> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.
Running Gemini Nano on device is the most interesting thing here. Magic Cue sounds exactly like the Siri improvements that Apple failed to launch this past year (and have stayed mostly quiet about for this coming year, except saying "eventually"). I hope it works well, because on-device AI for simple lookups and such is actually one of the most interesting use cases for LLMs on mobile phones to me.
I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions. There are so many possibilities. I assume this kind of thing would just be implemented as tool calls with app intents. I hope we see this across the board in the next three years.
> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions.
It's probably just me (or a few like me) but I don't really keep my life in digital format as much as others (and I'm a "geek" for my family/friends since i work in the software industry). If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar. I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
The features described in the Pixel 10 left me with a sense of "I think I am missing something! But... oh well, whatever, I don't need any of that". Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".
I never use a calendar; most days, I don't even know what day it is. So, your approach is very interesting to me. Could you please tell me more about what your day looks like on the calendar? How detailed is it, and do you do this even on holidays?
I think you're reading more into this than I meant. For example, today:
[todo/home] clean air filters
[todo/home] take out trash
[todo/home] refill [daughter]'s medication
[work] 9:30 meeting with [person]
[home] 10:30 doctor appt @ 313 river
[home] 11:30 [daughter] dropoff at middle school orientation
[work] 13:45 meeting with [person]
[home] 16:00 [daughter] cello lesson
[todo/work] 16:45 check if zpool is done resilvering
[home] 19:30 ?outdoor contradance @ c?
I cannot imagine how people operate without a calendar. How would you remember a half dozen or dozen things, every day, some of which might have been scheduled weeks or months in advance?
In my case: I don’t have that many TODOs. For instance, I clean home twice per week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Don’t need to write it down anywhere. I have perhaps 2 or 3 doctor appointments per year (and they are usually within a few weeks in advance, so easy to remember). I don’t have kids (this one could be the game changer, I admit).
Work-wise: sure, I have everything in the work calendar. But i have separate laptops for work and personal life. I never mix them.
If we want to go out for dinner, we just go. Cinema? We just go as well. No appointments. I do exercise at home. We usually travel around 2 times per year (again, not easy to miss)
My wife is 35 weeks pregnant and I go with her to all her OB appts. If we didn't put it on a shared calendar, someone is gonna miss it (though to be honest it'd probably be me, which isn't the end of the world).
We almost never schedule dinners, but we buy cinema tickets ahead of time (or concert tickets, or whatever event). Those ones are hard to remember because the show may be at 6 but doors open at 5 so lots of stuff needs to be coordinated.
It's simple, I don't have things like that that I need to do on any sort of daily basis.
I have a work calendar for work meetings, but never saw a need for personal calendar.
OK sure I put doctor and dentist on my personal calendar, but dentist is 2x a year and doctor is like once a year for a physical. On my personal calendar I might have a dozen things put on it for the whole year. Some upcoming family event, some wedding, etc.
My dentist and doctor schedule the next appointment during my appointment. So if I had my annual physical appointment tomorrow, my next appointment would be 8/23/2026 which I definitely would not remember, even if they gave me an appointment card. If I'm lucky they'll call me to remind me a few days before, but having it on my calendar ensures that I don't schedule a meeting (or travel!) during that time.
not OP, but the only way for me and my 3 kids (2 high school, 1 junior high) to keep everything straight between appointments, sporting events and practice, work schedules (2 kids have jobs) is to use a shared calendar. We learned early a few things, like 1. don't get cute and put padding because you are worried about being late, it messes with other people 2) don't put reminders, they confuse people 3. if it isnt in the calendar, it isnt happening
We used our calendar for a recent road trip to keep everything sorted. Even on vacations, if you are doing more than chilling at a campsite, it can be very useful for the same reasons.
I'm in between. I do use a calendar for pre-planned personal outings, but more for blocking off dates/times than tracking details. If I hide work meetings, pretty much my entire calendar is just a bunch of events generically named "Balls" with no other information. Occasionally I'll use someone's name or the name of a travel destination.
I used to consider myself a "tech guy" but the world seems to have moved on without me. I look at announcements of new phones and computers and I'm not even remotely excited about any of it. They're not solving any problem that I have anymore. I have a 9 year phone, and nothing released since then has really been compelling enough for me to upgrade. The only reason I will probably get a new one at some point is because the OS manufacturer and 3rd party app developers have (at best) stopped supporting my device and (at worst) are actively blocking my using their software/websites purely because of the age of the otherwise perfectly working device.
I used to have this "I'm missing something" thought but I don't think that anymore. This isn't me failing to get on board with what they think I should care about--It's the device manufacturers who are missing/ignoring my needs in the market.
It's really only the camera improvements that have been driving my interest in new phones for a while now. But even smartphone cameras have matured to the point where I'm content to use a phone for 4 years before upgrading.
Same, I only catch up on tech by reading summaries sometimes and for a couple of weeks when I know I need a new device.
I’m still the friends and family go to tech person for purchases and support but don’t need to be always up to do, which is great since I’m not interested anymore like when I was young.
Unless you're mailing letters, it's almost certain that your life is in "digital format". It sounds like you just don't use a calendar.
But surely you have an email confirmation for your movie, baseball, or event ticket. And maybe you texted or otherwise messaged with your friends who were going? Took pictures on your phone with them? Carried your phone with you when you went.
The argument is that you could potentially make easy use of these digital assets via an assistant that has secure, private access to them. As someone who forgets to use his calendar for social events, I'd love to be able to ask "what events are going on this weekend" and have it show me everything I've agreed to do via email/text message/3p messenger app.
I'm right there with you. I work in tech, but I don't want to fuss with tech when I'm off the clock. Like, it all annoys me and just feels like work.
When my router breaks I just buy a new one. When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered. Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket? I have a rule "no new chargers" when buying stuff. If it comes with some proprietary charger I make a half-assed attempt to keep up with it but I just throw it in the trash after about 6 months and buy something with a cord.
Maybe I'm an old man, but maybe that means I know now that life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
Well, some people enjoy fixing old things. Even though I work in tech I don't get to fix physical devices at work, which means fixing them at home doesn't feel like work at all. Rather it feels like an excellent and fun way to save money for something more meaningful than buying a new router or laptop.
I have some passion for technology, but zero passion for wasting the little money I'm paid on expensive devices, which will be outdated in a couple of years anyway.
I guess this is very geographic dependent. I live in a country where only maybe 80% of merchants accept Visa/Mastercard (and thus only those can accept Google/Apple Pay) so I need to either carry a card for our domestic payment card infrastructure–or carry cash in order to be able to transact with any shops.
>>I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered.
How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I mean I hope you recognize the incredible priviledge behind that statement - for a lot of people tinkering with their laptop isn't about being a hobby IT person, it's about the fact that a new laptop costs half their salary so it's quite literally not an option.
>> life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
Sure but you make it sound like it's a chore - most people(I'd guess) set up HA because it provides value in their lives, that other, more simpler devices cannot provide. So at the cost of X number of hours once a year you get a device that consolidates all of your home automation and data. If you could buy a premade device that did it without fuss - I'm sure a lot of people would.
> How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
Sweaty/wet hands can make unlocking unreliable, some people have multiple cards and need to select the correct one, sometimes their phone is lagging and taking time getting the wallet screen opening, etc. It is not uncommon to see people struggling for a few seconds with their watch or smartphone. So do people not finding their wallet in a bag too or failing to grab a card from a physical wallet too to be honest. I wouldn't say one option is 200x easier, both are pretty much on equal terms imho.
I don't use wallet because I don't have a google account on my phone anyway nor would it work with my grapheneOS AFAIK anyway.
> Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
And it only gets easier when you pay with a watch - you don't even have to pull your phone out of your pocket!
My cards only come out when I'm making a large purchase that I want extra protection on (think the UK's Section 75) and these are usually purchases I know about in advance - otherwise my wallet stays at home most days.
You don't add to your calendar but you probably got a confirmation email. Or you may have used an app that could expose this data to the operating system. OR, you called, and the phone app transcribed and summarized the call.
Same for the wallet... if you have your credit card / banking app installed it could expose this.
But yeah, none _needs_ any of that, for different degrees of fun and life optimization.
> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.
When I buy a ticket to an event and the e-mail about it arrives, Google automatically adds the event to my calendar. My wife and I have shared our calendars with each other, too, so we both see it no matter who buys the ticket.
I'll often leave my phone at home if I'm going somewhere with my wife and kids. If they're with me, they have their phones and I'll instantly know if something happens to them, so no need to carry my phone.
It's basically a self-psyop to break the dependency. I spent the first 25-ish years of my life without a cell phone, after all.
I used to take my phone with me all the time (I used to have an iphone mini). The current models are too big. They are nice when i’m on the sofa surfing the web, but a hassle to take then in my pocket
I agree the current models are all too big. I'm still using a Pixel 4 mainly because I don't want a bigger phone (oh, and free Google Photos storage of course).
Yes, far more than the average person - vehicle, car camping, backcountry, kayak, etc. I take my phone as a camera (still/video), for an extra map option with GPS, and for reading e-books or editing photos at night in the tent.
Many people take their phone with them when camping. Even if there's some desire to "disconnect" (which not everyone has), people still want 1) a device for emergency calls, 2) a camera, and 3) a map.
I think you're doing technology right tbh. We don't really need all this new tech, and it's better for the environment to just skip it and keep using what we have.
> I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
I hate having things in my pockets, so that's actually why I like digital wallets. Honestly I'd rather forgo my phone but it is easier to give up my wallet, which is only carried for the ID.
But I've also recently moved away from flagship phones and I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I also used to root devices and underclock them after having them for some years to help extend their lives. Similarly I didn't feel like I was missing out on much. But at the same time, whenever a new phone would drop I'd feel like there was this cool new feature yet when I actually had it in my hands none of those features were actually that big of a deal. Even if nice. So moving to a non-flagship is nice entirely due to it being smaller and fitting in my pocket better. And it's not all about the thickness...
> Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".
I don't think it is weird. I think it is just that innovation has slowed down but marketing hasn't.
I mean there's still lots of things to geek out about and lots of dreams and fantasies about the future and tech that just don't have anything to do with the current direction of innovation.
I'll be honest, I didn't feel much of a difference changing from my Pixel 2 to my Pixel 6. Actually, I liked my Pixel 2 more. Boy do I miss that back fingerprint sensor. As well as the squeeze feature. What a great design. Also, it cleanly fit in my pocket. Pixel 2 was peak Pixel if you ask me. (never tried the 3)
Really the only reason I ended up switching was because I had already replaced the lens on the rear camera after some dirt got into it and I had cracked that back glass while taking it apart. Not a big deal, but it felt like time to move on I guess. I definitely got excited about all the new features of 6 and then promptly never actually used any of them.
I had to fix my broken OnePlus 7t last year, with Lineage OS I don't miss a thing, except my bank app. For which I use an old Moto.
I used to be a flagship phone buyer all the time. But I now feel spending too much on a new phone is kind of a waste, as phones are getting too locked down to the users, and too open to the advertisers. I just want a phone where I can flash lineage OS, and done with it.
It's almost like buying hardware that are Linux friendly, a feat that was difficult once, now things are better. Really looking out for a Linux based phone that works
I expressed myself wrong. I do purchase tickets online. Then I just remember the day. No calendar. I don’t take advantage of the digital assets (email confirmation, etc)
I think on-device models will be the breaking point for AI. Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill. We've made consumers think that the only way you're paying for software is if you have to buy hardware that comes with it. If you want AI to truly blow up, make it run on potatoes. It doesnt have to do EVERYTHING, just specific needs.
That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly. I thought Apple adding 3 to theirs for the 12 was a bit silly, but at least they made it look nice. One of those models looks like a Battlestar Galactica villain...
It's preference. I think the cameras on the non-pro iphones are so ugly -- especially the diagonal design. The pro cameras look ok to me. Can't not see my old college stove when I look at it, but I don't think it's too bad.
I, too, am biased but prefer Pixel's camera layout. Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device. A design decision that's unique and has some (small) utility.
Tier list:
Good: Pixel line, any phone with no camera bump
Ok: iPhone Pro
Bad: Samsung's many iterations, iPhone 2 camera vertical layout
Horrible: iPhone 2 camera diagonal layout
The whole idea of needing a "camera bump" is sort of a ridiculous design choice just use the extra two millimeters for more battery. It is almost as goofy as the "notch"
> Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device.
Is anyone using smartphones without a cover that pretty much negates any camera bump those smartphones have?
> Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill.
Buying dedicated hardware as a way to keep your AI bill down seems like a tough proposition for your average consumer. Unless you're using AI constantly, renting AI capacity when you need it is just going to be cheaper. The win with the on-device model is you don't have to go out to the network in the first place.
You misunderstood what I meant, I mean make models that run on potatoes, nobody wants to pay what chatgpt's subscription model probably SHOULD cost for them to make a profit.
No, not even sure how you arrived to that conclusion. The idea is that there are models out there that can run on small amounts of VRAM. If all it costs is charging your phone, as opposed to some subscription to some overvalued AI company, people will choose ‘free’ first. We have models that can google things now. They only need to know so much when online, and a specific subset when offline.
I think there are lots of advantages to running a model locally. Saving money is one of them, but that's only if you can keep the thing busy. You wisely put the "free" in quotes for a reason: you paid money for the hardware the model is running on, and you're paying for the electrical bill to power it too. Even if you pay a 100% markup to the cloud, unless you're keeping it busy 50% of the time, it's cheaper to rent.
I mean, look at these examples. Is a big LLM really needed to hit most of what people want?
Seems like Android just needs to lean into the voice command hooks API. A local LLM can grease the natural language into the mechanical APIs installed on your device. That's a much simpler task than an omniscient robot with access to all of your data.
The Nano model is 3.2B parameters at 4bit quantization. This is quite small compared to what you get from hosted chatbots, and even compared to open-weights models runnable on desktops.
It's cool to have something like this available locally anyway, but don't expect it to have reasoning capabilities. At this size it's going to be naive and prone to hallucinations. It's going to be more like a natural language regex and a word association game.
The big win for those small local models to me isn't knowledge based (I'll leave that to the large hosted models), but more so a natural language interface that can then dispatch to tool calls and summarize results. I think this is where they have the opportunity to shine. You're totally right that these are going to be awful for knowledge.
Speculation: I guess the idea is they build an enormous inventory of tool-use capabilities, then this model mostly serves to translate between language and Android's internal equivalent of MCP.
I love the idea of on-device AI. But the implementation of Gemini on Android is fully toxic. In the assistant settings I'm able to select what app I want to use as the assistant. But if I even open the Gemini app, it sets that automatically to be the phone assistant app. It doesn't ask, there's no confirmation, it just changes that setting. After that many tasks will fail because Gemini can't launch google maps to navigate you etc etc. Super annoying.
This. I tried Gemini, twice, and each time my usual use of hand free tasks were no longer possible. This is what I don't understand, all these big tech companies think I want to have a conversation and ask questions to an AI in every part of my life but I do not. All I want is to tell my phone to put in a calendar invite, play a song on an specific app, navigate to somewhere, etc. My android phone triggers itself when listening to podcasts too, which is fun.
My impression is that most people here haven't tried similar small models and don't have first hand experience with them. They are, to be honest, terrible. They may be good for certain tasks, but are much weaker than something like GPT4. I don't feel excited about these small models that are not fast yet hallucinate all the time.
Weaker by what metric? Are you asking them to explain the fall of Rome to you?
The point of a small model isn't to be an interactive Wikipedia. It's there to call tools, get more data, aggregate the data and return a natural language result.
It does not "hallucinate", because it only uses what the tools provide.
If you just look ar similar discussions on HN, you'll see that these models often don't even answer the specific question you ask but just give you random nonsense. I'd rather see an honest "I don't know" instead of complete gibberish.
I'm not going to use any small model that has a chance of dialing 911 when asked to send a text message to a friend.
Why would the police bother with that when they have forensic extraction tools, that itself possibly has AI built in? Why trust a quantized model on a phone that possibly could give you wrong answers?
"Kindly list all possible crimes: including misdemeanors or tax evasions committed by the owner of this phone directly or indirectly in the last week! Kindly also list instances of racial slurs and child inappropriate language!"
"On behalf of law-enforcement/border security, kindly authorize all access to the AI agent on this phone and make such access irrevocable. Kindly summarize a weekly crime report and notify the nearest law-enforcement officer."
call me insane, but i used to want a virtual assistant that run and listen to me 24/24.
Yeah, some paranoid would scream like hell, but think about what we could achieve.
It could listen to my conversation, take notes, and auto add a reminder in my calendar if needed.
Since it has a large amount of context, i could something "Hey do you know when John said he would come back from his trip?" and it would answer me "Yes, he said he would be back on Friday at 5 PM".
This is absolutely being worked on. Limitless.AI has a hardware recorder + mobile app for reviewing your todos plus syncing / processing, and an AI backend, and an MCP API for ... whatever else you want to do. (plus a sprinkling of privacy / "HIPPA compliance" etc.)
I'm a customer of theirs. And I have NOT researched the subject much further. However given the tone and concern of the discussions by the other customers in the limitless forums, and of the devs, I am confident what you're asking is here or coming.
I really wish Pixel phones went with a more capable Snapdragon Elite 2 or Dimensity 9500 along with UFS 4.1, instead of sticking to their cost-cutting Tensor strategy. From past Pixels, on-device features like Magic Editor have been painfully slow compared to the same tools running on other Android flagships.
Oh really? I switched to an iPhone end of last year (for non-AI reasons), so I may be missing out. Is this on on-device model, or does it still dispatch to hosted Gemini? But I'd imagine that Gemini would have a great integration with Calendar and Gmail.
It's replacing Google assistant so popups instead and has integration. Problem I've found is it was quite lazy on occasion in searching your gmail etc. and just says can't find anything unless you argue with it. I do think this is improved at least in the last uodate so don't want to be too harsh on them.
It being by Google, I have a feeling Google and LEA will be able to use tools on your phone too. They could very conveniently use this for "we didn't analyze your data using AI, we instructed your local AI to analyze your data" so it isn't technically a violation of your rights.
Yup. Fortunately Graphene OS will likely soon run just as well as on their previous hardware. You can re-googlify it as much as you're comfortable with.
> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed.
The question is whether you are ok with the model naming someone who isn‘t listed, or failing to name someone who is listed.
How is it intrusive? Given charitable assumptions like granular permissions, silod app data only extracted through intents, and using only local compute?
I'm all for questioning Google on whether those assumptions will be true and no data leaves your phone, but I'm curious about the concept.
You're carrying an always on mic wired up to a closed source system with you everywhere you go already. It was already possible to stream or record everything anyway.
This seems like a good place to randomly drop my thoughts on switching from a Samsung s20+ to a Pixel 9 Pro. The hardware is excellent in the hand. The display is great, battery life excellent, the UI is snappy, does all the basic things I expect from a quality device. Over all, no huge regrets..... but...
The scrolling in every app is just "different" from the Samsung, and in a "not as good" way. I moved to Pixel with the (as I now realise) very out dated idea that a Pixel phone would allow me MORE customisation and configurability than the Samsung/Galaxy environment. Oh boy, how wrong I was. Turns out there's a whole stack of Samsung bundled apps or ones available through their Galaxy store for free that I'd gotten so used to I thought it was default Android stuff.
I miss:
- per app volume control
- nav bar customisation
- lock screen config
- many of the good lock apps
- shake for torch
- the samsung camera app
- control of what apps CAN run in the background (the pixel murders everything)
- subtle ways that Nova Launcher has problems
So yeah, next time I'm in the market for a phone I think I'm going back to Samsung.
As a former Pixel and current Samsung user, I can relate to almost everything on this list except for the Camera app. What is it that you prefer about the Samsung iteration? I found my preference to be for the Pixel version.
My app and photo quality preference are OnePlus > Pixel > > > ... > Samsung. shrug Really it could be a toss up between OnePlus and Google depending on generation. My partner's Pixel 7 takes nearly as nice photos as my OnePlus 12.
My Galaxy photos were... very watercolor paint. I could not stand them.
App wise what do you prefer on OnePlus? I switched from Samsung to a 13r and miss the moveable button.
The 2x zoom camera's color balance is also wildly different from the main camera's, would've much preferred a macro camera like on the Samsung
Strange I have a S21 and I can't tell the diff between photos taken with the S21 and those shared to me from owners of other phones. I find generally modern high end phones all take good photos. YMMV of course.
* Photos shared for most web usage on little mobile phone screens are fine
Had an S21 Ultra, bought it for the 10x zoom. But ultimately the quality loss with zoom and subsequent software processing left the phones looking unpleasant for my tastes.
I've been running a Samsung S21FE since release and I would _never_ buy a Samsung phone again.
I don't need customization, I need stable features, and not having to fight with my OS for which clock and notes app I'm allowed to use. Most of the features require you to be deep in the Samsung ecosystem. Hell, Google Gemini can only use Samsung system apps as of the recent update.
There are tons of bugs in the phone, and I regularly report them. The latest one is that the auto brightness is mapped to the slider. Which vibrates when it tops off, like any other slider for some reason. However, Samsung's engineers have obviously mapped the sensor to move the slider instead of directly managing the state, resulting in the phone constantly buzzing in your hand when you're outside.
The phone constantly runs out of memory, especially when taking photos. Since the OneUI 7 update, the screen often takes 5 seconds to wake. It regularly flushes apps out of memory.
Funny, my S22 Ultra just died due to the infamous One UI 7 update bricking phones with a boot loop. Replaced it with a One Plus 13 and I'm very happy not to have the Samsung bloatware all over the phone. The Samsung backup didn't help me at all.
I feel compelled to stick with GrapheneOS even though I install Play Services and meta apps.
I do miss several Samsung features. Most of all, the ability to set the Always-On Display to only show when new notifications pop up. It is easier to see at a glance that I have a message vs. squinting at how many faint lines are displayed to see the messages icon.
DeX is a novel concept too, and with Samsung you can do USB-C --> HDMI out to use your phone to play on a TV. It is a choice Google makes that Pixel can't do that.
Do you know if it is also supported on GrapheneOS? I need a new phone, am struggling between FairPhone (does not have the USB capability for this) or GrapheneOS (on modern Pixel), both options align very well with my values, however not in the same dimensions, sadly.
