will spend $1k for a phone when there are good options for $500 or less. I will grant that Google's phone is probably the best. But in my experience the difference in quality does not correlate to the difference in price. Apple has a monopoly and they set price expectations.
Also, I think buyers think if you have a cheaper phone strangers may think you are poor. Personally I want people to think I am poorer than I am.
People use their phones probably more than any other single item besides their home and bed. It’s not really that crazy, especially if you factor in camera upgrades for people that care about it.
One stat that takes me out of my bubble on this one is we are closing in on 2/3 of website visits being done via mobile devices. I.e. it's not necessarily the ultra tech focused folks that make up high end mobile user base, it's people using phones constantly as their primary device that are often spending a grand on them.
In terms of percentage of my day that I spent using X, my smartphone ranks pretty highly. More so than my TV, car, etc that are high budget items that you can spend a lot on.
I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone. There's not much my phone does for me that a laptop doesn't do better, and I probably use some form of desktop/laptop about 10X the amount of time I use my phone. Sometimes I forget where my (8 year old) phone is for days, and life trucks on, but I probably sit in front of a computer for hours a day and that's just for work. I guess I'm turning into an outlier.
I personally could not even fathom spending $500 on a telephone let alone $1000. It's just not an important enough gadget in my life.
Should we be celebrating this, or even talking about it as if it's remotely sensible? Even putting aside that mobile software is designed to undermine your personal interests, getting a laptop that's good for a decade (or more) and then churning your phone less often is likely a win on straight device cost.
Who defines sensible? For most people, a phone is a far more sensible purchase than a laptop. How many sub-$500 laptops have cellular modems? How many sub-$200? How much of the technology that people realistically use day-to-day requires a laptop?
I’d even question your premise that phones churn more frequently than laptops, especially at the budget end.
The point of my comment was to talk about what is sensible?
Your comment just seems needlessly dichotomous. I'm talking about having multiple devices, such that you aren't beholden to any single one. Nobody "requires" a laptop, just like nobody actually "requires" a phone. But if you're using up all your buy-stuff-online time looking through a tiny screen and tapping out search terms like Morse code, rather than being able to comfortably compare skus/stores far and wide, it's likely that you're drastically overpaying. I'm willing to believe this is a trap many people fall into (eg why else is Amazon always pushing Subscribe and "Save"), but we shouldn't be normalizing it as if it's effective rather than pathological and extractionary (cf Vimes's Boots).
And sure, the same trash-treadmill dynamic exists in the low end new laptop market with poor hardware and poor software (eg MSWin also pushes an upgrade treadmill). But this is kind of a weird Schrödinger's argument in a thread about a phone that costs $1,000 - someone who doesn't have enough resources to buy anything beyond a phone, yet also spends an outsized amount to have the latest flagship. My larger point still stands about the longevity of good product choices, but they require research and actualization - once again, the kind better done from a laptop or desktop rather than a pocket porthole.
More and more of societal services “require” a smartphone. I went to a baseball game where it seemed like it was required to install their ticket app (might have been an offline workflow available).
For someone with a limited budget, a phone seems wildly more valuable than a laptop.
There's a very large community of people in which their smartphone might be the only luxury purchase they make (I'm pretty close to that).
Now that we no longer upgrade every second year (or, in fact, every third year) and given I usually get 50% of the cost back by sending the old phone in, spending $1500/phone means that I'm typically amortizing a $750 charge over 4 years - or $15/month for the only luxury item I own. I'm probably more concerned about the $85/month AT&T bill than the $15/month cost for the actual phone.
Never having to even think about storage, like literally zero concerns about how much I download is one reason I always grab the high-end model (now around 1TB)
Also - there are lots of weeks, (in fact, sometimes a month) that my mother doesn't touch her (pretty high end, nice 4K monitor) computer system - but I doubt there has ever been a single hour that she wasn't using her phone. The Phone, for many, has become the new computer.
And, with LLMs becoming pervasive, the new knowledge-system. (I can go many days without touching google - but I hit up some combination of Claude/ChatGPT pretty 7-10 times/day) I can already envision the day in which you will be able to run an LLM on your phone - but the H/W specs for that thing will likely be insane and I have a hard time seeing how the first releases of (reasonable speed, reasonable model -I'm aware you can do it today) - in a 2-3 years from now that can run an LLM will go for less than $2000-$2500.
And I will be standing at the front of that line begging them to take my money. Entirely new device at that point.
> I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone.
This is not a helpful comment.
No one argued it was true for everyone!
> I personally could not even fathom spending $500 on a telephone let alone $1000. It's just not an important enough gadget in my life.
This is also not helpful.
Can you imagine why someone else might spend $1000 on a phone? If the answer is no you have a shockingly poor ability to empathize and see things from a different perspective.
I totally understand why some people spend $1500 on a new phone. And I also understand why some people want to spend the bare minimum! These perspectives are not difficult to grasp.
Here we have OP doing an "I have better money sense than you" brag followed by a guy doing an "I have better empathy than you" brag. (Followed by me doing an "I'm more savvy than you" brag.)
It's a pet peeve of mine how often programmers argue from their niche perspective without even attempting to think of things from a broader or different perspective. It's especially annoying when it goes from "people do X" to "well I do Y so nyah!".
Does it get easier over time? I asked the most socially adept person I know about how she's so good with people. She said, "I just picture myself in their shoes." She made it sound easy, so I tried it, and phew! It's tough! It made me wonder whether part of the reason why perspective-taking is easy for her is because she's practiced it so much.
It’s also not binary. The biggest UX experts in the world will still be shocked by what people do in a user study! There’s always surprises.
Understanding a very specific individual is pretty hard! But I think understanding that there are literally billions of smart phone users and that some of them will be happy to buy expensive phones and some will be prefer to buy cheap phones is pretty straight forward! The larger the group being considered the less valuable a personal anecdote is!
Okay, but just because you use something a lot doesn't mean you need to spend huge money on it.
That's the argument I don't understand.
Like, Taxi drivers don't buy the most luxurious and comfortable car you can think of because they drive it all day, they get Toyotas and sometimes Teslas where EV support is decent.
That's a really good point! I spend 10x time in front of a computer as a phone and I don't think twice about buying Alienware or Razer so that makes more sense to me.
This is true, but I don't think the price translates. Most folks use their phones for messaging, internet, videos, camera. That's about it. And the things you do on your phone don't translate to these price tags. You're not getting a bunch more from a 1k phone than from a 500 phone.
I personally try to get flagship phones, but used a few years after their release. That, and avoid upgrading my phone as much as possible :P I'm jealous of Apple folks here, they support their devices for eons longer than Android!
I usually sell my $1k phone after a couple years so I end up paying much less than $1k in the end, while getting a better phone out of it than had I just bought the $500 phone up front.
It blows me away that people actually care how much other people spend on something at all. Want a $50 flip phone? Cool. Want a $1300 fancy fold phone? Also fine.
When I had my last kid we got a Snoo bassinet, $1300 or so. Anyone that saw it couldn't help but inform me that their baby survived in a trash bag with holes poked in it or whatever for a bassinet. But I sold it 6 months later for $900, and my overall $400 investment was very worth it. Thing was a miracle.
Because the implication is that there is non-monetary profit. The person is describing it not as a loss but as an investment, because it was an investment in themselves and their ability to sleep at night and an investment in their child feeling safe and whatever other impossible-to-directly-price externalities were realized as a result of the monetary loss.
I suppose the problem is that there isn't a good word for this concept. I just find it interesting that, in my experience, this is only used in relation to luxury goods.
> in my experience, this is only used in relation to luxury goods.
Not really. You can also "invest" in personal relationships, for example, which implies neither a financial outlay nor an expectation of financial return.
When used in the context of purchasing consumer goods, I think it is most often used in the context of goods which are expensive (the financial outlay) and durable (ie, capable of providing enjoyment--analogous to profit--for a long time into the future). And of course those goods are more likely to be considered "luxury" goods.
In the case of a relationship, maybe it could be argued that you are profiting, in the currency being used: you get more positive interactions out than you put in. ;)
Because the value the item brought you was worth more than the money you exchanged for it. My Bose QC35s were one of the best investments I've ever made, lasting many years and very many loud plane rides. Or would you consider groceries a "pure financial loss" as well?
> Or would you consider groceries a "pure financial loss" as well?
Being healthy results in me being able to make more money, so it literally is an investment.
Investing in a luxury purse or basinet has no concept of profit, but can happily result in high value. Profit and value (or satisfaction) are not the same.
It blows me away that even with the investiture of 100% of your intelligence and effort, at the peak of your personal ability, that you couldn't realize that I only said "It blows me away" because I was mocking the comment I replied to.
Have you looked into leasing your phone? You pay more per month but always have the latest upgrade. I'm curious about it too and am hoping you've done the numbers on it.
No I haven't. I typically just buy them up front every 2 or 3 gens and use them on whatever cheap provider I'm on at the time. Currently using Spectrum (also my home internet provider) for service.
>I usually sell my $1k phone after a couple years so I end up paying much less than $1k in the end, while getting a better phone out of it than had I just bought the $500 phone up front.
Yes, there are different ways to go about it. I buy the best phone of last year or the year before, and run it into the ground.
But is it just me, or are the changes so incremental now it's hard to justify a new model of any brand? Sure the processors get better etc, but I use my phone to browse the web, text/phone and email.
For most people the amortized cost of a phone over its life is pretty small. If you spend $1000 on a phone and it lasts you 3 years, that's ~$28 a month. A lot of people spend that on coffee each month. The value they get out of their smart phone dwarfs most other big expenses.
Tech is a really weird field; I think because of the high salaries, a lot of people are rich without realising they're rich. Tech is the "Nouveau rich". $28 a month on coffee is rather large amount to spend on coffee.
No, $28 not a large amount to spend on coffee. That's a McDonald's medium coffee 3.5 days a week. How is that a lot to spend on coffee? That's just silly. A lot to spend on coffee is $150/mo with a $5 latte at Starbucks each day and that's certainly more common than the house painter getting a McDonald's coffee on half his workdays.
Ok, "decent amount": Buying a coffee at McDonald's 3.5 days a week is a decent amount to spend on coffee. $150 is absurd. The "house painter" is making their own coffee before work.
Rationalizing a purchase because the monthly payments are small is a terrible way to approach shopping. If you don't have the money to pay for it upfront, you can't afford it. Full stop. People actually finance their phones, believe it or not. It boggles the mind.
They're not saying finance a phone. They're saying $1000 is not that much for a device you use throughout every waking hour for several years. The monthly framing helps understand cost as a rate, as we experience value as a rate.
People making an average hourly don't think of things that way. Paying $28/month for a phone provides much more liquidity for the unexpected, when the other option is spending over 25% of your months income, you're SOL if your car breaks for whatever reason, or you get a flat tire, or your water bill was unusually high.
I assume, then, of course, that you bought (or would buy) your house in cash only? After all, "If you don't have the money to pay for it upfront, you can't afford it. Full stop."
So I get pixel because of security and less software bloat, along with good custom ROM support.
That being said, at least for me, my phone is the device I spend the most time with, whether articals, emails, books, podcasts etc.
It is at least 5 hrs a day.
This is probably an argument to spend less time on my phone, but the will is weak.
But if I am spending a significant percentage of my waking life interacting with this single electronic device, a price difference of 500 dollars is not much, especially amortized over a 3 year period.
I don’t like spending $1k on a phone, but my iPhone 11 Pro lasted 4 years and the only reason I upgraded was because the 15 has USB-C. It would have needed a battery upgrade otherwise but modern phones do have much better longevity.
I have S21 Ultra and bought it refurbished for less than $500 few years ago.
I see no reason why should I buy new phone. Seems like all those new features are just gimmicks.
I would probably consider buying a new one if it had better video recording, but this Pixel only has 4k at 60Hz which wasn't impressive two years or so ago.
Somewhat tangentially, your comment made me realize there can be non-vain reasons to try and appear less poor than you are. Of course, when you’re really poor it’s probably unwise to use a new iPhone to achieve this deception.
$500 extra dollars for a better device people use everyday for at least a year or more. Especially around here, many make plenty of money that a $500 difference isn't that significant.
I have a lot of data on my smartphone I want to be secure, plus I like the OLED screen for reading ebooks/watching videos and I also want to make great photos.
Only Google Pixel devices tick those boxes, but at least you can buy older gen Pixels rather cheap (Google Pixel 6 Pro with similar camera setup as the Pixel 9 for example)
I think phones really stopped differentiating a few years ago. A $200 Motorola is extremely capable and does 99% of what normal people need. I bought a Moto G Power for my kid who always forgets to charge it because the battery lasts 3 days. That's more valuable than having 3 cameras and an AI chip.
Most people spending $1k on their phone are either trading in their old phone if they upgrade often, or are upgrading every 2-3 years, which makes the cost not that crazy given how smartphones are often essentially a part of us nowadays with how much we rely on them.
You can say that about anything: cars, headphones, appliances. To each their own. I can’t imagine using a 500 device in place of my 800 iPhone even though it would be “almost as good”. I can justify extra even for very small convenient features.
Since only Apple, Google and Samsung provide some realistic assurance of security updates, there aren't so many options left. If you don't want to spend 1k there is the Pixel 8a for half that price.
Some of it is a status symbol. I don't know any well to do tech friends that buy expensive watches or jewelry, but are happy to drop 1k+ on a new phone every year.
It is! If you also need service, Google Fi has had a promotion for a while that gives you the $500 purchase price back over 24 monthly bills.
In fact, they also have a promotion right now where you can get $800 back on either the Pixel 9 or 9 Pro, spread over 24 months; that makes the 9 free and the 9 Pro only $200.
I have been trading in my phone every year to get the new Samsung S2x (now S24) model since S21. There were always new model deals plus some regular cashback. I ended up paying <200 USD every year.
It's like a manual phone upgrade plan. Not sure how long it could last. Last year the Google Fi deal wasn't as good and I almost missed the budget target.
Are you including the extra $50/mo you pay your carrier for this privilege? There ain't no such thing as a free lunch; you can either pay up front or pay over time (and often more than you would otherwise).
The only thing I have to do is keep using the phone for 120 days. Monthly price for service is $20 plus $10 for each gig of data, unchanged by their phone price promotions.
Don't even have to pay a fee to use a cellular smartwatch, as long as it is made by Google or Samsung.
OP here- my last two phones have been Moto G Power. I think the first one only cost $200! I value battery life and simplicity. As an Apple shareholder I prefer you buy an iPhone.
I have a 5G Stylus rn, it's totally fine except I ruined the camera 3 days in so it takes TNG soft focus photos... love the G Power line, battery for days is not to be underappreciated
I got the SE 2 used, a year after it came out for a serious discount[1]. If that's something you're comfortable with, you can get a really good deal if you pay attention to what's posted on FB Marketplace.
More than anything, I'm most impressed by Apple's OS support. I'm pretty convinced that SE phones are some of the best deals in the industry if you keep them until they run out of support. They have the same guts (minus cameras) as tier 1 flagship phones. Apple is a bit tight with ram, but the processor is faster than any Android phone.
And the support - 7 years is standard right now, and it could very well go longer.
---
1. I think I paid $150 for it. It has a small crack in the screen, but just the part that's over the chin, not anything that affects the display. If I wanted a pristine phone, I'm sure I could have found one for a bit more. But after several years, I'm happy with my decision.
That's a cracking result! I'll definitely keep an eye out and hopefully the second hand market is healthy.
I think the SE never really turned any heads from the flagship causing the second hand market to be lively. With these new touted SEs, they're looking to be as good as iPhone 14 (maybe pros) which has a very wide reach.
I don't disagree but..
1) To me there is a lot more variety in cars than phones. An SUV is very different then a sports car or some luxury car. Phones vary a lot in OS (but people don't cross shop), a little in battery and a lot in camera.
As a thought experiment, if you put me in a civic I will know I am in a civic and not a BMW in one second. If you gave me an iphone 10 or an iphone12. Or a google 8 vs google 10... You get my point. Yes Android is different then iOS but people are usually locked in.
2) In general people spend way too much on cars, either to buy capability they don't really need or can't use. Or to try and say something about themselves.
My phone (£500/$500) was released in Nov 2017, bought in Feb 2018, and it's still just fine. Only recently have I been noticing the battery life is getting a bit pathetic.
Spending £500 on a new one hasn't really entered my thoughts. The last time I went shopping for an (Android) phone with and for my girlfriend it was a nightmare - so many absolutely shit giant phones that don't feel right in the hand
ifixit has exclusive deals with some manufacturers where you can get an OEM replacement battery + tools for ~$30-50. can easily double the lifespan of a well-maintained device
That kind of question isn't really answerable. Patch rates and known vulnerability rates are roughly comparable. Broad hardware capability is similar. Zero days appear for both platforms on the open market with some regularity. Neither is perfect but both are quite good relative to the rest of the market.
I was initially excited at the announcement of the "fold" phone, but then I saw it's effectively two phone screens, instead of one folded in half. Sigh...
I have a Pixel 3a, and it's still larger than I'd like. I realize that the market for folks who would prefer something smaller is, well, small. But, I look at the phone landscape, and I hate every one of them. I like the Pixel, because it's stock Android. I wish they would release a Pixel "Basic" or something. 5.5" screen, basic camera, no AI bullshit. Just a no-frills basic phone.
One of the folding Samsung phones is the "single screen that folds in half like a flip phone" style! Played with one for a minute in Best Buy and it was pleasantly compact.
Yeah, the main dealbreakers at this point seem to be (1) price, (2) battery life, since it's literally a smaller battery, and (3) vulnerability to debris. I've heard people say that you shouldn't take a folding phone to the beach because the sand can wreck those flex screens.
In June 2025 new EU regulation will come into effect, mandating at least 5 years of OS updates, starting when the model is *removed from the market* aka the last unit is sold.
So in practice that'll mean 7+ years.
Note that Apple and Google made a big deal out of extending their upgrade timelines, without mentioning that they actually have to ... if they want to keep selling in the EU.
> Note that Apple and Google made a big deal about how they are extending their upgrade timelines, without mentioning that they actually have to
This is unsurprising, but deceptive and borderline illegal. “Presenting rights given to consumers in law as a distinctive feature of the trader's offer” is an Unfair Commercial Practice.
"Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro XL will receive updates for 7 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US. See g.co/pixel/updates for more information."
I'm really not happy tbh. Android started out as a relatively open thriving open OS/ecosystem. It's since evolved into something much different due to Google and it's objectives.
It's also just plain not realistic. The industry would of evolved differently had it not been for android and other operating systems may have been picked up by the alternative manufacturers such as Samsung.
Lack of proper dual sim (with two nano sims) is what made me not buy the previous gen and I guess this as well gets skipped.
It such a small feature that 200$ Xiaomi phones have and Google's flagship do not, because people in their silicon valley bubble can't understand there's many carries in the world that don't support esims properly or the issues that people that live in two countries need to face.
Which is why I don't trust GrapheneOS. They seemingly push Google on the privacy and security crowd while ignoring truly freedom-respecting devices like GNU/Linux phones, which would be supported forever.
For GrapheneOS, trust in Google is ultimate. If you don't trust it, you're out of luck. My threat model is different.
Most people, from a person on welfare to all celebrities and almost all CEO’s, including Elon Musk, use iPhones. The Pixel and Android in general is simply not cool like the iPhone. Google has been making their own phones for over 10 years now and they’ve barely made a dent. What’s Google’s goal here?
Samsung, which uses Android, is the most popular phone brand in the world. Google doesn't need Pixel too be as sucessful as iPhone because Android dominates the iPhone and come pre installed with multiple Google products which is where the money is made for Google.
Their objective is simple, get the hardware in place, so they can force-feed Google Search, YouTube and Google Gemini.
Yes it's true, iPhone are popular, but it's a US-centric answer, because most of the rest of the world runs Android (Android has a 70.69% market share worldwide).
So Google has a really valid plan there.
Google claims their target is the "next billion people".
Also iPhones are very expensive, just relatively less expensive in the US (due to wages, low taxes, less intermediaries, etc).
Even a poor US citizen is often some sort of rich citizen in other parts of the world.
Of course, there are exceptions, for example, Kim Jong Un uses iPhone and MacBook Pro.
maybe use it to have a controlled product in the market to test Android?
I had one Google Pixel 8 and couldn't regret more. It broke (my mistake) so I'm already free of it.
The only thing that would make a new phone interesting is Linux support.
Otherwise email works, the web works, mms works, and the camera, screen, and RAM, on phones ten years ago was already way more than you need.
The phone specific software barely justifies maintaining a phone (and doesn't for me so I don't even own a modern smartphone.) There's certainly nothing to justify upgrading it.
Picture taking and video recording have gotten unbelievably better over the past decade. They were not remotely sufficient for many use cases ten years ago and even now there's still plenty of room left for improvement.
Yeah there's some really amazing stuff the new phone can do but I honestly don't care. If I need a piece of correctly specked camera equipment I'd probably buy a dedicated device with proper cooling and a removable memory card.
Still using my pixel 4a. I refuse to discontinue a perfectly good phone just because the manufacturer decides it's not supported anymore. Hopefully the EU does something about planned obsolesce one day.
> These regulations will empower independent repairers and end-users by ensuring access to spare parts and to the information necessary to repair for at least 7 years after the end of the distribution of a product in the market. Additionally, manufacturers will have to make compatible software updates available for at least 5 years.
That's definitely a good step but sadly compared to PCs still the stone ages. I want to use my phone with the OS I choose. Sadly the proprietary driver BLOBs make that unnecessarily hard or sometimes impossible.
I don't do it "to stick it" to anyone. I am just not willing to spend 500$+ since my current hardware is perfectly fine and does what I want. Saving money and avoiding unnecessary e-waste is more important to me.
I don't have to do this on my laptop. I have 10 and 15 year old laptops that I can run the latest version of Linux straight from kernel.org on for free.
The Android running on your phone is not FOSS. If someone wants to write free software that runs on your phone they totally can (and do, check out Graphene).
To an extend yes but it's unnecessarily hard to do so. If we were at a point where is was as easy to develop foss OS/Software for mobile devices I wouldn't complain. Sadly the proprietary nature of mobile phones (mostly drivers) doesn't allow that.
I have negative desire to get a phone billing itself around AI and LLM features. I turn off every AI assistant feature on my existing devices, I actively don't want a phone that ties Gemini and AI photoshop even tighter into it. If Google wanted to actually improve their phones they would add basic software functionality they're still missing instead like, say, a per-app volume mixer that half the 3rd party Android phones I've used have added but is still missing from AOSP and Pixel.
> I have negative desire to get a phone billing itself around AI and LLM features
Google has been tastefully integrating AI into phones for a while now using opt-ins. The now-many-years old phone screening feature ensures the fear of spam won't lead to unintentionally missing calls from the doctor/dentist who call from unknown numbers. Screening suspicious calls instead of declining them is a massive quality of life improvement, and having an AI assistant answer your phone and do a live transcription is straight from the Jetsons.
There is also "hold for me", where the phone listens to hold music for you, then rings when the operator arrives.
And there is a feature now to show you how busy a customer service line is at a particular time, and to give you a text transcript with clickable buttons for the phone tree.
Am I the only one who thinks these features really don't add much to the experience?
If an annoying phone tree is going to take 3 minutes to navigate by listening to the prompts, then it will also take 3 minutes to navigate by letting the AI listen and write little buttons for me.
I didn't really save any time.
If on the other hand it could say "other users have seen this phone tree before, so here is the whole searchable tree with no waiting", that would be a noteworthy feature.
Hold for me is pretty good. I've never used the phonetree feature, but I think it's often the case that I don't know which button I need to press: I have to listen to them all first, then decide which one. Commonly I have to listen to the tree twice: once to decide, and once to find out what to click. I'll probably look for the phonetree next time, so I can just read over it and find what I want. I agree it would be much better to preload it, but that might not be plausible due to privacy concerns or legal reasons.
> due to privacy concerns or legal reasons.
There are probably only ~10,000 phone trees that cover the vast majority of calls in the USA.
If a phone tree is seen by many users and is identical, there is probably no privacy reason not to publish it. Even moreso if the total number of digits typed in quick succession is < 4 (ie. user hasn't entered some password to get in). A human operator could be the final check.
I recently discovered that you can Google "{company} phone number", and in a number of cases it will offer to call, navigate the phone tree, wait on hold, and call you when a customer service agent is on the line. Delta, Allegiant, etc all seem to work.
What does it do if the company is Google?
> Am I the only one who thinks these features really don't add much to the experience?
Probably because it's just bolting more shit on the ends of a shitty, outdated relic of a system. Like, we have two different computers, one of which is playing back a pre-recorded voice, to a computer which is transcribing that voice into text and buttons, so it can play a generated voice back to the other computer, which will then interpret that voice into text, then perform an action based on that text. The action probably being repeating that process a few more times.
This is remarkably bad. I'm remembering the last time I had to deal with Apple Support. I didn't sit on hold for hours, I told them I needed a call, told them what the issue was, gave a brief summary, and then their support person called me, I was immediately on the phone with a human, she sorted out my problem, and the entire thing took probably 10 minutes tops, including filling out the form.
It feels like these legitimate challenges to businesses to manage their customer service lines, support lines, etc. have actual solutions that:
a) don't require two different damn computers talking over a shitty low-baud connection to one another, and
b) result in a better experience for all parties involved
If they'd just be willing to spend a little goddamn money, like they actually care to provide good service, rather than just paying lip service to it while offering the same garbage system they've offered since the fucking 1970's.
> result in a better experience for all parties involved
Yu are mistaken in assuming businesses want better experiences for everyone, including workflows that may lose them revenue (like cancelations).
The friction is intentional and part of a wider dark pattern strategy employed for "retention" - even Apple does this when one tries to get them to stop an unexpected recurring Apple Music subscription that only shows on ones credit card and nowhere else (apple.com or the Music app). The support number is not provided on amy of the support pages, and ine has to get their bank to stop the outgoing payments. Guess how I know this...
In light of this, I'll gladly take any client-side agent assistance I can get to make to reduce my cognitive burden; the "hold for me" emulates the support agent calling you as you described. , and the experience is more important than implementation details.
I can empathize. I recently tried to cancel Adobe Indesign. Every human stuck to the same script despite me stating 'no' up front after the first time it offered. They would confirm my intention, then when I stepped away they would cancel the chat because I was 'away' and did not double confirm that I wanted to cancel. That happened to me twice. By the third time, the sandbag was - 'You signed up for a yearly subscription, if you don't take those two free months, you will incur a early cancellation fee.' I never signed up for a yearly subscription and told them 'not accepting that'. As a gesture of 'goodwill' they waived it.
I could not understand all the Adobe hate before, but they made a neutral person negative with that experience.
> It feels like these legitimate challenges to businesses to manage their customer service lines, support lines, etc.
Wrong. These are not challenges. The customer service lines work exactly as designed: as cheap as possible to operate, as effective as possible in preventing majority of the callers from engaging support staff and starting any kind of support process. And the magic, most people who try and fail to get support believe it's their own fault - they're not being patient enough, or persistent enough, or maybe the problem isn't that big a deal, etc.
The companies don't want you to work around the phone tree and hold time. And once most people have tools that are able to, the companies will adjust their support channels to compensate.
It can do that with previously-known phone trees.
Correct, I've had it show all the phone tree options as soon as the phone tree starts playing. So, yes, it will reduce time to navigate the tree in that way.
Also, it often prevents me from having to listen to the tree twice, if I am looking for a better option and then decide a previous one was actually the better fit.
Really? I mean it 'saves your time' by not having you to keep waiting so that you can do something else in that time. I don't know how that is not useful. Even if I'm not doing anything world changing in those 3 minutes, it will save me some stress.
>phone tree
i Googled that term
looks like it's another name for an IVR menu.
> IVR menu
i googled this; looks like it means "Interactive Voice Response" menu, describing automated phone systems where the user navigates a series of options using either their phone buttons or their voice.
Yes, exactly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response
That's what they are called in India, at least, where I live, and where I am from, although the term would not have originated in India, since it would have been brought in by mobile phone companies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response
Although I have a good amount of exposure to, and familiarity, with US terms and slang, due to older relatives up to grandfather level having visited the US for more than short periods, having visited the US myself, and having worked in US-based companies (but in India), the exposure is not complete, that's why I was not familiar with the term phone tree.
That should not be surprising to anyone.
I've worked at call centers and contact centers whatever the hell you wanna call them places for 15+ years. have you legit never heard the term phone tree before? I'm on the east coast in case its a regional thing, that's like literally what my dad who wasn't an uneducated person called them. totally just curious here!
yes, legit, dude, why else would I mention it in this thread?
>I'm on the east coast in case its a regional thing,
everyone does not live in the US.
see another reply by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251430
> If an annoying phone tree is going to take 3 minutes to navigate by listening to the prompts, then it will also take 3 minutes to navigate by letting the AI listen and write little buttons for me.
If it's a common number for a support line it actually shows you the options before they're stated by the robot. Say for example if I call bank of america's support line, it will show the not-yet-said options as greyed out, but selectable. If the call robot accepts early inputs you can actually navigate a phone menu quite rapidly. Pair that with the estimated wait times or "hold for me" you can save yourself the headache of "actively" waiting.
All of that would be great if it was actually available to me in the smaller country/market I live in, which is less of a priority for Google. I still paid for them as part of the phone.
> tastefully integrating AI
Tastefully integrating AI involves not uploading all of my photos and speech and text to the cloud and doing who knows what with that personal data.
The majority of this data should never leave my device and that's why on-device LLMs/AI are much more tasteful.
You can control that.
You can, and I did, but at some point I must've accidentally fumbled one of the many 'would you like to back up your data to...?' requests as I recently had a warning that my Google drive was nearly full. This was perplexing as I very rarely use it, so I check and lo! A years worth of photos off my daughter there. Not happy.
This happened to my mom too. She told me she can't do any more photos because her storage is full. So I checked her android phone a and somehow the cloud backup got activated (we explicitly turned that off!!) and our family photos were uploaded to google cloud..
I hate google so much for doing this.
Surely that's reason enough to avoid Google from now on? They are simply not a trustworthy company for personal data.
To what extent? Google buries a lot of their privacy options deep within settings of individual apps and the settings menu
Eh? Afai, it prompts you to enable it these days.
Heck, Google is removing Location History storage from their side and making it device side only. Users in the past few weeks are getting notified to trigger the migration to device storage or all data is deleted.
Except Google Photos, which every couple days starts up telling me my phone is backing up (it isn't yet, not until I confirm it on the screen) and presenting an opt-out for uploading photos to Google. That's in Poland, EU, so I'm not sure how is that even legal. Next time, I'll ask my local DPA.
If you refuse to upload all your photos, Google Photos randomly sometimes pops up a second request to upload your 200 most recent photos instead.
I declined the first request that interrupted my task, then tried to select a photo to continue my work, but the "Yes" button for uploading recent photos appeared over top of the photo just as I clicked. Google Photos immediately began uploading my photos without my true consent.
I have the same issue. That's part of what triggered my op
eh? Two years ago they didn't allow MRU in GMaps if you weren't logged on.[0]
And with every new phone I always power on it without an account, update, reset and only then add an account; I had my share of 'I did disable that thing'
EDIT:
[0] and they claimed what there is not enough storage for it. On a fresh phone with 128Gb on board. For the small array of ~30-100 letters. Fuckers.
The AI editing tools in the Google Photos app (https://blog.google/products/photos/google-photos-editing-fe...) also feel like magic and have been very useful/convenient for me, so honestly I can't agree with all the negative comments. It feels like there are plenty of ways to incorporate AI that add value for users and don't require a weird ChatGPT-like interface.
Despite also having no desire to have an "AI" phone, this feature is incredibly useful; however hard I try to avoid it, there are organisations who will insist that they contact me by telephone. Luckily it's available on older devices so I can keep my 6a going for another year.
First world problems. My iPhone can't even split notification and call volume.
Yep, this is insane.
I dislike the bundling of hardware and software alltogether.
In the world of laptops, we have a wonderful situation. I can select the hardware that I like, then wipe the whole disk and install the software I like. Which in my case is a Linux distribution and then exactly the applications I prefer.
I wish the world of phones was like that.
You can kinda do that with Pixels and Sony Xperias only, because last I recall, they implement Android Verified Boot correctly (or non-draconianly), specifically avb_custom_key.
From a security and freedom perspective, I actually like the restrictions of the Android platform if implemented as Google intended, which means allowing you to roll your own ROM and relock the bootloader with your own keys. Android itself has among the strongest security models for a consumer platform, again if implemented as Google intended (which is why GrapheneOS only supports Pixels). You're actually not supposed to root your phone because that opens up a large attack surface.
It's inconvenient for customization, sure, but you can still wipe the phone and roll your own system. It's a matter of the workflow to do it.
The desktop OS are all pretty bad so I wouldn't want to use that as an inspiration for anything.
I'm very happy with my Linux desktop.
I mostly live in the Plasma desktop, Konsole and Firefox. And life is good.
What are you missing?
Bad in what way? Most people who aren’t power users barely leave the browser.
I mean, define bad.
Certainly they're much more complex. More susceptible to malware, too.
But they're also much more powerful. I can get tasks done 10x as fast. They're much more open, too. They have well-defined interfaces for most things, which means I can automate tasks. Can't do that on a phone.
> If Google wanted to actually improve their phones …
… they would enable swapping button order.
