I broke my phone and bought a cheap burner phone, it was 20 dollars and honestly I'm not sure I'll ever buy a nice phone again. It's 720/1gig of RAM but it's only a mild annoyance, it's just as good as my old expensive one.

Anyway it came preinstalled with FB and I'm wondering now if, even though I deactivated it, it spies.

That's for sure why the phone was for sale at that price, it's subsidized with lots of bloat ware

Vote with your wallet and buy pixels or Apple phones.

The problem is no one except Samsung makes any decent tablets, and even Samsung is hardly decent - crap cameras, no NFC... and the Apple ecosystem is a walled garden.

Pick your poison I guess. I’d rather have security than freedom when it comes to a cell phone. I’d also rather Apple decide what the wall looks like than Verizon.

Microsoft, Asus and Huawei also do nice tablets.

Microsoft tablets are far from “nice”. They run Windows with all of the bloat that entails.

This isn’t meant to be an anti-MS screed. I would say the same if Apple released a “Mac tablet”. Windows is perfectly fine as a PC operating system and I use it everyday and have been developing on and for Windows my entire career. But, as a tablet operating system - No.

It’s only been within the last couple of years that I’ve been deploying to Linux and it’s still .Net Core.

Pixels are not so easy to buy for some reason (outside of the US), only through the web site and some stores.

I'm also voting with my wallet against Apple taking out the headphone jack.

I bought my current Pixel by walking into a nearby store the night after my previous phone bricked itself in my hotel room, and simply picking the box up and walking to the register. Getting them to sell me just a phone, and not insurance, maintenance, service, style advice, or a fitness plan took about ten minutes, but buying the phone was easy.

Persuading Google and everybody else relevant that this was not a SIM hijack (new phone, same number, old phone was totally bricked so couldn't help, other non-work PCs were hours away) was not easy but I wouldn't want it to be.

I wanted to buy a Japanese Pixel 4 because of the local train access, but it was so ridiculously expensive. In the USA there are constantly discounts allowing you to buy the pixels for a couple hundred dollars below retail price.

In Japan and other places of the world the whole thing is over a hundred bucks more expensive than retail. Over a 1000 dollars for a phone?

I'd rather buy an iPhone then. I ended up getting a second hand iPhone 8 for $250 as second device instead. Most of it better than most previous year android flagships and dirt cheap with 97% battery capacity.

I'm trying really hard to keep my "freedom" on android devices, but what the actual f. The only reasonably priced flagship CPU devices are from Xiaomi.

Most companies either don't have the ability to unlock the bootloader anymore or brick some random thing of the device or software if you do. Yeah sure the pixel does that and has good source code support, but over 1000 USD for 128 GB? Apple devices have better value for money and you won't have to play lottery about whether the next two android updates will actually work properly.

What's the price of a Pixel 3A in your part of the world?

I got one after having iPhones since the Nexus 3 (I think), and I'm quite happy with it. It cost me 300 euro, and it feels like it can handle everything I need. I specifically went for the Pixel 3A because leaving the Apple ecosystem I wanted the alternative that is most likely to be stable, updated, and not filled with crapware. so far I have no complaints, and I even prefer much of this new phone over my previous iPhones (iPhone 7, iPhone 5S before that).

I only buy Apple products, because of their durability. One of my friends are still using an iphone 6s, he did not even needed to change the battery

Hey, I have a completely functional, regularly used Samsung Galaxy S5 (IMO the last good phone Samsung made, and I currently run an S9 as my daily phone, and my partner has an S10).

Anecdata is weird when it comes to mobile devices. It seems that some phones are really not created equal to others in the same production run. I presume it's sort of like processor binning, but not actually tested in the factory. Every now and then a customer gets a phone that performs perfectly, and the battery lasts for over a decade (obviously with recharging!) ;-)

I agree on personal experience varies wildly.

I also bought an iphone 7 three years ago and it was working fine with 85% battery life, before I broke the screen and replaced it.

Before phone, I was using Samsung phones exclusively, S4, Note 4 etc, they all died within two years.

You realize that the Pixel 2,3 and 4 also don’t have headphone jacks....

It didn't sound like he uses Pixels.

He mentioned buying a Pixel but didn’t because of the difficulty in buying one. One of his primary complaints against an iPhone was about it not having a headphone jack.

Newer Pixels have the same issue as iPhones that you mentioned (Jack)

Many, but not all. Half of Europe is missing, for example.

Also missing is all of the American continent other than North America and Brazil. And selecting Brazil, there's only the Nest Mini and the Chromecast, and nothing else.

Sorry I did not go through the purchase process, it seems you cannot ship phones outside of the country where it is available.

And all of Africa.

Pick the Netherlands, for example. No way to buy any (smart)phone.

On the one hand I agree, on the other why should Google have a monopoly on adding bloatware to my phone. Might as well go the whole nine yards and pre patch the unremovable chrome with an ask toolbar.

It's a bit easier to remove Chrome from a Pixel than it is to remove Safari from an iPhone!

At least can you disable facebook, Bixby sadly not..