It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very little to do with the hardware and should not fundamentally be a reason to upgrade to this phone.
There is so much time, effort, and physical waste that is generated by slightly redesigning phones every year purely for the sake of making sales (as opposed to meaningful improvement upon the existing design or introduction of a new hardware feature). Think not only of people upgrading for the sake of it, but all of the cases, screen protectors, and other assorted accessories cast in plastic for previous models that are garbage now.
It would be nice if we could just space these things out to 5 years or so now, because that's probably how long it takes for anything to change enough to justify a new model.
It's funny because if they did not release a new phone every year, the old phones would be useful for longer. I recently had to replace my iPhone 7s plus because it was getting so slow I sometimes could not get the camera to open as it loaded the system down too much. This was despite the fact that the system said my battery was not degraded (it had been replaced with Apple Care a couple of times).
Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl.
And faster phones are nice, but I think it is worth considering how valuable that really is to us as users and a society, especially if the process involves making loads and loads of ewaste and consuming tons of new resources, and all the emissions their mining and transport involves, when we could simply keep our software slim and our old devices functional.
And the big companies will never do this. Do we need to force them to allow open software to run on these devices, so that clean builds can be patched and maintained when the company over bloats them or abandons them?
I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow.
Flash storage doesn't last forever, and it's got a whole gradient of failure and wear experiences.
> I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow.
Too bad no flagship phones have removable storage anymore, because that would be a really easy fix to this problem.
If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years.
And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.
With cloud backup... this isn't as defensible as it used to be.
Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM.
Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined whenever there's an issue.
Apple/Google sell cloud storage subscriptions.
Aka the cockroach phone.
That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans.
And integrated batteries and flash memory happen to be a convenient "Oh well, we can't possibly design it any other way" excuse.
That's honestly not a good user experience. Having to buy a new sd card routinely, and better hope you system can detect impending as card failures accurately.
Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that.
They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
I think most people don't realize how slow SD cards are compared to conventional flash, too. When you put apps on a SD card on Android, it's always been dog slow. And you're at the mercy of the manufacturer to put a reasonably high-speed interface on it.
There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large and create inefficiencies in the phone shell (even M.2 2230, when you take into account the mounting mechanism), and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
> I think most people don't realize how slow SD cards are compared to conventional flash, too. When you put apps on a SD card on Android, it's always been dog slow. And you're at the mercy of the manufacturer to put a reasonably high-speed interface on it.
It's been a long, long time since I couldn't fit all the apps I wanted on the phone storage. My SD card is mainly for multimedia files, and it's plenty fast for that purpose.
The only performance limit I've hit in recent times was because it was exFAT, not because it was an SD card.
> There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large
Ignoring SD Express as a failure to launch, UHS SD cards can be plenty fast if they're designed to be. A hundred megabytes per second is not a significant bottleneck if individual IO operations are fast and it can do many of them.
Also there was that XFMEXPRESS form factor if manufacturers wanted to put an SSD socket into a phone. "card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm."
> and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
That's the real killer incentive, that you can charge huge amounts per terabyte and also force people to buy higher-end phones just to get the ability to buy more storage.
As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.
> Ignoring SD Express as a failure to launch, UHS SD cards can be plenty fast if they're designed to be. A hundred megabytes per second is not a significant bottleneck if individual IO operations are fast and it can do many of them.
As mentioned, random I/O tends to fail, but the other tradeoff here is that fast microSD card slots tend to get extremely hot. Not necessarily "failure" hot (stuff like the ROG had issues from other parts), but uncomfortable to hold, depending on where the thing is going to go.
> As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.
The thing is, price anchoring is a thing, and people are going to look at a phone that costs $400 and needs a $40 Extra Thing and a $500 phone and go "the latter is easier".
> The thing is, price anchoring is a thing, and people are going to look at a phone that costs $400 and needs a $40 Extra Thing and a $500 phone and go "the latter is easier".
Oh definitely. I would too. I dream of the price being only $200/TB.
The biggest storage upgrade for a normal iPhone is +384GB for $300 (Oof). If you upgrade to the Max model you can get +768GB for $400.
A Galaxy S23 can get +128GB for $60, a Galaxy S23+ can get +256GB for $120, and a Galaxy S23 Ultra can get +768GB for $420.
A Pixel 8 can get +128GB for $60, and a Pixel 8 Pro can get +896GB for $400.
If you include the price increase of better base models, to get access to bigger options, then $700/TB is a good ballpark figure.
I think this pricing is a little bit better than when I last looked, but it's still very bad.
The availability of >512GB is growing but still flaky and usually requires extra expensive base models. While in comparison microsd has had cheap 1TB for a good while, and 1.5TB for $150 becomes available later this month.
It doesn't have to be that way. Its entirely feasible to make a microsd card with a better controller and some ram buffer for fast wear leveling. The best we see today is some mild tuning for IO in A1 and A2 cards.
You have to remember that a current microsd cards is just a general purpose micro-controller and some (probably SPI) flash in a plastic case.
After working wireless retail in the early '00s, I will always choose a phone with a high IP rating. Other scenarios I've seen - Phone pushed into sink without realizing while doing dishes and walking away for an hour long phone call, parked convertible with phone in the cupholder, boob sweat, working in a greenhouse going in and out of air conditioning, leaving on a picnic table overnight while camping, water bottle leaking in purse, etc. Also there's utility in feeling confident the phone can survive if you need to wash syrup, baby food, sticky bar residue, etc off it.
Funny you say this when I was just in a pretty bad rainstorm tonight and got absolutely soaked. I've lost a couple of portable devices getting drenched like that in the past but this time it was just the USB-C port wouldn't charge for an hour while it dried out.
So yeah I would have needed a new phone tomorrow if it wasn't for my phone being waterproof. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I've lost many things from water damage. So many people used to complain about Apple denying warranty claims from water damage from the device just being in a humid area for a long time, now that just doesn't happen.
my old Samsung Galaxy s2 died when tripping around Australia, just by being in the car overnight (where I was sleeping too). Apparently enough humidity that in the morning it was dead, board fried up
I have, phone in the pocket of my rainjacket, got caught in a serious downpour, water got into the pocket and because it was a rain jacket stayed there to the point it was sodden.
Screen on the phone died.
I see the point of waterproofing phones after that.
> Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.
This is the main use case, but it's not to be dismissed considering this is a very common cause of phone failure. If this doubles the lifespan of your phone then it effectively ~halves the cost. Which is a big deal when phones are as expensive as they are.
People routinely ruined phones via submersion or splashed water. I drowned a phone in my pocket while biking in a rainstorm as recently as 2018. You never hear about this anymore.
Nothing is truly waterproof, but IP55 is really weaksauce by modern standards. Modern flagships are IP67 or even IP68.
I live in an area where's it very humid and rains a lot. My phones get wet, a lot, just due to nature. I had one die after I got caught in a massive squall line at an outdoor concert on what was supposed to be a sunny day.
They do, but they were also doing it before the phones were routinely designed to be waterproof, and I don't recall an epidemic of water-related phone-killing incidents.
you don't mind so much when it is a 50$ phone, a bit more on a 1100$ one. Not that I understand why anyone would pay more than 250$ in a smartphone really.
Well since even the average Android phone’s selling price is $285 the last time I checked, maybe it says more about your lack of insight than anything else?
I don't know, I have had company issued high end phones and apart from better camera quality[1] these devices weren't doing things significantly better than my personal 240$ smartphone.
Also, generally people spend an awful lot of money on things out of vanity and social pressure, regardless of their needs and if it is a good decision. Look at new cars prices and how most vehicles purchases are usually overkill for everyone. The most sold car in the US are the Ford F series , Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram trucks before a number of high end SUV. Sure people are free to buy whatever they want but a Honda Fit would be enough for large majority of them and be a smarter financial decision[2]. They mostly do it because they can, not because they need.
[1] which has become fairly decent for anyone accross all ranges in the last few years.
[2] I am not sure it is still sold in the US but I could have chosen another example of a smaller and more affordable vehicle.
Yes I’m sure 60% of Americans care about “social pressure” enough to buy a different phone. Trust me, my 80 year old mother doesn’t care about what TikTok influencers think.
Low end Android phones just plain suck when it comes to performance and battery life. Not to mention they rarely get operating system updates.
If you did force me to buy an Android phone, it would be the Pixel.
Actually she does. Once she saw that an old computer running an old version of Windows was no longer going to get updates, she stopped using it. She would be just as cautious about a phone that didn’t get updates
> That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans.
I like your idea but in the US at least most mobile carriers actually don't encourage yearly upgrades as they force you into a multiyear contract for your phone to get "the best deal". In fact, currently both verizon and AT&T have 30+ month payment plans for phones so you're locked into at least 2.5 years. consequently, most people hold on to their phone for 3 years now.
IDK, I've never had a RPi corrupt an SD card to my knowledge. Also, there are now SD cards optimized for the load patterns similar to that of an OS.
There's unfortunately slightly different issue here: if the phone vendor puts the OS on an user-replaceable SD card, then the UX quality and reliability of the device depends on the SD card vendor, which is a bad position to be in, given how much fraud is happening in this space.
I've never had an RPi corrupt an SD card, but I had one (running pi-hole) wear out a card over the course of about six months. It was pretty easy to get everything back up and running (it needed a new card with the most recent version of the default OS package), and I was able to resolve the situation long-term by using log2ram to space out writes to the SD card (at the risk of losing a day's worth of logs).
Phones could ship with a good SD card which will get the vast majority of consumers to end-of-useful-life for their device. At that point if a user replaces it with crap, it's kind of on them. Similar to how cell phone chargers are now.
Most of that is because the OS defaults write about 20 times more crap than anyone needs, and devs consistently do not care about preserving write cycles. There's still a culture of "Beautiful code is everything, hardware is disposable and meant to be upgraded".
An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap.
Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS.
But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.
I have a love/hate relationship with Sony Xperia phones, they look and feel nice, have a 3.5mm and a microSD slot.
That said, unlike Pixels and OnePlus once the bootloader is unlocked you lose functionality and it's not relockable. It also almost always has some software quirks and I most recently found out that the Xperia 5 I've been eyeing will after 2-3 years of use randomly break and show vertical green or pink lines.
There you have another "well" manufactured phone with external storage that becomes almost unusable faster than the storage degrades without the user being responsible for it.
I have an obsolete (with Lineage OS installed) Samsung smartphone with an SD-card. I use it for podcasts and audio books, as it has a jack, and I have a nice non-Bluetooth headphones that I wear most of the time of that listening time. I like to think my internal storage isn’t wearing over and over again, but the SD card, which I can super easily replace any time. Plus, I can replace it with something huge (like extra 128 GB or even more, what is supported) for very cheap. I cannot add extra 128 GB of storage to my iPhone, even if I’m willing to pay the premium. I have just one way: to sell my unit and buy another with more storage.
Ran a rpi for well > 1yr running Ubuntu server and 3cx off the SD card. Longest uptime was like 90+ days only dropped because my town regularly has power outages. Same card had been in use for a good year prior on another rpi doing a different function. Hasn't missed a beat. SanDisk gold colored one. It's now in another rpi...
Microsd's used to suck(had plenty fail years ago) but it seems like they have gotten pretty good these days.
should just use m.2 2230 nvme. should be user replacable, its okay if it needs to be disassembled and its a 30 minute job, but that would solve a whole lot.
SD Express is PCIe and much smaller, but a full sized SD card still isn’t small. Supposedly microSD Express exists but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen it…
Aren't the speed constraints on SD cards due to the controllerless single flash chip design rather than the connector format? Unless you also shoved an ssd controller on the SD Express card I can't see it being much of an improvement.
I just don't buy flagship phones, you can get midrange stuff with removable micro sd, oled, >60hz screen etc. Sure the CPU isn't as fast but unless you're playing games it makes almost no difference.
Interesting, finally I have an idea of why my phones have always gotten slower over time. Is there a way to measure error rates and/or average storage latency on my (Android) phone somehow?
eMMC usually has csd and ext_csd registers that tells information regarding wear level and such. It's easy to access these from Linux, but not sure how we would do it on Android.
You can build/install mmc-utils on the device (even from Google's repo,[1] if outdated) but can't access the storage device paths without root. If you're on a custom ROM, the mmc command might even be part of it.
Don't be surprised if your latest 'update' is a 'downdate' in disguise. IE it's purposely designed to go slower when the maker has decided that it's time for you to upgrade your device.
I know there have been cases where companies seem to intentionally slow down old phones to encourage new sales, but it doesn't really even require an "evil" motive. By releasing new hardware yearly, they are dramatically increasing their workload by having to support every device. On top of that, there's the perverse incentive that spending the money to release timely, high-quality updates to previous-generation devices will actually have a negative impact on their bottom line by reducing new sales.
I think that a new phone release should just be warranted. The trigger should be "we made significant improvements that couldn't be applied in software to the old device" instead of "it's October"
Having a cadence helps improve quality by standardization and repetition. It’s just like with agile and scrum, the cadence improves quality, and releasing often reduces risks by making smaller changes.
>> It’s just like with agile and scrum, the cadence improves quality
In my experience of years working in agile and scrum methodologies all cadence does is it makes developers release unfinished code to tick boxes and show that they are productive every sprint.
But it's silly to imply that there would be a new release every October even if they hadn't designed a new phone and prepared it for mass manufacture. What determines whether each release is "warranted" is, roughly, whether people buy the new one.
An improved camera can't be something applied in software, a faster chip can't be applied in software. So by your own standard every version is warranted.
"significant" is the key word here. I'd be hard pressed to think of a generational release of an existing phone line in the last 5 years that I would describe as a "significant" improvement.
The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean nothing to make them sound like a dramatic improvement despite the fact that we've reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of diminishing returns on the user experience for smartphones in their current form. More megapixels don't matter anymore, CPUs are hardly a limiting factor and yearly gains on their performance are marginal at best, and we have more than enough RAM for pretty much all use cases.
My point is that if these companies insist on re-releasing the same phone every time, maybe they could space it out a little.
For me, the addition of satelite SOS introduced on iPhone 14 is a game changer. I do enough out of cell range activity that I carry a SPOT device.
The ability for one more device (and pricy subscription) to be eaten by my phone is fantastic.
For others it might be onboard ai capabilities.
Each incremental hardware update to an iPhone tips the utility scales for someone, and is a completely ignorable change for others. Some people don’t care a bit that the new iPhone has a 2k nit brightness, for others, that is the feature they’ve been waiting for to upgrade.
I don’t pay attention to androids much, but it is pretty rare for iPhone full number bumps not to have a hardware feature that is new.
This is not a replacement for a SPOT device. It's a backup. You might need to move around reportedly, point it very carefully to find a satellite, coverage isn't great, even minimal tree cover is a problem, etc. Plenty of cases where a SPOT device would be a life saver and where this would not.
I too would like to ditch mine. But I'd rather be alive in a real emergency than die because I broke my leg and can't walk around in a circle pointing the phone right.
My SPOT has a pretty significant failure rate at getting tracking messages out (~20% of my tracking dots are unsuccessful), and has no feedback mechanism to indicate whether it was successfully sent. Unless emergency messages are sent using a different technique than tracking messages I’m not sure I trust the spot much either.
Just because you don't value the type of improvements doesn't mean there aren't improvements. It just means you probably don't need to upgrade this year.
And yet compare this years phone to a phone 5 years old. There is a large different. It just so happens that the yearly increase isn't seen as "significant" to you.
When you say "seen as", are you trying to imply that they're wrong? Because what you said can be true without them being wrong at all.
It makes perfect sense that five non-significant changes can add up to a significant change.
So the suggestion would be 1 or 2 releases instead, after more of the changes build up, instead of 5 releases.
Personally I think yearly is fine for manufacturers that only have a couple models. But they need to actually support things for a reasonable lifetime, and should be mocked for having frequent releases if they don't have a good support lifetime.
My last three phone upgrades have been decidedly 'meh', and I only upgrade every 2-3 years. There have been some marginal improvements in battery life and performance, and some software niceties; but those get counteracted by bloat, regressions, and UX churn. Replacable battery and storage becoming less common is categorically worse for users.
A phone with upgradable parts and minimal bloat would be better than any recent phone I've had, but it would also be less profitable for Google so obviously they will avoid that as much as possible.
Honestly, one of my favorite phones was the Motorola (what's now) Power.
Middling specs. Huge battery.
I'm still on a Pixel 4a 5G now, because I haven't seen any reason to upgrade.
But I'm a "I want to be able to accidentally run over my phone with a car, shrug, and go get another one" type of person. (Despite the fact I've never actually cracked a screen...)
I still use a Motorola G(whatever, honestly can't remember) Power. Works fine, doesn't lag. The camera is nothing to write home about but I have a DSLR for good pictures and all my phone pictures are crap due to a hand tremor that stabilization can't accomodate for anyway.
Battery lasts forever and a day and there's never been a situation where I've felt prevented or limited by the phone.
I hold no love for Apple but the phone I used the longest was my iPhone 3GS. I think 5 years or so but only because it was jailbroken. (Thanks saurik!) Otherwise it would have been half as useful (or secure since I got fixes to exploits faster than Apple made then).
The initial SailfishOS phone from Jolla was supported for 7+ years and was also a really nice experience.
Indeed so: I do replace mine every year because each generation has a successively better camera, and I value being able to take better pictures with the device I have available [1] more than I value the incremental cost to me of selling the old one and buying a new one each year (and iPhones hold their value very well!)
By the requests of the luddites here, I should not be able to do better than a 5 year old camera to appease them.
[1]: I also have a DSLR for special occasions, but I do not carry that round with me generally...
People have been saying this literally since the release of the pentium and probably earlier. From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this(usually complaining about developers using C++ instead of assembly).
Even just on the iphone the improvements in software have been dramatic over the past 10 years. Go install one of the early versions of ios on the simulator some time to see how far we've come.
> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s
I feel compelled to bring up this tweet from John Carmack I just saw a few hours ago. The most popular editor on the planet feels laggier than stuff Borland made in the 90s, on hardware probably a thousand times as fast. I don't know how anyone can say software is great with a straight face.
We have supercomputers in our pockets and on the slightly aged phone my dad refuses to upgrade from four years ago many apps lag. They display like 5 widgets or 20 rows of items at any given time
Turbo C++ was my first IDE(a birthday present when I was a kid) and I will always be grateful of it for triggering my love of programming but to say that is even in the same category as a modern IDE is a huge stretch. Of course modern stuff is laggier for most IDE's as it's doing real time analysis on your code as you type. If you want to compare it with a Borland IDE from the 90s open up notepad and start typing.
