The dominance of the negativity in these comments is noteworthy. Personally, I thought it was a exciting update with major hardware improvements, some compelling AI demos and use cases at a similar price point as the past. Top tech reviewers e.g. MKBHD has similar impressions.
Mostly just curious as to why there are ~0 positive comments here. I suspect could be:
1) anti-google HN bias - perhaps deserved?
2) it's simply more tempting/satisfying/rewarding to complain about rather than to praise big companies
3) any other ideas?
I'm guessing the 95% negative comment proportion isn't representative though so I was curious if anyone had any explanations for the HN skew
Simple AI fatique I guess? Personally I'm immediately turned off when yet another product announcement mentions AI gimmicks, especially when there's no other features to get excited about. It's like the time when each new TV came with "3D support".
I don't really think there's bias, it's just that HN these days predominately attracts negative ranting comments.
It's not really Google specific either - if you look at any other topic, even Linux or OSS related, there's going to be bunch of highly upvoted people ranting and raving. That pushes out any kind of positive discussion and normal people leave.
We all know negative content drives more engagement, see: Facebook. But I've also noticed this trend and for me it makes sense seeing as most of the content on the internet nowadays is negative content. Social media is used to belittle and criticize other people/ideas, the news has never been positive, we've passed the stage where content creators that are positive about products are seen as trustworthy, because an overly positive attitude has been linked to a "shill" mindset. We've seen the evolution of big tech from trying to destabilise old/existing industries and giving us a new, improved service to trying to squeeze as much profit out of their users as possible. Other big companies have dominated their competition and have used that power to boost prices, limit access to media, decrease the user experience,... In a lot of ways I feel like the toxicity that we are experiencing online these days is a direct result of noticing all these negative patterns and realising that most of what is being advertised to us has a large chance of being too good to be true. Games that look good pre-release but then get released full of bugs, software that was once a good deal becomes a subscription, series that get cancelled too soon, products that look good on release but have issues not long after without a chance to repair them, companies completely changing their objectives after a CEO change, the list goes on. So instead of trying to be positive and finding ways to get excited about something it is now a "safer" bet to be critical and negative about anything that is being announced because of the cycles of dissapointment we've all been through. At least to me, this makes sense, eventhough I would like to see it be different.
I've been wondering if Reddit has always been this cesspool or if I just got older. When I'm logged in it's not too bad because I curated the subreddits, but the default subs it shows me when I'm logged out feel like half the content is angry people complaining about politics and immigrants.
My personal pet theory is that the Internet is aging.
20 yrs ago, most of the Internet users were teenagers and very young adults.
Most of these people are in their late 30s to 40s now.
Did new kids join too? Sure! But if you look at the birth rates of our societies, you'll notice that it's a bell curve. Consequently, the average age is going up.
Furthermore, there is a strong selection bias with this demographic: the happier they're, the less likely they're going to be on these platforms, because they'll prioritize family, hobbies or whatever else over ... Well... "shit posting with random strangers".
Ultimately you're left with a significant chunk of people that are often disgruntled, jaded or outright mentally unwell.
It's not really new, even going back there were flame wars and shit-posting on BBSes before the internet was common. It tends to come with relative anonymity.
It takes curated communities in order to overcome. Some places do better than others. It's also all to easy for biases to become policy in some of these communities/sites which can wind up almost worse than the shit posting to begin with.
I guess mostly because the only thing new smartphones offer is faster cpu, more memory (which I don't really need, a 10y old smartphone handle my current load correctly) and a better camera and an always bigger footprint.
The only thing I like is the possible better camera sensors, but that won't make me shed thousands of dollars for it. If I have the choice I'd rather have a more compact model with the camera quality of the previous iteration which was already great.
I can understand it will sell because a lot of people have the feeling they live a crappy life and wants to cheat by taking crappy pictures and videos and have a some magic inventing a better imaginary life that they can share on instagram and tiktok but I am not one of them. If I take a picture, I want to get the moment, with all its imperfections including the sad face of a stranger or dog peeing leg up against a wall in the background.
