It was also just horribly expensive, and that's the main reason I did not upgrade yet. I'm not a big fan of Google trying to copy Apple on e.g. the notch at the top of the screen; copying the Apple pricing strategy of expensive==luxury is even worse.
I agree. It seems like a fairly clear marketing play that they don't think people will treat them as premium if they don't price at the top of the scale.
However I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. It is not uncommon it hear of stories where raising the price lead to more sales and people regarding the product as of a higher quality.
The main thing is I buy Google because I don't like Apple (for a number of reasons, starting from the OS itself). The last thing I want is them trying to be more Apple-like. People who like Apple will buy Apple. They need to design for everyone else.
Face unlock is ... inconsitant, and support in apps is sparse. I have a 4XL (personal) and 2XL (work), and I never run into issues with the 2XL, it reads the fingerprint as I take out of my pocket, and it is open as I look at it.
4XL - take it out, and 80% of the time it works, the other 20% I spend time moving it up and down, and just entering the pin.
I prefer fingerprint too, but just want to point out it's also imperfect. If your hands are at all damp, or sweaty, or cold, the success rate drops to well below 50% (at least for me). It often takes 3-4 tries to unlock if not under perfect conditions, so it's not uncommon that I have to give up and enter the PIN even with my fingerprint-capable Pixel 3.
People seem to forget that their skin is a glove when it comes to viruses.
My point is instead of wearing gloves you can just avoid touching your face until you wash your hands or use hand sanitizer, which you can't do wearing gloves.
You should probably be hand sanitizing when you're getting in the car - if you keep the gloves on you're just smearing whatever you picked up at the store all over your car doors, keys, and steering wheel, as well as the strings of your mask. Assuming you use the car gloved in the next day or so, it's now on your hands as well.
I've also been wearing gloves out places just so that my hands don't get too dry from using so much hand sanitizer/washing. Washing or sanitizing the gloves doesn't dry out my skin which is nice.
I wear them when at the grocery store, primarily. There's a lot of high touch there. It's probably overkill, but it makes me feel more comfortable about it.
So, you wear gloves at the grocery store, then you touch your phone with them? Wearing gloves isn't going to help unless you also wash everything you touched with gloves.
If you're concerned about touching things when out wash your hands when you get home (and anything else you've touched while out).
I just don't touch my phone in the store and hand sanitize before I touch my wallet or car keys (anything I'm taking home with me) and then again after I put the cart away. At each of those contact points I'd need to sanitize my gloves as well so it doesn't seem to provide extra protection.
People around here do but my research indicates it's no better than just regularly washing your hands and using hand sanitizer (and never touching your face, of course).
As an Apple Face ID user, I'm quite happy with how they improved the responsiveness of showing the keypad in iOS 13.5, presumably if half a face is detected [1].
Face ID continues trying to find a face for a few seconds if the sensor is pointed elsewhere.
At this point marginally improved devices at premium price point.. might further leave iPhone as the leader.
iPhone sales are up this year while samsung/Android is down.. Part of it is iPhone will last longer have updates for far longer than any Android device.
I'm an Android user considering switching to iPhone not out of boredom, but wanting my phone to be an appliance instead of a source of innovation, as that seems to be largely gone in this Form factor
There's a subreddit for photos taken with Pixels (https://www.reddit.com/r/pixelography/). About 1/4 of the posted images are Nightsight or Astrophotography mode images. People may not use it a lot, but they seem to be very proud of the results when they do use it.
Using your phone's camera is niche? I don't know about you but I easily take a dozen photos a day, between SC and work documents and social photos.. honestly the quality of a phone's camera hardware and software is the defining factor for buying a phone for me.
Nightsight on its own is freaking magic, and makes the camera worth it for me. Taking pictures in doors, or in a bar (not that I can do that anymore :) ) was easy on a pixel, and always came out looking good.
Neat, the Google Camera phone is definitely amazing.
My reference is to the thing that's more important than cameras or any feature - Android One is about ongoing and meaningful security updates that are available to the devices in the same month that they are released.
You might have clicked on a techcrunch link in the past few weeks or live in a country different than the OP. They use http redirects to assign you an advertising ID based on your IP or something afaik.
I am. I'm using uBlock Origin, but apparently this redirect got through. Then the DNS lookup of guce.advertising.com failed because of the filter I have set up on that end, so my Techcrunch experience ended on an error page.
DBrand summed it up best in their marketing email for the Pixel 4 skins just after the launch:
> That's right: it's another marketing email from the robots at dbrand. That means it's time for another email footer. Here are a few ground rules if you're reading this on your shiny new Pixel 4. First, make sure the battery is fully charged - you don't want it dying while you're reading this, do you? If you need to scroll to keep reading, you'll have to use your greasy, gross thumb to do it. No hand-waving allowed. Lastly, consider turning off Gmail sync - your photos are going to burn through that non-expandable storage very quickly. With that preamble out of the way, here's our footer: dbrand is having a 10% off sale - masking your $800+ mistake has never been more affordable.
It also raises and interesting question in me for the folks who think of themselves as "product" types. Has anyone measured the effect of platform denigration on improving or diminishing a brand?
I am trying to imagine ways you might A/B test this. Set up two brands with products in the same space with comparable specifications, and have one that is "product focused" in their outbound messaging and one that is "platform hostile" in their messaging. Then compare customer loyalty and margin support in the two brands.
On specs the Pixel 3a is a no-brainer for me as my Nokia 6.1 is getting long in the tooth however the Nokia has been such a hassle-less little phone and is tough enough to have survived 7000 miles on a motorbike without a mark that I'll likely buy another of whatever their current model is.
Also AndroidOne so I'm still getting updates for it which is the longest after purchase that's ever happened on an android handset.
At least I would except the Nokia 6.1 does literally everything I need out of a phone still so I'll likely wait another year at least.
For what it's worth, the Pixel 3a is the most fragile phone I've ever owned. In 12 years of carrying smartphones around, it's the only one I've ever broken.
There are two problems with it:
- Within 2 weeks the top of mine was covered in thousands of tiny scratches. It seems like maybe it was a manufacturing defect in the screen coating or something but Google wouldn't replace it. They did however do a great job of fucking around in their support emails to exhaust the 30-day return window.
- The body is plastic but the glass goes all the way to the edge. Dropping the phone on its corner caused the screen to crack and die completely (and this was with a screen protector on).
I've cracked a 3a screen and had pieces of it just fall out exposing the hardware behind it from a 6 inch drop off my lap onto my patio with one of those transparent cases on. This is the first time I've broken a phone screen in my life.
All of the used ones I've bought have huge scratches on the screen making me believe it's compromise glass at a cost reduction. I buy phones used because I like recycled instead of new, and usually there are small scratches like swirl marks in a car, but never huge scratches like all of my 3a's so far. That's fairly anecdotal however.
I keep buying them though, they're absolutely excellent value for a Pixel device and I do recommend them. A 4a is on my radar.
That's terrible. Everyone's experience varies, my Pixel 3A has been great, no problems, no noticeable scratches. The killer feature of the 3A for me has been ability to take night time sky photos and show something. I got a usable picture of the comet.
I really don't want to ever buy a phone without a headphone jack. At least the 4A still has one. Only reason to buy a 4A now would be to get 128 gig storage.
I've found corner drops to be the bane of all phones.
It took a lot of good drops to crack my screen, and I think I'll be able to go for a month or two before I swap in a replacement. (No screen protector or case)
I don't really see why the glass needs to go so far down. There's a large buffer of space before the screen actually starts
My 3a XL has fallen many of times without an issue (in a case) usually on laminate flooring or something relatively bouncy, but the other day I dropped mine on carpet no less and the OLED screen under the glass cracked and killed the screen. The glass on top was totally fine, but the screen underneath just had big crack across it and some rainbow colors.
I tried looking for replacement screens and they are out of stock all over the place and relatively expensive starting at $100ish from places I would consider more reputable and maybe 10% less elsewhere. I'm not sure if the lack of screens lends credence to how easily they break, but it certainly can't be used to disprove it.
My wife got a Moto G6 two Thanksgivings ago. I got a G7 this past Thanksgiving.
I am really pleased with how well the phone works for the $150 price tag.
I don't use my phone all that much, but I can't imagine a situation where I'd justify paying 3-5x that amount for a phone. The Moto G line seems to be perfectly adequate.
I'm a clumsy person and have dropped my Pixel 3a numerous times. It withstood all of those drops fairly well. The only one it couldn't withstand was the drop on concrete and I was lucky to get away with a cracked screen in the corner. The back didn't crack which is nice.
The Pixel 3a is hands down the best phone in terms of value for money. I'll get the 4a 5G later this year provided it has the headphone jack.
Completely agree. The zillion scratches happened within a week for me. My screen didn't die when I did drop it (on a carpeted floor!) but it did crack. It's the only phone I've ever had crack.
I just got the Nokia 7.2 to replace my pixel 3 after I broke the screen. A bit large for my taste but otherwise hassle free, powerful and pleasant. Definitely checks all my boxes - even happy with the camera now that I've tuned it some.
The thing I like about the Nokia is the chassis is aethetically gorgeous and a single piece of aluminium coated in unobtainium, isn't a mark on it after nearly 2 years.
On release I purchased a Pixel 4 and gave it an honest-to-god try for a week. The battery issues really were as bad as the reviewers said they were. I needed a phone with the best camera available and sufficient battery life to handle an overseas vacation, and the Android ecosystem at the time had fallen so far behind Apple that I actually jumped ship from Android to iOS.
So quite literally, Pixel 4 is what caused Google to lose me as an Android user.
it was useless gimmick already at arrival, nobody ain't gonna buy phone with such huge bezel in 2019 in times of punch holes, small notches, pop-up cameras and upcoming under the screen cameras
A LOUD, constant hissing and crackling noise when nothing's playing (also audible during podcasts or quiet music). Like 3x worse than my $40 truly wireless buds.
They are buggy. They would sometimes disconnect with no way to reconnect, requiring a factory reset (which you need the case to do).
It's too bad, in a lot of way's they're better than the AirPods. I prefer the "open audio" design to the transparency mode even, and they're more comfortable and secure in the ears.
Is it saying that Google will just no longer sell the phone just nine month after release? (which IMHO would be ok) or that they also will stop giving it Os/security updates? (which IMHO is a total no-go for any company, especially Google).
It's pretty obvious that Covid supply chains have affected Google's hardware strongly. The Pixel 4a was delayed months (and the Pixel 3a ran out of stock before the 4a was introduced), the Pixel 4 is out of stock before the Pixel 5 is introduced.
They're not the only ones, though; Apple has announced already that the new iPhone is going to be delayed.
Even in the Nexus days, a gap of several months between the last generation going out of stock and the next generation becoming available was normal.
I think Google is just bad at inventory management (that, and selling a previous generation Android phone is probably much harder than it is for iPhones, where even Apple routinely continues selling models for years after introducing their successor.
> I think Google is just bad at inventory management
Or they have different goals. No big sales on the Pixel 4, and they sold all the units they made. Of course, nobody is overproducing flagships and then firesaling them anymore, it was a nice run between the Nexus 5x, the Nextbit Robin, and the Essential PH-1.
I'm sure they don't want to sit on a warehouse of unsold phones while introducing a new model. Running out of model A before model B drops is prudent :P
I switched from iPhone 6 to Redmi Note 8 Pro recently as I lost my iPhone. I have been an Android user before the iPhone.
I really can not overstate how happy I was with how long Apple supported that device - I used it from end of 2014 to early 2020 - yep! Every single day, new iOS supported till late 2019.
Even I use the RN8P. I unlocked the bootloader and flashed pure android to get away from MiUI's ads and constant tracking. Due to COVID, I didn't have anything else to do at home, so finished the whole unlock/flash process in a couple
of hours.
It connects to Mi servers every 4 seconds and just constantly sends logs. I noticed it and immediately switched.
Exactly. If you're constrained by production, there isn't much sense in making more of the old version when you need all the capacity for the new version.
Apple actually has custom SoCs that they build, so they very much depend on TSMC.
Whereas the 865 was already happily producing last year. Not only that, the Pixel 4 sony camera sensor was actually in 2018s flagships. Pixels are kinda old, overpriced and outdated. The 4a seems okay for the price.
The Face ID like thing they replaced the fingerprint scanner with in the Pixel 4 actually caused a lot of people to skip it.
That Face ID like thing is actually one of my favorite features. It's on par with Apple's implementation. Unfortunately, battery life, accessory integration (e.g., WearOS), and app support all suck relative to the offerings on iOS. I REALLY want to use an Android phone if only for the Microsoft integration, but having spent the last three weeks trying to make a Pixel 4 XL work, I'm back on iPhone. I may be an outlier, but god damn I love my Apple Watch.
I just can't buy into Google hardware anymore. When they first introduced the Pixel, I thought that by version 3 or 4 that they would have made vast improvements and "figured it out", like Microsoft did with the Surface Pro 3 and 4 (which is when that line really took off, letting them expand into laptops and AIO desktops). But it just seems like they went backwards with the Pixel 4, and I don't know if I can trust them again.