The editor did nothing more than notepad does today and the IDE at least back when I was using it was basically just a compiler, debugger with basic inspection window and stepping and a make system. It wasn't doing realtime formatting of your code, inspection for errors, referencing to other parts of code, autocompletion, syntax highlighting, etc.
As someone that used all their products from MS-DOS, through Windows 3.x days up to switching to Visual C++ 6.0, I clearly remeber code completion, syntax highlighting and macros, three features that Notepad isn't capable of.
As easily proven, by reading the manuals available in Bitsavers.
Yeah looks like you're right about at least the syntax highlighting and macros, I can't find any reference to Borland doing code completion back then and what I did find was people from much later complaining that it'd take up to 5 seconds to return suggestions, I used it around 4.5 and really don't remember any of those features though. I guess it was almost 30 years ago now though and I was mostly just interested in making the asteroids do weird things.
So replace Notepad with Notepad++ in my previous comments. There are definitely fast editors that do the same thing as Borland editors did back then the ones like VSC do a whole lot more and support a whole lot more.
It isn't. The users are just conditioned to shut up. Technology universally sucks, but it's magic, and it's all a supplier-driven market with high natural barriers to entry - meaning vendors don't give a flying fuck about what the users think, the users are to buy what they're given and be happy about it - so everyone just accepts it's how it's supposed to be, and adjusts their lives to work around tech being shit.
I don't know, Microsoft Word 2.0 started up on a high-end machine of its time faster than Google Docs with its stupid progress bars.
My Tesla phone key takes 15+ seconds to connect bluetooth and unlock the car, making me look like a goddamn idiot while I keep yanking the car handle while bystanders stare at me as if I'm a car thief.
This stuff should take <0.01s in 2023 by Moore's Law. Computers should work imperceptibly fast by now for the same high-level tasks.
Moore’s law has never been about speed - and serial speed has been on a very slow increase rate year-after-year for more than a decade now. The current Microsoft Word can do a million times more things than 2.0.
> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this.
Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The modern C++ one does crash, often.
Much like with old IDEs old DAWs did a lot less. If you truely prefer it why aren't you still running Cubase on an old Atari or emulator?
Besides that there is the whole rose tinted glasses thing. My early experiences getting FreeBSD and Slackware running on my computers, and setting up X for example were something I'd never trade and taught me a lot about debugging systems, configs, etc. But that whole process was objectively worse than today.
both can be true. software has become objectively more abominable each passing year. spyware is being normalized, locking down and taking away control from users is being spoonfed to hipster users as "opinionated" and "curated". Have you taken a look at the chromium codebase lately? 1.5GB of compressed (lzma) "code". W T F. Just look 10-15 years ago and look at khtml, look at webkit a few years after the fork, then look at this shit? we still ordered crap from amazon back then. We still had forms to submit to HN or similar. Sure, we didnt have thin webgl wrappers, webusb, webmidi, web-wipe-my-ass updates to our japanese toilets. The amount of direct crap being put into almost everything is beyond measure
All those things you're complaining about existed in the past in the form of applets, flash scripts, and activex. They were way worse than a bunch of web* standards.
As for curated/opinionated, most people don't want to be power users. Most people never did it was just in the 90s you had little choice. If you want to be a power user today the options are still there.
applets were largely unused and flash was mostly used for ads, neither of which were even remotely as huge and gross as the chromium codebase.
nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.
The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.
And my work x86 Thinkpad fan rarely spins up and when it does it's way quieter than my Intel MBP ever was. Also gets 8 hours battery life web browsing which is good enough.
My former work 16 inch MacBook Pro could easily make it through a day and half of decently heavy work and conference calls doing presentations over Chime (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked) on battery when on site at a customer. Some of their team couldn’t make it.
My personal MacBook Air (M2) can make it 16+ hours with a relative light workload and there is no fan.
Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?
My M1 Macbook Air was lucky to make it 6 hours with Docker running in the background. If I was editing text I could get maybe 10-12 hours. For my money, there are lots of machines that would run cooler and more efficiently.
> Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?
Because your workload isn't compatible with MacOS, and Apple makes no effort to remedy it at a software-level? Docker should not be more energy efficient on Windows than it is on Mac... and that's really just the tip of the incompatibility iceberg. Unless your workload is explicitly compatible with ARM, it probably Just Works better on x86.
It hovered around 40c, about the same as my Macbook Air. Fans kicked on at 45c, so idling was silent (but working wasn't).
The real killer-app for me was just switching to Linux as my base OS. I can leave containers idling while watching YouTube at a cool 27c internally. I'm using a 6-7 year old T460s, but honestly I feel like I could get away with even weaker hardware if I wanted. A Macbook Air running Linux might be a candidate if I didn't need to wait for basic functionality to get reverse-engineered. As-is though, you can count me among the people who doesn't quite need an upgrade yet.
How real are the security risks? My wife is using Oneplus 5t about 6 years old. It doesn't feel slow, cam may not be greatest, but pretty good. Battery life is one day with mild usage. It is stuck on Android 10, but play services and apps are updated.
This how it works or most people in the world. They get a phone and they change it only when they are forced to (hardware failure, some app they absolutely need stops working etc.). The group of people changing phones because they are no longer supported with security fixes is very small.
This is beyond stupid how fucked up the phone market is. I'm still using my 2008 laptop with newest LTS (x)Ubuntu, but my 2018 Android phone lost official support in 2020... Thanks to that, now I have iPhone (longer support) and Fairphone 5 (I like how they try to upstream everything for this phone and promise really long support).
About your question:
Should be fine. As long as browser is up-to-date, she doesn't connect to unknown WiFi networks/Bluetooth devices and she is not targeted. The easiest security fix is to not have anything worth anything on the phone :D
I have the same phone, and the main culprit is the connectors. The audio jack connector has gone a few years ago, now the USB-C is getting worse - I need to sometimes wiggle the cable to connect the charger. If I use a headphone then the smallest motion might disconnect it. This is the only reason why I'm considering getting a new phone - battery is still around 75% capacity (after 6 years of daily use!), otherwise still performant enough, runs any apps I use without a problem.
> And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl.
I mean, it is a bit unfair against Apple - some of the reason behind the OS getting more heavyweight is actually backporting new features in 7 year’s distance, many which actually has dedicated hardware in case of the more modern lineup.
Also, there is a big aspect which is independent of Apple: every app is getting more and more heavy, the same phone now has to open a 500MB facebook app, not a 70MB one (just random numbers).
Also, the whole “yearly replacement” thing is just.. not an actual thing. People on average change their phones every 3 years, where the accumulated small improvements do add up. But everyone is at a different point in the cycle, so it absolutely makes sense. Add to it how apple devices hold their value to an insane degree, often living 2nd-3rd lives, and one would be really hard-pressed to actually pinpoint apple as a threat against our planet - compared to cheap androids that are barely good for a single year due to instantly obsolete software, has no resale value whatsoever, and are absolutely single-use.
I am not a proponent of extreme capitalism/libertarianism, but I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.
If Apple just let people hang out on the last nicely-working version of iOS, where their camera still opens fast, then that’d be fine. But they don’t. They bully you into always being on the latest
Also, I remember a while back they did a specific optimised speed-up release of iOS with barely any new features and it _really_ worked. My iPhone 6S went from being basically garbage I was going to replace to like a brand new phone.
They can do it if they want to. It’s what’s needed now. My iPhone 12 Pro has started to feel super slow since I got iOS 17. I have a new battery. Even texting feels painfully slow. There’s no excuse for this. It’s either deliberate and bad, or lazy and bad. Either way it’s bad.
I also have an iPhone 12 Pro and it’s just as snappy as ever on iOS 17.
Sounds like you might have some buggy / bad app interactions going on? There’s really no reason for a 12 Pro to be slow at this point even if the OS was getting “heavier.” The 12 Pros have 6GB of RAM, which is now pretty standard across the iPhone lineup even years later. And the A14 SoC in the 12 Pro is effectively the same tech as the M1 processors that are still rock-solid at running full blown macOS, albeit with fewer cores running at somewhat lower clocks.
I can’t really think of much reason for you to be having a slow experience aside from the usual bugs that can accompany any new major release, and usually get ironed out over the course of a month or two.
FWIW you also don’t have to update. Of course they bully you to update. You don’t have to.
Curiously, I noticed people here mention that camera on older iPhones is taking ages to open. I'm on iPhone7, battery never replaced ("battery health: significantly degraded" as reported by iOS), so goes from 100% to 10% in about 12 hrs with "normal" use. However, camera opens just fine.
It’s just temporary - after you install a new update, every cache has to be regenerated in the background, so for a few days/week it will have a shitton of background tasks running.
Also, ios 17 likely is a bit buggy - I’m on 17.1 beta with a 12 pro max and I can say that the performance is back to how it used to be.
The consequence of their upgrade was a slow down. But they didn’t slow it down just because they could. It was to prevent a phone with an old shitty battery to shut down in the middle of a task when there was still battery left. Better a slow down than just no phone at all.
And yes they didn’t communicate it, that’s why they got sued. But this problem was real.
But if they were genuinely just concerned about battery health, and not about their sales numbers, then why do the throttling covertly? Why not tell the user that throttling was happening, that it was related to power issues, and that they should consider a replacement battery?
If they wanted a new sale, why not do nothing and let the phones reboot? Why only target individual handsets with degraded batteries? Why bring the phone back to full speed when the battery was changed? Why does the feature still exist?
The only thing that has changed is they now tell you if it’s happening.
Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern, and not just a fabricated excuse... it's better for Apple's reputation for old phones to be slow than to be flaky.
With the former, people were assuming that Apple's shiny new OS required state-of-the-art hardware to run smoothly. It just appeared as if technology was advancing rapidly, and one had to buy the latest iPhone every year or two to keep up.
With the latter, there would be noone to blame but Apple, and they would develop a reputation for unreliable hardware, like Samsung or worse.
> Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern
They still are. As a battery ages the internal resistance increases. This leads to brown-outs under high current. This isn’t unique to Apple, it’s just how batteries work.
This issue would still have drastically different framing if the given reason was true and users had the freedom to easily replace batteries in old devices, as well as OS-level warning pop-ups which let the user know that it's time to replace a battery and that their phone will be slower until they do.
If it was true? All the evidence supports it. My wife’s phone was throttled and mine wasn’t. Replacing degraded batteries brought devices back to full speed. How can you draw any other conclusions?
The only thing they have changed is that they now have the OS level pop ups, the feature still exists.
It's quite easy to draw the conclusion that other alternatives were considered such as an easily-replaced battery, but Apple's management decided on a course of action which was plausible enough to be accepted without much further questioning, and wouldn't give the user back any freedoms, and would ultimately lead to more phone sales.
I don’t subscribe to that at all. I see other manufacturers dropping support for their phones after one or two years and I see apple supporting them for a long time. They want to sell services and they want you to have a working phone to use them.
Apple get phone sales from me because of this stance.
This is not Reddit, you do not need to prefix comments with personal attacks. Nor is karma farmed here by insinuating that you are poor, confused about your gender, or had abusive parents.
If by "bubble" you mean my family, nobody but the eight year old has seen a new phone since before the first COVID lockdowns. And the phones that my children use were are purchased with money they earned themselves - including the eight year old. He decided at six that he wants a phone, and saved for two years to buy one - not a grain of which was aquired through his parents.
I don't see that as a personal attack. It is factual. No teenager - except the richest ones - can afford buying a new smartphone every year, neither do their parents.
And most of those that can afford it would still want to buy other things instead when they already have one, which means only the richest of the richest ones really do that.
The "attack" was deciding that I live on a bubble of rich parents. In fact, my own mother wouldn't be hungry during dinner many evenings while we were growing up... only years later did I realize why.
I'm 15 and I don't even want a phone, this thing is a goddamn headache, portable little advertisement device hurdling me with ads even when I run GrapheneOS and it depresses me mine (pixel 5a) is the last that will ever be made with a headphone jack, which I literally rely on, earbuds don't need a battery. I use it because it's what I can get and I didn't make my financial decision on it.
He got the phone at eight, but in general I agree with you.
As a father, I see the phone as an opportunity to teach limits from an early age. And wow, does he test those limits! In retrospect, it is better that him and I are going through this testing phase at eight, rather than in the rebellious teenage years.
He walks smaller dogs and sells drinks that he makes at the football field near the house. The neighbour lets him pick lemons to sweeten the drinks. He worked for two years to buy the absolute least expensive phone available. I did buy him a case as a gift for achieving his goal, though: $3 on Aliexpress.
I should mention that he also managed to buy two goldfish during this time - also with his own money. So he learned very well to budget, and that each thing that he buys along the way pushed back his goal.
That article is from 2018. 2 Year Contracts were still a thing back then. The contract included a hidden fee that covered the cost of the device spread out over the length of the contract.
That is all gone now. Carriers have post-paid plans where the monthly device cost varies based on device. These are 0% interest loans from the carrier. At the same time, people have started holding their phones longer. Renewal periods when to 30 months, then 36 months.
Some people will never be happy but cellphone customers are never happy.
Why can't people just enjoy our pocket computers with their always on connections?
I worked for a verizon reseller in 2014-2015 and 2 year contracts were not very common by the time I left. 0% loans on 2 year periods were big by then. Functionally I don't think "normal" people really see a big difference.
The mistake was giving the general public pocket computers with always on connections and acting like they wouldn't be stupid with them or turn them into status symbols
An OS update does a lot of writes though. Its downloading a several gig file, unpacking lots of tiny files, shuffling them all around etc. Its probably one of the most disk intensive things a phone will do.
And in fact installing the first big OS update was one of the key points on the Nexus 7 that showcased its incredibly fragile storage. So we've definitely seen this happen in the past specifically with OS updates being the straw that killed the camel's back in flash storage performance.
I've experienced it on devices before as well. Play around flashing different ROMs on Android, eventually each flash keeps getting a little slower and a little slower, and suddenly just copying files directly off USB gets incredibly slow and the device becomes nearly unusable. I've seen it happen on a few different devices.
> Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl.
Realistically what exactly could it be doing more on startup, that would slow it down so much?
I wonder if there’s code that simply intentionally slows it down. Like the Camera app calculating the value of PI for some number of digits before opening up.
There would be a massive financial incentive to do something nefarious like this.
Opening the Camera app on iPhone is one of the most demanding tasks it can possibly do. Doing it and doing it fast means powering up the image sensor and its supporting hardware (ISP, ML hardware, etc.) and immediately terminating all non-essential tasks on the device so it can dedicate it to this.
There would be such an incentive, yes, and even more: set the number of digits to compute as proportional to the age of the model.
But haven't those anecdotes been debunked already? A counter-anecdote is my non-plus iphone 7 with whatever the latest ios it supports (15 something IIRC) that opens the camera as quickly as when it was new. Apart from Apple Maps, which never worked well for some reason, the apps I use don't lag. Google Maps is fine. My motorcycling mapping app (scenic) is fine. Lightroom is fine. Hell, even MS Teams works like it does on newer devices.
But phones are manufactured regardless, so why not let the people who are currently in the market for a new device get something current? The yearly release cycle isn't meant to be kept up with every year, in fact I think that that notion is so hilariously out of touch basically everywhere except the US (and a small international wealthy elite elsewhere) that it would be ridiculed. Remember, the global median per-capita household income is only $2,920 per year. That's not "the poor", that's the median. 99% of the world would never have even considered buying an iPhone 15 or similar after having an iPhone 14, let alone feel pressured to do so.
This is a great point, further evidenced by the fact that past years models remain on sale. Apple still sells iPhone 13 and Google still sells Pixel 6a.
Is it? New generations are not released every year. It takes 5-8 years to show something new. In the middle of it there is facelifting (sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger). But I wouldn't say that one, particular model of car have new version each year.
There is no reason to release flagship phones each year.
I love it when people say "there's no reason to do x" where x is a thing that the world's biggest companies spend billions of dollars doing. There are lots of reasons, you just don't like them.
The car release cycle is pretty much exactly what flagship phones do too. They get a major redesign every few years with incremental improvements in between.
The biggest reason is obvious: if you didn't your competitors would and they'd eat your lunch. Modern mobile devices are only 15 yrs old, they're where PCs were in 1995. I'm already seeing people who used to upgrade every two years switch to 3, and before you know it that will climb to 4, 5, etc. as the tech matures. In 1997 your PC was obsolete after two years, now they're fine a decade later, and phones will get there too.
Because if someone is looking to buy a new phone and they see the pixel is 3 years old while the Samsung is 3 months old and 5% faster, you’re going to buy the Samsung.
So every maker has to have the best they have on sale at all times.
I've been consistently upgrading every 3 years since the Nexus days and I really don't think I'm missing anything. With trade-in, it ends up being something like $50/yr (I always go for the budget versions). Unless you're already sitting on FU money, I don't understand why anyone would spend more.
> Unless you're already sitting on FU money, I don't understand why anyone would spend more [than $50/yr on phone upgrades].
Among the people I know, there's more people living paycheck to paycheck and getting annual phone upgrades than people with FU money doing upgrades. That said, the percentage of FU money upgraders is higher than the percentage of paycheck-to-paycheck upgraders.
Google/Samsung/Apple/etc may be making more total money from the not-well-off than the well-off, at least thinking about people I know.
There's a point at which something like a new smartphone isn't a status symbol anymore. Among wealthier people, having an iPhone 11 isn't less of a signal than a day one iPhone 15.
I like to get a nice laptop and phone because I spend so much time on them. An iPhone is worth it for me, as I like a predictably good camera. Before I went iPhone, I had a Pixel 3a, and it took perfectly fine pictures. I just like the iPhone cameras more, although I’m starting to get a little jealous of the better zoom capabilities on some Samsung phone cameras I’ve seen recently. Lately I’ve been upgrading every two years, but every three would also be fine.
Not everyone lives on the same upgrade cycle, you can, but you're not supposed to change your phone every year. With iPhone 15, the majority of people upgrading would be 12 and older device owners.
That is technically true. However, I do find that a lot of people I know tend to get new phones well before they actually have a need for them.
I don't entirely blame peoples' consumerism; As somebody who once worked in cell phone sales, the mere act of visiting a carrier store is likely to land you in front of a salesperson who is incentivized to sell new phones and lines indiscriminately. Not to mention the incredible amount of advertising that goes into phones - if people only upgraded when they needed new phones, I don't think Apple, Samsung, or Google would feel the need to advertise the new ones so aggressively.