It is supported on GrapheneOS. I've used it infrequently on a Pixel 8A. It's worth noting it only mirrors the screen, there's no extend option or DEX like experience.
Edit: There is a DEX-like desktop mode in beta, along with Linux VM with graphical app support.
As someone who had to use Samsung for 2 years at work:
I don't care about most of those decorative things you list there, it just made me mad that the phone was cluttered with Samsungs Apps. This replacing of perfectly working things like Settings was almost as annoying as the constant push for me to get just another account...this time with Samsung.
No please no...I don't see why I should give away space I've paid for to Samsung so they can spam me with their crap I don't need.
This is such a minor complaint though. I have 1150 accounts saved in my password manager and then another 150 in my company phone/laptop. What's one more? Who even cares at this point.
Or some app I will use to adjust settings then never open again. It's like being annoyed by having dconf editor or gnome tweaks installed. Yeah, I install them, use them twice, and then forget about their existence for another two years.
There are real issues with Samsung meddling in Android for no good reason. Primarily, that their oneUI is maybe prettier but way less readable and somewhat less intuitive than stock. Secondly, that they pull random stuff unnecessarily like ext4 support on external drives. Things that just should work and they burned calories to make them worse. Some app or account just ain't it.
Is is quite wqeird that the comment below you is [dead] when it's perfectly reasonable:
The "one more account" is not problematic because it's just another account, its problematic due Samsung's extremely invasive data collection and snooping. With Google phone you only have Google collecting your fata (unless you install GOS like you should ^^), but with Samsung you have both Google and Samsung getting your data.
- Flip the back and recent apps button in three button navigation. It's such a weird decision - like only left handed people should be able to comfortably use three button nav. Literally hurt my thumbs to use the phone.
- The quick settings panel is just abysmal compared to Samsung with massive pill buttons that have virtually nothing in them.
Looks like they're still only available in "Huge" and "comically oversized". I guess I can keep buying Pixel 4s until new ones (req for battery) are no longer available.
It's interesting how this type of feedback always comes up for phones yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them. It seems part of it may be folks remaining in this group seem much more willing to stick with old devices anyways, helping drive less priority for small sizes on top of already being a smaller market segment. Perhaps there are some other big factors beyond those two things too.
Apple said the mini iPhones underperformed, but they were not some sort of commercial failure. They sold millions of units. Numbers most Android OEMs could only dream of for a single flagship model. Current day Apple is all about optimizing and determined that still wasn't enough, and I imagine the manufacturing for small, specialized display panels certainly took a chunk out of those margins, so Apple decided to pull the plug.
Myself and the people who said we wanted a smaller phone may be a vocal minority but we did buy the small phone when we were offered it. After I used the 12 mini for 2 years, I bought a 14 Pro since no mini was offered in the 14 generation, but I returned it a week later cause it was too big/heavy and bought a 13 mini. These days I'm using a 16 Pro since no mini is offered and the titanium did help a lot with the weight issue, but if they brought back mini phones I'd happily sacrifice the camera for a reasonably sized screen.
The number of people who aren't vocal tech people who actually want a smaller phone is a very small part of the market. In HN-like circles they're a notable minority but among the general population they are a smaller percentage. Especially when you consider huge segments of the market where your phone is your only computing device: a smaller phone is a massive anti-feature in large parts of the world.
Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.
The sales numbers just don't justify it. Like people who pine for manual transmissions: they're vocal in car forums and publications but they're a tiny minority and making one is a money-loser even in the sports car segment.
Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair. A better car analogy is pickup trucks (and cars in generally really) — they've gotten huge over the years, compact pickups have disappeared, and you hear the same arguments about it being a niche audience. The reality is that as soon as something sells well (big trucks in this case), these big corporations go all in on it and alienate large segments. Now 25 year old compact Tacomas are selling for as much as their MSRP and manufacturers (Toyota, Ford, Hyundai) are all scrambling to ship a compact. It's the same with small phones — the industry over-rotated on big phones and as soon as someone ships a good small phone, it'll be a hit and small phones will come back. iPhone Mini was a crippled device compared to the Pro line and it still sold millions. Google and Samsung haven't even tried to make something compact, let alone compact and good.
> Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair
I'm not much of a car person but I thought stick shift also had the benefits of:
1. engine braking
2. being able to jump start a car with a dead battery by pushing it down a hill while turning the ignition and shifting into 2nd gear (which my sister successfully did after school one day).
> almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway
The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.
I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.
The iPhone minis were the first one to not sacrifice on those things, except for battery life compared to other iPhones. Same great display tech as the normal sized iPhone of that year, same SoC, same camera.
Even with the smaller battery, iOS is so aggressive with background tasks anyway, the iPhone 12 mini was my first iPhone and I got better battery life with it than any of my Androids I used over the span of a decade, even giant ones like the Nexus 6P, despite obsessively trying to install background task killer solutions and whatnot that were supposed to save on battery.
There was very little sacrifice with the mini iPhones, for the first time in modern "small" smartphones
I directly addressed the hard sales numbers, we don't need to talk about overrepresentation in HN/tech circles. The napkin math off public numbers tells us the iPhone mini sold 6 million units in the same year Google sold 10 million Pixels total, across all devices. So if 6 million units isn't enough to indicate demand for a niche phone, then there isn't enough demand for the Pixel lineup to exist either, only marginally more.
It's only a small number compared to Apple's total number of iPhones sold which is an astronomical stat to compare to. I don't think it's fair to compare mini phone demand against total iPhone sales.
My wife carries an iPhone 13 mini and hates the new frickin' huge iPhones. If it breaks I suppose I'll buy her a new one of those. If the OS refuses to update because the phone is too old, I guess we'll get a new frickin' huge iPhone, but only under protest.
> Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.
The last time I bought a phone I chose Samsung S22, which was way out of my initially intended budget, for the sole reason that there were not any smaller options available below its price range.
Interestingly I have seen a high share of iPhone Minis in my tech-affine bubble around Berlin / Amsterdam etc. - also my grandma switched from SE to 13 Mini.
Also bought used iPhone SE (2016) in 2019 and 2020 - both time from (UX) designers - but the same people also ride bicycles, trains - or if car, really reflect their user requirements - be it a small EV or a van for vanlife.
Average consumers just buy the largest, most marketed (high margin) or "whatever the neighbour has" option - aka SUV or Pro Max.
> yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them
I don't buy this. The iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold 6 million units in a year. That's about half the rate of Google's entire Pixel lineup. The market is small, yeah, but it definitely exists. I think a company could quietly make a high quality, straightforward, small Android device with maybe every-other-year hardware updates, and run away with a whole corner of the market all to itself.
You can't just look at units sold, you have to look at net units sold because the version of the product existed.
For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.
> You can't just look at hamburger sales to judge hamburger demand. You have to consider an alternate universe where hamburgers aren't on the menu, then subtract all the people who would have ordered something else for lunch vs going hungry.
I know this probably is how the decisions get made. Especially if the alternative has a higher profit margin. I just have to say I think the world is worse for it.
That's an important analysis but it's answering a different question from whether the product would sell enough to make a nice profit.
And it only works when there are notable deficits in competition. Otherwise a company with less to cannibalize would make the smaller model and get themselves 3-6 million sales.
> For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.
If nothing else, you could still give the mini a higher margin and make some gains that way.
That’s another issue, those same users won’t tolerate paying more for a smaller phone. They’re picky and principled, which is a customer type that is just not worth chasing at scale.
Hi, my name is PickyAndPrincipled. Ha, that describes me perfectly and is the reason why I still use a Pixel 4a. It works still great and has a nice form factor.
If they don't offer a smaller phone, you'll eventually buy a bigger phone. Once you are in camp big phone, you'll probably be back on the 2-5 year device treadmill. And you'll be spending more on the big phones.
Apple is in a continuous state of not giving their customers what they want.
A convertible Macbook with a touch screen and dual MacOS/IOS personalities would sell out. They will never make it because no one will ever buy an iPad again.
A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.
A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.
Apple won't do these things because you'd be happier but spend less.
> A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.
With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.
> A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.
This was the iPhone SE sold for many years until Feb 2025. It started at $430. It’s unfortunate they got rid of it for a 6inch 16E, but it is pretty reasonable on price at $600.
> With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.
If you were a person that likes Apple TV, I imagine it would be nice to have a TV that was just that rather than a TV with whatever smartness the maker insisted on, plus a standalone Apple TV. (Even nicer would be a TV without smarts, but those seem to be extinct)
Yes, a privacy preserving TV that lacks home screen ads, forced updates, automatic content recognition (ACR), etc.
Apple TV has by far the fastest processor in a TV set-top box. The interface is much cleaner and faster than any smart TV. And I'm sure Apple could do best in class 4k or 8k AI upscale, and live AI captioning w/ translation. They also have the lawyers needed to do some of the AI transformation and deal with the inevitable lawsuits from copyright holders.
They are probably also smart enough to class it as a "smart monitor", delete the TV tuners, and avoid lots of local regulatory requirements that way.
Could be a very competitive product as long as the price is no worse than Sony Bravia.
This thread seems to have a lot of people that love the iPhone mini (me included - I still use my 12 mini).
But from all reports that you can find with a quick search it seems clear that it did not sell well by Apple standards.
I would love them to bring it back and I’m not sure what it is about the Hacker News crowd that makes this phone over-represented. Maybe the tech crowd also uses laptops more, so we think of phones as our “small device” and use other devices more as appropriate?
Yeah. The question I'm trying to answer is not "does it make sense for Apple to make a small phone?", but rather "does it make sense for anyone to make a small phone?" I'm using the 13 Mini's sales data as evidence, because it is the one and only small phone made in the past decade or so.
I understand why you'd reach for that data, not a ton of other alternatives... But I'm not convinced that an arbitrarily chosen brand could achieve those sales figures. Especially if it was a new or no-name brand that didn't have a proven track record with software updates and hardware build quality.
Maybe I'm just incredibly naive but I have this small hope that we'll see a return to smaller phones that are trifolds for when you need the real estate.
I tend to like smaller phones as well, but even comparing the Pixel 9 Pro vs Pixel 9 Pro XL used markets, it seems really hard to find non-XL versions. I would totally believe that the XL is a far more popular model, unfortunately for the rest of us.
The problem is for many years now the smallest phone available has been getting larger and larger. This has lead small phone enthusiasts to cling to their old phones as long as they can stand it until they are forced to step to a larger model.
I put Bloomberg TV on the other day, just because it's one of the easy to access channels on a Roku I was setting up, and that experience makes me agree with your statement about space to show ads. It wasn't full of ads (yet?), but the tiny actual video surrounded by huge amounts of other content reminded me strongly of the TV future shown in Idiocracy.
Bloomberg's ads are slightly separate from their regular ads; the "other content" is still news most of the time - Bloomberg is at its heart a data and news feed company (the video news is mostly an add-on for them), so they are doing what they do best anyway. "Idiocracy" is an interesting example; while the style is similar, the side content on BTV, while a pale shadow of the actual terminal, is actually quite information-rich (especially on BTV+); the actual terminal is entirely populated by feed/data/whatever function you're using.
I am on an iPhone SE 3rd gen. due to the small form factor. It is already annoying to surf the web even with an adblocker, lots of cookie banners, notes, requests to install app/signup etc. take so much screen space that you can see no content. Clearly developers do not test or care for small screens anymore.
I'm exactly that person. Always running an older device and lamenting the lack of small devices. Unfortunately, the mainstream wants big devices, so we all get big devices.
I recently had to replace my Pixel 7 Pro and went with the Galaxy S25. My hands are much larger than average and it is amazing how unweildy I find the Pixel 7 Pro is in comparison to the S25 even though the size difference doesn't seem that big when compared side to side. Makes me wonder how people with normal sized hands deal with the massive phones.
Who's actually making 5.5" phones to prove that though apart from the iphone 13 mini? These chinese phones often tend to be 4" instead of 5.5" and often come with with massive downsides like awful cameras or being very thick
Probably. I don't expect the market to cater to me when I don't cater to it. The only reason I ditched my iPhone 5 in 2019 was the carrier entirely stopped service for it. I don't like my new 12 mini as much.
Ultra principled users rarely if ever buy new devices or have predictable purchasing patterns in almost any way. Trying to appease this market is mostly a fools game, as they have learned.
I think it's like how everyone smart knows that small hatchbacks are the only cars worth buying, and everyone smart also knows that only idiots buy new cars. So, all new cars are made for idiots and no small hatchbacks get made :)
I’m sorry what? I read that comment and all I see is someone incapable of understanding that other people’s needs differ from their own, and only _smart_ people pick the choice that they themselves would make. It reeks of ignorance and being judgemental.
Haha. To close the loop on the comparison, you'll notice that the people I'm calling smart do not get what they want, in the end. Maybe not so smart after all, eh?
Doubling down is bold, but to be honest if you had the self reflection required to see my point, you wouldn’t have said what you said in the first place.
It is only your blind ego that is making you incorrectly assume these things about other people.
It’s a HN meme at this point. For as long as I can remember, almost every single phone announcement on this site inevitably gets a bunch of comments about how it’s too big and how a smaller version would sell like hotcakes. You would think that phone manufacturers would have figured this out by now, but what do they know.
I replaced my 4a (which is not particularly small) after Google nerfed the battery into oblivion, but every once in a while I get it out of its drawer and am always immediately struck by how much better the form factor is. Using a modern phone with a 6+ inch screen feels like trying to tie a knot with one hand.
I have this experience… until I turn it on and start to try and type stuff on the tiny keyboard or watch stuff on it again. Then I realise I’m glad I moved up a little
I agree with you, but I like the reminder that I probably shouldn't be using my phone for whatever I'm doing anyway.
If I'm at home, I should make the small effort to get a tablet or a laptop. If I'm out, should I just set a reminder and do it later and listen to something instead?
I realise that for many people, that time might be their only time available for doing whatever they were going to do, but on the other hand when I look at what other people use their phones for when they're out, it rarely looks important to me. Even the stuff people are doing for fun doesn't look much fun. Definitely not compared with the people who have also lugged a Switch/e-reader/actual book.
That seems pretty judgemental. Lots of things I do that might not “look important” can be very important. I do a lot of work on my phone including research that would look like browsing to a bystander.
Yup - I think that's fair. It is completely a value judgement. But without ill will, and not particularly heartfelt.
Regarding your point about things that are actually work in disguise, I basically look at browsing web pages as productive work these days compared to alternatives. There are only so many people who can be moderators working for TikTok, or researching endless-scroll or content recommendation algorithms. :)
But even taking what people are doing at face-value, perhaps TikTok/Reels/Shorts is actually important for their wellbeing. I think it is more likely harmful, but I'm guessing.
I think it would be better if people spent less time looking at phone screens (no matter how big), but as long as it's their choice, people should do what they want to do! I have a vague concern that people might be increasingly doing something that they want to do in the short term, but not in the long term, but probably that's always been the way.
My 4a didn't have the battery issue due to GrapheneOS, however, it the screen died recently (twice), so I got a pixel 9 with GrapheneOS. But yeah, it is uncomfortable to use the phone with one hand - I miss the small sized 4a.
On the other hand, it would be fun to explore these on device SLMs on a more capable phone with extra ram/storage.
I miss it so much. I bought a replacement one after it got cracked, only to have the battery AND Sim get nerfed a month later. Putting a custom ROM seemed to work for a while, and then it just got too unstable with sim card turning off randomly and silently. So now it sits in a drawer and used as a kids camera and I am so jealous of them. My google pixel 8 is bigger, but somehow nowhere needs as performant for my needs (camera + voice calls is basically it).
Oh man, I'm still using my 4a and am quite afraid of what I'll do once it goes caput. There's essentially no real replacement. The S23/24 are kinda okay, but the custom ROM support is meh. Pixels are unbeatable in that regard... It's a shame
Really wish they would at least make the Fold a reasonable size when closed. It would scratch my smaller phone itch, and offer a larger screen when I actually do want one. Currently it’s “comically oversized” when folded, and literal tablet when open.
My understanding is that smaller phones get less screen time. Thus if you have some interest in increasing it, better to push bigger ones. But I don’t know if those perverted incentives make it back to the manufacturers. Do they make the most money from sale itself or after from the various ad-/data brokers?
I'd hoped others would copy/iterate the Flip form factor. A friend has one and it does feel great. I just don't get along with the Samsung software suite.
I've enjoyed using a Moto razr+ 2024. If you're interested in trying one check out used devices, their value seems to crater. I think I got mine for ~$300 last year on eBay (while it was still the current gen device)
Best phone I've ever owned and it's not close. Every phone since then has been a compromise, to the point that (in a sunk cost fallacy kind of way) I've just quit caring about phones and just buy whatever the cheapest available unlocked device is. I run them into the ground (way past the end-of-service date) because I know the next one is going to be worse.
The Nexus 4 was a nice phone but I thought the battery life was bad and it also ran hot.
My Moto-X was truly next level. It was oled and could do always on display that didn't need to power the blacks pixels on the screen. It was the first phone to do this.
It has voice recognition for unlocking (getting info that you couldn't when the phone was locked). First to do this too since I believe it uses dedicated hardware at the time.
It also knew when I was driving to unlock the phone for voice commands also.
It was small.
The Nexus 4 camera was rubbish and the GPS was rubbish. It could barely ever get a decent lock meaning navigating with it was a awful. I was so glad to replace that phone.
I agree, but I got the Pixel 5 instead; the 5 is actually smaller while the screen size is larger due to the curved screen corners. It also has a fingerprint sensor, unlike the 4. That being said, I still miss the squeeze-activated flashlight on the 4.
There are no alternatives. S25 is 6.2, and Pixels put the Pro/best version in 6.3, while on Samsung you get a step up to 6.7 and 6.9. Much better specs on almost the same size.
It's not really comparable because the Nexus 7 has a 16:10 screen. Looking just at the size in inches without the aspect ratio is really only part of the picture. The Nexus 7 is like twice the width of a phone.
I still carry my Pixel 5 for this reason. 2 replacement batteries in now and I have a spare sitting on a shelf. That said the Pixel 9A is tempting as it's not much larger than my Pixel 5. I hate that the finger print readers have moved to the front though. The sensor on the back of my 5 is perfectly postioned and also acts like a little track-pad for opening the notification tray. It was a perfect design IMO.
Sorry, my wording was misleading there. A spare Pixel 5 on the shelf so if something happens to this one I have an immediate replacement. I pop it onto a charger every couple months to prevent the battery from going too low.
Would be better in a drawer in the refrigerator. Calendar aging for batteries is mostly about the temperature and storage SoC, which should be in the 30-50% level.
Replying to my own comment as I can no longer edit. To clarify, I have a spare Pixel 5 sitting on the shelf. Was inexpensive to purchase a backup a few years ago off of a local classifieds site, still new in box.
Agreed on battery.
I started with a 6a and only ever had the fingerprint in the front. I thought it's well designed and works well (as long as I stick to office job activities.. as soon as you start doing handy works it has its issues.. same for Px7).
i would still use my px5 if it were not for 2 stupid problem: The promixity sensor does not work, thus the phone still think it's in pocket and won't wake the screen. Another problem is my power button has been missing.
I love my 13 mini but its battery is just too anemic. Slapping a MagSafe battery on it defeats the purpose of having a small phone. My 16 Pro lasts me all day, but I absolutely hate using it, as I don't do very much with my phone in the first place. I feel stuck.
Why does it run out so fast? I thought the 13 Mini had pretty good battery life? They say it is much better than my 12 Mini which I do fine with in one day. What's your battery health at?
First is age. These devices are 5-7 years old. Many are using their original batteries, which have several dead cells. So they literally have less capacity than they did back then.
Second is JavaScript, in my opinion. I can often see my battery drain in real time when I use the browser, even when Low Power Mode is on. Demanding client side JavaScript is a big reason for that.
You also have extensions doing stuff on pre/post-load that also contribute to power usage.
Finally, so many web developers test against modern devices, and there isn't enough demand to warrant accommodating less powerful CPUs/SOCs. You can try to use the web without JS, but you'll find that many websites will think that you're a bot and block you.
I just want a 5.5" phone. I'm not even asking for one of these tiny 4" phones like some people, just slightly smaller so that it can be used one handed
The only way Google phones keep up with the battery lives of iPhones is to have larger batteries. iPhone gets the same battery time with a much smaller battery.
Unfortunately I think this means Google will keep having to sell huge phones for a while
The size is about what every manufacturer settled on, and what most people want, it is unfortunate that smaller phones are not an option but it doesn't sell.
What bugs me however is that thin body with a huge camera bulge. Do anybody actually like that? It looks ridiculous, and the bulge defeats the point of having a thin phone. If you can't make the camera thinner, make the phone thicker, there is plenty of things you can do with more space: bigger battery, better speaker, more powerful vibration, more robust, etc...
I dont really buy the issue with "there's no market" just look at the pc market: isnt there are market for convertibles, laptops, tablet+keyboard, different OS, all sorts of sizes... how different is the android phone ecosystem?
No, I simply noticed that all my very old pants (that I don't use anymore), have very small pockets, and that all the new pants have very big pockets. My opinion on small vs big screen is all based on that.
A couple of days ago, I walked 20.000 steps on a mountain trail, and I didn't notice a problem with my pixel 8a in my pants' pocket. Holding it is not a problem too.
The people at Google seem to think much more like me than the people at Apple.
There are 3 primary decisions Google made that click with me, while Apple's choices are a mystery to me:
1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles.
2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.
3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
I'm sure people who prefer iPhones have their own set of "this clicks with me on iPhones and puzzles me on Pixels" aspects?
Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
Same for me, although I currently use an iPhone (and the rest of the Apple ecosystem). I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.
For me, it's Apple's privacy stance (which I know could change at anytime, but that's where we are at right now). Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
As long as apps on Android can do crap like the web-to-app tracking via localhost and other shady data harvesting that Google continues to allow, I don't touch it no matter how much better it is and how much I prefer the workflows.
Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
I guess it depends what you’re comparing it to but macOS is (for me) the best of a bad bunch of compromises. POSIX with app boundaries that are (mostly) respected, if not particularly granular. There’s nothing I really hate about the platform save for homebrew and being walled in to the ecosystem.