Same here. I used to buy Google hardware exclusively for my mobile needs because I wanted the pure AOSP experience (without all the crap the other vendors load), but it was very hard (Nexus 5X) to impossible (Pixel C) to get hardware replacement parts, and the premature end of security updates were the final straw for me.
A friend recommended Android One to me [1]. Basically, it's pure AOSP on third-party hardware.
I bought a Nokia 5.2 just to try it out, with the intention of getting the 7.3 when it comes out and I liked the Nokia experience. And I do -- it's simple AOSP.
Nokia promises 3 years of software updates and 5 years for security.
AOSP is completely different than pure Android. What you call AOSP is basically android without (other) vendor crap, but real AOSP is also without all of googles proprietery stuff (like google play, push notifications and so on).
So AOSP is basically pure android without googles crap.
Well, whatever the official name is, I meant the most pure version of Android but including the Google apps (which I haven't managed to get rid of yet entirely).
The serious downside to Android One is the absence of GCam. That photo app is simply the single best one out there. I own a Nokia 7 Plus, and it comes with a Camera app that only shoots blurry photos, even though I don't have shaky hands. Finding a GCam version that worked was a major PITA: I pretty much tried every version here [0]
I'm getting a Pixel 5 on day one, for the camera, camera app and security updates.
Meanwhile, the Pixel 2XL's default camera app has the single worst video taking experience I've ever seen, comparable to a $100 flip cam from 2008. 1080p at 30fps is all you seem to get, and it suffers from the same max 4gb file size issue that mp4 has had forever, causing skips and stutters when it stops one video file and starts a new one, which happens more often than you would expect because despite the low video quality, the encoding is incredibly inefficient
The Pixel isn't the only game in town for good cameras. Although if you add the constraint that the software extras and bloatware have to be google, then yes it is.
Up-to-date phones with guaranteed software updates, usable interface, and good camera, but not Pixel? Well, I'm interested, but somehow sure that's just a dream.
Links or it doesn't exist.
Edit: I specified Android, but really, I just want a phone with a standard port (USB C) and my apps (WireGuard, NextCloud, Google Photos, etc.)
I owned a Nexus 4 and then a 5x... damn that fucking camera app taking 20 seconds to load, making you miss the moment, and then loading a broken image. This happened the first week I had it and I couldn’t be without a phone so I sucked it up. So many good moments missed by that.
My last experience with an Apple product was my Apple IIc in college. I have been an Android user since the original Motorola Droid with slider keyboard.
I am thinking about switching the family to iPhones later this year.
(I also feel like I live in fear of waking up each morning to find out the my Fi service will be shut down in three days.)
Heh, I'm in a similar boat here. I've been using Android since the original Motorola Droid, the first "Apple competitor" according to their marketing.
The short support cycle, quality issues, and dropping the unlimited Google Photos backups have me seriously considering an iPhone. While I really love Google Fi, the service hasn't kept up with the competition in terms of data pricing and coverage.
I've been very satisfied with my 3a, though that might just be my personal preferences. I only use my phone for texting, reading Reddit/Twitter, and taking pictures. A phone with mediocre specs and an excellent camera is basically my dream phone.
They aren't dropping support for it, they just aren't selling it anymore. The 4a just launched. The 4 will continue to get software updates. This has to do with supply chain constraints (and probably low sales.) Unlike Apple, not everyone controls nearly the entire chain.
All I can say is I hope you read the HN guidelines [0]:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Google hasn’t had a successful product in a very long time. Am i exaggerating? Why does it even want to stay in the consumer electronics business at all? None of their phones are able to gain traction and they have a terrible strategy.
> Just like all Pixel devices, Pixel 4 will continue to get software and security updates for at least 3 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the U.S.
This is something I just don't understand. As phones get more powerful, there is absolutely no excuse to not support them for longer. When did the standard for supporting consumer devices get so low? Love it or hate it, Apple still supports the iPhone 6s Plus. A phone which is almost 5 years old now.
just buy phone with unlockable bootloader and good custom ROM community and you can have this even now, just not officially from manufacturer
anyway in Pixel case the phone will have already after 2 years completely unusable battery, not that it would be satisfactory for heavy user even out of box
"Just not officially" is a simplistic view. You don't know how long the phone is still going to be supported, and you have to have the skills and the patience to go through unofficial documents and procedures in order to make the whole process work. I know because I'm in this situation, and I do support this approach (to "fight against the market"), but it's not an easy feat.
just because it gets YOU through the day, doesn't mean it gets others, people use phones differently, for starters their phones have different Screen on Time per day, so while 1-2 hours is fine for you and gets you through the day, for others 7hrs is not enough and phone will die for them before dinner
I average 6 hours of screen on time, easily lasts the whole day. You should be careful talking about the performance of a phone you haven't used, I don't know if you've heard but people on Reddit sometimes don't tell the truth...
Perpetual donations to debian and apt update; apt dist-upgrade keep it in tip-top shape. The same cannot be said for a growing drawer of phones/tablets that are no longer supported/updated.
(I was glad to see that partial postmarketos support is present for at least some of those devices now. Looking forward to trying that out when I get a chance.)
"Happily" is a stretch. I ran Damn Small Linux (because puppy actually wouldn't fit) on a 233mhz pentium II, with 32mb of RAM and it was..... semi functional (including allowing the USB 1.0 ports on the motherboard to work!) but multitasking or complex tasks caused it to hard lock up and I was too young and uneducated to diagnose the problems
I think my 440BX motherboard supported up to 384 MB of RAM--that would have helped a lot. You can still get PCI SATA controllers for fast swap. You're still capped at 133 MBps because of PCI, but PC100 RAM only runs at 800 MBps, anyway.
What's amazing about the PII is it's the oldest "modern" computer in a few ways. USB came out around the same time, and i686 is the oldest x86 architecture still supported by modern distros out-of-the-box. i686 will be 25 years old in November. The fact that it's still supported is incredible.
Is all of the hardware in that desktop still supported by the vendors? I'd imagine not. Go check the ram compatibility list for the motherboard and see when the newest module was manufactured. This is always the first thing that gets dropped from support.
I installed a couple of new sticks of RAM in the Spring.
In terms of security updates for motherboards and other hardware, they're very rare. For my phones/tablets, some are literally pinned to ~Android 6, with just oodles of known security holes.
Alternatively, depending on your hardware requirements, you might want to consider taking a look at the Mobian (mobile Debian) project. Only the Pinephone is currently supported, but you get things like `apt` instead of `apk` on pmOS, which is based on Alpine Linux. Both are great projects, of course, and I think pmOS is focused on more devices.
I would be interested in seeing data on that. When you say "5 years is not that old" it can be read as "a 5 year old phone works just fine" and I fully agree with that, but it may be considered old in the sense that not many 5 year old phones are in use today.
Do a lot of people ignore their carrier's emails about upgrading at the expiration of the contract? I know I do, but I always assumed most people just upgraded almost right away to the new version.
That would be great. But it would also be great if they just released the specs/code of the first version of iOS that worked with any older-than-5 phone.
I still run iOS 10.3 on mine, and really don't care about the latest one, probably would run very slow anyway.
I love my 6s. I got a new battery last year and it still works great. I don't expect support to last a whole lot longer but the SE is not a very expensive replacement. I just don't want to give up my headphone jack.
People love to hate (which seems justified on the surface) on Apple's high prices, but the unparalleled years of support makes it worth it for me. Especially for phones like the SE.
As someone who has bounced back and forth between iPhone and Android over the years: my hate hasn't seemed to have been fixed over the years. Sure Apple will push updates for 5 years, but after about 3 years somehow the latest update makes the phone so slow as to be unusable. It's happened to me with every iPhone I've owned (3G, 6, and I guess we'll see on the latest).
I'm using iPhone 6S with latest iOS and no issues with performance. Although I did replace the battery last year for about 800ZAR (~$45) from a certified Apple repairs company.
I've heard that was the case for some of the older devices, but they're really gotten better at it. I'm currently using an OG iPhone SE (a 4 year old phone) and I'm running iOS 14 beta and it runs great.
If it helps ease your concerns any - my current work issued phone is the lowest end iPhone 6S model and it is still running fine to this day on latest iOS. Granted, the 6S is a pretty significant spec bump up from the iPhone 6.
The performance of my personal Pixel 2 on the other hand has not held up nearly as well by comparison and my next personal phone will likely be an iPhone even though I'm not a great fan of Apple.
My Pixel 2 XL has been humming along nicely, even on Android 10. Maybe I should worry how Android 11 will run on it--it will be the last update planned for this phone, and hence an opportunity for Google to make me unsatisfied with my old phone--but as it stands now I have no performance complaints whatsoever.
My Pixel 2 XL had heating issue. The battery couldn't last much at the end. I couldn't use it as GPS anymore (plugged or not) because it was over heating. I have a Pixel 4... still get warning about heat when using it as GPS once in a while ( I have the phone in the A/C vents so it has no reason to get that warm).
Similar complaint - I have a Pixel 2. Everything still works great, except for the battery, which lasts around a third as long as when it was new. I checked out replacing it, appears to be highly difficult to not damage the screen when replacing. Sigh. I'm ordering a Pixel 4a to replace it.
It's kind of a drag that once they finally got the fundamental hardware and OS good enough to really last for a few years, they also made it nearly impossible to do what should be simple maintenance.
Contrary to your view, I have a Pixel 2 XL and the battery is still stupendous. My only disappointment is how long it takes to charge on an old style, 500ma-1amp charger.
Did you leave in plugged into the AC adapter overnight? anecdotally that killed my previous phones and there's also (anecdotal?) evidence that it isn't great for it.
Have you checked what apps are eating all the battery? On older phones, newer versions of certain apps seemed to turn them into pocket warmers, getting stuck in a tight CPU loop and efficiently turning 3000mAh into heat at about 5 watts
Did you leave in plugged into the AC adapter overnight? anecdotally that killed my previous phones and there's also (anecdotal?) evidence that it isn't great for it.
Don’t most people do exactly that with their phones? If that’s something that actually breaks a phone, that’s ridiculous and they should fix it.
I also have a work iPhone and a Pixel 2 personal phone. I haven't encountered the same thing as you in terms of performance, they seem to be aging pretty similarly to me.
Google's attitude to customer support and brand loyalty, on the other hand, is a different story...
My girlfriend's Pixel 4 screen cracked and was a huge PITA to fix even though we paid a ton for extra warranty. Trying to get that fixed was far more painful than any experience I've had with other brands.
Worse than that, there is a software bug that can / will irreversibly brick your Pixel 2 rear camera. You can find a ton of info on it by searching. It doesn't seem to affect everyone, but I was unlucky enough to hit it last week, presumably from a recent update. Google has been absolutely silent on this issue. Unethical at best, and probably worse.
There was a time where I would have scoffed at paying a premium for Apple or other brands that sell an experience more than just a device. That's completely changed now. I don't have the patience or energy in my life to deal with what I perceive to be Google's cold / impersonal / numbers oriented approach to customers. It's just not worth the stress. If anything, I'm willing to pay a pretty big premium for the opposite. If that means switching our household to Apple products, so be it and good riddance.
I didn't mean to imply my Pixel 2 is unusable by any means. The phone is still perfectly usuable but it is certainly not as snappy as it used to be despite its ridiculous overpowered specs. For instance, bringing up common applications like the camera or dialer has noticeable lag now under current Android 10 that wasn't present in previous versions of Android.
Anecdotal for sure, but my Pixel 2 is still running great. My last one was running even better until it got stolen. The batter life, while not phenomenal, was still pretty good since I took care to preserve it (just basic things like not charging it over night, keeping it around 60-80% battery).
After it was stolen, I bought another Pixel 2 used and while the battery life is worse, it still runs perfectly well as far as I can tell.
Even the iPhone 6 runs all right. I have dropped mine quite a few times and it still works fine for my needs (which are not many since I have a computer). I have to admit that sometimes it doesn't start charging without shaking the cable a bit though, and not being able to update to the latest iOS version is regrettable.
But what I'm saying is that my iPhone 6 is still running mostly fine as well.
Same here. I purchased it expecting it to last me 5 years, and so far that plan looks sound. I’ve followed the release of subsequent phones in the review media, and I don’t feel like there have been any compelling new features since that would tempt me to upgrade sooner.
I use a first generation iPhone SE every day in conjunction with my regular iPhone 11 Pro Max and I definitely wouldn’t call it unusable. The main pain point I have with it is loading a heavy webpage if I don’t have ad blocking on
I'm still running an 6s plus. My luck might run out with iOS 14, but so far so good. It was expensive when new, but I've gotten 5 years out of it. Might get 6 if the update doesn't hurt it. Still runs quickly. Screen is still scratch free. Despite it's high initial price, it's been a bargain overall.
I still have the iPhone 6. Since it became "obsolete" I stopped keeping tracking of iOS updates but I feel like it hasn't hurt much. I can't really install many apps anyway since it only has about 11 GB of effective space (the "System " uses 6.87 GB)
I’m replying to you on a iPhone 5S (2013 model) running iOS 12 (the last supported version), and it runs perfectly fine for me.. Maybe it’s slow as hell comparing to the latest model, but it allows me to do everything I need it to do for me..