And yes I understand I am not everyone, but I really don't care what everyone want because I am not the one trying to sell that phone.
I just had a samsung galaxy s6 edge die one me, probably because of heat.
I do the usual stuff, navigation, whatsapp, music, video...except I tend to avoid installing apps when the corresponding website works well (but I still have lots of different apps) and the only social media I am connecting to is the fediverse through the browser.
I'm using a Pixel 4a myself, prior to that was a Pixel 2XL and I had about every third Nexus and a few other phones before that as well as a One-Plus phone somewhere in there. My current phone still runs fine, and I'll probably upgrade when the 9a comes out, I do think they're priced more than I would like.
I've tended to like the close to stock experience, but I do turn off all. the assistant features that I can.
I was happily using an iPhone 6S (which is very nearly 9 years old) until recently (when I dropped it and smashed the screen). It definitely wasn't as fast as a modern phone (but it honestly wasn't bad), the camera was much worse, and the battery life wasn't as good. But it some ways it was better: it had a fingerprint reader (modern iphones don't), and it was much smaller and lighter.
> I guess mostly because the only thing new smartphones offer is faster cpu
The next killer-feature in the race to the bottom is probably software, not hardware, and is near realtime translation. Samsung is airing an advert for that right now, but it's not real time.
Better "AI" with a faster CPU and everyone has their own Babel fish.
I think it's because Google could make a great phone, but choose not to. They keep adding gimmicky features that myself and apparently many other HNers don't care for, while core functionality is neglected and often regresses.
I own a Pixel 8 Pro and it is without a doubt the worst phone I have owned in at least a decade. The amount of bugs for such an expensive product is mind boggling.
One of main features is the camera but I've found myself taking far fewer photos with the phone than I expected I would, mainly because the camera UX just kind of sucks in a 100 small to medium ways that add up to an unpleasant experience. Just for example: you need to reenable the manual focus slider after ever picture, focus peaking is flawed and impossible to disable, there's a very noticeable lag with the telephoto mode when adjusting the camera, setting are buried in several different menus, and more.
The only reason I would even consider another Google phone after this one is that the phone landscape has gotten pretty bad as a whole. Samsung phones have their own list of flaws and I won't buy a phone that Apple dictates what I can do with; and those are the alternatives for buying a nice phone that I'm aware of, but if anyone has other suggestions I'm all ears. I loved LG phones and wish those were still around.
Out of (genuine) curiosity, what major hardware improvements are you referring to?
On paper, it’s largely the same as prior years for the SoC at least. I think the fold has the most obvious upgrade but nothing I’d consider really major. Other than that, it seems like mostly a camera bump year?
- Much brighter screen
- Next gen tensor chip
- 50% ram upgrade
- Better camera + battery
- SOS functionality
- Better ultrasonic fingerprint sensor
Holistically felt like meaningful improvements across the board to me, but I understand where you're coming from. I think maybe I have lower expectations for improvements year to year
Ah, fair. I usually don’t include form factor too much because it’s so subjective.
I think perhaps one of the reasons for the negativity here is that the price is approaching flagship from other companies, but that Tensor G4 performs like chips from four years ago.
I think that overshadows a lot of the improvements. Perhaps if the whole package was significantly cheaper, the reception would be more balanced.
First sentence of the current top voted comment. What's constructive about that?
You could argue the rest of the comment makes up for it, but I don't agree. It reads like a standard negative rant against change to me. I don't see much constructive here.
> I just hate modern phones, all of them. I want an adequate one-hand screen size (~6"), a headphone jack, and an even camera bump (just so it lies flat on the table).
I love the pixel 8a, the size, curvature and camera bump seems ideal. Ofc they removed a freaking 3.5mm jack, but I can make a compromise here and buy 100 type-c to 3.5mm adapters, but I'm super disappointed with the new 9x series, they are now even more blocky and square-ish which i really don't like, plus no "a" model which is usually looking much better for me than the main one.