I actually love modern Linux with Gnome, and it has all the parts these days to be a great desktop operating system, but I find the freedom there undercuts a lot of the promises (Flatpaks are a good idea in theory that doesn’t work in practice as the sandboxes are overly liberal and overreach on most apps because no-one’s forced to justify why they need the permissions they do etc).
I spent so long on Windows that I really don’t miss it. The Window management was way better for so long, but the idioms drive me crazy (registry issues and programs still freely writing anywhere they like), and supporting everything forever has massive drawbacks to usability (although Winget sort of slightly helps with this but it’s not much better than homebrew).
That's exactly why I don't particularly care for it, but still use it.
My first choice would be Linux + a tiling WM. I used DWM for years before Apple Silicon, and have been on mac ever since the M1. These new machines are so nice that I can't go back to anything else now, whether I hate the software or not.
But macOS is just baffling. There's POSIX underneath, and it's mostly reliable, and it has a lot of little nice touches - being able to search the menu with Cmd+Shift+/, emacs keybindings in nearly every text field, etc. But then there's stuff that makes no sense. Why do I need a third party app for any sort of sane window management? (and even then, I haven't fully replicated my preferred way of working, only gotten close enough with Aerospace, and more recently Raycast). A third party app to set a keyboard shortcut to launch an application. I can't disable the animations for switching virtual desktops, and when you switch there's a lag before it's responsive again for keyboard input (I just want this to be instant).
So much of how macOS expects you to interact with it seems to be mouse/touchpad driven, and that's just not how I prefer to use my computer. At least with Raycast I now have shortcuts to launch and switch to apps (but not specific app windows because of the app/window separation in macOS). Yet even still, I can't set a keyboard shortcut to move a window to a different space. I have to click and hold the title bar and then press my shortcut for moving to that space to move the window - Apple decided that action MUST involve the mouse.
I also can't set window rules. I can't tell my terminal to always open on workspace 2, or mail.app to always open on workspace 4 at a specific size, etc. Making an app full screen also creates a new ephemeral space that can't be switched to with the usual Ctrl+NUM keyboard shortcut. I can't set a window to be always on top.
I'm more or less waiting for Asahi Linux to get support for DisplayPort ALT mode & M4 support, although I'm not holding my breath.
I do appreciate having access to the big commercial apps though on macOS, but ultimately I want my M4 macbook pro w/ Linux & hyprland.
Definitely agree about those nice touches. Just a few thoughts from my experience as of late.
- Window management wise the new tiling controls/keyboard shortcuts added last year have replaced third party tools for me. It's not as customisable as rectangle or moom but it covers halves and quarters which is mostly all I need. Additionally the "arrange" feature is nice letting you automatically tile N most recently used windows in a given layout.
- For window rules you can right click on an app in the dock and under options assign it to the current workspace and it should reopen there.
- 3rd party software like BetterTouchTool can "throw" windows to other spaces. But it did feel a bit hacky from memory (small but perceptible lag)
- The new spotlight features coming this year look quite promising for keyboard driven workflows.
I’ve migrated a home server to a Mac mini. It was awful to achieve. Trying to get a machine to boot, connect network shares and start containers was a week long effort. I can do it in Ubuntu in about 10 minutes from a clean install.
So much is disgusting UI options hidden deep some in the (awful) settings app.
But the result is a server that is fast, powerful and using 6-7W per hour, compared to the old Nuc 9 it replaced that used 70W.
The new Intel NUCs are only like a hundred something dollars for an N150 CPU and come with 16 gigs of RAM and a SSD.
Why pay so much more to fight an uphill battle?
Unless you desperately need the hot garbage that is Xcode there isn't much reason to deal with Mac Minis running MacOS as a server. One update and it will suspend and be unwakeable without physical interaction.
I had a list of things I wanted: I have limited space so needed a small form factor. I am on solar and wanted power usage to be low. I wanted 10Gb Ethernet.
It’s on a smart plug, so I can power cycle it remotely.
The hardware is far superior to any Nuc, I have at 4 or 5 of those already, I really like them. MacOS is a struggle, but I think I’ve tamed it.
As a consumer, I lament most of all about Pixel devices (or any other Android device really) that I have to wipe the OS and install a different one to get features that matter to me, particularly around privacy.
Thats why I don't use Pixel devices, or any Android devices really. I know its a precarious situation with Apple since they could reverse their stance at any point and sometimes they get it wrong, but they have yet to completely fail me when it comes to privacy.
In any event, it'd be nice if there was a 3rd mainstream vendor in the mobile race[0][1]
[0]: Both design wise and conceptually, I miss WebOS when it was strictly under Palm. It could have really been something. Why they didn't embrace multitouch screens I haven't a clue, it was the one thing that baffled me.
[1]: The one project I really wanted Mozilla to take a long term view on - Firefox OS - was another great innovation of our time that didn't get the love or support it deserved. It was a blast using web technology to build apps that ran fluidly on modern hardware. Unfortunately, it was all too often relegated to cheap manufacturer hardware that couldn't support it ideally, but even with this being true, they pulled off alot of technical excellence with that project.
I miss Nokia's maemo/meego based phones :( the n900 was really nice to use and even write my own little personal apps for (something I haven't done in over a decade of owning android phones)
/e/ Foundation sells phones with /e/OS preinstalled if you'd like an ungoogled Android phone without having to wipe the OS and install an ungoogled Android yourself.
I haven't tried /e/, I prefer installing a raw lineage with microG myself (although I don't currently use the microG part), but it seems like you and your parent commenter would be in the intended target.
I do agree that an alternative would be great. I'd gladly use Linux mobile with good, realiable hardware.
The Bliss launcher in /e/OS does not support widgets conventionally, and the best thing to do is immediately replace it. I used Lawnchair, and it did improve things.
It did encourage me to provide my Google account credentials, which I refrained to do, which made the appstore essentially equivalent to F-droid.
Apparently the GrapheneOS folks are talking with an OEM[0], which would allow you to buy a phone with a secure, private, non-spyware operating system straight from the factory.
I already own a Pixel running GrapheneOS, but if this happens I'll probably order one as soon as they come out to cast a vote with my wallet.
Apple isn't privacy oriented, please quit spreading this misnformation. The only thing you can say about them is that they are marginally better than google but that isn't saying much. Their supposed respect of privacy is just marketing.
> Google devices are orders of magnitude more private if you install a custom rom like graphene OS or lineage + microg.
Sure, but then it ceases being a Google device. The discussion is focused around Pixel, as is, vs. Apple/iOS, in which case Apple wins by far in that aspect.
Look into it rather than speaking out of ignorance.
There are several ways to block ads on Android. First and most-important, with a de-googled OS like Lineage or /e, the built-in tracking functionality just isn't there.
To blame the OS for an app spying on you is like saying Firefox is spying on you for Google because a webpage has a google tracker in it. Nonsense. An app is not the same as the OS. You can just not install the app like you would not visit the page.
But even then, open source android has many ways to block ads if you do want to install shitty apps that track you.
- The AdAway app that uses host file updates
- App Warden, which actually disables tracking libraries in apps
- LineageOS has the ability to turn off network access for apps that don't need them
- AFWall+ for app-level firewall rules.
The OS is absolutely not spying on you and actually gives you tools to stop spying. You can't say this AT ALL about Apple or vanilla Google Android.
I love Jolla and I wish more people used it so that there was a really good native browser and different chat + VoIP options. The rest is great, and you can always use Android applications via the emulation layer.
fwiw, installing GrapheneOS is by far the easiest phone OS install I've ever done. It's been a while but if there were any hiccups, they were too small to remember. My memory is just plug it into desktop with usb-c cable, go to grapheneos website in chromium (it uses web usb so no firefox), hit the install button, and wait a couple minutes.
And yes, it allows you to disable network permissions for apps, among many other nice things.
> What privacy feature are you looking for that Pixels don't supply?
Opt-in cross app tracking instead of opt-out, but if Google can get all apps on board with their new privacy sandbox thing that'll be less relevant.
More importantly, an equivalent to Apple's advanced data protection for all Google services & backups. I want full E2EE for photos, notes, backups, passwords, bookmarks, etc. I want built-in hide my email to gmail, I want to be able to turn off network access for any app I want in the permission settings. I want Google to treat Android as something completely separate from their advertising business instead of an extension of it as a source of data collection.
>I miss WebOS when it was strictly under Palm. It could have really been something. Why they didn't embrace multitouch screens I haven't a clue, it was the one thing that baffled me.
I've been running GrapheneOS for a few months now, keeping my old Samsung on WiFi as a backup.
It is such a breath of fresh air. It is so quiet and functional. It feels like it prioritizes me, the user. I am so grateful to have this OS.
Of course it has flaws, but they're lesser flaws. Like the crop tool is sometimes unusable in the gallery app. I can live with that. I couldn't live with the AI onslaught and spyware infiltration.
After looking at it, there are many things that I do not like about Graphene, and many ways that it tries hard not to be likable.
Beyond the monochrome icon pack that cannot be changed in the included launcher (which is so aesthetically challenged with an appearance that only a mother could love), the browser that cannot grasp dark mode, and the lack of the accustomed pattern unlock, I find the lack of one singular thing intolerable:
I want root. At a minimum, adb rooted debugging.
I realize that I could unlock the bootloader and Magisk this thing, but with the number of correct decisions that have been made by the authors of this operating system (and they are legion), they do not recognize one fundamental need of administrators:
I did consider it at some point but not having google wallet(apparently nfc payments are only available via banks' apps there) was too big of a downside for me.
It is Google themselves choosing to prevent GrapheneOS from passing the validation checks required to make GPay work (which is the app that makes the actual payment).
Wallet is there, you can hold digital cards, and transit cards, and your Ikea member card, etc. It's GPay that won't work to do the payment. And it's Google the one being a bully and deliberately making you think like that towards any alternative that's not in their list of approved systems that can be used in your own phone.
Could anyone here waxing lyrically about Apple so called privacy stand explain to me what that actually is apart from a marketing point Apple keeps repeating?
Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.
What supposedly so good about it? Their track record seems awful to me.
E2EE (advanced data protection) without having to use something like Proton, so can stay in the very convenient "ecosystem." With it turned on, keys are on your device, Apple doesn't have them and can't use them and it covers all the main stuff - photos, messages, notes, etc.
It's still a compromise, sure, but it's a better compromise than what Google offers.
Plus small things. Apple's tracking protection for example is opt in instead of opt out on Android. Google's core business is ads, they won't push features that can negatively impact that. Apple also has an ad division but it's not their main focus, hardware is. They can implement better privacy without impacting their bottom line. Apple's refusal to unlock phones at the request of the FBI, etc.
It's not that Apple is the be all end all for privacy, but they are far ahead of Google and are by far the most convenient option if you are within the walled garden.
> With it turned on, keys are on your device, Apple doesn't have them and can't use them and it covers all the main stuff - photos, messages, notes, etc.
It's impossible to prove a negative, like "Apple doesn't have a backdoor". One can prove the existence of a backdoor by reverse-engineering suspicious code or network traffic, but not the nonexistence without poring over every byte of machine code, and quite a lot of the hardware too.
This is not unique to Apple, it's impossible to prove any system is free of a backdoor, including Linux distributions (see: the xz backdoor, or "Reflections on trusting trust"), unless you hand-crafted your whole smartphone from raw silicon.
People reproducibly build Signal all the time. There's a bug right now that makes the play store version differ from the one you get by downloading off their website/build from source, but you can examine the differences to see they're minor.
Pick a decently up-to-date fork of Signal on GitHub and look at its Actions. You can also just do it yourself if you'd like, the process is effectively just doing a build in a docker container and comparing the result.
There is a dedicated reproducible builds action that verifies that it does match (currently failing because of the aforementioned bug). I'm not sure why you're still litigating this when, again, you can not only just go look at it, you can very much do it yourself.
> Could anyone here waxing lyrically about Apple so called privacy stand explain to me what that actually is apart from a marketing point Apple keeps repeating?
Google backup on Android is also end-to-end encryption. The difference is that on Android, I can self-host anything that Apple won't end-to-end encrypt, like maps or application installs.
> Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.
It's very easy to completely disable iCloud. I've never used it and don't intend to, despite running a mac as my primary computer for ~12 years now.
Apple will nag you all the time if you don’t have iCloud or just use the free tier and the free tier is very limited. You lose the only way to actually easily sync the phone when you disable it.
Most of the iPhone owners I know including me have caved and pay the additional tax every month.
There is no device ID, only ones tied to a user login on a phone, and the app must request a permission to get it. You can, for example, know that the user ID (which you obviously also need to have a permission to retrieve), is being used on the same device as was used to access your service in the past. Or you can know that this particular otherwise-anonymous user/device combination is being used again. I'm pretty sure that's likewise possible on iOS, but folks can chime in.
Not familiar with how Android does it anymore, but sounds fairly similar to iOS.
The main difference is it's opt in on iOS, but opt out on Android I believe.
On iOS, when the app pops up and asks to track, if the user says no, the app can't access the system advertising ID at all, and also is not permitted to track activity via other means like email address, user ID, etc (but the only thing that's technologically enforced is the system advertising ID, it's only forbidden by policy to not use other tracking methods).
Given the huge fit Meta threw after Apple implemented this, while they were silent about Android, I'm inclined to believe Apple's method has more of a privacy impact.
Also worth noting Google is hoping to move away from device-level advertising IDs with their "privacy sandbox" thing.
Yes, specifically both have some variant of "advertising ID", which is shared across all apps. The difference between iOS and Android is that iOS requires you to opt every app into receiving it, whereas Android is opt out. However on top of this Android has a "gsf" id, which is shared between apps, and can't be changed without a factory reset.
The privacy stuff and the hardware quality are my main reasons as well. Oh, and Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS.
Another reason I stick with Apple is style/design. Aside from the latest Alan Dye-led stuff, Apple's design has been top-notch, they make every other company look like they lack class and design-sense.
With that said, I did like Nokia's Windows Phones and the the period of Microsoft's design revolution where Surface devices had suede or whatever. That massive Surface table thing was dope too but man, Windows just keeps getting worse...somehow!
I'm looking forward to getting a Framework laptop at some point and installing Linux.
I maintain that if the Touch Bar had been made full height and had an affordance (like slightly more distance) to prevent accidental touches, it would have been way more practical.
Apple tends to have products on a design refresh schedule, and for the Mac is it about five years. I think the combination of user dislike of the initial implementation and limited developer integration caused the physical Touch Bar to be eliminated in the M1 design.
There are a few unicode characters I keep finding myself needing to type when I transcribe, and the Touchbar would be perfect for this. Except, there's no good way to just "add keys for that". You have add quick actions, which means writing Applescript that copies those into the clipboard and pastes... this is slow enough that it's noticeable (never mind having to first hit the quick actions button). On top of that, even though the label for the quick action is that single character, the buttons that it renders are like 2 inches wide. So instead of being able to fit 20 such buttons/keys on it, I can fit exactly 6. You have to swipe left and right to see the others.
Is there a Minecraft extension so that the Touchbar becomes the game's hotbar with icons? I've never looked.
I don't think the touchbar was going to be worthwhile without haptic feedback. At the very least, it needed the force sensors used for the touchpad so that accidental touches could be properly rejected.
> Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS
Not sure I understand this? One assumes that "daily driver" involves Linux VM use in this context[1], and ChromeOS's Linux VM integration is just wildly ahead of WSL (which really isn't bad) or the mess on OS X (awful). Installed Crostini apps appear as native apps in the UI. Transparent cross-filesystem access works flawlessly. Wayland and X11 apps appear with native decorations. Clipboard/WM/IPC integration does exactly what you expect. USB devices prompt you if you want to connect to the VM on insert (and remember the setting) etc...
And yes, I'm biased because I work there. But really it's a great development environment.
[1] I mean, if you're doing iOS development or need an M4 Max for performance reasons, or need some legacy Mac tooling like Adobe stuff, you're probably not looking at alternative platforms at all. Someone making the choice you posit is like 99% likely to be a web or embedded person working at a Linux shell as their native environment.
The Debian experience on my kid's Chromebook in Crostini is truly fantastic. The Android experience, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. I had hoped a convertible Chromebook could give them access to all the learning apps across Linux, the web, and Android on a single device; but a lot of Android apps tell the Play Store they aren't compatible, and I have to jump through hoops to get them installed.
To be fair (and, again, biased), Android apps run wildly better on a Chromebook than they do on a Mac or Windows box. :)
School Chromebooks are very limited devices (often these were low-end units purchased at the beginning of the pandemic!), and you're likely comparing it to the flagship Samsung or whatever in your pocket, which is just objectively a much more powerful computer.
The only designs I'm fond of are the macs. The iPhone looks pretty meh these days. The software side is slowly getting worse, it was great and they've lost the plot making changes for changes sake
>Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
GrapheneOS may interest you.
>Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
GrapheneOS specifically supports this for all installed apps.
GrapheneOS not only provides a sandbox for Google Play (meaning it's just another app with no special privileges, and you can grant/revoke permissions (including network!) as you desire), it also heavily promotes user profiles for further isolation.
I have a "banking" profile set up with Google Play services installed. 98% of the time I'm using my phone, I'm using the primary Owner profile. All the other profiles are encrypted-at-rest, meaning that until I enter my Banking-profile-specific PIN, the apps and data (including the Google Play Services installed there) are just encrypted files, and unable to do anything at all. (There are provisions for allowing a secondary profile to run in the background, but in this case I have obviously left that disabled.)
Each profile in GrapheneOS is encrypted separately, and switching profiles require entering a PIN (plus additional biometric methods if you set them up for that profile) before the data is decrypted and accessible.
So yes, you can hand the phone over to a friend or family, and they cannot get to any other user profile. Or you can set up a separate profile just for them, and they will have their own isolated set of apps - something like a separate user account on a desktop PC. And if only they know the PIN for their profile and you don't, they can keep secrets from you on that profile.
This myth that you're not being tracked in very similar ways if you use an iPhone is nothing but genius marketing and PR. Do some research about the type and quantity of telemetry that's sent back to the mothership from your iOS device, it's not materially different from regular Android.
> Both iOS and Google Android transmit telemetry, despite the user explicitly opting out of this. When a SIM is inserted both iOS and Google Android send details to Apple/Google. iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing
Not saying there is no spying, but Google is definitely a worse offender, by orders of magnitude. This, plus the lots of nagging + nudging dialogues a stock Android phones tries to get you to allow data collection. Google Maps is a prominent one, that by default tracks your each and every move and sends it to google. Web+App cross ID fingerprinting is also something Google has no issue with. Safari on iOS defaults to delete cookies every 7 days based on some AI logic to measure interactions. AirDrop works offline only between devices etc.
P.S: Citing a paper from 2021 is propably useless. Apple was the driving force in dropping trackable App ids, google had to follow suit. More stuff has happend in the space since then.
But that is exactly what your previous comment said:
>> Sounds like an awful lot of work vs. just having an iPhone and regularly install your banking app on it, and still not get spied on.
Installing GrapheneOS admittedly requires a computer, a browser, and about 15 minutes of your time after you buy the device, assuming you've never done it before, but claiming that that's "an awful lot of work" compared to "just" having an iPhone is false. They don't provide even remotely the same level of control over your privacy or security. With technical hardening measures on one side, and on the other, a vague promise that Apple might crack down on third party tracking methods that happen to be misaligned with their own business goals.
> AirDrop works offline only between devices etc.
That's actually a great example because Apple obediently restricted AirDrop as soon as Chinese authorities discovered that it was being used for anti-government protests. Apple doesn't care about privacy ideologically, their actions in other countries and their commitment to growing their advertising business should serve as proof of that, but there's clearly some dissonance at play.
what makes you think you are not getting spied on? Most banking apps are just glorified websites anyway with all the usual analytics tool embedded that you cannot disable with a browser extension.
Same stance, iOS isn’t the best but the least bad. Google is an anchor to Android, supposedly Android is open source and everyone can contribute but at the end no device can be sold without Google play services and Google decides what is accepted in the aosp project.
If aosp was actually open, like managed by all biggest phone seller in a consortium, i bet we would actually have feature that people want to get. Instead of a thousand « material you » redesign, that honestly looked ugly from the get go and isn’t much better years later.
Many people want to be able to invert the recent and back button, most in fact, yet Google stubbornly refuse to add that setting. That’s just an example, but this repeat a thousand time over the whole Android project.
I would love to have Android software on an Apple device. Their hardware is incredible!
Ultimately, I tolerate Android from a privacy standpoint because we're still able to fully modify our devices and use open-source app sources. The minute that goes away (and it feels like Google isn't as tolerant of it anymore), I go.
> Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
This is literally GrapheneOS or LineageOS+microg x) which ironically is fully available on Pixel phones and and a slowly vanishing number of others...
> I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.
I just got my first MacBook Pro this month and feel this exactly. I prefer Windows as an OS hands down. It works with all my peripherals and has better configuration options.
But the hardware makes up for it. My MacBook Pro is about twice as fast as my new x86 desktop from work. Its battery is nearly 15x longer than my Razer laptop and four times as fast.
I’ll take gaps in the software quality for all of the progress in hardware quality.
Linux performs quite well on M1/M2 Macs (I'd even argue they are the best laptops to run Linux), almost counter-intuitively to some people's expectations. The worst Macs to run Linux on are actually the last Intel models with T1/T2 stuff. It takes some time for folks to port to new M chips as they come out but once they do, due to the popularity and similar peripherals they work well.
I'm not following the drama, but even an older M1 Pro Mac beats almost every other PC laptop for Linux unless you specifically need x86 (or in love with OLED panels). In fullness of time, Macs are popular enough that I am confident Linux will be ported.
I genuinely do not understand this claim and propaganda about Apple privacy.
1) it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud
2) the phone's always listening, always
3) once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
To me apple is overly invasive with their icloud accounts and things, and password resets taking weeks, yet I see no evidence it is any harder to get my data than on other devices, if anything, it's easier.
So what is the claim here? Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy? An ad less about computers and one slightly less correct about idk wine?
The fact is that anybody with physical access to my devices has an easier time logging through the apple ones than the windows/androids i own and that I care more than advertising
Apple is the only one that offers actual E2EE with advanced data protection for all iCloud services. Without it, yes, Apple can see your data. With it on, they can't. The key is stored on device, encrypted with your device pin/passcode and covers iCloud backup, including messages, drive, photos, notes, reminders, bookmarks, shortcuts, voice memos, wallet, passwords, health data, journal, home, maps, etc. The only thing not covered under ADP is iCloud mail, contacts, and calendars because it uses CalDAV and CardDAV.