You should get your battery replaced. That is generally the cause of performance slowdown -- see the iphone battery complaints thread. But it is known, and an easy fix.
As I understand it, Apple slowed down certain models to deal with the problem of batteries losing capacity over time. Which actually could give those phones a longer usable life (slower is better than shutting off completely). The problem was they didn't tell people they were doing it.
Also usable here should be in pretty big quotes. The phone didn't die and turn off, but it didn't get much done either. It could possibly still make phone calls
Apple gives performance beyond what you would expect for a similar phone, in terms of battery life and responsiveness. Then, as you burn through your battery's age beyond what even other phone manufacturers would warrant, the OS slows down the CPU to let you continue using it. So it's actually giving you more than you would've gotten otherwise.
But all the complaints are that iPhone sucks, I guess.
Is that really such a bold expectation that when I buy a phone the manufacture will not use hidden software to downgrade the performance without informing me?
>the past couple of months have seen a sudden increase in Nexus 6P battery complaints, with many users reporting that their phones suddenly shut down, even though there was plenty of battery life remaining
It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger.
Yes, and what part of transparency is opposed to a working phone? Apple did not have to do what they did in secret. Nothing you have said responds to what I said.
This isn't an "Apple vs Android" discussion. Maybe that's where you got confused.
When users complained that their phones died while showing a 50% charge and would not work again until connected to a charger, Google did nothing to fix the problem.
>The processor easily overheated, a bootloop bug made quite a few units die prematurely, and lastly, a battery problem surfaced that led to early shutdowns anywhere between 50 and 0 percent. At least the remaining owners of this Nexus device don't have to worry about the latter issue anymore — according to Google, that is. An engineer just marked the early shutdown entry in the company's issue tracker as "fixed."
I don't know about you, but when I just retrieved my Nexus 6P from my junk drawer a minute ago, it didn't have an update pending.
Is it really too much to ask of a company for them to tell us when they're throttling our phones? Yes, they had a technical reason to do so, but people are right to be skeptical about this when it takes a lawsuit for this to come out.
Where did I lie? Apple was hit with a $500 million fine for nothing?
I'm not an Apple hater by any means. I understand they had their technical reasons, I was just pointing out the dichotomy between their perceived willingness to support older models and the lawsuit that says they are slowing them down.
>This seems like an odd thing to say about a company that was caught purposefully slowing down older models <END>
That is a half truth and considered lying through omission. It's misleading because as written it implies that they slowed down phones without a valid reason, AKA to force upgrades.
Early Android devices had removable batteries and most of the popular ones had custom ROMs that extended support for way beyond OEM updates.
The irony is that early Android phones were built to last, but quickly got obsoleted by more recent models. Now, progress is much slower, but the thing that kept devices alive (removable batteries and community ROMs) are dying. Real obsolescence is replaced by planned obsolescence.
> Early Android devices had removable batteries and most of the popular ones had custom ROMs that extended support for way beyond OEM updates.
how long is "way beyond OEM updates"? one year? two years? three years? five years? The main problem is that third party roms can only update so much. Without OEM support, you're not going to be getting updates for the proprietary bits of your phone. This includes blobs, baseband, and even the kernel (technically it's open source, but all android phones run off a customized kernel that's specific to that SoC. When that SOC gets EOLed, the updates stop coming).
Even if there are custom ROMs and the like, as gruez said, you will not be receiving updates for other critical parts of the phone. Regardless, those are only community supported, and not from the vendor.
I have far less trust in a random community. Plus, their EOL could be completely unexpected.
I do not want my phone to be reliant on community updates, personally.
Yeah, but I can buy 5 to 6 android phones for the price of Apple's high end phones. So while this makes sense for their cheapest product, even that is twice the price. So the comparison is between 2 to 5 generations of android phones and one generation of an apple phone.
Typically price is a pretty good indicator of the amount of resources that went into making something. I'd expect the environmental cost of an iphone to be a similar multiple of the environmental cost of an android.
You are right. Few do. If people cared about the environment that much, they would have lobbied for laws against planned obsolescence. Me buying 5 phones or even 500 won't make a difference to the environment. Laws forcing phone makers to support their phones for a minimum of x years might. Clearly, our society is not interested in that. Why should I then go out of my way to inconvenience myself to do something that will make zero difference? No reason to at all.
Well, a smartphone is fairly bad for its small size, but we're talking less than 100kg of CO2[1][2] to make and operate for its lifetime. But driving a car for a year in the US produces 4600kg[3]...
My understanding is that CO2 output is the least worrying part of smartphone usage. It's all the other toxic waste released during mining. Also, if cars are more polluting, that just means cars are bad too, not that smartphones are magically ok.
Socially and legally, we are ok with it, indeed. Otherwise, we wouldn't allow such a short support window. Our culture is now completely based upon planned obsolescence. I don't agree with it, but that's reality. These are the incentives society provides. In theory, it could easily provide others. In reality, Apple/Google are in many way more powerful than our government so it's unlikely. Like I said above, if this is a problem, it can be fixed. It's not a problem for me. I'd like more support, but I'm ok without support also. Not ideal, but I'm also not going to waste a thousand bucks on a phone either. Or even $400 for the cheapest iphone.
I have an iPhone 6S Plus. Apparently it came out in 2015. The ORIGINAL Pixel was announced in 2016. I'm still getting support for the 6S Plus - I actually have iOS14 beta running on it rather pleasantly. It's plenty fast, too.
Based on support period, one can easily justify the most costly iPhone over the seemingly temporarily supported Google/Samsung etc. flagship.
If only they put even remotely good batteries in their phones. The battery they generally spec out seems to only handle one day of mild use (including accounting for Apple's very efficient processors), and VERY quickly loses capacity and other specs. I'm sad they don't provide an option for if you like having 3500mAh or more.
Unfortunately I still wouldn't be happy with an iPhone as I'm just not a fan of iOS
The batteries are usually decent for the first two years. After two years, getting a battery replacement from a 3rd party has gotten cheaper and can be worthwhile (right now it's 35€ for an iPhone 6S and 45€ for an iPhone X)
I tend to use my phone more as a computer with a lot of SSH, unzip/unrar, downloading audio files, editing audio files, sending videos, full file manager access, and I want to move to iOS because I am absolutely not liking Google at all, and have tried, but it's just not there yet. I see improvements being made, but things like not being able to hold open an SSH session without subscriptions or expensive applications is a big issue for me. iPhones also can't play .webm's and other media files. I have a 6S plus I keep trying, but its personally not there yet.
Also not a fan of face unlock and wish they'd implement a fingerprint into the screen. I usually block out the front camera and any sensors that I don't use.
Likely because your statement that your Pixel 1 still works and is not receiving software updates is exactly in line with the points being made in the comment you replied to, and people are probably interpreting your point as "but my device is fine, what's the problem". The problem is that your device which is still working fine isn't receiving software support.
They don't have a "guaranteed support" lifetime, because instead they just have a track record of supporting hardware well beyond the (2-3 sigma) x (average) person keeping their hardware.
When you see "guaranteed support" by a manufacturer, you can be sure that it actually means "guaranteed end of support" timeline. Which Google follows exactly.
Other vendors are far worse. After using iphone 5s for 4+ years, My kid now watches youtube or play game etc on that phone. Android phones after 2-3 years basically turn to crap. It could be OS/ battery/plastic shell/screen that fail for sure.
> Their track record seems to be more recent- earlier iPhone's were not supported nearly as long, from what I have seen.
This is sort of true.
It is true that Apple dropped support for older devices much faster in the past. But it is also true that the older devices were way underpowered.
As an example: when Apple introduced home screen backgrounds on the iPod Touch, they released the same software upgrade for all iPods. However, since the older generation didn't have enough compute power (most likely GPU), they disabled the feature for older generations. I thought they were trying to force people to upgrade, but after a jailbreak and force enabling the feature, I realized that it was not the case. It was not smooth, so this is why they disabled it.
Same goes for, say, iPads. The first iPad quickly got obsoleted, but it was also very underpowered compared to subsequent devices.
They will not hesitate to drop hardware if it turns out to be insufficient, but they are just as likely to disable a feature if there is insufficient hardware support and allow the OS upgrade anyway.
I was curious so I looked to see if I could find a chart that shows how long iPhones typically receive iOS updates. Some are up to 6 major releases (and possibly more — we'll find out next year).
This thread talks about Apple as if they're the only company offering support and warranties. Whether it's their products or services, Apple's success is based on a smooth experience and they pursue to control the entire ecosystem. So for them to offer long-lasting support is neither surprising nor significant.
The Android phone market is distributed. You can get almost anything there you can get from Apple, in particular wherever the competition regulators had done their work.
The stuff Google itself is participating in is a different matter. Honestly, with respect to consumer products and UX Google is generally a failure. It's like Google is full of engineers and analysts but lacks talent in every other profession. Even Microsoft which has been so often a late-comer and the death for so many brands seems to be better at it.
I've always heard that it's the SoC that doesn't get updated after X number of years so Google is supposedly limited by how much support Snapdragon is willing to give their SoC.
I was thinking the same thing the other day. I just updated my parents' computers (which are 10 years old) to Windows 10. They still work great for their needs and they're up-to-date. I'm running a 7 year old ultrabook also on Windows 10. I'm planning to upgrade this year, but at least it's secure with the latest updates. I feel like we've been able to get a ton of use from these devices.
Meanwhile, I have a Samsung Note 2 phone which is 8 years old. It's fast enough for what I do (browse the internet for 10 minutes a day, send a dozen WhatsApp messages, book an Uber). That thing was released in 2012 and could no longer upgrade to new Android releases in 2014. That's pathetic. I need to replace it this year, not because it's too slow, but because it's insecure and no longer supported by anything. I was going to buy a smart scale the other day, but the app doesn't support my Android version. Also wanted an app for syncing the time with my Bluetooth GShock. Not supported. Sonos speakers? Not supported. It's a garbage phone now not because of the hardware, but because of the lack of support.
You're talking about three different classes of device: PCs, phones, and IoT (IoS)/deep embedded.
Embedded development is hard. Really hard. And much of that difficulty is intrinsic to the problem space, so it isn't going away anytime soon. But much of it is just embedded developers being masochists and embedded tool developers being sadists. For phones, the pain is probably 90% avoidable. 90 percent!
No, I don't know why we live with it either.
The reason your phone is different than your PC is that the PC's OS has all the drivers for everything built in, then loads whichever drivers your specific machine needs. Embedded Linux images are built specific to one model of hardware, with weird crappy OEM-provided drivers baked in and nowhere else available. It doesn't _have_ to be this way. But it is.
So to support your phone, the vendor basically maintains a custom-patched kernel with a bizarre build process. And that's done more or less independently for every model they're supporting. It's a huge headache!
Why deep embedded is this way is a little more understandable. (It's also where I prefer to work if I'm doing software; I don't like embedded Linux. It's just not my thing. So if I'm wrong when talking about it, that's why.) Deep embedded is often working with very limited hardware, custom circuits, and general strangeness. It also can serve the industrial, automotive, or medical markets, which naturally tend to longer product cycles. So the product is generally less standard, meaning it makes more sense (at least to me) why the support flow is so bespoke.
That "custom-patched kernel with a bizarre build process" is a self-inflicted wound on the part of both Google and the carriers. It could have been corrected years ago.
Yup, and to that point, the fix is really stupid simple, push the drivers into the linux kernel mainline and give google (or whoever) a kernel build profile for your device.
Done. You don't have to support the device for an eternity and, as a bonus, you can benefit from OS improvements to your drivers/etc. Hell, you and other manufactures using the same broadcom SOC (and hear me out... this might sound crazy) wouldn't have to spend the same engineering effort building drivers!
Of course, that would require manufactures to actually give a damn about driver quality, whereas the current situation allows them to push out the most broken patch imaginable to pass whatever conformance tests google asks for.
That would also cut into manufactures bottom line which is why I suspect they've not gone down this route. Gotta sell them phones every year... (they'd cut support to 1 month if they could)
> Yup, and to that point, the fix is really stupid simple, push the drivers into the linux kernel mainline and give google (or whoever) a kernel build profile for your device.
"If only the bad people would just stop being bad!"
This mantra continually assumes goodwill from people who continue to show that they have none. At some point one needs to stop gaslighting themselves and their users and make the system more robust to bad actors. Manufacturers don't want to mainline their drivers? Fine. You can work on getting drivers mainlined while also stabilizing the interface so that it doesn't injure a billion customers when they don't.
Google earns more money with the current scheme, so they have no incentive to improve this. Android One is a joke, it should be the baseline for Android, not a "special" version.
They could force the OEM to play ball, like they require Google Play Services to be pre-installed.
> They could force the OEM to play ball, like they require Google Play Services to be pre-installed.
I think Google really has to walk a fine line here. Android OEMs are already not thrilled with their lack of freedom when it comes to changing the experience on their phones. The more restrictions Google adds on, the closer some of them (especially Samsung) will be to cutting ties with the Android name and forking.
Google had absolutely no problem with forcing the hands of device makers when it came to their ability to build devices running a fork of Android.