HN is likely a much more tech-literate crowd than the average person, so I think to a lot of us it seems silly to buy new phones every year. But I know that every time Apple releases a new iPhone, I get a call from my dad asking if it's worth upgrading from last year's model. I say no, nothing has changed, but the next time I see him he has it. Why? Because the salesperson made such a convincing case, not only about the merit of the new phone, but the fact that they could give him such a "deal" on it.
> lot of people I know tend to get new phones well before they actually have a need for them
It might just be your “bubble”, but even if not, is it really that bad of a deal? If you resell your previous phone at 2/3 the original price each year, you can use the latest phone for like 200 bucks for a year, or $17 monthly. For a device that is with you 0-24, and is probably the most often used item a typical person owns — they have it on them more often than even their shoes!
Yeah, but in the end they are those who fuel the waste machine. They start it, and they are the reason why there are new phones every year. For no sane reason.
Somewhere along the way, you pass a threshold where it's uncool to have a certain version of phone and judging from what you hear about the waste problem with phones, it's above the reasonable moment to get rid of it because it's broken or not usable.
I mean, sure it's a nice lie you can tell to yourself, but in the end, it's not good.
It's not always about being uncool. Sometimes it's about your current device getting slow enough to be annoying, so you want to replace to avoid paying the daily mental tax, "death through thousand papercuts", coming from the single piece of electronics you use most of, day in, day out. And that is caused mostly by software bloat - as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, between OS updates and app updates, a year is about how long a flagship phone has before it starts to become annoying to use. And then it only gets worse.
I feel qualified to say it's not just my bubble, having worked in cell phone sales. The business hinges on the fact that people don't run out the useful life of their devices.
Incentives exist on the part of the person who, being human, definitely want the new shiny thing, regardless of the logic behind it.
They exist for the salesperson, who will get a commission for selling the new shiny thing, regardless of whether this makes the customer's life any better or worse.
They exist for the carrier because the customer is on the hook for 2-3 years of service when they buy the shiny thing.
Finally, they exist for the company that made the phone because they make a profit on the sale price of the shiny thing.
Historically? Sure. But we are no longer in that phase of the mobile industry that a year old phone is close to useless at running new apps - the hardware improvements are more gradual.
Math doesn't work. Entry iphone 15 pro is $1,000. Say Tax is .08, so $1,080 out the door.
1 year from now if you sell it for 2/3 the price, you get back $720. A year's use cost you $360. About $1 a day. This is very worth it for some but not quite as cheap as $200 a year. This is without factoring in time to sell.
You could trade in but that means you are locked in contract with service provider.
I have a Xiaomi 10 or something I bought in 2020 I paid 279$ for, almost 4 years later it comes at 0.18 and I see like 0 reasons to upgrade.
I admit I'm not the most social (media) person out there, I'm not into connecting my phone into every other device on this planet (as Apple people consistently remind how easily they interoperate their devices), but it does everything great: camera, battery, messaging, games.
To me to see people thinking it's normal to spend so much money for a phone is borderline crazy.
My whole point was that you can actually get the latest, best phone for this price.
Alternatively, you could buy a second-hand iphone 11/12 pro and use it for 5-6 years easily, with proper software support. That’s what I do, and don’t yet plan on updating - maybe the iphone 16 would be worthy for me.
Apple has a few products like the ipad mini and imac that don't release on yearly schedules and it creates this situation where there are good and bad years to buy. Where the product hasn't been refreshed for 3/4 years and is now severely outdated and a major refresh is something like 6 months away. It's pretty bad for the customer and the seller. Meanwhile it's always a good time to buy an iphone. There is no point waiting for the next model because it won't be meaningfully different.
I agree. I find upgrading less frequently makes the upgrade so much more significant. Upgrading yearly would leave you complaining and wondering what's new.
I know people who lease a new car every 3 years. And often, if there's no redesign, they're getting a nearly identical vehicle. It's strange. Whereas, I upgrade my car every 10 years, and am thrilled with all the improvements.
I think the lease thing is more to avoid dealing with any maintenance issues as well as the wear and tear on a less than new car. It’s not to get the newest tech or style all the time AFAIK.
I don’t understand what you mean by avoiding repairs being cheaper. In order to avoid repairs you need to have a relatively new car all the time, and leasing is an easy way to achieve that.
This is fine and good, but the problem is that once your phone is no longer the newest thing, the experience takes a hit because there's little incentive to actually support your device anymore.
Indeed, Apple compares on its website the iPhone 15 to the iPhone 12: "The A16 Bionic GPU is up to 40% faster than the GPU in iPhone 12" [1]. Maybe unsurprisingly, they don't use this comparison for the Pro line. r/iphone discussion here [2].
In the iPhone 15 release they wrote "huge leap" 6 times. It felt like something to anchor the perception and to trick journalists to include it in a sentence. But when they say it so much, it kinda shines through that it's mostly just desperate words. "any man who must say I'm the king is no true king" vibes.
The fact that's it's just 15 seems to belie this. I would expect Apple to re-brand once something truly different comes along... that being said all smartphones are becoming long and in the tooth and we're finally starting to see inklings of what might replace our phone addiction in the near-term (audio (buds) + vision, eyeglasses etc.)
I think counterintuitively there's less waste this way.
With yearly, incremental releases, people will evaluate what's new from their phone and most people will update on their own cycle, probably every few or several years.
Meanwhile, with gaming console "generational" releases every few years, that is a strong incentive for everyone to upgrade.
If I have a 3 year old phone which I'm on the fence about updating, then I might pass on this year's model and go for next year's. But if there won't be another phone for 3 more years I guess I might as well get this one.
Not in every country/region, unfortunately. In my case it's cheaper to upgrade my phone and sell my previous phone than get a BYOB device by a significant margin.
Yes. Though in terms of physical waste that the original commenter brought up, selling your old phone for someone else to use makes that upgrade a pretty good option.
We could look at the total amount of years any phone is used and abstract away from who uses it. Slightly stylised, if we have four people, Alice, Bob, Charles and Dave, and Alice gets a new phone every year, Bob buys Alice's old phone, Charles buys Bob's old phone, and Dave gets Charles' old phone, then everyone changes phones every year, but each phone is still used for a full four years.
I'm currently using Pixel 4a (just recently EOL), and I'll probably upgrade my phone this or next year.
Maybe Pixel has a yearly release cycle, but it doesn't mean I have to upgrade every year, that would be crazy. And they can iterate more often to try some ideas more often than once every 5 years.
I'm using a Pixel 3 (my first Pixel) that I bought new (in original sealed box) on eBay one year ago, for a bit under AUD$300, still works fine, all the apps keep upgrading (the OS won't upgrade as it's EOL, hasn't been an issue for me so far), the camera AI is impressive enough for me, I'm planning to keep on using it for at least another year. That's as close as I get to having a bleeding edge smartphone. No need to waste $1k+ on the latest and greatest hyped-up kool-aid.
The Pixel 3 is a good phone. I bought one new and used it for ~5 years. The battery was still going strong and my only issue was the USB-C port stopped working.
As someone who's mostly buying used tech, or newish at deep discounted price from classifieds or ebay, I appreciate not having to wait 5 years cycles for stuff. Yearly release cycles means people let go sooner of perfectly functioning high end tech very fast, selling for very cheap, and I'm very grateful for that.
Great many containers filled with stuff from rich countries find their way to poor countries, some include stolen goods (like cars), others include garbage, most include goods that still have some value for other people, including tech.
Maybe the problem should be looked at from that angle, and maybe there's no problem, really. One's garbage will always be another one's treasure.
I agree with much of this post, but I have to take issue with "it's starting to feel silly." The "you need to upgrade your phone every year" concept has been silly from the outset.
That's totally a fair point, but at least phones were actually adding new features year to year a decade ago. It's fair to have new stuff releasing yearly when you're in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" phase.
What's silly isn't the fact that they release new smartphones every year but that people feel compelled to upgrade every year.
Incremental annual hardware refreshes are great, because everyone who is in the market for a phone can always get the latest and greatest and can be set for several years. For those that give in to the marketing and throw away perfectly usable devices and a thousand+ dollars – well that's nobody's fault but their own.
I'll probably end up like this with my Pixel 4a because every single of modern phones feels like a downgrade. Larger, heavier, no headphone jack, unnecessarily more powerful CPU to drain the battery faster, all that stuff.
I used to be excited about technology. I no longer am. I may consider upgrading to something with a 4" screen however. That would truly be an upgrade.
> Try this: don’t upgrade your phone for five years.
Try that and monitor your quality of life. See if you can avoid therapy.
It's not that people think they need to upgrade their phones every year, or two, or three. It's that the phones are designed for short usable life on hardware side, and on software side, neither first-party nor third-party developers give a damn about performance.
My wife just got to a place where her iPhone got unusable because it's running out of space - mainly having to do with her massive Messages history and photos/videos. We didn't even know until I checked, her phone is the iPhone X which was released 6 years ago and technically nothing is stopping her from using it longer except the lack of desire to prune her message history/photos/vids.
My wife is someone who's not going to suffer with a poorly functioning piece of technology nor someone who is going to work hard to optimize it or prolong its life, so the fact that her 6 year old phone works just fine is a good sign that it can, in the average case.
This is why I invest in Apple. They have made a bet, that the majority is too unwilling to forgo useless data like messages and photos and videos. If you want to save a picture or a video, why not download the photo and store it somewhere permanent? I think Apple knows most people will not manage/backup their own data. So instead of warning users or educating users, they have come up with a paid solution. iCloud storage. In the future, I can imagine most Apple users paying Apple a monthly fee to store all of their data. I suspect that Apple's profit will continue to grow with every new 8k video created and saved on their servers.
As another data point, I've a tendency to not store too many photos and messages for long term. I think thats the reason why my 7 plus is still running like new after all these years. The only reason I'll upgrade will be 5G.
I do that too, recently for the first time enabled cloud sync (had a 1 TB of OneDrive storage sitting unused anyway), so most photos delete themselves from the phone eventually. But that's compensating for tech deficiency, though.
What is the point of me having 256 GB of storage on the phone, if the phone starts slowing down wholesale once I take 50% of it? I get that there needs to be some buffer for swap and flash magic and whatnot, but I'd thought it would be closer to PC / Windows, where everything is fine until ~90% storage being used.
That's on top of bloated software doing background magic. Can't speak for other phones and brands, but my experience with Samsung flagships (S4, S7, wife's S9, now S22) is that the camera and gallery app are bloated, and their performance degrades rapidly with the amount of photos you take - around 50% worth of storage is when camera starts having delays on the order of seconds, interfering with its core purpose of taking photos.
(And it's not that it couldn't be better - Samsung just isn't investing effort in making core system apps performant enough. It's hard to find efficient apps these days on the Play Store, but there are rare exceptions, like e.g. Aves gallery, which is FLOSS and manages to be leaner, faster and significantly more feature-full than just about anything else, stock or third-party.)
I upgrade once every 2-3 years on average and my quality of life is great. It’s not on principle either—I will walk into an Apple Store with my existing phone and use it side-by-side with whatever is their latest. If think the new thing improves my life I’ll buy it.
Currently I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Last year when I compared its “lesser camera” to the latest and greatest, I couldn’t tell much of a difference so I kept the old phone.
The specs they throw out are always better on paper, but practice upgrading each year will yield very little improvement in quality of life.
Eh? I just replaced my four year old iPhone 11 Pro with a 15 Pro. The upgrade's nice, but it was a pure luxury purchase, the old phone was still running fine (mostly I wanted the 120hz display, and 5G). There was a time when a 4 year old smartphone was verging on unusable, but that's long past now.
Either I'm having bad luck with phones, or Android flagships just don't have the longevity iPhones do. I can believe the latter, as this seems to be the common belief about all Apple devices relative to competition.
My pixel 4a 5g works like a charm. 3.5 years and still going fine. I used my pixel 2 for three years so badly. I used it as a hotspot every single day and the number of battery cycles were as if the phone was used for 6 years.
My pixel 4a5g takes photos that are on reasonable standards, obviously they won't match match, but it doesn't make a serious difference either to me. I need three things from my phone - battery, camera and lag free user experience. I don't need thinner bezels for gods sake, I can't understand the craze and demand for thinner bezels over a two day battery life.
DON'T UPGRADE TO ANDROID 14, I am 4a 5G user, work as charm on last version of Android 13 September version, I feel like a lot of dropping frame while using Android 14. I feel upset and dissapointed towards Google now.
Whatever you do, don't take the Android 14 upgrade. Mine is dogshit slow now. I'm trying to decide if I can be bothered losing all my config and setting it up again with Android 13, or just paying Google for a new phone.
You may not buy a new phone every year. But there's always someone who's buying a new phone right now. Why should they have to buy hardware that's potentially almost 5 years old?
It doesn't seem to annoy people who buy cars. In fact usually cars that were released 5 years before had most of their quirks known and ironed out through a midlife revamp or the model or scheduled preventive replacement of known parts breaking at a specific mileage. Just released one tend to be more of a problem to first gen owners reliability wise.
I rely on my smartphone for work, I'd rather buy a 4y old model known to be reliable than a brand knew one that ends up preventing me to call 911 or whose screen die randomly and unexpectedly.
To be fair, a car is widely expected to last 12 years or longer, has relatively simple software and computer systems, and has no (or limited) access to your personal data. They are also typically a much larger investment.
The phone on the other hand is connected to every facet of your life and has a software stack that absolutely contains security flaws waiting to be found and exploited.
Apple has always worked to keep devices secure longer, at least up until now having the best long term support. My favorite part of the Pixel 8 is that Google is attempting to match and exceed what Apple's done so far.
Phone performance and features are definitely not changing fast enough for older devices to no longer be useful, even for affluent audiences. I hope support windows continue to get longer so that folks who must use or choose to use older devices can remain secure.
> The phone on the other hand is connected to every facet of your life and has a software stack that absolutely contains security flaws waiting to be found and exploited.
This is an entirely different subject. The software can be upgraded/updated during the life of the mobile phone. And when it comes to chip makers mistakes, which led to vulns like Spectres, they are likely to affect several generations of chips anyway.
Used car sales outstrip new car sales 3:1.[1] I didn't bother looking up the same number for cellphones but it's nowhere near that ratio. That should be your second clue that cars and phones are very different.
Isn't domain knowledge lost when we don't regularly build and release things?
Isn't this why we're struggling to build nuclear in some countries because they weren't building it regularly, and now it's difficult to scale, let alone build new ones?
I understand that it's wasteful, but maybe it's necessary to sustain itself? Especially from a feedback perspective from consumers?
> I understand that it's wasteful, but maybe it's necessary to sustain itself?
Some waste is the cost of resiliency. But with phones (and other electronics and appliances), we're talking about extreme amounts of waste. Way more than is needed to keep around and develop the capacity and know-how.
> Especially from a feedback perspective from consumers?
What feedback? Unless they screw things really badly, they're just listening to the echoes of their own marketing departments. This is a supply-driven market with high natural barriers to entry. Customers buy what they're told to, and are happy about it as they're told to.
This seems divorced from reality. Just because a new phone is released every year, it doesn't mean you need to buy a new one every year.
Small, incremental improvements each year means that whenever you buy a new device, it's modern (not using 4 year old components), and substantially 'better' than the previous one.
Apple has, what, roughly 1 billion iPhone users right now.
Imagine if they only released a new design every 5 years. They'd have to manufacture another billion iPhones in a relatively short window of time to handle all of the upgrades.
This has nothing to do with phones, but products in general. Many product companies try to release new product versions very year. Not because they expect customers to update every year, but because buyers looking for a new product want to buy the newest to ensure the product is not outdated soon. And the older version can be sold to price sensitive customers, so it allows product companies to get higher margins for new products.
I feel it's a decade since I was excited about a new phone. Now I just copy over my settings and app, and act a bit disgruntled for a week that things are slightly different.
I have a Pixel 7 Pro that I was pretty excited to get, mainly for the 5X optical zoom lens. First time I've had anything like that on a phone. Super nice!
Well no. Car models have generations and mid-generation updates (aka facelift).
It's very rare that there are any updates at all within the same generation. Year in model designation is just "ha, look at his looser driving last year BMW" and to show when car left assembly line.
There are some examples where the same generation had a significant upgrade without a facelift, but those are rare. One example I could think of is MX-5 (ND): between 2015 and 2018 there were no changes at all, but in late 2019 there was nearly complete overhaul of its powertrain and then a small update in 2021.
As far as I'm aware, the idea of a "model year" is uniquely American (perhaps North American) - in the UK, it's not marketed at all.
Everyone can tell the age of every car [1] simply by the license plate (used to be in 1 year increments, since the early 2000s it's been in 6 month increments).
[1]: Yes, yes, before some is pedantic, imported cars don't come under this scheme, and self-assembled cars also have a unique form that mean you can't tell their age.
There are also the odd ones due to the pandemic; the 2024 MY I just bought technically had almost no changes from 2023 MY but the reality is that several options that were TECHNICALLY available for the 2023 refresh weren't actually produced in any significant numbers due to supply constraints. Now in 2024 those options are actually hitting, making it almost a mini tech update.
Nobody is demanding that you buy a new smartphone every year. Modern smartphones have 3-5 years of security/bug updates and the batteries no longer degrade as fast as they used to.
I bought my pixel 7 early this year because my s20's screen broke and the cost to buy a new one to replace it myself, which is not something I think most people would be willing to do (instead paying even more for someone else to do it), exceeded the cost to buy another S20. On top of that, the moment my 3 year old, perfectly working phone had anything other than a pristine screen, it had zero trade-in value and basically encouraged me to throw it in a drawer or the trash. This was literally Samsung's flagship phone only 3 years prior.
That could have probably been mitigated if the s20 remained relevant for more than a year or two and there was a mature parts market that made it feasible to upkeep rather than scrap.
Normally I agree with you, but I don't think that's the case this year at least. The on-device ML chip (Tensor G3) is a legit difference-maker. A lot of the ML features they are rolling out wouldn't be possible on older hardware. You could do the non-realtime portions in the cloud, but the realtime audio cleanup wouldn't work for example (way too much latency). Also, personally I much prefer on-device. I frequently have spotty data connections so it's very disruptive when stuff relies on cloud connectivity.
When I upgrade in two or three years from now, the ML chip will probably be even better than now. My phone has been fine for the past couple of years and the introduction of something on iPhone 15 doesn’t really change that. I don’t mind waiting.
I think it's more likely that if they spaced the releases out to every 5 years, there would just be a 5x reduction in the pace of changes, and you could issue the same complaint "Why do they release every 5 years when hardly anything changes?"