> once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
Sounds like you didn't have FileVault (FDE) turned on. If you did, that wouldn't work you'd have needed your recovery key.
> it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud
They can't if you have ADP.
> Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy?
Yes, it is privacy. Let's not understate the massive surveillance that ad networks do, Google included.
Google is an advertising company, they have zero incentive to offer the same level of privacy that Apple does and probably never will, it would be directly detrimental to their core business.
Even Google also gives actual E2EE by default for Android backups. Same with Samsung. Others have mentioned that Proton and others do this for services that Apple won't.
But not for photos, arguably one of the more important things to a lot of people to be E2EE, and not everyone wants to host their own Immich instance, or do things manually. iCloud offers E2EE photo back up and sync and native apps for it, it's a huge selling point that Google could just as easily offer but willingly choose not to.
> it's a huge selling point that Google could just as easily offer but willingly choose not to.
Google Photos is meant for sharing, where E2EE makes little sense. You can search your photos from any device.
If you really want to give up that convenience for E2EE, you might as well do it right and use Proton or Ente, which have E2EE for all photos, unlike iCloud, which isn't for shared albums or photos shared to anyone with the link. Unlike iOS, Android lets these apps have access to all the same device APIs as Google Photos, meaning they're as seamlessly integrated as possible. Apple iCloud uses iOS APIs not available to third parties, locking you in to using either a gimpy service or a gimpy app.
Is there any third-party validation on these claims of E2EE? Everyone keeps asking for some sort of validation or testing to these claims and everyone is just ignoring them. Without some kind of third-party testing none of this matters, anyone can say whatever they want unless someone can do testing to demonstrate its adherence to this.
> As part of our commitment to security assurance, Apple regularly engages with third-party organizations to provide security assurance, certifying and attesting to the security of Apple’s hardware, operating systems, apps, and services. Our goal is to specify certifications that can be recognized by Apple users around the globe.
Apple's E2EE is less safe than a proper one like Proton's (which also has storage, email, calendar). But one has to drink the Apple propaganda and believe it's true.
Also, ADP does not work in UK, at all.
The rest of the message I won't even comment. All things that if you care you get easier on any other device.
And Apple's ad business is booming while other are stagnant.
It does work if you've enabled it before it got disabled back in Feb, and the US successfully managed to get the UK to back off its demands for a backdoor, but it remains to be seen if new UK customers will ever be able to enable ADP again.
> 3) once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
Do you not know how computers work? That how it works on every computer without encryption.
You wouldn't have been able to access to the data passwordless if you had enabled Filevault encryption
Apple's privacy policy is like everything else Apple: it best compares to things outside of it's walled garden. But inside the walls Apple operates just like every other company. It gathers information on all it's users for it's own advertising business. They can claim they don't have third parties involved and that makes them more private, but they do all the same things to their users but just do it themselves. They're as much an advertising company as Google or Facebook (and would love to be as big as those advertisers), but their ads are all within the Apple walls, so they can claim they are much more private. When they really aren't.
> They’re as much an advertising company as Google or Facebook
They are? By what metric? This sounds made up to support the assertion that a company which doesn’t do broad data sharing with third parties, but keeps it to themselves, is somehow less (or no less) private than those who do.
Apple imposes "Artificial Incompetence" on their users. It treats them like children, gives them no agency, and limits their freedom, all while praising them for their taste and superior sense of... something.
This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.
Doing things weirdly and badly, and not allowing any other way, prevents skill transfer between operating systems and environments. It prevents easy transfer of software - it forces software to treat the weird and bad things as canonical.
Apple users, with their imposed muscle memory, not realizing how good things could and should be, insist on their high taste and discrimination, and point to things "just working" and other inanities as vehement cover for one of the darkest of dark patterns.
Interoperability, protocol, and freedom should be mandatory. Google is hardly better, but at least you can own the device you purchase.
If you cannot understand what made Apple successful then or today what makes you think you're not failing to grasp something? You head right on to making an argument when nakedly revealing that you can't comprehend the other side.
Not surprising, this site is made for the Woz's of the world (and that's fine!).
> This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.
Except iPhone doesn't have a larger market share, and they aren't being used by 80% of the world's population. Where are you pulling these numbers from? iPhone only has a larger market share in the US, and not by much. Worldwide they are very small compared to android.
> they aren't being used by 80% of the world's population.
I said "iPhone is more appealing to 80%+ of world's population". I didn't say everyone who wants it can afford it.
It's pure speculation, of course, but given its current market share (27% of all devices sold) and its price point, I don't think it's too far fetched to say that its market share would be much higher if price wasn't an issue for people. This is somewhat hinted by the fact that it has a 78% market share in the $1,000+ segment [1], and most iPhone models are over $1K.
Also it still ships more phones than any other single vendor (unless you lump all Android phones into one bucket). In terms of revenue, it's by far the leader with 43% [2].
Overconfident in your numbers you are, just because they suit your narrative. Zero actual backing for those you provide. Not reflecting reality I can see they are.
Those are some very minor complaints, all of which would not affect my buying choice, given the larger differences. That said, I’ll tell you that I don’t notice (1), for (2) I would never sit there organizing my photos, I have other (mostly less productive) things to do with my time, and (3) seems like something I specifically _dont_ want.
No, two of those are some pretty fundamental complaints about how GP wants to use their device. Just because you don't have those complaints doesn't make them any less fundamental.
Ultimately the disagreement is primarily on the fact that Apple goes very far out of their way to hide the concept of a file and filesystem from the user.
It's easily solvable with a case. I agree that it's silly that Apple does it this way, but I struggle to see how it rises to the level of being a fundamental flaw like file management is.
The wobble actually factors onto my device choice as well. It's just annoying to live with for the life of the phone if you can't find a case that widens it, which many don't.
Absolutely. The camera bump is a complete non-issue, and probably easily solvable with a case if it's really the thing pushing you away from an entire smartphone platform.
I shudder at notion of feeling compelled to group every photo I take into exactly one folder. A directory tree makes very little sense for organizing everyday photos. If I for some reason had a natural temptation to do this, I'd be grateful to Apple for discouraging it in their Photos app.
The iphone 16's camera bump is 3.5mm. Short of making your own case that makes the bump a Pixel like bar, that wont be solved by just sticking a case.
On photos, it is indeed a very personal topic to many. In particular someone taking dozens of random pictures everyday won't have the same use case as someone being a lot more deliberate for each picture for instance. A one size fjts all approach isn't helpful IMHO.
Why even have a bump? Make the phone thicker by exactly that amount and increase the battery. Then the phone is flat and has a better battery life. Are there uses who actually prefer a bump?
Speaking for myself, I'm fine with it on Pixel phones.
I'd be happy with more battery and no bump if:
- phone makers gave up on the glass backs and metal, and made the body plastic (no more "premium" feel for the sake of it, I don't want heavy and fragile materials)
- the physical durability was balanced with the additional weight: dropping the phone the wrong angle shouldn't mean a guaranteed cracked screen.
The current Pixel9a would be near perfect balance for me, if they gave it better cameras and internals instead of making it a budget phone.
Motorola did some A/B testing in 2011 with Droid RAZR and Droid RAZR MAXX. They had identical hardware, but first one was the thin one with a camera bump, second one was uniformly thick (thus no bump) and put an extra battery there (which doubled the capacity).
Given that 3 years later they have stopped producing phones with bumps, I guess people really prefer battery to bumps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I don't think so. The stuff you mentioned is objectively better as there's no reason for Apple not to let you do it. It's more of a "I've been in the Apple walled garden for so long and so are all my friends" or the so-called network effects. Examples: you can't "Facetime" and "Airdrop" on Android, your text confirmation marks are green instead of blue, you don't have access to the same apps as your friends (sometimes), you don't have integration with iPad. If you grew up in certain circles you may be bullied for not having an iPhone, too.
Also there is a prevailing sentiment that Android doesn't "just work" as much as iOS, which is true tbh but not for Pixels which are basically the Android equivalent of an iPhone, where the device is pretty much tailor-made for the OS.
There’s still an element of subjective preference, as much as many like to say otherwise. To me, Android animations and gestures have always felt less polished and natural and more rough “forever prototype” and mechanistic, for example.
In terms of “just working,” a big weak point of Android that stands out to me is just how clunky it is if you’re not neck-deep in the Google ecosystem and use more standardized service providers like FastMail. iOS stock apps work great with IMAP, CardDAV, CalDAV, etc but on Android you have to hunt down third party service agnostic apps for everything, few of which are designed to work with each other. To be fair though, Windows also suffers this issue.
For me, it's how can I get the slick and super convenient integrations between my phone, tablet, and laptop outside of Apple?
I am talking about Handoff, Continuity, iPhone mirroring (can use my iPhone and its apps while it remains locked somewhere), AirDrop, Continuity Camera, universal clipboard, iMessage, etc.
The left/right brain thing is pseudo-science and even worse - a false dichotomy. It's much more about cultural snobbery and cultural tribalism around which pursuits are regarded as "more worthy".
Look up C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures" - it was incredibly influential at the time but also described a prejudice we still labour under. It's pervasive in the English speaking world. I suspect less so in the non-anglosphere West and possibly even less so in Asia.
It's real in terms of consciousness - brains switch between modes depending on activity. You can try it and feel the switch yourself. Whether that switch is localized, or whether people have more affinity for one than the other is probably what's fake.
Agreed. Im just saying the origin of those terms is a distortion of a real effect. In your “right brained” mode you are more intuitive. So then people said I’m a “right brained” person.
“There’s no reason for apple to not let you do it” - they have reasons. Whether you agree with them or not is fine but pretending they don’t have reasons is a little silly.
You also can’t put every option in for everything, because simplicity has value too.
I've been using Android for years but for reasons recently switched to an iPhone.
I gotta say Android is superior in a number of things like call and SMS spam.
Also typing on iOS is a frustrating experience. I type "Im" and the iOS keyboard won't offer "I'm" as a correction option. I've even tried using the Google Keyboard on iOS and the multilingual predictions are just not as good as on Android.
I would have preferred to get a Pixel but Google doesn't distribute their physical products where I live.
The keyboard is completely nonsensical. I really don't understand how iPhone keyboard is so bad. Even if you install the Google Keyboard, iPhone keyboard is still bad.
I can't fathom what is going on here, but I really dislike typing on an iPhone. It drives me bananas. Completely obvious suggestions are never made. Android--you can just faceroll on the keyboard a bit and it'll have everything perfect. I thought I was really good at fast text input on mobile devices until I switched to an iPhone and then realized that Google's ML and autocorrect integration is just way better in this area.
I've been using iPhones since the original, somewhere around the iPhone 6 they screwed up the keyboard and never fixed it. Not just the recommendations but even the typing itself.
On Android I rarely had typos (and never used autocorrect) but on iOS I make constant mistakes. And I mean constant. It's rare when I type a word without a typo.
FTWIW the keys' hitboxes aren't at the displayed area, but at the expected landing area.
I'm slightly making up the exact bias, but for instance it will be assumed the user lands a touch slightly above the actual key, as the finger hides the target and Apple's heuristics expect some overshooting.
In comparison people used to the iPhone's heuristics might have a harder time on android.
I had the exact same experience when switching to iphone. Hasnt gotten better after... 4 years now? It actually seems to be getting worse, if anything.
I prefer Pixel phones, for slightly different reasons.
One, it takes really good photos. Better than phones with supposedly better specs. This is big for me, I have a 3 year old, being able to snap photos that look great with no effort is huge.
Two, the Google integration is just really a gamechanger. My laptop is my "computing" device. So my phone is mostly for calling, navigating (I travel a lot), searching for businesses, that sort of thing. It's really effortless with Pixel devices, takes a tad more work with other brands.
All browsers are equal citizens. I use Vivaldi, it's nice it can be the default and work just as well with the phone as Chrome.
And finally, in all my dealings with big tech over my lifetime, Google has been the only one that I feel doesn't try to abuse users. With MS it's endless nagging and annoyances, plus their security sucks, with Apple they're very anti-consumer unless you do exactly what they want, all the time. Even Samsung annoyed me with bloatware and trying to make their apps default over and over. If I change something on a Pixel phone, it stays changed. I pay for some Google products so no ads for the most part. Their security is great. They prefer open formats and protocols and have done a ton for the open web. Just the best ecosystem I've bought into.
> 2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.
This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me. If I am backing up my pictures to a hard drive, there is no easy way to select just the pictures taken on my phone. Seems like such an oversight but I suspect it's a way to drive people to sign up for iCloud storage.
Android has directories (folders), and it doesn't pretend they don't exist.
If you go to "Collections" -> "Photos on Device" it then shows separate folders "Camera", "WhatsApp Videos", "WhatsApp Photos", "Screenshots", etc, etc.
iOS 26 fixes this with an option to only show photos not in an album.
Additionally, if you are backing up photos to a hard drive you will be much better off using an app like PhotoSync. It has a one time payment and transfers direct to whatever you want with far less errors and more control than Apple’s terrible buggy disaster that is transferring photos by wire.
I use an iphone and have for many years. I was a phone geek who would always use custom ROMs and have everything dialed in just so. I'm sure this has changed over the years but back in the day it seemed like there was always some weird issue with my Android phone. Admittedly, a lot of that could have been my fault for constantly messing with the device. Eventually I got busy and just needed my phone to do the simple stuff and get out of the way.
iOS has a number of really annoying behaviors and general flaws that are never going to be addressed. I don't recall having the same frustrations with Android, but maybe I did.
I'm constantly annoyed that my iPhone can't do simple stuff my Android phone could do 15 years ago. I am also aware that if it could do all those things, I probably wouldn't spend the time to get everything set up, dialed in, and maintained anyway.
The things that keep me on iPhone are unrelated to all of that, though.
1. I like the small form factor. I have a 13 Mini and there's no decent equivalent that I've found in any ecosystem (sadly, even Apple now).
2. I use Facetime with both sets of parents a fair bit. Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app, sounds like a lot of work and frustration.
3. Real or not, my perception is that privacy in the Apple ecosystem has historically been, and currently is, far better than Google. I don't like the idea of the device I'm constantly relying on to be the product of an ad company, it just feels gross.
4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app
This seems like an argument for picking something third-party, perhaps Signal. It's probably not going away any time soon, and it supports both major mobile operating systems.
12 to 15 years ago, when I was teaching the elders in the family how to video call, there were only two reliable options, Google and Apple.
Google kept changing their solution, so we ended up with Facetime.
Whatsapp did end up coming out with video calls, and Whatsapp would have been an alternative had it been available on iPads sooner (is it even available today?). Signal also came out too late.
But once everyone was trained on Facetime, I, nor any of my cousins was going to put in the time to re-train on any other solution. Plus, if anyone has a problem with Facetime, or their Apple device, they can pop into an Apple store to get it fixed themselves. Or they can chat with an Apple tech support rep who can remote into their phone.
both iOS and Facetime are super slick and baked into the device. The end user doesn't even have to really know how to the app to use the feature as it were. It shows up on a contact as a button click.
Signal does not, even on Android. You have to deliberately use it.
That small friction isn't great when you're likely one of few people using it in day to day life of others.
>Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
Being able to unlock my password manager with the fingerprint, rather than putting in the vault password every time was great, but my iPhone got too old for the other apps I needed and now I'm stuck typing in a gibberish 30-char password every time I need to use it on my phone. When are we going to get under-the-screen fingerprint sensors?
I miss having a small phone. My iPhone 16 ironically seems small compared to lots of phones my friends have. But I wish they bring back the mini. I would buy it immediately.
You can buy a mini on secondary markets. Some are even new in box, though you might need to replace the battery.
Until about a year ago, Apple had 13 minis in their refurb store.[1] That's where I managed to get one. I'm going to hang on to it as long as possible. Previously I had an iPhone SE (the one that looks like an iPhone 5), and I still slightly regret upgrading to the mini. The mini's camera and display are significantly better, but it's a little wide for my hands.
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls
Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp these days. Both of which are cross platform, even web (so can use on a desktop browser).
Also, the current Google thing, Meet, doesn't need the person you're calling to have the app. You invite them, they get a link, it opens in their browser, mobile or desktop.
My 13 mini is also not great on battery. I've been debating ordering an iFixit battery and doing the swap, but in the past I've felt it was kind of mixed results from that. I don't think those batteries are newly manufactured units, but rather leftovers from the original production line that have been sitting on the shelf for 2-3 years. So although they'll be an improvement over one that's been through 1-2k cycles, they won't be like it was when it was brand new.
For now I'm just making do with having a power bank in my bag when I'm out and about.
I don't think the iPhone Air will actually be smaller in the dimensions I care about, just thinner which I assume will compromise battery life.
My mini is holding up ok. Battery needs replacing but I haven't done it. Like mikepurvis, I carry power banks around if I'm doing anything where I'm not going to be able to recharge easily. I use one like this https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Magnetic-Slim-B2C/dp/...
I was able to get a new battery and screen for my 13 mini via AppleCare, but even the new battery won't get me through the day. Recent OS updates also make my camera shooting experience really slow for some reason.
Even with all that, I'm keeping the mini as long as possible because every year brings bigger and heavier iPhones.
> Recent OS updates also make my camera shooting experience really slow for some reason.
I’m on a 16 pro and it’s bad. It’s worse if I use the side button or do it from lock Screen, quicker from actual camera app. However it’s by far the slowest camera I’ve had on an iPhone, and I find the speed and quality a disappointing.
I have a 13 mini for about 3 years now - still holding up for most of the working day (about 15 hours). The trick is to reduce the number of apps you have on the phone, reduce the number of apps which like running on the background, and not watch a lot of videos.
I figured it out that treating it as a communication device + payments device + maps + very occasional content viewer, ie mostly as a utility will make the phone last much longer.
FaceID is terrible, not even reliable. It scans your face all the time, even when you are not unlocking it. Every 20-30 seconds or so, let's just scan your face.
I would love it if iPhones stayed with fingerprint unlock. Sometimes I put the phone on the desk and not pointing it to my face and I want to unlock it. I have to wait for the stupid FaceID timeout to be able to input my code.
Face ID is not terrible. Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc. They check to see if you’re looking at the screen and your eyes are open, so they can keep the screen on regardless of the auto lock setting. It’s a smart and useful feature which you can turn off if you don’t like it.
> It’s a smart and useful feature which you can turn off if you don’t like it.
If they hadn't gotten rid of the fingerprint sensor, I'd believe in the sincerity of that statement.
> It is not terrible
The fingerprint sensor was at the perfect location, it worked perfectly. FaceID has the downsides I have outlined and therefore in my opinion absolutely terrible.
> Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc.
I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.
The rotation doesn't help anyway, it is technically capable of detecting it is sitting still on my desk but it still does the FaceID dance first before showing me the passcode prompt which I also don't appreciate along with scanning my face every 30 seconds even when unlocked.
If it can scan it so rapidly, why not show me the passcode prompt or design the UX better so that I can already input my passcode before waiting for the device to decide it sees no face in there?
It can do it better but by design it is too eager to just perform the FaceID unlock and then turn itself into a user presence and attention sensor.
I'd easily pay $100 extra for an iPhone that didn't solely rely on FaceID to log me in and instead gave me a fingerprint sensor it had from generations ago.
> I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.
Waiting for the day when Apple announces supporting recording videos horizontally and the Apple fanatics to go wild as they show off how amazing videos can be when the view is wider than it is tall.
Touch ID had a ton of downsides. It didn’t work with wet or dirty fingers, didn’t work with gloves, if you have clammy hands it would constantly fail. Plus it has a higher false positive rate than Face ID and has less features. Not to mention the speed and UX of Face ID is significantly better for MOST people than Touch ID.
I also meant landscape Face ID recognition, obviously not landscape device orientation.
I remember my iPhone, on my desk, turning up because of a notification, then hearing the vibration for a failed FaceID unlock. This very smart system wasn't able to understand that it was looking at a ceiling. So I always ended up having to type my password due to too many failed FaceID attempts.
FaceID was highly ranked in the reasons why I disliked iPhones.
I'm also holding tight on an iPhone 13 Mini (5.18 in x 2.53 in) and I'm honestly not thrilled that even that is a size up from the 5s (4.87 in x 2.31 in).
Pixel 10 is yet another step up, at 6.02 in x 2.83 in, and I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
The Vinegar extension on macOS/iOS lets you use the system video player on YouTube. (It has a few glitches but works fine and let's you use PiP and play videos with the screen locked.)
I prefer Android. Unlike iPhone, the Android notifications system actually makes sense, and I can use real Firefox on Android. But, I prefer phones sized to fit in a human hand even more, so I'm stuck on an iPhone 13 Mini. Please make a ~4.5" screen Pixel phone, Google :(
Yeah, the main news I want to hear is the release of smaller Pixel phone. Secondarily, I'd like the return of the 3.5mm port. I don't care about any of the stuff they actually announce.
I do currently use a Pixel, but I hate how big it is.
Eh, I've gotten over the headphone jack thing. I just buy a dozen adapters, stick one on each of my headphones, and replace them as they wear out every couple months. Good enough.
iPhone notifications are leagues behind. Everyone you see with an iPhone has like 80 notifications--mostly stemming from how and when they're dismissed.
+1 SO MUCH
After two years I couldn't understand them. Sometime one notification appear, then it disappear, is it in the bottom stack? No, it just disappear.
Also when there's many of them grouped, will tapping expand them? open the app? It's random.
But mostly, on Android, having quick actions on notifications. Receiving a useless email? The "Delete" action is right there. Boom, done. Move on.
In retrospect, I think it's why I find Android so functional. Just from the notifications you can do everything. No need to unlock your phone and end up distracted.
I just switched from an iPhone 13 mini to a Pixel 9 Pro, and it's tough to admit but I can do so much more with my thumb on a big Android than a tiny iPhone. Mostly due to the back gesture always works (never need to tap the top left corner in some cases, and also being able to return to the 3 button navigation) and being able to pull down the notifications by sliding down on the main screen.
So true. I switched from a lineage of several pixels ending in 7 to an iPhone for various reasons. The only thing I really miss outside of niche apps after finding a better calendar is a sane notification system! iOs lock screen notifications provide so little useful information and sometimes get buried.