> Does anyone know the phone which is small, has a headphone jack, even camera bump and is still buyable to this day?
A release of the 9th model of a phone is not "change", the change lies in the past for devices like this. I believe general statements like this increases the cynicism of those that don't really feel invested in the soft- and hardware landscape of current-day smartphones and there is a lot of reason for that in my opinion.
Essentially get the same product with improvements that are only another iteration. The Pixel 9 might be a good device comparatively, but I would be more surprised if people were too hyped about it. The larger context of hype and Google is relevant here as well.
First question I had when hearing about a Google phone is, if they try to make it harder to block advertising. I don't believe the thought is too unreasonable, is it?
„Top“ in the sense that a lot of people watch them. Please don’t take seriously what they say. Luise Rossman did an excellent video on marques apple propaganda.
Or people resent the major privacy issues, inconsistent UX, and deprioritization of what they see as needed features, all to add a few hugely hyped but minimally useful AI features.
My biggest worry is that everyone complaining about hamburger menus will soon be wishing they could use a hamburger menu instead of being forced into chatting with an AI for menu settings.
What qualifies someone as a “top tech reviewer”? It’s a phone for gods sake and some random YouTubers opinion isn’t anymore valid than a random Hackernews commentators opinion.
If we were getting opinions on the latest PhD paper on attention mechanisms than I’d trust someone with a PhD versus a random person, but for getting opinions on the new Google phone? Think for yourself.
Joe Rogan has a lot more subscribers and listeners than this guy, does it mean I should listen to his opinions?
Valuing someone by reach makes no sense at all. Most professors at MIT have no social media reach at all, I still value their opinions extremely highly.
In fact, valuing someone's opinion purely based on the size of their megaphone is partly why we're the world is in such a bad state politically (and in other ways) these days. E.g. people listening to social media influencers opinions on vaccines.
I think this is a fair take. The parent comment shouldn't have added subscriber count as one the qualifications. But for MKBHD's qualification, simply use point number 2.
Call it disappointment I guess. No phone from any manufacturer has felt totally “right” to me in years in the way that phones from a decade ago did. It makes sense from a business perspective since smartphones were effectively complete way back then. The business needs a way to justify selling me a new one so it's been a long slow downhill of shit-I-don't-care-about ever since. I especially miss the era of HTC flagships. HIGH TECH COMPUTER!
The software is disappointing too even though today was not really a software announcement. To me it feels like since they're both from Google the Pixel hardware direction also signals what Android itself will prioritize. I used to be a huge Android-the-OS fan but found that my enjoyment of the platform peaked at 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Version 4.3 was the first version to remove something I loved (the “Phablet” UI layouts that were great on my Galaxy NoteⅡ). Announcements like today's push that point of Peak Android even further away in my mind, and I'm sad about it.
Yeah, exactly. Phones aren't going in a positive direction at all. What I want is a phone with excellent battery life, a great OLED screen, a great camera, plenty of local storage (and expandable with a microSD card), durable/rugged, and fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy. I don't want AI bullshit, stupid features that tie me to cloud services and help advertisers build profiles of me, can't-delete bloatware, stupid features that spy on me, etc. I also don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two when there's nothing wrong with the old one.
You're describing an iPhone. I've switched from Android to SE2 in 2020, and bought 15 last year on release day to get the type-c charging. I feel it ticks most of your boxes:
* excellent battery life - can't complain about it. I'm not streaming YouTube on 5G on the phone, and I've found out that it can last about two days per charge with light use - messenger apps, phone calls, emails. YMMV of course.
* a great OLED screen - it's bright & crisp. I haven't seen a better screen in person yet.
* a great camera - it's a very good camera IMO. Takes good shots of people and nature and shoots impressive videos of music shows in dark basements.
* durable/rugged - not sure about 15, but my SE2 was abused and dropped. The metal sides were dinged, the screen had a few nasty scratches, but the phone held up together very well.
* fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy - iOS is much nicer and snappier that any of the Android phones (HTC Desire S, Galaxy Note II, Xperia Z3, Xiaomi Mi6) I've had.
* don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two - I think iPhones do last a few years, given the fact that my wife uses 13 and has zero desire (or reasons, really) to upgrade.
The only requirement the iPhone doesn't fit is the storage - Apple charges an absurd price for storage upgrades on all of their devices. I went with the cheapest option and pay for a large iCloud subscription, and it seems to work well - the photo and file sync between the phone, Macbook & even my Windows machine is seamless and quick.
It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat. Apple are not saints, they collect a lot of data and telemetry that I'm not a fan of, but at least they are not a corporation that is built on advertising.
It's not an option: I can't block ads on it with uBO and Firefox. Also, I can't connect it by USB to my Linux machine and download photos. You also forgot about the expandable storage. The lack of headphone jack also sucks.
>It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat.
That's funny, because you're giving money to a company that actively wants to prevent you from blocking ads on, for instance YouTube, by restricting your app and browser choices. Meanwhile I can install any app I want on my Android phone, including apps Google won't allow on the Play store such as SmartTube.
I share this sentiment which is why I'll be passively-aggressively going for a Sony Xperia 5 VI once it launches.
Not because it's particularly great (it's not), but because it's the only somewhat mainstream manufacturer to retain the headphone jack on their flagships as well as microSD card slot.
My only gripe is that it's mostly likely going to be a 180+ gram brick.
The snappiness (yet) and camera are not great, but Librem 5 might be relevant here. Headphone jack, ability to run anything without tracking (FLOSS GNU/Linux by default), microSD, smart card. If you install SXMo, it will be snappy, too.
Looks great except for the eMMC. That's the part that died on both of my previous phones (Galaxy NoteⅡ and Galaxy NoteⅣ; currently still using an iPhone 7 that's on its third battery and literally falling apart) so I am very wary of getting another phone with that type of non-replaceable storage. I know that people have replaced them but it takes some awfully fiddly soldering just to end up with another part that Will Die At Some Point.
I'm very bullish on genAI, and I bought the new phone, but I really don't think the features shown are that exciting yet. It feels like they're laying the groundwork for more powerful AI to be ready to do things in your phone apps, and the current features are just paving the way.
The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
Being able to order food is only useful for those who live in an area where there is food to order. Here in rural Michigan I can count on one hand the number of times I've ordered delivery in the past 3 years.
AI has been totally useless to me in my life. Give me a headphone jack and better SMS spam filtering. No new phone has better features than my Pixel6a and it isn't even that great.
> The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
If this were a "killer-app", then Amazon would still be selling those quick-buy Amazon Dash[1] buttons, and Alexa would be making a profit[2]
> The killer-app is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
What you're actually going to get is a None pizza with left beef from a ghost kitchen at the least competitive price you've ever seen with the branding of a YouTuber.
> I'm very bullish on genAI, and I bought the new phone, but I really don't think the features shown are that exciting yet. It feels like they're laying the groundwork for more powerful AI to be ready to do things in your phone apps, and the current features are just paving the way
That was Assistant right up until they killed it for a new thing.
> The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
This killer app of yours can be stealthily enshittified, you aren't privy to its decision-making process.
What’s killer about that? I order food once every 2 weeks, I like to browse the different options myself. Almost all the ‘killer’ AI functions are already here: smarter photo retouching, auto-replies, searching, and text summaries with some reading comprehension to ask questions. These things I use daily.
The only thing I’d like is a better integration with ALL actions possible on my phone.
HN has relatively high Graphene OS proportion, and those who use it are those who likely comment here. From Graphene OS user perspective, this does not – on the surface – add much new value. Thus negativity. Other factors ALSO.