It's not like the incremental physical changes just automatically happen independently of designing, mass manufacturing, and releasing new phone models. The incremental physical changes happen because companies are trying to develop new phone models.
If I’m buying a phone 4 years into the cycle, I don’t want to start with a 4-year-old CPU and camera. 5 years later, when I’m ready to get a new phone, that’ll be a 9-year-old CPU and camera. I’d rather have the latest tech when I buy it, and use it until it stops working.
I agree though that the physical design should stay the same, so that cases and accessories don’t need to be thrown away. Apple more-or-less does this with the iPhones, eg a case should work with any iPhone 12-14.
They are selling millions of each version. There's lots of products where the volume is more like 10,000. The waste isn't in the product that is selling millions...
How is it “physical waste”? No one is forcing you to buy a new phone and in the case of iPhones, Apple has released security updates in the past year for all iPhones introduced in the last decade.
I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max that is three generations behind now. While there is nothing I have to have, the always on display, the USB 3 speed, and video out to my portable USB-C monitor on the iPhone 15 Pro would be nice.
The price system is how our society allocates resources. The fact that people are allocating their own resources to buy one -- without any perverse incentives or being compelled, indicates it's not wasteful to them.
A better example of waste is when local governments funds things which people don't use.
I think the root of this sentiment is misunderstanding or lack of satisfaction at the system level.
New cars come out every year, with minor updates, and big updates every 3-10 years ("generation"). I am still pretty happy driving a 2006 car. Maybe phones move toward that, but I like incremental improvement, and I'd be annoyed to buy a phone today which is 4-5 years old if I'm also wanting to keep it for 3-5 years.
Enterprise computers get refreshed every 3-6 years, usually (I'd probably do shorter for most laptops, longer for desktops). Monitors can do 5-10 years. Until they became active electronics, headphones/speakers/microphones which were decades old were fine.
Biggest boost on a lot of new mobile device refresh is getting a new 0-cycle battery and a clean OS install, and for a lot of people, "buy a new one" is the main opportunity for that kind of upgrade.
Based on the phrasing of this, I'm not sure if it's meant to be taken sarcastically or not. Apologies if you did mean it that way, because I'll respond seriously:
- Advances are mostly software.
- Massive quantities of e-waste (and plastic waste via cases, screen protectors, etc).
- Perverse incentives by companies to not properly support the user experience on older devices.
Obviously, companies that sell phones want to sell more phones as frequently as possible. I'm just glad that Google is aware that people value having longer term feature and security support for their products. The new 7 years of feature and security support is pretty fantastic.
Continuous improvement is the bedrock of pretty much everything modern. It’s a lot easier to make frequent minor revs than it is to do rare, gigantic revs.
If you work in software, think of it as normal SDLC versus once-a-decade waterfall style total respec and rebuild. Which is more efficient?
It also spreads demand more consistently, rather than having 90% of demand landing in the first year and 10% spread over the next four. What would that mean for production capacity?
Continuous processes beat batch processes every time. See also: Tesla’s ideas about model years.
Titanium matters for lightweight that is one of the important spec for some people. They aren't good at advertising this (or don't want to advertise much to make heavier again in the future?)
You wouldn't notice it, the difference in weight between aluminum and titanium phone shell is negligible compared to the weight of the glass, battery, and PCBs combined.
Titanium sounds cool, it sounds luxury, it's a marketing hack. Like <strike>"aircraft-grade"</strike> "space-grade" aluminum. Nobody is launching their aluminum phones at escape velocity. It's 100% for marketing reasons.
I have some titanium spoons, I feel into the trap too.
> You wouldn't notice it, the difference in weight between aluminum and titanium phone shell is negligible compared to the weight of the glass, battery, and PCBs combined.
The previous iPhone Pro's have a stainless steel shell, not aluminum, and the ~30 gram difference is noticeable.
Of course, they caused this problem themselves by using stainless steel rather than aluminum like the regular iPhones, but they are nonetheless solving a problem with the titanium frame.
But they don't even say that. As if everyone knows that? And no technical improvements? But then again, the new USB C with out of date max data throughput is nothing to brag about.
It’s still a “fancy” or too niche a phone. It neither has the reach, nor the supply chain backbone. By the time it reaches critical operational/business mass phone landscape would have had changed. Just like it’ll happen with frame.work.
You'll really need to come with some backup of your claims.
Because it simply isn't true. FP has been around for 10 years now, making phones, learning, scaling up. They sold close to a million phones every year since 2020 (last year over 1100000 phones). And while a million phones isn't much compared to iPhones or Pixels, it's bigger than many other small phone companies (Chinese or not).
They've been diversifying with headphones, and earbuds. And with t he last edition, they finally felt confident with supply chains to guarantee spare parts for decades to come.
A lot of these new software features are enabled by better hardware. Especially AI features, which can require quite specialized and powerful processors. On-device LLMs are the next frontier in personal assistant software, and that can only be enabled by better hardware.
Even the image processing for high resolution images can benefit from better hardware. Modern smartphones are heavily dependent on image processing to improve camera quality. Without the right hardware, performance and energy efficiency could be unacceptable.
And - price is ridiculously high. $1000+ for what? I don't know about others but my phone camera is only used for scanning QR codes rarely or taking occasional pictures of family (not a picture every hour) which even lower range phones (300 USD or so) do damn decent given it's not dark.
My 98% of the usage is to read something. Some website, email or ebook. Why do I need 120 Hz display for that? Gaming? That's always going to be inferior to even a console let alone a gaming PC.
> Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very little to do with the hardware and should not fundamentally be a reason to upgrade to this phone.
But the software development is driven by the profit from hardware sales. Why would they improve the software if it doesn't make money?
I guess in the ideal world the phone's software should be pay-to-upgrade but free-to-stay-as-is.
The status quo is great. You have yearly releases that are stable and allow anyone to upgrade without fear of the new model coming out like with traditional video game consoles.
No one is forcing you to buy anything you don’t want.
Also, the OS and apps need to take advantage of new hardware, so it’s not a surprise if your seven year old phone becomes slower.
If you don’t like the status quo then I would go with a non-iOS and non-android phone like pine phone, Mairena, librem, or anything else that based on a more open Linux distro.
I think it's interesting that you cite video game consoles as a negative. I'd argue the opposite, I think phones should be more like them.
With video game consoles, you have a single device where micro-optimizations are constantly done, new features are added, and all software can be purpose-built to work really well on that specific hardware. All of that for ~7 years means a really fantastic user experience and a massive community of people that have collectively worked through solutions to common problems and forced the company's hand on defects (joycon drift, for example). It also means tons of high-quality hardware-specific accessories, both from the company that made the console and from third parties.
Meanwhile Apple always do the best (and their older chip like A14 is already enough in today IMO), Qualcomm often hits and miss. Their flagship chip made by Samsung fab is tend to be bad battery life and heat. SD888 to 8 Gen2 upgrade is huge than expected for me.
When I feel that I have to upgrade because the phone slows down or that newer apps aren't available on my OS version anymore, I move over to the opposing team so as to avoid incentivizing short-lived phones too much.
So far, I only owned 2 phones in my life (didn't need one before the smartphone era), an iPhone 4S and a Google Pixel 3. For now, the Pixel 3 is doing great, battery life is not so good but holds the day.
I think the market agrees with you as well. The going rate for a 512GB Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra in like new condition is somewhere in the £600-£700 region. The equivalent S23 Ultra, with only minor specification differences as far as I can see, is currently retailing at £1399. That's a gigantic depreciation for a phone that's only a year and a half old. Phones used to depreciate much slower 5 - 10 years ago.
I agree. I was convinced I need to move from an iPhone 14 to iPhone 15.
My reasoning was better camera.
I honestly was going to skip upgrading but the camera and some other minor features were enough for me to make the upgrade happen.
I feel if these companies worked together to cut back on the waste of yearly release cycles, there’d be better environmental results. But every year we have a new feature because tech has caught up with demand.
They keep selling a better camera. Constantly. Every year.
Yet, can you really look at your old photos and say "my God, those 2017 photos. Could you imagine taking such crappy photos with such a bad phone?" I doubt it. That hasn't been true in more than a decade even for challenging environments like in low light.
They're selling you on a better camera each year because there's basically no useful way to measure its impact anymore aside from in really technical conditions that don't affect anyone practically.
Well, when they added a wide lens camera to phones I think that significantly changed phone photography. In the Pixel 7 pro (and the 8 pro) they added a telephoto lens; this is another significant upgrade.
Personally, I have a proper camera, but I am not carrying it around with me at all times. My phone takes excellent pictures (I have a pixel 6) but I do feel the lack of zoom.
The quality of the main cameras hasn't really gone up in a few generations; but I do think there's been significant improvements in the photography department in phones in the last 5 years. Wide lens, macro photography, zoom lenses. These are genuine innovations.
It does make me a bit angry when software is kept locked into new models when older models are perfectly capable of running it though. But there's been hardware innovation for sure. Don't really see much of a reason to go from a Pixel 7 pro to a Pixel 8 pro, and probably not going to be the case for a few years. But who knows.
Unfortunately the world is filled with people like my fried who, without fail, buys - for cash, not as part of a contract renewal - the max spec iPhone available every year. One for him, one for his wife. Sell the old ones, or give them to family. Revenue like that is too hard for these companies to pass up. And so we get this waste.
And half the time the UX somewhere gets worse. Then a year or two later it gets better again. Then worse again. It's a stupid endless cycle that was solved years ago for devices that have only one main form of input. At this point I believe most UX changes are made solely for marketing's sake.
Isn't it the same story with every other "smart" device these days? Headphones, smart watches, etc? A new release almost every couple of years, causing a deluge of waste. That's our "growth at all costs" society.
Yeah. They couldn't even give us an ultrasonic fingerprint reader, which is one feature that would have convinced me to buy this instead of the 7. The brighter screen and 1TB model are the only upgrades I find compelling.
> It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones.
These companies virtue signal about climate change nonstop, but still manage to produce disposable phones and light up their data centers for advertising and user tracking
I remember how much I wanted every new phone before - back in the days of my Motorola Droid there was always some awesome new feature or development. Now, the only reason I upgrade is if the phone ends up damaged or unusable.
Both car and phone trade ins get resold and used until their actual EOL, no? I imagine most of these Pixel 8s that physically survive to year 7 (no cracked screen, etc) will have been traded in and will continue to be used in the 3rd world.
Based on the numbers I found from a few minutes of searching you are incorrect. Some phones get resold or reused, most do not. Only 25% of people are using a secondhand phone and the phone population is increasing at 5x the human rate.
This is a meta comment, but I think it's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers.
Consider how long it took PCs to reach the same stage (with a fraction of the adoption). It was like 20 years from Kenbak-1 to the 90s PC era.
I really don't think the iPhone (or even Android) was the equivalent of the Kenbak-1 in terms of smartphones. There were "smartphones" before the iPhone.
IMO the iPhone was the 90s PC era where these things got a lot better and more ubiquitous and less fragmented.
And (also in my opinion) coincidentally 90s led into an the era where overly dominant OS vendor(s) were crushing the fun and freedom out of computing. Phones are harder to escape from that than with PCs though.
I'd argue the equivalent of iPhone/Android on the PC side would have been Windows 95, when things really became consumer focused and had their revolutionary explosion take off. That was "only" 28 years ago now
Agreed on the Win95 timeframe for the start of the take off phase the iPhone kicked off - just that PCs peaked, stagnated and got boring much less than 28yrs later (eg around 2010ish?).
I was disagreeing with the claim that PCs took longer than smartphones did to reach that plateau. They did take longer to reach the initial (Win95/iPhone) take off point though. Smartphones spent less time in the primordial phase - probably more a case of better internet availability though.
Yep, I too remember Windows CE 5 on my Audiovox slide out keyboard phone which in 2006 was blowing people's minds. I got it purely so while on-call I wouldn't have to head home to handle incidents.
It was a great mobile computing experience but terrible at being a phone.
I hear what you're saying, but I feel this release is less boring than other recent smart phones. It seems that they are really at an inflection point where they are able to start really utilizing their AI chips for deeper integration. From a hardware perspective, I agree this release might be boring. I don't think the Tensor3 is a far faster chip than the Tensor2 (for general purpose CPU tasks), but the AI processing capacity of this chip seem like the focus of this model. The new display seems pretty great, but I have been pleased with my Pixel 7 display.
Yes, I think it's kind of odd to see people disregarding some of the pretty impressive efficiency, security, and reliability improvements the phone hardware has undergone. Smartphones are astoundingly good at their jobs.
Windows Mobile and Palm phones were around int the early 2000s. I think they would absolutely need to be included if considering the history of smartphones.
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I think the expanded AI capabilities are the biggest step forward for phones in like 5+ years or more.
But I'm someone who is still using a pixel 3, so maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better about purchase I need to make because my phone's battery is pretty close to useless.
Not at all. I am more concerned having Facebook (or any other Zuck’s spyware) installed on that very computer. I cannot imagine how anyone would hack my very phone. Also I like to decentralise devices, so none of my devices is a super-device. My go-to phone (iPhone SE with no iOS update, but with security updates) has only a few apps installed that I need for being away from home. My other smartphone (Nexus 6P with no security updates) has loads of apps installed, but I use them only when I need it. The phone has its WiFi, Bluetooth and cellular turned off all of the time. I cannot imagine the way you hack into it, tbh. And even if that would happen, I cannot imagine what a hacker would get out of it, if anything at all.
Current LLMs and misc. deep learning enable an early kind of ubiquitous personalized AI augmentation that's always with you.
One barrier to innovation here is that most of tech has shifted to think of empowering users as not the goal, but rather, empowering users is an occasional necessary step towards the company exploiting those users harder.
In addition to the other comments about pre-iPhone/Android smartphones, another part of the story are the devices that preceded even those, the personal digital assistant (PDA).
There's the well known PalmPilot and various Windows CE PDAs like the Compaq iPaq and Dell Axim and even earlier, now largely forgotten devices like the HP 95LX and 100LX, a DOS based palmtop PDA that was really quite capable for 1991, and probably a few even earlier than that. So the evolutionary path to the modern smartphone probably stretches to 30+ years.
Recording calls was possible on pretty much any Android phone until google killed the accessibility API in May 2022, since then at least Google and Samsung phones can still record calls, it's just disabled in some countries for legal reasons, but people then buy phones from other regions on ebay/other similar platforms. It's been a "thing" for years.
Maybe I’m weird, but I’d sooner get rid of all my “real” computers and replace them with a typewriter (or… nothing) than ditch my smartphone. It does way too much useful stuff.
I dunno—I can use a "real" computer to do geek stuff, but my phone does a whole hell of a lot more that's way, way more important to my everyday life, most of which a "real" computer would be worse at or isn't practically an alternative at all. I'd have to spend money and space (for other electronics) plus a bunch of time to replace what a smartphone does for me. Losing my "real" computers would do me practically no harm, by comparison (assuming we're not counting my employer's computer that they loan me so I can earn a paycheck—gotta have that, sure)
It's because of how limited they are. Companies gave up trying to add stuff, and are in fact removing stuff and sensors in an attempt to up the sales of watches, earbuds etc etc. As long as it sells , they won't bother with better improvements
If I could plug them into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor setup and be running a full fledged OS they'd be exponentially more interesting than current. Their usefulness is hindered in their current form. Yes I know about Dex.
> It's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers.
I think people are not yet ready to accept the exact same thing is about to happen to cars. Some company will have a perfectly usable electric self-driving vehicle and will produce tens of millions of them a year. They will be an appliance, like your toaster, and nobody will care anymore.
I'm sure it will happen to other things in our lives too.
It's already like this for ICE cars in the UK. So many people buy them on PCP deals and upgrade them every 3 to 4 years. It's pretty much a meme at this point about a certain kind of person:
We're quite a ways off from full self driving cars and it's not clear that we'll ever get there. By that I mean you can drive anywhere you want while taking a nap. Car companies will still be working on improving limited self driving / enhanced cruise control for the foreseeable future which leaves plenty of room for differentiation.
The real PC revolution was when manufacturers were able to come out with a machine every two years that was much better than what they made two years ago. Machines like the Apple ][ and Atari 2600 lasted a lot longer than their makers thought because upgrading meant replacing all your software until the PC AT clones came around.
I'm really glad to see both the partnership with iFixit and the 7 years of support. Because everything else seems mostly meh to me, and while I'm upgrading this year from a Pixel 6 Pro, the continued diminished returns make it seem likely that 2-3 years from now I won't have as much reason to.
My experience with my own pixel 7 pro and a pixel 5 has been that these devices are an order of magnitude lower in build quality than Samsung or iPhones. I really, really wanted to be happy with them but they've been a never ending source of frustration.
My pixel 5 just stopped turning on one day about 2 years in, and my pixel 7 pro had the volume and power buttons fall out about 3 weeks in (not due to a drop, after googling it's apparently a very widely seen issue).
The service with iFixit was unhelpful, they told me "We keep seeing this and Google says this is wear and tear. We can't submit it for a warranty repair, and if we try we end up eating the cost". After finally complaining on twitter I was contacted by some support person who said to give iFixit this email and they would fix it. They still refused, and after a few more rounds of interactions like that I eventually bought some replacement buttons on Amazon, popped them in, and put a case that covers them on it. I'm fully expecting this to randomly die some time before 2 years is up.
Combine that with Google's extremely strong tendency to abandon everything, promises like these seem well, worthless.
Meanwhile my daughter is using my wife's old iPhone from 8 years ago. My Samsung note 3 and my s8 still boot up and work just fine (though I cracked the screen on one about 5 years ago). It's just so obvious that these phones are very low priority to Google, while other companies base their business around their phones.
> My experience with my own pixel 7 pro and a pixel 5 has been that these devices are an order of magnitude lower in build quality than Samsung or iPhones.
Subjective, I am at my third Pixel phone in six years and I never had an issue.
> Don't you think that three phones in six years is the issue?
One (P3) ended with me having it in the back pocket of my jeans and literally jumping in the backseat... yeah, not smart.
Another (P4a), I tried to open to swap a new battery in and it did not end well. I'd still happily be with the 4a if it was not for my dumb self. It's perfectly working and I use it to listen to some music while biking or at the gym. I just did not reattach the speaker cable.
Would you still be with it, though? Someone upthread claims the phones just don't last. Maybe if you hadn't broken your phones, they still wouldn't've lasted much longer anyway.
Having said that, I'm still using my 4-year-old Pixel 4, and it's in great shape. I'll probably get a new phone this year since it's no longer receiving security updates. Which is stupid, because I'm otherwise perfectly happy with the phone. And hate that they get physically larger every year.