… they would remove gestures.
… they would improve OS stability.
… they would add a hardware do not disturb switch.
… they would add hardware camera and microphone switches.
… they would add a headphone jack.
Their phones are still preferable to iPhones, because at least with a Pixel one owns one’s own phone.
I think the best reason to use a Google phone is that turns out it's one of the easiest to Un-Google by installing GrapheneOS.
This. I was kind of shocked when I realized I had completed the installation of GrapheneOS via my web browser.
I will likely pay a premium for the Pixel convenience when it's time to get a new phone. Will run this 6a until support ends.
This is the correct answer. Grapheneos is basically the minimum acceptable security standard anyone should put up with from a device they carry around all day.
I like gestures and would be very upset to see them removed.
Same for me, I feel all those AI assistants are most of the time hit or miss (even though they improved very much in the recent times) + UX is most of the time not that good because of the network latency.
But on the positive side i like the new 9 pro because of its smaller size + hardware improvements (better ultrawide, ultra sonic finger print sensor, 16GB RAM...)
So buy this phone and install GrapheneOS on it.
I'm with you that AI is overhyped but your suggested feature is "per app volume mixers" like in Windows? What's the use case on a mobile phone to warrant the extra complexity?
An example I can think of is when you're listening to a podcast or music that has been recorded on low volume. Without a volume mixer you're forced to increase the general volume, resulting in overly 'loud' sound notifications from other apps.
Media volume and notification volume have their own sliders
Unfortunately this doesn't work for notifications such as 'lap times' from the Garmin app. This is also considered media by the phone.
That can be fixed with Garmin notification sound being treated as a notification sound.
Adding per app volume control is IMHO a really bad UX. It means there's a master volume and then per app volume is like a coefficient the app volume is multiplied by.
My car has its own volume control separate from the phone bluetooth volume and I hate the experience of having two volume knobs interacting with each other when all I want to do is to increase or decrese volume
> Adding per app volume control is IMHO a really bad UX.
I really prefer it for having different things set at different volumes. Like presets.
The media volume slider is joint across the apps though if they aren't notifications.
I don't let my phone make any noises, but I do use it for music. Would be nice not to have to turn "do not disturb" on or off to listen to music.
Notifications are tied to ringtone, as far as I can't have silent ringtone but noisy notifications, however media is separate from both these two.
You don't have to? I use DND all the time too.
That's how it works now on my pixel.
The use-case is the exact same one that is on a desktop. System-wide setting for a comfortable max volume, application specific volume because different apps handle audio differently. Youtube videos are loud, voice chat is usually moderate, some recordings are quiet.
Samsung phones have this, and I use this to play music at a pleasant low volume while watching YouTube videos at a higher volume.
I'm surprised Pixels don't; small things like this area each QoL wins.
I forgot this wasn't a native feature.
Samsung/OneUI has a good few addons like this. Ability for multiple apps to play sound is good too (same addon) and the ability to output different apps from different sound devices at the same time (built in)
Not only are these AI features stuff people don't want, but obviously having a Tensor G4 in the device raises its cost. I'd rather not pay for that.
I have the Pixel "a" devices, and hope they can stay at that price point.
On Samsung phones it's Sound Assistant. On Xiaomi and Motorola it's built in.
Recent Pixels support Android Virtualization Framework, which theoretically allows Linux or Android VMs alongside the primary Android OS. Could be good for experimentation.
AI integration in Pixel phones is bland, and all in areas where it can be day to day useful.
why? AI is very useful in day to day life, and having a phone with on-device capabilities is crazy useful even for those that like their privacy and are paranoid about big corpos stealing their data. I don't see any reason to hate these features.
Running ai locally on your device is awesome.
Why do you don't like it?
And there are other use cases like running your own LLM offline or using it with home assistant.
There's also the obligatory non-Pro model, and a refresh of the Pixel Fold:
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.
I'm glad they finally went this route. I can't be the only one who usually wants the specs of the Pro but always opts for the smallest phone (p1, p3, p5 & now p8).
Pretty much in the same boat here. The P9P is around the same size as my P8 (0.1" shifted from depth to width), which is great news. I would pay more for a better camera, but I care more about compactness than camera quality.
My issues is the smallest of pixel phones are still to big. I don't want anything bigger than the smallest Pixel 4 ideally.
I've moved to FairPhone anyway because there are concerns more important than compactness.
Indeed, it's a good choice. My wife has been routinely annoyed that the phone with superior specs was/is always uncomfortably large for her hands.
As likely anyone on HN is to hold: I have a bunch of old phones.
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.?
The funny thing is the Fold is actually the smallest phone by height, and the thickness change isn't as big as you'd think...
The price change, on the other hand…
I did that with the Pixel 8. Although I don't really care about the better camera either.
Same. I wish you could get a Galaxy S Ultra, with the stylus in a smaller size.
Isn’t this equivalent to just not offering you the smaller, lower spec phone then? Per your decision tree?
Would have been nice if they did a regular size (5.8”) for normal people and 6.8” for the genetic freaks with dinner plate hands.
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.
I long for the days of being able to reach all four corners of my phone screen with one thumb. I had an iPhone 12 mini which was a wonderful respite, but apparently us small phone fans are a small enough demographic to not warrant serving.
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.
At this point, it is just easier to stick a popsocket to the back so I don't feel like I am going to drop the phone.
iPhone has this accessibility feature ‘Reachability’ that can help. On the SE you double tap (but not click) the home button, I think on others you swipe up and down quickly from the bottom centre.
Reachability is useless and no substitute for a smaller screen. It just slows you down, obscures the bottom half of the screen and makes a lot of gestures impossible.
I believe that sort of feature got to Android first, and they're still there, but in reality they are no substitute for actual reach. They add cognitive and time overhead to the gesture.
> 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.
Small display sizes used to mean "cheap phone" for so long that people still won't pay more money for a smaller device.
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".
My dream is the iPhone SE for 2025 is just a iPhone 13 mini with upgraded chip and one camera.
It'll never happen but I'll keep dreaming.
> Small display sizes used to mean "cheap phone"
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).
For the majority of the population, their phone is their main computing platform. It makes sense beyond "vanity" that people want the display on their main computing platform to be large.
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.
I had the opposite experience. I've been using a larger phone for the last 3 years and to be honest, I'm ready to go back. Too many times I had to look up something in a hurry, one-handed, and just couldn't. It also fell off my hands way too often, and the choice between a sturdy one (that makes it even more unmanageably big) and a flimsy one (that will only protect from light scratches) is just depressing.
Ah, this world where a 5.8"-sized shovel is somehow considered normal.
Yup. I had a Pixel 4a, which is 5.8". I thought it was a great phone and still perfectly usable, but it stopped getting security updates. I'm now using a Pixel 8. It's fine, but too large and no headphone jack. I'd buy a new Pixel tomorrow if they released a smaller one.
I miss the dedicated fingerprint reader. It was faster and more accurate than the ones built into the screen :(
Yes, this too! The in-screen fingerprint reader on the Pixel 8 is distinctly not as good as the dedicated one on the Pixel 4a. I'm surprised they shipped it.
> the Zenfone 10 is also 5.8” and is adored for it
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.
> Zenfone 10
If they hadn't disabled the ability to root the device, I would've bought one.
Well, turns out that noone really bought one based on sales numbers of that phone.
Everyone keeps talking about wanting small phones, but when the time to pull the wallet comes, there's always an excuse.
For the USA, ASUS also stopped producing the high storage models so what was left to buy wasn't as appealing.
There's usually a #a model like that around April/May. I think they stagger the release as many(most) would probably just opt for the a model most of the time.
The Zenfone 10 traded height for depth. It was very thick.
That's 100% fine. I've never cared how thick my phone is in the least.
For a single phone you don't care, but for folks with a separate work phone, this suddenly matters a fair bit.
If you rotate the phone backwards 90°, you can reach all corners but the depth will be like 7"
And I love it for it. Most modern phones are too thin.
6.8" is so close to their old Nexus 7 tablet that was 7" lol
Screen yeah, but the tablet was a lot bigger, almost 2x the surface area
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
The Pixel and iPhone are really seeming homogenous with each other. The marketing seems similar, typefaces used, the naming conventions are close to the same, the airbrushed image generators, the photos app marketing that's turning your personal photos into a photoshoot with editing capabilities.
On top of that you've got the same earbuds form factor, smart watches, etc.
>> On top of that you've got the same earbuds form factor, smart watches, etc.
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.
So, the pixel watch would be fine on people who don't have huge arms?
Seems like a decent choice, given that the average person has average arms by definition.
I wish we had more than two phone giants. This is aggravating.
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.
As far as the phone hardware goes, Google isn't much of a giant worldwide: Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Huawei and probably a few more outsell Google. The pixel is downright rare outside of the US.
They don't even sell Pixels in most places, the Pixel 9 series is launching in 32 countries, except the Pixel 9 Fold which is only launching in 19. Believe it or not that's a significant improvement from the Pixel 8 series and first Fold which debuted in only 20 and 4 countries respectively.
Pixels were the best selling android smartphone of 2023 in Japan. It's gained a lot of popularity recently here in Japan.
This might be misleading. I've got a Japanese model Pixel -- except that I bought it in Chile, from a Chilean supplier. (Had to root and tinker with some hidden partition just to disable the camera shutter sound.)
I thought that was illegal, but I guess not. https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/w...
(For what it's worth, Chile has no such law anyway, so I felt free to do all this.)
> Pixels were the best selling android smartphone of 2023 in Japan. It's gained a lot of popularity recently here in Japan.
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).
Also Samsung has been innovating with hardware. I'm not the hugest fan of their flavor of Android but I absolutely love my flip phone and would not consider switching back to iOS or pure Android unless Apple or Google were to make a flip.
Samsung + Universal Android Debloater rocks. You get great hardware and you can remove as much or as little of the Samsung\Google nonsense as you like.
https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-an...
It's rare in the US too. Less rare than outside it, but still < 5% market share.
Google is like 3%ish of the smartphone market in the US. Pixel phones are US-focused, so I can't imagine they're that high worldwide.
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.
Tangentially related, but I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by how well Airpods (at least the original ones) worked with Android phones.
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).
Oddly enough there is an official Android app for Beats headphones, which use the exact same Apple SoCs as AirPods ever since Apple acquired them. They surely could extend that app to work with AirPods too but they've seemingly made the arbitrary decision not to.
That's not exactly true, unfortunately; because Apple's product line-up would be too easy to understand otherwise.
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.
Why would you want an app for bluetooth headphones?
Equalizer config, shortcut button config, and firmware updates mainly. There isn't a standard way to do those on Android without a manufacturer-specific app. As for why you might want to update the firmware on your headphones, well...
https://blogs.gnome.org/jdressler/2024/06/26/do-a-firmware-u...
Why would you want an app for bluetooth headphones.
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.
Much easier to do things like setup buttons and alter the amount of noise cancelling in an app than via the limited buttons on the headphones.
> Unfortunately due to their market dominance and muddling of (hardware, OS, software distribution, and platform ecosystem), it's almost impossible to disentangle.
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.
I have one counter point for you:
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.
Didn’t Apple originally plan not to have an App Store for the iPhone? It was supposed to all be HTML and WebApps, with only core apps from Apple?
Yup. People act like they are geniuses there, but they were pulled kicking and screaming to allow native apps.
Yes, but then all apps would be poorly-written webapps in a single-threaded language with a bunch of performance kludges bolted on (like WASM, which STILL inexplicably can't directly edit the DOM).
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."
The video game industry has already solved this problem with engines like Unreal that can compile to PC, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo. There's certainly no reason why you shouldn't be able to just compile the same phone app from the same IDE to both iOS and Android. I believe the architectures are basically the same but with different operating systems.
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.
70% of mobile games are Unity too.
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.
>I have a theory that the world......
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 isn't just the barrier to entry, Microsoft famously paid the cost to enter the smartphone market.
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.
If AGI ever becomes a thing and you can simply spend electricity to write the new operating system, that would be pretty insane, and it seems like it would disrupt duopoly.
I think it's good that android exists because it keeps governments from trying to ruin my vertically integrated iphone experience
Would there be competition though? Take the mobile app stores: consumers are going to demand that prices are consistent across storefronts (or preferentially buy from the cheapest option), so that market will inevitably race to the bottom. Is that better for consumers than Apple and Google operating them and demanding a high enough margin to support moderation and review? Or hardware; if Apple was mandated to support Android on their devices, who do you think is going to pay for the additional testing burden? Apple's certainly not going to take it out of their profit margin, they're going to forward the expense down the line, as will everyone else.
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.
>Is that better for consumers than Apple and Google operating them and demanding a high enough margin to support moderation and review?
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.
They certainly improve the situation for shareholders. I am banned from the Google app store for making an app which was labeled with the service it interacted with, which was trademarked. (Example: If you make a Reddit app, Google won't let you put "Reddit" anywhere in the label without Reddit's legal permission, making it impossible for anyone to discover your app through search, which is the way people discover apps)
I think that policy is probably well-meaning, to protect people from installing apps masquerading as other apps by mistake.
It's not clear to me from your example what the relationship is to shareholders.
it's good for the shareholders of reddit, and any other company that trademarked something you might want to make an app about
I would rather have a better phone than more options, apple's 800-pound gorilla-ness gets me a phone with:
- 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
There's that old saying that a benevolent dictatorship is the best and most effective form of government, right up until the dictator dies.
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.
if the antitrust actions actually harm the consumer, then the government can take action
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
> 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.
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>- 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
As if you're benefitting from that with apples margins.
Apple's monopoly margins suck the air out of the innovation manifold, so who actually knows? Maybe we would have cured cancer already or something without the Apple Tax. All that money goes to a whole lot of incrementalism rather than bold new ideas and diversity.
> - "Ask app not to track" that works, because of the app store monopoly
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.
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Sadly, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold seems to have the camera of the base Pixel 9 (non-Pro), rather than the much nicer camera of the Pixel 9 Pro.
Thanks for highlighting! If anything, based on compare page, it seems that camera setup is closer to previous gen Fold rather than Pixel 9. Barely any changes.
The only thing that could pry an iPhone from my hands is a foldable screen. I have envy.
I have a zFlip 5 and love it. I was pretty hesitant about switching (Pixel user before) but I like the smaller size in my pocket when folded and there seems to be a psychological effect of closing it when I'm done that results in my mindlessly fiddling with it less.
>psychological effect of closing it
When I close mine, my dog immediately jumps up because he knows I'm done sitting down messing with my phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clicker_training
This would destroy me. I’d avoid closing it so that I don’t disturb the pooch. Forever on my phone.
My dog sleeps most of the day. I get about 10% of the amount of sleep that he does. I'm fine disturbing his sleep once in a while, especially when he's the one that wakes me up early almost every day. I love my dog, but his comfort comes second to mine.
You and me both. I consider switching a few times a year just for this.
And the XL has higher audio gain. But yeah, those are the only differences.
The dominance of the negativity in these comments is noteworthy. Personally, I thought it was a exciting update with major hardware improvements, some compelling AI demos and use cases at a similar price point as the past. Top tech reviewers e.g. MKBHD has similar impressions.
Mostly just curious as to why there are ~0 positive comments here. I suspect could be:
1) anti-google HN bias - perhaps deserved? 2) it's simply more tempting/satisfying/rewarding to complain about rather than to praise big companies 3) any other ideas?
I'm guessing the 95% negative comment proportion isn't representative though so I was curious if anyone had any explanations for the HN skew
Simple AI fatique I guess? Personally I'm immediately turned off when yet another product announcement mentions AI gimmicks, especially when there's no other features to get excited about. It's like the time when each new TV came with "3D support".
AI will solve this AI fatigue too! Introducing AI Relaxation and Restoration Center where you will get reeducation in loving AI!
I don't really think there's bias, it's just that HN these days predominately attracts negative ranting comments.
It's not really Google specific either - if you look at any other topic, even Linux or OSS related, there's going to be bunch of highly upvoted people ranting and raving. That pushes out any kind of positive discussion and normal people leave.
I think the internet has become much more toxic these last few years.
I see a lot of resentment and projection in people’s comments.
And most of the time the ,comments are useless and don’t represent the general consumer/citizen opinion.
This is specially true for anonymous profiles
We all know negative content drives more engagement, see: Facebook. But I've also noticed this trend and for me it makes sense seeing as most of the content on the internet nowadays is negative content. Social media is used to belittle and criticize other people/ideas, the news has never been positive, we've passed the stage where content creators that are positive about products are seen as trustworthy, because an overly positive attitude has been linked to a "shill" mindset. We've seen the evolution of big tech from trying to destabilise old/existing industries and giving us a new, improved service to trying to squeeze as much profit out of their users as possible. Other big companies have dominated their competition and have used that power to boost prices, limit access to media, decrease the user experience,... In a lot of ways I feel like the toxicity that we are experiencing online these days is a direct result of noticing all these negative patterns and realising that most of what is being advertised to us has a large chance of being too good to be true. Games that look good pre-release but then get released full of bugs, software that was once a good deal becomes a subscription, series that get cancelled too soon, products that look good on release but have issues not long after without a chance to repair them, companies completely changing their objectives after a CEO change, the list goes on. So instead of trying to be positive and finding ways to get excited about something it is now a "safer" bet to be critical and negative about anything that is being announced because of the cycles of dissapointment we've all been through. At least to me, this makes sense, eventhough I would like to see it be different.
I agree with you assessment but I think it’s a snowball effect as well.
Mental health is notoriously declining and I myself feel the difference when there are days where I don’t touch social media.
I also found that some social media affect me more than others, namely X.
Before the acquisition I remember feeling like I was under an authoritarian regime censoring everything and that made me feel bitter.
After Elon there were short periods where there were no bots, and the algo was actually adapting to me, I didn’t feel bad using it.
But right now its so toxic and full of fear mongering posts, making it unbearable.
I hope society figures this out quickly because AI is only quickening the decline.
I've been wondering if Reddit has always been this cesspool or if I just got older. When I'm logged in it's not too bad because I curated the subreddits, but the default subs it shows me when I'm logged out feel like half the content is angry people complaining about politics and immigrants.
My personal pet theory is that the Internet is aging.
20 yrs ago, most of the Internet users were teenagers and very young adults.
Most of these people are in their late 30s to 40s now. Did new kids join too? Sure! But if you look at the birth rates of our societies, you'll notice that it's a bell curve. Consequently, the average age is going up.
Furthermore, there is a strong selection bias with this demographic: the happier they're, the less likely they're going to be on these platforms, because they'll prioritize family, hobbies or whatever else over ... Well... "shit posting with random strangers".
Ultimately you're left with a significant chunk of people that are often disgruntled, jaded or outright mentally unwell.
It's not really new, even going back there were flame wars and shit-posting on BBSes before the internet was common. It tends to come with relative anonymity.
It takes curated communities in order to overcome. Some places do better than others. It's also all to easy for biases to become policy in some of these communities/sites which can wind up almost worse than the shit posting to begin with.
I guess mostly because the only thing new smartphones offer is faster cpu, more memory (which I don't really need, a 10y old smartphone handle my current load correctly) and a better camera and an always bigger footprint.
The only thing I like is the possible better camera sensors, but that won't make me shed thousands of dollars for it. If I have the choice I'd rather have a more compact model with the camera quality of the previous iteration which was already great.
I can understand it will sell because a lot of people have the feeling they live a crappy life and wants to cheat by taking crappy pictures and videos and have a some magic inventing a better imaginary life that they can share on instagram and tiktok but I am not one of them. If I take a picture, I want to get the moment, with all its imperfections including the sad face of a stranger or dog peeing leg up against a wall in the background.
And yes I understand I am not everyone, but I really don't care what everyone want because I am not the one trying to sell that phone.
> which I don't really need, a 10y old smartphone handle my current load correctly
Which phone are you using then? I presume your usage is totally non-representative of the average normal user, but curious nonetheless.
I just had a samsung galaxy s6 edge die one me, probably because of heat.
I do the usual stuff, navigation, whatsapp, music, video...except I tend to avoid installing apps when the corresponding website works well (but I still have lots of different apps) and the only social media I am connecting to is the fediverse through the browser.
I'm using a Pixel 4a myself, prior to that was a Pixel 2XL and I had about every third Nexus and a few other phones before that as well as a One-Plus phone somewhere in there. My current phone still runs fine, and I'll probably upgrade when the 9a comes out, I do think they're priced more than I would like.
I've tended to like the close to stock experience, but I do turn off all. the assistant features that I can.
I was happily using an iPhone 6S (which is very nearly 9 years old) until recently (when I dropped it and smashed the screen). It definitely wasn't as fast as a modern phone (but it honestly wasn't bad), the camera was much worse, and the battery life wasn't as good. But it some ways it was better: it had a fingerprint reader (modern iphones don't), and it was much smaller and lighter.
> I guess mostly because the only thing new smartphones offer is faster cpu
The next killer-feature in the race to the bottom is probably software, not hardware, and is near realtime translation. Samsung is airing an advert for that right now, but it's not real time.
Better "AI" with a faster CPU and everyone has their own Babel fish.
I think it's because Google could make a great phone, but choose not to. They keep adding gimmicky features that myself and apparently many other HNers don't care for, while core functionality is neglected and often regresses.
I own a Pixel 8 Pro and it is without a doubt the worst phone I have owned in at least a decade. The amount of bugs for such an expensive product is mind boggling.
One of main features is the camera but I've found myself taking far fewer photos with the phone than I expected I would, mainly because the camera UX just kind of sucks in a 100 small to medium ways that add up to an unpleasant experience. Just for example: you need to reenable the manual focus slider after ever picture, focus peaking is flawed and impossible to disable, there's a very noticeable lag with the telephoto mode when adjusting the camera, setting are buried in several different menus, and more.
The only reason I would even consider another Google phone after this one is that the phone landscape has gotten pretty bad as a whole. Samsung phones have their own list of flaws and I won't buy a phone that Apple dictates what I can do with; and those are the alternatives for buying a nice phone that I'm aware of, but if anyone has other suggestions I'm all ears. I loved LG phones and wish those were still around.
What others would you recommend under $800? I looked at Motorola, but the camera quality is bad.
I found this useful https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/
Using a Xiaomi now, but Android Auto doesn't work for me (other brands on the same car work fine)
Out of (genuine) curiosity, what major hardware improvements are you referring to?
On paper, it’s largely the same as prior years for the SoC at least. I think the fold has the most obvious upgrade but nothing I’d consider really major. Other than that, it seems like mostly a camera bump year?
I thought the upgrade to metal/glass + new design looked great which I included in "hardware".
Beyond that https://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Google-Pixel-9-vs-Pixel-8... shows:
- Much brighter screen - Next gen tensor chip - 50% ram upgrade - Better camera + battery - SOS functionality - Better ultrasonic fingerprint sensor
Holistically felt like meaningful improvements across the board to me, but I understand where you're coming from. I think maybe I have lower expectations for improvements year to year
Ah, fair. I usually don’t include form factor too much because it’s so subjective.
I think perhaps one of the reasons for the negativity here is that the price is approaching flagship from other companies, but that Tensor G4 performs like chips from four years ago.
I think that overshadows a lot of the improvements. Perhaps if the whole package was significantly cheaper, the reception would be more balanced.
> On paper, it’s largely the same as prior years.
Not even the same. The 9P screen has lower PPI than my 7P, the camera has worse field of view and the battery has lower capacity.
You see «negative comments» where we see «constructive criticism» and «helpful reviews». It's not a «happy news» site.
> I just hate modern phones, all of them.
First sentence of the current top voted comment. What's constructive about that?
You could argue the rest of the comment makes up for it, but I don't agree. It reads like a standard negative rant against change to me. I don't see much constructive here.
> I just hate modern phones, all of them. I want an adequate one-hand screen size (~6"), a headphone jack, and an even camera bump (just so it lies flat on the table). I love the pixel 8a, the size, curvature and camera bump seems ideal. Ofc they removed a freaking 3.5mm jack, but I can make a compromise here and buy 100 type-c to 3.5mm adapters, but I'm super disappointed with the new 9x series, they are now even more blocky and square-ish which i really don't like, plus no "a" model which is usually looking much better for me than the main one.
> Does anyone know the phone which is small, has a headphone jack, even camera bump and is still buyable to this day?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242944
A release of the 9th model of a phone is not "change", the change lies in the past for devices like this. I believe general statements like this increases the cynicism of those that don't really feel invested in the soft- and hardware landscape of current-day smartphones and there is a lot of reason for that in my opinion.
Essentially get the same product with improvements that are only another iteration. The Pixel 9 might be a good device comparatively, but I would be more surprised if people were too hyped about it. The larger context of hype and Google is relevant here as well.
First question I had when hearing about a Google phone is, if they try to make it harder to block advertising. I don't believe the thought is too unreasonable, is it?
> The Pixel 9 might be a good device comparatively, but I would be more surprised if people were too hyped about it.
Would you be surprised if a post about the new iPhone would look like this looks here?
Point taken, I would be surprised since the hype for Apple is indeed quite disproportional.
People who have never held the phone are not giving "reviews". They're trotting out pet peeves.
> Top tech reviewers e.g. MKBHD
„Top“ in the sense that a lot of people watch them. Please don’t take seriously what they say. Luise Rossman did an excellent video on marques apple propaganda.
you're in the minority, I consider myself well educated in tech and a critical person, and MKBHD videos align with my values.
GenAi is seen by some people as a very negative thing.
Maybe people resent losing their jobs to machines?
Or people resent the major privacy issues, inconsistent UX, and deprioritization of what they see as needed features, all to add a few hugely hyped but minimally useful AI features.
My biggest worry is that everyone complaining about hamburger menus will soon be wishing they could use a hamburger menu instead of being forced into chatting with an AI for menu settings.
No, it's just boring and uninspiring.
What qualifies someone as a “top tech reviewer”? It’s a phone for gods sake and some random YouTubers opinion isn’t anymore valid than a random Hackernews commentators opinion.
If we were getting opinions on the latest PhD paper on attention mechanisms than I’d trust someone with a PhD versus a random person, but for getting opinions on the new Google phone? Think for yourself.
Agree with you re: think for yourselves.
Two things:
1. He's held / seen the phone live, I buy online so won't get a chance to before I decide.
2. He's also held hundreds (thousands?) of phones which I haven't.
While he does have preferences that differ from mine, his perspective is still interesting.
>what qualifies them?
19.3m subscribers on yt
Joe Rogan has a lot more subscribers and listeners than this guy, does it mean I should listen to his opinions?
Valuing someone by reach makes no sense at all. Most professors at MIT have no social media reach at all, I still value their opinions extremely highly.
In fact, valuing someone's opinion purely based on the size of their megaphone is partly why we're the world is in such a bad state politically (and in other ways) these days. E.g. people listening to social media influencers opinions on vaccines.
I think this is a fair take. The parent comment shouldn't have added subscriber count as one the qualifications. But for MKBHD's qualification, simply use point number 2.
Whatever I watch==top tech reviewer, apparently.
> any other ideas?
Call it disappointment I guess. No phone from any manufacturer has felt totally “right” to me in years in the way that phones from a decade ago did. It makes sense from a business perspective since smartphones were effectively complete way back then. The business needs a way to justify selling me a new one so it's been a long slow downhill of shit-I-don't-care-about ever since. I especially miss the era of HTC flagships. HIGH TECH COMPUTER!
The software is disappointing too even though today was not really a software announcement. To me it feels like since they're both from Google the Pixel hardware direction also signals what Android itself will prioritize. I used to be a huge Android-the-OS fan but found that my enjoyment of the platform peaked at 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Version 4.3 was the first version to remove something I loved (the “Phablet” UI layouts that were great on my Galaxy NoteⅡ). Announcements like today's push that point of Peak Android even further away in my mind, and I'm sad about it.
Yeah, exactly. Phones aren't going in a positive direction at all. What I want is a phone with excellent battery life, a great OLED screen, a great camera, plenty of local storage (and expandable with a microSD card), durable/rugged, and fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy. I don't want AI bullshit, stupid features that tie me to cloud services and help advertisers build profiles of me, can't-delete bloatware, stupid features that spy on me, etc. I also don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two when there's nothing wrong with the old one.
You're describing an iPhone. I've switched from Android to SE2 in 2020, and bought 15 last year on release day to get the type-c charging. I feel it ticks most of your boxes:
* excellent battery life - can't complain about it. I'm not streaming YouTube on 5G on the phone, and I've found out that it can last about two days per charge with light use - messenger apps, phone calls, emails. YMMV of course. * a great OLED screen - it's bright & crisp. I haven't seen a better screen in person yet. * a great camera - it's a very good camera IMO. Takes good shots of people and nature and shoots impressive videos of music shows in dark basements. * durable/rugged - not sure about 15, but my SE2 was abused and dropped. The metal sides were dinged, the screen had a few nasty scratches, but the phone held up together very well. * fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy - iOS is much nicer and snappier that any of the Android phones (HTC Desire S, Galaxy Note II, Xperia Z3, Xiaomi Mi6) I've had. * don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two - I think iPhones do last a few years, given the fact that my wife uses 13 and has zero desire (or reasons, really) to upgrade.
The only requirement the iPhone doesn't fit is the storage - Apple charges an absurd price for storage upgrades on all of their devices. I went with the cheapest option and pay for a large iCloud subscription, and it seems to work well - the photo and file sync between the phone, Macbook & even my Windows machine is seamless and quick.
It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat. Apple are not saints, they collect a lot of data and telemetry that I'm not a fan of, but at least they are not a corporation that is built on advertising.
It's not an option: I can't block ads on it with uBO and Firefox. Also, I can't connect it by USB to my Linux machine and download photos. You also forgot about the expandable storage. The lack of headphone jack also sucks.
>It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat.
That's funny, because you're giving money to a company that actively wants to prevent you from blocking ads on, for instance YouTube, by restricting your app and browser choices. Meanwhile I can install any app I want on my Android phone, including apps Google won't allow on the Play store such as SmartTube.
No headphone jack, no expandable (microsd) storage.
Not listed on software, is the ability to install whatever I want, not what Apple decides I'm allowed to install.
I share this sentiment which is why I'll be passively-aggressively going for a Sony Xperia 5 VI once it launches.
Not because it's particularly great (it's not), but because it's the only somewhat mainstream manufacturer to retain the headphone jack on their flagships as well as microSD card slot.
My only gripe is that it's mostly likely going to be a 180+ gram brick.
The snappiness (yet) and camera are not great, but Librem 5 might be relevant here. Headphone jack, ability to run anything without tracking (FLOSS GNU/Linux by default), microSD, smart card. If you install SXMo, it will be snappy, too.
Looks great except for the eMMC. That's the part that died on both of my previous phones (Galaxy NoteⅡ and Galaxy NoteⅣ; currently still using an iPhone 7 that's on its third battery and literally falling apart) so I am very wary of getting another phone with that type of non-replaceable storage. I know that people have replaced them but it takes some awfully fiddly soldering just to end up with another part that Will Die At Some Point.
True, however, in the worst case, you can boot the phone via USB (uuu).
I'm very bullish on genAI, and I bought the new phone, but I really don't think the features shown are that exciting yet. It feels like they're laying the groundwork for more powerful AI to be ready to do things in your phone apps, and the current features are just paving the way.
The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
Being able to order food is only useful for those who live in an area where there is food to order. Here in rural Michigan I can count on one hand the number of times I've ordered delivery in the past 3 years.
AI has been totally useless to me in my life. Give me a headphone jack and better SMS spam filtering. No new phone has better features than my Pixel6a and it isn't even that great.
> The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
If this were a "killer-app", then Amazon would still be selling those quick-buy Amazon Dash[1] buttons, and Alexa would be making a profit[2]
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47416440
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/alexa-had-no-profit-...
I think Amazon prefers "Subscribe and Save" over Dash. (I agree with you that AI for ordering is not a killer-app.)
I really hope the killer-app of genAI is not takeaway food prediction, nor porn.
> The killer-app is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
What you're actually going to get is a None pizza with left beef from a ghost kitchen at the least competitive price you've ever seen with the branding of a YouTuber.
> I'm very bullish on genAI, and I bought the new phone, but I really don't think the features shown are that exciting yet. It feels like they're laying the groundwork for more powerful AI to be ready to do things in your phone apps, and the current features are just paving the way
That was Assistant right up until they killed it for a new thing.
> The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
This killer app of yours can be stealthily enshittified, you aren't privy to its decision-making process.
What’s killer about that? I order food once every 2 weeks, I like to browse the different options myself. Almost all the ‘killer’ AI functions are already here: smarter photo retouching, auto-replies, searching, and text summaries with some reading comprehension to ask questions. These things I use daily.
The only thing I’d like is a better integration with ALL actions possible on my phone.
HN has relatively high Graphene OS proportion, and those who use it are those who likely comment here. From Graphene OS user perspective, this does not – on the surface – add much new value. Thus negativity. Other factors ALSO.
It's also roughly a ~month before next iPhone, which is significant. I doubt many people will switch, but getting ahead of hype cycle is probably valuable. Or maybe Apple will see what from Google marketing has not landed and adjust decks accordingly.
the only places where MKBHD is a "Top tech reviewer" is yt subscriber ranking and corporate payrolls
It'll be interesting when (and only when) it can run GrapheneOS and other open source alternatives.