They are not powerless. They simply made the decision to treat carriers and device makers as the customers they cared about and not the people using the devices.
So this situation has persisted for years, across the entire Android ecosystem. You're not going to just fix it with "one simple trick".
> Yup, and to that point, the fix is really stupid simple, push the drivers into the linux kernel mainline and give google (or whoever) a kernel build profile for your device.
Yeaaaaahhh... I don't see most companies doing that.
1. It is a lot of work to clean up your driver (that will only ever be used on one product) enough to be accepted into the mainline kernel. It takes time, effort and skill. Companies don't want to pay for that, because it doesn't contribute to bottom line. The MO is: get the product out... yesterday so we can sell it and make some money.
2. Even if it was accepted, does that mean it is going to work forever afterwards because the Linux kernel fairies / pixies / whatever will maintain it? No. If you're going push out a new release to end users, you'd better make damn sure it works. So that means each Android release has to go through a long round of QA. Who's going to pay for that?
There's only a couple ways out of the current mess we are in. Only one is likely to actually work.
Option 1: Release the IP! Have basically all phone SoCs (system on chip) use the same IP blocks for the display, I2C, SPI, memory controllers, GPIO, various sensors, power management, etc. Then you can be more like a PC where the system can basically boot up, and you can then download additional drivers as needed. This will never happen.
Option 2: Fuchsia style microkernel. Create a device driver API for the various SoC hardware blocks, and make it good and flexible enough that you never, ever have to change the API. The device driver binary is written once during initial product development, and can be carried into newer OS updates with no changes at all.
People need to realize that the SoC world is not like the PC world. Hardware interfaces change all the time, with every release of a new family member. Some stuff doesn't change much, like a USB host controller, because the SoC world has standardized that somewhat. Other stuff like power management is a total pain.
After TI left the Android SoC space, most OEMs and Carriers are beholden to Qualcomm, who write their own drivers and will never mainline them, if they can help it: long upgrade cycles will hurt Qualcomms bottomline, planned obsolescence via kernel incompatibility is how they achieve that. I don't think customers will upgrade from Snapdragon X05 to Snapdragon X20 for the minor gains in performance, if their old device could get the latest Android features.
Google decided on a cheaper technical solution instead - they only recently started abstracting Android drivers from the linux kernel (Project Treble[1]), which should allow drivers to continue working after the kernel has been updgraded.
Except Qualcom drivers are so crappy, you can rely on a remote exploit via WiFi or BT every year. So no chance to use the phone longer than maybe 2 years, even if nominally the software support might be longer.
You know, your PC has BIOS/UEFI and PCIE busses and other ways for kernel to discover what it is really running on, which drivers to load and so on.
ARM devices have none of these (except for servers, where Redhat had enough clout to say, that if your ARMv8 server has no UEFI, it will have no RHEL). Not only they add up to energy consumption (it is extra hardware, after all), they add up in the BOM as well (again, it is extra hardware). So we are stuck with kernels targeting only a known hardware (which today devicetree describes to some degree) and where a poke on a wrong port could mean that the entire device hangs. And after all, no consumers base their decision on whether a third party can replace the operating system, so why make a worse (=worse battery) and more expensive (=more BOM) than the competition?
> You're talking about three different classes of device: PCs, phones, and IoT (IoS)/deep embedded.
Not really, Google applies the same disposable approach to supporting ChromeOS on bog-standard x86 hardware. I have an x86 Chromebox that Google suddenly dropped all support for - including security patches - with a generic message that "your device is out of its support window". This basically rendered it useless as a ChromeOS device, because you can't browse the public web with an unpatched web browser. Yet I can run up-to-date Linux in Crouton.
I don't see how this is technically any different than Microsoft deciding to stop all Windows 10 patches on PCs older than a certain age not because of any blocking compatibility issue, but just because they've passed a certain age threshold and they don't want to do it anymore.
I used to evangelize ChromeOS as a great, simple solution for non-technical users who just want to browse the web without the hassle of maintaining a full-fledged PC, but I won't do that if Chrome devices are part of the smartphone "time based support model" rather than the "compatibility based support" model we've had on PCs for decades. A PC for basic use can easily last 10 years, OEMs who arbitrarily shorten that are not helping their customers.
If companies are not incentivized to change, then nothing is going to change. If companies pushing OS and hardware refreshes every year means people are going to buy more phones, I'm not sure why they would have any reason to stop.
Anecdotally, I needed a new phone because my Pixel XL was getting 4 hours of standby time and was constantly overheating. I had just gotten back from an overseas trip and was nearly stranded several times from finding myself in remote places with my backup battery dead. In the end, I settled for a OnePlus 7 (ironic, I know). I would rather have used the Pixel for many more years. hate not having a headphone jack or bezel, and I know that some product manager is going to use my purchase as evidence that those "features" were the correct move and continue to propagate the belief that nobody wants headphone jacks or bezels anymore. But I was in serious need of a smartphone that was actually reliable over one that had a headphone jack or bezel, so I got one without those features anyway.
People like me are now reliant on smartphones to do things like make calls, navigate unknown places or look up things on cellular data. In my book, if people need to have a cellphone in order to function in modern society, or are at least strongly incentivized to have one, then planned obsolescence only increases profits. Companies can market this as "upgrading" to new phones with a festureset that doesn't have to be a significant improvement over the last generation, and if people are used to this and don't mind spending the money to upgrade, then this will continue. And there are surely a lot of people who will buy the lastest model anyway even if they don't absolutely need to upgrade.
The answer is to start using open ROMs before you get sucked into attractive nuisances like Netflix. However if you're stuck now, get a second device and work on weaning yourself off.
Hear, hear. Who wants to watch TV for 19 minutes on a phone before it overheats and the battery dies, anyway? And then how am I supposed to compulsively doomscroll while ignoring the show I'm ostensibly watching? Hard pass.
Since you are planning to replace it, first unlock the bootloader of the old device. Then install whatever version of android is available for your device on xda-developers.com
Always check exact version/model (US model, Indian Model, etc) before flashing ROMs
That's not a fair comparison. PCs have barely gotten faster in the last 10 years. 20 years ago you could spend $2000 every 3 years and get a 10x better computer. Not so last 10 years. Aside from graphics cards the hardware has not gotten noticeably better or faster for day to day work.
PCs have gotten a lot faster in the last 10 years. Not 10x every three years better, but significantly better. The high end PC of 2020 would crush the high end PC of 2010.
Yes, the rate of change for PC performance in the 90s was insane, and the effect was magnified by the fact that most horizontal applications benefitted from the extra power.
The OP was claiming that there’s barely been any change in performance in the 2010s, which is just not true.
Yeah, but does it make any difference in day to day usage? I don't think it does. I'm using a 4770K at the moment. A Ryzen 3600 compiles my C++ project 30-40% faster, but that's literally the only time my old CPU is a bottleneck. If I wasn't working with C++, I can't see any reason I would want to upgrade the CPU -- even 7 years later.
A Ryzen 3600 is a different tier than a 4770k though. So you're effectively saying a mid-tier CPU today will handily beat a top tier CPU from 7 years ago.
a mid grade 2010 PC with an SSD upgrade will still be extremely usable. Go 5 years to something like a Broadwell i7, and many people might not be able to tell its 5 years old. I would expect that CPU to function fine for 5 more years. (albeit it no longer has support or security patches.)
The biggest improvement, from a most people perspective, in the last 5 years is power usage. They run cooler, and batteries last longer.
Indeed. I just picked up a laptop from my shelf the other day that had been collecting dust for years (literally booted it last in July 2017), as a friend needed a replacement laptop.
The laptop was bought in 2011. It was a fairly cheap one then, and has a dual-core i3 with hyperthreading, and it came with an SSD. I added another some RAM I had laying around so now it has 8GB.
After getting a fresh copy of Win10 on it, it's surprisingly usable. Webpages loads just fine, YouTube is accelerated so is smooth. I could totally use that for my daily laptop had it not been for the rather lackluster 1366x768 screen.
That’s true. But a high end PC released in 2010 can still run the latest version of Windows, Office, and Chrome well.
This was my work laptop in 2010 with 8GB of RAM and a 2.66Ghz Core Duo. They let me keep it after the company folded. Until late last year, it was my Plex server and I used it occasionally since it sat right by my work computer.
Yeah, but that's not why windows 10 still works on 10 year old hardware.
Windows works on 10 year old hardware because hardware manufactures don't get to modify the windows kernel. Instead, they have to push out drivers which work with the windows kernel.
It's really that simple.
There are several solutions here.
Google could make their own kernel which is closer to the microsoft kernel methodology (Fuchsia is basically just that)
Google could ban devices that with custom kernels from the play store (They MIGHT be able to do that now, then again, Android could be forked).
Google could create a private kernel repo and have manufactures submit to it. They could have their own kernel build profiles. (if getting things into mainline linux are deemed too difficult).
It’s not obvious when doing just normal stuff on an iPhone SE vs an iPhone 5s, which is about 7 years old now.
I use the 5s as a Spotify player and when I wiped it and set it up for the task, I was pleasantly surprised at how snappy it still felt and how everything I tried with it continued to work.
The hardware doesn’t have to be incredibly fast to support most of the functions supported - it’s only a small subset that really benefit from extra CPU speed and hardware acceleration.
Desktops and laptops are commodity hardware with standardized drivers and interfaces. Phones are secretive buggy hardware running secretive buggy binary blobs. It's difficult to get manufacturers to upstream anything or even give you any information at all about their hardware, and it's a herculean task to work around all the firmware oddities to upgrade devices yourself.
This is the exact reason why my next phone will be a Pinephone (just waiting for it to ship now). I'm expecting it to last a good 10 years just like any decent Linux laptop.
I don't think comparing the phone to a PC is entirely fair. A smartphone gets used everywhere and more or less constantly. Even a laptop is mostly used on a desk or other flat workspace where it's less likely to get dropped/ flushed/ etc. Also, up until 4-5 years ago, smartphones were moving pretty quickly in terms of capabilities.
On the other hand, comparing the useful life of this to the iPhone is entirely reasonable, particularly since its the price of a mid-high end iPhone. It's pretty sad when you realize that the new iPhone SE released just 6 months after the Pixel 4 will almost certainly be supported for 2-3 years after Google has abandoned the twice-as-expensive Pixel 4.
They're not talking about hardware durability though. They're just talking about software support. Wear and tear on the physical device should have nothing to do with the company's willingness to continue supplying software/security updates to the phone years down the road.
I agree they could and should be supported for longer, but regarding your comparison to Apple:
> Love it or hate it, Apple still supports the iPhone 6s Plus. A phone which is almost 5 years old now.
You're comparing what Google guarantees up-front for all devices to what Apple has done for the one device. Did Apple give a guaranteed support date for the iPhone 6s Plus at launch? In a quick search, I couldn't find one. I did find articles (eg [1]) from January speculating if Apple would include the iPhone 6S in the iOS 14 update or not.
Google still may support the Pixel 4 for longer than three years.
edit: forgot to add the disclaimer earlier that I'm a Google employee. I don't work on Android or hardware.
Actions speak louder than words. 10+ years of supporting iPhones and continuously increasing the service life of them says a lot more than a marketing promise.
When you say Google guarantees support up front (like a benefit), what you'll really find is that's a guarantee support ends on that timeline.
Apple (in my observation) tends not to say what length of support will be given, but offers it well beyond when an average person would throw away a device 2-3x over.
When Google says 3 years guaranteed, you can be damned sure you're done at 3 years.
(1) Battery life goes down while wear and tear build up. After ~3 years you are looking at spending money replacing a battery for a banged up phone. Or you can spend another $200 and get a new phone.
(2) Cameras are still getting better. Going from a Pixel to the Pixel 3 was a phenomenal upgrade in the camera.
> Or you can spend another $200 and get a new phone.
I'd guess people aren't replacing a ~$500 phone with a ~$200 phone, but I get your point. Who wants to replace the battery on a phone worse less that the battery?
>I'd guess people aren't replacing a ~$500 phone with a ~$200 phone
That's fair. I buy used/refurbished 1 model behind the current flagship. For me it was ~$140 more to get a lightly used 3 XL than replacing my battery.
I owned an iPhone 5S, my phone terribly slowed down in just a year to the point of becoming unusable. Opening the camera app would take 10 seconds. It would randomly freeze during calls and in the end, started having random shut downs. At the time, I didn't know they were throttling the phone. Funnily enough, my battery was replaced a couple of times and had no impact.
I paid $1000 at the time for it. I wrote it off in a year and a half due to all these issues. The manufacturer DID support with updates, but in the end, it didn't really matter because they just kept introducing more bugs and did nothing to address the throttling until very recently when they were caught in the act.
In contrast, I still own an Android 2.x HTC Desire that works flawlessly as a backup phone till date. I got it 8 years ago and is absolutely stunning - be it the beautiful OLED display or usability, and solves my needs perfectly.
I would say, software support for older phones is overrated. If you thought I am lucky with the HTC, then how about my other Android - Xperia X. I've dropped this thing so many times and not once had the screen gotten a single scratch. Supports dual sim and camera is great for low light. Still fluid to use. Again, software support for long term is really overrated in my opinion.