I find people have wildly differing opinions on what normal wear and tear on phone is so it's hard to judge from anecdotes if it's a build quality issue or if they're rough on their phones or on the other side if I'm personally very delicate with my phones.
For my contribution to this anecdata the only Pixel phone I've had die is my Pixel 3 XL that started having weird charging issues and refuses to turn on and charge unless I let it completely passively drain then recharge it after that it only works for a bit, that happened after about 2 years maybe. Tried having it looked at by uBreakIFix and they had nothing. Other than that my Pixel 6 is doing great but I keep it in a case 99% of the time and don't abuse it.
Idea was to stretch the P4a until the end of security updates.
The reason is that it is much, much more compact and it's perfect to carry around when on the bike as it does not wedge into my quad when pedaling. And it's easier to hold with my gloves on. Well, it's living a second life full of music and OsmAnd maps.
For fun today I booted up my Pixel 3 XL and it works just fine. It was slow at first, probably as it synced a bunch of stuff, but after that it was about as snappy and useful as I remember it. Everything still works. I used that for 3 years before the Pixel 6 Pro. Before that I had a Pixel XL for 3 years. I still have that phone too in my device collection.
But the lack of security updates makes the XL and the 3XL, though still functioning as expected, not acceptable. This thing has far too much access to my life to actively use it on the Internet every day.
I'm getting the Pixel 8 not because the 6 Pro has any problems (personally I've had none), but rather because I have a bit more disposable income to spend on my tech enthusiasm and I'm excited about a phone with a 7 year software support window (with incidental coverage to support 5 years of accidental damage). If all goes well, I hope to take advantage of more than 3 years of that, assuming some insane new development doesn't happen in the interim.
I can't say about the 7 (the upthread you are referring to), but my Pixel 3 XL is my daughter's daily driver now, replacing the hand-me-down Pixel first gen that just didn't have enough memory to live up to today's requirements 6 years later. My current 6 Pro has been a champ, I'm seriously conflicted about upgrading. The 6 is perfectly fine, but I'd enjoy an upgrade, and look to be able to sell the 6 pro for $350 if I wanted to go that route.
My Galaxy S10's bluetooth modem just said no 3 months in. My pixels have only failed me by losing support from Google prematurely.
This is all anecdata.
I don't really mind; it concerns only updates of core system, not apps. Apps are still updated, so I get updated browser, mail and other apps, that could be attacked; they are not locked to the system. It makes the attack surface vastly smaller.
There are risks to leaving an Android OS out of date, too. That can be mitigated somewhat by keeping Bluetooth and Wi-Fi off when away from home, but it's not foolproof.
I'd guess you aren't seeing the build quality issues as frequently because you replace your phone more often. Three phones on six years sounds like a lot to me
Why doesn't really matter for OP's observation, the point is that your phones don't last long enough to manifest the possible problems. It'd be like if you were in the habit of totaling each car you own at about 50k miles. You might have really enjoyed it for those 50k miles, but you're not qualified to comment on how durable the car is in the long run.
I didn't have any problems with my 4a or 5, but my 6 is only about a year old and I no longer can use the USB-C port. I have to charge it wirelessly. The battery life is crap as well.
I am biased, as I've had every pro/xl but the Pixel6 and the google nexus phone's prior to that.
With that being said i've only had questionable build quality on 2 occasions. The Huawei 6p which was covered under a recall, and the Panda Pixel 2XL where there was some lamination issues.
That being said, the build quality and materials (mostly) really stepped up initially in the Pixel 4, and then noticeably again in the P7. They are quite nice. I don't really find them lacking in quality, fit, or finish these days.
I'm a Pixel owner, and the phone quality has been stellar IMO, but I would never use any phone that couldn't get security updates - zero days, and sometimes zero days that require no or very little user action, are too common with cell phones. Which is why I think the 7 year support announcement is great news.
I have had a pretty similarly bad experience repairing my pixel 4a the other month. Purchased a new screen and kit from ifixit for 1/3 the cost of buying a new phone, even had to get a heat gun to unglue the old screen, and guess what? she dies a week later anyways due to some other issue.
The problem with all these phones is that they're kind of built to be disposable. They're just glued together plastic. And even if you can repair the phone or it survives 5 years or so, the vendor is just going to stop supporting the chipset anyways.
Just got a fairphone 4, optimistic but the build quality is shit and they're already rolling out a fairphone 5 now... whatever, I use AOSP. I can't stand samsung anyways with all the crapware they put on stock android.
Yeah. I didn't want to buy a Google phone but they're the only ones supported by GrapheneOS. From what I've read they've got pretty good reasons for supporting them too. Why can't Samsung step up and offer the same security features and firmware update schedules? I'm using a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and it's been excellent for many years but it doesn't matter if it doesn't run the software I want.
With respect to grapheneOS on samsung, I don't think it's about security. It's about openness, there is already samsung knox (or whatever it is called, samsung dex?) so clearly they know how to make a secure enclave it's just that samsung wants to keep their stuff proprietary.
In general samsung and others (huawei, etc.) are trying to get a grip on android, and open-source seems to oppose that.
I don't know what motivates google to lean in so hard with open-source ( maybe trying to prevent fragmentation or avoid future antitrust or set a "clean" example standard for stock android with their pixel brand ), but we do currently enjoy its fruits.
You're right about that. Google seems to be a lot more open with its hardware compared to other manufacturers. This attitude apparently even extends towards their laptops. It's certainly something I've come to appreciate about Google.
Bare minimum support horizon (no, a self-compile repo doesn't count) combined with small but numerous hardware demerits:
flashlight, overheating, extremely slippery which mandates a case, small chance of screen lines, no personal need for SD, weird camera choices e.g. focal length of telephoto, notification LED, waterproof but unusable in the rain, I think one vendor sells a screen protector that isn't total garbage, no personal need for Qi charging, basic photography mode has always been awful, antenna/battery/amp/side sense/night mode is nothing special, previous gen microphone config had echo and/or gain problems on Signal calls, and the list goes on and on...
Biggest selling point: photography, right? Sony continues to develop amazing hardware and then takes the most leisurely and conservative approach toward camera firmware/software. Both auto modes on an a6000 are head-and-shoulders above this year's Xperia auto mode, despite being nearly a decade older. The fanboys continue to defend manual mode photography as if every serious picture taker wants to dial in focus, white balance, shutter speed, etc. all on a touchscreen while their toddler hangs from a branch for his/her first time; as if every photo should go straight into Lightroom Mobile before getting sent to grandma or the friend group or onto social media.
Beyond that, the update schedule is suboptimal (Hello, Pro-I!?) and so fast-paced, you're always hoping the next generation or surprise mid-year model fixes most of the details you dislike.
The 5 V comes out and totally eliminates the telephoto which you loved and frequently used. Not only that, everyone compares it to the 5 IV (60 mm) when Gen. II had a 70 mm shooter and Gen. III had a 70--105 mm (which, as most non-prime lenses, was quite soft at the longer range). "You get literally the same detail because 52 MP!" Sure, dude. Now explain why every comparison review of the 5 V telephoto has significantly less detail than even a lowly 3x zoom, even factoring in how 1/9th of 52 is 5.8 MP? (Notebookcheck.net supposedly lets you downscale its comparisons to 2 MP and 4 MP, and the closest-to-Xperia-quality but still better shot belongs to the 3x Galaxy S23.)
You remember being disappointed when the 1 V bundle was WH-1000XM5 and you already owned well-worn WH-1000XM3s. You're even more disappointed when the new 5 bundles inferior cans rather than buds or something wired from Sony's Pro Audio division. The 5 price is always the same as the 1 price when the 5 drops in September, so you wonder why not get the 1, which is superior in nearly every way?
Oh, right, because you know it only gets one more OS upgrade (Material You: Yuck!) and you probably won't get whatever new APK comes standard in the next gen's Xperia 1, plus you've already missed your chance to order and resell the bundled headphones, so the now-300-off price of the 1 is just the same that you would've paid by selling the bundle plus a little depreciation.
Also, where the hell IS this Pro-I successor? Is _that_ going to have a real telephoto and less of Xperia 5's wacky design changes and 4 to 7 years of software support and a screen bright enough to use as a flashlight because, let's face it, Sony will close its mobile division before letting its users put more current through the rear LED. Plus, who knows, maybe next year they finally release crimson or that same sweet shade of orange that sits at the base of their true flagship full-frame mirrorless??
-----
Cost, within reason, is not an issue for me. I would get another Xperia---any model---if it ticked most boxes. My main reason for ignoring Sony as a serious contender? Sony continues to nerf two peripherals or APKs for every one feature they improve, and then I continue to wait for actual improvement while my Zenfone 8 and a6400 slowly age. Every few months, I wonder what phone I would get if I needed a replacement today, and Xperia drops further down the list.
My wife and I have apparently been lucky enough to buy the 6 variant then- we've had nothing but good luck with ours, and we haven't been babying them either.
I miss some of the nice touches LG added on top of stock Android, but the hardware has met all expectations so far.
I must be lucky. I'm still rocking a pixel 3. It's got multiple breaks in the screen, the back of the phone is pretty cracked, the camera cover is completed smashed out. Hey somehow this thing still works and takes ok pictures.
I got rid of my Pixel 3 because I wanted the new-sexy... I wish like hell I'd stayed. Best phone I've owned since the dumbphone days. I hate pressing my thumb to the print reader on a screen; feels so wrong compared to the little divot on the back.
I agree with you about the build quality, but also from a software perspective.
I've been a long time Pixel user, and have had the Pixel, Pixel 4 XL, and currently have the Pixel 6 Pro.
On every device, there has been one or several glaring software bugs that haven't been fixed for months, or have required a really, really nasty workaround.
A good example was the bluetooth stack on the Pixel 4 XL. We got a security software update one day, applied it, and then found that the bluetooth connection to loads of devices was suddenly broken. Google took months to get the issue fixed, despite a few hundred pages of complaints on their forums. Instead someone (not from Google) worked out that if you went into developer mode, you could swap out the bluetooth stack for a previous version, and it might work again.
Is this sort of blasé approach to quality assurance and lack of urgency around fixing user reported bugs that really, really irritates me about Google's hardware devices.
The 6 Pro is an ok phone but also has it's problems (painfully slow and somewhat unreliable fingerprint unlock). I think I've had enough and I'll probably give a Samsung device a try.
>My pixel 5 just stopped turning on one day about 2 years in
My Pixel 3 stopped working because Google fucked up it's kernel boot and mechanical design. They placed a laser focus IC, that's a bare die mounted on a tiny FR4 shim to get it closer to the backpanel, on top of the main PCB. When this tiny laser focus IC inevitably breaks off or loses contact with the pads due to mechanical forces on the back panel, the Pixel 3 linux kernel ends up panicking during boot because the driver can't communicate with it.
I could see this because I had the bootloader unlocked before it bricked and could get the boot logs coming out. In fact it could boot into recovery just fine too but what a PITA to fix this at that point.
I had one Pixel 2 that lasted five years. I had another that lasted only six months before the screen just stopped working at all. We'll see how long my current Pixel 5a lasts.
My wife's 5a was bit by a common "screen" completely dies for no reason bug. It's more like the phone is stone dead, but that's how Google describes it. Even though she was well past the 1 year warranty they replaced it free under a special warranty program due to how common it is.
And by replaced it, I mean they sent a different phone that had lots of wear and she lost all her non-cloud data.
The 5A's have some kind of mass motherboard defect and the warranty was quietly increased to 2 years. I know 2 people who recently went thru a bunch of hurdles (must go to Asurion/ubreakifix to get special request submitted) and got replacement phones sent outside of the extended warranty, because both the phones failed days after the 2 year mark.
My 5a's camera routinely crashes the phone and reboots when attempting to take a photo in bright light conditions (e.g. in broad daylight) -- it's infuriating, google says the phone is out of warranty so apparently I'm SOL.
With Asahi Linux I'm now considering going back to all-Apple hardware after 12 years away.
The Nexus One was built by HTC. The Galaxy Nexus was built by Samsung. The Nexus 5 was built by LG. Pixel is in house, of course, but IIRC, Google bought a fragment of HTC some time ago.
My friends regularly have to have their Pixels replaced/retired due to hardware failures around the 2 year mark. The 7 years of support is nice, but these phones don't last anywhere near that long.
I had a Pixel 2 XL that was replaced this year not because it was broken, well the screen was bit that's hardly the phones fault, but because my carrier had an offer on a Pixel 7 that was too good to be true. The Pixel 2 is still working so, even if there are no more OS updates anymore.
4a 5G was my favourite phone since Nokia N9. Fast and lightweight, great photos, fingerprint reader in the back.
I switched to Pixel 7 so that my partner can get the 4a 5G to replace their aging device. But this 7 is clearly heavier and while a good device, I just don't like it quite as much.
My impression is that the flagships have become fairly interchangeable (aside from perhaps the new Xperia, which still has its own character to some extent) and which one "is the one to buy" is now mostly down when you're in the market to buy.
As in, this one is debuting the new Samsung GN2 cam sensor and I think the SoC manufacturing process node, ahead of whenever Samsung and the others post their new updated devices. So for a few months this is probably the one to get, until a competitor drops the next set of updates from the HW supply chain, and so on.
Three years of updates and iFixit are great and could be differentiating for now, but hopefully the rest of the ecosystem will catch up to that standard.
Except for stylus support --- Samsung is thankfully continuing with S-Pen support (which also works on the Kindle Scribe and Wacom One and various other devices).
Oh, do you have a source? The pre-release coverage still talked a lot about the GN2 even days ago, and to me it was more or less the defining new HW drop in this phone.
It's a lot less exciting without a sensor upgrade and would be mostly playing catch-up otherwise.
Did you purchase your phone from T-Mobile? I'm on T-Mobile but I always buy my Pixels direct from Google. All updates have come direct from Google, no T-Mobile involvement at all.
In this particular case, yes, but the update can still be blocked by the carrier. People have been successful in updating the device by temporarily putting the SIM from another carrier in the phone.
My daughter's Pixel 5a update, for example, was delayed but it was purchased from Google.
To be clear, the update _does_ come directly from Google but the device won't show that the update is available until the carrier gives the green light. The factory image can still be sideloaded.
The P7P is the first phone that I've not purchased outright, and that's because TMO was willing to give me a ridiculously generous offer to trade in a OnePlus 7t.
I agree, that's how I ended up buying the P7P through TMO -- it was a ridiculously generous offer.
With the Pixel updates, at least, the updates come through Google but the carrier (at least TMO) can prevent this from happening even if the phone is unrestricted.
While the downloads do come directly from Google, they work with the carriers, who can delay the updates until they have a chance to look at it and ensure they're happy with it... whatever that means.
IIRC you can download the images from Google via web browser and flash manually, but not sure if you can still do that, and I've never tried it myself.
>IIRC you can download the images from Google via web browser and flash manually, but not sure if you can still do that, and I've never tried it myself.
The depreciation between Pixels and iPhones is staggering.
Trade-in in Germany on Google Store page:
- Pixel 6 Pro 256gb ($999 on release) - 235€
- iPhone 13 Pro 256gb ($1099 on release) - 730€
While I am partial to Googles line of phones (had pretty much every Google phone since the nexus one), the loss of value is something I cannot really ignore any more when deciding to buy a phone.
My last flagship phone was a Google Nexus 6P where the base model was $499. Amazing phone, too bad after 3 years it had a battery issue but the manufacturer gave me a new one.
But the thing is: it was $499.
That was the greatest thing about the Nexus lines - good hardware (maybe not the latest SOC) with regular updates and a good OS experience. I miss those phones.
Google with the Pixels went full goofy mode. I'm not paying 1.140€ for a phone. I have a Huawei P10 that's still running smoothly, just the battery is getting tired... so maybe ill get one of those Pixel 6 Pro :)
But Google pushed away a lot of the Nexus user base, who were hyped every year for the new Nexus.
7a is almost a flagship, so most people don't have to care their flagship series. Just buy a series. Nowadays "flagship" means that the best camera they can achieve.
Back then, phone providers were competing to be the Nexus brand, so it was generally a loss-leader. The brand that released the Nexus phone would release their actual flagship about 3 months later.
They pack a lot more stuff into phones now too. Better screens, multiple cameras, etc. Today's flagships are also just physically larger than the older phones for the differences that makes.
Google pushed away frugal customers. That was a very smart business decision for them.
When Google sells a Pixel 8 Pro for $999, they’re sending a signal that says “our phone is just as good as the iPhone.”
I think your story points to how the Nexus line was basically an unfinished product where Google wasn’t even willing to attempt to sell it at a profitable price point until they could buy a hardware designer (HTC) and integrate that company into Google to produce a comprehensive product. Your Nexus phone had to be entirely replaced and yet you only gave the company $500. So they just sold two flagship phones for $250 each. That’s not a business, that’s a charity.
My Nexus 5X bootlooped right in front of my eyes with no user intervention.
The Nexus lineup wasn’t as good as an iPhone (nor a Samsung or Huawei phone for that matter) and that’s why nobody paid iPhone money for it.
Some of that is inflation (and it's claimed the iPhone 15 Pro at $999 is the best deal since the original adjusting for inflation). I also think that in order to continue shipping something new each year back in 2010 all you needed were some same-price-new-generation silicon/battery/screen improvements. These days the tech has plateaued a bit and we've seen a number of years where the improvements come from adding another camera, then another camera. More and more sensors. Some stupid and more expensive features like under-screen fingerprint readers. A phone could cost way less, but the table stakes are now much higher so manufacturers can get away with phones costing nearly a grand (and sometimes much more).
"That was the greatest thing about the Nexus lines - good hardware"
Yet every nexus phone had major hardware issues. that's not good hardware. It wasn't premium, it wasn't supported long, and it wasn't high quality. I LOVED the nexus line, as a broke college student that prioritized bang for the buck and customization, and speed, and android was getting great new features every year, but things have gotten so bad at google.
> Yet every nexus phone had major hardware issues.
I won't argue with that. But I'm right there with you, Nexus phones and android releases were exciting - and you knew with Nexus you'd be the first to get the new stuff.
As the lifecycle most consumers have for their cellphones stretches out adding additional years, the manufacturers are pushing their high-end phones more heavily, and creating even higher-end phones.
Nexus hardware (LG made) was crap. Both mine and my wife's phones bootlooped at 12-14 months of purchase. Never had such issues with any of the other smartphones we have owned.
A major confounding variable here is that there's probably a bit more of a motive for Google to get someone to move cross-manufacturer than to incentivize an upgrade from someone who already has a Google phone—depreciation aside.