I Use Hacker News for technical input.
on an average, HN crowd is pretty clueless about
a) running a profitable business
b) foreseeing technological progress -- say two iterations down the line.
c) mass adoption of features
On an average, they tend to be elitist and don't represent the average brand popularity (e.g Google, Meta, Amazon). They only mildly upvote technology that helps their extremely privileged life.
E.g Current AI / Metaverse features helps plenty of poor, underprivileged people around the world, especially non-english speaking. But HN is the first to mock such features.
Because of this, they tend to be poor individual stock pickers. They are highly risk-averse and typically bring an SRE mentality to the world.
> They only mildly upvote technology that helps their extremely privileged life.
Your bias is heavily US centric. HN is not SF or SV. Plenty of users in Serbia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, Vietnam, in war thorn Ukraine.
Arguably the average user is above average for their area's COL but to claim everyone is swimming in VC money is as dilusion as the people you want to portrait in your comment.
You don't have to be swimming in VC money to be an elitist.
Portray
>E.g Current AI / Metaverse features helps plenty of poor, underprivileged people around the world, especially non-english speaking. But HN is the first to mock such features.
AI features in phones from Google are English only or maybe a few languages, even if you know English try to use "AI" to set a route using your voice when the locations are not english words. Sure, some free AIs on the web will help poor people but the best ones are under payment wall and not only that you need a specific way to pay, what I mean for example is Netflix, Steam do not need my credit card, they have alternative ways to pay like PayPal but Google, Microsoft, OpenAI they only allow credit card , so I conclude they do not care for my money they really need that credit card for some reason.
> Metaverse
No quicker way to signal how little you know about technology than to promote something niche that doesn't function well on most cheap electronics.
Thanks for proving my point of not looking Two iterations down the line
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You have no crystal ball. You have no high ground nor do you have privileged knowledge to back what you're saying.
You are personally invested in those technologies being game changers. It couldn't be more clear given your aggressive, substance-less posts.
I don't know about the second part, but I fully agree with you on the first part.
Some days HN feels like an echo chamber, where thinking outside the box is heavily downvoted.
Pixel 9 also says satellite emergency support ("Satellite SOS"). Search for info gets you to https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15254448?hl=en&...
It looks like it's coming "later this year". Lots of chatter about it, see a few details at https://www.androidauthority.com/pixel-9-satellite-sos-34676...
* apparently coming with android 15, but they are shipping android 14
* turning on satellite sos later, but this year
* us only
* free for 2 years on pixel 9 phone, but probably would cost more later?
If you go on a lot of backcountry trips, maybe you already have something like a Garmin device with paid in-reach service with texting and emergency service button - no voice support. I have this, it works well. You can do 2 way texting, also you can have your location uploaded as you travel if you wish.
TBF that’s what Apple did, basically.
It wasn’t in the initial release. Needed a software update 2 months later or so.
You were only supposed to get 1 year (?) of service. But they extended that by a year.
Because of that everyone with a qualifying phone is still in the “free” stage so we still don’t know what it will cost. Or when that will start.
If ever.
I’ve never used it but I like that my iPhone has it. I would never carry a Garmin (city/suburb life, no point) but I know the satellite is there if needed.
I think Apple is expanding it to iMessage this year (text only) though for all we know that will cost extra.
It's doubtful they'll ever charge for SOS. The "one year, one more year" thing is likely to make the accounting and liability work out. If they had just said "free for the life of the phone" it would have locked them into providing the service for many years, and required revenue deferral for many years. Easier to just under-promise.
That’s kind of what I expect. It will simply be free forever but maybe the other services that they might add in the future, such as iMessage over satellite, will cost extra.
“A man got lost in the woods and died because he didn’t pay Apple two dollars a month“ is probably not a headline they want to see.
It’s also possible they didn’t know how often it would end up getting used and so they said that is a hedge in case it ended up too expensive on their end. Now that they know it’s not they don’t really worry about it.
I mean they they don't have to choose between "100% free forever" and "not free and literally kill the people who didn't pay in advance."
They could just leave it enabled for everyone, and then retroactively charge them for a (moderately hefty) 1 year subscription if they end up using it.
Charging a fee for using it is a bad idea because then people will delay using it until it's too late.
That's why in New Zealand, at least, there is no fee for a rescue callouts in general.
> You were only supposed to get 1 year (?) of service. But they extended that by a year.
I suspect they wanted to gauge what the usage (and therefore cost to them) would be like before making any promises.
I would not be surprised if satellite messaging ends up costing after the first year, but that satellite SOS remains free forever. After all, who wants the reputation hit when someone ends up dying in the wilderness because they didn't keep up their satellite payments?
They can charge you after you get rescued. Or does that come out as a negligible amount?
Even if you managed to charge people (or their SAR insurances) tens of thousands of dollars per rescue, I'm not sure that would entirely pay for running such a service.
But I suspect their actual business model will be to charge for non-emergency messaging, which might just be able to subsidize the emergency use case.
Are there cases of people actually being charged for their backcountry rescues? I know it's theoretically allowed many places but I'm not aware of anyone actually being billed.
Generally, SAR teams would rather the R continue to stand for Rescue rather than Recovery (of a body).
As soon as SAR involves a helicopter, I remember hearing you're looking at a hefty bill in many places, even if the SAR teams themselves don't charge anything. (Not sure why/how that is the case – maybe the helicopter is often operated by a for-profit company, essentially taking the SAR crew as passenger?)
As someone who’s been rescued via helicopter, I can state at least in my case there wasn’t a large bill. The only thing I was charged for was the out of network ER visit.
Yeah, I'd imagine the helicopter is where the big expense lies and those are mostly private hires. The SAR teams around me are first responders already on duty or volunteers. They still have expenses when launching a mission but driving a dozen people to a trailhead is cheaper than a chopper.
New Hampshire regularly charges for backcountry rescues when they determine the person being rescued was negligent: https://www.backpacker.com/stories/essays/opinion/new-hampsh...
Outside of the US all bets are off. Plenty of rescue services that charge.
In Alberta and BC, helicopter rescue is free if you contact emergency services (Parks or RCMP).
They could.
But “iPhone saves man’s life after he fell down a mountain” sounds a whole lot better than “worlds richest company charges man who nearly died $25 to save his life”.
I just used iMessage via satellite on the iOS public beta this past weekend. I forgot it even existed. The phone prompted me to update my location for "Find My" via Satellite, which I've done before. So I accepted, and got a screen that gave me the option of sending iMessage via satellite to. Sent one to a friend as a test. It's a pretty cool UI. It shows "Satellite" as the message type when writing messages, as you might see "SMS" or "iMessage" or "RCS". And then when you're in iMessage and connected, the dynamic island shows a green indicator. When not connected, the dynamic island is larger and shows you which way to turn to reconnect to satellite; presumably if you want to see if there are replies to your message, or whatever.
Thanks for the review. I have a Garmin inReach device that I connect to my phone when I go up in the mountains, but I would love to get rid of it. Sorry Garmin.
When you're in SOS mode, you can use the satellite connection to manually update your location—separate of the emergency response service—so anyone who you've chosen to share that with can see it, as well as in Find My. I'm often out of cell service in the mountains and will usually push the location once I'm in the general area I plan to be for a while.
Oh that’s right. That’s the other thing you can do. I’d forgotten that.
Thanks.
While I never needed the satellite SOS it’s fun that there is a demo in settings that shows you how to find the satellite and everything just as if you used the feature for real.
Plus Garmin devices use the Iridium network which has truly global coverage (as opposed to Globalstar which is only in select areas of the world) as well as other features useful for non-emergency backcountry travel. I won't be dropping my Garmin InReach any time soon.
Correct. Globalstar is a "bent pipe analog repeater" network. They have ground gateway stations that provide connectivity from their satellites to the public switched telephone network and internet. In order for your handheld to work, you need a satellite in view and that satellite must have a ground gateway station in view. Iridium doesn't have that latter requirement. I won't be getting rid of my InReach Mini anytime soon.
On the other hand, that "bent pipe" nature is what allowed Globalstar to support a (presumably) completely new type of protocol and modulation over existing, decades-old satellites!
Apple has also been adding new ground stations as part of their agreement with Globalstar, which has, among other things, added coverage to Hawaii. I'm pretty sure they have much larger plans for this than just emergency texting.
I do a lot of solo hiking and use a Garmin with InReach in case of emergency and to reassure my wife, it can also send my position every N minutes (I usually set it for 20 when on the trails in an area with limited or no cell phone coverage). I wouldn't mind if similar functionality becomes common on cell phones.
I know someone on our local SAR team that had mentioned they were having issues with folks using the Apple devices for SOS that resulted in long delays. This is for coastal British Columbia, so perhaps not a universal experience - but something to keep in mind.
Personally, I'd stick with the better known option, and like another commenter said - the battery life on the Garmins are pretty amazing, and it doesn't weight much.
And I rather depend on a PLB, whose signal can be picked up by an international network of receivers on 406MHz, and even transmits a homing beacon for first responders.
No subscription required either. You simply register the beacon with a government agency (in the US, its via the NOAA, and distress signals are handled by the coast guard or air force receivers)
Plus the fact that the inReach has a mad battery life, and is a very simple and dependable device.
Only works in the US and not even in all states. Ridiculous. What's the point of satellites to then be so geo-restricted?
That's Google for you. I bought Pixel 8 Pro when it came out, after I had Samsung (never was into iPhone, my wife has those though). I regretted pretty much right away. Heavy AF compared to Galaxy, cool features US-locked, EU means nothing to that company since it looked like they haven't even applied for licenses for cool shit in EU - had to fake my SIM to be in US just to unlock thermometer etc.. I will not buy any device from them anytime soon.
> had to fake my SIM to be in US just to unlock thermometer
IIRC that's also available in some EU countries, the issue in this specific case isn't google but the fact that devices which could be construed to offer medical info tend to require certification varying by country
you're right, the issue being google hasn't even applied for certification. Aside from that, try buying anything google hardware outside of select core market. Somehow, Samsung and Apple (and a ton of smaller players) are able to have global availability with no issues.
And yet somehow Samsung and Apple manage to bring most features here.
Regulations don't much care about what's technically possible.
Apple was able to make it work in most "developed" countries (do we have a better term for these countries now?). I guess they're just better at the regulatory game?
Also why would regulations prevent them from operating in Alaska, for example? I'm sure the Alaskan government would be happy to provide better emergency connectivity, highly doubt regulation is the issue. People are already being rescued, this here happened in 2022:
https://www.businessinsider.com/stranded-man-alaska-rescued-...
Google presumably uses Skylo, and that's only available in some regions.
I believe they currently only use Terrestar-1 and Terrestar-2, with Inmarsat to follow some time this year for almost global coverage.
Terrestar-1 covers the lower 48 US states with one spot beam, and Alaska and Hawaii with another one each, but I believe the latter two ones are relatively new, so maybe Google isn't using these yet?
I suspect this because I've used a Motorola Defy Satellite Link for the past year, which uses IoT-NTN just like the Pixel's baseband, and it's only been available in Europe and the lower 48 at launch (i.e. also with Hawaii and Alaska missing).
[1] https://www.satbeams.com/satellites?norad=35496
It's available in 17 countries so far. That's a long shot from "all developed countries" by most metrics.
And this really does seem to be largely due to regulations (and probably also integration with local emergency services), as there is no geographic pattern to availability.
One of the more popular terms is now the "Global North"[1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_Sout...
As someone from a developed country in the southern hemisphere, I find that a pretty terrible term.
Not sure, but it may have to do with Apple using the Globalstar satellites.
How much is the subscription for the Garmin device? I'm curious because I bought my parents a personal locator beacon, since they are retired and hike constantly. It costs more up front but has no subscription, and I didn't want to gift something with a high recurring cost. There's no communication option, it's all or nothing - if it's activated they send the helicopters. On the plus side, it has a fixed 7 year battery life, so no need to worry about charging or it dying when you need it (if you remember the expiration date). I'm curious what Google will charge for their SOS feature and how it will compare to PLV or a satellite communicator.
It's $120 per year or $15 per month. That covers the SOS, 10 text messages and unlimited check-in messages.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/837461/pn/010-06003-SU
One thing to bear in mind is that the iPhone based satellite connection is highly directional, meaning whoever is using it needs to be conscious and able to follow the on-screen instructions to align the phone with a certain point in the sky (within a few angular degrees.)
Whereas, in contrast, the Garmin inReach devices need "only" a clear sky view.
It's not cheap, about $12/month is cheapest plan, https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/837461. Pay 0.10c for tracking points, you have 10 text messages a month.
If you use it a lot, you'll start to increase your fees, I'm on the next higher plan which I think is $35/m. I should revisit that, it's a lot over a year ;-)
They have the basic devices (connect with phone, or emergency button), I have the one with maps built in. That one is awesome, it has worldwide city and trail maps. Maps works without a subscription, but I do use it for trips where there is no phone service more to get text messages.
They also charge you for time spent with service suspended. We finally canceled ours when my wife got an iphone with satellite SOS - it was pretty expensive for something we would typically use (activate, not actually use - we've never had to SOS) one or two months per year.
I assume you meant 10c and not 0.1c.
(See https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/)
yes, sorry
Which device did you choose for them?
I bought the Ocean Signal RescueME PLB1. It was the cheapest model I could find at REI. Not what I would necessarily choose for myself, but since it was a gift I wanted to buy it from a major retailer. I also got a basic model since all PLBs work in the same way and have similar capabilities. Higher price models only add features like strobe lights or additional test functions.
Thanks!
PLBs are not all or nothing.
You are supposed to register it with the local government org. In the US, that is the NOAA. When the PLB activates, the receiver which is either the Coast Guard or Air Force will attempt to contact you before they send the distress call to whatever local S&R there is. Obviously if they can't reach you, they will send help anyway.
I'm aware they will attempt to call you, I still think it is fair to call it all or nothing because the only reasonable response to a PLB activation with no response from the phone call is to assume someone is in mortal peril. If you do respond to the call, why did you activate the PLB when you could have called?
What's going to be more interesting is what hardware is added for this, and what it can be made to do other than this service that's obviously part of Google Play Services. Can it be made useful in some way on AOSP?
Google really needs to improve the core offering of what a phone is supposed to provide instead of using half baked AI as a selling point.
I have been using Pixel 7 for almost the past 2 years. But the amount of basic core issues are crazy. Recently,since the July update, every place where the phone cannot catch network signal, it shutdowns. And with the update, somehow i feel it cannot catch network signal as strongly. That is such a crazy thing. Last year, my friend got locked out of all his valuable pictures with Android 14 upgrade on Pixel 6.
My experience of Google is so bad with hardware that it has finally pushed me towards buying an iPhone for the very first time in my life after having been exclusive with Android OS for over 10 years.
I had the Pixel 6 Pro and everything was amazing... except for signal and battery. Which are two of the most important things in a phone.
The battery was quite bad from the very beginning, barely lasting a day of normal usage, but I thought "well, at least they seem to have taken lots of care to avoid battery aging - slower charging than other phones, intelligent charging speed, etc. - so it won't degrade much". Two years later it wasn't even making it to 6 PM, or 3-4 PM on heavy use days (such as trips). OTOH my previous phone (Huawei P30 Pro), with much faster charge and no "intelligent" anything, still has amazing battery after more than 5 years of use (now in my wife's hands).
That was my first and last Pixel. A pity because the software was amazing, but that's no use if you operate under constant battery anxiety and can't even use Google Maps and camera on a trip without spending hours charging at the hotel.
Research: consumers are turned off by AI in marketing because it's a vague term that makes no promises about features or usefulness
Google: takes deep breath AI AI AI AI AI
Google and Microsoft's marketing strategy for Gemini: the AI will continue until customer sentiment improves
My 2 year old Pixel 7 is working great, I've experienced none of these problems. That's frustrating.
I'm using a Pixel 4a, it does everything I need well. I upgraded from the Pixel 2 only when it started malfunctioning. I plan to buy a newer pixel when I can no longer use this one, but I'm concerned they're not being made to last through a few of Google's frequent release cycles. Seems to be a problem with most manufacturers. I just want something durable and stable
The Pixel 7 fixed those two problems, but it's still pretty weak compared to phones in its price range.
I've had a similar sentiments with Google hardware and nearly every device I've purchased, including several generations of phones and a Google Home Hub, had to be returned at least once. This has left me with a less-than-favorable impression of Google's hardware quality. Given that I don't see much need for premium phones these days (I don't play games on my phone and am unsure about the value of AI editing features), I'm inclined to wait and explore midrange alternatives as they become available. (and not going for iPhone myself...)
My Pixel 6 and Pixel 8 have worked remarkably badly as cellular devices. I may well not re-up. The last straw is the aggressive Doze mode. Notifications regularly come in very late, 30+ minutes or more.
Yep, I've had to disable it. Not impressed.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/328432356
Especially frustrating because they've tuned that to try to improve battery life, rather than fixing what causes poor performance (battery life) in the first place.
Meanwhile, I'm getting pushed away from iOS when I can't customise basic things and the Phone app (you know, the main use of a phone) takes 30s to open, even after restores.
I like how just in this thread you can see the way marketing leaves a permanent mark on its customers.
Your comment is one of few where people report unrelated problems with their Google Phone. Different versions, different problems, no problems, all kinds of things. Open talk.
You've however brought up an Apple device and the comments under your comment are all Apple customers telling you that you either don't use your device properly since using your phone as a phone is "no longer the primary means of communication" or that it might be your fault (perhaps you have too many contacts in your phone book).
So while problems with the Google device are something normal, problems with the Apple device seem to be something extraordinary.
I don't even know where my phone icon is(don't even remember the last time I used it), but I just searched for phone tapped the phone app and it launched instantly. So it's probably something unique to your phone. I suggest you wander it into Apple and see if they can fix it.
As for customization, that's sort of Apple's main feature set: It will always work the same everywhere on every device.
>I can't customise basic things and the Phone app (you know, the main use of a phone) takes 30s to open
I can't even remember the last time I used the actual voice calling function on my phone. It's probably been a couple of years now.
Call your mother
I talk to her frequently, using FB Messenger (both text and voice, sometimes video).
As much as I want to agree with you, saying the main purpose of a smartphone is to make calls is like saying the main purpose of amazon is to sell books. Only in the beginning was it so
> the main use of a phone
While the phone app remains important for some, it’s no longer the primary means of communication for most folks, especially with the rise of messaging apps and social media.
that seems like a hardware failure or perhaps you have too many contacts in your phone book? For 'fun' I created 50k iCloud contacts and it broke my account / phone. I had to call apple support to delete them.
Imagine calling Google support...
Pixel 8 Pro has been fairly solid. Some occasional battery life issues at first and some flakiness in recognizing the charging cable but otherwise it's the best Pixel since.. Idk.. the 5 or before.
no need to go too crazy, the samsung galaxy is stable
Samsungs are amazing phones but there'd no GrapheneOS support.
Stock OS is always going to have these pesky problems. After switching to GrapheneOS, I had close to no problems
I'll also vote for this. It worked great for stock operation including things like Android Auto. I had to switch back due to a need for some BS Microsoft software for teams that needs to pass safety net which my work uses for paging.
Why iPhone? Why not another Android—not Google's one? For me, it looks like you wanted to switch to iOS and looked for an excuse to blame something else for your decision. You blamed Google, not Android. In this case the rational decision is to switch to another Android brand—not switch to iOS. So, you seem a bit dishonest here. Maybe even dishonest with your own self.
what would you improve about the core offering of a phone? for me i don't see a reason to upgrade because my current phone has everything i want
I'm kind of sad that the world seems to have given up on the smaller phones. The marketing of the masculine hand holding the larger phone is amusing to me, and I can understand wanting to have a larger screen. I do not like the amount of space these things take in my pocket, though.
From what I have seen women tend to prefer the larger phone sizes more than men, because they keep it in their handbags and use it two-handed.
Yes, that is also my anecdata (women with giant phones in their purses, or even wearing the phone as a purse). I have an iPhone 12 mini, really don't want anything bigger, but perhaps I'll go for a good watch and buds that can be online without a phone and also leave the giant phone in the bag most of the day, that would mean great battery life, less phone in hand, less distraction perhaps?
I've wanted to ditch the iPhone/Macbook and go watch/airpods/ipad for years now. They need to decouple the requirement to own an iPhone to get a watch up and running (this should be something an iPad can do), and make the iPad an actual pro dev machine. Not sure I'm ever going to get my wish, sadly.
Apple could sell $200 "indulgence" NFC dongles secured by T2 enclaves.
Tap enough sacrificial indulgences on a neutered iPad or Watch, and it will software-unlock obvious convergence functionality, whose artificial absence now proliferates physical devices and environmental expense.
Straight facts. I have a purse, hip bag, or small backpack on me everywhere so the size is pretty much irrelevant so long as I can type on the keyboard with two hands. I would use the hell out of a 3DS XL sized folding phone.
I will say that the folding screen seems like a gimmick on the "2.5 phones taped together" size. For compact flip phones it makes sense tho.
Sure, for some women, but let's not generalize. Personally, I hate carrying a purse, and the new phones don't even fit in the pocket inside my purse. Plus, I miss being able to reach the entire screen with one thumb, with the phone held in one hand. I do admit to typing two-handed, sometimes, but damn I wish I didn't NEED to! I can barely reach the left side of the screen reliably, much less the top left corner. :(
Unfortunately the market has consistently spoken - small phones simply don't sell. Nobody could sustain it. Whether or not it's because the generalization is accurate or not is moot.
"Sure, for some women, but let's not generalize."
I agree, we should only talk about individual anecdotes. After all, we are special little snowflakes, each and one of us.
I have pretty average man hands (although my fingers might be a bit long) and I use a Note 8 one handed without really any problem. Honestly, I like it even if just for the fact I tended to drop smaller phones a lot more.
Based on that, I would expect half the men to be able to use even the biggest non-fold phones one handed without any problem.
What really annoys me is that that there are like dozens of Android phones on sale in major stores right now, from different manufacturers, and they are all the same. All featureless ~6 inch slabs where the only difference seems to be the arrangement of the camera lenses on the back, even on the software side they are all pretty much the same.
I understand that we have found some kind of an optimum, that it is the form that sells the best and what most people want, but with so many manufacturers and models, there should be room for some niches. Where is the craziness from the early days? All the gadgets Samsung was known for, the physical keyboards, the small phones, the huge phones, the styluses, etc...
It seems the only exceptions you can find are overpriced folding phones, and some rugged phones. You may get a few more options from brands most people never heard of, usually only available online, often directly from China. But even with that, if you want something that doesn't have the iPhone form factor, your options are very limited.
If 100 different phones are available, it would be nice if one of them was for 1% of the people who want something different.
For many years - I don't know whether it's still the case as I'm out of the industry now - the major mobile operators in the US had (increasing) requirements about the minimum fraction of the front of the phone that was covered by the screen. They also had requirements for battery life. Given geometry and minimum-practical bezel sizes, both of those factors led toward larger phones.
I broke my iPhone 12 mini and part of me died that day. A tired dad moment – set the phone on the trunk lid when getting my kid in the car and then later opened the trunk. It slid down and crunched in the hinge.
I could replace it with another mini but have been holding out hope for another updated version. I love the small form factor, even at the expense of battery life and camera quality. I just want a reasonable phone with solid hardware that fits in my pocket.
In the beginning, smartphones were all tiny, because it was universally agreed that smaller cell phones were better.
Then there was a huge, neverending push to make phones as large as possible, or larger. Sometimes smaller phones have been offered as an unpopular option, but more often "enormous" is the minimum size.
And as long as that's been going on, people have been complaining that they want their phone to fit in their hand.
Stipulate that a majority seems to feel that there's no need for a phone to fit in your hand. Why are the manufacturers so insistent on not providing small phones? Shirts come in all different sizes. How much does it cost to design an additional size of phone?
(Related: ever since the switch to 16:9 laptop screens, everyone has been complaining to no avail about the inferior dimensions of the screen. Why are manufacturers still cramming them down our throats? This one isn't even a case where people prefer 16:9 to 16:10.)
The best form factor of any smartphone I've owned is the first one, the Nexus S: 63mm wide, 124mm tall, and the back popped off to make replacing the battery convenient.
Phones have gotten steadily worse, as far as usability goes, ever since. There's more computing power, but I have trouble believing that's what's driving the shape.
>Why are the manufacturers so insistent on not providing small phones?
They don't sell.
Apple killed the iPhone mini due to low sales. Asus replaced the universally lauded Zenfone 10 with a very large Zenfone 11. Google increased the size of the Pixel 6 when compared to its predecessor. Sales also increased.
It's weird though that there apparently isn't a market for even one high-end small phone, from any manufacturer.
I wonder if to some extent they're not different enough. The iPhone mini has a 5.4" screen. Not so long ago we managed well enough with 4" iPhone screens. I wonder how a 4.5" version would sell - call it the iPhone Nano.
Unfortunately a lot of apps don't support those smaller screen sizes so well anymore. But people who want a small phone that's easy to carry around, who won't be using it for hours a day, don't always need many apps.
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll occasionally re-introduce a mini phone like McDonald's does with the McRib.
Somewhere there's gotta be numbers that show "there are people who buy minis, but they only buy a phone every few years, so let's make a mini every third model year" or something.
> They don't sell.
This isn't an answer, unless you believe it's impossible to make more than one size of phone at a time.
I specifically asked what might be pushing manufacturers toward such a viewpoint. How does the existence of an iPhone mini reduce total iPhone sales?
It costs a lot of money to make multiple versions of something, compared to having just one version. The amount of profit they were getting from the mini wasn't enough compared to the regular model, and they correctly deduced that if they eliminated the mini, everyone would just buy the larger model instead so they could decrease their manufacturing and design costs.
If you're an Apple user, would you switch to Android just to get a smaller phone? Or would you just bite the bullet and get the larger iPhone after the mini is discontinued? Apple knows that 99.99% of Apple users are in the second group.
> If you're an Apple user, would you switch to Android just to get a smaller phone?
I would never be an Apple user.
And that's relevant here, because this argument doesn't apply to Android users, and yet Android phone manufacturers are just as insistent on not making smaller phones.
> It costs a lot of money to make multiple versions of something, compared to having just one version.
Oh? Ballpark it for me.
I really wanted a 12 mini but the shortened battery life made it a no-go for me. Ended up with a standard 12 and am still happy with it years later aside from it being slightly larger than I would like.
16:9 is a compromise ratio for content viewing. It fits both 4:3 TV content and 2.40:1 movie content. Once 16:9 widescreen was popular media started adopting it natively https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16:9_aspect_ratio#History
That link is quite explicit that the idea of making 16:9 screens is to save money because they're smaller than 16:10s:
> In 2011, Bennie Budler, product manager of IT products at Samsung South Africa, confirmed that monitors with a native resolution of 1920 × 1200 were not being manufactured anymore. "It is all about reducing manufacturing costs. The new 16:9 aspect ratio panels are more cost-effective to manufacture locally than the previous 16:10 panels".
> since a 16:9 is narrower than a 16:10 panel of the same length, more panels can be created per sheet of glass
This is why people complain. "We've decided to charge the same amount for a worse product" isn't a winning message.
It also does some weird editorializing:
> By July 2022, 16:9 resolutions are preferred by 77% of users (1920 × 1080 with 67%; 2560 × 1440 with 10%). [In the Steam Hardware Survey]
Steam's hardware survey, of course, doesn't even address the question of what users prefer.
https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-i...
I keep an eye on sites selling refurbished iPhone SE, the first one! : )
Shipping with new battery for extra (...unsure if I'd trust that battery though).
That one I can still use for phonecalls and occasional practical things I need when away from desk and computer.
And the irony about decent hardware is that all have decent hardware from the past 10-15 years, only the software that is crap on garbage and can't use hardware that could have been excellent mainframes some decades ago in some secret nuclear research laboratory. Need a powerstation now to present and scroll bitmaps and some text.
Didn't they basically confirm that they're discontinuing the mini series? The 15 is still your best bet.
They never say. The 13 mini was the last one. Maybe there will be a 17 mini, maybe never again.
bought a 15- bearing in mind that the 12 mini was also too large for me (5s was perfect).
15 Pro has been dropped many more times, can’t be operated with one hand at all. It’s the first time I had to have a replacement screen actually- after owning iPhones for 15 years.
Anyway… I’m considering going back to the 5s. I would only miss wireless charging and apple wallet I think. (and apps are now made for the larger screen and will have elements that are inaccessible due to going passed the edges of the display).
get the SE 2, 3, or 4. 5s is too old, nothing works a lot of apps won’t download.
I ordered and sent back a Pixel 7 because it was so large/heavy compared to what I was used to. Ended up buying a refurbed Pixel 5 (the model before Google introduced the new camera bar design) that's still kicking, been very happy.
Looks like they've gotten the Pixel 9 a bit smaller than the 7 but still the same weight. It's still larger than the Pixel 5 too.
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Google-Pixel-9,Google...
The iPhone, to be fair, is closer to the Pixel 9 in size/weight than the Pixel 5 too.
This has been brought up in the past and Apple did try to cater to that market with their smaller phone and it seemed the market response was not great, they ultimately had to drop the iPhone mini because it was not worth it.
I’m sure there are many out there like me, but I used to prefer smaller phones until I used a larger phone for one generation; after trying to move back to a smaller phone, I just missed the real estate of a larger screen.
I am male with large palm and fingers but a 6.5" phone is simply unusable for being a phone. Pocket? Haha, probably a small sachet, weights 0.2kg, comedic on the face for calling, all the folks lost their minds completely giving 1000$ for such a parody?! It can't even sit stable on the desk for f's sake. Pretentius fragile money pit garbage all.
Just set up a new Android with 6.5" size and I am in a particularly bad mood now. Wasting my hours on ...this! The process itself is infuriating, zillions of 'features' just wasting my time reading how über-user-focused are so set it up NOW! while tap-tap-tap-tap-tap for seemingly into eternity, beyond comfortable by an ocean plus a half, but watch for this and accept that and log in and register here and connect that and you will be amazed, allow us to take your data, don't worry, we care, we say it repeatedly so it must be like that, right?, here are two dozens of icons be amazed about, wow how many icons are there it is amazing, amazing multiplied, word-editor-assistant-presentation-maker-tv-communication-console-education-news-pretty-sleepwithme-and-tap-me-tap-me-day-and-nigh-oh-yes, into eternity, but first allow this and allow that, just one more, read that, we improve your experience so do it do it, do it again and again, soon we get there, oh wait, camera MUST have discovery of nerby devices otherwise closes itself, hmmm, not something on my old Pentax, that's new kind of development in the history of photography, watching for nearby bicycle or toaster or whatever...
Users have no self respect nowadays, none!, and swallow whatever manufacturers stomp down their throats in the dozen, repeatedly. It is good this thing was the cheapest, I did not dare discovering past 8 years' development on high price, and will only be used as a small tablet at home apart from being a guinea pig, not good for anything else (without satisfying its attention hungry distracting barrage of time wasting functional nothingness). Maybe navigation from time to time, but unsure, heavier than some travel books!
I'm still rocking my pixel 4a for this reason
I know that eventually I'll need to replace the 4a (security) but every time I look at phones I just can't find anything that I would actually want to use instead, and I also resent price increases that remove features I use (headphone jack).
I discovered about the Unihertz Jelly Star the other day which is allegedly the smallest android phone with a 3 inch display. People over /r/dumbphone seem to like it as a mean to make doom scrolling less appealing to them while the phone can still be used to do all you need like use Uber (although android auto on this must be horrible).
At 309 CAD on Amazon, I'm tempted to give it a try.
A bit late but I switched to that phone six months ago and it's been positive for me. Love the size.
At this point it's probably irreversible. Even if someone will release small phone, apps developers will ignore it and their apps will not be very usable on those phones.
I guess only Apple can pull that, but they're not interested either. Their latest "Mini" model is still huge.
I'm curious about those Samsung flip phones that, instead of flipping open like a book, flip shut into a square like a 90s flip phone. I don't really want to buy one, but I like the idea a lot.
Perhaps they're catering to people with different hand sizes and gender is not a factor?
The large phones are so large that even large hand sizes won't be able to comfortably use it one handed.
They're catering to people liking big and shiny.
I can see wanting a smaller phone. That is an underserved market segment. But implying that phone marketing is patriarchy-driven is laughably absurd. Marketing for phones is probably more diverse and carefully balanced than for any other product category.
I didn't read patriarchy on the original comment.
I read that they need to use gigantic manly man hands for the gigantic phones, because otherwise people would realize that it's a "two-handed" phone for most of us mere mortals, that's impossible to use with one hand for anything but the most basic tasks.
> Marketing for phones is probably more diverse and carefully balanced than for any other product category.
Marketing for phones is forcibly (over) diverse and carefully not balanced but constructed than for any other product category.
They do not market objectively to the customers. They market by emotion and political correctness.
Just try to find a straight, white male, dare I say, two white male friends in a Google ad.
This isn't Facebook.
Yes, Meta is one of the companies that also market this way.
They probably were trying to imply that they had to use a male model to hold the phone because they are now huge
> Marketing for phones is probably more diverse and carefully balanced than for any other product category.
How can that be true when there's only 2 phone OSes of note and one single company sells half the phones in the US? There's not enough diversity in the market to create the conditions for diverse marketing.
If anything it's a race to the middle. When there are 2 shops in town, they tend to become more similar not more diverse.
He said diversity of marketing, not diversity of product. Marketing is how you're selling, not what you're selling.
Marketing in a space like phones where Apple is trying desperately to differentiate is intrinsically tied to product design.