As long as you can make calls, surf the web, check emails, take photos, I'd say the purpose of the phone is complete.
-Download offline google maps files on it and use it as a gps in my car. Smooth as butter map animation and everything.
-Use it when I'm doing yard work, Podcasts, audiobooks.. The latest overcast app is a little bit hiccupy.. but very usable.
-Take pictures with it once in a while...
Still on original battery... On the latest iOS that Apple is currently supporting the 5S with.
The throttling didn’t happen until later, and was dependent on battery health. If you were having issues in the first year it wasn’t the throttling it was probably another issue with the device. I had an iPad like that and was able to get it replaced with the same generation and then-current OS, any issues like yours disappeared with the new hardware.
Were you using the phone each day to battery 0% straight? Did you consider getting the battery replaced? Those performance issues are completely explainable by the battery age + performance throttling for aged batteries, if you were a 100->0% without any charge during the day kind of user over the course of 1.5 years.
Some of it has to do with hardware vendors like Qualcomm refusing to support older chipsets with newer kernels, or you know, just open sourcing their drivers.
My pixel 1 is basically stuck on a 3.18 kernel forever, even if I go and compile AOSP myself, because of Qualcomm's nom-free drivers.
At a certain point, companies like Google have to decide how much they want to backport fixes to older systems. Apparently they've decided on 3 years.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have started. They have only been in the phone game for ~4 years which I imagine is quite quick to get a custom CPU into a shipping product.
They don’t have to make their own CPU. They could use a CPU with a couple of years of guaranteed support. If Qualcomm doesn’t want to do that, choose someone else.
I'm sure they would if they could, but almost everyone uses Qualcomm for a reason: Qualcomm has a practical monopoly on high-end smartphone chips and competition is difficult because of their patent ownership.
My life is a tiny bit more active than your average gym/yoga rat and phones last me around 2 years. That's consistent across something like 10 years now.
- One got stolen
- Two broke while hiking/kayaking
- One was a lemon and the battery started working funny after a year and a half, it's one of the pixels that came with a high capacity battery and the replacement one is lower capacity so I didn't risk spending money on servicing it
Apple has support statuses for discontinued products which kick in five years ("vintage") and seven years ("obsolete") after the it stops being sold.
It's disingenuous for Google to start counting when the product is released. As the buyer, I don't care when it was released, I care when you sold it to me as new. I could buy a Chromecast Ultra (the current-generation 4K Chromecast, released November 2016: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_ultra) and, by this standard (which may not even apply to Chromecasts, FWIW), they could discontinue it and drop support for it tomorrow.
> Apple has support statuses for discontinued products which kick in five years ("vintage") and seven years ("obsolete") after the it stops being sold.
That doesn't mean OS support. Apple sold the iPhone 6 until September 2018¹ but it did not get iOS 13 only one year later.
I'm an xoogler who has only owned Google Nexus and Pixel phones until recently when I switched to iPhone. The primary reason I switched was the limited support window that Google has for its phones.
Google and Microsoft lost me when I built a hackintosh on a Thinkpad X1 and my iPhone from work started syncing with it without me doing anything at all. Handoff, personal Hotspot, Airdrop, iMessage, continuity and all that working automatically is something google is very far from achieving with Microsoft.
I’ll keep a windows desktop for gaming, but once Apple settles down through its processor changes I might just get a personal iPhone and a MacBook Pro
Google stack ranks employees regularly. Lowest of a group is always fired. Doesn't matter how good you are or how much satisfaction you give to your customers, you're basically asked, "what have you built that could be the next billion customer thing?" If you're not answering how you're part of the next big thing, you're going to lose. So, once something is acquired or released, consider it deprecated.
This isn't true. I've worked at Google for 13 years and have rarely seen someone fired for performance; it's certainly not automatic based on being at the bottom of a stack rank. Other companies have or had such a system [1] but Google never has.
The sliver of truth is that Google's once-or-twice-yearly performance evaluation system asks colleagues to stack rank folks they are reviewing. I wish they'd get rid of it, but it's not used for much. It's only a partial order of folks they're reviewing, nothing really enforces that people actually do it, I suspect some people just rank all the people trying for promo this cycle above the people who aren't, and the many reviewers' stack ranks are never reconciled into one authoritative stack rank of the folks in a group. I don't know why it's still around.
I think you may be confusing the stack ranking at google, that doesn't result in dismissal (Google were in fact, right up until Covid, still on a hiring spree with a shortage of engineers); with what Microsoft historically did (and stopped doing in 2013).
Google actually has the reputation of being the hardest FAANG to get fired from for performance reasons. Amazon is the easiest, due to stack ranking. Facebook is sort of a middle-ground where you risk getting fired if you aren't being promoted at the expected rate, but it's not the same as Amazon's stack ranking.
Blame Qualcomm. I'm sure this issue doesn't exist in Windows 10 ARM. This might change if Google-Samsung Exynos partnership came into fruition, so Google uses its own chip for its own phones
This seems incredibly dubious as an excuse (for a variety of technical and business reasons), but has been the Google get out of jail card for a decade+ now.
More likely Google loses interest, the devices no longer make them any money and they want to wipe their hands of them.
It is now possible to use a decent[0] 3rd party keyboard on them and the XR is actually not that expensive compared to a number of other phones.
And for the first time since Samsung SII I'm happy with my phone :-)
[0]: the Apple keyboard doesn't support autocomplete while showing Norwegian letters, and it is also hilariously bad it seems wrt autocorrecting correctly spelled sentences into embarrassing ones and even going as far as autocorrecting one medicine name to another at some point. On SwiftKey one can at least turn of autocorrect.
On my iphone the problem is solved by restarting the app. My assumption was either the keyboard or the app updated and lost contact with the other, but I find killing the app solves the problem.
This why I will only ever use a smartphone with LineageOS (formerly CyanogenMod). Supported until your phone dies, putting aside the firmware.
Unfortunately, you have no options at all for having a modicum of control / openness over your firmware if you want to use a smartphone. Gotta use/build your own odd device if you want that.
LineageOS is NOT guaranteed to be supported until your phone dies. The Lineage OS devs have repeatedly stated that builds are maintained by volunteers, and if the dev responsible for one phone model loses interest in that job or loses his own phone of that model, he can quit maintaining it at any time, and the community has no right to complain. Because Android development is such an arcane science, usually no one else steps in to pick up an abandoned phone model once the original developer has quit.
My phone, an non flagship brand was supported by lineage when it was still being sold and used. Now as main android support has gone, so has the users and so has lineage support. I think it's the same for the majority of android phones. Only the phones with the longest vendor support also get the longest lineageos support. Other phones are out of luck from any angle.
Or an aggressive business model that is fair only to the top 10% of customers who are not concerned with spending $250 per month in effective charges to have a wireless handheld computer with 4G.
Obviously they want people to buy more often. For most top-tier devices most are probably bought on payments and generally speaking those customers can get a new phone every 12 months if they assume they’ll always have that smallish monthly payment.
I constantly get down voted when I say iPhone is the cheapest and most secure mobile device you can buy. "Price is what you pay, value is what you get" -you know who.
It makes iPhones look cheaper, given you don't have to replace them as often. I expect to keep my 11 for more than 5 years, which will make that $800 price less painful.
Even expensive phones are cheaper than their wireless service contracts in the US. A good rule of thumb is they depreciate about 50% in their first two years (at least for iPhones).
That means your $800 phone is costing you less than $20/month: A $1400 phone less than $30/month.
Right now I’m paying over $40/month each for service for four phones right now.
I pay around $65 for service on 3 phones with Google Fi. But, I'm lucky, I live in an area where it works just fine. Many people live in Verizon-only country, and that's not cheap.
I was watching a review of the Pixel 4a on YouTube last night in which the reviewer likes the Pixel 4a and calls the iPhone SE “trash” in comparison because it has bezels. Nevermind that the iPhone will run circles around the 4a in terms of performance and probably receive OS updates for 2-3 years after the 4a is EOL’ed. But no, bezels = “trash”.
A significant portion of phone users are there for aesthetics and status. Those same people are unlikely to have a phone past 1-2 years after paying it off with their carrier.
I haven't noticed the phone status thing in years. Everyone covers their phones with gigantic cases and phone design is largely generic anymore. So it's pretty hard to tell who has the latest one.
I've watched many Pixel 4a and OnePlus Nord reviews and they get compared against the SE a lot, yet I haven't heard anyone calling it trash. You should probably stick to more reputable YouTubers.
Also the form factor and screen to size ratio are very important criteria for a lot of people, if not the most.
> This is something I just don't understand. As phones get more powerful, there is absolutely no excuse to not support them for longer.
From our perspective, sure. From the manufacturers perspective, it costs money to port, build, and test new releases. And if people are happy with their up-to-date 5-year-old phone, they'll be less likely to buy the latest shiny new one.
Not saying those are good excuses -- they're explicitly customer-hostile -- but they're completely understandable.
My freshly-reinstalled Pixel 2 XL with a minimal app load has four goddamn gigabytes of RAM and can't even manage to run my podcast player in the background without killing it after 5-30 minutes to economize on resources, despite my having turned off every optimization function on the device. That's why. The software is garbage, and it necessitates an upgrade treadmill to keep pace. It's PCs in the 90s all over again!
Bump up the price of Pixel by additional $100, and you get an 5 years guarantee upgrade.
Not to mention the Pixel isn't that powerful. iPhone 6s despite being 5 years ago, is probably as fast or still faster than some of the sub $300 Android Phone released today. ( Excluding Chinese Brands )
big surprise, fugly design with huge bezel unseen in years combined with typical less than mediocre battery
not that pixel 4a would be much better in this aspect - when others are moving already to centered punch hole Google releases fugly asymetric punch hole and combine it with 3100 mAh battery, good luck with such battery as heavy user or even average user after year or two wear
And the iPhone X lasted about as long[0]. I’m unclear why we see unusually short product life cycles as being some kind of indication that All Is Not We’ll. Sometimes a product is a dud, sometimes the tech changes and it makes sense to release a new product for market or economic reasons.
I was so glad to bet one of the early adopter of the Google pixel 1. I broke my screen and gladely bought the pixel 2 and was so satisfied with it, gladely showing off photos. Both version had the best cameras on the market. Had amazing customer support inside the phone, and unlimited photo/videos cloud storage. iPhone owners were jealous.
But then starting the 3rd , everything declined. Camera became average, they stop the unlimited storage, battery became really bad. They went backward, and couldn't keep their competitive advantage or stay ahead of the innovation. Original early adopters starts getting disappointed seeing better cameras[1] and battery life flooding the market.
Hopefully the 4a will help them regain the heart of us (and me)
I think you might be confusing 3 and 4. 3 still had unlimited storage and the best camera. 4 doesn't have the unlimited storage and camera is still top notch (you can refer to many reviews) but lacks the zoom lens unlike other flagship phones. Looks like you forgot to put your reference link. Plus battery on 4 XL is good, 4 had really undersized battery.
They don't seem to be treating it with the level of care and attention that perhaps you'd expect for what seems like a key part of their business.
Stupid stuff, but an example is with the closing of Play Music, Wear OS won't have a first-party music player until the new Youtube Music app is ready. Couldn't imagine that happening to watchOS.
I switched from iPhone 6 to Redmi Note 8 Pro recently (early 2020) as I lost my iPhone. I have been an Android user before the iPhone.
I really can not overstate how happy I was with how long Apple supported that device - I used it from end of 2014 to early 2020 - yep! Every single day, new iOS supported till late 2019.
same, I hold unto my se until I could, waiting for another midrange iPhone to materialize that was not completely gimped like the C line, I really enjoyed all the years with it. eventually switched to a mi a2, which is not as good, but workable replacement.
and hey, it cost a fourth of an iphone, so I can have extremely short replace cycle to work around the chronic android updates issues.
This isn't surprising given the Pixel 4a and the 5 being coming up soon. With the price difference there is really no reason to purchase a Pixel 4 now.
I recall that the 3a used less frames than the 3 for the HDR+ and similar image processing. It would be interesting if the 4a and the 4 used the exact same processing (minus performance)!
Google really needs to figure out their phone hardware plans. This is a mess. 9 months? Who is buying these phones? Is the hardware division even profitable? I can't imagine it is.
I preordered the Pixel 4 XL at launch, upgrading from a 2 XL. I lost the 4 XL in April, when I unknowingly dropped it at some point during a bike ride, so I reverted to the 2 XL. This made me realize what a completely unremarkable phone the 4 XL was, and in some ways, it was actually a step _backwards_ from the 2 XL. I really did miss the fingerprint scanner on the back of the 2 XL, and for me face unlock will always be a gimmick. The camera on the 2 XL is still really good, even by today's standards.
Every smartphone I've had since the gnex days has been Google. I really want Google to make the best Android phones. The appeal of Nexus was that it was so cheap. With Pixel, prices have gone up, and the increase in functionality between generations has gone down. Maybe that's a general smartphone trend, but I think for the first time in a long time, my next Android phone won't be from Google.