This means best way to buy a pixel is few years after release, and even better if it's a used one. I recently got Pixel 4a and believe i can easily keep using this for at least 2 3 years.
The 4A doesn't get security updates anymore though, right? The language on the website says "guaranteed until at least August 2023" so I guess it's up to Google's good will.
Do security updates really matter that much? May be they do depending on your usage patterns. I think anyone will be fine without most of those security updates. Also most of the slowdowns are caused by automatically updating apps which keep gaining weight with every update.
Yes, security updates absolutely matter regardless of your usage pattern. You could unwittingly visit a website that has been compromised to exploit a zero-day in your browser. Or receive a malicious text message. Or open a PDF. Or or or.
I do visit sites with a phone with latest firefox with ublock origin. Browsers get updates regardless whether android itself is updated to latest version.
I am not defending unpatched phones just to be clear, but its not end of the world if you use unsecure device, just keep all your money and other important stuff away from it. Which is fine for many people.
>You could unwittingly visit a website that has been compromised to exploit a zero-day in your browser.
In Android, browser, messaging app updates and many even system updates are delivered through Play store (long after system/OS updates have stopped for the phone), so attacks will have to be much more sophisticated.
Nobody that I know cares the least bit if they get security updates or not. Could be that it changes if there ever comes along a widespread exploit that won't get patched, but currently it's just not a concern especially for any non-techie.
This is a particularly badly-timed comment. Not even a month ago there was a 10/10 severity vulnerability in webp, including Chrome, that could let your phone get pwned by serving it a video, and people have confirmed it is being actively seen in the wild. Security updates absolutely do matter.
Older phones don't get significantly cheaper when bought new, used ones are a gamble, and the savings don't go that far anyway when you consider the amount of updates you'll be receiving diminishes.
Who the hell cares that one's phone is going out of support? This anal obsession with OS updates for some people is honestly appalling. If the phone doesn't get updated every micro second the sky is falling and the phone becomes a dangerous place. What are you doing on your phone that you need to be on top of OS security so badly? Browsing on the dark web? Going to sketchy sites? Have no password savers or 2nd factor auth? I had a Samsung galaxy S7 until less than a year ago. Had ZERO issues. Now calculate how many years I was out of support. I have now a Pixel 4a5G. I will only trade it for another for the same reason I did with the S7 - when it becomes too slow. Or it explodes, or turns to dust.
I do not care about getting the latest updates, I care about having all the vulnerabilities being fixed. Can you load a malicious WebM file without executing arbitrary code in a webview on your S7?
In the US it is $400 for the Pixel 6 Pro (256GB) and $550 for the iPhone 13 Pro (256GB) to trade-in for a Pixel 8 Pro (128GB).
I am probably going to trade in an old Pixel 3 (64GB) that I had sitting in a drawer. They will give $200 trade-in for it for a Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro. Only $30 trade-in for the other phones they sell.
New Pixel 6 Pros are selling for around $400 on eBay, used ones go for about $250. iPhone 13 Pros are priced at approximately $700 new and $500-600 used.
My hot take is that the vast majority of Android users are not specifically looking for an Android; they just want "a phone." There's a minority of hardcore Android fans who are committed to specific models like the Samsung S23 or Pixel. In contrast, there are many people specifically want an iPhone, whether it's for iMessage, the ecosystem, or even just for the status symbol. This seems to hold a lot more value.
Yeah. They're absolutely shooting themselves in the foot. Makes no sense to me at all as it's good advertising for their brand and people all around the world are going to be interested.
Here's an archive.is link which has most of the info [1]
What is the point of being one of the largest technology companies in the world if you can't even provide basic global coverage to your websites and products?!
Because it is still massive. The 6" Nexus 6 is 3.3in wide whereas the 6.7" Pixel 8 Pro is only 3" wide. Even omitting the bezels, the Nexus 6 has a screen width of 2.94" vs. the 8 Pro's 2.75"
You've highlighted exactly what the comment you were replying to was talking about, the aspect ratio is much different. The Pixel 8 Pro has a 6.7" screen vs the 6" on nexus 6, despite being 10% narrower.
Our thumbs haven't grown in the past decade and they now are expected to stretch longer distances. I can't even reach the opposite top corner with my thumb on my iPhone 13 mini
Yeah, no shit. I don't think that there's anyone who can't figure that out. The problem isn't "I can't figure out how to use my phone", it's that always having to use the phone with two hands is annoying as hell. Phones shine when you can use them one handed. They suck when you have to regularly use them two handed because they are so big.
I think a lot of phone UI stuff biases for the lower half of the screen already. UI elements for picking most frequently used apps are at the bottom, controls for ending calls etc are at the bottom, keyboards are at the botton, swiping up to change apps.
Sure, but many phones are so wide that I can't reach elements at the bottom of the screen (but on the side opposite my thumb). I'm willing to not fuss about stuff all the way in the top-left corner, but I almost always have to hold my phone with two hands to use it.
The original galaxy note was 147 x 83 x 9.7: slightly wider and thicker than the pixel 8, but not quite as tall. Overall very similar in size, but with a 5.3" screen rather than 6.2".
I was going to complain about the screen size but my Pixel 5 has a 6.0 screen and I might actually finally upgrade to the Pixel 8. The pixel 8 is still half a cm wider than the pixel 5 but they appear to be the same height and nearly the same thickness.
I had a Pixel 6 briefly, at launch, but returned it almost immediately in exchange for a 6.0" screen Pixel 5 because the 6 was ludicrously too large for daily use on the go and uncomfortable in my pants pocket. Hopefully they keep shrinking the non-pro models and we settle on 6" as an ok size.
GrapheneOS has been the target of ongoing personal attacks against the former lead dev. None of the claims are true. GOS devs have been swatted and harassed on multiple occasions.
I suggest you examine the baseless claims against the (former) lead dev more closely - they are fabrication.
(He has been harassed so much, with death threats and the like, that he has recently stepped down as lead dev).
I use GrapheneOS, and I've donated to its development. To say that "None of the claims are true" and that they are "baseless" is incorrect.
Louis Rossman was a supporter of the project until he and Daniel had a failing out in which Daniel behaved inappropriately [1], all over a Youtube comment. There's proof for that and other claims [2, 4, 5].
Daniel can be a talented developer, privacy advocate and asshole at the same time.
It's sad to see him (and others, like yourself) say stuff like "examine the baseless claims", without providing any sources.
After all the drama with Calyxos, Techlore, Louis Rossmann etc, at some point one has to notice a pattern of behavior.
Think about all the products you purchase. Do you really think that in each case, the CEO of the company behind that product has a "pattern of behaviour" we approve of? [I really doubt it.] But here we are concerned about personality quirks of a guy developing a valuable free product.
I think you are engaging in Whataboutism [1]. This does not make for a constructive discussion.
But lets take what you said in good faith.
I imagine most products I buy have a not so amazing CEO. That does not prevent me from criticizing one of the products I use most often. Furthermore, as the (former) lead developer, he had or has control of the signing keys, simply deleting (as he has done in the past) them would cause significant damage.
If I had the time, knowledge and money. Which I don't.
So, I rely and support others that do to ensure I have a functioning and constantly running system without much maintenance work, except donating one a year.
> But I am thoroughly on his side when it comes to the CalyxOS and Techlore drama.
Sure, that could be argued either way. To be honest, it's too complicated for me to really care about. I think GrapheneOS is a solid project, currently.
My biggest problem is that Daniel refuses to apologize or even acknowledge these issues. I try to judge people not by their mistakes, but by their responses to these mistakes.
My worry with GrapheneOS is that the same thing to Copperhead might happen to it. I don't know or care who was right/wrong in that situation. But the end result was that Daniel deleted the signing keys, so I am worried that if Daniel is pressured form either real or imaginary attacks, he might do the same to GrapheneOS.
I want the project to go on for as long as possible, and part of that requires honest reflection.
> My biggest problem is that Daniel refuses to apologize or even acknowledge these issues. I try to judge people not by their mistakes, but by their responses to these mistakes.
I think this is very fair, and very unfortunate as well.
The issue with Copperhead was that they wanted to make it proprietary against Daniel's will (an oversimplification). I'm on Daniel's side on this issue.
The way they're currently in the process of setting up a "GrapheneOS Foundation" to ensure it stays open and not-for-profit _should_ ensure this never happens again. But the issue they are having is that a public figurehead is likely to get harassed and Doxed by malicious parties like what's happened to Daniel - but a real name is required to be on paper legally (also an oversimplification).
> I want the project to go on for as long as possible, and part of that requires honest reflection.
I agree. And I think this is very hard to discuss in official graphene circles with official graphene members+devs because they always always always shy away from discussing meta-issues and comment threads, forum threads, etc are removed once conversations go too far into it. I see both sides - they want to focus on development and the project itself - but also, these discussions need to be had.
I moved away from Android entirely because of size. Currently on an iPhone 13 Mini, which is riiight at the very upper edge of a reasonable size. I would love to go back to Android if only someone reputable would make a reasonably-sized phone.
My SO is holding on to a first-gen iPhone SE for the exact same reason - I don't know what kind of hands manufacturers expect people to have, but at this point I'm all but certain that modern flagships are too large for most of the population.
If only 13 Mini battery wasn’t shit. I don’t need the 1000 mega pixel camera or M20 Apple cheap. Just give me a good battery and a non-crazy sized phone and I am good. And yeah take my money.
I have a 13 Mini. The battery is typically at 30-50% in the evening. Generally never have to worry about the charge during the day. Perhaps it's time to replace the battery if it's at 80% of health or below?
If I travel and have to use GPS most of the day / take hundreds of photos, I carry a small 5000 mAh battery to charge up on the go. I think it's a reasonable accommodation for a phone that's perfectly fine day-to-day.
No no. I had 12 Mini and from day 1 it was a pain. And when I was switching I was told by many who had used both the minis that the battery life is essentially the same. Not much difference. And no I don’t want to consider s power bank as an option for my general usage.
Besides I was tired of buying “old” phone. While 14 battery life is good, nothing compared to the Android word though, it’s a brick. Unlike everybody told me I am still not used to it after 4-5 months. Still hate it when I look at it or hold in my hands or is in my pockets. The problem is that in Android there’s literally no phone smaller than 14 now.
So next is not going to be an iPhone for sure unless a smaller and lighter iPhone comes up.
Despite it having a reputation for being a small phone, the Zenfone 10 is essentially the same size as the Galaxy S23 and iPhone 15 - in other words, "normal" size and quite a bit larger than the iPhone minis.
This was the exact reason. I never even considered iPhone. I thought it’s ridiculous to pay that crazy price. Then one day I saw the first SE and it was at a decent price on deal. Fell in love with tue size. But now that size of phone is nowhere to be found essentially. I finally bought 14 few months ago and next time I have to change I’ll move back to some cheap Android phone. Screw tracking. If at this crazy price I have to buy a locked down brick I’d rather replace that with something much cheaper.
Is the regular Samsung model too big for you? S22 and S23. It's just the right size for me and I prefer small phones (or what used to be normal sized phones).
Yeah, it really sucks!! I'm hoping they bring it back in some upcoming gen, maybe a "once every couple years" kind of model. (Or even better, someone on the Android side picks up the ball.)
I'd heard rumors about a Pixel Mini in 2023. Was holding out hope for a surprise drop at the Pixel event today, but with how leaky Google hardware development is, I should have known better.
I am also in the Pixel 5 group and have been struggling to find a replacement as our phone nears its end of security updates. Does anyone have any suggestions for a potential replacement? There seem to be few phones in this size and weight class.
I've had all Pixel phones up to and including the 6 Pro, finally gave up due to various issues and am super happy with 13 mini + watch ultra combo. I don't depend on my phone that much anymore and mini model size is perfect for pockets and one-hand use, the build quality and CPU/speed is amazing, battery life is decent too, screen on time it's not impressive but really efficient just streaming BT audiobooks all night. Miss 120Hz screen and zoom camera so I'm going with a Pro phone next, but not yet.
I was in the same boat and opted to use this moment to make the switch to an iPhone 15P. It's an interesting transition, haven't fully bought in yet.
If I stayed on Android I would probably be looking at an Asus Zenfone 10. Similar form factor and battery life to Pixel 5. Pretty good reviews. Check it out as an option.
Maybe I have abnormally large hands & pockets but the Pixel 6 Pro w/case size is really good. I am always annoyed when I have to use someone's phone and their tiny screen.
Same here in Italy. Crazy price, almost 350€ more than the Pixel 6 Pro. I really wanted to upgrade, but no Pixel at this Price. I'll wait for a sure street price in less than 6 months
Give me 380USD phone which lasts for next 5-8 years, feels premium, is repairable, camera is decent, replaceable battery, OS is just Vanilla Android with atleast 5 years(more years of Software updates would be welcome) of Software Updates and when you can't provide it, make it hackable enough to install Custom ROMs.
No company will ever make a 5-8 year phone at that price. That's $47-76 a year.
People pay that amount or more for apps that help manage their fantasy football team...
Comparitively that would be an insane bargain for a phone and it's absurd for that to be your requirement.
I do wonder what the right price point would be for a subscription model. At the moment the average replacement time is every 2 years which would be the equivalent of $30 a month basic and $40 for pro.
Could they afford $30 a month sub but you got the yearly upgrades rather than every 2 years?
If the price of the parts is quite low compared to the R&D that could be feasible.
The current iPhone SE starts at $430 and will (probably) get at least 5 years of updates. If budget phone makers can't do something cheaper than the iPhone SE then surely their entire business model is just fucked?
Economies of scale. The SE is basically the hand me downs from the mainline iphone and couldn't exist without it. It's not surprising that no name brands can't compete with the richest company in the world.
Why would they not make a budget phone? It's not like the BOM + assembly for a touchscreen, first(!) battery, motherboard, and plastic case cost that much. Check out some of the public reports from counterpointresearch.com: the profit margin on flagships is often double the BOM cost, the profit margin on budget phones is a little tighter but still not bad. Who cares what the revenue is per year? What matters is how much it costs to make the thing. Most vendors are just tweaking reference designs anyways.
The Moto G Play is just $170 list, currently going for ~$110. It has a rather pathetic 3 years support, but that's $4.72 per month at list, or ~$3.95 at current list rates - assuming you throw it away when the support contract ends. The Samsung A14 5g is $200, and gets 4 years' support, which is $4.15/mo, again, assuming list price and discarding when security updates are over.
I'm currently typing from my Moto G6, which came out in April 2018. I bought in July of that year for $100 (it was a BOGO with a buddy's $400 Moto One Zoom, they were literally giving them away as a backup to promote their more expensive phone because the BOM cost was so cheap). I plug it in on my desk at work because the battery sucks now, but that's no great hardship. By that math, I've enjoyed the use of a smartphone for $1.62 per month (would be $3.25 at list). Yes, it's only running Android 9 and not getting "security updates" anymore, but I have my phone app, messaging app, a camera, and Firefox, and that's about all I need.
I think it would be ridiculous to spend $30 or $40 A MONTH for a smartphone. It doesn't matter what some people pay for a fantasy football team app, that has nothing to do with buying hardware. Other people are buying 3000 lbs used cars for the same price others are paying for a flagship 200g slab of glass!
I have the Moto G4, which is on its last legs after 8 years.
It barely had any non-android, non-Google apps. If there were any, I uninstalled them all except one from the Apps list without having to root my phone or anything. The last one is called Moto, which is disabled (can't be uninstalled).
> No company will ever make a 5-8 year phone at that price
But they already do? I used my Oneplus X for 6 years and that was $249. Battery is the main reason I stopped using it. That's $3.50/month, maybe an outlier, but I wouldn't pay 10x that to check my messages and get directions.
I still don't get the "premium feel" line when everyone covers their phone in a case anyway. I don't care if my phone is made of plastic when it actually makes it less prone to breaking when dropped.
I've been saying this to people for years. Tons of companies market how a phone feels, its looks/colors but then almost everybody just ends up slapping a case on it.
I literally couldn't care what a phone was made out of/how it feels since I just put a case on it before I even use it for a day in most situations.
Same here. I think it's ridiculous we make phones out of glass, then put more glass on them to protect that glass. Phone screens should be made of plastic, which doesn't break, and then let me put a piece of glass over it to prevent scratching. And then if that breaks, oh well, I don't care because i can replace it for $10.
I put one of those ridiculous military spec, carbon fiber reinforced type cases on mine, it would be in pieces otherwise. It bulks the phone up a lot but every time I drop it, I smile.
I don't know if I've just been excessively lucky, but I've never put a case on any smartphone I've owned since 2010, and I've only cracked the screen on two of them. These days (probably for the past 4 years) I do put the thin-film screen protectors on as well, and replace them if they get damaged.
I've always been of the feeling that I'm buying this lovely, well-designed piece of hardware, why would I want to cover it up in an ugly plastic case?
I don't put cases (or even screen protectors) on mine either (since 2015). I've dropped it many times, obviously, but I've only ever had the edges of the phone get the slightest nicks - which I prefer to having a case on it.
Even worse is when the premium feel is at the expense of usability as well as durability. Matte glass backs and rounded aluminium sides might as well be a bar of soap
The pixel "a" series match your requirements for the most part. An inexperience phone stripped of unnecessary features. Unfortunately I don't know any phones that are also repairable, replaceable, and hackable.
That's why I think I'm going with the Samsung A54. It's around that price (if unlocked), but has decent specs. I eventually want to phase out my 4-year-old A50, mainly for android auto reasons. Need to ask online though, there may be better spec'd phones for the price point.
No replaceable battery, sadly, but those don't really exist at this point.
I am also in the market, and replacing my small/compact Moto G4 after 7-8 years. Sansung A54 seems to be the most appropriate replacement, based on my criteria.
I just looked up the battery replacement procedure, and it is not horrible for something you want to do once after 4 years.
Samsung sells their regularly-refreshed A series into something close to this price range, and they're great devices. For some reason they don't get nearly as much attention in the US as they do in Europe and other parts of the world, though.
The battery is replaceable, just not by the user (at least not easily). I've had my Pixel battery replaced; the cost didn't seem exorbitant.
It would be nice to be able to pop batteries in and out on the fly, but I suspect that would make it a lot harder to waterproof. I've lost more phones to water damage than I have to battery death.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 from 2014 had a removable battery, headphone jack, a microSD card slot, and was IP67 dust/water resistant. We lost removable batteries because it was an easy way to make devices obsolete.