Apologies, I meant my comment as a dig on the old idea that the larger phone is for men. It genuinely amused me that they used different hands to hold the phone. Especially since I have no real concept looking at that page on how big it would be in my hands.
And note that this was a serious criticism a few years ago where it was a complaint that all things are designed for 6' men by default. I don't know if that is still the general belief, but it got a ton of traction for at least a short while. I would be surprised if there aren't a fair number of folks that still think that.
"Unlock Gemini Advanced for a year on us ($239 value)"
Who thinks they are booking phone sales as AI revenue to juice the numbers?
Probably. And we're probably going to see more of that later with other companies.
It’s total trash AI. I keep forgetting to unsubscribe. Can’t do anything.
In the Google Pixel 2024 Keynote, one of the presenters, Dave Citron, had to try three times to get Gemini to perform the preapproved, practiced demonstration task - 33.3% success rate for something that Google KNOWS will work.
see https://www.youtube.com/live/N_y2tP9of8A?t=1692
Most of the demo fails they had during today's keynote felt more like beta supporting software and bad network kinds of failures. The only failure I saw that felt more like a generative AI-level failure was one of the hot air balloon image gens they tried which generated a circle of garbage in the sky; which was one variation presented among five or six which the AI spat out in seconds.
At https://www.youtube.com/live/N_y2tP9of8A?t=4119 in the Google Pixel 2024 keynote, the generative AI in Magic Editor still produces wacky objects - a hot air balloon that looks deflated?! The gen AI did produce two decent-looking hot air balloons.
at this stage, I'd be happy with google assistant "only" understanding what I'd like to play on youtube (+music) while driving. Far-fetched dream would be to understand streets I'd like to navigate to via google maps (not US, not english). Barrier is so low compared to rest.
UX-wise, I'm not sure why everyone is so keen on voice commands for AI.
Why let everyone in earshot know what you're up to? Sure, it's easier than typing all that text given crappy feedback of these smartphone onscreen keyboards.
If you show a pic to Google Lens app, the app will proceed to identify text and highlight those text passages.
In the AI-verse, Lens could detect the concert tour.
- if the tour was in the past, Lens could look up in Photos any media with GPS locations at those concert locations/dates and show them.
- if the tour is now/in the future, Lens could detect the dates and locations, and look up in your calendar to find when you are available. If you are available when the tour comes to your town, Lens would show a big green checkmark next to that date/location pair or highlight that date/location. Otherwise, it goes into search mode and crosses out dates/location when you aren't available. For out-of-town locations when you are available, Lens could start up Maps to search for flights to those locations. Perhaps a search of your contacts to see if you have friends/relatives in/near those out-of-town locations. or look in your calendar to see if you've been to any of those out-of-town locations before, etc. etc.
That'd impress me.
to be fair, it seemed like it was phone-specific. it worked the first time once he switches phones.
I mostly agree, but partially because I can't tell (even though I'm paying $20/month) what tier of Gemini I am getting. I know most people won't care, but because they won't tell me, I will assume I'm getting Gemini Flash from 6 months ago, and I'm not paying $20/month for that. I'm sure if they were honest about the model people wouldn't pay for it.
They're making the mistake of optimizing for general case users (who don't care about model version) when they need to attract power users so that they can find product-market fit.
20 bucks a month for Gemini is bonkers.
The 20 bucks a month is actually for 2TB of storage. Gemini advanced is just a plus.
https://one.google.com/about/plans
There's a vanilla 2TB plan for $10/month, the plan with 2TB and Gemini is $20/month. You could say that Gemini is $10/month then, but if you don't actually need 2TB or the other benefits then you're effectively paying $20/month because you can't unbundle Gemini from everything else.
Wait, where's this $10/month plan? I don't see it. I see it at https://one.google.com/about, but I can't actually choose that.
Edit: I found the answer on Reddit, as usual. You need to go to your plan settings and only then is the plan available under one.google.com/settings. That's the only way to downgrade.
when an important fact like this is added to a subthread, i wish all the thread participants would come back and edit their comments to reflect it
12€ per month here. 10€/month for the regular 2TB Google One plan, 22€/month for the same but with a chatbot. I wonder who falls for that.
I have Gemini Advanced but I can't tell which model it is, yeah. Same problem. Whatever it is, it's useless. GPT-2 level. Can't do anything reasonable.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet and ChatGPT-4o are roughly the same with the former pipping it for me and then out there is this shitty Google product that is worse than Llama-3 running on my own laptop. Even Llama-3 is better at remembering what's going on.
Fortunately, this time I managed to look it up and I have it for free because I have Google One 5TB, apparently. And there's no way to spend more money so that's what I have. It's so bad that when Claude and ChatGPT run out of messages for me I just use local Llama rather than use Gemini. Atrocious product.
> GPT-2 level
You must not have ever used GPT-2 if you think it is comparable to any commonly used chatbot today
"it's useless. GPT-2 level" Really?
In my experience they are at similar level for most tasks.
In my experience, the latest experimental model is a bit better than the latest Claude/ChatGPT at creativity, but a little worse at general reasoning. They're still mostly comparable and certainly of the same generation.
Where it truly stands out is the 2M context window. That's game-changing for things like analyzing publications and books.
Yeah, in practice, for the tasks I set it. High hallucination rate. Low context window. Frequently refuses to act and suggests Googling. If the other guys didn't exist, it could be useful, but as it stands it's as useful as GPT-2 because neither of them hit the threshold of usefulness.
I'm sure some benchmarks are decent but when Google finally shutters the chatbot I'll be glad because then I won't constantly be wondering if I'm paying for it.
It's a shame because Google's AI features otherwise are incredible. Google Photos has fantastic facial recognition, and I can search it with descriptions of photos and it finds them. Their keyboard is pretty good. But Gemini Advanced is better off not existing. If it's the same team, I suppose they can't keep making hits. If it's a different team, then they're two orders of magnitude less capable.
> Low context window.
Gemini Advanced has 1M context window. If this is low, I am not sure anything else on the market will satisfy you.
It doesn't actually work. I pasted in a House Resolution and asked it a question and it immediately spazzed and asked me to Google. I used Claude and it just worked. That's the thing about Gemini: it has a lot of stats but it doesn't work. With Claude I could then ask it the section and look at the actual text. With Gemini it just doesn't do it at all.
This feels a lot like when people would tell me how the HP laptop had more gigahertz and stuff and it would inevitably suck compared to a Mac.
I used Gemini Pro API to sort my folders, and it misclassified some files, I asked why, and he said it was done to "promote diversity in my folders"
...
This is very lame (and the sad part is that it's a real story).
The output from an LLM is like the path a marble takes across a surface shaped by its training data and answers to “why” questions just continue the marble’s path. You may get good sounding answers to your why questions but they are just good sounding answers and not the real reasons because LLM’s lack the ability to introspect their own thinking. Note: Humans do not have this ability either unless using formal step by step reasoning.
I pay for Gemini Advanced and it's much better than GPT-2, I think. I often search the same thing between Gemini and GPT-4 and it's a toss up which is better (they each get questions right when the other gets it wrong, sometimes).
But recently I asked Gemini "Bill Clinton is famous for his charisma and ability to talk with people. Did he ever share tips on how he does it?" and Gemini responded with some generic "can't talk about politics" answer, which was a real turn-off.
How do you know if you are paying for it?
I signed up, but I have no idea if I am being charged for it. Hope not.
Bottom left. Settings > Manage Subscription. It turns out I have it included till the end of the year because of the 5TB Google One sub https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41237943
The absolute confusion/pain in subscribing and unsubscribing is why I'll never consider a Google AI service in the future.
So true.
It feels like Google's marketing has gone full dark side.
And it's lazy marketing. Nothing feels genuinely positive for the consumer.
It's depressing.
Since there's no public reporting of AI revenue, what would be the point of artificially inflating it?
Some VP of AI wants to become an SVP? And some marketing director on phones wants a "SAVE $250" sticker on all the new phones and is happy to play along?
No, the CEO wants to present progress in "AI" (TM) growth within the company to shareholders
Internal KPIs
and are they booking AI search as cloud revenue?
No, absolutely not. The only part of this that would be Cloud revenue would be model usage exposed via Vertex.
That's what I meant. Google search expenses become Google cloud revenues.
Phone with scuba glasses and the woke AI. In fact it looks like Bender from Futurama, only with a nondescript personality. Thanx but no. No need for an AI to lecture me or avoid questions because it thinks it might remotely offend a hypothetic alien civilization.
Can't stand the iPhone either. At least it has a good camera and audio, but most of the apps are either junk or you have to pay for Apple rent seeking. A lot of shady Chinese apps. I spent hours trying to find a decent calculator like the stock one on Android. And the on screen keyboard is outright annoying. Couldn't turn off haptics either.
So I'm still using my Pixel 4a until it dies. The iPhone is garthering dust on my nightstand.
I'm surprised that no media outlet is seriously talking about its on-device inference capability, which is the biggest next thing for LLM. Apple did a better job on its PR here, but they didn't also get all the attention that it deserves.
On-device inference improves not just its latency, this also removes a huge chunk of LLM's economical constraints from software companies. The biggest advantage of software is its marginal cost being nearly zero. LLM hasn't enjoyed this luxuries but the dynamic is going to change.
People are getting pretty tired of AI. Just about every tech company is shilling "AI", without actually selling anything which is useful for most consumers. On the other hand, just about everyone is being drowned in AI-generated garbage. To a lot of people, "on-device inference capability" is identical to "FlarzBuz engine to power Garbage Generation".
Also, I'd disagree with it going to change the economics behind it. Sure, offloading the hardware and power cost of inference on the consumer is going to make it cheaper for the AI companies, but they're still going to have to spend an absolute fortune on training. And how are they going to sell it if it runs on your device? The tech industry has been trying to push everything away from on-device code in order to sell subscription-based cloud services! Who's going to pay a subscription or per-query fee simply for the right to run a pretty mediocre app?
Also promising AI isn’t a new thing for Google.
They’ve over promised and under delivered on AI for years, and that is now their reputation.
Going back and watching the Google Duplex demo versus what shipped and what it is today - that was 2018 and it still doesn’t perform as demonstrated.
After the media backlash, the team was quietly deprioritized.
Source: knew folks on the team.
Easy, they just disable it if you don’t pay. Pretty sure automotive companies are going to make breaks a paid upgrade next.
For years, Google has been promising me a high-performance voice assistant. I find that in 2024 it still can't understand "call mom" and "call my wife's name" unless I'm in a perfectly silent environment. And it usually takes several tries.
I'm not going to get carried away with technical announcements.
Telling my Pixel 8's assistant to "set an alarm for 10 minutes" fails when it's not connected to the internet (after spinning for a few seconds.) That's crazy to me. I thought offline voice for basic things was working back in the Nexus days.
I travel a lot and often find myself in areas with poor or no connectivity, and things "get a little freaky" in those scenarios. Even things like Google Maps (which has downloaded/offline mode) often fail or spin for 30 seconds. I think Google/Android engineers don't test these scenarios enough (or at all), and they're usually bathed in perfect connections.
Siri seems to be better at the voice recognition in my experience but it has these crazy bugs where I see it perfectly transcribe the text, and then un-correct it into something completely different. Piping the raw text into a 90s Perl script would be better, and it amazes me that the same team can do on-device transcription so much better.
I dont want to use the voice assistant on my pixel but the function is so baked in that if I connect a headset, despite never setting the assistant up, it will interupt any music or playback after 15 seconds to tell me the assistant is ready now and there is no way to make that message go away or resume my media playing.
What's even worse for me is that it regularly "forgets" how to respond to queries that it could serve perfectly well before, especially related to smart home things.
"Play <local radio station x> on living room stereo" has been hit and miss for my parents to the point where I regret setting them up with a Chromecast-supporting AV receiver and Google Nest speaker. They now just use the regular remote and listen to the station via FM.
If you're unlucky enough to be bilingual, it's a complet joke. It's a real shame, because it makes this function useless for the people who need it most, those who can't type easily on a phone (visual challenges), or have difficulty transcribing names in a foreign language.
It could help millions of elderly people stay independent a little longer. But no instead, they were trying to sell us generative AI and photo filter.
The weird thing is that they just don't seem to care about improving it. WhisperX can process my speech just fine, but Google assistant can't. That's the lowest bar to clear and they don't need to invent any new tech for it - there's a number of solutions ready to go right now.
> If you're unlucky enough to be bilingual, it's a complet joke.
Yep, it's just pain :D I'm native portuguese speaker but I navigate the english web.
Hey siri, read notifications (portuguese name bad written) sent message <random portuguese read as english>.
or:
E aí siri, lê notificações (read notifications in portuguese) Notificação de Twitter, <english post read as portuguese>
For me, this recently started working! Do you have both Portugese and English configured as languages in your iOS settings? I believe that that's what motivates Siri to try and interpret a message in the other language as well when reading notifications.
hummm, found the "read message" language setting... I doubt it it will work properly but will try
Thanks :)
I dont know, it works perfect for my (non-native) accent even in the noisy car environment with a super-slow car unit. It's really good
Google's voice assistant is leaps and bounds better than next best thing available on a cell phone, Siri.
It's much much worse if you're trying to call someone without an Anglo-Saxon name too. It just outright refuses to call anyone I know with a Thai name, regardless of how I pronounce it.
The same goes for French and Romanian, I call it Starwars name problem. You have to make some sort of strange variation like the name in Starwars so that the device recognises it.
Yeah, I think the LLM for everything crazy is stupid, but I do wish there were a little more of it in the Google Assistant. Then I could finally say "Text Bob 'Home in 5'" and not have it reply "Sorry, I don't have a 'Home' number for Bob."
Let's wait until it actually ships and if it'll work offline. Last few times Google sold Pixels on dedicated AI hardware it wasn't even used and instead offloaded to their cloud services, making them slow and often blocking app UI until it's either finished or timed out.
Not only does it free the device manufacturers but it's something they can offer to app developer for free without costing them anything. Personally I think this is what will be the biggest impact (When/If they open raw "api" access to 3rd party devs). There are whole slews of apps that could make of that in small or major ways if it's not something the developer has to price into the app/subscription (especially with usage being something that can vary greatly user-to-user).
Some random examples I just came up with:
* Podcast app does STT for transcriptions/"subtitles" as well as episode summarization (Even cooler if the podcast provides chapter markers)
* Games getting new and interesting types of NPC's, level generation, etc
* Filters that do more than keyword matching (for news/social apps). I can technically filter out political Spam SMS messages but only with regex/keyword matching.
* Catch-up on 3rd party chat app conversations
I know LLMs will make plenty of mistakes and are far from perfect but there are things they can do very well that are very hard or expensive to do (sometimes just for indie-level devs but also for small/medium businesses). To be able to do those for free and offline would be a gamechanger.
> On-device inference improves not just its latency
this is a nuanced thing. sure you save the network hop, but you are running inference on a much more underpowered model on an underpowered device. at the end of the day you want to get the lowest time to first token and highest tokens per second. on-device optimizes TTFT at the expense of Tok/s. i think there are many usecases where Tok/s dominates in overall latency considerations.
If you watch Google’s keynote, the majority of LLM inference they showed happens on their cloud. (Also called private cloud to borrow apples term)
They actively call out only a few areas that run locally.
Almost all their summary features are in the cloud for example. Unlike Apple, they haven’t figured out API to let apps vend data to their AI system.
It's good for privacy so media companies probably don't want you to know it exists.
How useful is it really? It s a novelty, and as language are going to get truly useful and reasonable, the small llms will be nothing but a novelty item that drains the battery.
They don't say it explicitly that it's running LLM on phone. Built in Gemini could just mean pre installed and configured app that works with a connection.
tokens per second is normally the biggest cause of latency, so amortized I would bet a decent LLM on the phone is still slower than groq/aopenai etc
I fell for the Google Home, and it has gotten significantly worse over time. My only hypothesis is they found ways to reduce the cost of running the server-side, and it does not benefit the consumer.
My Consumer Report: Do not fall for hardware backed by software that costs the seller money to keep running.
It’s internal culture that devalues maintenance and product improvement. Launch gets you promo, maintaining gets you laid off.
I saw a lot of humble and dedicated engineers get laid off in the first round and it was a lot of people who put systems stability over their own promo. There used to be a place for those people, which is part of what made Google a decent place. That’s gone now, things will continue to break as long as fixers take the brunt of lay offs.
People say this a lot about Google, but I'm pretty sure this is true for every big company.
I think the point was that it used to be different at Google in the past(I saw it first hand). People ensuring services functioned correctly after launch were valued and rewarded appropriately.
Over time, the value given to maintenance and smooth operations decreased in reviews, esp for 'non core' services, which inevitably led to engineers doing the rational thing and prioritizing launching features, getting credit and moving on before they got saddled with pesky things like maintenance.
This also had the unintended consequence of politicizing work assignments quite a bit with more savvy political operators getting the most opportunities to launch featu ... er 'deliver impact'.
Interesting. Any hypotheses as to why this shift happened?
Stonks only go up /s
[flagged]
I have a smart home gym that does not run unless it successfully reaches the servers first (I found out after the return period was over, while my WiFi was down for a week). This really shoved this issue to the forefront of my mind and I am now trying to understand the packets it sends and receives with the hope of running a fake host on my home server, redirecting the traffic to a local destination and returning fake data to trick it into thinking it succeeded the fetch and finishes bootup.
The idea that I can't work out because of an internet outage upsets me greatly. Also their recent updates have added more ads into the gym interface which I am not a fan of, so I might just never have it connect to their servers ever again if I get my workaround working.
What device is this? I wonder if Pihole could block the ads for you. It was able to completely remove all of the ads on my LG OLED TV and the UI now looks perfect.
What does a smart home gym actually do?
at-home coaching, analytics and feedback
but those shouldn't be mandatory features that prevent you from working out.
Same, I have nest cameras and nest wifi (now discontinued 2 years later, so can't buy compatible wifi points anymore). Software + Google voice assistant is so goddamn buggy!
Wish I went with a TP-Link solution instead
I have the Google Wifi pucks because it was only mesh system at the time that offered both wireless and wired backhaul for mesh networks, which was great because I could wire most of it.
I used it as wired until I moved, and my current house I started using it wireless. That's when I discovered a bug in the wireless mesh that requires me to basically restart the network every couple days.
I also wish I didn't need to app to connect to it. I really don't understand why I can't manage it directly from my PC or phone via IP Address like every other system I've used. I regret it, but it is better than having an upstairs and downstairs network I needed to keep switching between with my netgear routers I had before.
I switched from Google Wi-Fi to Eero a few years ago and discovered that almost everything I’d thought were network limitations was some kind of non-obvious problem with the Google Wi-Fi system. Random daily 20 second hangs for iOS devices disappeared, the DNS proxy is now reliable, etc.
Highly recommend UniFi. Storage is in your home, everything is well integrated with router, loads up video very quickly, scrubbing is fast… its great.
The Nest cameras are infuriating. I’ll get an alert, only to tap it and get “This video isn’t available yet. Check back later.”
After all these years, my devices still are split across the Nest and Home apps, and the Home app is still missing features Nest had from day one. Oh yeah and presence sensing doesn’t work since switching to the Google app [0].
I bought an iPhone last year and have been de-Googling since.
[0] https://youtu.be/upLSYyprib8?si=ykEmaxmdTDAt3ghz
I thought it got slower because of Gemini. I have been setting alarms (yeah, I know!) under various conditions and it always worked like magic. It's something I have gotten really REALLY used to now and I'd notice any change.
Also, their AI photo effects never really worked any good for me but I do not own a pro model.
I've got a nest hub max that I use daily, for the most parts my family has learned the key phrases that result in the action we want. But randomly it'll play music from youtube when we only ever want spotify. Randomly it won't display google search results in a usable format.
So even the very simple use cases that we know work, aren't solid.
Then there's the massive disappointment when you just have a quick think about the types of interactions that it could do very well if google cared at all. Honestly, the failure to follow through on what could have been a house hold changing device is just sad to ponder.
Why they haven't rigged it up to gemini yet baffles me.
I abhor all these phones with a glass back, that look great in the store and then everyone puts an ugly back cover on.
I'm still rocking a Pixel 5, which is actually my second Pixel 5. I really like using it without a case. It's light, small, can handle a fall without the back shattering, and I like the matte finish.
All I want is a version with more modern specs, but every manufacturer keeps optimizing for the advertising shots, and people keep falling for this. Right now the camera is the only thing tempting me to upgrade, but I'll probably wait another year.
You don't need to put a case on phones. I've had an iPhone 11 since it came out, with no case, and quite a few drops onto hard floors. It's still fine.
Obviously there's some luck involved but the only time I put a case on a (in that case, Samsung) phone it shattered the first time I dropped it. So, I figured I might as well go without again. I've yet to have an iPhone break from a fall, only from leaning up against something with it in my pocket.
I can't remember the last time I held a phone without a case and didn't think "wow, I am going to drop this NOW". You'd think a $1000 camera would have, oh I don't know, some grips? A lanyard hook? Instead it's just shiny smooth nonsense all around.
Sure, I won't put a case on my next phone as well, even if it's glass, but most people do use a case, which keeps incentivizing manufacturer to get away with more fragile designs.
I'm mostly lamenting on how durability is a niche value for one of the most widely used objects in our lives.
Related: I use a 15 Pro with no case and this thing is an absolute beast. I've dropped it on concrete many times, no shattering. The newer glass they use seems to be doing the job. (This from someone who's shattered the front and/or back glass of at least 5 prior iPhones too.)
Not even a scratch on it either, titanium turns out to be a pretty fantastic frame material.
I don’t know what it says, but I managed to break a 15 Pro lens WITH a Tech21 case, dropping from about 3’ on concrete on the corner (not flat on the lens). It may be that Apple covers the actual lens with a cover, but whatever that outer surface was, it was replaced for $29 with Apple Care and didn’t require a new phone. Not a big deal, but makes me hesitant to carry it without a case.
You do, because now all phones have ugly camera bumps and can't lie flat on the table without a case.
Why can't make phones thicker, to match the camera bumps, filling the extra space with battery, is beyond me.
Because most people would put a case on it, making it even thicker? I mean, I spent ~$1500 on my last phone, and while I treat it carefully, I'm not risking it getting smashed so I could never go without a cover.
I would totally use my phone without cover. $1500 or $300 I'm not going to resell it anyway, so scratches and wear aren't an issue. But I'm going to put it on a table a lot and I hate it when it wobbles.
I don't really know why I'm supposed to be upset that the phone doesn't lie flat. It's pretty rare I set it down on a table, to begin with. Even when it is...so what? I can make it jiggle when I poke it, I guess.
You’re right that a case does little against big drops - with or without case, either you’re lucky and the phone survives or it doesn’t.
Cases prevent scratches but, meh, I wouldn’t mind a few scratches on the back of my phone.
However the main attraction of a case to me is: grip. My iPhone 15 Pro Max feels more slippery than a bar of soap. Unless I exert a lot of force, it just slips out of my hand while using it.
I've used minimalist cases for my the last 3 or 4 phones, dropped them all plenty of times, and never suffered more than a minor scratch on the screen. I assume phones are just much tougher than 10 years ago, but the case isn't hurting the cause and I'm too scared not to use one.
I'm a pretty greasy person and while obviously it's not as good as rubber I don't feel the same way about glass phones. They're obviously smooth but glass on skin is pretty grippy, overall.
Many often cite the wireless charging argument, but often forget that there are many people who don't care about wireless charging and would prefer a durable phone.
There are non-glass backings that work with wireless charging. It's not either/or.
picks up plastic phone in store
"feels cheap"
buys iPhone
I miss my Pixel 4. If it were still supported I'd use it.
I may switch this time since they're finally offering trade-in offers here in Ireland. I like my Pixel 6, but wanted a better camera for a while (to be clear, the Pixel 6 camera is really good, especially considering the price the phone was, but I still miss things like e.g. better optical zoom), so I may get a Pixel 9 Pro.
BTW, for those talking about issues: I bought my Pixel 6 at release, and yes, I had some strange Bluetooth issues during a few months. Not anymore, and for a while the phone is solid.
Also, this is probably the first phone that I have that I don't feel the battery got worse after 2+ years of usage, maybe thanks to the Adaptive Battery. My wife iPhone 12 (that she bought around at the same time as me) already had a ok-ish battery when she bought, but nowadays the battery is just plain sucks (battery health is 87%, that doesn't explain the whole story), one of the reason that she may switch to a Pixel too. Another thing I like from my Pixel is after those 2 years, the phone still feels snappy. I know people like to say that Tensor CPUs are bad, but I never had any issues with them.
I don't like the fact that Google increased the prices though: Pixel 6 was an amazing value for EUR649, but at EUR919 the Pro looks a more interesting choice since the gap reduced between the two. I think the reason is because the Pixel a series is such an amazing value that nobody care about the normal Pixel anymore, but if anything this is Google's fault.
Curious that you say this, because I had a 6 Pro and while all the rest was amazing, what ended up making me hate the phone was the battery.
My experience in that respect was just the opposite of yours: just barely OK at the beginning, and quick degradation in spite of the adaptive battery. In 2 years it wouldn't even make it to 3 PM in days of heavy usage. Definitely much worse than the batteries in my friends' iPhones, and of course also than all the other Android phones I've had, some of which lasted (or are still lasting) for more than 5 years with battery being a complete non-issue.
I wonder if it's a 6 vs 6 Pro issue or I just got a bad unit (I'm not the only one I know with the complaint, though, so if it's the latter, bad units were rather common).
> My experience in that respect was just the opposite of yours: just barely OK at the beginning, and quick degradation in spite of the adaptive battery. In 2 years it wouldn't even make it to 3 PM in days of heavy usage. Definitely much worse than the batteries in my friends' iPhones, and of course also than all the other Android phones I've had, some of which lasted (or are still lasting) for more than 5 years with battery being a complete non-issue.
How is generally the signal in your region? Because here in Dublin it is generally pretty good, being in 5G most of the time and generally with high speeds. And I think signal is the most important thing in Pixel phones, because of their bad Exynos modem. So if your overall signal is bad I can see the battery draining faster and your experience being much worse than mine.
I have a Pixel 7 and the battery feels like it has gone down a bit. Hard to tell as it has never been great to begin with...
It was a good deal at the time with the free Pixel Buds Pro, but I surprisingly liked my previous phone better (One Plus 5).
I'm currently on the 6 and one issue it has is a pretty bad battery drain. Every so often it gets into superheating mode where the CPU is doing... something... and the phone gets wicked hot. I've even replaced the battery and the problem persists.
I don't care much about photos so the 9 really just doesn't have anything that would make me want to buy it. I'll probably be holding on to my 6 until it reaches the end of its security updates.
For me, when I am using the phone during roaming or in situations when the signal is bad, I can see increased battery drain and the phone itself sometimes gets hot. I assume this is the bad Exynos modem, but I heard the new modem for Pixel 9 will be focused in efficiency for the first time (still Exynos though), so I am hopeful that the situation is better because this is the only time the hardware from my Pixel 6 bothers me.
Do you think this is recent? I've been using a Pixel 6A for over a year, this current one only a few months. In the last few weeks it has started (seemingly) randomly getting quite warm.
It's been better for me, it doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to. The worst of it was around the beginning of this year.
Just Traded in pixel 6 for $90 USD.
Discounted pixel 9 pro xl by $350 by being subscribed to Google Fi.
Cheap-ish.
I don’t know how anyone could possibly trust a premium product from Google, regardless of how good the specs are. Their entire approach to QA and privacy is anti-premium.
When Google bought HTC the idea was the best of Google software and the best of HTC hardware, but we have Google level hardware and HTC level software. The glory days of the HTC One were a decade ago.
Reminds me of that old joke: "Canada could have had British culture, French food, and American industry. Instead they ended up with American culture, British food, and French industry."
Reminds me of an issue I had with the Nexus 6P: when I wanted to get it fixed (I think it was an issue with the ambiental microphone) Huawei said it was a software issue and Google said it was a HW issue.
In the end, none of the two companies fixed the problem, and my 6P eventually died randomly one day.
So, this Google software and X hardware story is very similar to yours w/ HTC, except that if they don't buy the company it's better for them as they can just throw the problem over the fence to the other company. What a clown show
HTC software wasn't bad at all IMO, it was among the less bloated Android layers of the time.
I had three HTC flagships back in the glory days and they were amazing machines, their only problem was that most people preferred to buy the likes of Samsung despite being much worse in almost every respect (software, camera, design, durability, etc.). I don't know if due to bad marketing by HTC or just because they bought reviewers less (they used to have a blatant pro-Samsung bias).
Then of course quality actually degraded when they had to make huge personnel cuts due to bad sales.
Bit of advice I'm looking for, if my question resonates for you: I've had Pixels in the past (pretty distant past at this stage) but I generally found the experience to be too "beta" or "experimental", in that various features would not carry over to a new Pixel, and I'd have to get used to something entirely different all over again. In contrast, I've enjoyed the Samsung approach, and I love the Fold. (I also carry iphones, I like gadgets)
Should I try the Pixel Fold, might I like it? (looking for opinions from people who recognize my story; no need to tell me things like "nobody can answer that for you")
I only bought a Pixel because of GrapheneOS.
I think I've never had this few issues with a phone. (I only had Samsung phones before this)
It feels even better than the Android that the Pixels ship with, I used it for a day before I flashed GrapheneOS, and I can completely understand why one would not buy a Pixel again if they only experienced the Stock OS.
I'm always interested in trying things like that, but I'm not that into playing some sort of "jailbreak cat and mouse" over time. If I install GrapheneOS, is it automatic after that for security updates and whatnot, or do I have to do some weird two-hands-three-fingers reboot and manually download, etc?
Graphene OS has automatic updates, prompts you for reboots after installing them via notification.
Yes, it's fully automated OTA updates with GrapheneOS.
(running it since 9mo on my Pixel 8)
What about banking apps ? Do they work correctly ? Do they complain that you don't have genuine phone ?
My banking apps all work (three different german banks), but the app from my health insurance does not want to work.
Relevant recent submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41215126
Speaking as a Calyx user since 2020, the install experience was a bit finnicky, and it required no ongoing manual maintenance. My understanding is the web installer is pretty easy now though.
One caveat: Unlocking the bootloader deletes the disk. This is a reasonable security measure, but it means you don't want to use the phone for anything important before installing Graphene.
What excited you about Graphene?
Probably the top reason I wanted to get GrapheneOS was the privacy/security aspect of it, this includes: no google play services by default, multiple user profiles (more than the Stock OS can have), a network permission for apps (this normally can't be toggled), disabling all usb data connections (can easily be activated in the Settings if I need it), Bootloader can be locked again after flashing the ROM and much more.
It also has very frequent updates, and my phone will get them for a long time (also true for the Stock Android on Pixels, but that one really sucks), which was also very important for me, as I want to be able to use my phone as long as possible.
What made this even more appeling is the possibility to install sandboxed google play in a seperate profile/user for apps that really need it, which works surprisingly well, and even then the google play services don't run with elevated permissions like they normally do, but with the same permissions like other apps.
And the battery life is insane, if I don't use my phone it basically does not loose any battery, and even with heavy usage I don't need to charge it daily.
So GrapheneOS was the easiest way to start degoogling (kind of ironic using Google Hardware) my mobile phone, while still being able to run nearly all of the Apps I need.
https://grapheneos.org/features#grapheneos
Many of those are appealing
Oh right! I think I have that on a tablet. I was confusing it with the alternative to Android that Google is developing when I asked you about it. Thanks for the info.
I'm not sure why you think you'd like the Pixel fold more than the Samsung Fold. Their dimensions are similar, but you've already said you dislike the software experience.
I had the Nexus 5, Pixel 1, 3a, and now 7a, with a couple other phones in between which each time drove me back to Google hardware and their flavor of Android. If you didn't like the software in the early days of Pixel, or even in the Nexus days before, you probably still wouldn't.
Personally can't imagine someone thinking "I hate the pixel experience" and then actually preferring samsung's, which is way worse.
Why is it worse?
Samsung's experience is objectively more customizable (you can have custom color schemes, custom keyboard layouts, macros and more).
At the same time, samsung defaults have neutral design, while google screams at You "this is a google app" almost everywhere.
I guess the only downside is that samsung's UIX is heavier on the performance side, but in context of flagships it doesn't matter much.
So again, what makes you say pixels experience is better?
i probably write in too parsimonious a style compared to how people read: my complaint was not about the pixel experience, it was about the experience moving from each pixel version to the next back in earlier days, it was about the deltas.
I can learn any system, but I want one and done. I don't want to keep having to learn all the time when it comes to things like muscle memory.
i hate gestures, for example. If I could configure/control them, alright, but I don't like when some touch that used to be unnoticed or neutral suddenly starts wiping out what I'm doing. my mantra when it comes to coding UIs: job number one is never ever lose anything the user has typed
Personally I view the Pixel experience as "clean", but I've heard it described as "sparse" by Samsung fans.
i used to think that too. but then ss fold device changed my mind.
the problem mostly come from the tensor chip where apps/games are not optimized for it. can't imagine using a top flag phone (pixel 8 pro) at the time with sub-optimal performance.
the fold is so much money that I never even considered it. For what they're charging (where I live, I guess) I can get a macbook air or an ipad pro and still buy a nice pixel with the change from the price of the fold. Not really worth it to me.