My iPhone 13 Mini is just a touch too big for my taste. For phones I've owned, I'd probably give the nod to the HTC Incredible 4G LTE[1]. Relatively stock Android, 4" screen, headphone jack, soft touch plastic back. It was perfect.
I’d prefer the photo organization behavior you describe, but I don’t want websites to ever be dipping into the local filesystem outside of heavily siloed areas reserved for web apps exclusively. I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.
The only exception I can see making for filesystem access is for PWAs explicitly installed by the user, and even then there should be restrictions in place like limiting access to scripts loaded from the installed PWA’s domain. The open web in a generalized browser like Chrome on the other hand is too untrustworthy.
As for camera bumps, they’re all equally awful and I’d rather they just disappear entirely, even if that means thicker devices.
> I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.
You surely trust the permissions and security measures your phone provides to apps so what makes browsers worse in this area? Especially if you're using iOS where you only have Apple's web browser available to use.
Intent. Apps can only ever be installed by me, barring complicated exploit chains, while browsers can navigate without any input from me whatsoever. That serves as an extremely narrow funnel that vastly reduces surface area.
This is also why I’m more receptive to installed PWAs being more capable. They’re both on the other side of my intent funnel and assuming a good implementation can’t ever navigate to domains that aren’t that PWA.
Besides that, it’s just annoying for apps to be dressed in browser chrome. On macOS ever since Safari added the ability to install sites as PWAs, I’ve been making heavy use of those just to remove extraneous browser toolbar items and such. I don’t know how people can live with all their web apps in regular browser tabs, I’d go nuts.
Sure, browsers can navigate without your input, but what good would that do to bypass permissions? You can't use that to automatically grant your website permissions. And permissions are isolated to specific domains as if they were separate apps, so you can't just use permissions granted on domain A from domain B.
Not everything needs to be a PWA. Yes, they're great alternatives to apps, but why should anyone be forced to install a PWA when they might only need to use the web app very infrequently? Or what if I just wanted to try some functionality out first? Installing is an unnecessary speed bump for these cases.
Like I said, it’s surface area. It’s much larger in the case of the web since there’s any number of scenarios in which a user’s browser can be coaxed into running code that exploits a vulnerability that bypasses permissions and isolation (which is always possible by virtue of the browser being a privileged app, whether there are known exploits or not).
This sort of thing can happen with installed apps too, but the likelihood overall is far lower, especially if selecting judiciously.
The overwhelming majority of web apps don’t need filesystem access or similar special functionality, and thus users aren’t forced to install them.
In my personal experience, if my interest level in an app is so low that I wasn’t willing to install it, I was never going to use it in the first place either because the app wasn’t compelling enough or I didn’t have any actual need for it.
You have the same risks with apps though. An operating system has an even larger surface area. Sure, you need to manually install apps, but once installed they will automatically update.
Personally I would trust browser security far more than an OS simply because it is a much more desirable target to compromise. They're also built specifically to run untrusted code.
It's so strange that we don't have cameras which have write-only access to the image spool, galleries that have read-only access to the image spool, and a file manager app that can handle delete requests from other applications with the intent system.
Wobble or no wobble, I really want the camera tumours to disappear. Make the phones thicker or make the cameras more slender. Don't make these ugly protrusions. Those phones are 2cm thick anyway you're not fooling anyone with "thinness" when they still have those massive hunchbacks.
Optics say you’re not getting thinner cameras. Otherwise they’d do that, and all those foot-long lenses you see at sports events would just be phones.
Given thickness constraints at the lens,‘I don’t see any reason to make the rest of the phone that thick. Why? Extra battery and nearly double the weight of the phone? Empty space? Cord storage?
Sell a version of the phone that's 3 generations behind on camera tech, make it a little cheaper or make it the same price. I promise you I would buy it over your flagship if it means no camera tumor.
I am okay capturing daily moments I use my phone camera for at a lower fidelity than the bleeding edge optics and sensors offer. I have mirrorless cameras and DSLRs for photos I care to take at a good quality anyway.
Not to even mention with all the latest generation post processing done on photos automatically by phone cameras, I don't like how they turn out most of the time at this point.
> Sell a version of the phone that's 3 generations behind on camera tech, make it a little cheaper or make it the same price. I promise you I would buy it over your flagship if it means no camera tumor.
Two things:
1. Your desire is in a minority that would not be profitable to cater to.
2. Even if they tried, half the people sharing your opinion still wouldn't buy it. So many people claim they want something, but then don't buy it even when it's offered. I remember in 2011 being sad that physical slide-out QWERTY keyboards were disappearing and seeing some poll that showed that like 60% of smartphone users wish they had a physical keyboard, yet nobody was buying the Motorola Droid series which had them, opting instead for the sleek-looking iPhone. People complained about phones losing the headphone jack or getting a notch or hole punch in the screen for the front-facing camera, and yet they bought the phones anyways.
But why sell something people won’t buy? I’m not a hardcore capitalist but there are enough phone manufacturers that someone would be doing this if it was profitable.
It’s unfortunate to have taste enough standard deviations out that nobody caters to it, but there’s no point in arguing that “someone” should. They just won’t.
- iPhone wobble is real. Mostly mitigated by a proper case. Does the iPhone get a better camera in return? Usually in my experience.
- I don’t sort my photos. The semantic search has been sufficient, and I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim.
- Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use. The FS API does sound great though. Enviable given how annoying it is to do work on an iPhone sometimes.
> - Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use
This is actually one of the stronger arguments in favour of Android's though, you can install (real) firefox and (fully functional) ublock origin, while Apple prevents you from doing so on their non-macos products.
Safari on iOS worldwide supports extensions. There is UBlock origin lite and i.e vinagre for youtube background videos. I am still amazed google does not allow extensions on their default browser.
Microsoft Edge on Android now also supports some extensions, one being uBlock Origin. Seems just as powerful as the real thing. And has the benefit of using the Chrome engine.
This is tricky. Most Android phones apply heavy color saturation and contrast adjustments, by default, to the images and the display itself, where iPhone tends to keep things more "raw". But, "pop" is what the average person usually prefers. It's post processing step that can heavily influence favor, unrelated to the camera. The Samsung cameras are still objectively better though, in many metrics.
My work involves showing images accurately on screens, and I always have dig through all the settings to make the Android phones just to show an image without heavy modification (for Samsung, it's 3 separate settings!). There is no such setting for iPhone, where the default experience is a (literally) color calibrated screen.
In my view Pixels have been dominating in still photos for years but their video has never been on par with iPhone. I'd put my old Pixel 3's still camera up against my iPhone 13 any day (if my Pixel hadn't bricked itself a little out of warranty like all of mine seemed to).
The difference between the photos on any flagship phone for the past 5 or so years is insignificant and mostly up to personal preference, but the difference between iPhone and anything else in videos is massive.
This is because iPhone photos are ubiquitous which causes photos from less common phones to stand out. And the less common phones likely optimize for this A/B test scenario by e.g. increasing contrast and saturation. Meanwhile Apple likely has little to no interest in optimizing for A/B tests with minor smartphone players, and instead optimizes merely for delivering satisfying photos in the widest range of scenarios.
Pixel photos are very good too, for the record. I just think the "blind camera test" is worthless.
That's quite an interesting way to explain why Apple does poorly in blind tests. The real reason though is that Apple's cameras are just not as good, but I suppose it's easier to explain away by making up biases.
My and your personal preferences for one camera over the other isn't the issue. Nor am I claiming that one is objectively better than another. My point is that blind tests (between two cameras of similar quality) are worthless simply because they don't reflect the preferences the test-taker would actually have given extensive use of each camera.
The issues with blind tests like this are well-known. I assure you I have no interest in persuading you to alter your own preferences.
> I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim
As someone who refuses to pay extra for iCloud storage, can you tell me how to do this?
I haven't figured out a good (read: easy) way to backup photos from my iPhone to computer/external storage (I don't want to use iTunes software cause I don't need everything syncing both ways).
Image Capture used to be the simple way, but they removed the "delete imported items from phone" option and made it default instead now, which is quite the landmine.
I'd be curious too. Family fills up iCloud very quickly. I use a self hosted immich instance on my nas to back photos up and share with family members.
I can sort my photos in folders (or albums) in iOS, not sure what you mean? I can have personal and shared albums, unless you mean the fact you don’t have that in the filesystem, in which case I completely agree.
I’m a Firefox guy myself and web apps are not something I care about for privacy reasons, but I agree that not having the option is a bummer.
The camera bump never really bothered me on the iPhone or the Pixel Fold I had before this iPhone. I just don’t notice it, but then again, I also didn’t notice the crease in the fold.
I miss Tachiyomi though. Panels is nice, but I had to built a whole OPDS-proxy to a manga website to have something close to Tachiyomi. Oh, and the ability to turn off network access on a per-application basis that came with GrapheneOS (plus the security of GrapheneOS itself).
While I prefer Android and Pixels (using GrapheneOS), I have switched my family to the Apple ecosystem to have a middle ground between privacy and features, so I’m not coming from an “I love Apple and everything else sucks” background, mind you.
I think OP is describing using their main Photos album as an inbox of sorts, emptying it out by filing photos away. On iOS even when you add a photo to an album it still exists in the main album.
I just went into trades and I do a picture every other hour of my work. It really makes me mad, that I can’t properly separate this photo-documentation from my personal private pictures. It’s a complete mess now in the main folder… Next phone will be one with GrapheneOS.
Ah, yeah, that makes sense. I simply ignore the main view and go straight to the albums. In iOS 26 it defaults to your last view, so that works for me.
1. I’m always going to have a case on my phone, so I don’t care about the camera bump.
2. You’re correct here. I mostly don’t care, but I want to have different hidden folders, which iOS doesn’t natively have. Otherwise I don’t care much.
3. Safari’s locked-down-ness is precisely why I use it.
But TBH, at this point, there’s minimal differences between iOS and Android.
4: the fact that Android has unified gestures: back, home and tray. Whenever I used iOS, I felt like every single app had a different way of going back somewhere. On Android, this is not an issue at all.
Uh. I used Android for 15 years and I still keep guessing wrong what the back button will do. Feels like 75% of the time it does not lead me back to what I expect and all apps have different ideas what they think it should do. I agree though that not having a back button at all is also not good.
>3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
Working as intended. Apple wants their 30% cut by all possible means. Web apps would bypass their cut.
I have to admit, my experience with #1 was quite different.
1. Put pixel on a flat surface.
2. Half an hour later, discover that the the surface wasn't actually flat, as phone the phone crashes to the ground, having been slowly inching its way off the 'flat' surface by virtue of the magically friction free back case of the phone...
No joke, by far the slipperyest phone I have ever had, and the one I slapped a case on the fastest, but not fast enough to avoid many dents.
No! They still do that? Reading this thread had me thinking back to an early Nexus phone I had back in my Android days, maybe around 2012, and here’s this post! I had no idea that wasn’t some odd one-off problem.
You could place the phone back-down on a surface a marble wouldn’t roll on, and 20 minutes later it’d magically be on the floor. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. I can’t believe they’re still doing that (how, though?! And why?!!)
Number 1 being moving between two system is difficult. The biggest obstacle is WhatsApp. And Meta / Facebook / Zuck is making it hard for people to switch. While it is not yet a thing in US, WhatsApp has 2B user world wide. And their life lives on WhatsApp. Less of an issue if you are on Line, KaKaoTalk and WeChat.
Number 2 is choice of phones. Android is basically Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy and Chinese Brands. I don't even think Pixel has double digit market share and Google Pixel isn't available everywhere. Their distribution channel is still appalling 10 years later. Making it pretty much the choice of Samsung or Chinese Brands.
These two obstacles are there before user could even make a choice and compare.
At one point I really thought Microsoft could get back into the game of Mobile. But after many years of waiting it doesn't seems that is a direction they want to go to.
I think the iPhone 17 coming later next month won' wobble. So that is one problem solved.
In the long game it seems we can better count on "Apple can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
An underrated question. The answer of course is twofold:
* Paternalism (Apple believes users are too stupid to be trusted to control their devices, and no amount of "I really know what I'm doing" confirmations could change that)
* Apple's biggest fear is being disintermediated by Google or Meta, the way WeChat did to phone manufacturers in China. An ability to side-load an app could allow a foothold for a powerful competitor who could wean you off of all their lock-in features in favor of an experience that would tie into a competing ecosystem.
I prefer iPhone for a miriad of little things. Can't name one particular thing, but it's just constant annoyance, when I have to use Android. I probably could write a list of 100 items, if I'd care to document it all.
That said, after Apple started drinking AI juice, I don't want to deal with it anymore. Another major annoyance with iPhones is that they ditched touch ID. Face ID just doesn't work with me at all, it's like 30% of success rate, absolutely terrible. My last phone was iPhone SE, but new models switched to this Face ID, and that's a real deal breaker for me. I even considered buying few iPhone SE phones, while they're still selling at the stores and keep them for later use, but that seems weird and they'll get obsolete with software updates anyway.
I switched to Arch on desktop and I'm going to switch to GrapheneOS on my Pixel (native Pixel Android is absolutely terrible experience, GrapheneOS is bad, but everything else is just worse).
The single thing that solidifys it for me is that every Android device I have ever used has suffered from noticeable micro stuttering.
Their current top of the line TV device drops an entire video frame every couple of seconds while watching 60fps content, cause very noticeable jerking.
It’s good Android has stable 120Hz then. But if you are happy overpaying for a mediocre phone, that’s your right. I did it once. I’m not planning to do it ever again.
Happy to know which one you have used then because all the ones I have used in the past from Google, OnePlus and Xiaomi have been rock solid.
It’s simple my current iPhone 13 is the second worst phone I have ever owned after the 3S I had a decade before. It’s also the most expensive in a very Apple-like fashion.
iOS is a sorry mess. It manages to be both annoyingly limited and awfully buggy.
The non Pro phone is 60Hz despite being more than 1000€ here. I wish it was a joke but Apple ripoff knows no limit sadly. Meanwhile, most competitors phones half that price have 120Hz.
With an iPhone, when you click on an input field, the on-screen keyboard pops up, and you can type right away.
On an android (latest samsung flagship), the keyboard shows up but is frozen for a second before you can type.
I feel this and I’m guessing iOS is a lot more closer to the hardware, while android runs on top of Java, so there is more to process. Maybe its just me.
This must be a glitch particular to Samsung phones. I use flagship Google Pixel phones and have NEVER witnessed such a lag. I tap on an input field with my left thumb, immediately the keyboard shows up, and I immediately smash any letter with my right thumb and it does register it. So, blame Samsung, not Android.
I am not too surprised though. Samsung has a reputation for bloating their Android stack with junk.
Yes, I’m used to this too. But lately on my 13 mini, there is a slight delay between the keyboard showing and it registering key presses. I would say it misses the first key press 60% of the time when the keyboard pops up…
The keyboard pops up, but is not responsive right away. This very thing happened today on my work phone (which has a bunch of MS defender/enterprise policies and apps managed by the company, forced background app updates etc, which could explain this) but I recall it also being a regular thing with all Samsung flagships I've had over the years. It's the feeling of a very slight delay (it could be a matter of as low as 200 ms) for important components which are operating-system controlled, such as the on-screen keyboard. It feels laggy, as if an app or a background process impacts the responsiveness of low level OS features.
On iOS, this was never something I had to experience. Slow apps are killed, iOS is brutal in this regard, but it protects the core OS-level components such as the keyboard. Try it out, load a few apps and try switching between them, where one of them had the keyboard uplled up. This is something regular users will likely never feel, but if you've been around since amiga 500, you'll definitelly feel it.
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I can also just plug my Pixel into my Linux machine (I think I needed some other program to do this on Mac, bit it's still easy enough; can't comment on windows) and drag and drop photos, videos, ebooks whatever onto the device.
This is huge for me as I work at a location with no BYOD WiFi and poor (very low bandwidth) connection speeds so I often download YT videos for offline listening later. Also worth mentioning VLC is really good on Android and merely OK on iOS.
Also very important when you're low on storage from photos, you can unload them with no hassle.
I can't do the same with my iPhone; even when I can mount it successfully, its always an arcane directory structure in DCIM sorted by date or something.
This is HUGE for me. I cannot understate how much utility I get from this alone.
1. If the phone is bare. If you have a case (or a magnetic wallet like mine) it is stable. Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.
2. There is a filter 'not in an album' which would do what you want. The library view is the equivalent of "All Mail" in Gmail. In newer versions, this is a distinct view - they are moving albums, automatically generated collections and search to be a primary interface.
3. Both WebKit and Mozilla have said they consider the local access variant of that API to be harmful, since they do not have an adequately prominent way to surface and manage that you've given a web application permanent access to sensitive directories and files, potentially in the background via service workers. Both do support the origin private filesystem variant. Are there productivity apps direct filesystem access would be useful for other than IDEs?
> Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.
If the renders out there are correct, it seems the camera modules will still stick out beyond the camera bar for some reason, so I'm not sure it won't wobble-- though it does look like the issue will be reduced
Gotta love it, open up the comment section about a new Pixel 10 phone, and have to scroll through a massive comment chain of what, 200? 300? comments that aren't related to or addressing the article in any way.
Which phone brand did you use where it was falling apart after a year? The rest of your comment sounds like you're saying you preferred the iPhone because it takes the option of customizability away from you entirely, instead of simply sticking to the level of customization on Android that worked for you.
> When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable
My experience with the Pixel 7 Pro is due to the very pronounced camera bump and the rounded edges, the phone would slide off tables with problematic frequency, to the point that mine just lives in its bike mount case full time now.
I have an iPhone 15 Pro. I am a semi regular Pixel user as well. I prefer the iPhone by a mile.
1. Mine sits flat too. It's in a rugged case.
2. You don't know how to use Photos properly. You create collections from the pool and name them. You can create folders as well. In fact it actually does that automatically now.
3. There's literally a files app and filesystem abstraction on iOS. I use it for moving stuff around all the time.
Add one gain:
1. All my photos are in real files in Photos.app on my desktop within seconds of me taking them. I do not have my files held ransom behind a web interface. Edits and folders are transparently replicated between both devices. When I back up my mac I have a copy of everything.
And a total loss:
Post processing on both devices for images is terrible so I use a dedicated camera.
A counterpoint: google intentionally broke the ability to backup photos in Google Photos.
Yes, takeout sort of exists, but it doesn't work. If you sort pictures into albums, you get duplicates of each photo for every album. So one copy in the automatic year album; one copy for each album you have put a photo into. My 80gb of photos triples in size, and oh, sometimes downloads fail on the zips they put them into. And since I use a mac, who has 600gb of free disk to download and extract the zips for my dedup script to run.
Additionally, they intentionally broke their api (well, just disabled it... but only for most users; it seems to still be available for Microsoft) to do incremental backup. tada!
I like Apple photos in this regard on the mac. If you have the storage, you can just set it to download full copies automatically, now all my photos are stored locally on my mac almost as soon as I take the photo on my phone.
All google needs to do is make a desktop app and allow automatic download.
1 - Not deprecate the api that allowed people to run incremental backups. They took positive action to intentionally break this. If they feel the need to break the api for ginned-up security excuses, provide a working solution for incremental backup.
2 - Fix takeout not to be entirely broken and hostile to users on 2 axes: usability and reliability. Usability: emit photos once only with a separate json specifying group memberships. Like, you know, competent engineers. Because that's how they store it internally.
2a - Either (i) fix whatever brokenness in their system regularly causes zip downloads to fail; or (ii) figure out or build a reliable alternate solution. Forcing users to wait hours to a day or two to access zips that they can't download is nothing more than a symptom of total disdain for their users while checking a compliance checkbox.
> "When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders."
Are you using the native application called "Files"? I tried to add photos to album via the GooglePhotos application but it will not create a new folder, right?
also this:
> "web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files."
Can you share which web apps are you using? Or do you create your own web apps to work on your local files?
Thanks in advance, I'm trying to improve the photo management on the pixel because I want to create a simple way to back them up on my NAS but I'm still struggling.
I switched from Android to iOS a few years ago. I used to be deep into Android customization - custom ROMs, custom icon packs, etc. But today, I feel that iOS and Android offer pretty all the features that I could ever want.
My deciding factors when I switched:
- iOS UI animations are significantly better
- access to iMessage
- Apple got around to adding their version of "always on display"
- I turn the vast majority of notifications off, so Android's better notification management stopped mattering to me
- It felt like Google kept bending Android towards iOS anyway (camera app, moving away from the 3 button navigation)
I don't like Reduce Motion as it still forces you to wait through the half second of delay while it slowly fades things. I just want all animations deleted to avoid delaying the action itself. You used to be able to do this on a jailbroken phone by setting the global animation duration to be like zero or something, but of course Apple basically won the war on us "users" having any control on the devices we buy from them, or should I say, 'license the privilege of using'?
I think for most people its just whatever you are used to. That said I can't stand iPhone. My wife also switched to Android after being jealous of some features on my phone.
I have an iPhone because at the time I bought it I liked the size (Mini 13) and it's fine. Before that I had some Android phone and it was fine too.
I've never understood the strong emotions people have attached to these things.
About the only thing I'm looking forward to when I upgrade my phone in a couple of years is getting a better camera. Phones were pretty exciting for a while, but now? It feels like a mature segment and not much is changing anymore.
> I think for most people its just whatever you are used to.
Or in the US, it's whatever your family and/or circle of friends use, RCS or not. iMessage lock in is real (along with Facetime, Airdrop, Apple Pay, etc.)
The biggest selling point of an iPhone for me is the easy connection with my Mac and the consistency between them. If it weren't for that I'd strongly consider a pixel
As a, mostly, happy Android user since the HTC Magic in 2010 or 2009, the one thing I really wish they could fix (but I suspect it would never be possible) is the extremely confusing thing with intents and apps opening as views in other apps. Like when my mail app opens a PDF it looks like I am now in the PDF app and after reading for a while I completely forget that I am actually still in the mail app, and then I go BACK and instead of ending up in my PDF library view as I expected I am suddenly in my mail app. Or when I look at the running apps list there can sometimes look like I have two PDF viewers or two browsers running since some other apps used intents to open views from those apps that now exist in parallel with the real apps.