IMO smartphones peaked around that era, and we've only seen incremental improvements and enshittification ever since. I used to be excited about every new device, but these days all manufacturers are grasping at straws trying to differentiate their rectangular slabs from the competition. AI is the latest gimmick in this trend.
The recent issue (from the last two years) does not appear to be Teams-related. The Teams thing was from the first wave of emergency call failures, which was traced to a bad interaction between Teams and the Android dialer.
I will never get used to this geo-determined internet (i cannot see the phone's page without a vpn)
is like we developed this new amazing inter-connection network. and then due to politics, decided it was much too good... far too much freedom without national barriers, so we've gone on to reintroduce these barriers.
as if the internet was restricted by the same geographical (physical) realities that we commonly encounter.
but nothing will ever be as dumb as the re-introducing material scarcity (DRM schemes) back into the 'cyberspace' just so a few can keep making money out of what they already did; possibly for several generations of descendants
I think we've been there for quite some time. iOS is also limiting certain features based on model like this. The new 15 has certain image processing features the 14 Pro doesn't get, even though they have the same SoC.
Yep, I expect most of these to make it to older pixels but probably not for a few months. There are some that probably require the newer Tensor G3 chip though, which can't be backported.
Not really, I have a Pixel 4a 5G that doesn't come with magic eraser but because I pay for Google One, they gave me access to it.
So I doubt there are really any limitations on the hardware themselves or that you absolutely need the new version. Google just paywalling the features.
I bet you all those will be available very soon for Google One subscribers.
Yes, but magic eraser is something that can be easily done off-device in the cloud. Real-time audio shaping cannot with introducing unacceptable latencies. There are no doubt some things they'll roll back to older Pixels, but they can't do everything new on this year's release without hardware.
They've already been limiting some of the "AI" image editing features to newer pixels (but installing the same app package on older phones works just fine).
Is that confirmed? Do you have any further sources on that? I am not questioning, just interested in learning more. I had kinda assumed that the new chips had new instructions that supported these features. Kinda lame if they are literally just gating them to new phones.
The planned obsolescence conversation seems to revolve around Apple (the only self-interested greedy company on the planet according to the detractors) but they hold the record for software updates on smartphones - 10 years for the iPhone 5s. Here we are, in 2023, and Google is coming around to seven years of support. Apple has done at least seven since 2013.
In any case I applaud this move and at least five years should be mandated by law. I wonder how many "random manufacturer drops a cheap Android on the market and walks away on software and support" Android devices there are sitting in landfills across the globe. Of course there are plenty of Apple devices as well but it's not due to lack of support.
There is a slight difference in how OS updates work in iOS and Android.
iOS system apps release with the OS on an annual cycle, but in Android system apps are upgraded independently. Meaning, even without Android OS upgrades the device would get new system apps.
And in every discussion mentioning Android and Apple people see it as some kind of religious debate. I do not care what anyone does or doesn’t use. I have no stake in this and I don’t see it as some kind of argument.
That said, I do know this and your reply is based on either a misunderstanding of my point or optimism/enthusiasm for some kind of argument you seem to think we’re having.
I’m not talking about the built in calculator app, browser, etc.
I’m talking about the operating system version used and targeted for by applications.
Compare an Android fragmentation chart to an iPhone/iOS fragmentation chart.
It’s painfully obvious device support, updates, etc are still a mess in the Android ecosystem.
Talk to any team deploying Android applications and the first pain point you will hear is how ridiculous the fragmentation is compared to iOS.
It’s gotten better but it’s still a mess. Announcements like this are heading more in the right direction but I think it’s painfully clear that Apple got at least this one thing right from the start in their overall approach.
You are making incorrect assumptions in a discussion and don't like to be corrected.
For the record, Android can also update system libraries via the store. The two platforms handle security updates very differently. If you want to get into a debate and criticise the one you are not using, at least try to learn how it works.
For many it absolutely is. It's vi vs emacs on steroids - a bunch of very technical people debating intricacies the general population is either unaware of or doesn't care about.
> You are making incorrect assumptions in a discussion and don't like to be corrected.
Naturally I don't think I am and I get corrected all of the time. It happens. Overall I think what happens in these kinds of discussions is the general tendency for HN users to live in very small technical bubbles, often very far removed from the general population. Generally this is a very good thing and it's one of the reasons we like and appreciate HN.
However, we're a tiny portion of the population. My viewpoint here is an attempt to put on my "Joe average walking down the street" hat. I understand what you are saying, I do understand how it works, but for the vast majority of the market these distinctions don't really matter. There is data all over the place that shows huge portions of the iOS user base running the latest iOS release within days of release. This is a result of the iron-fisted domination and control Apple exerts over its users. Sure, we don't appreciate that but clearly a substantial portion of the market does - and the actual data backs it up.
As I noted, all one needs to do is look at a fragmentation chart representing real world Android vs iOS users/devices to see how this manifests in the real world for the overwhelming majority of the user base of these devices.
At every organization I've been in that develops mobile applications when you talk to the Android team vs the iOS team the Android team is constantly grumbling and running into problems supporting the bewildering array of Android devices, screen sizes, releases, etc. Sure this applies to iOS devices as well but it's a night and day difference. It's actually one of the many reasons iOS tends to be the "lead" platform for new applications - they're early and they just don't want to deal with it yet. You can target and test on a handful of devices and releases and push an iOS app with some confidence it's going to "just work" on the large majority of devices with access to the App Store.
>they hold the record for software updates on smartphones - 10 years for the iPhone 5s
This is such a disingenuous comment. Claiming that it got 10 years of updates because it received a recent security update is not telling the complete story. It's a phone stuck on iOS 12 and Apple chose to release a recent security fix.
The Pixel 8 is going to receive 7 years of OS Updates, 84 months of monthly security updates and quarterly feature drops. This blows the iPhone away.
> The Pixel 8 is going to receive 7 years of OS Updates, 84 months of monthly security updates and quarterly feature drops. This blows the iPhone away.
Honestly the most appealing thing for me is the seven years of software support. The Pixel 5 support leaves a lot to be desired, given that I don't even want to upgrade from the hardware.
The demo video of their AI photo editor was kind of mind blowing but ultimately not a feature I would use. I've seen a few complaints about their automatic photo processing as well, which you can't disable in the official camera app.
Overall the majority of their features seem to be software which is tied to Google apps/services, which doesn't sit well with me.
> Honestly the most appealing thing for me is the seven years of software support
Yup. I've been clinging to my Pixel 4, but it hasn't gotten security updates in a year, which I'm not particularly comfortable with (been lucky so far, knock on wood). I might pick up the Pixel 8 (not Pro, god that thing is huge) mainly due to the support lifetime. And it does seem like their non-Pro releases are actually decreasing in physical size for the past few years. Still a couple/few mm larger than the Pixel 4, but that's doable, I think.
I was interested in this release. But right now it's a $20 difference here in CAD between the Pixel 8 Pro 256 GB and the S23 Ultra 256 GB (there's a sale going on for the S23). With all of the Pixel's heat, battery, and connectivity issues (bad reception I can live with, but not knowing if I can call 911?), I can't justify it at all.
Also, S23 Ultra is equipped with Snapdragon 8Gen2, which is much more powerful than Tensor G3. The latter is almost equivalent to 8+Gen1 in terms of CPU and GPU.
I honestly don't much care for benchmarks, but in this case there's a direct correlation between power and efficiency. The Pixel Pros are typically very poor for battery life and that's really what I care about.
Contrapoint: Samsungs UI is much cleaner than modern pixel phones. After a minimal amount of setup it gets much less in the way than stock android on pixel phones.
I'm still on the Pixel 3! I can't get off. I bounced off the Pixel 6. It's too big in my hand. The finger print sensor is in a weird spot. Android 13 is more restrictive. And worst? It's not faster or better. It's legitimately a hard _downgrade_ for me.
I have 2 Pixel 3s now (microphone died and battery swelled) but they run everything snappy! I might just keep buying Pixel 3s off eBay, its so much cheaper. My main worry is lack of security updates, especially with the webp vulnerability.
I won't be moving off of the Pixel 5a until the hardware breaks. Fingerprint sensor on the back and the camera notch all the way to the left are so good. With the case on the phone, my finger naturally lands on the sensor when I pick it up and it unlocks lightning fast. I don't understand why we can't have fingerprint sensors on the back anymore :-(
The on-screen fingerprint sensor on newer models is infuriating. Unlocking the screen is always a two-action operation of "tap the screen -> wait for it to fade in / wake up -> put your finger on the sensor".
The first tap to waken the screen often fails so I have to try one or two more times.
It's a small thing but, I have to tumble with it probably 100+ times a day given how often I check my phone for e.g. Slack. It should be the smoothest part of operation, imo.
That sounds infuriating. My iPhone SE (2022), bought second-hand for $250, has a fantastic fingerprint reader; indeed, when I have headphones in and Siri asks me to unlock my device to do something, I slip my hand into my pocket and find the sensor with my thumb.
If you go to Settings > Display > Lock Screen > "Always show time and info" and turn it on, it'll always show the time, notification icons and the fingerprint icon to show you where to position your finger. It does say that this reduces battery life.
I keep "Lift to check phone" on as if I need to unlock my phone, I'm usually going to lift it up into my hands. Unfortunately it and "Tap to check phone" are a bit buggy and don't always work correctly.
I have the 9 and it's a fairly good phone, but seems to have a hard time working with UK phone networks. I get patchy 4G, not sure I've ever seen 5G, and there seems to be a very magic combination of settings that allows me to actually make and receive calls (turning of VoLTE, and a bunch of other things need to be on or off). A shame, because otherwise I love the form factor and other features.
Yeah, both my Nexus and Pixel 1 had that issue. I lost 6 months photos and other data because of that. Now I continuously backup my entire phone to my file server when on my home wifi, and a whiff of a bootloop gets me rattled.
My current Pixel 3 has done something similar twice, but it's going good so far so
I was surprised to see my Pixel 4 is worth $250 for trade-in.
I've never actually traded in any of my old phones, on the fear that the new one might break at some point and I'd need a backup. Granted I've only once had to take advantage of this in the 13 years I've had smartphones.
I didn't click all the way through, but I'm hoping you don't have to turn in the old phone immediately... I'd like to hang onto it for at least a couple weeks just in case I find the backup/restore process hasn't completely done its job.
> I didn't click all the way through, but I'm hoping you don't have to turn in the old phone immediately... I'd like to hang onto it for at least a couple weeks just in case I find the backup/restore process hasn't completely done its job.
Last I remember looking the timeline is within 30 days of receiving the new device.
Getting access to the Apple ecosystem has inherent value that comes on top of the phones themselves.
Green bubbles can be worth a few hundred dollars. Or why some people keep a busted iPhone around just to manage the parental controls. Android doesn't have much of those restrictions or it applies less.
> Green bubbles can be worth a few hundred dollars.
I'm sorry, but what? To whom? I have an incredibly hard time believing it's actually something which makes a concrete return on investment, but maybe I'm wrong and the world is even dumber than I thought.
My teammates for a university assignment let out an audible groan when they found out I was the only one on an Android. I do have an iPad, so thankfully I was able to maintain communication regarding our team project.
As someone living in Europe this whole green bubble thing is completely baffling. Worth hundred dollars? Nobody uses default OS apps for messaging around here since they fail at cross platform interoperability.
I hope they will improve the photo post-processing. Currently, I have the pixel 7 pro, and the camera app really alters people more than I like. Fortunately, you can also save RAW files. The rumors on Reddit said that the processing algorithm may have been developed for cameras with lower resolutions - if that's true, the results on pixel 8 will be even worse
The camera (actually cameras) on my Pixel 7 Pro is the most over-hyped mediocrity ever. I can't believe that it reviewed so well. The jpeg processing is so over-done that everything looks like cartoons and plastic. The video drops dozens of frames when zooming in and out. The raws are not real raws, but are instead just less processed pseudo-raws, and yet still have terrible dynamic range anyway.
The skin waxing (probably aggressive noise reduction) on the Pixel 7 Pro is so bad it's changed how I take photos. I no longer try to get faces in my photos unless the light is very bright and they're close and near the center of the frame (the very bad barrel distortion is another problem with faces, they cannot be too close to the edges or they'll be comically elongated)
Agreed. I was quite happy with my Pixel 6 until the 7 was released, which I got for my wife. Immediately noticed that both phones cameras were worse.
In particular, shots of light-eyed people show as fine initially and then when the software processing finishes they have almost black eyes from all the contrast they add. If you choose raw you need a whole other processing pipeline, not to mention you get to see how shitty these sensors and lenses are without software doing a herculean lift.
I was able to work around it on my 6 with a GCam APK but couldn't find one for the 7.
Is there an Apple’s Elop at Google now? I am asking this in all seriousness. How does this cost for this phone make any sense!
Or maybe Google finally learned it from Apple that all you have do is declared a phone flagship and bump its cost dearly - then enjoy sights of people in long queues.
Is there any word on whether the modem has moved to a different supplier? I previously suffered challenges having to soft-reset Pixel 6/7 to "Fix Connectivity" fairly frequently.
A decade selling phones and these guys still can't advertise their way out of a paper bag.
GOOGLE ONE 10% CREDIT, FITBIT SUBSCRIPTION, 24 MONTHLY BILL CREDITS from GOOGLE FI. YOUTUBE PREMIUM. Wow am I pumped for all the SUBSCRIPTIONS I can now purchase.
Isn’t this the same thing Apple does? Carrier bill credit, Apple TV+ trial, Apple Fitness+ trial, Apple Arcade trial etc. Seems like any other kind of phone marketing to me.
Maybe we should go back to pay for software. I'm willing to pay for new Android releases if I could use my phone longer. This would be fair for both sides: the manufacturer would earn money with the software and I would save money for a new phone and the environment would be saved from a lot of waste. Win-win-win!
Google benefits as long as you use Android, with Play Store, Google Search and the general Google ecosystem. The problem with long-term support was lack of discipline, not lack of incentive.
Yes! This is a steep increase in price since Pixel 7. Googles upgrades are not going to happen for 7 years on Px7, but hopefully GrapheneOS gives my phone a few extra years.
Comparing this to the regular Pixel 8 it doesn't look like you get an awful lot more for your extra £300, I'm surprised there's such a delta.
Bigger screen (which for many is a minus not a plus), an extra 4GB RAM (still seems absurd to me that we need this much RAM on a phone) and more capable/additional auxiliary cameras.
I suppose the charitable take is that £700 feels like a pretty good deal for the non-Pro one.
I'd love the telephoto camera for outdoor shots, but I can't stand the price or the size of the phone. Even with the Google Fi discount of $300, the price($500 with trade-in) is too much to justify.
This just happened to me after 1.5 years of usage of my Pixel 5A.
Luckily Google extended the usual 1-year warranty to be 2-years to give free replacements (which I took advantage of and in fact was given a free upgrade to a 6A)... But be prepared for your phone to die out of nowhere.
Unless the battery is seriously improved I wouldn't pay it much mind. The pixel watch is one of my biggest purchase regrets and basically just sits off on my arm as an accessory.
It was "free", but I rationalized that I'll have it for exercise and to hopefully reduce the amount of time I look at the gigantic screen. However, the way these purchases usually go is that you can't buy your way to a better lifestyle. So I'll find out eventually if it's just another gadget that collects dust on the shelf.
That being said I did want the better camera on the pro.
I'm intrigued by it. To be clear, it reads surface temperature, not ambient temperature. The demo gave the example of a hot pot on the stove, I think, and they mentioned they've submitted something to the FDA to take your temperature (to see if you have a fever).
This was my first thought as well. Curious to see if it functions similarly or within a certain tolerance of one of those much more expensive FLIR temp gauges you see laptop reviewers use. MKBHD video showed that it asks for 5cm distance from object being measured and for you to tap to select type of material, which notably excludes skin temp.
Wait, have they changed handling of (e)SIMs? I'm happily using two eSIMs on my pixel pro 7 (work and private). But looks like this supports only one physical and one eSIM?
The Pixel 7 Pro only has one eSIM chip too, which you're using with the MEP (Multiple Enabled Profiles) feature:
"This feature allows devices to have dual SIM support using a single eSIM chip, which can have multiple SIM profiles and can connect to two different carriers at the same time." https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/esim-mep
And again no Face Unlock like we had in Pixel 4 :(
COVID basically ended and they still won't bring that back, I was hoping that Apple push for that will make Android phones also with a nice and secure face unlocking (for us that have issues with fingerprint sensors not recognizing their fingerprints)
pixel 6 and 7 have severly weak fingerprint sensors, they overheat, and have basic telephone connectivity issues. its unfortunate not to see any of these basic table stakes addressed and instead just get a dog and pony show for the camera software and how it can produce fake photos
This turned me off to Pixel phones indefinitely. I got the Pixel 6 Pro and it could not figure out what it should be connected to: WiFi, 5G, or 4G and of course rather than just choosing one it decided to not have any connection whatsoever unless I moved a few hundred feet to a different location or rebooted the phone. There was lots of discussion around this and youtubers even covered it but rather than fix the issue Google focused on releasing the next phone.
The fingerprint sensors on the 6 and newer are terrible and massive downgrades in every way from previous models. Is there any indication that the 8 is moving to ultrasonic as rumored?
Still using a pixel 3 I bought used for <150 3 years ago. Works totally fine, never slow, no issues with battery life. Before that had a p1 that worked for a long time too.
Maybe I've just been lucky but I've had very good experiences with pixel phones.
Snoozer like the iPhone 15 release. No real innovation, just a new chip, improved cameras, and a bunch of waxing and waning about premium materials that I will never see again after I slap a case on it.
Why do people expect to be blown away every year? Most people upgrade their phone every 2-3 years. This isn't the early smartphone days where there was tons of room for improvement. Moore's law has gotten increasingly closer to ending, screens are as pixel dense as necessary, and people generally are satisfied with the capabilities of their phone. Starting around 2017 smartphones as we know them peaked and so they just shove bigger/better/more cameras into them for the most part.
There is tons of room for innovation in phones, but most companies don't want to risk deviating from what consumers think they want (just like Hollywood movies).
I'm sure the HN crowd could come together and form a list of 100 ideas that are truly innovative in the phone space. However, these ideas are quite risky to bring to market.
Some ideas:
1. Super Amazing Sound playback (next level)
2. Rollable display
3. More I/O (for 3rd party ecosystems)
If you want something innovative there's always the foldables, one of which is Google's. I'm not sure what other form factor you're looking for in a phone, turns out that "glass slab that's nearly 100% screen" is a pretty decent design choice.
In what way was the Huawei better? Not disagreeing, I myself regretted upgrading to the Pixel 7 from an S10e. Screen, portability, and speaker quality were all downgrades.