It's also roughly a ~month before next iPhone, which is significant. I doubt many people will switch, but getting ahead of hype cycle is probably valuable. Or maybe Apple will see what from Google marketing has not landed and adjust decks accordingly.
b) foreseeing technological progress -- say two iterations down the line.
c) mass adoption of features
On an average, they tend to be elitist and don't represent the average brand popularity (e.g Google, Meta, Amazon). They only mildly upvote technology that helps their extremely privileged life.
E.g Current AI / Metaverse features helps plenty of poor, underprivileged people around the world, especially non-english speaking. But HN is the first to mock such features.
Because of this, they tend to be poor individual stock pickers. They are highly risk-averse and typically bring an SRE mentality to the world.
> They only mildly upvote technology that helps their extremely privileged life.
Your bias is heavily US centric. HN is not SF or SV. Plenty of users in Serbia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, Vietnam, in war thorn Ukraine.
Arguably the average user is above average for their area's COL but to claim everyone is swimming in VC money is as dilusion as the people you want to portrait in your comment.
>E.g Current AI / Metaverse features helps plenty of poor, underprivileged people around the world, especially non-english speaking. But HN is the first to mock such features.
AI features in phones from Google are English only or maybe a few languages, even if you know English try to use "AI" to set a route using your voice when the locations are not english words. Sure, some free AIs on the web will help poor people but the best ones are under payment wall and not only that you need a specific way to pay, what I mean for example is Netflix, Steam do not need my credit card, they have alternative ways to pay like PayPal but Google, Microsoft, OpenAI they only allow credit card , so I conclude they do not care for my money they really need that credit card for some reason.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You have no crystal ball. You have no high ground nor do you have privileged knowledge to back what you're saying.
You are personally invested in those technologies being game changers. It couldn't be more clear given your aggressive, substance-less posts.
- Even though logtail is quite cheap, we are even cheaper solution
- Our pricing model separates ingestion from query. If you don't query, you don't pay for query. Just ingestion.
- We are JSON native. Our SQL allows querying JSON fields that are nested under nested JSON arrays.
- Performance. We believe our solution is much faster for selective queries. This like most performance claims, it all just depends on the data shape, volume and what you are querying.
Similarities:
- We both use ClickHouse as underlying DB.
That’s correct. If a positive effect in the treatment arm of the study is found to be strong enough, it is deemed unethical to continue giving patients the placebo as control. Hence, they terminate the study and proceed to the next phase of approval
That it's unethical to continue giving half the participants a placebo makes sense.
I am curious though: do they ever continue with the trial, with the patients on the actual drug? Might that be useful for monitoring rare-ish side effects, even if the drug is highly effective?
I believe they've only halted recruiting for the trial, not the trial itself. The Pfizer CEO this morning also said they're continuing with plans for two other trials starting soon, which is in people with non-co-morbidities, and to household contacts of confirmed cases.
Presumably they're kicking the placebo participants out? As others say, it is not ethical to give them ineffective treatment (placebo), given the effectiveness of the drug has been clearly demonstrated.
My guess: brand/name recognition is HUGE for vc as they can get first-look to the top founders/start-ups. A16Z is one of the best VC brands and they want to perpetuate that (and being in SF paints that image). Relatedly, the start-ups A16Z funds can afford to be in SF. It's the less well-funded companies that are moving out...and are probably companies that A16Z passed on.
At Nexmo we've been powering similar solutions for a lot of apps through our SMS API. However, we've just released a higher-level API that leverages our SMS / Voice APIs to make this kind of number verification easy to implement. Ours includes multiple deliveries and channels (falls back to a voice call if needed). We're looking for early adopters, would love to have you take a look: https://docs.nexmo.com/index.php/verify
Mostly just curious as to why there are ~0 positive comments here. I suspect could be:
1) anti-google HN bias - perhaps deserved? 2) it's simply more tempting/satisfying/rewarding to complain about rather than to praise big companies 3) any other ideas?
I'm guessing the 95% negative comment proportion isn't representative though so I was curious if anyone had any explanations for the HN skew