>I'm not sure why you think you'd like the Pixel fold more than the Samsung Fold.
a hypothetical answer to my question could be: "yes, worth trying the Pixel experience again, but stay away from the Fold." my question had two dimensions.
but thank you! very informative. yes, I had most of the Nexuses, then into the Pixels
I've never used the fold, I'd be a bit concerned about the screen wearing at the crease. Damage is another thing to be worried about.
As for the pixels, my advice is to hold off buying the latest until like Feb or even May. Google pretty aggressively drops the prices after release so waiting just a little bit will save you several hundred dollars. By Feb, generally the phones have been pretty stable.
Black Friday usually gets a couple hundred $ off as well. Only risk is that if the phone (or watch, etc) is selling well then they won't discount it, so you might end up waiting a long time or waiting a couple months and still paying full price. I always try to hold out for Black Friday though unless my old phone is broken.
Hm... difficult question. I got a Pixel Fold at half price second hand. What MKBHD says about the Pixel Fold is absolutely true: it has the best outer screen/folded experience of all the foldables. Most of the time, I use it closed. And, apart from the abysmal screen brightness, it's a perfectly fine phone when folded.
There are still very few apps that support the full screen properly and while you can force apps to run full screen on the big screen, their automatic UI layout will simply blow up the lower and upper portions of their interface so that you don't see that much more.
Most Google app, obviously, have proper support and YouTube is definitely the primary use case for the big screen. Insanely, Google Maps loses features when viewed unfolded (WTF?). But even among the Google apps, though, most don't really use the space in a useful way. They often just put some hamburger menu permanently on the screen. Nice, I guess, but you won't bother unfolding the phone just for that.
Web browsing/reading is great on the unfolded screen. That's where the near-rectangular aspect ratio works best.
Honestly though, while I'm keeping an eye on what's happening in the foldable space, I think my next phone will be a boring old slab phone again.
I'm an iPhone guy, but - there _are_ other designs for phones, right? The squircle corners, the shiny metal band surrounding the matte back, the aqua-pill-shaped buttons, the colors - Google is a $2T company, there's gotta be an industrial designer somewhere in the building or some process for phone design that doesn't take place in Cupertino, right?
That phone isn't a squircle, it is a rounded square. Those rounded edges seem to be inspired by google material design. Also phones have converged to the metal band, glass back before the iphone did it. Mobile phones are a mature technology and their designs have converged to the designs people are buying.
I have 5 year old Note9, and recently broke my display where small part of it is just black. I have been searching for a phone to replace it with, with very few criteria: modern SOC, non-folding, not ugly looking.
Its breathtaking how many phones just go nuts on their backside, stuff Id be ashamed to pull out in public (oneplus 12, oneplus open, xiaomi 14 ultra). When theres finally some normal lens housing that isnt protruding on a side making the phone wobble while laid flat on a table (like almost every remaining phone), it almost doubles the phone width.
And then when theres finally a phone Id like to buy thanks to its big battery, sleek design and no front camera cutout (Nubia Redmagic 9 Pro), the must fuck it up by adding a freaking fan to it. And ofc their Z60 Ultra has again huge and uneven camera housing with red accent around main camera.
Its as if every manufacturer is either conforming to herd, or going batshit crazy.
The reason people are buying those phone is because theres no choice. Not that theres no choice because people are buying it.
I really wonder if consumers have any influence on phone designs. People generally buy phones for completely different reasons, the design just has to be "not bad" which generally means just take whatevers available that meets your actual criteria (OS, camera quality, etc). After all you'll probably have to slap a case on it anyways.
I very much miss the halcyon days of the feature phone - Nokia got _weird_ with it for a bit:
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/2...
I really like the design of this red magic phone.
https://global.redmagic.gg/pages/redmagic-9-pro
I just wish thered be an option to omit the freaking fan. Really not a fan of fans...
Its super frustrating how the entire industry follows Apple; incapable of original thought. The Pixel 8 had somewhat rounded edges, which is fantastic for a comfortable grip. Apple killed rounded corners and converted to the squared-off design with the iPhone 12; and everyone has followed suit since. Galaxy phones used to have curved edge displays; now they're squared off, because Apple. Samsung's watches are generally circular, but they had to go squircle with their Ultra variant, because Apple. Apple does Titanium; Samsung has to do Titanium; no one gives a flying shit about titanium!
I would bet every dollar in my pocket that Apple is intending to convert back to a more rounded design with the iPhone 17, and the S26 and Pixel 11 will follow suit.
Begging+pleading for the googung corpodrones to have just one original idea, even if its only "we're gonna do it this way simply to spite Apple" (they won't).
Their original idea is the folding phone.
Apple will drop a folding phone one day and then we'll all be talking about how Android copied it.
The front of the phones are all screen and the back looks nothing like an iPhone but somehow people think they copied Apple. Go figure.
There is a vibrant Chinese Android scene, with their own fairly stand-out design trends. One design that's pretty popular right now is the "large circle", as exemplified by Xiaomi 14 Ultra. My favorites in this theme are the ZTE Z50s Pro (IMHO just a gorgeous phone) and the Honor Magic6 Pro.
Huawei released a phone with a retractable lens and 1 inch main sensor, fairly unique for a phone first type of device.
photography nerds rejoice
> ZTE Z50s Pro (IMHO just a gorgeous phone)
Woah that is a nice looking phone. Too bad the thing is massive.
I know people like to claim Apple designs and everyone else copy, but that's not what's happening.
Everyone is converging to the same design, Apple like the others. They all borrow from each other until they all look the same.
Pixel 9 design language is iPhone 4 design language from 2010 -- which was original iPhone design language from 2005, that didn't ship!
Apple calling back to what was considered their most iconic design language for the iPhone (and now iPads) long before others imitated it, doesn't mean Apple is now copying the imitators.
https://www.core77.com/posts/16817/core77-speaks-with-jonath...
This remains widely regarded as the most significant design since dropping the keyboard.
The plot on that design thickens, Samsung claimed Apple copied Sony:
https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone...
But those were Apple having fun with Sony fanfiction applied to an earlier Apple design ... turns out the iPhone 4 language was in their design repertoire in 2005, before even the original iphone shipped:
https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/30/3201162/apple-refutes-cla...
I seem to recall they couldn't do the design earlier due to fabrication and materials constraints.
Profitable products attract copycat designs. Samsung copied no removable battery and the metal used. The first Google phone was a Blackberry style layout until Apple popularized the all touchscreen design.
Apple copied bigger screens and Android’s notifications.
It could be worse, it could be TV where back rarely seen and only gimmick after maximum bezel thinness is display thinness until samsung decided to add a frame. At some point design gets optimized to death. Have to look towards niche segments like gaming phones with extra buttons, ventilation, ports etc.
That said, I just want a phone with a modernized 5 way switch rocker to scroll with thumb.
Rounded rectangle clearly won the form factor wars.
My favorite phone design is the Meizu 16 series, especially its white variant (search for Meizu 16s Pro unicorn, it's just gorgeous). The 16 series is the last series before Meizu also succumbed to the "mainstream" designs such as big screen size, punched-hole screens, and weird camera layouts.
Mobile phone design peaked with the Nokia 3110 and the Motorola MicroTAC, and it's been downhill ever since.
My fav iconic Nokia design was the 7600: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 ;)
Don't forget the 7280! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7280
mind blown
No problem, no one will use squares with rounded corners as long as iphones go back to the "perfect" design with a small phone and small screen that apple forever insisted was the perfect phone design, instead of larger screens that android had and apple now uses.
They literally made a phone that folds in half, what exactly are you talking about?
I like the small radius corners of my Pixel 6a. I hope it will last because I can't see myself switching to a recent Pixel with those huge squircle corners.
Rounded corners is a mechanical design thing, mostly.
HMD devices are doing a Windows-phone-esque throwback, so... there is _some_ variety out there. Ish.
No there is not
I love Google Pixel phones because of Google Fi for traveling; unfortunately Google Fi is facing major service downgrades/outages for travelers (including me) who go on 3+ month trips out of the US. Google Support tells me the Google Pixel 9 Pro has the same limitation. For comparison my iPhone works fine on Verizon.
The issue is now described in the Google Pixel T&C, and I hope Google will eventually offer a way to buy a Google Pixel phone and Google Fi that offers full functionality for longer trips.
Here's a link about it:
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/tech-tips/goog...
I used to be a Google Fi fan (early adopter at that) for European trips ... but nowadays, with multi-ESims, it is trivial to get a local SIM card and use that.
The local data plans are typically more broadly useable and cheaper than the $10/GB that Fi offers.
When it comes to Europe (and this might apply to other destinations as well) Fi is a bad deal.
Definitely applies to many Asian countries as well.
Often, eSims get significantly better latency too, since you get an IP from close to where you are instead of your data having to cross one or more oceans. A VoIP call between two US SIMs/phones roaming in Asia is not a great experience.
Note that's not always the case: eSIMs I got from Nomad and Airalo in Europe/UK last year were routing things via Hong Kong, so things like DDG and google search using the SIM geolocated me to Hong Kong all the time, and the latency was noticeably bad.
If you read the reviews of some of the eSIMs there are quite a few mentions of this happening.
Definitely – you need to be aware of that when picking one. Some vendors are pretty transparent about their "IP location" these days, fortunately.
Some, like Truphone, even have multiple gateways that are dynamically selected for lower latency, which is very neat (but they're generally more expensive).
Google Fi also has a very annoying rule where you can't sign up when you're out of the country. Found that on while on vacation.
I think its a pretty reasonable anti fraud policy.
Fraud? One needs a Google account to use FI so they for sure know who you are to any degree necessary
Also, defrauding ... what, exactly? If it's a US phone number, there are a bazillion ways to get an SMS enabled US phone number that is either anonymous or pseudoanonymous due to people not wanting to get sexting or pig butchering spam when Yet Another Breach leaks every marketing db in the world
It sucks about google fi after 90d, but Verizon is $10/d or $100 per billing cycle, no? It was easy and cheap for me to get a local sim (in Barcelona and London, at least). Does verizon still lock your phone? I had a bad experience traveling with Verizon to Munich. It was one of a handful of reasons I dropped them as my carrier. This was many years ago though.
fwiw, T-Mobile also have the 90 days restriction. I'm not entirely sure it's a company policy vs a US policy.
It's just an anecdote, but from my one-time experience the 90 days restriction isn't a hard restriction with TMobile. Service worked fine for 5 months for a family member abroad (in a single country) with no issues or messaging from TMobile about an overstay - although this was on a family plan with other phones in the US for the majority of that time.
Google Support tells me it's a Google company policy, not a U.S. policy. And for comparison, Verizon works fine, just by paying a bit extra for extended roaming.
people in the rick steves link say you just tell tmo when you get back in the us to reset it/turn it on for the us. This should not have unclear limits of course.
The issue with having an explicit threshold is super heavy users will use right up to the limit and recommend it to other super heavy users. This MVNO then gets a disproportionate percentage of unprofitable roaming costs. The solution is for them to pass through the costs so there’s no dancing around the costs by suddenly cutting you off.
Interesting. I likely won't be in a position to take a 3+ month trip for a long time. But I just came back from spending 1 month in China and Google Fi worked flawlessly in China and Taiwan. I had better 5G coverage in Shanghai than in the US.
My main complaint is once you go over your data limit and opt into the $10/GB there's no way to restrict your speed. It may sound silly, but I was hesitant to click some links as they may start loading tons of pictures and videos below the fold and cost me a dollar or two per click. So I pretty much limited my browsing to HN!
With uBlock Origin installed (I use Android Firefox), you can block large media elements from loading for all sites or per site. see https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches
I know it's not a good solution, but I wonder if you can send the Google Fi eSim to a friend back in the states to "reset" the 90 day counter then have the friend send you back the eSim.
Do you have a link with more information on the pending changes?
Added link above. The changes took effect last year.
I also love Google Fi, but FYI there are substantially cheaper phones that are still compatible. For example they will sell you this one for $60 right now: https://fi.google.com/about/phones/moto-g-5g-2024. No idea if that's a good phone, just saying that if you're mostly in it for the international coverage there's no reason to pay $800+ for a brand new Pixel when you need a new phone.
The keynote seems to only focus on the Pixel 9 software capabilities.
Honestly, why is this important? Aside from all the AI hype, I don't see why the event should be so focused on features that are purely software updates that will most likely propagate to other non Pixel devices.
It's just a bummer that the event focused so much on the AI features instead of the HW capabilities: probably they don't have much to show this year.
I just hope they fixed the numerous HW issues the previous Pixel devices had (e.g: overheating, radio, ...)
It's happening because nobody cares about phone hardware anymore. The iPhone 15 became a bit of a meme because of how similar it was to the 13 as it pertains to most people's use cases.
Phones are like laptops now, most phones regardless of make or model will do what you need it to.
I can't remember ever caring about phone hardware. Most things aren't resource intensive and camera quality doesn't matter that much.
I disagree with my Exynos S22 Ultra... Battery life is abysmal and it heats up instantly, a thing that got extremely better with Snapdragon S23 and S24. Hardware is still important
It would be nice to have some competition.
Right now basically you are forced to buy a Pixel phone, because if you don't buy an iOS or Android device you don't have apps, if you buy an iOS device you lose your freedom, and if you don't buy a Pixel phone you don't have timely updates and GrapheneOS and thus don't have an open source, frequently updated and well-engineered OS.
You could use e/OS or compile graphene cutting out the pixel specific hardware requirements.
Google's trade-in estimates for the P9 Pro:
Pixel Fold (256/512): $760
Pixel 8 Pro (128/256/512/1TB): $699
Pixel 8 (128/256): $490
Pixel 7a: $300
Pixel 7 Pro (128/256/512): $540
Pixel 7 (128/256): $360
Edit: there's a complete overview of all trade in estimates in this post: https://slickdeals.net/f/17689866-buy-pixel-9-pro-or-pixel-9...
If you're a Google Fi member, they have a nice discount on the price of the phone - but the trade-in value of your existing phone looks to be halved. I can get the Pixel 9 Pro XL with 256GB of storage for $750, but I only get $150 towards my Galaxy S22+.
Not bad, really. My Pixel 6 was being flaky a month ago (not playing sounds reliably), and I needed to fix it right then, so I bought a Pixel 8 from Best Buy for $549+tax and got $220+tax back (described as $70 valued price + $150 promotional) for trading in my Pixel 6. If you consider the $70 as the true value of my flaky Pixel 6, you could say I only paid $399 (plus tax) for the Pixel 8, and now Google's offering me $490 for it if I buy a Pixel 9.
Even so I'm not sure the Pixel 8 -> Pixel 9 upgrade is worth $799 - $490 = $309 (plus tax) to me when the Pixel 8 is brand new and working well.
I have a P8Pro and it may well be worth the money to trade it in, especially to get a slightly more manageable sized phone.
I think it's a good deal. After-tax price is ~$1082, trade-in is $699, with a $200 store credit ($300 with a Google 1 sub), and $21 back from 2% credit card rewards. So ~$162 cost, which is not much more than the increase in trade-in value. Plus the 1 year of Gemini Advanced and maybe some YouTube premium months.
The main downside is that store credit expires in 1 year. Also I hate buying new phone cases.
Yeah, that sounds perfect. To go from my 256GB P8 to a 256GB P9 Pro would cost me about $610 + 10% tax after trade-in which I don't think I'll have the stomach for.
Best Buy just gave me $1099 plus a $200 gift card for my S23 Ultra, when buying a Pixel 9 Pro XL.
Lots of comments about the camera bump. I'm glad they at least went for a symmetrical bump so the phone lays flat rather than iPhone's "off to the left" style bump. I don't mind a non-flat phone, but at least make it symmetrical.
This is a valid point, but in my experience, the further the camera is from the side, the most annoying to use it is.
Like sometimes you want to take something in picture with a difficult angle or small opening. Or for example being in the middle means that there will not be space for fingers when holding the phone for a picture.
I've never seen a temperature sensor on a phone before, I thought that was kind of cool. Sounds like it doesn't really work though: https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/google-pixel-8-pro-the...
>when done correctly, the Pixel 8 Pro's temperature readings are very accurate. Clinical trials revealed that the Pixel 8 Pro could successfully calculate body temperatures between 96.9°F and 104°F to within a margin of error of ±0.54°F.
https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/google-explains-pixel-...
The "human body measurement" test in that article seems flawed. When you launch the Thermometer app, there's only two buttons: Object temperature and Body temperature.
So I'm not sure why the author tried to measure body temperature by using "Object temperature" mode with "default" setting and measuring the temperature under the tongue. The Body Temperature test has always been accurate for me and matches my higher end forehead thermometer.
Looks like the body temperature update came out a couple months after that article was written, so I guess it works better now. Very cool, I would love to have that on a phone.
Could be the article is written by someone outside the US. If you aren't in the US (I gather—at least in the UK I can speak to personally), the app just doesn't offer body temperature at all because they haven't bothered to get it certified for medical use.
(You can work around this by spoofing your location, but it's not obvious to do.)
Samsung Galaxy S4 had one a decade ago. Also had a humidity sensor! A true weather station (barometer and light sensor too!)
That's ... not the kind of temperature sensor they are referring to.
Oh :(
Some Android phones have an IR camera so you can see the temperature of surroundings!
What's the selling points here for upgrades? Comparing my five year old A50, I'm not seeing it. Presumably a better camera, and more RAM (why?). I felt compelled to upgrade in past years, but I feel like phone tech reached a plateau. The AI features, front and center, feel like hype. Haven't found them useful at all.
One selling point is security updates. That's a good way to build in planned obsolescence even apart from the features themselves.
Wikipedia tells me the Galaxy A50 got its last security update in February of last year, FWIW.
But its Google Play Services (which includes WebView) + Chrome all receive regular updates independently.
People put a lot more weight on the Android security updates than they perhaps should. Unless you're installing random crap, there are very few OS vulnerabilities that you need to be concerned about if you have an up-to-date browser. Things like StageFright are very uncommon (and I can't find evidence of that actually being exploited in the wild)
There's a limit to that. Kernel/middleware updates see a steady flow of security patches on basically all devices. It's true that real world exploits tend to involve some bug higher up the stack (in still-updatable software, e.g. apps or the services layer), or at the very least to be susceptible to workaround fixes there. But nothing is perfect and relying on an out-of-service device is IMHO pretty questionable.
My wisdom tells me the more security releases, the more unsecure a piece of software was.
To be clear: the A50 is an end-of-life device. It's not that the latest security fix was a year and a half ago, it's that the update pushed a year and a half ago will be the last one for this phone.
While true, not every system needs endless security updates to be secure enough for most people.
That’s true for a microwave, but is ridiculous to claim for a general computer with arbitrary app execution and web access.
The AI features. More RAM is needed for those. If you don't care about them then you're probably not going to want to upgrade.
I thought Android was going to do AI features in the cloud rather than on the phone?
They're doing both. They're very proud of their on-device features.
The previous camera bulge was questionable but this one looks horrendous
All camera bulges are a poor design. Just make the battery thicker. Either way people are throwing a case on to make the back straight again.
> Just make the battery thicker
These devices are already rather heavy.
I wish there were more options for people who don’t care that much about the camera in their smartphone. I remember the non-bump camera in the 7.6 mm thin 2016 iPhone SE was perfectly fine for many situations, I took some impressive vacation photos with it.
There's a whole market of 250-400$ Android phones that are targeting exactly that. Every brand makes phones in the cheap with average camera segment.
Unfortunately those come with extremely weak hw. I got one of those phones (there are no high end, small, 3.5, rootable phones). I struggle to use background apps.
> I wish there were more options for people who don’t care that much about the camera in their smartphone.
Just get a cheap phone? If you're paying $500+ for a phone, I'd estimate most of that money is going into the camera. Judging by the marketing, anyway.
> Either way people are throwing a case on to make the back straight again.
Alternatively it's just exploiting "everyone uses a case" to get a mm or two of space for the camera lens that can very productively use it. Thickening the whole device only makes sense for people who don't use a case, which is basically no one (well, me, but most people love their cases).
Indeed, at this point my workflow is pretty mature. The camera bump ends up unnoticeable to me because I'll throw it into a Spigen case anyway. Seems like a lot of people are doing that.
I love the camera bump on the Pixel 6. I made a leather belt pouch¹ for it for use on trips and hiking, and the camera bump sits neatly on the edge of the front of the pouch (the back part curves around as a flap over the top). It gives my fingers exactly the right grip to grab it and get a solid grip on the whole device as I lift it out of its pouch.
Never used a case for any phone I've owned.
1: Using the wet moulding technique.
No one wants that weight. A thicker battery puts the phone out of comfort for everyone. A thicker camera bump puts the phone out of comfort for only a few.
I think the bulges are because everyone’s using a case anyway, so they may as well bump out. Unless someone’s doing the “I care so little about protecting several hundred dollars that I use an expensive phone without a case” thing.
I never used a case in my life, owned like 6 phones since my first Galaxy back in 2012. Much rather deal with a few scratches than touching some cheap case instead of the premium metal/glass.
My reason is that I never sell phones anyway, after 2 years I get a new one and give the old one to a cousin or something like that.
Have you held a Pixel 7 Pro? They are _way_ too smooth without a case. It's like trying to hold a wet bar of soap.
I have a leather case for my Pixel 7 [1]. Much better feel in the hand.
1. https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1303285181/leather-google-pi...
I used to say the same thing, then one day I tripped and shattered my phone. It was nothing I did that caused it. Just a small bit of uneven pavement was enough to ruin the whole device.
I have dry hands and can't hold my Galaxy S23+ with glass back at all. It slips out of my hand all the time. No way I can use without a case. It'd break on the first day.
It's not about selling them. It's about protecting it when you drop it etc.
I never use cases and I haven't had a phone break from physical damage in over a decade. Phones these days are pretty dang durable. I really don't want a giant brick in my pocket.
I just pay the extra $30 or whatever for accident protection. That's about the same price as a case and accomplishes the same goal. I think of it as a zero-ounce case.
Where do you get $30 accident protection for the lifetime of a phone? I've looked into Apple Care for this in the past, and it was about 10 times that for two years, with a deductible for broken screens.
I honestly don't remember how much it was when I got my last phone, but I don't remember thinking it was particularly expensive. I'm an Android user.
I never used a case and know a number of other people who don’t.
I've never used a case and never will. It's not that hard to not drop your phone, and unless you get a heavy duty case (like an OtterBox) they aren't adding much protection anyways. It's not worth the added expense, ugly look, and crappy plastic texture.
My wallet case is indispensable (to me). In other words, I'd rather use the "space" of the camera's bump-out for my own purposes (ID and credit card) than a worse camera or even more-er battery life (for some time now "more than a day" is indistinguishable to me from "more than a day and a half") or some other gadget. Probably. Um, maybe put some more gadgets on the phone and I'll get back to you on that one...
iPhone bumps have been so egregiously large that they don't lay flat even with a case for a few years now.
You've got to specifically look for one that has raised corners or something to compensate.
I really liked the "visor" style of camera bump since the Pixel 6. I like symmetry so the square corner bumps always bothered me, plus it didn't give it a corner wobble when sitting on a table. I wish they would have gone full width on the new Fold :/
At least the non-folding Pixel 9's have the symmetry in tact for the outline of the bump, but agreed, I do like the full-width visor on my 6 better.
My main criticism with the camera bump on the Pixel 9 are the sharp edges. It makes it difficult to slip into pants without catching, and also collects dust.
I was hoping they'd chamfer the edge in future models but it doesn't look like that's happening.
Using a case solves this, but it shouldn't be required.
I hated the camera bulge and in display finger reader on the 7 so much that I downgraded to a 5
Mobile phones are a mature technology. There aren't any opportunities to differentiate designs. For cars, they all look the same and differentiate brands with headlights and grills, phones only have the camera bump to differentiate brands.
It's a really ugly phone, and for sure it's a combination of Google playing "catch up" but not wanting to invest in Industrial Design like Apple.
I think the much rounder corners, as well as the round camera bulge look terrible. These were significantly better in the previous iterations.
Is it? Maybe I've spent too long using iPhones—I look at that, and think "yep, that's a phone". It looks very vanilla.
I thought the same before I bought it (Pixel 8) but with a case it's okay.
Cases have helped on past pixels but agreed, this one looks pretty terrible!
I’m still bitter about my last Pixel with the stuttering display (no real-time thread for the graphics), the settings all over the place (I counted 4 different addresses for my home, and 1 was deeply hidden in their assistant), and the debug strings in UPPER_SNAKE_CASE in the Google apps, which is unacceptable for a device that is sold to everyone.
My Pixel 5 is an amazing device, but it's slowly falling apart, software-wise. Bugs bugs and more bugs! It's also no longer getting software updates, and its successors have a laundry list of issues.
The alternative is Samsung, the company that doesn't understand privacy nor consent, or Apple, whose phones lack uBlock support.
Kagi’s Orion browser for iOS actually supports ublock and other browser extensions.
It’s a bit wonky and on iPhones there’s a lack of configurability, for example there’s no way that I know of to bring up a dialog to block elements in ublock, or adjust the settings in dark reader, but they do seem to work well enough in their default flavor.
The reading list functionality is less ergonomic, but tabs/pages are more ergonomic imo, and it seems to work better with webpages that safari spins it’s wheels on.
Unfortunately it doesn’t help the forced zoom that Apple forces on everything when a text box is loaded, that is then compounded when giving it focus with a cursor for writing (yes, I’ve already tried all system systems that could potentially disable that. Nothing works, Apple’s text input continues to be straight up burning garbage on multiple levels)
I’d say it’s worth trying, and sending feedback to.
If uBlock is the only thing holding you back from an iPhone, you can use the Orion browser, which can install many Chrome extensions (including uBlock Origin)
how do we know the orion browser isn't somehow spying on you? I want an opensource browser, that's where I do so much financial and other transactions (as well as like bank company apps).
That browser should be something like a fully opensource de-googled chrome browser, but it doesn't seem to exist on mobile.
1. It is a zero telemetry browser
2. It is a browser with a users paying for it business model
These mean that it is easy to verify any 'spying', and that there is no incentive to do that.
You're not going to see that on an iPhone. Apple doesn't really allow competing browsers. Even Chrome for iPhones is just reskinned Safari.
Hold strong! I replaced my 5's battery about a year ago after it started bloating. I usually draw the line though when security updates cease. Staying with the Pixel line is easier but I'm trying to divest from Google in general and moving to a different phone would be a big step.
FWIW, I use a Pixel 8 with an aramid fiber case (Thinborne), and it's pretty much a strict upgrade over the Pixel 5. Only real downside is that it's ~1.6mm thicker than a caseless Pixel 5, but on the other hand the added protection of a case comes in handy.
Does the case make the candybar-style camera feel less bulky? I'm in the market for a new phone, and the Pixel form factor is really nice, but the protruding camera makes me hesitate.
I personally don't mind the candybar-style camera and think it looks kind of cool. It's definitely not something I actively notice or think about while using the device, and I like that when I set the phone down the entire screen is tilted slightly upwards rather than just one corner.
Having said that, if the camera bar is an issue for you, the case wouldn't make a difference one way another. There are cases that are flush with the camera bar to mask the protrusion, but those obviously extend the total thickness to be at least as thick as the section of the device with the camera bar, whereas the aramid cases are more like a few sheets of standard office paper.
Good to know, and thanks for the info!
I had similar issues with my pixel 3a about three years ago, and I switched over to Pixel Experience. This got me up to Android 13, and everything just works great to this day. I'm pretty sure there won't be an Android 14+ Pixel Experience build for this device, though.
AdGuard has worked well enough on Safari on iOS for years now.
It does nothing for cookie banners
Nothing? AdGuard offers a “cookie notices” filter, which is presumably designed to remove cookie banners. I haven’t tried turning it on.
You can use "Content Blockers" on iOS, they add ad-blocking to Safari. I quite like the (paid) Wipr one.
Wait, you can install uBlock on chrome mobile?
You can install it on Firefox for Android. It's one of the main reasons I'm on Android.
You can install all kinds of extensions on Firefox on Android my friend. Firefox for Android is one of the killer apps now IMHO. Termux, Tasker, KDE Connect, and NetGuard are some others.
Another alternative is GNU/Linux phones.
Which Pixel was that? I'm really happy with mine (7a)
What is the problem with upper snake case? That seems like a bizarre complaint to me.
I think the point is that grandma shouldn't see "ERR_INVALID_USRN" instead of "Error: Invalid Username" when logging into an account.
I read "debug strings" as something more hidden than "user-facing error messages", but perhaps you're right. Of course, a snake case error code is more searchable, so objectively more useful in at least one sense.
Damn, I want this hardware.
No thanks to anything else coming from Google (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix ...). Have you noticed how they improved their Youtube recommendations in the last year? Creepy, how well it works. Unfortunately, all this tech paired with state of the art psychological research is not used to help people, but to make them media junkies. Everything AI follows the same pattern. The tech is amazing and can be indeed helpful used the right way, but at the end of the day it's used to gather data to make us using their services more and more and to than extract money from us (mostly still via ads). Decades ago, this industry was kind of innocent. Today, they all know exactly what they do and what damage they cause in esp. younger peoples brains. Healthy kids and young people need to be creative, explore the real world, be proactive. Not muted screen zombies. The extend of emotional and general mental illness in young people is heart breaking. We all see it. They don't care.
I hate you, Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, TicToc ... the world was a better place without you.
Is it possible to buy the phone without the Gemini/AI crapware for $239 less?
I have never been less excited for a phone.
Maybe it's the One Plus 12 I'm holding, but this is a hard pass by me.
All I want is a flagship chip, Esim support and a headphone jack. But since earbuds are almost all profit we won't see jacks coming back.
> and a headphone jack
Just use a USB-C adapter. No, it's not as good as if it was built in. Yes, it's good enough. Yes, they make charge+headphone adapters.
I dunno about your carry situation, but when I first lost access to the headphone jack on a Pixel I tried that USB-C stunt and the phone's edge came right to the top of my pocket causing the adapter to fulcrum back and forth, sometimes dislodging the plug and 100% worrying me that it's going to break my USB-C port
Hard. Pass.
Yeah I can definitely see that being a problem depending on your particular phone + headphones + pants situation. For me, I use the smallest phone I can buy (iPhone 13 Mini, currently) so it all tucks into my pocket, for the most part. The adapters still regularly break after ~6 months anyway.
Sucks they removed the port :(
Sony flagships fit these requirements (micro SD card slot, swim, flagship chip, esim, etc) but they unfortunately don't feel as polished in the software end. Not to mention Sony phones being very difficult to find.
One big concern I have is getting security updates quickly. If there’s a zero day issue, how would Sony act?
I don't think Sony is releasing new phones in the US anymore.
You can still order them online and they work fine.
They work fine depending on where you live, because they don't have the necessary band support for everywhere in the US.
I'm looking at either a 5a, or one of the Samsung budget phones since I don't care about the flagship chip. But I wouldn't be surprised if this is the last time getting a new phone where headphone jack is an option at all.
Take a look at the Nokia XR21. Headphone jack, esim, and incredibly rugged
Get Apple’s USB-C to 3.5mm adapter. It has a very good DAC for its price.
I personally found Best Buy's Insignia brand to be the most reliable one. I usually get 6-12 months of heavy use out of those, while Apple's usually broke after only a month or two.
The OnePlus 12 cost about the same as this phone when new, correct?
Correct.
I think the OnePlus 12 is the best Android phone for the money.
The Red Magic 9S is very close to perfect, but lacks Esim.
Still no dedicated fingerprint scanner, as it was in Pixel 4a :(
And it was awesome! Super-fast, tactile feeling, right under the finger, doesn't blind you at night. Cannot understand why they removed it, cost-cutting?
I also detest that screen based reader with all my heart, but as a point of observation if you have your phone in a car holder it masks access to the physical fingerprint reader, making a situation where your phone locks while on the road some nonsense to unlock it. I'm aware of the plethora of "keep phone unlocked" settings, but my life experience has been that Google's gonna Google about when it wants "extra sekurity!1" even with all the "smart unlock" toggles on
I'm not saying that's a good reason to make the other 99.9% of my life terrible pushing on the glass like I'm trying to suffocate it, but I did notice the one tiny UX improvement with the front reader
We can have both at the same time. Turn them on/off in settings. I'd pay for that at least +$100.
This is really cool.
Now that Google is offering 5-6 years of updates, you can get a 7 or 8 loaded with Graphene OS and be good for the long haul at about half the price as when they came out.
7 years.
Looks great. Really nicely designed except that camera bump is intense. I like having nice cameras on my phone, but I wish we could go back to the flush camera design. I guess they know you will put a case on it anyway.
Do these phones have an upgrade to the "phone" part? My Pixel 8 Pro keeps dropping networks every few days and takes minutes to reconnect.
They are using a new modem this year but it is still Samsung rather than Qualcomm.
Pixel 7 and 8 used the Samsung 5300 which wasnt very good so the new 5400 might be better but we will have to wait for reviews and what not.
Google is switching from Samsung to TSMC for chip fab next gen, so the Pixel 10 might end up with a significantly better modem.
Tsmc is manufacturer, but whose design will they be using?
Leaks say that tensor G5 is designed in-house based on ARM softcores [0].
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Google-Pixel-9-successor-First...
What about modem tho?
One day, the pixel and the stock android will have the ability to hide the navigation pill/ gesture bar[0]. On that day, the screenshots of these products pages will be of the complete screen instead of the top half.