I upgraded from a Pixel XL (which itself was a free upgrade after my Nexus 6P ran into the battery shutdown issues) to the 4XL when it came out in November, and while I can't say I _regret_ my purchase, it's just... unremarkable. The camera is fine, but the battery is not any better than my 3yo phone.
I haven't had to downgrade, but I imagine that (like you) I wouldn't miss it :)
This is exactly how I feel. I have the 3a XL and it's a fabulous phone. the a+XL combo is a category killer if they could get their supply chain together.
I couldn't disagree more. The Pixel 4 XL was criminally underrated. The non-XL wasn't good because the battery was too small, sure. But the XL battery was OK, not worse than the 2 XL I upgraded from.
Then there are several big improvements. It's faster with more RAM, of course. I will never go back to a 60 Hz screen. The speakers are a million times better. I use the telephoto camera. The screen to body ratio is better. Face unlock works incredibly well for me; it's significantly more reliable than the fingerprint sensor ever was. Of course the mask thing is unfortunate but I stay at home and need a mask very rarely so it's not an issue for me.
I'm furious that they are shuttering Google Play Music. That's the singular Google product I enjoy, and now it's going away. I had a bunch of purchases too.
When Brin and Page left, the company entered its Ballmer era.
I hope another company outdoes them on search. It can't be that hard with all of the AdSense spam these days. I'd love to see their golden goose go away and have them face an existential crisis that causes them to refocus and start giving a damn.
Edit: why the downvotes? People are frustrated with this company.
436 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadHowever I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. It is not uncommon it hear of stories where raising the price lead to more sales and people regarding the product as of a higher quality.
4XL - take it out, and 80% of the time it works, the other 20% I spend time moving it up and down, and just entering the pin.
It is a lot more than just "password manager == sorted"
That said, I still like it better than face.
My point is instead of wearing gloves you can just avoid touching your face until you wash your hands or use hand sanitizer, which you can't do wearing gloves.
Your skin does not.
If you're concerned about touching things when out wash your hands when you get home (and anything else you've touched while out).
Face ID continues trying to find a face for a few seconds if the sensor is pointed elsewhere.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21265019/apple-ios-13-5-o...
move fast; break all the things.
At this point marginally improved devices at premium price point.. might further leave iPhone as the leader.
iPhone sales are up this year while samsung/Android is down.. Part of it is iPhone will last longer have updates for far longer than any Android device.
I'm an Android user considering switching to iPhone not out of boredom, but wanting my phone to be an appliance instead of a source of innovation, as that seems to be largely gone in this Form factor
I was talking about astrophotography.
My reference is to the thing that's more important than cameras or any feature - Android One is about ongoing and meaningful security updates that are available to the devices in the same month that they are released.
Edit: That's kind of possibly concerning for you. It may be totally fine. Still seems weird.
Why aren't you using an ad blocker?
I am. I'm using uBlock Origin, but apparently this redirect got through. Then the DNS lookup of guce.advertising.com failed because of the filter I have set up on that end, so my Techcrunch experience ended on an error page.
I guess it's an http redirect but I haven't checked because I prefer to write comments than debugging crappy websites.
To the people behind this : Go to hell.
> That's right: it's another marketing email from the robots at dbrand. That means it's time for another email footer. Here are a few ground rules if you're reading this on your shiny new Pixel 4. First, make sure the battery is fully charged - you don't want it dying while you're reading this, do you? If you need to scroll to keep reading, you'll have to use your greasy, gross thumb to do it. No hand-waving allowed. Lastly, consider turning off Gmail sync - your photos are going to burn through that non-expandable storage very quickly. With that preamble out of the way, here's our footer: dbrand is having a 10% off sale - masking your $800+ mistake has never been more affordable.
It also raises and interesting question in me for the folks who think of themselves as "product" types. Has anyone measured the effect of platform denigration on improving or diminishing a brand?
I am trying to imagine ways you might A/B test this. Set up two brands with products in the same space with comparable specifications, and have one that is "product focused" in their outbound messaging and one that is "platform hostile" in their messaging. Then compare customer loyalty and margin support in the two brands.
Curious to know if anyone has done this.
Also AndroidOne so I'm still getting updates for it which is the longest after purchase that's ever happened on an android handset.
At least I would except the Nokia 6.1 does literally everything I need out of a phone still so I'll likely wait another year at least.
There are two problems with it:
- Within 2 weeks the top of mine was covered in thousands of tiny scratches. It seems like maybe it was a manufacturing defect in the screen coating or something but Google wouldn't replace it. They did however do a great job of fucking around in their support emails to exhaust the 30-day return window.
- The body is plastic but the glass goes all the way to the edge. Dropping the phone on its corner caused the screen to crack and die completely (and this was with a screen protector on).
All of the used ones I've bought have huge scratches on the screen making me believe it's compromise glass at a cost reduction. I buy phones used because I like recycled instead of new, and usually there are small scratches like swirl marks in a car, but never huge scratches like all of my 3a's so far. That's fairly anecdotal however.
I keep buying them though, they're absolutely excellent value for a Pixel device and I do recommend them. A 4a is on my radar.
I really don't want to ever buy a phone without a headphone jack. At least the 4A still has one. Only reason to buy a 4A now would be to get 128 gig storage.
It took a lot of good drops to crack my screen, and I think I'll be able to go for a month or two before I swap in a replacement. (No screen protector or case)
I don't really see why the glass needs to go so far down. There's a large buffer of space before the screen actually starts
I tried looking for replacement screens and they are out of stock all over the place and relatively expensive starting at $100ish from places I would consider more reputable and maybe 10% less elsewhere. I'm not sure if the lack of screens lends credence to how easily they break, but it certainly can't be used to disprove it.
I am really pleased with how well the phone works for the $150 price tag.
I don't use my phone all that much, but I can't imagine a situation where I'd justify paying 3-5x that amount for a phone. The Moto G line seems to be perfectly adequate.
Is is really that expensive to add NFC, or is it a marketing thing where it's considered a premium feature for product differentiation?
The Pixel 3a is hands down the best phone in terms of value for money. I'll get the 4a 5G later this year provided it has the headphone jack.
The thing I like about the Nokia is the chassis is aethetically gorgeous and a single piece of aluminium coated in unobtainium, isn't a mark on it after nearly 2 years.
So quite literally, Pixel 4 is what caused Google to lose me as an Android user.
This has basically no effect for existing owners.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
https://gcemetery.co/
A LOUD, constant hissing and crackling noise when nothing's playing (also audible during podcasts or quiet music). Like 3x worse than my $40 truly wireless buds.
They are buggy. They would sometimes disconnect with no way to reconnect, requiring a factory reset (which you need the case to do).
It's too bad, in a lot of way's they're better than the AirPods. I prefer the "open audio" design to the transparency mode even, and they're more comfortable and secure in the ears.
Is it saying that Google will just no longer sell the phone just nine month after release? (which IMHO would be ok) or that they also will stop giving it Os/security updates? (which IMHO is a total no-go for any company, especially Google).
They're not the only ones, though; Apple has announced already that the new iPhone is going to be delayed.
I think Google is just bad at inventory management (that, and selling a previous generation Android phone is probably much harder than it is for iPhones, where even Apple routinely continues selling models for years after introducing their successor.
Or they have different goals. No big sales on the Pixel 4, and they sold all the units they made. Of course, nobody is overproducing flagships and then firesaling them anymore, it was a nice run between the Nexus 5x, the Nextbit Robin, and the Essential PH-1.
Not from Google itself, but for the past months third party resellers can't seem to lower the price enough to get rid of their stocks.
Also the Nexus 5X was not a flagship, and was plagued by LG's mainboard/bootloop issues.
An old Android phone will have to compete with newer ones at the same price point.
I really can not overstate how happy I was with how long Apple supported that device - I used it from end of 2014 to early 2020 - yep! Every single day, new iOS supported till late 2019.
Google - well they are famous for killing things.
edit: typo
It connects to Mi servers every 4 seconds and just constantly sends logs. I noticed it and immediately switched.
That is do you have the EU version, Indian model or the Chinese version?
If you have trouble finding it, look for MIUI version in settings.In the 'About' section of your phone.
Apple actually has custom SoCs that they build, so they very much depend on TSMC.
Whereas the 865 was already happily producing last year. Not only that, the Pixel 4 sony camera sensor was actually in 2018s flagships. Pixels are kinda old, overpriced and outdated. The 4a seems okay for the price.
The Face ID like thing they replaced the fingerprint scanner with in the Pixel 4 actually caused a lot of people to skip it.
Pixel 4a looks decent for the price, though.
A friend recommended Android One to me [1]. Basically, it's pure AOSP on third-party hardware.
I bought a Nokia 5.2 just to try it out, with the intention of getting the 7.3 when it comes out and I liked the Nokia experience. And I do -- it's simple AOSP.
Nokia promises 3 years of software updates and 5 years for security.
[1] https://www.android.com/one/
So AOSP is basically pure android without googles crap.
Well, whatever the official name is, I meant the most pure version of Android but including the Google apps (which I haven't managed to get rid of yet entirely).
That's not AOSP. AOSP has no google apps at all.
I'm getting a Pixel 5 on day one, for the camera, camera app and security updates.
[0] https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/
Links or it doesn't exist.
Edit: I specified Android, but really, I just want a phone with a standard port (USB C) and my apps (WireGuard, NextCloud, Google Photos, etc.)
Bathtub notch aside, the 3 series are excellent phones and hope in a few years when they need an upgrade that the 6 or 7 is equally good.
I am thinking about switching the family to iPhones later this year.
(I also feel like I live in fear of waking up each morning to find out the my Fi service will be shut down in three days.)
The short support cycle, quality issues, and dropping the unlimited Google Photos backups have me seriously considering an iPhone. While I really love Google Fi, the service hasn't kept up with the competition in terms of data pricing and coverage.
Meanwhile my 'very old' 2016 iPhone SE is still supported and will be running the new iOS 14 update very soon.
All I can say is I hope you read the HN guidelines [0]:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is something I just don't understand. As phones get more powerful, there is absolutely no excuse to not support them for longer. When did the standard for supporting consumer devices get so low? Love it or hate it, Apple still supports the iPhone 6s Plus. A phone which is almost 5 years old now.
anyway in Pixel case the phone will have already after 2 years completely unusable battery, not that it would be satisfactory for heavy user even out of box
just because it gets YOU through the day, doesn't mean it gets others, people use phones differently, for starters their phones have different Screen on Time per day, so while 1-2 hours is fine for you and gets you through the day, for others 7hrs is not enough and phone will die for them before dinner
Perpetual donations to debian and apt update; apt dist-upgrade keep it in tip-top shape. The same cannot be said for a growing drawer of phones/tablets that are no longer supported/updated.
(I was glad to see that partial postmarketos support is present for at least some of those devices now. Looking forward to trying that out when I get a chance.)
What's amazing about the PII is it's the oldest "modern" computer in a few ways. USB came out around the same time, and i686 is the oldest x86 architecture still supported by modern distros out-of-the-box. i686 will be 25 years old in November. The fact that it's still supported is incredible.
In terms of security updates for motherboards and other hardware, they're very rare. For my phones/tablets, some are literally pinned to ~Android 6, with just oodles of known security holes.
[1] https://mobian-project.org/
My daily driver desktop, from which I do all of the rsync.net CEO things - from terminal to VMWare - is an octo-mac-pro from early 2009.
Currently running el-cap. Nothing is ever slow. 11 years and counting ...
Nowadays 5 years is really not that old for a phone.
Phone manufacturers should release the specs and/or an open source version of the phone's os so people can provide their own support.
Do a lot of people ignore their carrier's emails about upgrading at the expiration of the contract? I know I do, but I always assumed most people just upgraded almost right away to the new version.
I still run iOS 10.3 on mine, and really don't care about the latest one, probably would run very slow anyway.
The performance of my personal Pixel 2 on the other hand has not held up nearly as well by comparison and my next personal phone will likely be an iPhone even though I'm not a great fan of Apple.
It's kind of a drag that once they finally got the fundamental hardware and OS good enough to really last for a few years, they also made it nearly impossible to do what should be simple maintenance.
Did you leave in plugged into the AC adapter overnight? anecdotally that killed my previous phones and there's also (anecdotal?) evidence that it isn't great for it.
Have you checked what apps are eating all the battery? On older phones, newer versions of certain apps seemed to turn them into pocket warmers, getting stuck in a tight CPU loop and efficiently turning 3000mAh into heat at about 5 watts
Don’t most people do exactly that with their phones? If that’s something that actually breaks a phone, that’s ridiculous and they should fix it.
Google's attitude to customer support and brand loyalty, on the other hand, is a different story...
My girlfriend's Pixel 4 screen cracked and was a huge PITA to fix even though we paid a ton for extra warranty. Trying to get that fixed was far more painful than any experience I've had with other brands.
Worse than that, there is a software bug that can / will irreversibly brick your Pixel 2 rear camera. You can find a ton of info on it by searching. It doesn't seem to affect everyone, but I was unlucky enough to hit it last week, presumably from a recent update. Google has been absolutely silent on this issue. Unethical at best, and probably worse.