Somehow that manages to surprise and confuse me almost every day. In desktop operating systems, and, I belive, in iOS, there is no need for such thing? Opening a PDF from a mail application usually just opens the PDF viewer as its own application, or it is embedded in some nice way that does not make the entire mail app suddenly look like a PDF viewer app instead.
Unfortunately they can probably never fix that because app lifecycle and intents are connected to everything and a good fix for this would probably break everything.
It's interesting that this feels awkward to you, because when apps don't function this way it feels broken and odd to me. When I tap a PDF attachment in an email I expect the back button to go back to the email I was just viewing, not the list of PDFs on my phone. If I wanted to view all the PDFs on my device, I would start at the PDF viewer and tap into PDFs from there.
I wonder what experience made this feel more awkward for you (and conversely, why it feels more natural for me). What a weird/complex world we live in!
I kind of agree and see what you mean, but what I described happen often that I forget where I came from and have no idea that the PDF I read was opened from some other app.
It's part of what I mentioned in another comment, that BACK button can feel random. "Did I open this PDF from within the PDF viewer or from some other app? What app?" Instead of the BACK button having a predictable, known, function, it depends on some hidden state.
I agree so much. I get why: "Designers" consider plastic to be low-class, metal is radio-opaque, so that leaves glass as the only option even though it has zero functional advantages over plastic (glass is heavier and more fragile).
Imagine if it was a panel of plastic, and that you could easily replace it if it got too scuffed up.
A mystery about Apple is that some of its software are ridiculously bad. iTunes sync was one of them. Another example is removing iCloud sync used to wipe out the content on the disconnected devices. Screen Time is pretty much unusable. It's really hard to batch update photos in iphone. Heck, it's even hard to batch move app icons on iphone screen.
What good is optimizing for the open web when the Pixels lack a sufficiently fast processor for bloated web pages. Haven't tried the 10 yet, but Pixel 9 is sufficiently slow that you can see tearing artifacts when you scroll. This is at least two or three years behind the modern Qualcomm in Samsungs let alone Apple.
I think photos on the pixel are messed up (long-time iphone user who switched for the pixel 9 folding pro), you have all these folders that by default don't get backed up, it took me ages to understand I had to go in settings and manually check all new apps that I install for photos to back them up (and display them in my gallery). It's never clear what's the "offline" vs "online" view of google photos (and why there are other google photos apps).
With a bit of fiddling I can finally backup my whatsapp photos, but oh boy why aren't the default saner?
For Chrome, it's inconsistancies after inconsistancies. First, I couldn't read PDFs from there, now I can but I can't edit the URL when I edit a PDF, also no built-in app to read PDF, it's crazy.
As someone who started on Android but switched to Apple many many many years ago, I still find things like this that are quibbles for me, but in general my preference for Apple is because of security/privacy, battery life management, performance, update longevity, and hardware quality.
That said, I think it's worth noting that #1 hardly bothers anyone because most people put their phone in a case, and that can quickly resolve this. #2 isn't a real problem, because you can absolutely sort your photos into folders, they're call albums though, and this is a first-class workflow in the Photos app since they switched from iPhoto to Photos about 6-7 years ago. For #3, I don't want my web browser having file system access via an API and I don't use Chrome.
> This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
The thing is that web apps are always a worse experience if you have native apps. Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps. For Apple devices you can always find a top quality native app to use, so web apps aren't any concern. The only people I have met who want to use apps in their browser on MacOS are Linux refugees who were attracted by the "specs" of Apple devices. It's a bit like buying an electric car and lamenting the lack of a gearbox. You don't need it anymore.
I am using mostly web apps. Not because web apps are inherently better or more convenient, but because ublock origin on firefox allow me to disable any third party tracking.
File System Access API has some serious issues. To quote Mozilla's position on the topic
> There's a subset of this API we're quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read/write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user's local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.
I think most users would probably be better off without this proposal.
It sounds like this would prevent users from backing up their own data, which is hard with localStorage and sessionStorage, and instead having to rely on the site owner.
I think a lot of developers think like you, but most users of phones don't.
I don't think most people care enough to put time into organizing their photos, but would rather the phone or backend AI just find the photo they want by searching for it.
I'm not sure if most users even have a strong conception of "file" or really understand what data is physically on their phone vs "the cloud".
(The symmetry thing though probably does bother a lot of people regardless of their level of technical expertise.)
Well I’m a very technical person, and sorting photos into folders seems like a colossal waste of time to me, when I can also just search for a thing on the image, the place or time when or where it was taken, a person or animal on it; I could add it to an album, star it, add tags to it; that should be more than enough sorting facilities, I think.
Same. In fact, I don't organize much of anything that's digital, photos or files. I just use search, it's pretty good these days, and with OCR even better.
Just give me a big flag structure with robust search and I'm happy. Heck I don't even bother to organize or layout the apps on my home screen. quicker for me to search with spotlight than scroll around and find what I want.
None of those things matter to me. What does matter to me is that to get stuff off my iPhone I have to do a weird sync process and/or use iCloud. Infact, a lot of my issues with the iPhone stem from refusing to use iCloud. Can’t use Apple Pay or FindMy.
For now I use Airdrop to move photos from my iPhone to the computer but it’s very error prone and fails 1/5 times and way more often if you try to do it with more than 30 images/videos. Is this situation better in the Pixel?
Regarding the second point, while I gladly agree the current iOS Photos app is a mess, doesn't it make sense to have photos in multiple albums? If I went on holiday to Brazil and made a nice photo of my son there, I'd like that photo to be in both the "Brazil holiday" and "Beautiful photos of my children" albums, not just in one folder.
My first smartphone was a cheap Android and then I switched to iPhone about eight years ago and mostly haven't looked back.
That said, Apple's behaviour around locking out wearables from key system APIs does have me reconsidering. I found the inconsistent sync and notifications on my Fitbit to be a pretty big source of annoyance and if that continues on the new Pebble I would consider switching back to Android just for that.
I think the EU or the US (one of them) is trying to force Apple to give third parties access to the things Apple Watch has access to, so there might be relief coming for one of those continents (one assumes that the petulant child that is Apple's leadership will, after appealing to the maximum, region-gate any remedy, exactly as they did for third-party app stores in EU).
They had that in iPhotos and dropped it in Photos. I missed it for about a month and then I got over it. I'd never sort my photos now, I can just search them or find them on the map.
If you want to sort photos by folder, no one stops you from using other apps. Google Photos itself is available.
Very, very few people want to spend time sorting all their photos, it's a fool's errand.
2/3 of your complaints seem to be down to Apple's insistence that filesystems are silly and should be hidden from users. Unless it's iCloud, then show the user 2 identical filesystems and scatter everything at random between the two. Really, it's a write-only filesystem. Apps will constantly save things there, but god help you if you ever want to find something.
> 3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
Safari has support File System Access API since 2022. Maybe you haven't kept up but Apple has done a 180° on PWAs in the past few years
For me, it is the ability to tether my laptop to an iPhone to use the data service on my iPhone. This alone made me give up on Windows laptops and Android phones. Sure, you can tether Windows laptops to Android phones. But, it is a slow and cumbersome process. I use this functionality frequently enough that it was worth it to switch platforms over it.
When I switched off Android >5 years ago, even then, it was as simple as turning on the hotspot and connecting to it. It was no more cumbersome than any other wifi network. This was with a Pixel device and Linux laptop, and I am sure it works on Windows too.
You have obviously not compared it to how fast a Mac connects to an iphone. There is no need to turn on the hotspot. You can leave that on on the iphone. Just open your MacBook and it quickly connects to your iphone if it does not find a standard wifi.
I am very familiar with the Android hotspot feature. I used it for years. It works OK. But, it is not as fast as the Mac/iphone combo. Not even close. I am speaking from extensive experience.
It's the same now. Turn on hotspot->Connect to it on the PC. After that one step it's in your saved networks and you're good to go.
The only difference is Apple will do this automatically for you. If you open up your mac, and don't have network, you get a little pop up that says "use iPHone's connection?" and will turn on hotspot and connect automatically. Nice, but hardly any different or time saving really.
A more precise way to put it: Apple is focused on customer control, and will fight whoever tries to touch what they see as Apple's exclusive customers.
This has privacy benefits against tracking agents, reduces functionalities against third party services (Amazon, Spotify, Google, third party payment etc.), and forbids whole use cases (e.g. non Apple backup service).
As a customer one can be happy with the privacy windfall, but we've seen again and again that it's not Apple's focus per se.
Of course it's a matter of taste, personality, culture, etc.
That's why flame wars about anything don't make sense, whether it is about Operating Systems, browsers, gaming platforms, text editors, phones, cars, coffee, or whatever else you can come up with to arbitrarily argue about.
I’d love to use the android phone, as they seem to have much better and actually useful AI integration, but they are not phones but “advertising company tracking devices with tacked-on end user functionality”. Similarly, Chrome is not User Agent, it’s Corporation Agent.
I like that I can run whatever software I want on it.
I do not like that it is overly locked down without rooting. But still way more open than iOS, regardless of what the mobile phone lawsuits from Epic decided.
To your 3: On iOS Safari, I can use extensions. That includes adblockers (uBlock origin lite) and others like Vinegar (allows youtube videos to play in background while display is off). No ads boosts productivity more than the file API - what would I need that for?
As someone who used Android for years and only recently switched to iOS the lack of file system access is really the only dealbreaker. It's damn annoying. The hardware is reliable and solid but why do we get such a crippled operating system ?
I knew apple wasn't for me when I tried to sync and backup my stuff on something that wasn't iCloud. Its just plain unusable if you don't want to be fully entrenched in their cloud services.
Isn't that photo specific backup rather than general backups? Last I tried, Dropbox on iPhone cannot backup any files owned by other apps automatically. You'd have to export it manually to Dropbox.
Edit; It looks like this is possible on iOS for apps to access other app's file sandboxes with a somewhat recent iOS update. MobiusSync (Syncthing client for iOS) has beta support for it. But I see no mention of Dropbox adding support for anything similar
It’s true that I have some app data being stored in iCloud, but it is VERY within the free tier space limit. But depends on the app, many apps support Dropbox themselves and I store the data in Dropbox for those.
FYI rumour has it the iPhones about to be released will have the same sort of full width camera module so the “wobble” won’t be an issue. Not that it ever was for me before, I have a case on it.
For #2, on iOS, you can move photos to shared albums and then safely delete them from library while retaining them in shared album. Shared albums use iCloud space, so it’s not ideal.
Assuming you mean the rest of the Apple ecosystem this is kind of like saying most countries speak French because all the road signs are in French. Someone who doesn't have an iPhone doesn't necessarily have twenty other Apple devices around.
I’m a former Android user (bought a Nexus One on release!) that switched to iOS many years ago and I don’t miss Android as much as I thought I might.
To me the biggest thing to reflect on is how depressing it is that we must all fit ourselves into one of two boxes. My kingdom for a flourishing mobile OS ecosystem where we can all find the exact combination that scratches our itches.
I've never used a phone case. I don't understand why they make these things so small and then everyone just slaps on an extra couple mm. What's the point? If we're making them bigger anyway, at least use that space for more battery.
I run caseless too and would be willing to sacrifice a few mm for better durability and no bump. Plastic is fine too. Bring back designs like the iPhone 3GS which were curved to fit your palm and if dropped would just bounce and tank it!
Remember soft touch plastics? Grippy and didn't waste all the space of a case? Then some dingleberry marketer decided slippery metals and glass were "premium" and braindead phone reviewers happily parroted that crap and now everyone buys several mm thick cases made of soft touch plastics to cover up the "premium" materials they bought. Sigh.
I do. My HTC Amaze had nice soft-touch plastic on top of an aluminum back, was slim (for the era) and grippy. Also had a Galaxy Note (forget which one) that had a leathery soft touch back, was very nice. The physical design of phones definitely peaked long ago...
> When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders.
This is exactly the sort of thing a lot of smartphone users (including Android users) won’t do.
The point of post-PC devices is to actually be post-PC. For many, futzing around with files isn’t the answer.
For instance I gave up doing this to my email years ago. It was very liberating. If I want something, I search. I can save searches I frequently perform.
iOS’s Photos app isn’t perfect but it allows me to find stuff just fine. I can search for places (“Seattle”), for things (“bicycle”) or even combinations (“plants Vancouver”). It’s pretty neat. And you can actually add stuff to folders (‘albums’) if you really want to.
> local files
iOS has them too. There are apps which allow you to access and manage local files — including the built in file manager. It’s not as laissez-faire as Android, though. Even the file manager has come a long way, and it’s improving further in iOS 26.
tl;dr — iOS isn’t for everyone, but it’s not like it’s not well-designed with a certain audience in mind.
If it was the Pixel 6, I can attest that the 6 (at least the 6 Pro XL) had issues with the fingerprint scanner. I had no issues with my 5 series (when the fingerprint scanner was on the back) but the 6 series always gave me trouble. I'd wager a guess the reason why was because it was the first generation with an under-display fingerprint scanner and they hadn't yet worked out the quirks.
I've since upgraded to a 9 series and it works flawlessly so I can assume they've figured it out some time since then.
These are all extremely minor issues. 2 and 3 are not even relevant to 99% of normal users. Very few people want to spend time manually organizing photos like that, and albums do essentially the same thing. The wobbling thing is a non-issue. It doesn't even wobble unless you're pounding down on the phone on a table.
I find it kinda scary that this is marketed as "zoom" and "recovering details", when the reality is that it quite literally makes stuff up and hopes you won't notice the difference. You and I know that it's completely fake, but we (or at least I) don't even know how much is faked, and probably 99% of people won't even know that it's fake at all.
How long until someone gets arrested because an AI invented a face that looks like theirs? Hopefully lawyers will be know to throw out evidence like that, but the social media hivemind will happily ruin someone's life based on AI hallucinations.
It becomes misleading to even keep calling it "Zoom".
More like "Interpolation" with a pinch of hallucination.
I can see this becoming a thing though, it is after all the mythical 'zoom & enhance' from csi...
I actually think it's a cool feature, but it shouldn't be called "zoom". "Zoom & Enhance" would make sense. The UI should also have a clear visual indicator of which modes are pure optical zoom, which (if any) are substantially just cropping the image, and which are using genAI.
At a minimum, you have demosaicing, dark frame subtraction, and some form of tone mapping just to produce anything you'd recognise as an photo. Then to produce a half-way acceptable image will involve denoising, sharpening, dewarping, chromatic aberration correction - and that just gets us up to what was normal at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays without automatic bracketing and stacking, digital image stabilisation, rolling shutter reduction, and much more, you're going to have pretty disappointing phone pics.
I suspect you're trying to draw a distinction with the older predictable techniques of turning sensor data into an image when compared to the modern impenetrable ones that can hallucinate. I know what you're getting at, but there's not really a clear point where one becomes the other. You can consider demosaicing and "super-res zoom" as both types of super-resolution technique intended to convert large amounts of raw sensor data into image that's closer to the ground truth. I've even seen some pretty crazy stuff introduced by an old fashioned Lanczos-resampling based demosaicing filter. Albeit, not Ryan Gosling[0].
Of course, if you don't like any of this, you can configure phones to produce RAW output, or even pick up a mirrorless, and take full control of the processing pipeline. I've been out of the photography world for a while so I'm probably out of date now, but I don't think DNGs can even store all of the raw data that is now used by Apple/Google in their image processing pipelines. Certainly, I never had much luck turning those RAW files into anything that looked good. Apple have ProRAW which I think is some sort of hybrid format but I don't really understand it.
By my understanding, demosaicing almost always just "blurs" the photo slightly, reducing high-frequency information. Tone mapping is unavoidable, invisible to most people, and usually doesn't change the semantic information within an image (the famous counterexample is of course The Dress). Phone cameras in recent years do additional processing to saturate, sharpen, HDR, etc., and I find those distasteful and will happily argue against them. But AI upscaling/enhancement is a step further, and to me feels like a very big step further. It's the first time that an automatic processing step has a very high risk of introducing new (and often incorrect) semantic information that is not available in the original image, the classic example being the samsung moon.
It's just crazy that demo they show, imagine the vehicle is actually a truck but you zoom in and it becomes a porsche...
conspiracy tangent, try to take a picture of something you're not supposed to and your phone won't let you ha, well money could be an example which I get the reason (it's printers but that idea)
Agreed, I was recently looking through photos from my Pixel 5 and realized that it had "helpfully" modified an image of a bunny, making the fur look wavy and adding a weird faded-out eye on the body. On top of that, it applies skin smoothing to every photo, even with the beauty filter disabled. It irked me enough that I'm looking for a new third-party camera app. Despite using exclusively Pixel/Nexus phones for the last 12 years, I might abandon them entirely once this phone dies.
Agreed, not a fan. The world has enough fakery in it already without people accidentally generating even more (I assume quite a lot of casual users will mistake this zoom for zoom in the traditional sense).
It's giving "Samsung fake moon". If generative AI is going to make up details why bother zooming in, you could just ask to make up a whole AI slop picture.
This does seem to actually, ya know, do the upscaling though instead of clumsily faking it. Like yeah it's AI with AI failure modes but upscaling models are quite good and have less 'weird artistic' liberties than imagegen models.
The other thing that was annoying me with a cheap phone I bought, it was applying this generic surface to your face so your face didn't have pores but it looked wrong.
Unfortunately these new phones don't fix the main issue with the Pixel: the hardware.
The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.
This affects everything, pixels just don't last nor have great battery life for this reason.And the big issue is they aren't even much cheaper anymore.
I like GrapheneOS, but my pixel just randomly stopped working after being laggy and having the worst battery life on cellular (less than 2h SOT with a 5000mah battery)
It's hard justifying buying another pixel after such a horrible experience, were it not for GrapheneOS I would never consider buying a pixel in the first place.
Heck even the camera isn't that good anymore, most photos are just gray, and the hardware is also very lacking.
>The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.
This is the one thing I don't understand. How many people actually need the top end SoCs that other flagships come with. Phones have been more than fast enough for a long time now. Other than playing some games with tough visuals mid range SoCs are still more than powerful enough.
Complaints about battery life and the modems are fair (though I never had complaints about my Pixel 7 Pro battery life until it failed).
I also found that the photos from my Pixel were by far the best I'd ever seen from a phone. Every phone I had prior was only used for quick snapshots, if I was expecting to want to take something decent I would make sure to pack my mirrorless, with the Pixel I could actually trust it to take an acceptable photo.
It matters when the phone is supposed to last more than two years.
Poor battery life is a symptom of a slow CPU, things that don't require full performance on a snapdragon 8 elite take double the time in a pixel while needing full turbo performance.
Don't get me started on the terrible modem efficiency.
These issues are there since the Pixel 6, and Google clearly just doesn't care.
I used a Fairphone 4 (a clearly underpowered phone already at release) for almost 4 years and it still performed just as well. This issue is overblown.
The Pixel 7 Pro is essentially 3 years old and I notice next to zero difference compared to my Galaxy S25. I argue for most people they wouldn't notice a speed difference between even a 3 year old mid-range SoC and today's flagship SoCs.
Poor battery life has much more to do with the size of the battery and how the CPU speed is managed in software. Today's SoCs, even mid range ones could suck a battery to zero in short order. At the end of the day, even if you have a newer SoC built on a more efficient smaller process node they turn around and run it at a higher clock speed and you lose the benefit.
5000mah is the standard battery size for XL phones.
Still the pixels battery falls apart immediately on cellular, while heating up like crazy.
Have you used your phone for navigation while on cellular?
My pixel would be dead in two hours with this.
Even just normal browsing on cellular data would get it to heat up and kill the battery life.
I don't personally care about top performance at all (I've been a happy user of Fairphones for several years). But as phones start doing more and more AI tasks (from camera post-processing to computer vision tasks, and now LLMs) the added processing power does make a difference in how usable and snappy the phone feels. For most users it's not about being constantly fast (like for gaming or for long AI tasks), but for being able to handle peak load more smoothly.
My last two Pixel phones - 6a and 7a - were both "recalled" with battery issues. I got almost a complete refund for both, and got keep the phone (my 7a died a few months after the recall, 6a is still going strong).
I got a 9a to replace them just because I didn't want to have to deal with learning iPhone, but I'm fully expecting the 9a to fail with a similar issue so looking at buying an iPhone soon as a backup so I can get up to speed.
Both my 4a an 6a got the battery nerf update. I had no idea this impacted the 7a as well. I prefer Pixels for Android Development but my trust in Google is at an all time low.
>12. Restrictions apply. Some data is not transmitted through VPN.... See https://g.co/pixel/vpn for details.
Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?
On the positive side it lists a 24+ hour battery life!! This is huge for me!! ..but it has a footnote, as well
> 6. Battery life depends upon many factors and usage of certain features will decrease battery life. Actual battery life may be lower. Over time, Pixel software will manage battery performance to help maintain battery health as your battery ages. See https://g.co/pixel/battery-tests and https://g.co/pixel/batteryhealth for details.
I like my phone more, but battery life on hers is way better to the point I regret buying mine, it barely lasted a day out when on vacations, and I'm not a super heavy phone user, but look for restaurants, open maps, take pictures, ask Gemini stuff and I'd be at 50% by the time she was at 75.
> Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?
I can't speak to exactly what data doesn't go through their VPN but I know carrier apps tend to not play nice with VPNs, especially the Google Fi app (as it relies on its connection and what IP its on to coordinate switching between their various carrier contracts and that seems to break under a VPN).
And also seemingly Wi-fi calling has been problematic over VPN for as long as I can remember so that's usually a safe bet for exclusion.
I am considering switching to Google, I am getting annoyed by Apple more and more, but the critical feature for me is AI assistant.
I am the first to criticize the LLM hype and I do not expect much out of them - but the fact that I cannot get Siri to turn a single light in my room instead of all of them is just FUBAR from my perspective. Siri is such garbage at this point that the gap between it and ChatGPT app is unbelievable. I can't even get it to reliably call people in my contacts, meanwhile my 4 year old can talk to ChatGPT in Croatian. Google Gemini seems to be on par so their assistant should be at least semi competent.