[0] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/288400051
I didn't realize that wasn't available in stock Android until your comment! I'm guessing you know, but for everyone else, it's been available in Lineage OS... Maybe since the switchover to the "thin pill" format?
Genuinely, you gotta love those altOS nerds. 'Giving you stuff you didn't even know you needed.
Don't get me wrong, I've been using custom ROMs for years, and even I didn't know about this issue until I switched to GraphineOS where the pill cannot be hidden.
That's whack, I have this on my Motorola and I thought they were basically stock.
The gestures are so frustrating to use I can't believe they were devised by a human being, but at least I don't have to look at a nav bar all day
I went through many moto/samsung/google phones. Every single one sucked ass after about a year or two. Wasn't a big deal when the phones came with contract renewals. Became a major deciding factor to abandon them when I had to hand over my own cash.
If I'm paying 500+ for a device it needs to you know... last more than a few years.
I paid $1000 cash for my Samsung Galaxy S10+ and the 5½+ years with it have been flawless.
I was very hesitant to spend $1000 on my first smartphone but if it can easily last 5 years, I'm impressed.
Even now, I can't think of a reason to upgrade aside from wanting a new, shiny gadget.
This hasn't been a problem on Android in 7-8 years. I bought my S10+ brand new in 2019, and it still works flawlessly till today (well, except the battery).
The S7 Edge was the last time I experienced slowdowns after 1-2 years.
Im still on a pixel 5 pro and it works great. Thats a 4 year old device. Im actually surprised how well it still holds up today
Can someone explain why we get 12GB and 16GB RAM in these phones, but Apple sells its MacBook Air M3 with 8GB as the starting configuration.
Shouldn't mobile phones require much less RAM?
It’s to run on-device LLM models. They require a lot of RAM. That is one of the reasons why only iPhone 15 Pro (only model with 8GB) is getting any Apple Intelligence features.
Because if Apple sold MacBook Air with more RAM, many people would prefer it instead of MacBook Pro.
128GB of storage in 2024 is the real shocker here.
This is what happens when your phone and all it's apps are written in a garbage collected language.
That’s a gross misrepresentation, and far from the whole truth. (Besides, ref counting is also a garbage collection algorithm)
A huge chunk of the OS runs native stuff. Add to it that android is less strict at putting apps/processes to sleep, it’s become a much less black and white question.
You are missing the point here – garbage collected languages (the "allocate it and forget about it" style, not refcounting like Objective-C) require much more memory to perform at the same level as a language where memory is explicitly allocated and deallocated.
Yes, I’m fairly familiar with garbage collectors and these are called tracing GCs. My point is that a big chunk of the system doesn’t use these, so you can’t just put the blame on one thing.
Would one percent be responsible for a system’s bad performance if that is “slow”?
Yep. I still use the iphone 7+ as a backup phone, it still gets security updates and runs modern apps fine with 3GB! Slow compared to modern phones, but that's not down to the RAM, the memory management is amazing, never had an issue.
So, if I understand correctly this “built-in” Gemini is 100% just calling to the Gemini cloud backend?
Honestly, Apple Intelligence is looking much better than this. But I suppose it’s no wonder, I don’t think Pixels are a large market for Google, while iPhones kind of are for Apple.
There's Gemini Nano which runs on-device
No, it's not all just calling to a cloud backend. The newer Pixels have hardware to do some stuff on-board, including non-trivial stuff like realtime audio cleanup (that works amazingly btw). STT and TTS are done mostly locally as well (with some cloud processing used when network connection is available), but can work all offline. The Gemini Advanced stuff is going to the cloud though.
Yeah I was primarily speaking about the LLM part, as apple is doing that (smaller LLM models will handle simpler tasks on device and hand over to cloud when necessary + apps will be able to efficiently deliver fine-tuned LORAs for the already-available local models).
I do remember a lot of other typical "AI" stuff being done locally and well when I had a pixel a couple years ago.
I fail to see what is much better about a system where you don't know when it sends your data to the cloud or not (and is likely to do it 90% of the time).
> Video formats: HEVC (H.265), AVC (H.264)
So much for supporting Open Source AV1...
I think the word you want to use is royalty free. Because there are open source implementation of HEVC and AVC.
I just hate modern phones, all of them. I want an adequate one-hand screen size (~6"), a headphone jack, and an even camera bump (just so it lies flat on the table).
I love the pixel 8a, the size, curvature and camera bump seems ideal. Ofc they removed a freaking 3.5mm jack, but I can make a compromise here and buy 100 type-c to 3.5mm adapters, but I'm super disappointed with the new 9x series, they are now even more blocky and square-ish which i really don't like, plus no "a" model which is usually looking much better for me than the main one.
Does anyone know the phone which is small, has a headphone jack, even camera bump and is still buyable to this day?
Historically, the a-versions came a year after initial release.
Is there a technical reason for the ai feature to be on this phone and not just like an app, or is it just limited on purpose to this phone?
Often features that are touted as being only for the newest Pixel phones, come to all Pixel phones (or all Android phones) in a few months.
I'm still salty about my Pixel 8 dying out because of the "green screen" bug (basically, screen just progressively turns greener until it stops working). Very common according to reddit, and the ubreakitifixit guy acknowledged it's a common problem as well.
My Pixel 5a also had some shenanigans and my dad's pixel 6 as well
No idea why they don't do proper Q&A. Looks like a good phone but yet fails in ways my work iphone never has.
It's still a running theme that their in-display fingerprint readers are uniquely terrible for many people, even 3 (now 4) generations after they started using them instead of rear-mounted capacitive sensors. I don't know why they struggle so much with that compared to every other manufacturer using exactly the same sensors from the same handful of suppliers.
I held on to my Pixel 5a for as long as I could, primarily for that rear-mounted fingerprint reader. Such a wonderful implementation. Fast, accurate, and fingers just fell naturally into place when picking it up. I'm still dreaming that someday they'll return to that.
I had some issues with this very early when I got mine, but I think this went away completely. I feel like this was a software issue, and is now fixed (well, at least part of it).
I don't think these anecdotes (yours or the guy above with the green screen issue) are useful.
Fwiw, I haven't had either issue with my P8 Pro and it's definitely the best phone I've ever used, both on Android 14 and running the Android 15 betas.
These anecdotes are useful to highlight the low quality of Google devices. Certainly case reports cannot replace defect rates and other meaningful statistics, but if manufacturers are deaf about the issues then it doesn't bode well for instance for security related issues.
I had similar bad issues with the fingerprint tech and would assume that the issue has at least 20% prevalence among the affected Pixel models.
I noticed this morning my 7a back adhesive has weakened already. Guess it ain't water resistant anymore and it's barely over a year old.
I had this exact issue on my Pixel 6 Pro! I thought it was done for but it seems to have recovered over the last few months and I don't see it anymore.
Where did the “{our, the} most {adj} yet” marketing thing come from? I remember apple using it for a long time. Did everyone just decide to copy it? It sounds so lame to see it during every tech product announcement.
Our most derivative advertisement yet.
Serious case of sticker shock here.
My current Android phone was free from the provider in exchange for buying around 3 months of service in advance. It is no speed demon but certainly does all of your average phone stuff just fine.
I have only two reasons to buy a high end phone (which I buy used, of course):
1. Taking good photos. I like my DSLR, but for memories a phone is handier. And cheap phones take crappy photos in low light (i.e. indoor) conditions. I don't want to look at family photos 20 years from now and say "Boy, I wish I paid $200 extra".
2. Lasting longer. My current phone was launched in 2017 (bought in 2019). It had a powerful CPU and a lot of RAM. It's still running fine.
I absolutely refuse to pay for a phone; call me old-school, but I am still stuck in the memory of the days when they came 'free' with service contracts.
Me? I will happily take a slightly outdated phone with a new provider/contract where I don't pay anything on top of the expected monthly fee. I have 8 months left on my iPhone13 mini (128GB) w/VZW and will happily change to one of the other Big Threes to make it happen again.
A regular Verizon plan with tethering that supports the "free" phones costs the same in three months for what I pay for a year of service on Mint.
But sure, the phone was "free".
$2,880 for a Verizon plan with a "free" phone (3 year commitment after all), $720 for three years of my current Mint plan. I could spend $2k on a phone over those three years and I'd still have spent less money.
I pay $20/mo for Visible, and it works great. The average phone plan with a "free" iPhone from a major carrier is $100-120/mo with a minimum 3 year contract. So yeah, paying for your phone yourself is always significantly cheaper. You can even get a device payment plan if you want, and the payment plan + phone bill will still be cheaper than the bundle AT&T or Verizon offers you.
Historically I have never used carrier commitments and paid for phones outright but did it for the first time earlier this year with a targeted offer to get a iPhone 15 Pro from Verizon for basically a couple hundred bucks in taxes. Mostly because it felt like I was getting worst of both worlds paying for a single line Verizon post paid plan without taking advantage of any upgrade offers after my BYOD deal expired.
But I'm now regretting it especially because I'm getting tired of constantly missing notifications on my iPhone being so used to persistent notification indicators on Android. Planning to use T-Mobile to buy me out of my device payment plan once I get around to 800 dollars owned on my 15 Pro because being I hate how I'm locked in to a premium plan I don't come close to making full use of. I still have an unlocked S23 Ultra I can switch back to as my main phone if I decide to.
Based on the Mint website, it appears to be $360 up-front + $360 or $720 for their 'unlimited' annual which I don't know if it includes tethering. I pay ~$684 for VZW for the year, for unlimited w/tethering and HBO Max + Netflix.
Max and Netflix with Ads
That is an important distinction. Those plans together only represent a $17/month value.
And that value is assuming you actually watch both of them regularly.
You would almost certainly save money using an MVNO and a not-brand-new-super-pro phone.
And I already get Max through my home ISP anyways, so really only $8/mo extra value. But I wouldn't watch Netflix With Ads anyways, so really $0 for me.
But that $80/mo plan I quoted doesn't even include the streaming services. That's just the regular data plan rate for a single line. Adding Max + Netflix (With Ads) is another $10/mo, so $90/mo compared to the $20/mo I'm paying now.
Note, when looking at Verizon's website, the big advertized rate numbers show the per-line rate with four lines.
Mint's unlimited is $30/mo when purchasing a year up front. The only "plus" is taxes and fees. It includes tethering. So even with whatever deal you've got going on its still $324/yr cheaper, $972 cheaper after a three-year commitment (if applicable in your case).
The "free" phone only applies to Unlimited Plus and Unlimited Ultimate. At a single line for Plus that's $80/mo. $960/yr. $2,880 over that three-year commitment.
But either way, I don't bother with the "unlimited" plans. You're going to get de-rated after 30-40gigs anyways on Verizon.
> Unlimited data is restricted to on-device smartphone usage. After exceeding 30 GB/mo of 5G Ultra Wideband, 5G, or 4G LTE mobile hotspot data, mobile hotspot data reduced to speeds up to 3 Mbps when on 5G Ultra Wideband and 600 Kbps when on 5G / 4G LTE for the rest of your monthly billing cycle.
https://www.verizon.com/support/important-plan-information/
"Unlimited" plan you're paying $80/mo for that you're going to get 600Kbps if you really treat it as "unlimited".
I personally don't even use all of my 15GB a month. I get lots of people live different lifestyles, but a lot of people don't need "unlimited". So really, I'm not even spending $360/yr, I'm spending $240/yr. $444/yr cheaper than your plan. $1,332 cheaper after three years.
I think you misread, that throttle is for the hotspot data.
And honestly that's a lot better than most throttles. Though it seems silly they even bother to throttle 5G Ultra Wideband. Are those antennas ever going to be heavily loaded with how short their range is?
I pay $120 AUD a year at the supermarket for a prepaid sim.
It's the other way around for me. I refuse to get a phone from my carrier.
Phones "free" with a contract are just disguised loans. The loan is hidden in your monthly sub, which is why you have to be locked from anywhere from 1 to 2 years.
Also I don't want to have carrier bloatware on my phones, and I don't want my phones to be locked to a carrier.
I pay my carrier only for the network. I pay for my phones.
This is literally still how it works. Instead of a contract you have a device payment plan where you're defacto locked into the carrier because if you leave you owe the balance on your smartphone.
The trade-in and switching deals are all done as bill credits so that you are locked in for 2 or 3 years.
If you are using a big three cell carriers with the unlimited postpaid plans and aren't getting a brand new latest model Pro phone for free you are throwing your money out the window, because you're still paying for the phone in your higher plan price.
You will almost certainly save money if you buy the device yourself and use an MVNO instead of the big three postpaid plans. Especially if you buy the device used after it depreciates for a year or two.
Conversely, maybe it's a European thing, but I couldn't imagine having my phone in thrall to one provider. So I buy a phone and then pick whichever monthly-contract provider is offering the best package at that moment.
> I will happily take a slightly outdated phone with a new provider/contract where I don't pay anything on top of the expected monthly fee.
At least for Android, the main issue you'll face is the lack of Android updates. Which eventually leads to apps no longer working because they don't support your Android version.
My phone (2017) still runs everything fast, but I can't install several apps merely because they don't claim to support my old Android version. I have to go online and find apks of the app's version that last supported my Android version.
How is a phone different to a TV or other electronic device? Also, providers are giant assholes, one of the only good things about apple and google becoming a duopoly and their gripes getting tighter is that they can say f** you to providers that just install bloatware on our devices with no concern for privacy, or even basic functionality.
That seems crazy to me. You're paying significantly more for a product that you don't completely own and have less control over.
Yeah, iPhone/Galaxy Sxx price without the same reliability.
You're crazy if you spend $1k for Pixel's build quality.
I find it super annoying that the base model's camera doesn't offer RAW photo support. Surely this is just a software limitation since the Pro version shares two of the same cameras.
I'd buy this if it had USB4 that - when plugged into a dock with a monitor, keyboard and mouse - put up a complete desktop OS (preferably full fat Linux).
I could then use my phone as a thin-client for work or gaming, perhaps even experimenting with proton locally.
Apple already demonstrated that mobile hardware is capable of workstation workloads so I'd see this as a natural step forward.
Beyond that, there isn't any compelling reason to upgrade my Pixel 6a.
If I broke my 6a, I'd probably upgrade to the 7a for the better screen.
I thought the older Pixel 8 Pro already had a "desktop mode" feature for that.
I'm pretty sure it's half baked and useless
This.
It would be perfect if I could run a Linux DE with full hardware acceleration (within a container or VM?) that replaces the Android desktop mode
Samsung DEX still works great with my 4 year old S10e
One of the big problems with Pixel phones is their lack of thorough testing. You upgrade and suddenly you encounter strange Bluetooth issues, call problems, or other features that were working fine before but suddenly stop functioning. Tons of people will be complaining about this in forums, and you won't receive any updates to fix them for months. IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers. Adding more AI features won't help unless they start taking their customer service seriously!
>IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers.
I've had Pixel 3XL, Pixel 5, Pixel 8, and Pixel Tablet all without issue. I realize that can't be everyone's experience, but the idea that you can't "seriously use" these devices is untrue.
I upgraded from a Pixel 3XL to a Pixel 7 Pro XL. I've been generally happy. But...
Back in September 2019, my Pixel 3XL had a problem doing an OTA update. I spent hours with Google support (both live and over email). Their only suggestion was to reset the phone and restore from backup.
The problem is... I had had the 'backup' option in settings enabled, the whole time I had the phone. I thought it was being backed up regularly. But I could not create a backup from my phone. I tried rebooting the phone, but the 'Backup Now' button was still greyed out. Based on some information from the web, I disabled my PIN. That caused my Google accounts to be logged out, but DID enable the 'Backup Now' button. However, the backup failed. I tried doing a backup via adb, which also failed.
IIRC this was before Google Authenticator had the ability to transfer 2FA codes from one device to another. So, without the ability to restore from backup, a reset would mean I needed to recreate 2FA codes for tens of services, which is pretty time-consuming.
I wasn't the only person with this problem: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/13519859?hl=en
I really like Pixel phones, and just ordered a Pixel 9. But for the foreseeable future my parents will continue getting iPhones.
As shocking as that sounds, I had a Pixel 7 and after sometime calls stopped coming through making me miss some emergency calls.
I have never ever had a phone do that and I have used some really cheap phones.
So I don't think what OP is saying is far from the truth. I am resolved to never buying a Pixel again.
The last I read there were still ongoing issues with 911 calls with Pixels, it didn't seem limited to any particular phone model or OS version.
Really? The Pixel 8, my first Pixel, shipped without working USB webcam support, which was one of the advertised launch features. To actually get that feature you had to switch to the beta release track, which of course broke lots of the other things on the phone. Notable things that have been broken for a month or more on the beta track since I owned a Pixel 8 include tap to pay and the unlock screen.
We could do anecdotes all day. Unless there is hard data on how brittle or robust these devices are it all seems a bit pointless.
No, anecdotes are data. You can't just ignore customers and claim their experience isn't hard data.
One of my pet peeves is engineers making excuses for incompetence.
>No, anecdotes are data
They're not good data, they're some of the worst. Your idiosyncratic one-off experience should be addressed, but not necessarily generalized from. I feel like this is an important, perhaps even the most fundamental prerequisite for information literacy.
Ok, so my Pixel 1, 3, 5, and 7 have had no problems.
Data shows 100% reliability then?
I agree they are 100% data that's why we can say with absolute confidence there are no issues. (source my anecdotes)
tbf this is abusing the word anecdote a bit. Anecdotes are unreliable narratives and hearsay, not facts or data.
An anecdote is "I forgot to pray before bed last night and now I have a headache. See God is punishing me." and other people agreeing with this happening to them.
Saying, "here is a documented pixel bug that was released on day x but wasn't fixed until day y" is evidence and data.
Once its documented as a real bug then its no longer in the land of weird anecdotes.
How you categorize that is up to you. You can be dismissive of what that bug broke as an "unimportant feature" but its no longer an anecdote.
Good luck with that. Sure it's data, it's the worst possible data you could choose to make an informed decision. If you want to gain insight by selectively reported, highly biased reports of a tiny sample size, go for it.
So the fact that my iPhones wifi failed means that they're all terrible products and we shouldn't look at engineering practices like failure rate statistics?
Or do we just do that for brands we're not fanboys of like __true__ engineers?
anecdotal evidence is what I usually base my purchases on, which is why I've never bought a Google device after being burned (literally) by the Nexus 6P battery issues.
you can pretend it doesn't matter, but bad word of mouth is all it takes for me.
> but bad word of mouth is all it takes for me.
That's fine, but it's also entirely different from saying that the phones are objectively unstable and bad for everyday use.
I have been burned twice by iPhone battery issues (specifically my iPhone X).
Battery started discharging rapidly, I got it replaced, barely a year later it’s dying again.
This is me + wife with Pixel 3 despite "Battery Saving" mode and killall apps.
The screen is eating up the battery like me drinking water on a hot California weather.
A quick search turns up problems, enough so that, as a consumer, I'd be concerned. Is that hard enough data to reach a conclusion in a major scientific journal? No.
Is it enough data so that, as a consumer looking to purchase one, I would be concerned? Probably.
Is it enough data that I'd expect some engineer at Google (or wherever) to pay attention and address? Certainly, I would expect some engineering team to pay attention to public forums and address issues as they arise. It doesn't seem to be happening. If these phones are supposed to be a flagship items, and I think it's reasonable to claim that they are, it's also reasonable to expect flagship support.
But who is going to have the data that we need to assess this?
The firm that has an interest in everyone thinking there's no data, and that we should withhold judgement.
There's not a lot of good choices here, either you assume that because there's no info, everything is fine, or you assume that the one guy complaining is one of many.
I'm sure we could also find anecdotes of some iPhone users having features necessary for them blocked or non-functional. It does not mean that the vast majority of people cannot still use the device without incident as a "daily driver."
I used an iPhone from launch to the iPhone SE3 and I can't recall there ever being a feature printed on the box or hyped by Steve Jobs on stage that did not work out of the box, or that later stopped working.
Here's one about battery life:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255046014?sortBy=rank
You must have had that single magic version of Apple Maps no one else got for a long time on release.
They lost the batterygate lawsuits, right? Guess you missed that fiasco that resulted in Apple paying out over half a billion. In this case Apple deliberately degraded previous user experiences on older phones, which means previous behavior (in this case performance) stopped working, done deliberately by Apple.
yes, it didn't go to zero, but it didn't do what it once did as decided remotely by Apple).
Apple also promised user data security, sold user data, and got hauled before Congress in 2011 for that. But I guess your user data was safe in offshore data silos.
I could go on, but I think your recall on iPhone downsides stopped working.
The only thing they did on purpose was run too close to the limits of the battery.
The battery degraded because it was a battery, and the performance had to degrade along with it because of physics.
Apple didn't decide remotely to weaken performance. That performance was on borrowed time. What Apple did wrong was not making it clear upfront that the performance was on borrowed time and wasn't sustainable.
> The battery degraded because it was a battery, and the performance had to degrade along with it because of physics.
> Apple didn't decide remotely to weaken performance.
It's amazing when people just make crap up without even looking something as simple as this up. Apple lost the "batterygate" lawsuit because they specifically did slow down performance on old phone with an update.
A quote [1]: "Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a class action lawsuit that accused the tech giant of slowing down older iPhones to encourage people to buy the latest model. Apple faced a wave of criticism -- and lawsuits -- after acknowledging in 2017 that its iOS software slowed down the performance of some older iPhones."
All the court docs [2]. Knock yourself out.
If you're going to shill, at least take a moment to google a claim before making up nonsense.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-to-pay-up-to-500m-to-...
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6431809/in-re-apple-inc...
Okay there's an asterisk on the "had to", which is "unless you want an unstable phone". There's plenty of evidence for that.
Apple lost because they did a bad thing, but I disagree with your characterization of what the bad thing was. In particular I will note that your quote says that they settled and what they were accused of, which is very different from a verdict.
Simply read the court docs, which I linked. Or go read proper legal sites where the case is laid out with evidence. Stop making assumption you want to be true, which has been this entire thread.
They settled because discovery pulled out docs showing they knew full well what they did, on purpose, and they settled for a half billion dollars because they stood to lose far more in court if a jury saw that evidence. There is no "we were trying to be nice" defense that would counter their internal documents and discussions demonstrating otherwise.
Apply doesn't hand out half billion payouts for touchy feely reasons.
> knew full well what they did, on purpose
Of course they made the update on purpose and knowing what it would do, but that is not the bar for being malicious and causing truly unnecessary slowdowns.
(If it's unclear, when I wrote above "The only thing they did on purpose" I meant the only relevant problem they caused on purpose. Obviously they do a million things on purpose.)
I'm not going to read a thousand pages of documents to look for maliciousness, if you're not going to point to a specific one, and you're not linking to a news article that has any relevant quotes of those documents.
Reading all of that is not "simple".
Can't you show me the specific evidence that made you so sure? I'm not asking you to search through, just for the information you already had.
> Apply doesn't hand out half billion payouts for touchy feely reasons.
I keep saying they did a bad thing. That is not disputed.
> They lost the batterygate lawsuits, right? Guess you missed that fiasco that resulted in Apple paying out over half a billion. In this case Apple deliberately degraded previous user experiences on older phones, which means previous behavior (in this case performance) stopped working, done deliberately by Apple
Let’s not share this absolute misinterpretation of what happened.
Apple fcked up big time on communication, that’s for sure, but it was an absolutely well meaning feature for an old device, lengthening their lifespan. They saw a bunch of random poweroffs due to degrading batteries not being able to output enough power to the CPU, and pushed an update that decreased the CPU clock down a bit. This of course degraded performance, and not having informed the buyers, making it a choice, they lost a lawsuit. But if they would actually do the communication well, it could have been an excellent positive PR, them fixing a bug for a 4 or so years device!
> Let’s not share this absolute misinterpretation of what happened.
Let's not spin what happened, which has concrete and irrefutable evidence. Here's all the court docs [1]. Apple got caught, most definitely did degrade performance without warning and on purpose, and certainly people at Apple knew some of those device owners would upgrade. That they spun it as a feature once caught is classic spin. Apple is no idiot at marketing - if they thought people would see this as positive PR, they would have announced it and touted it. They did not. The 7 million+ pages of Apple discovery made all this clear. This is why Apple settled for a half billion - they were certainly going to get hammered in court.
Read the court docs, not Apple PR.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6431809/in-re-apple-inc...
So you think there should be more testing so the testing track is stable?
I worked on Pixel, left Google in October. I agree vehemently with what you're saying, its just, you're barking up the wrong tree on a couple different levels, the easy one above, and a more difficult one below.
Management did what you wanted a few years back, #1 and #2 and #3 priorities were "stability above all else" since Pixel 6.
This unfortunately didn't do anything in practice, other than enable newly minted middle managers to punch down, hoard work[1], and hide poor decision making and lying easily.[2] Net negative effect on product of course.
What managers wanted to legislate was "care about your features", but I observed over years that you simply can't enforce that. Ironically, given the above behavior from the new management layer, people got more detached. Unit test coverage went up, I'd bet, which is also a lesson in unit tests have significantly diminishing returns. E2E tests are hard and flaky, but they pay 100x dividends in these situations.
What you want to legislate is the truffle hunting that lowest level management does is bad. i.e. say we can definitely do whatever pet thing some guy 3 levels up says we need to copy from iOS this year. Then, hold it back because it's not done, but still announce it. Then, layer on a special process to get you on the betas to get the feature you thought you were buying. All of this keeps each individual happy and yet, remarkably, leads us directly back to the initial situation we were trying to fix.
From all this, you can also derive why things only launch, and never improve (tl;dr: management has 0 incentive to do anything other than latch onto the latest vague ask / iOS copying from above)
[1] Estimate everything takes 3-5x engineers it did 3 years ago. it's a huge win: I'm managing this team because I did it myself 3 years ago, so this makes clear what a talented engineer I was/am. When I solely listen to the vague asks from people 3 steps above, they'll want to give me the headcount I need to get their pet project done, so this gives me more reports. My compensation scales with report count. And if the estimate is questioned in any depth, well, we're making sure we have enough to deliver this Priority™ at high Quality™. Also, no one is going to question it anyway, my manager made me a manager because they trust me.
[2] it's very easy to work around blatant irresponsibility by flipping it into "the guy lower on the totem pole is insufficiently committed to quality and collaboration [taking forever to do anything]"
Yes, I think the dogfood stage before the beta release should be more thorough. For the record, I was also adamant about this while I still worked at Google. Google, especially Android, is way too eager to release to beta. You should not release to beta until you have stopped generating new defect reports in dogfood. If you do, you just annoy the beta testers and get a huge number of duplicate reports. That is exactly what happened this year with the lockscreen bug. If anyone in dogfood had even touched the phone once the problem and its severity would have been obvious. And breaking Wallet generated 13000 duplicate reports, breaking a core use case for beta users.
That's actually the policy as I understood it, though, it was being enforced starting in an OS cycle, and I was only there for a month of it. When I think of institutionalized maladaptive dysfunction, I think of the lock screen.
> IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers.
While there's a lot you said that I agree with, I find this statement quite an exaggeration. I've owned Pixel phones for the last 7 years, both with stock and custom ROMS, and as much as Pixel seems to always have weird quirks, it's been reliable enough for me that I don't see why it couldn't be a daily driver.
That said, I share your view on upgrading so far that I really hesitate to upgrade anything, whether it's my Pixel phone or something else. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been legit hacked, but I don't have enough fingers to count all the times that software bugs did things like get me stranded, cut me off from my finances, almost get me killed on the road, and so forth.
Although I've never been an iPhone user, Pixel is the best Android phone I've used. I'm a bit biased since it's developer-friendly I'm a software engineer, but I've had the least catastrophic issues (and less crapware) with them compared to other phones like Samsung's line. The strange thing about Pixel is that updates seem to always destabilize the UI, and I'll get weird things happening like the lockscreen coming up and remaining frozen for some time.
>I've been legit hacked, but I don't have enough fingers to count all the times ?>that software bugs did things like get me stranded, cut me off from my finances, >almost get me killed on the road, and so forth.
I hesitate to defend apple on Hackernews but I have never experienced anything like these issues with any iPhone. Major problem is battery life, other than that I can say the core features of every iPhone I've owned have 'just worked' pretty consistently.
Neither have I on all my android phones. Only device that failed me was an iPad 3 (yeah 12 years ago) that I got replaced in the store due to it crashing right in their hands. But hey, anecdotes.
I've had a Pixel 8 Pro since launch day and have had zero issues with it. Really great phone.
Not doubting your experience, but you've had the phone for less than a year and haven't had a major Android version update.
You are 1/7th of the way of your total support period. If you can say you have no problems in 2030, that would be much stronger evidence.
Sure, though in the past when I've had problems with phones they've either manifested within the first few months, or it's been 4-5 years down the line when I'm fine with replacing it. I'm not being complacent: it's true I've not had a major OS upgrade yet, and this is of course anecdotal. My main point is that I'm really happy with my first 10 months with the phone, and would recommend it so far.
Wow, talk about an unrealistic expectation. 2030? lol
> That means your Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro will be supported all the way into 2030
https://store.google.com/intl/en_uk/ideas/articles/newest-pi...
Some stats from another site
- As of 2023, the global average replacement cycle length for a smartphone is 3.6 years.
- 40.4% of people upgrade their smartphone every two to three years.
- The majority of people (75.0%) upgrade their handset due to issues with their battery life shortening over time.
For the majority of Android phones, two to three years was also the length of time you got software updates of you bought the phone right when it was released, if you were lucky. I would have loved to pay somebody 80 EUR to replace the battery in my Samsung S10, but that wasn't an option since it was EOL.
Upgrading a phone also doesn't mean that the old phone goes to the bin or the new phone wasn't used before. Lots of people upgrade from one hand-me-down phone to another, others buy on the secondary market. Longer software support also extends the lifetime and viability of that market.
Sure, eventually the battery dies and the screen breaks. For many devices it's cost-effective to have somebody repair it. Having user serviceable batteries would make it much easier still.
That is Google‘s stated goal of long term support.
People trade in cars every 3 years. I imagine it's similar to phones. Plus phone battery life does degrade pretty heavily over time and heavy use.
I trade them when the old one breaks.
Phones stopped having any meaningful reason to update since a decade.
My 2019 Xiaomi Note 8 Pro is still perfect and capable of answering posts on HN like this, going on YouTube or answering WhatsApp. Pics are also great and battery life is too.
Yes, your personal experience is not the same for the average consumer class. Which is the majority of phones & cars are designed for and sold to.
It's actually the same of the average consumer class, people are updating phones less and less, as there's really little reasons to do so. New phones are marginally better, at best, but not in any meaningful way.
Another user posted in above
"As of 2023, the global average replacement cycle length for a smartphone is 3.6 years."
I'm not disagreing on a technical level. I agree. I use a pretty cheap ass phone myself that I bought off the rack.
I think it's clear though that phone makers and telecom companies are more than happy to sell people a new one every few years and intend to continue doing that.
A subculture trades in cars every 3 years, as in they are resold on the used market for another 13 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity
Is that really a large subculture, or is that mostly car rental places cycling vehicles through their fleet?
The rental companies typically buy vehicles from the manufacturer at such a volume discount, that they're able to flip them onto the used market a few years later and come out even with taxes benefits factored in.
There are also private and corporate leases. In the UK at least 20-30% of new car sales are leases (it's a tax efficient way to get a new car, particularly EVs), and these usually run for about 3 years, after which they're sold off at trade auction.
Do those same cars have 0 problems with them and not require any scheduled maintenance in those 13 years?
You are talking about the auto market like Japan didn't come in and devastate Detroit. No problems means things about TCO to 16 years and how that plays out.
Mid tier Android makers that couldn't secure chipset support beyond 3 years began to realize they have to exit the market a couple years ago, a guaranteed outcome of Apple fixing their story long enough for resale values to impact purchase decisions.
>People trade in cars every 3 years.
Looks at their 2010 Honda Fit in the parking lot
Umm, yeah, some people do.
Yes, but the automakers and car salesman aren't selling to you.
>Yes, but the automakers and car salesman aren't selling to you.
Guess where the trade-in value ultimately comes from.
Something tells me it's a factor in how many people are able to trade their car in every three years or so.
I don't think it's an unrealistic expectation for a hunk of bleeding-edge electronics that costs ~$1k and you interact with for a couple hours each day at minimum.
I've had an iPhone XS since 2018/09 (equidistant to 2030 from today), and have had no significant issues – my upgrade cycle is ~6 years, there is at least one of us!
I had a Pixel 4XL that could not do basic phon calls. 7/10 tries I would get no audio but the other person could always hear me. I wiped the phone and it magically started working, then about a week after that it was back to not working again. Also the back cover started peeling off the phone since all they did was use a tiny bit of glue to keep it on.
Wait until they update the OS
I'm in Android 15 beta with my P8P. Zero issues. So where are the problems I'm supposed to have?
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> IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices
These were the Nexus. Pixel phones are definitely consumer devices. Nexus phones were designed to be rather generic, meant to be used as a model for other manufacturers and as a test platform for developers. It was when Android really was open (or at least more than it is today). They were usable phones, even good ones, but without any "personality".
Pixel phones on the other hand advertises exclusive features, and is mostly picture-focused, hence the name, and also AI, but who isn't nowadays. Nexus advertisement was little more than its spec sheet.
This describes the average Android phone for sure, but the Pixel line has been pretty solid in my experience.