There was a time where I would have scoffed at paying a premium for Apple or other brands that sell an experience more than just a device. That's completely changed now. I don't have the patience or energy in my life to deal with what I perceive to be Google's cold / impersonal / numbers oriented approach to customers. It's just not worth the stress. If anything, I'm willing to pay a pretty big premium for the opposite. If that means switching our household to Apple products, so be it and good riddance.
After it was stolen, I bought another Pixel 2 used and while the battery life is worse, it still runs perfectly well as far as I can tell.
But what I'm saying is that my iPhone 6 is still running mostly fine as well.
If Apple didn’t throttle, the phone would restart every time it’s power requirements outstripped the batteries declining capacity.
I think it’s pretty clear which use case is better.
Apple gives performance beyond what you would expect for a similar phone, in terms of battery life and responsiveness. Then, as you burn through your battery's age beyond what even other phone manufacturers would warrant, the OS slows down the CPU to let you continue using it. So it's actually giving you more than you would've gotten otherwise.
But all the complaints are that iPhone sucks, I guess.
Your standards are in the basement.
>the past couple of months have seen a sudden increase in Nexus 6P battery complaints, with many users reporting that their phones suddenly shut down, even though there was plenty of battery life remaining
It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger.
https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random...
That seems especially problematic if you are on the go and need to make an emergency call to summon help.
A working phone seems preferable.
This isn't an "Apple vs Android" discussion. Maybe that's where you got confused.
When users complained that their phones died while showing a 50% charge and would not work again until connected to a charger, Google did nothing to fix the problem.
>The processor easily overheated, a bootloop bug made quite a few units die prematurely, and lastly, a battery problem surfaced that led to early shutdowns anywhere between 50 and 0 percent. At least the remaining owners of this Nexus device don't have to worry about the latter issue anymore — according to Google, that is. An engineer just marked the early shutdown entry in the company's issue tracker as "fixed."
I don't know about you, but when I just retrieved my Nexus 6P from my junk drawer a minute ago, it didn't have an update pending.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut...
I'm not an Apple hater by any means. I understand they had their technical reasons, I was just pointing out the dichotomy between their perceived willingness to support older models and the lawsuit that says they are slowing them down.
>This seems like an odd thing to say about a company that was caught purposefully slowing down older models <END>
That is a half truth and considered lying through omission. It's misleading because as written it implies that they slowed down phones without a valid reason, AKA to force upgrades.
The irony is that early Android phones were built to last, but quickly got obsoleted by more recent models. Now, progress is much slower, but the thing that kept devices alive (removable batteries and community ROMs) are dying. Real obsolescence is replaced by planned obsolescence.
how long is "way beyond OEM updates"? one year? two years? three years? five years? The main problem is that third party roms can only update so much. Without OEM support, you're not going to be getting updates for the proprietary bits of your phone. This includes blobs, baseband, and even the kernel (technically it's open source, but all android phones run off a customized kernel that's specific to that SoC. When that SOC gets EOLed, the updates stop coming).
I have far less trust in a random community. Plus, their EOL could be completely unexpected.
I do not want my phone to be reliant on community updates, personally.
1: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-iphone-x-environmental-repor...
2: https://sustainability.google/reports
3: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-ways-smartphone-environment.ht...
Based on support period, one can easily justify the most costly iPhone over the seemingly temporarily supported Google/Samsung etc. flagship.
Unfortunately I still wouldn't be happy with an iPhone as I'm just not a fan of iOS
Also not a fan of face unlock and wish they'd implement a fingerprint into the screen. I usually block out the front camera and any sensors that I don't use.
Non-professional developers support Android Q on the original Pixel, but Google is too resource-starved, apparently.
When you see "guaranteed support" by a manufacturer, you can be sure that it actually means "guaranteed end of support" timeline. Which Google follows exactly.
While Google may end support as soon as they can, not all manufacturers do.
This is sort of true.
It is true that Apple dropped support for older devices much faster in the past. But it is also true that the older devices were way underpowered.
As an example: when Apple introduced home screen backgrounds on the iPod Touch, they released the same software upgrade for all iPods. However, since the older generation didn't have enough compute power (most likely GPU), they disabled the feature for older generations. I thought they were trying to force people to upgrade, but after a jailbreak and force enabling the feature, I realized that it was not the case. It was not smooth, so this is why they disabled it.
Same goes for, say, iPads. The first iPad quickly got obsoleted, but it was also very underpowered compared to subsequent devices.
They will not hesitate to drop hardware if it turns out to be insufficient, but they are just as likely to disable a feature if there is insufficient hardware support and allow the OS upgrade anyway.
https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...
The Android phone market is distributed. You can get almost anything there you can get from Apple, in particular wherever the competition regulators had done their work.
The stuff Google itself is participating in is a different matter. Honestly, with respect to consumer products and UX Google is generally a failure. It's like Google is full of engineers and analysts but lacks talent in every other profession. Even Microsoft which has been so often a late-comer and the death for so many brands seems to be better at it.
It's just not a priority for them.
Meanwhile, I have a Samsung Note 2 phone which is 8 years old. It's fast enough for what I do (browse the internet for 10 minutes a day, send a dozen WhatsApp messages, book an Uber). That thing was released in 2012 and could no longer upgrade to new Android releases in 2014. That's pathetic. I need to replace it this year, not because it's too slow, but because it's insecure and no longer supported by anything. I was going to buy a smart scale the other day, but the app doesn't support my Android version. Also wanted an app for syncing the time with my Bluetooth GShock. Not supported. Sonos speakers? Not supported. It's a garbage phone now not because of the hardware, but because of the lack of support.
Embedded development is hard. Really hard. And much of that difficulty is intrinsic to the problem space, so it isn't going away anytime soon. But much of it is just embedded developers being masochists and embedded tool developers being sadists. For phones, the pain is probably 90% avoidable. 90 percent!
No, I don't know why we live with it either.
The reason your phone is different than your PC is that the PC's OS has all the drivers for everything built in, then loads whichever drivers your specific machine needs. Embedded Linux images are built specific to one model of hardware, with weird crappy OEM-provided drivers baked in and nowhere else available. It doesn't _have_ to be this way. But it is.
So to support your phone, the vendor basically maintains a custom-patched kernel with a bizarre build process. And that's done more or less independently for every model they're supporting. It's a huge headache!
Why deep embedded is this way is a little more understandable. (It's also where I prefer to work if I'm doing software; I don't like embedded Linux. It's just not my thing. So if I'm wrong when talking about it, that's why.) Deep embedded is often working with very limited hardware, custom circuits, and general strangeness. It also can serve the industrial, automotive, or medical markets, which naturally tend to longer product cycles. So the product is generally less standard, meaning it makes more sense (at least to me) why the support flow is so bespoke.
Done. You don't have to support the device for an eternity and, as a bonus, you can benefit from OS improvements to your drivers/etc. Hell, you and other manufactures using the same broadcom SOC (and hear me out... this might sound crazy) wouldn't have to spend the same engineering effort building drivers!
Of course, that would require manufactures to actually give a damn about driver quality, whereas the current situation allows them to push out the most broken patch imaginable to pass whatever conformance tests google asks for.
That would also cut into manufactures bottom line which is why I suspect they've not gone down this route. Gotta sell them phones every year... (they'd cut support to 1 month if they could)
"If only the bad people would just stop being bad!"
This mantra continually assumes goodwill from people who continue to show that they have none. At some point one needs to stop gaslighting themselves and their users and make the system more robust to bad actors. Manufacturers don't want to mainline their drivers? Fine. You can work on getting drivers mainlined while also stabilizing the interface so that it doesn't injure a billion customers when they don't.
Google seems like the natural point for that. Maybe a law is needed? Too bad most law makers are completely tech illiterate.
But I agree, it won't change without some central force to kibosh it.
They could force the OEM to play ball, like they require Google Play Services to be pre-installed.
I think Google really has to walk a fine line here. Android OEMs are already not thrilled with their lack of freedom when it comes to changing the experience on their phones. The more restrictions Google adds on, the closer some of them (especially Samsung) will be to cutting ties with the Android name and forking.
They are not powerless. They simply made the decision to treat carriers and device makers as the customers they cared about and not the people using the devices.
Huawei only stopped shipping the Store because they were legally obligated.
> Yup, and to that point, the fix is really stupid simple, push the drivers into the linux kernel mainline and give google (or whoever) a kernel build profile for your device.
Yeaaaaahhh... I don't see most companies doing that.
1. It is a lot of work to clean up your driver (that will only ever be used on one product) enough to be accepted into the mainline kernel. It takes time, effort and skill. Companies don't want to pay for that, because it doesn't contribute to bottom line. The MO is: get the product out... yesterday so we can sell it and make some money.
2. Even if it was accepted, does that mean it is going to work forever afterwards because the Linux kernel fairies / pixies / whatever will maintain it? No. If you're going push out a new release to end users, you'd better make damn sure it works. So that means each Android release has to go through a long round of QA. Who's going to pay for that?
There's only a couple ways out of the current mess we are in. Only one is likely to actually work.
Option 1: Release the IP! Have basically all phone SoCs (system on chip) use the same IP blocks for the display, I2C, SPI, memory controllers, GPIO, various sensors, power management, etc. Then you can be more like a PC where the system can basically boot up, and you can then download additional drivers as needed. This will never happen.
Option 2: Fuchsia style microkernel. Create a device driver API for the various SoC hardware blocks, and make it good and flexible enough that you never, ever have to change the API. The device driver binary is written once during initial product development, and can be carried into newer OS updates with no changes at all.
People need to realize that the SoC world is not like the PC world. Hardware interfaces change all the time, with every release of a new family member. Some stuff doesn't change much, like a USB host controller, because the SoC world has standardized that somewhat. Other stuff like power management is a total pain.
After TI left the Android SoC space, most OEMs and Carriers are beholden to Qualcomm, who write their own drivers and will never mainline them, if they can help it: long upgrade cycles will hurt Qualcomms bottomline, planned obsolescence via kernel incompatibility is how they achieve that. I don't think customers will upgrade from Snapdragon X05 to Snapdragon X20 for the minor gains in performance, if their old device could get the latest Android features.
1. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/11/an-update-...
Not incidentally, "Qual" is german for "torture".
You know, your PC has BIOS/UEFI and PCIE busses and other ways for kernel to discover what it is really running on, which drivers to load and so on.
ARM devices have none of these (except for servers, where Redhat had enough clout to say, that if your ARMv8 server has no UEFI, it will have no RHEL). Not only they add up to energy consumption (it is extra hardware, after all), they add up in the BOM as well (again, it is extra hardware). So we are stuck with kernels targeting only a known hardware (which today devicetree describes to some degree) and where a poke on a wrong port could mean that the entire device hangs. And after all, no consumers base their decision on whether a third party can replace the operating system, so why make a worse (=worse battery) and more expensive (=more BOM) than the competition?
Not really, Google applies the same disposable approach to supporting ChromeOS on bog-standard x86 hardware. I have an x86 Chromebox that Google suddenly dropped all support for - including security patches - with a generic message that "your device is out of its support window". This basically rendered it useless as a ChromeOS device, because you can't browse the public web with an unpatched web browser. Yet I can run up-to-date Linux in Crouton.
I don't see how this is technically any different than Microsoft deciding to stop all Windows 10 patches on PCs older than a certain age not because of any blocking compatibility issue, but just because they've passed a certain age threshold and they don't want to do it anymore.
I used to evangelize ChromeOS as a great, simple solution for non-technical users who just want to browse the web without the hassle of maintaining a full-fledged PC, but I won't do that if Chrome devices are part of the smartphone "time based support model" rather than the "compatibility based support" model we've had on PCs for decades. A PC for basic use can easily last 10 years, OEMs who arbitrarily shorten that are not helping their customers.
Maybe it's the profit motive.
If companies are not incentivized to change, then nothing is going to change. If companies pushing OS and hardware refreshes every year means people are going to buy more phones, I'm not sure why they would have any reason to stop.
Anecdotally, I needed a new phone because my Pixel XL was getting 4 hours of standby time and was constantly overheating. I had just gotten back from an overseas trip and was nearly stranded several times from finding myself in remote places with my backup battery dead. In the end, I settled for a OnePlus 7 (ironic, I know). I would rather have used the Pixel for many more years. hate not having a headphone jack or bezel, and I know that some product manager is going to use my purchase as evidence that those "features" were the correct move and continue to propagate the belief that nobody wants headphone jacks or bezels anymore. But I was in serious need of a smartphone that was actually reliable over one that had a headphone jack or bezel, so I got one without those features anyway.
People like me are now reliant on smartphones to do things like make calls, navigate unknown places or look up things on cellular data. In my book, if people need to have a cellphone in order to function in modern society, or are at least strongly incentivized to have one, then planned obsolescence only increases profits. Companies can market this as "upgrading" to new phones with a festureset that doesn't have to be a significant improvement over the last generation, and if people are used to this and don't mind spending the money to upgrade, then this will continue. And there are surely a lot of people who will buy the lastest model anyway even if they don't absolutely need to upgrade.