And wasn't the whole play store debacle part of some US ban on Huawei? Something outside of Google's control?
Battery life, screen quality, performance.. It has of course all this super annoying bloatware you can't remove but some of the extra features were actually quite good and I miss those now (close all apps, how to create screen recordings and screenshot, etc).
Yeah it was a forced by a US policy on a wider Huawei ban, which I think is more a "protect our companies" motivation.
I "upgraded" from a Samsung Galaxy S9 to a Pixel 7 this year, only because Samsung stopped doing security updates. Big disappointment for me, too. The fingerprint scanner from that 2018 phone was 10x more reliable than the in-screen thing that the Pixel uses.
I don't miss the battling software ecosystems (Samsung vs Google) on that old phone, though.
Oof. I forgot about how much better Samsung's sonic FP readers were. Yeah completely forgot about that from the S10e. I will say for the Pixel it's a little bit better now than it was at launch.
TBH the most interesting feature to me is screen brightness. I have a pixel 6 and it's not TERRIBLE in bright sunlight but it is... not great. Not sure that quite gets me interested in upgrading though. Cameras seem better I guess - have to wait on reviews for that.
Do you have adaptive brightness enabled? For the longest time I did not realize that the screen doesn't achieve max brightness despite the brightness slider manually set to the max unless it's enabled.
Why are these phones so heavy now? Like others have said, still clinging to my 5 and hoping for another smaller Pixel. But size aside, I don't see why this phone should weigh ~30g more than my 5.
Things are moving in the right direction (207g for Pixel 6 -> 197g for 7 -> 187g now), but I still value how light my 5 is at 151g, especially for one-handed use.
Zenfone 10 is closest thing to a modern Pixel 5, and only weighs 172g. It checks almost all boxes for me, except eSIM support.
It's awesome to me when they do these kind of pages and then there are 28 footnotes, can you even trust any claim on the page, would you even bother reading them at a certain point
I've use every single pixel from the Nexus line to the pixel to the 6, and the reason I skipped 7 is that the camera bar on the 6 is soo annoying.
It makes the phone 'negatively compatible with wireless charging, that is to say, when I put it on the phone spot in my car, it makes just enough contact with the wireless charger to go in and out of barely-in-range, causing my phone to heat up and lose battery charge.
I've been wanting to get off of my s21 ultra because it's extremely bulky and has gotten slow over the years. The killer feature keeping me on it is the 100x zoom for identifying birds and I haven't seen another phone rival it yet. To be clear the 100x zoom is awful quality and not really useful for anything beyond getting basic shapes and colors but for identifying far birds it's awesome.
1) Google is more going forward towards mediocre photography. You can't turn off HDR (HDR in 99% cases is bad), now they introduced AI-tool to replaces unsmiling \ awkward faces.
2) Pixels going toward cloud based smartphones (Video Boost feature) - is really bad, no future proof. My fathers 2 XL works fine without updates, but with cloud based features Pixels gonna come crippled
If you’re really set on Android, I would buy a year old phone (so probably a “Pixel 7 Pro” if that’s a thing? Not sure when Google last changed their naming scheme).
A year old iPhone goes for maybe €100-200 less than the new model, but last year’s Android phone is now basically half price.
I don't think that necessarily true - Samsung has hidden the cameras inside the body, and I'd argue that there's nothing terribly special about the pixel camera hardware compared to, say, the S23 Ultra.
>Dropping your phone is a rare event, not a serious risk
For you
I drop my phone at least once a day lol
I actually dropped it more before I got a case on the Pixels because the back glass is ridiculously slippery and it'll even slide itself off surfaces that aren't perfectly level. Back glass needs to fucking die.
The insanely polished smooth metal frame doesn't help either when combined with the ultra smooth glass back in my hands.
Heh, when I got a Nexus 4, it was my first glass backed phone. It arrived two days before the case did. I was meeting my wife for dinner and got there a bit early, and had the phone on the restaurant table. When my wife came and sat down the slight wiggle she gave to the table was enough for the phone to slide right off and make the back look like a spider web of cracks. Fortunately it was only the back.
I never go without a case now. The thicker and grippier the better. I also have a belief that phones these days are too thin, and I would gladly have a thicker phone with better battery life. The best feeling phone in my hand IMHO was my Palm Treo, which was almost an inch thick.
In my experience most of the flagship phones are slippery enough that it's not a rare event to drop them if you don't use a case made out of a higher friction material.
Of course that's an incredibly dumb design, but unfortunately they are made like that.
I guess I can't relate. I've had a Pixel (the first one) and I didn't feel like it was slippery or anything. It's been a while but I think the reason I had to replace it wasn't damage, but because it wouldn't hold a charge any more. Otherwise I'd still probably have it, I really liked that phone.
Is there any way to make it safe? I've bought newer pixels and they are a downgrade all around for me. I just want security updates and the ability to browse on-device files/do file management (newer Androids keep restricting further and further)
LineageOS is not the answer. Check out the DivestOS, it is known for supporting 'out of support' devices. but I would strongly suggest you to change your device, that is too old. There is new vunrebility each month.
I am curious because I have been using LineageOS on Pixel 2 / Pixel 2 XL phones for a while (and it works very well, I might add), but I am kinda clueless when it comes to Android security.
Plus it just provides updates quicker, eg. the recent WebP CVE was first fixed in DivestOS before other aftermarket systems. https://divestos.org/pages/news
Pro starts from $1000. First Android phone 's HTC Dream launch price was $180 (with a 2y contract), the phone had a physical keyboard, a physical trackball, a replaceable battery, it was a real work tool.
Same here, but Ive been using lineageOS on mine for a year or so now?
Works great, minus the battery life. On first 'amazon' battery replacement and debating a 2nd. Broke the rear glass changing it last time -- but now I have a pixel 3 'panda'.
Was really hoping to see a similarity sized phone.
Also, do you use the squeeze feature of the phone? I use it all the time - to activate assistant in my pocket, squeezing through the pocket , and in headphones it pops up. Slick.
Guess I'm just replacing another battery.
Hope Google or some phone company is reading all these small phone requests. I understand the compromise may be battery life. I'm fine with that. It needs to fit in a pocket AND be able to bend around and do physical work without binding up or snapping in half.
with a Pixel 6 Pro and graphene OS installed (and this was the same with stock Android) - i have to say the call quality is absolute garbage on this device. The picture quality on Graphene - also aweful. I am really upset that even this option is not great...Lineage seems so flaky :/ Dear Nokia - please make an S30+ based phone with a QWERTY keyboard....please.
The Pro gives you access to full res RAW images from each sensor which are all 48mp (on the Pro, not sure about regular), not accounting for digital crops, which are 12mp center binned.
As a sidebar, you're all over this thread with negatively framed and inaccurate musings on features, so I'd recommend you give the product page or critical reviews a more serious look rather than letting other people do the work for you by correcting.
I came here after reading the product page, and comparing it to Pixel 7 pro.
Bith have similar sensor with 50mpix, they don't mention what is mpix if actual jpegs in neither of the pages.
7 got 12mpix jpegs.
Face Unlock is also not that promoted as it should be, I didn't see the note about it being strong security from just the selfie camera. That's the single feature that will make it buy that phone and ditch Pixel 4.
All over? Just two posts, one which is still not decided until someone gets a hand on the phone and make some photos.
I'm surprised Google isn't leaning more into their main advantage over Apple: AI. If it weren't for Call Screening and Wait-for-Me I'd have probably already switched over by now.
Yeah, one of the biggest companies in the world and still not selling the phones in our country. I actually used Pixel phones a few years back, but currently with no working 5G it's not going to happen.
Yeah it's pretty stupid that this trillion dollar company can't figure out how to sell a phone worldwide. I'm actually gonna have to import this thing if I want to run GrapheneOS.
A very small part of the world is supported unfortunately and the situation year to year has not been improving. On the other hand samsung and apple are available everywhere.
It's a mix of good and bad. The iPhone is generally very good, and the integration with other Apple products is unmatched.
...but my Android runs Firefox with uBlock Origin. I forget that cookie banners exist until I use my iPad. It also runs two background apps pretty reliably: a GPS logger and Syncthing. It respects my default web browser and music player choices.
Quality is subjective. For my specific needs, I prefer Android. If those things were solved I would have an iPhone.
Same situation. I have both, my work phone is an iPhone. I just don't like using it. There's nothing major, both operating systems are capable, but there's little reminders everywhere that Apple is the one dictating how the phone can be used. Can't organize home screen icons. Uncontrollable notification spam by the system. Apple's apps mostly don't have individual privacy controls. Apple maps. Limited optical zoom. Having to find and use a special cable.
All of these are minor gripes (and the latter even resolved going forward), but why pay a premium for a device that irritates me?
I was a long time iPhone user for about 15 years - never had an Android. My iPhone 8 Plus finally reached end of support for OS updates and I'd heard great things about Samsung Dex so I ordered a Samsung Ultra S22 last week and I absolutely love it. Once you get it set up and used to it, I've found the experience to be superior to the iPhone. I just find it quicker to do the things I want to do because of the way it's set up. Things like editing the settings is just way better thought out - the search works really well in the main settings app and if you want to change the settings for a particular app (e.g get rid of the notification badge) you simply have to long press on the app, hit the "i" button on the pop up, and you're taken straight to the settings for the app.). And Samsung Dex is fucking awesome, especially if you've got a pair of AR glasses. My entire computing setup now fits in a small reporter bag. I'm now going to sell my Macbook and use the Ultra as my sole device which means I will have completely exited the Apple ecosystem. In the early smartphone days, I think iOS was superior to Android but I really don't think that's the case anymore.
I'm adding another comment and eating humble pie because I found out this evening that the Samsung keyboard application saves up to 100 items in the Samsung Keyboard clipboard in plain text, with no way to set any kind of auto clear and it does this no matter what other keyboards you install and use. For example, you can install gBoard (Google Keyboard) and set it as the default keyboard, copy something to the clipboard, and it will be there in your Samsung keyboard regardless of whether you set gBoard to auto clear the clipboard every hour. The only way to completely clear the clipboard is via manually pressing five buttons: first the clipboard button followed by the trash can icon, followed by select all, followed by delete, then confirm. This is obviously a massive security risk if you are using a 3rd party password manager and, despite lots of requests for many years, Samsung have declined to do anything about it.
Thankfully, it does look like you can uninstall these packages and most of the other Samsung bloatware using adb or the Universal Android Debloater[1] but it is still some of the most exceptionally disgusting behaviour I've ever seen from a major tech company and I hope that either the EU or some other governing body forces them to fix it or Google bakes something into Android that makes it impossible for them to do. Either way, I will be jumping ship to a more trustworthy brand as soon there is one that has an adequate desktop mode with Quadlock case support.
Yeah, Samsung collects data and sells it. So does every other company. Not going to stop me using the phone. At least Android actually asks me every time if I want to opt into a service or not. If Apple want me back, they can:
- Build a Dex competitor
- Allow apps to communicate outside their sandboxes if I allow them to
- Make it quicker and easier to edit settings
- Stop doing ridiculous things like borking USB-C ports on non-pro models
I own a Pixel 7 Pro (and owned the Pixel 6 Pro), and I regularly have iPhones of friends/family in my hands.
Especially for the flagship Android phones like the Pixel Pros, I really don't think there is a noticable difference. They have excellent build quality, camera quality is so similar to iPhones that I couldn't tell which one is better, and on the software side I think it's a matter of being used to it (where I'm a lot more comfortable on Android).
I don't know who would be telling you that android phones have better hardware specs. And if I did, I would confidently tell you that they don't know what they are talking about.
Signed, a decade+ android user.
However, will end users really notice the gap? Not really.
I can't speak for stock android, but I can say AOSP (GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, lineageOS and such) is a much better experience than iOS.
The free software ecosystem is nice cause the mobile apps are way more functional. You can do almost anything you can do on your laptop. Syncthing, K-9 mail, newpipe, firefox (with ublock), orbot, libretorrent, etc. are a few pretty good reasons to use AOSP.
its kind of stylish too. google put out this "material you" thing which basically makes it so the whole OS uses the same color pallete.
The only thing I miss about my iphone was that it was nice and small and could be used in one hand.
Sorry to hear about your shadowban, it's annoying.
These downvotes for a genuine question (-3 points at time of writing) are why I don't participate in HN tbh. And maybe they're exclusively for my parenthetical request for feedback, in which case, still, like, come on guys. Those downvotes are why my posts and comments always shadowbanned in the first place. And they all started with downvotes for genuine questions. The typical response from HN is "I dunno, maybe post better content." But I post the best content I have in both submissions and comments. So yeah, I guess this community is not for me, that's all I can conclude.
(I imagine you did get some downvotes for your request for feedback because it's off-topic)
Your request is honestly a little difficult for anyone to answer. "As a long-time Apple user I've long suspected that despite the public specs, Android phones are crap. Can any long-term Android users confirm for me whether their phone is crap?"
If there is a long-term Android user out there who finds Android phones to be crap I'd assume they would have long since switch to a different type of phone.
> If there is a long-term Android user out there who finds Android phones to be crap I'd assume they would have long since switch to a different type of phone.
That's a wrong assumption to make. I think there are a lot of reluctant Android users around.
I'm one of them, and I've been using Android phones for well over a decade now.
I don't mind Android itself and the selection of apps, but I've never liked the phones themselves.
The Android phones I've used weren't sensibly sized, or had quality and reliability issues, or were generally tolerable except for one fatal downside (like a bad camera, or limited storage), or were too expensive for what was being offered.
The iPhones I've used have generally been decent, from a hardware perspective. I find the software situation to be terrible, however.
For me, a bad Android phone with tolerable software is at least kind of usable.
A great iPhone phone with unsuitable/insufficient/frustrating software is unusable.
Given that those have been the only viable options for a while now, I resort to using Android phones, even if I've consistently disliked the phones themselves.
My guess is that your question isn't seen as relevant to the post (it's more of a general Android topic) and it has an ad for your failed submission which could be seen as manipulation, which is highly frowned upon on this site. There's a bias against the stereotype of Apple users too.
You posted an opinion suggesting that Android isn't the best in a thread about an Android phone. You inadvertently poked an audience self-selected to dislike questions phrased as yours was.
I mean that's cool. But sometimes it's cool to video call my wife and kids when I am away, or to use Google maps to navigate / find something in a new area, make a quick video when the kids are doing something cute, etc.
If none of these are your use case, totally cool but it does make life better for a lot of people.
Samsungs are non-standard by default. They take the AOSP experience which Pixel fully embraces then they hack in cute fonts, water drop overlays, and replace the default tooling that comes with Android to build their samsung experience.
Pixel drives and creates the innovation like cut-out display support, notification APIs that support multi-media control for instance across multiple apps, sound multi-plexing between apps, how calls interact with multimedia apps, foldable display support, app switching, fingerprint unlock support, the android API, etc.
Samsung takes that, twists it into their own.
In that essence, Pixel is the standard experience that Android is meant to be whereas Samsung is a customized experience built on the backbone of Android and in some ways in opposition to Android Open Source Project & Pixel Launcher's ideals.
Samsung android phones are the Ubuntu whereas Pixel is Google's Debian.
Except there is no such thing as "AOSP" experience anymore.
Why? Because AOSP stopped providing majority of apps that would be considered core for functioning smartphone.
There is no more "phone" app on AOSP. There is a Google one, that is closed source, full off unnecessary integration and telemetry.
Sure, both are made by the same company (google), but that's not remotely what the original idea of AOSP was about. And we should stop giving google a pass treating it as if it's somehow better when doing the exact same shit as other third party vendors, simply because it has the brand.
Either you are part of AOSP, or You are a third party vendor's custom. No in-between.
You are mixing pixel with AOSP, but those are completely separate projects.
Sure, aosp development is sponsored and managed by google, but that doesn't make it synonymous with pixels.
I assure you that people who develop AOSP work with all the major vendors and definitely aren't just driven by what pixel team wants and nothing more.
>foldables
Seriously? Samsung had first foldable 4 years ago, while first foldable pixel launched this year. In what world does pixel contributed to foldableAPI more?
I mean, I guess in the world we're you treat AOSP and pixel team unanimously maybe, but that's not the real one.
>pixel is standardized experience
Just because google says so?
Standardized experience of AOSP is AOSP. Everything else is addition.
Your debian and Ubuntu analogy fails to acknowledge that Google apps are NOT open source.
More apt comparison would be samsung being modern ubuntu 22 with all the bloat that it has, while Google being "only" 14.04 ubuntu with less bloat, but still far from the true purity
They do in many ways. Pixels have clean focused software that are excellent at what they do - it makes you want them. Also they dont include bloatware unlike Samsung.
1. Pixel Camera taught Samsungs and iPhones about computational photography pipelines and Night Sight,
2. Recorder,
3. Photos + various editing features (Top Shot / Best take / Magic Eraser),
4. Phone + various features (Call Screening(US) / Hold for Me(US) / Spam Protection)
5. Google Pay (UPI - India specific)
6. Gestures - Flip to Shh / Double Tap to open Camera / Twist twice in camera for Selfie mode.
That's all cool, but those aren't Android apps (at least most of them). Those are closed source, full of telemetry and unnecessary integration google apps.
Question wasn't about if google apps are better, but how pixels contribute to the growth of AOSP differently then vendors like samsung.
Just because google sponsor AOSP, doesn't mean that any proprietary app they make (which is all of them btw) count as AOSP contribution.
AOSP and Pixel are 2 separete things.
Pixels Image Process way too much. They add stuff into photos which is not necessarily there in order to make them look better. These devices are terrible.
I've been pondering about changing to this phone, but it's so ugly, I mean literally so ugly, that it always gives me the jives. It's the worst looking phone on the market, period. A hideous monstrosity, that noone considers buying. Maybe Chucky with the knife and this phone can be paired somehow, but I have serious doubts.
Just go to ASUS' industrial designer, who dreamed up the Zenfone 10 design, hand him lots of black briefcases with blood diamonds and greenbacks, plus strawberry cakes and beg him to come up with something.
And the colors... this is really the socks+sandals of the phone market.
There is so much time, effort, and physical waste that is generated by slightly redesigning phones every year purely for the sake of making sales (as opposed to meaningful improvement upon the existing design or introduction of a new hardware feature). Think not only of people upgrading for the sake of it, but all of the cases, screen protectors, and other assorted accessories cast in plastic for previous models that are garbage now.
It would be nice if we could just space these things out to 5 years or so now, because that's probably how long it takes for anything to change enough to justify a new model.