The fact that more than once, you could not call 911 due to a bug, should be enough to convince people that Google doesn't test their products or have any quality control.
I would seriously hope that 2 instances of a certain bug, no matter how critical, would not convince anyone that the manufacturer "doesn't test their products or have any quality control".
Any other service wouldn't have bothered me. This was a reoccurring issue across different releases of the Pixel line... If there is a single thing you should be able to do with a cellular device, it's call 911... Not acceptable.
This alone is why I will never buy another android phone.
It is inconceivable to me how a phone dialer bug can happen more than once, especially when it involves a life and death situation.
I switched from pixel to iPhone because I was fed up with bugs. I’m going to switch back to pixel for my next phone because I’m fed up with bugs on iOS. It’s really not better, just a different set of bugs.
I've had a dozens od Bluetooth devices (of both computers and headsets), and have never not had Bluetooth issues. I would not isolate "Bluetooth issues" to Android.
Bluetooth on android is quite terrible.
Especially BLE, a startup I worked at had a device that broadcast every 500ms for 375ms. We tested over 100 android devices and the best phone had a 40% chance of detecting the device within 5 seconds…
Any interesting observations with respect to different brands? What does the overall distribution look like and how does it compare against other devices you tested, e.g. iPhones, laptops?
Our app was specifically only for androids.
We didn’t test anything other than androids, my work laptop, and software defined radios.
Different brands, I recall Samsung devices being the worst on average. I believe the better Bluetooth devices were actually nexus/pixel phones… I think the top, by far, was the nexus 9, but it’s been a while.
The product was pretty cool that we built. It was essentially tile or Apple AirTags before both of those were around and ruggedized for usage in commercial usage to keep track of items (dumpsters, underwater diving equipment, mining equipment, portapotties, etc). You’d be surprised how easy it is for some of these companies to lose a dumpster or something else of considerable size and mass.
Building the mesh network and algorithms to determine if someone passed by, moved, etc the item the beacon was attached to was pretty cool stuff.
We also didn’t want to use data as much as possible, but the final determination of “what happened” to the item needed to be server side to ensure we took into account scenarios like 2 unrelated items traveled together for 2 miles, then went their separate ways. So we had to optimize for data, geo, temporal, spatial data, etc.
Given the speed a vehicle might travel and Bluetooth range, you could have 1-5 bbroadcasts to detect a beacons presence and update its location so missed detections were critical.
Well, on the contrary, we’ve worked extensively with Bluetooth since we're in the business of creating wearables. Unfortunately, we've had to compile a list of unsupported Android phones that exhibited unusual behaviors, such as sudden disconnections.
I must say that both Samsungs and iPhones have always been rock solid in terms of stability.
> One of the big problems with Pixel phones is their lack of thorough testing. You upgrade and suddenly you encounter strange Bluetooth issues, call problems, or other features that were working fine before but suddenly stop functioning. Tons of people will be complaining about this in forums, and you won't receive any updates to fix them for months. IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers. Adding more AI features won't help unless they start taking their customer service seriously!
I've been using the Pixel/Nexus phones for over a decade, and I find this complaint bizarre. I've had issues with the phones (just like I have with my Apple hardware) at times, but nothing like what you're describing.
The real issue with Pixel phones is not that their software or hardware support is worse (it isn't) but the customer support. If my iPhone breaks under warranty, I can walk into an Apple store and get it fixed or replaced immediately. When my Pixel device breaks, even though I live near the flagship Google store, the best Google will do is send me a replacement phone "within 5-10 business days".
The customer support experience is a huge issue, and I wish Google would do something about it. But the other points don't resonate at all.
More than once, pixel devices were left unable to call emergency services - 911.
Just imagine, you are in a life or death scenario and your literal phone has a bug preventing you from calling help.
All other issues are minor. I cannot forgive a bug of this nature.
> Just imagine, you are in a life or death scenario and your literal phone has a bug preventing you from calling help.
> All other issues are minor. I cannot forgive a bug of this nature.
Does that mean you will never use Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, all of which have had carrier-wide 911 outages? Will you never visit the state of Massachusetts, which had a state-wide 911 outage, affecting all carriers, just six weeks ago?
This type of failure is bad, but it's unfortunately a lot more common than you think.
this is a bad faith response and you know it.
It looks like a valid question to me. Obviously it's rhetorical, but it makes a reasonable point that the hard-line stance of "cannot forgive a bug of this nature" is probably not viable. These are not strawman examples, these are similarly horrible failures.
I don't think you can really tie that to the brand. Because it's wrapped on different OEMs, I find it varies from OEM to OEM.
First adopters are now the beta, or even in some cases alpha, testers and will continue to be for as long as there are enough people willing to sacrifice stability for having the newest tech.
I have a Pixel 7 Pro, and my Bluetooth has been fine. No issues there, ever, but I do have complaints about features suddenly not working and it mostly revolves around Google Assistant. It is utterly inconsistent with what it does, and it is maddening.
It randomly wants me to unlock the device to play music, but I'm using voice controls because I'm driving. It has my car's bluetooth device set as "trusted" so it shouldn't even require it to unlock to continue, and it's not like asking it to play something on Spotify would reveal any information about myself. Additionally, sometimes it just leaves the screen on in the off chance that it _does_ start to play music, and I feel my pocket getting warm but there's nothing that I can do because I'm driving and I don't want to mess with my phone.
If I knew that it was going to leave the screen on I would just queue up music before I leave, but it doesn't always do it and it drives me nuts. I don't think that my next phone will be a Pixel.
Nice to see they haven't changed anything from the Nexus 5 days. I purposely stayed on the official firmware in the hopes that I would have a seamless experience. The day before an epic trip around Europe, I upgraded to the latest version. It broke video recording so that all videos had garbled audio. Ruined priceless memories. Meanwhile my friend's iPhone 5 was operating perfectly fine and wasn't always running out of battery like the Nexus was. After the trip, I had enough and bought a used iPhone. That was the last time I ever considered Android. This also turned me into a die hard Mac user. Can't believe I wasted years of my life trying to make Linux and Windows work when I could have just used a Mac.
The win-win solution is to only buy Pixel phones that are several generations old. The kinks are ironed out, they're less than half the price, and for 95%+ of users, they're just as capable as the latest-and-greatest.
They don't get security patches though
Which ones?
According to https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en pixel 5a is getting eol this month, with the next security update dropping for pixel 6 starting in October 2026
"Last gen" pixel 8 is going to get android and security updates through October 2030
Phones are really rather secure. Even a 2 year past security patches android rarely has any of the most severe vulnerability (remote code execution with no action from the user).
The common security issues (app can get permissions it shouldn't have) are nowhere near as important if you don't download random APK's from dodgy sites.
Overall, my fully patched linux laptop has far bigger security holes than a 2-years-unpatched android.
Thirdparty roms are very good about backporting patches after Google drops support.
My bank apps don't run on rooted phones.
You could use only the banking websites or switch banks. That's what I did personally since I want completely control over any device I use, and more importantly over my data.
I didn't mention rooted phones, I mentioned custom roms.
Most of the important parts will continue to get security updates: https://www.androidpolice.com/project-mainline-android-14/
I've used Pixel 6 for the last few years and Pixel 3a before that. "As daily drivers" whatever that actually means, as I for sure don't have any other phone laying around.
I've had several Pixel phones and using the 6a currently. Never ever had any issues. My strategy is to delay updates for a few days to be not the first one bricking my phone. :)
Yep. I think I'm in the "fool me twice" category on Pixels now. This is the third one in a row with a bad USB socket.
So who does make good phones?
Pixel phones are among the best, and getting better as Google gets more experience shipping hardware. I've had a ton of Pixel phones and there are definitely paper cuts here and there, but:
> IMHO all Pixel phones are just developer devices and you can't seriously use them as daily drivers.
Is ridiculously hyperbolic.
OnePlus phones are also really good when new, although updates often introduce new bugs. When OnePlus was more affordable it was less of an issue, but with current prices I expect several years out of a device that expensive.
Just get a Pixel.
Nobody, you just have to chose which kind of bad you can tolerate.
Personally, I navigate the Android fragmentation mess to avoid Apple's control-freak tendencies. One is annoying, the other is offensive. But I totally see why you might prefer the opposite.
I've been quite happy with the Galaxy phones since the S21 Ultra.
It's crazy that I'm the first person in this sub-thread to mention Samsung, when they are by far the market leader in Android phones. They have decent options at pretty much every price point.
For some reason, HN and Reddit just hates this company, and I don't understand why. People talk about "bloat", because Samsung ships with their own apps for things like phone, clock, calculator, etc. But it's trivial to uninstall those, and/or set the Google stock Android counterparts as your system defaults.
People get all weird about One UI, but my son has a Pixel and I have a Galaxy and I honestly don't see much meaningful difference between the two (other than his phone getting hot as hell because Google's own Tensor silicon sucks). I just recently switched back to Android from Apple, perhaps these UI skins were further apart in the past?
I think a lot of contrarians just hate Samsung because it's the market leader, simple as that.
They switched the home and back buttons... why? I can only assume it was to make competing android phones feel awkward such that those who step foot outside of Samsung quickly run back to "safety".
This?
https://i.imgur.com/9uUJLaz.jpeg
I've never seen any kind of UI where the "Home" button wouldn't be in the center. And you have the option of placing the "Back" button on the left and the "Open Apps" button on the right, or vice-versa.
Agreed, home is always in the center. My comment is regarding whether "back" is left or right of home. Samsung defaults it on the right side, everybody else puts it on the left: https://www.androidcentral.com/how-switch-position-navigatio...
Recent android versions have put more of this in the the hands of the app, for better or worse. So it's not especially material nowadays.
My point is just that it's an example of Samsung making design decisions which leverage the fragmentation to create confusion among the users.
I noticed it when my boss said that non-galaxy devices feel awkward. I ended up using his phone later and realized why: vendor lock in through muscle memory. It's the kind of monopolistic move that only the largest fragment can benefit from--anyone else puts themselves at a disadvantage by departing from Android defaults. But Samsung, since they control the majority, can bias the market in a way that makes the defaults feel weird. It's rather Apple-like if you ask me.
... which is why I use a Pixel. I hate Google, but they're what I'm stuck with, so I might as well not be messed with by anyone else.
I'm sorry, but this is absolutely nonsensical. I literally just posted a screenshot showing that this is configurable on a Samsung.
In fact, when I first setup this phone, I had to specifically choose to make the home bar visible at all. Because the current default setting on Samsungs is to use "gestures" only. The same as the default setting on a Pixel now. All Android manufacturers seem united in pushing this, to ape iOS.
There are plenty of reasons to choose a Google Pixel. And I wouldn't quibble with any of them. But it's absolutely bizarre to point to a default setting as a reason, when they are configurable and when both brands use the same default setting anyway.
So many of these discussion threads are like this. It's perfectly fine to prefer a Pixel over a Galaxy. But people so often seem to take umbrage against Samsung for some reason, and when you poke at a little it rarely makes much sense.
The umbrage comes from having spent a few years supporting these devices (or rather, failing to support them). I don't know how many times I've had to sit there and get yelled at because I abandoned a troubleshooting workflow once I realized that the user was in some kind of Samsungified experience that was 95% identical to the default Android one (and was therefore out of my scope of support here in the carrier call center, go call Samsung).
Once they got their yelling out, they would sometimes ask me why Samsung would bother recreating all of the Google stuff if it was indeed 95% identical. What's in that 5%, they'd ask.
How do you answer that question without seeing Google's influence on the software as a necessary evil and Samsung's as an unnecessary evil?
OnePlus used to - until they didn't anymore. OnePlus 8 was excellent. Pixel 8 Pro has the worst mobile reception I've ever had in a phone.
Apple.
That's been Google phones even since the Nexus days. They review super well then three months after release there's some crazy-ass hardware problem no phone has ever experienced before. Screen discoloration, glass backs cracking while laying flat on a table, power buttons getting stuck, spontaneous camera glass cracking, etc.
The flaws were much more excusable with the Nexus phones since they were dirt cheap, but the price of the Pixels has crept upwards and now they're more or less at parity with Apple and Samsungs flagship prices.
My issue is that they are bottom-barrel of repairability.
My Nexus phones were described as "designed to fail and impossible to fix" by a repair guy.
But that's not true anymore afaik: they get good repairability scores at ifixit and also have a deal with them to stock repair parts.
Yeah that. Pixel 6A and 7A. Unreliable as hell. Went straight back to iOS.
Edit to clarify: constant problems with payments, bluetooth, eSIMs.
Weird. My 7A runs fine. I do swap out a lot of apps though, like keyboard and application selector.
what do you use?
SwiftKey and Niagara.
This was a major issue that drove me away from Android. In addition to first party bugs, I got tired of 3rd party accessories not working correctly.
My theory was iPhone probably got tested on most 3rd party accessories. However, the fragmentation in the Android space meant I’d have no idea what devices they actually tested with.
This is further compounded by the fact that Android isn’t really an open platform, at least in a practical sense. I can’t just load up a patch for something (assuming it exists) without fully switching to some open source ROM that’s going to come with its own issues.
There's also only one Bluetooth stack on Apple's platforms (presumably shared), so testing is more straightforward. And if so inclined, there's also the Made for iPhone program that requires validation, but again that's with one device in two form factors. It's not a fair challenge comparing Android device support because the task is bigger, though Google could probably do some stuff to make that less painful.
As a consumer, I just don't care whether it's fair or not. Android and iOS are competing, almost identical platforms. They both do what I need, but only one of them doesn't always break.
Saying it's not fair to compare them is like saying it's not fair to compare a minivan to an SUV when making a car purchase. They're different, but similar enough.
Google could just say "Here is our official bluetooth hardware/software. Either use the official hardware/software, or use something else but we will kick you out of the android program if your implementation and ours ever have any kind of difference that is noticeable to a user".
It's almost like there should be a, I don't know, STANDARD test suite that peripherals, phones, and chips that want to use the Bluetooth STANDARD would have to pass in order to advertise being compatible with the Bluetooth STANDARD, as directed and administered by the Bluetooth STANDARD organization.
Bluetooth is so old that it was coming into use when Computer Shopper was still published. It's been a dumpster fire of compatibility since its inception.
There's one of two culprits on the Android side: either its the device drivers, or the OS itself. Device drivers should be capable of being subjected to stringent acceptance standards in order to advertise "Bluetooth". If it's the OS, that's even worse since it is higher up the abstraction stack. At least the device drivers being closer to hardware have an excuse.
Bluetooth is 26 years old. A 26 year old industry standard should be better than a coinflip as to whether some bluetooth thingamajig will work with a mobile OS. It's just sad.
> year old industry standard should be better
Ballpark as old as USB if not mistaken, and that's saying lots ...
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How reliable is the Pixel fold? I jumped ship from Nexus/Pixel in 2019, and the only thing that could bring me back to Pixel would be the larger screen of the fold. But my personal experience with Nexus/Pixel quality 2010-2019 is pretty bad, and adding in the folding screen makes me think getting one is a Bad Idea.
Sadly, due to my employer, only Apple and Google are options, so none of the other folding phones are options. I wish Apple would do a fold..
There's no reason to upgrade a phone more than once in five years at least for me.
I bought a an iPhone 15 Pro Max few months ago and compared it to my S10+ which I bought in 2019 and still have. There's practically no difference for regular day to day stuff, except for the camera advancements which are notable (but not night & day either).
It was only the frustrating battery life, and desire to enter the superior iPhone camera ecosystem that forced me to upgrade.
I’ve always thought android phones had similar battery capabilities than iphones.. How worse are they ?
I mean, my S10+ is 5 years old now so it's definitely going to be worse. I'm sure the latest devices are ~on par.
Looks like an iPhone...one of the things I like about the other pixels is the curved bezels..
It looks like Bender.
Damn you nailed it. Now I can’t unsee it.
I came here to write the same thing. It absolutely does.
I have heard this for years. Not much you can do with a rectangle that's basically just a screen in front.
It's more about the software than anything. Maybe the camera too
I submit the HTC 10 as an example of a smartphone that did not look like an iPhone but had its own sleek design language:
https://dev.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/s9wsHkNaq6sKCSAzKvfZKo.jpg
That's kind of ugly though, IMO. I'd rather have a solid back.
I mean, the back didn't look a lot like an iPhone, but look at the front in white and compare that to an iPhone 4 in white.
Nah, it just looks ugly and too sterile. Nothing brave, just another double palm sized phone. A girl who tries very hard to look cool, but the bridge on her head just ruins the overall looks.
Maybe ask LG to make a cool looking phone. They have created a lot of brave designs.
Call summary is such a good feature. How many times has your wife snapped her fingers for you to jot something down when she's on the phone with the pediatrician? you go crazy looking for a pen or something
This is why I love my pixel. They build stuff that affects my life day to day. My biggest vote of confidence: since buying my wife a pixel, I've had zero tech support requests. it really just works.
Literally never? Do you live in a sitcom?
I can't record calls but Google can? Gross.
According to the keynote, it notifies the other party that you're using it, which makes sense, but also makes things awkward.
> you go crazy looking for a pen or something
When I was a kid, my mom would keep a cup of dead pens next to the phone just to annoy my father and I when we went looking for a pen :-)
Never because clear communication and good lines of understanding make a positive and stable relationship?
Snapping really? Your comment literally reads like a classic "I hate my wife" boomer meme and it comes off as kind of gross.
None of the post involved a lack of clear lines of communication. Sometimes someone on a call could use help making a note and it can be tricky to find pen and paper. Communicating better with your spouse won’t make the kids put the kitchen pen back where it goes or make it easier to both listen and hunt for things at the same time.
you are projecting something gross on a total stranger online. check yourself.
You don't snap at waiters, you don't snap at your spouse or partner. If you think that's "projecting" you have bigger issues and internal-unresolved-trauma my friend. I think you need to follow your own advice here: Check yourself immediately.
Spouses and partners treat each other with respect, and no that doesn't involve snapping.
You do when you're on the phone and need to attract attention of someone nearby. I guess waving a hand in front of their face also works...
Seems like a pretty common gesture when you are on the phone, someone is talking to you on the other end, and you want to get another person's attention in the room who is not looking at you. You are reading way too much into it.
Does the launcher still steal an enormous amount of screen space at the top of the home screen in order to display the date? Maybe I can ask the AI...
Though seriously, just bought a pixel 8 pro for the camera as my cheap Samsung whatever camera took aeons to focus and had garbage image quality. Overall the default Google app experience is very unimpressive with frustrating quirks and pointless changes.
Though what do you expect from company where your work performance is based on feature visibility meaning useless feature creep is all that matters instead of a quality user experience. Google it's not at all about quality and will never be. AI bullshit being added is more feature visibility metrics so they will keep adding stupid crap and then turning it back on after you've disabled it because someone wants a promotion.
One should consider that Gemini will have a paid version "Gemini Advanced" [1] for phones and whenever one has a phone with free Gemini version, it will constantly be annoyingly reminding about and pushing to the paid Gemini usage. For some reason big tech decided that people want their AI assistants and force them on everybody including requesting to pay for their decision to invest in AI hardware. I really prefer not having AI, not having an AI chip in any of my devices, and not be bothered with AI intrusion into my life.
Very soon not having an AI integrated into a phone will be a very good positive differentiation for a phone or PC brand.
1. https://gemini.google/advanced/
My current phone, a Pixel 6 Pro, is becoming unusable due to screen flickering.* I have an unopened Pixel 8 Pro on my desk that I got for ~$700 after cashback during Prime Day last month, and I've been waiting for this launch so I could consider the possibility of returning it and getting the new model.
So far, looking at this, I can't find any differences between the 8 Pro and the 9 Pro XL that I think I'd actually notice. It would be kind of nice to get the smaller 9 Pro for the sake of my wrists, but not enough to pay an extra $400 for.
Am I missing anything? Or is this just a heavily hyped release of a tiny incremental upgrade?
*I'd be more inclined to hold this against Google and not get another Pixel if my previous phone, a Samsung flagship, hadn't died in approximately the same way after approximately the same lifespan.
I was waiting for this to figure out if i want this phone. The answer is, I'm not willing to pay $1000 CAD.
I would like a phone with 7 years of updates, that's the reality. This is so annoying because I would go to LineageOS since it keeps getting updates, contrary to manufacturers roms.
If those are your only criteria, the Pixel 8a is $400 and has guaranteed updates until May 2031 (same 7 years, but released three months ago).
My real criterias would be way more, but if I put all of them together, the answer is there is nothing.
I ABSOLUTELY need to be able to use a glass screen protector, because my phone falls a lot, so I'm really concerned about the fingerprint reader on the screen.
One criteria I won't be able to satisfy is: I like fingerprinting on the back. I don't think there are recent phones with that feature at all.
The upcoming 9a is where Google has to make some tough business decisions whether it's going to have all the AI features of the main line, at half the price.
It's rumored that Apple's new SE will have the full suite of Apple AI features, and that might put some pressure on Google to match.
I got a _spectacular_ deal on the pixel 8 when I called to complain on my phone plan, otherwise I would have still used a Motorola.
The phone was $200, and I got a pixel watch 2 LTE as well that I flipped for $250. The only thing I had to do was keep using the phone plan I have used for 8 years for another year.
Ugh, I can't decide what to do. I am moving to Denmark from the US on Sept 3rd.
Denmark does not have trade-in deals. But between my wife and I, we can get a whole phone free with the trade-ins in the US.
We can also do international shipping and such through forwarding services, and that would eat into the savings, but still do so.
Then there is bands. THey are almost identical, except a few here and there, and I can't find a concrete place to get info on Denmark bands (multiple sources have different info or lack of info).
Is it worth switching out and going through the hassle and getting US pixels, and just deal with the Denmark prices, and try to sell the Pixel 6s we have. It is annoying.
> Then there is bands. THey are almost identical, except a few here and there, and I can't find a concrete place to get info on Denmark bands (multiple sources have different info or lack of info).
Maybe it's part of "multiple sources have different info", but have you tried https://www.kimovil.com/en/frequency-checker/DK?
Another avenue of inquiry: Use https://www.cellmapper.net/ to see what bands users have actually recorded in the wild in Denmark near wherever you're moving to.
Ya, Kimovil is my goto for most cellphone info, but unfortunately they are missing a lot of data on DK frequencies, primarily for 5G, and I would contribute to add them or suggest them, but they don't have an option for that. At least I couldn't find it.
But Cellmapper is not one I knew and it helped me a TON just now actually. Lots of great info and let me see all the bands currently in use, thanks for that.
Seems like a US phone will work mostly without issue in DK based on the 5G and 4G frequencies on Cellmapper.
Thanks again.
At this point I just want a phone that takes unbelievably amazing photos and videos under all lighting conditions and a phone that can zoom WAY the fuck out when I'm taking selfies.
I don't even pretend to know what else I'm paying for at this point. I just scan reviews until it feels like I've found a phone that will reward my $1000 (or so) with a significantly better camera. Too soon to say if these Pixels will lore me away from my S23 Ultra. Though I will say I am beyond sick and tired of Samsung's bloatware and associated problems and miss the days when I had a Pixel (or, before that, a Nexus). That, plus the fact that my S23 is almost paid off, might compel me to upgrade.
>samsungs bloatware
How is it any different then google's bloatware?
I'm more accustomed to Google's software. And I don't recall ever having to follow elaborate tutorials to uninstall/stop notifications for shit I don't want, like I do with every Samsung phone.
Being accustomed to one over another is fine, but there is no objective reason one would prefer google's calculator over samsungs one, or calendar or whatever.
I have google's apps included on literally every android phone out there - why do we pretend like somehow it's the samsung that is the only one forcing bloat on people?
The objective reason, as I mentioned, is user control. Samsung makes it too difficult to uproot their apps. Never had anything close to that problem with my many Google phones.
You can't fully remove google apps either, not to mention GMS itself
Unfortunately, for PWM-sensitive people like me, Google hasn't taken the hint and improved its PWM rate. The Pixel 9 series utilizes 240Hz PWM dimming across the board, meaning the Pixel now has the slowest PWM rate on any major phone.
From AndroidCentral review.
I bought a refurbished Pixel 3A for $150 and dropped Graphene on it. Has worked like a charm. Incredible 4-day battery life thanks to the absence of Google Play Services. Might move to /e/ soon now that Graphene has dropped support.
/e/ is nice. Pairs well with Nextcloud.
I'm very happy to see the good Pro camera setup in the smaller size. I've always gotten the non-pro Pixel, but missed the better camera. I might upgrade my Pixel 7 just because of this.
Country availability
https://support.google.com/store/answer/2462844?hl=en_US
Ridiculous how a company the size of Google can only support such a small part of the world. What's even stranger is that they don't support most of the strong android markets.
I don't see anything that wants me to upgrade my four-year old iPhone 12. (TBH, it's not just about these new Pixel phones; I don't know whether I will upgrade in the next 3-4 years.)
Minor rant: All of this powerful technology, and yet the examples they can come up with are always about e-commerce/shopping, photos, calendaring etc. Why can't they talk about something more fundamentally useful, like a feature that would reduce your phone usage or budget better, etc.? I guess I can dream.
I don't want AI on my phone, so will pass on this one.
Do you think the inclusion of AI is some new departure? Google has declared itself as "AI-first" for the past 8 years[1]. There's been neural cores included in every Pixel since the Pixel 4.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-ai-first-world...
It would be nice to be able to run llama.cpp on my phone but if I had the choice between that and a root shell and c compiler I'd definitely take the shell.
Private AI app in play store wraps llama.cpp
Heh I guess that's a good point. All I have is a ten year old iPhone just to run Cisco DUO for work and there seems to be no way to run llama.cpp on it even with a very small model.
Occasionally I'll use i.sh to ssh into a decent computer but it would be nice to be able to just run normal software on it.
It will probably run 2B models, there are many more options for iOS, try it out.
The price is higher for two reasons, I think. One, so they can offer ridiculous incentives and trade-in values and discounts all over the place right away. Sadly, this strategy probably performs better than simply lowering the price without incentives. Two, because Pixel 10 is going to be more expensive (TSMC chip, maybe Qualcomm modem?) and they're trying to move the brand upmarket in preparation.
How much of a limitation is that Tensor processor? Seems like the last of its line and below the performance of other flaghship phones.
I have owned a Pixel 1, Pixel 2, Pixel 6 pro.
The Pixel 6 pro has had its screen break 4x and I have to pay every time despite having the insurance. Terrible, weak screen. The phone feels cheap too. Lots of software errors now. This is the result of Google moving away from merit based hiring.
I will never buy another Google phone.
I jumped ship after they stopped using Qualcomm chips and the battery life went way down. The S24+ has been a much better phone.
Very telling that the first two pictures are of the camera lenses. Is that where most of the $999 price tag is going?
Holy shit, they have moved the design in the right direction, but it still looks awful. Maybe not the ugliest phone on the market, but still bears the hallmark of designed by an engineer. Hire a friggin industrial designer or smack the current one in the head by a frying pan until something cool pops up.
I like that there's a smaller "pro" model.
The Fold 2, sorry Pixel 9 Pro Fold, is the most interesting one for me but the price is too high. I've been waiting for a while for these foldables to go down in price but they still haven't.
Other than that, it's all about the "AI". Which I don't have much interest in, plus, didn't they already said last year that the Pixel 8 was "all about AI". At this point, there's no use in buying a phone to have these features when the following year your phone that's supposedly made with AI in mind is phased for for a new phone that this time around for real is the one that's "made for AI".
Eh.
I'm happy with my Pixel 6a. Think with my previous trade-in (some older pixel), it was like $299. Gotta time things right to get the next one at a similar price point. I def don't want that Gemini stuff on there though. The cheapest new phone being $800 seems to be a step up though.
Is there a new camera system? As I recall the physical hardware of Pixel cameras have not changed in years.
They said they've rewritten the HDR+ image processing pipeline from scratch for the first time in their live event. Not sure about the Pixel 9 hardware... I think the Pixel 8 was the first new sensor in a while though.
The front camera is a big upgrade: 10.5 MP to 42 MP from the 8 Pro to 9 Pro.
The rear wide camera looks the same, but the rear ultrawide seems like it has a small upgrade. Better aperture at least.
> The front camera is a big upgrade: 10.5 MP to 42 MP from the 8 Pro to 9 Pro.
42MP???
Wouldn't that just rapidly fill up the storage for most of their users
with little if any other tangible benefit ... maybe that is part of the plan :-) ... the profit
Front Camera though, so mostly for video chats.
The sensors are supposed to be new (except for the fold)
That was true up until the Pixel 7 or something.
It was Pixel 6 that made a big jump in quality. From 8 MP in Pixel 5 to 50 MP in Pixel 6. They also added ultrawide and telephoto on Pro. They have a big jump in sensor size to larger than most compacts. The Pixel 8 has even big sensor. The big sensor is the reason for the camera hump on the back.
It's incredible to me how much worse this web page is than a comparable Apple one. Just from a cursory glance, I've seen some late loading elements, weird and confusing pricing before I've even seen the whole phone, and a weirdly masked and slightly pixelated video.
Google is terrible at both UX and UI. I have said this for a long time that thank god Google search was a simple textarea. If they had done anything else, they would have blown it.
Definitely a page full of eye sores. Also the branding is all over the place, the page itself feels more like it fits BestBuy's branding than Google's.
They could have removed half of the "AI" references and it would still be overused.
"AI" on my phone is so incredibly unappealing. I don't understand who this is for.
It's for the investors.
AI phone… AI laptop… AI car… AI toothbrush… yeah nobody’s asking for this shit. It’s just uninventive, unimaginative marketing rubbish. Real innovation doesn’t need to go looking for use cases.
Totally agree.
Look at the marketing text on the Pixel Fold (https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_9_pro_fold?hl=en-U...):
“An epic display of Google AI. All the magic of Gemini on Pixel's largest screen.“
It is not only completely cringeworthy, but also nonsensical. How does having a bigger display affect AI at all? What sets it apart from other Pixels? Nothing.
I am honestly shocked that this company can keep putting out garbage like this. Any smaller company or startup would go bankrupt and cannot afford to be this sloppy and incompetent. This is only possible if your company has enormous cash reserves and monopolistic market position, where you can eat losses and fail repeatedly on epic scales.
Never in my life I will buy any Google product. They so easily kill products used by millions without second thought. This destroyed my trust in the company, they just don’t care enough, it’s all about profit and their monopolistic position. I hope other smaller companies with better ethics will emerge
Well, from the phone viewpoint people buy them to get a less garbage-filled android experience. Most consumers don't really expect phones to last forever... because they seldom do.
My comment is still valid for software killed in the mobile space. I don’t know what other people feel but I have a strange feeling that, because they have so much money, anything other than search is built temporarily. All their software, their apps and services aren’t build to last. It’s built for now and later they will abandon to start from scratch. It’s easier to start over from scratch with a new team than to make what’s been built last. That comes from a shortsighted vision that I dislike.
I have no quarrel with your viewpoint. Beyond search, everything is basically a strategem to get eyeballs at Google.
Monopolies are very profitable.
Wouldn't accept it as a gift after having several generations of Pixel phone. Half baked software. Also Apple has hammered Google on privacy and rightfully so. There's a 0 chance I'll use android handsets again regardless of the hardware.
GrapheneOS is a thing.
I just want to put my vote in that I'm really glad they're making reasonable sized phones again. Pixel 6, 7 were oversized monstrosities. If pixel 10 is even smaller than the 8, that's fine by me
Do they have an Apple Airtag / Samsung SmartTag style tracking dongle, and an UWB model phone that works with it?
Phone tech specs: both models have "Ultra-Wideband chip for accurate ranging and spatial orientation"
Tracking tag: ??
Any experiences with that?
I still can't justify spending more than about $500 on a phone when the perfectly good Pixel 8a is available.
I'm still using my Pixel 6a and will probably continue until it fails or the battery life gets really bad.
I will avoid google Pixel. Two of it's souvenirs are in my closet currently. The hardware vendor they partner with screws customers and maligns brand google.
I'm still on Pixel 2XL. The battery is not that good anymore but has no issues with the phone. I'd definitely not spend 1k on a phone. A Pixel 7 Pro is now a much better deal.
Bring back Google Now. That's all I want from "AI": What are the things I should know about that pertain to MY life/schedule.
Nutty pricing. Google is not, and will never be, a “premium brand”.
Good
Size Clarification: The Pixel 9 Pro is a new medium size. The Pixel 9 is a direct successor to the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 9 Pro XL is a direct successor to the Pixel 8 Pro.
Remember when Google used to do live benchmarks showing it beat the iPhone (and even the iPad). Those were the days. Now Tensor is bottom of the pack for high-end phones.
Remember when average people cared about benchmarks? Because I don't.
There's a reason Apple is doing so way. The A and M chips are a huge reason for that. So sure, benchmarks don't matter, but performance does, and Tensor is way behind.
Why make two sizes and STILL make the smaller phone enormous? Apple is reportedly making the regular iPhone Pro larger as well. Baffling.
Interesting that holding down the power button will now launch AI... On my pixel 6 that currently opens up the emergency/power menu.
Ha... I remember recommending a google pixel 6 to someone for their decent prices, but now even the non-pro model is at 800 USD...
I'm holding out on my Galaxy S10+ until someone finally makes another flagship phone with an SD card slot an 3.5mm jack.
> Plus, your phone comes with 7 years of OS and security updates.