Still probably worth the trade off though - Lineage OS is great.
Always check exact version/model (US model, Indian Model, etc) before flashing ROMs
Full Guide to unlock - https://gearallnews.com/how-to-unlock-the-bootloader-of-sams...
Your phone's XDA page - https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-note-2
Check out what Custom ROM you want here https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-note-2/orig-developm...
Use TWRP to flash ROM - https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1938733
So of course you can upgrade to windows 10.
Phone hardware has. Very much so.
Compare the best PC from 1990 with the best one from 2000. That change makes 2010-2020 look like it was standing still.
Phone evolution for maybe 5-10 years after 2007 was more like the nineties, though it's definitely starting to slow now.
And Windows 2000, from 1999, for instance, only supported ~4 year old hardware. Windows 10 has it much easier!
The OP was claiming that there’s barely been any change in performance in the 2010s, which is just not true.
The biggest improvement, from a most people perspective, in the last 5 years is power usage. They run cooler, and batteries last longer.
The laptop was bought in 2011. It was a fairly cheap one then, and has a dual-core i3 with hyperthreading, and it came with an SSD. I added another some RAM I had laying around so now it has 8GB.
After getting a fresh copy of Win10 on it, it's surprisingly usable. Webpages loads just fine, YouTube is accelerated so is smooth. I could totally use that for my daily laptop had it not been for the rather lackluster 1366x768 screen.
This was my work laptop in 2010 with 8GB of RAM and a 2.66Ghz Core Duo. They let me keep it after the company folded. Until late last year, it was my Plex server and I used it occasionally since it sat right by my work computer.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/
The only time that it felt slow compared to a modern computer was disk access. I could have upgraded it with an SSD if I wanted to.
Windows works on 10 year old hardware because hardware manufactures don't get to modify the windows kernel. Instead, they have to push out drivers which work with the windows kernel.
It's really that simple.
There are several solutions here.
Google could make their own kernel which is closer to the microsoft kernel methodology (Fuchsia is basically just that)
Google could ban devices that with custom kernels from the play store (They MIGHT be able to do that now, then again, Android could be forked).
Google could create a private kernel repo and have manufactures submit to it. They could have their own kernel build profiles. (if getting things into mainline linux are deemed too difficult).
I use the 5s as a Spotify player and when I wiped it and set it up for the task, I was pleasantly surprised at how snappy it still felt and how everything I tried with it continued to work.
The hardware doesn’t have to be incredibly fast to support most of the functions supported - it’s only a small subset that really benefit from extra CPU speed and hardware acceleration.
On the other hand, comparing the useful life of this to the iPhone is entirely reasonable, particularly since its the price of a mid-high end iPhone. It's pretty sad when you realize that the new iPhone SE released just 6 months after the Pixel 4 will almost certainly be supported for 2-3 years after Google has abandoned the twice-as-expensive Pixel 4.
> Love it or hate it, Apple still supports the iPhone 6s Plus. A phone which is almost 5 years old now.
You're comparing what Google guarantees up-front for all devices to what Apple has done for the one device. Did Apple give a guaranteed support date for the iPhone 6s Plus at launch? In a quick search, I couldn't find one. I did find articles (eg [1]) from January speculating if Apple would include the iPhone 6S in the iOS 14 update or not.
Google still may support the Pixel 4 for longer than three years.
edit: forgot to add the disclaimer earlier that I'm a Google employee. I don't work on Android or hardware.
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/ios/story/don-t-ditch-y...
Apple (in my observation) tends not to say what length of support will be given, but offers it well beyond when an average person would throw away a device 2-3x over.
When Google says 3 years guaranteed, you can be damned sure you're done at 3 years.
No, they say at least and have extended support dates before, eg: https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebook-end-of-life-extended-13... (That's Chromebooks; I'm not sure about Nexus/Pixel phones in particular.)
(1) Battery life goes down while wear and tear build up. After ~3 years you are looking at spending money replacing a battery for a banged up phone. Or you can spend another $200 and get a new phone.
(2) Cameras are still getting better. Going from a Pixel to the Pixel 3 was a phenomenal upgrade in the camera.
I'd guess people aren't replacing a ~$500 phone with a ~$200 phone, but I get your point. Who wants to replace the battery on a phone worse less that the battery?
That's fair. I buy used/refurbished 1 model behind the current flagship. For me it was ~$140 more to get a lightly used 3 XL than replacing my battery.
I owned an iPhone 5S, my phone terribly slowed down in just a year to the point of becoming unusable. Opening the camera app would take 10 seconds. It would randomly freeze during calls and in the end, started having random shut downs. At the time, I didn't know they were throttling the phone. Funnily enough, my battery was replaced a couple of times and had no impact.
I paid $1000 at the time for it. I wrote it off in a year and a half due to all these issues. The manufacturer DID support with updates, but in the end, it didn't really matter because they just kept introducing more bugs and did nothing to address the throttling until very recently when they were caught in the act.
In contrast, I still own an Android 2.x HTC Desire that works flawlessly as a backup phone till date. I got it 8 years ago and is absolutely stunning - be it the beautiful OLED display or usability, and solves my needs perfectly.
I would say, software support for older phones is overrated. If you thought I am lucky with the HTC, then how about my other Android - Xperia X. I've dropped this thing so many times and not once had the screen gotten a single scratch. Supports dual sim and camera is great for low light. Still fluid to use. Again, software support for long term is really overrated in my opinion. As long as you can make calls, surf the web, check emails, take photos, I'd say the purpose of the phone is complete.
My 5S is still very usable.
-Download offline google maps files on it and use it as a gps in my car. Smooth as butter map animation and everything. -Use it when I'm doing yard work, Podcasts, audiobooks.. The latest overcast app is a little bit hiccupy.. but very usable. -Take pictures with it once in a while...
Still on original battery... On the latest iOS that Apple is currently supporting the 5S with.
My pixel 1 is basically stuck on a 3.18 kernel forever, even if I go and compile AOSP myself, because of Qualcomm's nom-free drivers.
At a certain point, companies like Google have to decide how much they want to backport fixes to older systems. Apparently they've decided on 3 years.
Wait...
These are issues totally within their control. These excuses shouldn’t be acceptable.
Even in their datacenters they use third party CPUs. It's not surprising that they haven't made their own for phones.
They don't even need to design the chips themselves. They could partner with Samsung / LG / Motorola to form a hardware consortium.
They need more like 5/6, but no one seems to be willing to pay for it.
- One got stolen
- Two broke while hiking/kayaking
- One was a lemon and the battery started working funny after a year and a half, it's one of the pixels that came with a high capacity battery and the replacement one is lower capacity so I didn't risk spending money on servicing it
I'm on my fifth phone now.
It's disingenuous for Google to start counting when the product is released. As the buyer, I don't care when it was released, I care when you sold it to me as new. I could buy a Chromecast Ultra (the current-generation 4K Chromecast, released November 2016: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_ultra) and, by this standard (which may not even apply to Chromecasts, FWIW), they could discontinue it and drop support for it tomorrow.
That doesn't mean OS support. Apple sold the iPhone 6 until September 2018¹ but it did not get iOS 13 only one year later.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_6
I’ll keep a windows desktop for gaming, but once Apple settles down through its processor changes I might just get a personal iPhone and a MacBook Pro
Google stack ranks employees regularly. Lowest of a group is always fired. Doesn't matter how good you are or how much satisfaction you give to your customers, you're basically asked, "what have you built that could be the next billion customer thing?" If you're not answering how you're part of the next big thing, you're going to lose. So, once something is acquired or released, consider it deprecated.
The sliver of truth is that Google's once-or-twice-yearly performance evaluation system asks colleagues to stack rank folks they are reviewing. I wish they'd get rid of it, but it's not used for much. It's only a partial order of folks they're reviewing, nothing really enforces that people actually do it, I suspect some people just rank all the people trying for promo this cycle above the people who aren't, and the many reviewers' stack ranks are never reconciled into one authoritative stack rank of the folks in a group. I don't know why it's still around.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
I think you may be confusing the stack ranking at google, that doesn't result in dismissal (Google were in fact, right up until Covid, still on a hiring spree with a shortage of engineers); with what Microsoft historically did (and stopped doing in 2013).
If the company high prioritized environmental concerns, stack ranking would reward those who figured how to keep products in service longer.
This seems incredibly dubious as an excuse (for a variety of technical and business reasons), but has been the Google get out of jail card for a decade+ now.
More likely Google loses interest, the devices no longer make them any money and they want to wipe their hands of them.
It is now possible to use a decent[0] 3rd party keyboard on them and the XR is actually not that expensive compared to a number of other phones.
And for the first time since Samsung SII I'm happy with my phone :-)
[0]: the Apple keyboard doesn't support autocomplete while showing Norwegian letters, and it is also hilariously bad it seems wrt autocorrecting correctly spelled sentences into embarrassing ones and even going as far as autocorrecting one medicine name to another at some point. On SwiftKey one can at least turn of autocorrect.
(On my iPad). User error?
Not user error. Bad QA from Apple and/or third party keyboard.
Unfortunately, you have no options at all for having a modicum of control / openness over your firmware if you want to use a smartphone. Gotta use/build your own odd device if you want that.
Or an aggressive business model that is fair only to the top 10% of customers who are not concerned with spending $250 per month in effective charges to have a wireless handheld computer with 4G.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinephone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
A lot of stuff on Android is delivered directly by the Play store/services, for many years after the end of OS updates for a particular device.
Even expensive phones are cheaper than their wireless service contracts in the US. A good rule of thumb is they depreciate about 50% in their first two years (at least for iPhones).
That means your $800 phone is costing you less than $20/month: A $1400 phone less than $30/month.
Right now I’m paying over $40/month each for service for four phones right now.
Also the form factor and screen to size ratio are very important criteria for a lot of people, if not the most.
From our perspective, sure. From the manufacturers perspective, it costs money to port, build, and test new releases. And if people are happy with their up-to-date 5-year-old phone, they'll be less likely to buy the latest shiny new one.
Not saying those are good excuses -- they're explicitly customer-hostile -- but they're completely understandable.
Bump up the price of Pixel by additional $100, and you get an 5 years guarantee upgrade.
Not to mention the Pixel isn't that powerful. iPhone 6s despite being 5 years ago, is probably as fast or still faster than some of the sub $300 Android Phone released today. ( Excluding Chinese Brands )
Apple makes their own, so...
not that pixel 4a would be much better in this aspect - when others are moving already to centered punch hole Google releases fugly asymetric punch hole and combine it with 3100 mAh battery, good luck with such battery as heavy user or even average user after year or two wear
At least the Pixel 4's software updates don't render your phone unusable.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_X
Discontinuing the 4 means that Google will be without a flagship phone until whenever the new one is released.
But then starting the 3rd , everything declined. Camera became average, they stop the unlimited storage, battery became really bad. They went backward, and couldn't keep their competitive advantage or stay ahead of the innovation. Original early adopters starts getting disappointed seeing better cameras[1] and battery life flooding the market.
Hopefully the 4a will help them regain the heart of us (and me)
They don't seem to be treating it with the level of care and attention that perhaps you'd expect for what seems like a key part of their business.
Stupid stuff, but an example is with the closing of Play Music, Wear OS won't have a first-party music player until the new Youtube Music app is ready. Couldn't imagine that happening to watchOS.
I switched from iPhone 6 to Redmi Note 8 Pro recently (early 2020) as I lost my iPhone. I have been an Android user before the iPhone.
I really can not overstate how happy I was with how long Apple supported that device - I used it from end of 2014 to early 2020 - yep! Every single day, new iOS supported till late 2019.
Google - well they are famous for killing things.
and hey, it cost a fourth of an iphone, so I can have extremely short replace cycle to work around the chronic android updates issues.
Only if you exclude the cost of one’s time.
I was eyeing it as a replacement of my current phone, a mi a2, mostly because the android one landscape is really limited
Every smartphone I've had since the gnex days has been Google. I really want Google to make the best Android phones. The appeal of Nexus was that it was so cheap. With Pixel, prices have gone up, and the increase in functionality between generations has gone down. Maybe that's a general smartphone trend, but I think for the first time in a long time, my next Android phone won't be from Google.
I haven't had to downgrade, but I imagine that (like you) I wouldn't miss it :)
[1] https://9to5google.com/2020/07/10/pixel-4a-4a-5g-pixel-5-exp...
Then there are several big improvements. It's faster with more RAM, of course. I will never go back to a 60 Hz screen. The speakers are a million times better. I use the telephoto camera. The screen to body ratio is better. Face unlock works incredibly well for me; it's significantly more reliable than the fingerprint sensor ever was. Of course the mask thing is unfortunate but I stay at home and need a mask very rarely so it's not an issue for me.
I'm furious that they are shuttering Google Play Music. That's the singular Google product I enjoy, and now it's going away. I had a bunch of purchases too.
When Brin and Page left, the company entered its Ballmer era.
I hope another company outdoes them on search. It can't be that hard with all of the AdSense spam these days. I'd love to see their golden goose go away and have them face an existential crisis that causes them to refocus and start giving a damn.
Edit: why the downvotes? People are frustrated with this company.