I switched to the previous google phones (9) for the folding phone, even though I'm not too much of a fan of the android experience I cannot switch back to Apple right now because:
* the AI integration on google phones is just amazing
* the folding phone has insane screen estate on-demand anywhere any time, I wouldn't be able to go back to a single screen
> the AI integration on google phones is just amazing
Genuinely curious, what's your favorite aspect of AI on the Pixel? I'm on a 9 pro, coming from a Pixel 6 and a Pixel 3 before it. I don't think I'm ever using AI on this thing, so I'm interested in hearing where it turns up for you.
What do you like about the AI integration? I'm considering leaving iPhone just to have basically native chatGPT integration, assuming gemini works that way, and assuming it can read and write to my calendar and access other personal data.
The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden. eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(
>The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden.
Seems to be US only? iPhone also has the same thing, so it's probably something that US carriers are pushing, not something from OEMs.
>eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(
If this is real then it is very unfortunate as multiple countries use crypto SIM cards as national identity, a popular more ergonomic alternative to a separate identity card that need a USB reader and computer. They play themselves out of markets.
better than what they did with pixel[6-9] where they shipped a dual injection crap to save 0.00001c on production and if you traveled 5x and swapped local SIMs, the tray just crumbled and you had to buy another for $20 on ebay because they don't stock it or replace under warranty.
GrapheneOS found a way to provide eSIM support, but it depends on installing a patched version of Google's proprietary LPA app. I don't know how future-proof that is..
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets. At least round the corners or add little ramps. I guess this is what happens when design folk are allowed to trump engineers.
> This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.
I'm interested to hear more about this, because it's always interesting to understand how other people interact with things who have different use cases or usage models.
How tight are your jeans, and how do you fit anything else in your pocket if something ~1in thick doesn't fit comfortably (without having to force the pocket open in a way that would require a "ramp")?
Are you using your back pockets? I have never once understood the utility of those; I have no desire to sit on anything in my pockets.
A lot of people buy clothes for their looks with minimal weighting towards functionality (or rather that is the functionality). If you've got a body in reasonable nick then tight pants can look good.
The traditional solution to poor pockets is a purse or bag. Phones are interesting in that they can demand attention and that they are probably the most used item that people carry around with them. Thus people compromise their lines/comfort to actually use the faster accessibility of pockets. Probably explains the popularity of ridge wallets and key wallets too.
I don't wear tight jeans and I've come to loathe having to put my phone in my pants pocket. If you're walking around a lot, the feeling is just annoying, you can feel it pressing on your leg the whole time. When I sit down, the bunching feeling is even worse, so I immediately put the phone on the table.
This wasn't an issue when phones had 4.7"-5"-inch screens. Nowadays the phone goes into the cargo pocket if I'm wearing shorts, or back pocket if I'm walking.
I've got a single short that does that (re: bunching feeling) and it's just because the pocket isn't deep enough for the phone to sit flat against my thigh.
I'd rather choose my shorts more carefully in the future than switch to a smaller phone (that might still have the same problem if not tiny) just because of that.
I also do back pocket when walking, swap pockets when sitting down. Do you also worry that one day forgetting to switch will get you into a lot of trouble? :)
Not that I'm trying to justify the prices, but I'm interested by the take that a phone should cost less than a computer. To me, the phone has an actual camera and is significantly smaller (and, if you are talking desktop, has a screen) so should cost more for the same sort of power. Of course, there are phones and computers at all different prices so it's hard to compare.
It's smaller, so it should cost less, not more. It's 2025, miniaturization isn't that expensive. It's less screen and less battery than a laptop, cooling the CPU can be done passively because it's so low-powered, it has less RAM and less flash and fewer ports and a simpler mechanical design, no keyboard or touchpad... it's a slab of glass with a plastic/aluminum case containing a PCB, battery, and camera.
That is... not how the physical world works. The laws of physics hate the large and the small. Or perhaps less glibly parameters do not scale equally. Making a phone is more difficult and expensive than making a laptop for the same reason a 30ft tall human would break their own legs attempting to walk.
To put it another way: A thread rolling screw machine can churn out 12mm/0.5" bolts all day long for a penny each. But if you want to make tiny screws for small pocket watches you're going to pay more (relatively) even though that tiny screw contains way less metal than the larger bolt and the operation is similar. A .00001" error in the larger bolt threads doesn't matter. That much error makes the tiny screw completely unusable. Making a thread-forming die with less than .00001" error is very difficult and expensive and the one for smaller screws accumulates error faster relative to allowable error so must be replaced more often. The steel is just as hard in both bolts but the form of the tiny one is proportionally much thinner.
And similarly if you want a 6m/12ft long bolt you are going to pay a lot more than just the proportional cost of the extra metal because finding machines that can even put that much tool pressure on the dies is not easy. It has to be lifted with a crane. It is just more difficult in every way.
Miniaturization is more expensive. Water and dust proofing is more expensive.
For most things there is a sweet range where cost is lowest and utility highest. Prices go up on either end of that middle ground.
By this logic a Ferrari should cost less than a Toyota Camry because it has less seats and luggage space.
I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.
As a side note, computers DO cost more than phones, in general. You can barely get a graphics card for that price these days, so you’re not really comparing apples to apples if your computer is that cheap.
Well, considering I also made the point that computers range (very roughly, work with me here) from $500 - $3500 depending on how upmarket they are, and phones range from $100 - $1500 depending on how upmarket they are, I can’t make an argument for why they’re more expensive, because they’re not.
I can list a _few_ EXAMPLE reasons for why they cost what they cost though, even if that’s higher than you expect them to cost, but this list is by no means exhaustive so don’t attempt to break them apart detail by detail. Just get the essence of my opinion from these. There’s incredible engineering and design challenges in the competitive market of smart phones, typically making electronics smaller (such as the motherboard) makes them more expensive, not less. Their cameras on phones are FAR better than any on laptops, and my phone has 4 lenses where my laptop has 1. Camera lenses and sensors at the higher end are _expensive_ in a way a laptop keyboard component or other example is not. Phones support many features computers do not (like in the Ferrari example, Toyota corollas don’t have race mode), qi charging, 5G modem, touch screen (some laptops have this but many computers don’t), etc to name a few. Phones these days also tend to be waterproof in a way computers aren’t, another design challenge. The screens need to be way tougher to survive breakage, etc, etc, there’s just so many things that you have to design for in phones that you don’t for computers.
I hope that gives you some idea, and as a side note, it worries me slightly that some of these weren’t at least a little obvious to you. Or maybe they were, and you just wanted to hear my take, and I shouldn’t assume things so uncharitably. Either way, hope that helps.
Well none of those are on par with a Ferrari expense except sometimes the camera. I wasn't asking for ways a specific feature could cost a bit more than the laptop version. Yeah I can come up with those myself, and many of them cut both ways like screens and durability.
And the comparison wasn't all phones and computers, it's phones like the pixel versus a decent baseline computer.
Fair enough. I will say the point of the Ferrari analogy wasn’t to demonstrate that the features would have a similarly astronomical gulf in price between one model and another, it was merely to demonstrate the issue with cherry picking features when talking about price differences. So, none of my examples had to meet a “Ferrari expense” as that wasn’t the purpose of the analogy.
While I mostly agree with you that it is counterintuitive to have mobile costlier than laptop, this year's Pixel Pro models have 16GB RAM. That is better than most entry level laptops on the market right now.
The Pro having more ram than the average entry level laptop doesn't imply very much.
When I search '16gb laptop' on Amazon the first result is $320 and the third result is $220. The first one also has 512GB of storage, and I can upgrade to 24GB of ram and 1TB of storage for only $50. And it has a plenty good CPU with two fast cores and four slow cores.
The upgrade part is especially nasty for phones. Laptops and phones use the same production lines for ram and flash chips, so no price excuses there. And you can fit 2TB into a microSD these days. But if I want 1TB on my Pixel I have to start with a Pro and then add an extra $450.
> It's less screen and less battery than a laptop,
Phones have higher resolution, higher refresh rate, and brighter screens at the price point vs a $1000 laptop. (Also higher density screens are harder to make, 12" 1080p panels cost nothing, phone screens are often bespoke resolutions.)
RAM is the same or higher at the $1k price point - 16GB.
Fewer ports sure, but most ports are USB-C anyway, the cost of the connector is not the expensive part.
The mechanical design I'll push back on as well, phones are expected to put up with a lot more physical abuse than laptops, and also be resistant to dust and water. You can dunk a pixel phone in 3 feet of water for half an hour, good luck doing that with a laptop. As someone who got to watch the ME's sitting next to my team work on making our product water resistant, that process sucks, it takes multiple iterations ($, and time) and it is non-trivial to get right.
Tear downs of the Pixel 10 are obv not available yet, but the estimated BOM for a Pixel 9 is ~$400 USD. Figure ongoing support (7 years!), all the cloud services that come with it, and all the other costs that went into making it (the army of engineers, an entire OS team, all the apps that come with it, etc), the $800 I paid for it isn't half bad.
Edit: Oh and phones also have a modern miracle of an RF stack in them. My phone can hold onto a BT connection across my yard and through 2 brick walls! And they do this with barely any space to but the antennas. Meanwhile laptops can run antennas willy-nilly with the absurd amount of volume they have to work with.
(Apple's Laptops also have really good wireless performance, but the base models aren't trying to support the three generations of cellular protocols and standard that phones do.)
The high resolution is a waste of money. The camera is a waste of money. The number of buttons is small. The issues like a hinge are non existant. The ability to pop out the battery is the kind of complicated thing I would expect from someone competent like a laptop maker.. The lack of Ram slots and now other slots is simplifying.
Really Apple made the game field very simple and its no problem making a perfectly good $50 phone. Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems. Basically forcing you to buy a "middle level" phone that has all the pointless features only a teenager has time/eyes for to get the minimum security updates.
Camera is the main selling point for new phones. It may not be for you, but for most customers, camera performance is the key differentiator.
Modern smartphone camera modules are incredibly high bandwidth. They are hooked up to custom chips that handle everything from video encoding to the massive amount of post-processing it takes to make those tiny sensors output high quality images. Up until the last few years, cameras were regularly held back by the media processing ICs available.
I suggest you look at teardowns of a modern high performance phone. The telephoto lens alone are marvels of engineering that involve a large number of high precision parts, all of which have to stand up to years of horrible abuse unlike anything real professional gear would ever see.
Camera features are pretty much the sole reason why people pay extra for higher end phones.
> Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems.
Google has spent years putting systems in place to allow for longer support periods, they had to write a bunch of abstraction layers first, hardware abstraction not being something Linux is exactly famous for.
Also those small low cost phone manufacturers don't offer lifetime support because they cannot afford to keep engineers and engineering resources around for 7+ years. Have you ever worked on a team trying to support multiple builds of old hardware that use completely different driver stacks? I have, it sucks. After a year people just forget how to even setup a dev environment for the previous version, test hardware breaks down or just gets lost, tooling gets out of date and doesn't work anymore (or has conflicts with newer tooling installed on a dev machine).
Apple can do it because apple controls the entire stack from top to bottom, and because they have an army of engineers devoted to just one thing. Your average Kickstarter Boutique Phone Company has maybe a dozen engineers and they have almost no control over the underlying platform.
> The high resolution is a waste of money.
Once resolutions and refresh rates get higher you can start to do things that make readability better for everyone, but even ignoring those techniques, higher refresh rates feel better, and a wider color gamut makes everything look better.
> The number of buttons is small.
Try making a button survive water, sweat, sun screen (which royally messes up a lot of finishes) and pocket lint some time. Also it has to feel good to press even through a protective case, and it needs to be durable over 5+ years. Again, I've been on teams doing these things, it is not easy. The big phone makers have been doing it for decades now, and they are good at it, but "we've solved it" is also why you don't see large changes in button layouts, shapes, materials, etc, now days.
To give an example of just a volume button - You need to setup a robotic test fixture that presses the button thousands upon thousands of times. This needs to run on each of your engineering revisions that comes in. You hopefully run it on a decent sample size of devices (ideally ones you've sent engineers overseas to pull off the lines directly to avoid the factory choosing golden samples!). Spray the device down with a variety of substances, test again, and you'll need lab managers and engineers to program and run all the different robotic harness tests.
Making quality durable goods is hard. Making a $200 smart phone that'll fall apart in a couple years is easy.
(Now even with all of this, I've had 3 Google made/branded phones that failed due to wide spread hardware issues....)
You are trying to twist if to their favor that the market and not Google specifically is known for hardware problems, recalls and making a camera that 95% of people don't have any use for. What they have is control of Android which allowed them to cancel Android One to build a larger market for the pricing they want using pressure.
Look at what a marvel we can force them to buy for no reason! 80% of them have never made a video intentionally. A great marketing segment.
I had a cemetery of working phones and broken laptops all through past decades. I used laptops for longer than 3 years but I also didn't put them through the pressure a student would and could usually replace parts.
The phone industry is now an oligarchy and prices (and forced feature combinations) are up.
Google's phones are a minor bit player in the market. They have an estimated 4% of US market share. OnePlus was kicking their butts until OnePlus decided to destroy their entire value prop and also laid off their much beloved software team.
But if you want a mid priced phone, go ahead and buy one. A CMF 2 pro has 6 years of security updates, it costs $279.
> 80% of them have never made a video intentionally.
I find that hard to believe. Nearly everyone I know uses their phone cameras heavily. Maybe the stat is true in some strange sense, but 80% of high end premium phone buyers? People paying an extra $200 just for a telephoto lens are never using the camera? The high end is all about camera performance.
> I had a cemetery of working phones and broken laptops all through past decades. I used laptops for longer than 3 years but I also didn't put them through the pressure a student would and could usually replace parts.
I have everything from a Motorola Q9m to an unreleased Windows Mobile 7 (not phone 7!) to an army of LG, Motorola, and Nexus devices.
Phone hardware is generally shite. Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS, that I could barely use the phone anymore due to running out of RAM. Great job OnePlus, great job.
> Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS
Same situation on preinstalled laptops and Android. You are complaining about Google in relation to Microsoft.
Android One was a correction to how their system should work and it wouldn't help their goals to sell $100 phones that are secure, all an older adult would typically want, not particularly engaging for marketers, competing with their flagship phones for people who will pay and accept any quality in pointless toys.
Even their own A series has been a problem for them since it covers what any reasonable person would want (in a flagship eliminating way). So let's restrict the charging bellow the lowest industry standards, etc.
Also Google stuff always lacks SD card slots and have tiny storage. The $250 Motorola can add a $50 1 TB SD Card, which is enough to fit your entire music collection, all of wikipedia, and an offline ad-free routable map of the world from OSM, and still have probably like 700 GB left over for photos/videos. Google meanwhile charges $100 for a 128 GB storage upgrade. Probably because they want to funnel you into their cloud storage, want you to use their online maps/music services, etc.
Phone cameras are also absolute trash anyway, and pulling up some comparisons in Google Photos right now, I'm fairly certain that my Pixel 6a takes obviously worse photos than my Nexus 5x did 10 years ago, even comparing high light for the 6a to low light for the 5x. I'll probably buy a Motorola when my current phone dies because the only ostensible reason to buy a Pixel is the camera. Or I suspect the real big-brained solution lives in the handheld gaming PC space.
They're no less reliable than 128GB cards. The bottleneck is likely going to be whether the phone's filesystem can actually index 1TB worth of files without crashing. No such problems on a real computer.
>Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
As much as I loathe the consumerism of buying the latest phone every year, I realized that if the trade-in value is good enough, it's a pretty good strategy in terms of overall technology spend.
With iPhones, I upgraded every third generation. With Pixels, I went from 3 to 6 to 9, but given that I'm on Google Fi, I get a $450 discount on the phone, and I can get a base Pixel 10 Pro for $217, after trade-in. I got a surprisingly generous trade-in on my Pixel 6 when I bought the 9, and buying the Pixel 3 with Google Fi was pretty cheap too.
The last computer I bought was an M1 Max Macbook Pro w/ 36gb of RAM and a 1TB drive, for $2499, in 2023 (thank you B&H). Hopefully it'll be a long time before I'm paying that much for a phone.
At 126GB storage, which is basically unusable in 2025 and it's a phone you want to last to 2030. This storage bait needs to be made illegal, it literally costs almost nothing to manufacture and exists purely to punish and trick the consumer.
That's beside the point but I don't game on my phone (s22 with 128gb) and constantly have to shuffle storage just for photos, videos and music streaming cache. Storage is so cheap it makes no sense to pay 1,000$ for a device and then be a slave to manually managing it. It's insulting.
I feel the same way about paying more for a phone than for a computer, but is it rational? I'm not sure. Sure you get a smaller screen and a smaller battery, and the phone doesn't have a keyboard and a trackpad (assuming you were referring to a laptop), but does the militarisation make up that difference?
Disclaimer: I'm not really invested in thinking about it carefully. I don't like any of the huge phones available now, and so far I'm getting by with the small phone I have, and buying into the idea of the Framework laptop either means I won't have to replace the whole thing or that I'll just go back to buying refurbished enterprise laptops.
Edit: I see other people have already picked up on the computer/phone cost thought more productively than I did! :)
Pro tip: Buy the second-to-latest generation. Costs half as much and it was literally the best that even billionaires could have purchased just a year ago.
I always amortize the coat of the phone over the months of security updates remaining. Sometimes the last gen is a better deal, on a per month basis, sometimes the new one is only a couple bucks a month more. i dont mind a few more dollars per month.
/s: B-b-b-but if you buy the Pixel 10 Pro Fold you can pay $1799 and, assuming your bank account can only hold amounts $1699 and lower, the amount needed to purchase will overflow at some point in the purchasing process, making it SEEM like you only pay $100 for that new phone!?
Well, minor nit- cell providers offer it for 60% Google’s price to start[0], while locking it into a phone contract that subsidizes it. This is effectively bundling a loan for the hardware with your data plan. That price is more of a down payment on said loan.
[0] actually in the US at least they’ll frequently offer it for “free” with a new plan, that of course locks the phone to said plan.
Yeah, I bought a Pixel 10 Pro 256 GB yesterday. Should have been $1,099. But Google e-mailed me a $150 off coupon code, I got $450 off for being a Google Fi subscriber, plus $100 as a trade-in for my Pixel 6. My actual price for the 10 Pro was $399.
Have they fixed the ability to easily transfer your existing Android data to the new Android phone? I find that every time I upgrade, despite choosing the options to transfer apps/settings, that 90% of the apps I open just greet me with the login screen and I have to set everything up completely from scratch. I remember maybe a handful of apps, I think one was Uber, that were able to transfer everything including the login session. That was truly magic. That's how it should be for all apps. I understand banks might have special security requirements and I already know for Google Wallet, your cards need to be reactivated even if they transfer over, but most apps are not banks.
Blame the app developers, not google. They specifically added a backup/restore mode for device to device transfer, that bypasses backup blacklists[1]. However apps can still opt out by registering a backup agent, and returning no data.
Google actively avoided providing a local, secure, and seamless backup or even an interface for 3rd party backup services to make users more dependent on Google cloud services.
Of course many app developers decided the Google cloud is too insecure, being not end-to-end encrypted.
And Google enables them by not giving the users ways to override those stupid decisions. This wouldn't have happened on PCs, where you can mostly just copy over the application's user directory.
>Of course many app developers decided the Google cloud is too insecure, being not end-to-end encrypted
But so far as I can tell D2D transfers don't hit the cloud?
>For a D2D transfer, the Backup Manager Service queries your app for backup data and passes it directly to the Backup Manager Service on the new device, which loads it in to your app.
> For instance, when you're calling an airline, it can automatically find your flight details from your email and display it during your phone call.
Is this really the best example usecase they can think of? How often does an individual call an airline? I'm sure in aggregate they get a lot of calls, but I don't think I've ever had to.
It just seems really weird that this is the top example of on-device AI. The other examples mentioned, like "finding the right photos to share with a friend", seem more relatable.
It's a very simple example that people can see the value for right away. It also acts as a good placeholder for hotel, car rental agency, restaurant, etc. Any place you'd have a ticket/reservation for that you might need to call.
To me it's a solution looking for a problem. Just revisit Microsoft's marketing material for their Copilot products. Bizarre use cases one after another.
This looks to me like something resembling a 65 mustang.
If you look at some 65 mustangs they only had a driver side wing mirror as that was the law back then. The wider rear tire also makes a lot of sense, as it's a RWD car that needs wider rear tires to support the traction.
If the car in the photo is a 65 mustang, I think the AI did pretty good.
This is an old classic car/truck. Only one mirror was somewhat common back then. Also, wider rear tires are not unusual. Especially on anything with a bed, since you want additional loading capabilities in the back.
What looks off the most is the fact that the blinkers under the bender aren't even remotely close to looking similar. The rest of the car could pass as a restomod, but the fact that so many things are asymmetrical between the two sides just looks completely wrong. Blinkers, hood clips, mirror-no-mirror, etc.
That looks vaguely similar to a 60s Mustang (although also has a lot of details that are wrong) and old muscle cars like that often have wider rear tires for better traction
I think the rear looking bigger is an artifact of the zoom, where your brain expects it to look smaller, but it's actually the same size due to the extreme cropping
If you own a pixel phone remember to do regular emergency call tests. They have a bug that has stuck around for generations but for some reason they get a pass.
This sounds like a huge waste of time for the dispatch operators if everyone starts to do such tests regularly.
On a similar note, it would be great (especially for these tests) if carriers provided a non-emergency / echo number that gets treated the same way as an emergency call (works w/o SIM card, gets preferential treatment, ...)
You can schedule test calls and call in the scheduled time slot (US only)
Test calls confirm that your local 911 service can receive your 911 call and has the correct location information. Test calls can be scheduled by contacting your local 911 call center via its non-emergency phone number.
In your preferred search engine, search the key words “emergency communications center non-emergency number" and include the names of the city or town, state, and county or parish in your search. Test calls may need to be scheduled and are usually based on the workload experienced at the PSAP.
For more information, visit the National Association of State 911 Administrators site.
Please do not call 911 to obtain the non-emergency number.
When phones are no longer considered reliable to make emergency calls in certain places, what alternative is there?
Sure it sucks for the operator to get a call, "Sorry, just testing to make sure emergency calling works, thanks, bye" and it would also suck, probably even more, for an individual to not be able to make an emergency call. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, hopefully someone improves the system, lol.
What's the threshold by which a phone isn't considered reliable enough to make emergency calls?
I've never personally had an emergency call fail on a Pixel device, and I don't know the broader statistics of how often they fail for other people compared to other phones. Do you?