Way to go, the 7 years of updates was the reason I bought my Pixel 8 Pro
How does GrapheneOS perform on the fold?
It's interesting to compare Pixel vs iPhone product pages. B2B Tech vs Consumer master class.
Oof, even phones have 16GB RAM nowadays
it doesn't even say the CPU speed on their spec sheet....whats the speed of the CPU? how many cores?
That's how you know that they're not proud of the CPU specs.
They went with the Samsung foundry so they could get a bespoke CPU design because Qualcomm doesn't have time for that type of stuff. Turns out that the Samsung ARM cores aren't as performant as the Qualcomm/Apple ARM cores. But at least Google has these Tensor thingies...
[edit] in Dave2D's video about the Pixel 9 Pro XL, https://youtu.be/67hVZOJDFxQ?t=323 , he shows a Geekbench comparison of recent Android CPUs, the new Tensor G4 is still slower in multithread GeekBench than SnapDragon 8 Gen2 & Gen3.
Is there new hardware in the phone for the forehead thermometer? Any chance this comes to earlier models?
Is it approved for forehead use now? My recollection is it was a gimmicky thing because they could not add human temperature functionality without some kind of regulatory thing (FDA?).
Yes it's new hardware. Pixel 8 also had it.
Clicking on "Explore the Thermometer app" in the Pixel 9 Pro page leads to ... a Pixel 8 Pro page.
i switched back to samsung after experiencing terrible performance of the tensor chip in Pixel 8 Pro.
To be honest, it's probably not their fault though if games/apps are not optimized for that. But I can't wait around, using a flagship phone with sub-optimal performance.
These price increases for what appears to be marginal upgrades is such a splash of cold water.
It blows me away that people will spend $1k for a phone when there are good options for $500 or less. I will grant that Google's phone is probably the best. But in my experience the difference in quality does not correlate to the difference in price. Apple has a monopoly and they set price expectations.
Also, I think buyers think if you have a cheaper phone strangers may think you are poor. Personally I want people to think I am poorer than I am.
People use their phones probably more than any other single item besides their home and bed. It’s not really that crazy, especially if you factor in camera upgrades for people that care about it.
One stat that takes me out of my bubble on this one is we are closing in on 2/3 of website visits being done via mobile devices. I.e. it's not necessarily the ultra tech focused folks that make up high end mobile user base, it's people using phones constantly as their primary device that are often spending a grand on them.
In terms of percentage of my day that I spent using X, my smartphone ranks pretty highly. More so than my TV, car, etc that are high budget items that you can spend a lot on.
I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone. There's not much my phone does for me that a laptop doesn't do better, and I probably use some form of desktop/laptop about 10X the amount of time I use my phone. Sometimes I forget where my (8 year old) phone is for days, and life trucks on, but I probably sit in front of a computer for hours a day and that's just for work. I guess I'm turning into an outlier.
I personally could not even fathom spending $500 on a telephone let alone $1000. It's just not an important enough gadget in my life.
Fewer and fewer people own any computing device other than a phone.
Should we be celebrating this, or even talking about it as if it's remotely sensible? Even putting aside that mobile software is designed to undermine your personal interests, getting a laptop that's good for a decade (or more) and then churning your phone less often is likely a win on straight device cost.
Who defines sensible? For most people, a phone is a far more sensible purchase than a laptop. How many sub-$500 laptops have cellular modems? How many sub-$200? How much of the technology that people realistically use day-to-day requires a laptop?
I’d even question your premise that phones churn more frequently than laptops, especially at the budget end.
The point of my comment was to talk about what is sensible?
Your comment just seems needlessly dichotomous. I'm talking about having multiple devices, such that you aren't beholden to any single one. Nobody "requires" a laptop, just like nobody actually "requires" a phone. But if you're using up all your buy-stuff-online time looking through a tiny screen and tapping out search terms like Morse code, rather than being able to comfortably compare skus/stores far and wide, it's likely that you're drastically overpaying. I'm willing to believe this is a trap many people fall into (eg why else is Amazon always pushing Subscribe and "Save"), but we shouldn't be normalizing it as if it's effective rather than pathological and extractionary (cf Vimes's Boots).
And sure, the same trash-treadmill dynamic exists in the low end new laptop market with poor hardware and poor software (eg MSWin also pushes an upgrade treadmill). But this is kind of a weird Schrödinger's argument in a thread about a phone that costs $1,000 - someone who doesn't have enough resources to buy anything beyond a phone, yet also spends an outsized amount to have the latest flagship. My larger point still stands about the longevity of good product choices, but they require research and actualization - once again, the kind better done from a laptop or desktop rather than a pocket porthole.
More and more of societal services “require” a smartphone. I went to a baseball game where it seemed like it was required to install their ticket app (might have been an offline workflow available).
For someone with a limited budget, a phone seems wildly more valuable than a laptop.
iPad is the new laptop.
For what?
Because sure as hell it's not a working machine.
There's a very large community of people in which their smartphone might be the only luxury purchase they make (I'm pretty close to that).
Now that we no longer upgrade every second year (or, in fact, every third year) and given I usually get 50% of the cost back by sending the old phone in, spending $1500/phone means that I'm typically amortizing a $750 charge over 4 years - or $15/month for the only luxury item I own. I'm probably more concerned about the $85/month AT&T bill than the $15/month cost for the actual phone.
Never having to even think about storage, like literally zero concerns about how much I download is one reason I always grab the high-end model (now around 1TB)
Also - there are lots of weeks, (in fact, sometimes a month) that my mother doesn't touch her (pretty high end, nice 4K monitor) computer system - but I doubt there has ever been a single hour that she wasn't using her phone. The Phone, for many, has become the new computer.
And, with LLMs becoming pervasive, the new knowledge-system. (I can go many days without touching google - but I hit up some combination of Claude/ChatGPT pretty 7-10 times/day) I can already envision the day in which you will be able to run an LLM on your phone - but the H/W specs for that thing will likely be insane and I have a hard time seeing how the first releases of (reasonable speed, reasonable model -I'm aware you can do it today) - in a 2-3 years from now that can run an LLM will go for less than $2000-$2500.
And I will be standing at the front of that line begging them to take my money. Entirely new device at that point.
> I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for everyone.
This is not a helpful comment.
No one argued it was true for everyone!
> I personally could not even fathom spending $500 on a telephone let alone $1000. It's just not an important enough gadget in my life.
This is also not helpful.
Can you imagine why someone else might spend $1000 on a phone? If the answer is no you have a shockingly poor ability to empathize and see things from a different perspective.
I totally understand why some people spend $1500 on a new phone. And I also understand why some people want to spend the bare minimum! These perspectives are not difficult to grasp.
Here we have OP doing an "I have better money sense than you" brag followed by a guy doing an "I have better empathy than you" brag. (Followed by me doing an "I'm more savvy than you" brag.)
lol, made me chuckle.
It's a pet peeve of mine how often programmers argue from their niche perspective without even attempting to think of things from a broader or different perspective. It's especially annoying when it goes from "people do X" to "well I do Y so nyah!".
It's not hard or difficult, you just have to try!
Does it get easier over time? I asked the most socially adept person I know about how she's so good with people. She said, "I just picture myself in their shoes." She made it sound easy, so I tried it, and phew! It's tough! It made me wonder whether part of the reason why perspective-taking is easy for her is because she's practiced it so much.
I suppose it’s a skill like anything else.
It’s also not binary. The biggest UX experts in the world will still be shocked by what people do in a user study! There’s always surprises.
Understanding a very specific individual is pretty hard! But I think understanding that there are literally billions of smart phone users and that some of them will be happy to buy expensive phones and some will be prefer to buy cheap phones is pretty straight forward! The larger the group being considered the less valuable a personal anecdote is!
Followed by the “I have outlined how a typical conversation on this platform will play out” guy
Okay, but just because you use something a lot doesn't mean you need to spend huge money on it.
That's the argument I don't understand.
Like, Taxi drivers don't buy the most luxurious and comfortable car you can think of because they drive it all day, they get Toyotas and sometimes Teslas where EV support is decent.
If you use it for 3 years, $1000 is about a dollar a day. Does a better phone generate that much value each day - about 1/5 of a cappucino? Probably.
By which metric generates more value?
It answers better on HN? Gives you more value answering messages or watching YouTube?
Which far fetched edge case scenario do you need to justify the very small diminishing returns between a high end and premium phone?
Personally I inject probes into my brain to measure the exact dopamine response every time I need to make a new purchase
...idk I think people just like premium phones, it's not that deep
Yeah but when you get into the taxi comparison, it’s based on roi more than anything.
For a phone, it’s purely esthetic, ergonomic and user friendliness that most people are buying them. Not usually roi based decision.
That's a really good point! I spend 10x time in front of a computer as a phone and I don't think twice about buying Alienware or Razer so that makes more sense to me.
This is true, but I don't think the price translates. Most folks use their phones for messaging, internet, videos, camera. That's about it. And the things you do on your phone don't translate to these price tags. You're not getting a bunch more from a 1k phone than from a 500 phone.
I personally try to get flagship phones, but used a few years after their release. That, and avoid upgrading my phone as much as possible :P I'm jealous of Apple folks here, they support their devices for eons longer than Android!
I usually sell my $1k phone after a couple years so I end up paying much less than $1k in the end, while getting a better phone out of it than had I just bought the $500 phone up front.
It blows me away that people actually care how much other people spend on something at all. Want a $50 flip phone? Cool. Want a $1300 fancy fold phone? Also fine.
When I had my last kid we got a Snoo bassinet, $1300 or so. Anyone that saw it couldn't help but inform me that their baby survived in a trash bag with holes poked in it or whatever for a bassinet. But I sold it 6 months later for $900, and my overall $400 investment was very worth it. Thing was a miracle.
> $400 investment
Why is this word used to describe "pure financial loss" so often when talking about purchased luxury goods?
> Investment: the outlay of money usually for income or profit
Because the implication is that there is non-monetary profit. The person is describing it not as a loss but as an investment, because it was an investment in themselves and their ability to sleep at night and an investment in their child feeling safe and whatever other impossible-to-directly-price externalities were realized as a result of the monetary loss.
I suppose the problem is that there isn't a good word for this concept. I just find it interesting that, in my experience, this is only used in relation to luxury goods.
> in my experience, this is only used in relation to luxury goods.
Not really. You can also "invest" in personal relationships, for example, which implies neither a financial outlay nor an expectation of financial return.
When used in the context of purchasing consumer goods, I think it is most often used in the context of goods which are expensive (the financial outlay) and durable (ie, capable of providing enjoyment--analogous to profit--for a long time into the future). And of course those goods are more likely to be considered "luxury" goods.
In the case of a relationship, maybe it could be argued that you are profiting, in the currency being used: you get more positive interactions out than you put in. ;)
> this is only used in relation to luxury goods.
It isn't. People say it in regards to quality goods of all kinds - shoes, mattresses, food.
Because the value the item brought you was worth more than the money you exchanged for it. My Bose QC35s were one of the best investments I've ever made, lasting many years and very many loud plane rides. Or would you consider groceries a "pure financial loss" as well?
> Or would you consider groceries a "pure financial loss" as well?
Being healthy results in me being able to make more money, so it literally is an investment.
Investing in a luxury purse or basinet has no concept of profit, but can happily result in high value. Profit and value (or satisfaction) are not the same.
So goofy that you asked this with the "usually" right there in your own quote.
Investment in x% higher likelihood of your child's safety.
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> It blows me away that people actually care how much other people spend on something at all.
It's an idle discussion thread about consumer electronics. Not an attack on the core of your personal identity.
It blows me away that even with the investiture of 100% of your intelligence and effort, at the peak of your personal ability, that you couldn't realize that I only said "It blows me away" because I was mocking the comment I replied to.
> It blows me away that people actually care how much other people spend on something at all
Well you can dislike this fact but there is nothing seems to be blown away about it. Because this is such a mundane fact about people.
Bro I'm not blown away, I just copied the parent comment to be equally hyperbolic about said mundane topic.
Have you looked into leasing your phone? You pay more per month but always have the latest upgrade. I'm curious about it too and am hoping you've done the numbers on it.
No I haven't. I typically just buy them up front every 2 or 3 gens and use them on whatever cheap provider I'm on at the time. Currently using Spectrum (also my home internet provider) for service.
>I usually sell my $1k phone after a couple years so I end up paying much less than $1k in the end, while getting a better phone out of it than had I just bought the $500 phone up front.
Yes, there are different ways to go about it. I buy the best phone of last year or the year before, and run it into the ground.
But is it just me, or are the changes so incremental now it's hard to justify a new model of any brand? Sure the processors get better etc, but I use my phone to browse the web, text/phone and email.
For most people the amortized cost of a phone over its life is pretty small. If you spend $1000 on a phone and it lasts you 3 years, that's ~$28 a month. A lot of people spend that on coffee each month. The value they get out of their smart phone dwarfs most other big expenses.
Tech is a really weird field; I think because of the high salaries, a lot of people are rich without realising they're rich. Tech is the "Nouveau rich". $28 a month on coffee is rather large amount to spend on coffee.
No, $28 not a large amount to spend on coffee. That's a McDonald's medium coffee 3.5 days a week. How is that a lot to spend on coffee? That's just silly. A lot to spend on coffee is $150/mo with a $5 latte at Starbucks each day and that's certainly more common than the house painter getting a McDonald's coffee on half his workdays.
Ok, "decent amount": Buying a coffee at McDonald's 3.5 days a week is a decent amount to spend on coffee. $150 is absurd. The "house painter" is making their own coffee before work.
The value they get is identical they would get if they spent half of it.
Unless, idk, you're so deep into the Apple ecosystem, e.g. that it makes sense to stay in the gardened wall and lower any kind of friction.
> The value they get is identical they would get if they spent half of it.
I'm pretty sure that the camera on my Pixel is twice as good as the OnePlus that it replaced.
But the photos are nowhere near twice as good.
Eh, they are when motion is involved.
Rationalizing a purchase because the monthly payments are small is a terrible way to approach shopping. If you don't have the money to pay for it upfront, you can't afford it. Full stop. People actually finance their phones, believe it or not. It boggles the mind.
They're not saying finance a phone. They're saying $1000 is not that much for a device you use throughout every waking hour for several years. The monthly framing helps understand cost as a rate, as we experience value as a rate.
People making an average hourly don't think of things that way. Paying $28/month for a phone provides much more liquidity for the unexpected, when the other option is spending over 25% of your months income, you're SOL if your car breaks for whatever reason, or you get a flat tire, or your water bill was unusually high.
Something something cheap boot vs. expensive boot something something…
I assume, then, of course, that you bought (or would buy) your house in cash only? After all, "If you don't have the money to pay for it upfront, you can't afford it. Full stop."
OP wasn’t talking about a loan payment.
So I get pixel because of security and less software bloat, along with good custom ROM support.
That being said, at least for me, my phone is the device I spend the most time with, whether articals, emails, books, podcasts etc.
It is at least 5 hrs a day.
This is probably an argument to spend less time on my phone, but the will is weak.
But if I am spending a significant percentage of my waking life interacting with this single electronic device, a price difference of 500 dollars is not much, especially amortized over a 3 year period.
My cheap Android phone is in a cheap black case, nobody can tell how poor I'm not.
The lack of iMessage blue-bubble is a good tell. Instantly makes you lose dates with gold diggers.
That's a feature. Gets the vapid idiots to select themselves out of your life.
I don’t like spending $1k on a phone, but my iPhone 11 Pro lasted 4 years and the only reason I upgraded was because the 15 has USB-C. It would have needed a battery upgrade otherwise but modern phones do have much better longevity.
You'll get the same mileage out of a €300-€400 Samsung.
In terms of camera performance? You will not.
True
Cheap phones tend to have a lot more lag/jank than iPhones (or other $1k phones)
Depends how cheap. Midrange phones are fine and cost half the price of the equivalent iPhone.
Is there a new, $500 or less, phone with 256 GB of Flash, an unlockabke bootloader, and good GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, or LineageOS support?
Oddly enough I end up buying Google phones because I do not wish to put up with Google's shit.
Graphene only supports pixels.
I have S21 Ultra and bought it refurbished for less than $500 few years ago.
I see no reason why should I buy new phone. Seems like all those new features are just gimmicks.
I would probably consider buying a new one if it had better video recording, but this Pixel only has 4k at 60Hz which wasn't impressive two years or so ago.
Somewhat tangentially, your comment made me realize there can be non-vain reasons to try and appear less poor than you are. Of course, when you’re really poor it’s probably unwise to use a new iPhone to achieve this deception.
Why would that blow you away?
$500 extra dollars for a better device people use everyday for at least a year or more. Especially around here, many make plenty of money that a $500 difference isn't that significant.
I have a lot of data on my smartphone I want to be secure, plus I like the OLED screen for reading ebooks/watching videos and I also want to make great photos.
Only Google Pixel devices tick those boxes, but at least you can buy older gen Pixels rather cheap (Google Pixel 6 Pro with similar camera setup as the Pixel 9 for example)
I think phones really stopped differentiating a few years ago. A $200 Motorola is extremely capable and does 99% of what normal people need. I bought a Moto G Power for my kid who always forgets to charge it because the battery lasts 3 days. That's more valuable than having 3 cameras and an AI chip.
Most people spending $1k on their phone are either trading in their old phone if they upgrade often, or are upgrading every 2-3 years, which makes the cost not that crazy given how smartphones are often essentially a part of us nowadays with how much we rely on them.
You can say that about anything: cars, headphones, appliances. To each their own. I can’t imagine using a 500 device in place of my 800 iPhone even though it would be “almost as good”. I can justify extra even for very small convenient features.
Since only Apple, Google and Samsung provide some realistic assurance of security updates, there aren't so many options left. If you don't want to spend 1k there is the Pixel 8a for half that price.
Some of it is a status symbol. I don't know any well to do tech friends that buy expensive watches or jewelry, but are happy to drop 1k+ on a new phone every year.
what are your favorite $500 or less options
Google Pixel 8a is a great phone IMHO. Refurbished ones are available.
It is! If you also need service, Google Fi has had a promotion for a while that gives you the $500 purchase price back over 24 monthly bills.
In fact, they also have a promotion right now where you can get $800 back on either the Pixel 9 or 9 Pro, spread over 24 months; that makes the 9 free and the 9 Pro only $200.
It's crazy where phones are at now. My $160 Motorola phone has 8GB of ram
The camera is terrible though photos upon closer inspection appear smeared/blurry. My older Motorola which I paid more for has a better camera.
Yeah, I have a Moto G84 12GB RAM for $180 - and it has features that these Pixels do not have:
- SD Card up to 1TB
- 3.5mm headphone jack
- Unlockable bootloader?
I have been trading in my phone every year to get the new Samsung S2x (now S24) model since S21. There were always new model deals plus some regular cashback. I ended up paying <200 USD every year.
It's like a manual phone upgrade plan. Not sure how long it could last. Last year the Google Fi deal wasn't as good and I almost missed the budget target.
You can get flagship Android phones for $500 or less if you are a bit patient and have a good carrier.
I just ordered a Galaxy S24+ from Google Fi for $450 and it's a better phone than the $1100 pixel 9 pro XL imo.
6 months from now and on days like Black Friday you'll be able to get the pixel 9 for less than $500.
Are you including the extra $50/mo you pay your carrier for this privilege? There ain't no such thing as a free lunch; you can either pay up front or pay over time (and often more than you would otherwise).
The only thing I have to do is keep using the phone for 120 days. Monthly price for service is $20 plus $10 for each gig of data, unchanged by their phone price promotions.
Don't even have to pay a fee to use a cellular smartwatch, as long as it is made by Google or Samsung.
My iPhone SE is $429 apparently.
OP here- my last two phones have been Moto G Power. I think the first one only cost $200! I value battery life and simplicity. As an Apple shareholder I prefer you buy an iPhone.
I have a 5G Stylus rn, it's totally fine except I ruined the camera 3 days in so it takes TNG soft focus photos... love the G Power line, battery for days is not to be underappreciated
I bought a "renewed" iPhone 11 from Amazon a month ago for $230 and have been seriously impressed with it.
iphone se 2022 is $429
Hoping the SE 4 in the new year will be sub $500/£500.
I got the SE 2 used, a year after it came out for a serious discount[1]. If that's something you're comfortable with, you can get a really good deal if you pay attention to what's posted on FB Marketplace.
More than anything, I'm most impressed by Apple's OS support. I'm pretty convinced that SE phones are some of the best deals in the industry if you keep them until they run out of support. They have the same guts (minus cameras) as tier 1 flagship phones. Apple is a bit tight with ram, but the processor is faster than any Android phone.
And the support - 7 years is standard right now, and it could very well go longer.
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1. I think I paid $150 for it. It has a small crack in the screen, but just the part that's over the chin, not anything that affects the display. If I wanted a pristine phone, I'm sure I could have found one for a bit more. But after several years, I'm happy with my decision.
That's a cracking result! I'll definitely keep an eye out and hopefully the second hand market is healthy.
I think the SE never really turned any heads from the flagship causing the second hand market to be lively. With these new touted SEs, they're looking to be as good as iPhone 14 (maybe pros) which has a very wide reach.
ditto, I bought a 2020 SE refurbished for <$200 and it's been totally fine. If it were better, I'd be using it more, which I don't want.
Not GP, but I just got a Sony Xperia 10 VI, and I'm loving it so far.
Sony seem to be abandoning the NA market which is kind of unfortunate. Their new Xperia 1 VI isn’t available in either the US or Canada.
It blows me away that people will spend $500 for a phone when there are good options for $150 or less. :0
Apple does not have a monopoly. They sell 27% of all smartphones. Samsung sells 24%. Xiaomi sells 12%.
A galaxy a54 is like 50% of the price of an 24 but with like 80% of the specs and better battery life
> It blows me away that people will spend $1k for a phone when there are good options for $500 or less
Wait till you see how people spend $60k on a car when there are perfectly good options for $30k.
And people also spend much more time with their phones than in their cars.
I don't disagree but.. 1) To me there is a lot more variety in cars than phones. An SUV is very different then a sports car or some luxury car. Phones vary a lot in OS (but people don't cross shop), a little in battery and a lot in camera.
As a thought experiment, if you put me in a civic I will know I am in a civic and not a BMW in one second. If you gave me an iphone 10 or an iphone12. Or a google 8 vs google 10... You get my point. Yes Android is different then iOS but people are usually locked in.
2) In general people spend way too much on cars, either to buy capability they don't really need or can't use. Or to try and say something about themselves.
My phone (£500/$500) was released in Nov 2017, bought in Feb 2018, and it's still just fine. Only recently have I been noticing the battery life is getting a bit pathetic.
Spending £500 on a new one hasn't really entered my thoughts. The last time I went shopping for an (Android) phone with and for my girlfriend it was a nightmare - so many absolutely shit giant phones that don't feel right in the hand
ifixit has exclusive deals with some manufacturers where you can get an OEM replacement battery + tools for ~$30-50. can easily double the lifespan of a well-maintained device
Recently did that with my laptop. Replaced the battery and fans and reapplied thermal paste to the processor for £100.
I splurged for one of the flip phones not long ago. Thought I qualified for a discount that I evidently didn't qualify for. Oops.
That said, I think it was 600ish. So, yeah, I don't know that I understand the high end market. At all.
iPhones are 10x better than $500 Androids, so a steal at 2x the price.
Is Google Pixel (with default Android, not GrapheneOS) at least as secure as iPhone?
That kind of question isn't really answerable. Patch rates and known vulnerability rates are roughly comparable. Broad hardware capability is similar. Zero days appear for both platforms on the open market with some regularity. Neither is perfect but both are quite good relative to the rest of the market.
Those prices are bonkers.
Also why can't we have decent 5" display smartphones anymore?
Someone mentioned Bender from Futurama, and now I can't unsee it
Love the camera on pixels, hopefully this one takes it to next level.
No Qi2 is really silly. A full year to integrate this in your phone design and you punted. It's really just adding a few magnets google, come on.
Terrible prices, rather get a iPhone 15 at this point
Is the Google Pixel Tablet going to be refreshed?
I have a pixel 8 pro and the camera is amazing
Pixels were great phones at half the price.
why the price increase? is it really $200 better than the 8 (which already has 6 remaining years of updates)?
Why is it so big, heavy and expensive?
I was initially excited at the announcement of the "fold" phone, but then I saw it's effectively two phone screens, instead of one folded in half. Sigh...
I have a Pixel 3a, and it's still larger than I'd like. I realize that the market for folks who would prefer something smaller is, well, small. But, I look at the phone landscape, and I hate every one of them. I like the Pixel, because it's stock Android. I wish they would release a Pixel "Basic" or something. 5.5" screen, basic camera, no AI bullshit. Just a no-frills basic phone.
One of the folding Samsung phones is the "single screen that folds in half like a flip phone" style! Played with one for a minute in Best Buy and it was pleasantly compact.
If those weren't so expensive, I'd get one in a heartbeat. It's downright luxurious!
Yeah, the main dealbreakers at this point seem to be (1) price, (2) battery life, since it's literally a smaller battery, and (3) vulnerability to debris. I've heard people say that you shouldn't take a folding phone to the beach because the sand can wreck those flex screens.
What's your concern about it being two screens?
Will it blend^W overheat?
That is the question.
4k still only at 60Hz. Weak.
I wish they'd make one to compete with Samsung Galaxy, so I could ditch the Samsung ecosystem.
What's the policy on the length of security updates on recent Google-branded phones these days?
In June 2025 new EU regulation will come into effect, mandating at least 5 years of OS updates, starting when the model is *removed from the market* aka the last unit is sold.
So in practice that'll mean 7+ years.
Note that Apple and Google made a big deal out of extending their upgrade timelines, without mentioning that they actually have to ... if they want to keep selling in the EU.
> Note that Apple and Google made a big deal about how they are extending their upgrade timelines, without mentioning that they actually have to
This is unsurprising, but deceptive and borderline illegal. “Presenting rights given to consumers in law as a distinctive feature of the trader's offer” is an Unfair Commercial Practice.
Wow, wish I knew that last time I purchased my phone. I chose Samsung partly due to this promise.
7 years for the 8 (of full OS updates). I'd be surprised if it's less for the 9.
https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/newest-pixel...
7 years, until 2031[0]
[0]https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705?hl=en#zippy=...
7 years, also Android version updates:
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en#z...
7 years from release date for this and last generation.
"Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro XL will receive updates for 7 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US. See g.co/pixel/updates for more information."
It's so weird to me that an advertising company would sell a phone. It feels so dystopian.
You should be happy. If Google didn't produce Android*, we would only have a single phone operating system and thus only a single provider of phones.
*And why produce Android without also producing a showcase phone?
I'm really not happy tbh. Android started out as a relatively open thriving open OS/ecosystem. It's since evolved into something much different due to Google and it's objectives.
It's also just plain not realistic. The industry would of evolved differently had it not been for android and other operating systems may have been picked up by the alternative manufacturers such as Samsung.
Did you also feel this way when Amazon and Facebook/Meta were making (or close to making) phones?
Yes, why would I not? I don't buy computing devices from any of them... Google phones are straight up a data harvesting device for Google lol.
Lack of proper dual sim (with two nano sims) is what made me not buy the previous gen and I guess this as well gets skipped.
It such a small feature that 200$ Xiaomi phones have and Google's flagship do not, because people in their silicon valley bubble can't understand there's many carries in the world that don't support esims properly or the issues that people that live in two countries need to face.
80% of their “camera” features are just AI tricks.
For the size off the phone, that is sort of lame.
here cames the pixel 5-8 regression bugs! yay!
The Pixel 10 will have a TSMC manufactured chip. I'm keeping my Pixel 6 Pro for another year.
Yeah, Pixel 7 Pro here and ditto.
No desktop mode?
Not paid, not shilling or anything, but the Light Phone 3 looks even better compared to this hill of AI-nonsense.
https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii
I will buy oneplus12 and flash PixelOS into it.
Among Us
Thank you
Other than the camera bar, the case is a blatant iPhone ripoff.
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No, thanks.
Why?
Pixels are always pushing the boundaries of invasion of privacy. We need less of it, not more.
Pixels are the only androphones on which you cab install GrapheneOS...
Which is why I don't trust GrapheneOS. They seemingly push Google on the privacy and security crowd while ignoring truly freedom-respecting devices like GNU/Linux phones, which would be supported forever.
For GrapheneOS, trust in Google is ultimate. If you don't trust it, you're out of luck. My threat model is different.
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Am I the only one that thinks pixels have always been ugly?
The Nexus 4 was beautiful, IMO one of the coolest smartphones ever made. It was manufactured by LG, but AFAIK Google was responsible for the design.
I hated the Nexus 4... it was slippery and broke waaaay to easily.
I think the Moto X with the wood back was one of the coolest looking phones ever though.
The bulk of consumers can't even tell the difference between a Pixel, Galaxy and iPhone. So, yes, probably, at least to first approximation.
I think the Pixel 1, 4, and 7 are very nice looking. This one too.
I have to log in with a google account to view the product in their store? Kthxbye.
No you don't
It asked me to. Guess it's because I have logged in to a google property before. I'm sure they wouldn't be tracking my views.... right?
Most people, from a person on welfare to all celebrities and almost all CEO’s, including Elon Musk, use iPhones. The Pixel and Android in general is simply not cool like the iPhone. Google has been making their own phones for over 10 years now and they’ve barely made a dent. What’s Google’s goal here?
Samsung, which uses Android, is the most popular phone brand in the world. Google doesn't need Pixel too be as sucessful as iPhone because Android dominates the iPhone and come pre installed with multiple Google products which is where the money is made for Google.
Who the hell cares what is considered "cool"? I use the phone that's best for me, I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks of it.
The USA is not the World.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
USA is not the only market for pixel phones. In places with higher concentration of Android users, there's a premium market that the pixel fits into.
What kind of low budget commentary is this? Why put it on HN? What's _your_ goal here?
Their objective is simple, get the hardware in place, so they can force-feed Google Search, YouTube and Google Gemini.
Yes it's true, iPhone are popular, but it's a US-centric answer, because most of the rest of the world runs Android (Android has a 70.69% market share worldwide).
So Google has a really valid plan there.
Google claims their target is the "next billion people".
Also iPhones are very expensive, just relatively less expensive in the US (due to wages, low taxes, less intermediaries, etc).
Even a poor US citizen is often some sort of rich citizen in other parts of the world.
Of course, there are exceptions, for example, Kim Jong Un uses iPhone and MacBook Pro.
maybe use it to have a controlled product in the market to test Android? I had one Google Pixel 8 and couldn't regret more. It broke (my mistake) so I'm already free of it.
> Most people...
You know what they say about making up statistics...
Design looks almost like iPhone. Seems like the design patents have expired.
The only thing that would make a new phone interesting is Linux support.
Otherwise email works, the web works, mms works, and the camera, screen, and RAM, on phones ten years ago was already way more than you need.
The phone specific software barely justifies maintaining a phone (and doesn't for me so I don't even own a modern smartphone.) There's certainly nothing to justify upgrading it.
Picture taking and video recording have gotten unbelievably better over the past decade. They were not remotely sufficient for many use cases ten years ago and even now there's still plenty of room left for improvement.
Not all of us care. I barely use the camera on my phone.
Right, but obviously it's something that plenty of people do care about, and is a big driver of keeping me on the upgrade cycle.
And "there is a big difference but not everyone cares about it" is quite different from "there isn't a big difference". The latter is clearly false.
idk I was happy with whatever the iPhone 3gs did.
Yeah there's some really amazing stuff the new phone can do but I honestly don't care. If I need a piece of correctly specked camera equipment I'd probably buy a dedicated device with proper cooling and a removable memory card.
Still using my pixel 4a. I refuse to discontinue a perfectly good phone just because the manufacturer decides it's not supported anymore. Hopefully the EU does something about planned obsolesce one day.
EU actually did that:
> These regulations will empower independent repairers and end-users by ensuring access to spare parts and to the information necessary to repair for at least 7 years after the end of the distribution of a product in the market. Additionally, manufacturers will have to make compatible software updates available for at least 5 years.
https://repair.eu/news/new-eu-rules-smartphones-and-tablets-...
That's definitely a good step but sadly compared to PCs still the stone ages. I want to use my phone with the OS I choose. Sadly the proprietary driver BLOBs make that unnecessarily hard or sometimes impossible.
You're using a device that hasn't received security updates in a year to stick it to Google?
LineageOS for the 4a was last updated on 8/8/24:
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/
https://download.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/builds
I don't do it "to stick it" to anyone. I am just not willing to spend 500$+ since my current hardware is perfectly fine and does what I want. Saving money and avoiding unnecessary e-waste is more important to me.
Would you pay for continued software support? IIRC Windows upgrades were $100-200 back in the day.
More helpful answer: I think Graphene OS still has security updates for your model (assuming Google doesn't?)
I don't have to do this on my laptop. I have 10 and 15 year old laptops that I can run the latest version of Linux straight from kernel.org on for free.
The Android running on your phone is not FOSS. If someone wants to write free software that runs on your phone they totally can (and do, check out Graphene).
To an extend yes but it's unnecessarily hard to do so. If we were at a point where is was as easy to develop foss OS/Software for mobile devices I wouldn't complain. Sadly the proprietary nature of mobile phones (mostly drivers) doesn't allow that.
> The only thing that would make a new phone interesting is Linux support.
Looks like you may be interested in Pinephone or Librem 5.