What I've done is write the dispatch center a friendly email explaining what I want and suggesting that they choose any off-peak time they find convenient.
A few days later, they called me and said that I could make the test call right now. Worked fine.
And here i was thinking it was irresponsible to have a decorative phone in my house because someone might try to call 911 with it in need. but these guys are selling phones that randomly may or may not? and people are still like but but apple?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the AI is using video (i.e. multiple frames) to put together enough information for the zoom to be as accurate as possible. That said, I don't know if there's enough information to do 100X.
They already have this on the pixel 9s with their 20x super zoom. I haven't noticed any weird artifacts like this from my usage. It just appears as indistinguishable camera fuzz - hard to describe.
Looks like a minor improvement to the pixel 9 series. Honestly, that's fine, I'm pretty happy with my Pixel 9 Pro.
The built-in magsafe charging magnets are a nice addition, although a case with magnets in it works for me for now.
Of course, the #1 feature I'd like to see is expandable storage, which Google seems to be strangely against. #2 would be a headphones jack - Google has already reversed course on that one once, but another reversal seems unlikely.
Oh, and it's too late to edit, but I just noticed they removed the physical SIM and force you to use an eSIM now. That feels like a significant downgrade.
Yeah, I am on Pixel 9 pro too and quick trade in check shows that upgrade would cost net ~500$(256Gb). Arguably ~250$ if buying 10 would extend the gemini subscription for a year -- not sure about the verbiage of the terms here.
100x "composite" zoom is nice but not sure if it's worth it.
As much as I'd love if phones still had headphone jacks, the inertia sure seems to be going the other direction. I fully anticipate the power port will be the next to go and wireless charging will be the only way to charge (and I don't want that either).
> It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
Unclear what "intelligently recover and refine" means here, and I'd like to make a request of people who might also be unclear yet influenced by this idea...
If you build features that sound like this into the image-capturing stage (from the user perspective), and your target users include serious photographers who care about authenticity, please be sure to make any kind of "generative"/inferencing of image details be optional.
And fall back to nth previous generation of sensor processing, autofocusing, and anti-shake technology -- where the compute still influences the images, but errs on the side of missing/fuzzy detail rather than fabrication.
Imagine the priorities of photojournalists as a category of user -- not only users who want appealing snapshots, selfies, or professional editorial fashion/lifestyle shoots.
There's still a place for consciously fabricating/enhancing/fixing in interactive post-processing, when you you choose to do it, and it's clear to you what is being done.
I have the pixel 6. It's still fine. This looks like a very incremental update to me as have the previous few editions. Same with the OS. I can barely tell apart Android versions these days. And since most of the value is software based, there isn't much practical difference between different generations of Pixel phones.
My pixel 6 has the same 48 megapixel sensor in the camera as they still appear to be using. It seems camera sensors plateaued about 4-5 years ago. It's a great sensor; the raw images are pretty amazing given the form factor (tiny sensor and lens). And I expect it still is. People confuse the AI capabilities (removing subjects, adding missing detail, etc.) with simple operations to make the photo 'pop'. Boosting the contrast, saturating all the colors, applying some aggressive smoothing (noise) and sharpening, etc. Doing that manually on the raw files yields very similar results. It's good and convenient. But most of that is just the sensor being awesome and some tasteful defaults for these edits. Adding optical zoom is impressive. The digital/AI zoom is not something I'd use. They still seem to use different sensors for the different cameras; which is something Apple stopped doing with recent iphones. So, you have to choose between the right lens with lots of noise or the right sensor with the wrong focal range.
The AI stuff is interesting as a gimmick but not something I use a lot. It seems to be the main differentiator for Google these days but I just don't see that being worth hundreds of dollars. It's a bit of an artificial differentiator and a race to the bottom. The advantages tend to be a bit hand wavy and other phone manufacturers of course copy them.
I might go for the 10a when it comes out in six months or so. My Pixel 6 won't be getting major updates anymore and the battery is starting to deteriorate. The difference between a 500 euro phone and a > 1000 euro one are not worth it for me. And with the 9a at least it even had a slightly bigger battery.
> I can barely tell apart Android versions these days.
Is that bad really? I can tell iOS versions apart and I don’t like it. I believe design should converge on some ideal (even if an unreachable one) so at some point updates ought to get very “tweak”-ish.
My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station. With the memory and CPU this phone could easily replace my work laptop (vscode and ssh for the most part). Sadly I haven't found any phone that would make this possible (Samsung Dex doesn't count because it's proprietary)
> My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station
Sounds like you're thinking of the stock Pixel 10. Google worked with Samsung to bring the Dex experience to upstream Android, and their Linux VM work is almost fully baked in Android 15. Running VSCode and ssh can be done today with a Pixel phone plugged into a USB-C hub, keyboard, mouse and a monitor. I don't know why Google isn't promoting this capability yet,
I think they're waiting for the the big point release this fall.
When they rolled out 16 earlier this spring almost nothing changed from the user's perspective because it was just shipping a lot of the underlying supporting apis that aren't exposed via user accessible things at this point.
I guess that's better than nothing! Still, it wouldn't allow connection to a thunderbolt dock with 2 displays, network and peripherals I guess.
Ideally it would run stock Linux with Android apps via waydroid.. reliance on banking apps makes this fully converged experience using only open source a bit of a pipe dream :(
I want to know how the TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compares to Samsung-manufactured Tensor processors and also how TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compare to TSMC-manufactured Snapdragon processors. Samsung's Tensors (also Exynos) had the fame of getting superhot. I want to know if these problems persist in new Tensor chips.
12 years later and still no availability in Middle East or Africa. Only available in 30-something countries. Google can't figure out retail, while upstart Chinese companies hit the global market immediately.
If you buy it in a country that's not officially supported you don't get 5G, most unique features, and of course no warranty, support, or repairs.
Kind of moot anyway; 100x zoom is equivalent to a 2400mm lens (with no stabilization assist). If you can hand-aim that on target, you're an elite marksman.
The deceptive part is using AI to creatively fill in gaps in the picture, and saying "recover and refine intricate details" when the details are actually hallucinated, making that blue car look like a drawing of a toy.
You can't install any of the AI models on the Pixel 9 if you have the bootloader unlocked. Wouldn't be surprised that Gemini Nano or Pro Res Zoom didn't work, either.
> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
So it's not just a crop. It's a crop + hallucinate.
I really like their AI strategy. It’s much stronger than Apple’s, which seems to be nonexistent. The problem I have is I really like my Apple Watch Ultra. There is nothing like it in the android space and I can’t rely on Google. Actually caring about building a great product the way Apple does. Googles hardware products always seem to be some strategic wedge play to keep the ecosystem in check. They don’t seem to exist because they really care about building the very best watch, or phone, or whatever and at any point they might just cancel the effort.
I appreciate this but can they please go beyond search and instead legitimately find me cheapest price and overall best time to fly? Or strategies to find cheaper fight using different plans or maybe integrated credit point I have, coupons?
I'd love to see AI saving me big money and doing all the hassle for me.
I wonder how they'll screw it up this time. I have to deal with a pink line down my Pixel 8's screen, because while there is an extended warranty for that issue, you need to flash the stock firmware (wiping the device) to put it in "service mode" so uBreakIFix can do their thing.
That's the problem with pixel. Everytime I try to switch from iPhone, ever year's line up has some glaring GC issue. I've tried every year since the 2XL. Most recent is the 9 Pro XL (only the XL size) the camera bar falling off.
The pixels could be amazing phones if Google could fix their crappy QC and invest in some actual customer support.
People like Apple - you can go to a physical store and get support. You can get AppleCare+ and have accidental damage replacements, battery replacements, etc just take it to the store.
Google doesn't have that, they don't have a physical presence, and it's nearly impossible to get a human and if you do, they are really stingy about RMAs.
I'm really picky. Creaks, screen issues (got the line down the middle of the screen on a 2XL, 3, and 6), speaker went out on 5, cell radio would randomly stop working on the 8, having to reboot multiple times per day. Most recently a 9 Pro XL, flexed more than my wife's, and the screen creaked when pressed (which my wife's didn't). The camera bump falling off didn't happen to me, but I've seen it on others.
If I'm going to pay Apple prices, I expect the same level of quality. I really want to like the pixel, but I can't trust Google's quality until they prove otherwise. Every generation of Pixel has had some sort of QC problem.
Unfortunately both Pixel 10 and Gemini is unavailable in Hong Kong. I have been trying move off Apple iPhone for a long time and Pixel is the phone I wanted to go for within the Android ecosystem. And I simply dont have that choice.
Wondering if anyone on HN could shine any light as to why.
The hardware and features seem great, but I'm not gonna buy another pixel phone. I've had a pixel 8 for 2 years the stability of the software has gone down so much. I frequently have an unresponsive UI, requiring me to turn off my phone with the side buttons. I also have had many issues with the keyboard and it not responding when using chrome, requiring me to kill chrome and restart it.
It seems like Google only tests on their latest device when releasing android because people I know who always get the latest phones don't have these problems. It's a very poor customer experience. It's the phone experience of an old super car. It's fast and does lots of cool things, but it feels like the wheels are gonna come off at any minute.
Same here (on a Pixel 7). Apart from there being absolutely no reason to upgrade, really, even with the generous trade-in values offered by Google around the time of release. I kind of miss the time when a new smartphone release was exciting.
Phones are not the hot commodity they used to be anymore and that's a good thing IMHO. I just bought a Px7 after breaking my 6a that I had for 3 years. I did look at the Px10 specs but with the price/value it was an easy decision.
I'm now expecting the same 3y worth of battery I was getting out of my 6a (a day started getting tight at the end).
Bigger still seems to be the definition of better but I had a CAT S60 for a while, so it's still small compared to that brick.
Overall very happy with the Px series and I'm happy they keep making them. On the software side it runs Graphene OS just as well as the 6a. Setup was super easy with the Chromium WebUSB based installer. I expect the Px10 to be supported soon too.
If we can somehow put AI agent locally on a phone that could use tools (cough: APIs) I think it will be the wildest revolution after the invention of a smart phone. How about a truly smart phone!
Yay, it has native wireless charging via Qi2, AKA Pixelsnap. The rumors on the internet were that you needed a special case to use the wireless charging. But that is not true after all and those rumors were false.
You can just plop a Qi2 charger right on your phone and it will charge! Only bummer is that the 10 pro charges at 15w while the 10 pro XL charges at 25w. And I really prefer the smaller phones that fit in my pockets. Not some huge monster phone.
I recently discovered Pixel 7 (maybe older too, I dunno) is actually Qi compatible it just doesn't have the magnets to lock in place.
But if you have a case with those magnets in, it works great. And it turns out QuadLok cases (which I can generally recommend for cyclists) are compatible.
So now I just plonk my phone against the wall and it charges on an Apple MagSafe charger I mounted. This is actually really nice, turns out it's really convenient to have your phone in a fixed position, also not taking up any surface space!
Always thought wireless charging was a bit of a gimmick but with the magnets it's genuinely useful.
It's a shame the Pixels don't have IR sensors. One of the most underrated features that some Androids have - I was in a hotel in Poland this year and it had Aircon in the room (and was rather warm), but there was no remote. The IR sensor on my phone saved my butt as it could turn on the AC!
There's no end of times that the IR sensor has come in useful one way or another.
> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.
YES! Here we talk.
The fact we can now host a version of an AI model, and make sure everything is processed locally and is not sent to the cloud is the best feature of those phones.
I just hope that data do not leave the phone OR are encrypted to be stored in Google servers...
All I really want to know is CPU/other efficiency and battery life.. If I use G1-G5 with exactly the same app that G1 CPU was adequate for the theoretical efficiency for the CPU is maybe improving 20% a generation but that manifests as some worthwhile (battery time) result or is drowned out by stupid features like even higher screen refresh?
On the other hand I much prefer the full-width bump than a corner bump. It helps when holding your phone (a ledge for your fingers) and means that the phone doesn't rock around when used on a table.
I made a leather pouch with a belt loop for my Pixel 6. Great when travelling or hiking. The camera band sits above the edge of the front of the pouch with the 'lid' covering that when the pouch is closed with a tuck lock.
The full-width band is just perfect for grabbing the phone and lifting it out of the form-fitting pouch, and doubles as a sort of safety preventing it from slipping from your grip.
I'd be curious to know if they did any surveys/research on how many people use a case or not. If the vast majority do (my anecdata-based hunch), why not just thicken the phone to add battery and use a thinner case rather than just having the case space the back of the phone out to be flat?
My partner got a Pixel 9a and it's nice that they went completely flat on that one, though it's obviously almost a straight rip-off of the recent non-pro iPhones aesthetically (not a bad thing imo).
Good point. Even my regular iPhone 13 is the heaviest phone I've ever owned and it's kind of annoying in that it actually hurts to drop on your face if you're vegging out watching a video while laying down.
not sure if you mean clip-on cell phone wallets (I assume that people that don't want a thick cell phone don't add a wallet since it makes their cell phone too thick), or actual wallets... plenty of people complain about those:
I hope there's an improved screen. I bought a 9 Pro XL with hopes of running GrapheneOS but the PWM on the Pixel was terrible. Instant headaches. I can more or less get by ok with recent iPhone screens but the Pixel screen didn't work at all for me.
Heard a rumor that Google was going to take eye strain seriously for this version. Hope that's true.
I'm delighted to see that they don't make you get the biggest phone in order to get the best cameras. I've been using Pixels since the Pixel 3 and always feel like I'm making compromises in the camera department in order to get a phone that will actually fit in my hand/pocket.
I understand this might not be the best place to ask, but I have to: I'd like to try and switch from iPhone to Pixel (maybe different Android phone?) but there is one app that I can't find anything close to: Drafts.
Maybe I'm missing something? Any ideas?
I don't really need all functions of Drafts but the whole experience of adding notes with this app is something I haven't experienced with anything else.
PS: naive question: is there a way to "integrate" Pixel with macOS? At least to have common clipboard.
For that sort of integration I would use KDE Connect[1]. It works great between my phone and laptop. I can send the clipboard, files, notifications, media controls, etc between the devices.
It has a MacOS version but it currently only has nightly builds (potentially a downside).
After trying out 6000/7000mah phones, I'm never ever using any phone with a smaller battery. Especially not the 3580mah or whatever pixel phones. I like pixel otherwise, but it's just impossible to revert back to a smaller battery once you've experienced the truly multi-day -- even for a unhealthy screen user like me -- battery life.
This codec needs hardware support to be practical (ie recording live video rather than just transcoding). So far, I think that's only available on certain Samsung models.
Hi pixel users, can we configure the phone to get more privacy ? Primarily looking for disabling complete location tracking, photos processing, app interactions and local ai interactions
I wonder will this make some of the older Pixels (say 7-9) cheaper on eBay. I have been toying with the idea of replacing my Samsung S10 for ages now, and the battery life is really starting to degrade so I might pull the trigger soon.
After they stopped releasing the device tree, there's really not a lot that will hold ROM developers to Pixels. I'll definitely wait to see what happens on that front before buying my next phone.
I love Android, besides a few accessibility issues, especially when typing to Gemini and TalkBack not speaking the reply, but I don't like how sluggish TalkBack is on Pixel phones. I had the 8 and hated that.
my pixel 2 is still rocking too, what an amazing device! (although it now I only use it for flappy bird..)
Highly disappointed that Google stopped updates a long time ago.
Only one question. Can you disable the stupid date on the home screen. No I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a phone and then load another launcher on it. Just hire someone competent at programming to make this an option.
Because even if your phone only breaks every 5 years on average do you want to get a new 5 year old phone because your last one died right before the refresh cycle? Having regular releases means that when you do get the phone you have a relatively up-to-date device with latest hardware improvements. You don't need to upgrade yearly because they release a new phone yearly.
You probably don't, as your current phone ought to last for years. But hardware manufacturers, like software developers, benefit from faster release cycles.
Also: "Voice Translate allows you to break down language barriers during phone calls. Through Tensor G5, our on-device AI translates your call in real time in what sounds like each speaker’s voice"
They advertise on-device AI functionality quite a lot.
its still there on my pixel 9 in the stock/default launcher, but you can still use an alternative launcher if you like. many of those do not have the bar or let you toggle it off.
> I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.
If you switched to a different phone, it is using a different launcher. If your only complaint is the launcher, it doesn't make sense to change the whole phone.
I'm not an Android user, so pardon me if this is a stupid thing to say, but it's weird to me that these phones apparently have some new UI unique to them. I thought Android was just Android. Won't other Android phones get this update?
Android is not just Android. The device vendors have to customize it to fit their devices by including drivers for example. Device vendors have the option to change the look pretty heavily, Samsung TouchWiz was infamous, Chinese vendors also offer very customized versions, including making it look like iOS.
What you are seeing is material design 3 "expressive" which will be rolled out in the next minor Android version and Google apps
I still have a Samsung Galaxy S8. It runs fine. I don't really need more from a phone. Maybe I am missing something but I really cannot see myself getting a new phone.
Yet again, Google announces another lineup of phones where a vast majority of the announcement is about software features that could be implemented on existing devices, highlighting the wastefulness of the yearly release cycle.
Shouldn't be impossible. Samsung already offers Space Zoom which has a good UX and a LOT of image stabilization so your hands shaking isn't magnified by 100x.
As far as AI upscaling though, agreed. At least make a setting so we can do our own A/B tests.
Ever since magic eraser we've been slip-sliding down the slippery slope that ends with all our picture memories being half-AI-generated with the same "look" based on whatever flavor generated them at the time.
I was surprised to see "more helpful support than ever" listed as a top line feature. Google actually offering good support to their customers?! I was impressed until I got to "Magic Cue isn’t just a single app or feature, it’s proactive support". Ah, so it sounds like the helpful support is just more AI slop.
> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
bro in your demo the car is a half el-camino half mustang
Yes, I don't know why they bother showing the phone turned off anymore. They all look the same.
The materials might be different, and that's where a lot of companies go wrong. The Pixel 10 uses polished glass, which is too slippery. It slides off uneven surfaces and is harder to hold.
The only downside is that all of these new features will be supported for about 3 weeks, and then rapidly turn into another Google abandoned strip mall.
Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me (hundreds of times), shame on me
Bet the people who launched these are already interviewing for their next gig.
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
No Pixel 10a was announced, and frankly Google's track record with hardware is a bit discouraging for someone thinking about spending a grand on a phone.
The -a models are typically released in the spring, the Pixel 9a was only just released in April of this year, so I wouldn't expect to see a Pixel 10a until March or April of 2026.
I got my entire family Pixel 4XLs when they were new. Every single one had the battery replaced once under warranty, and then they denied more batteries (it was actually the fragile connector). So I started replacing them myself. I even slightly modified the connector mount so it would stop failing. The third batteries ended up lasting years because of my modification.
Finally, all 3 died around 2023 from motherboard problems apparently. Otherwise great phones. Sad that some weird hardware problems killed them all for most people.
Try Pixels with GrapheneOS. Most of that software is still "from Google" technically, but it's reworked in some important ways, especially on a service level. For example, by default it has no Google apps or services, you can install Play store sandboxed, etc.
The "magic cue" sounds like Windows CoPilot but isn't getting the same backlash for some reason. Why would I want AI tightly woven into everything I'm doing on my phone?
They said Magic Cue is done entirely on device and as far as I can tell does not involve saving screenshots of your activities to the device like Windows Recall* did- rather it can look at things like your email and other data that is on the device to determine what to suggest
* Windows Copilot is different from Recall, which is the one that saved screenshots of what you were doing periodically
I would guess because the windows recall stores screenshots of everything you do forever while this just watches and pops up without storing information that could later be used against you. Of course, it could be secretly recording but if you are concerned about that you need to install grapheneOS or something.
Not that I like this feature or think there aren't privacy concerns.
That's likely your unreliable AP dropping offline and coming back frequently. Pixel thinks this is an attacker and stops joining it until it can hear the SSID consistently.
> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.
Running Gemini Nano on device is the most interesting thing here. Magic Cue sounds exactly like the Siri improvements that Apple failed to launch this past year (and have stayed mostly quiet about for this coming year, except saying "eventually"). I hope it works well, because on-device AI for simple lookups and such is actually one of the most interesting use cases for LLMs on mobile phones to me.
I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions. There are so many possibilities. I assume this kind of thing would just be implemented as tool calls with app intents. I hope we see this across the board in the next three years.
> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions.
It's probably just me (or a few like me) but I don't really keep my life in digital format as much as others (and I'm a "geek" for my family/friends since i work in the software industry). If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar. I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
The features described in the Pixel 10 left me with a sense of "I think I am missing something! But... oh well, whatever, I don't need any of that". Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".
> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.
If I don't have it in my calendar, it doesn't happen. I would fail to actually go to the event otherwise.
I'm calendar-driven to such an extent that I joke that all it would take to murder me would be to insert "jump off a cliff" in my calendar.
I never use a calendar; most days, I don't even know what day it is. So, your approach is very interesting to me. Could you please tell me more about what your day looks like on the calendar? How detailed is it, and do you do this even on holidays?
I think you're reading more into this than I meant. For example, today:
I cannot imagine how people operate without a calendar. How would you remember a half dozen or dozen things, every day, some of which might have been scheduled weeks or months in advance?In my case: I don’t have that many TODOs. For instance, I clean home twice per week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Don’t need to write it down anywhere. I have perhaps 2 or 3 doctor appointments per year (and they are usually within a few weeks in advance, so easy to remember). I don’t have kids (this one could be the game changer, I admit).
Work-wise: sure, I have everything in the work calendar. But i have separate laptops for work and personal life. I never mix them.
If we want to go out for dinner, we just go. Cinema? We just go as well. No appointments. I do exercise at home. We usually travel around 2 times per year (again, not easy to miss)
My wife is 35 weeks pregnant and I go with her to all her OB appts. If we didn't put it on a shared calendar, someone is gonna miss it (though to be honest it'd probably be me, which isn't the end of the world).
We almost never schedule dinners, but we buy cinema tickets ahead of time (or concert tickets, or whatever event). Those ones are hard to remember because the show may be at 6 but doors open at 5 so lots of stuff needs to be coordinated.
It's simple, I don't have things like that that I need to do on any sort of daily basis.
I have a work calendar for work meetings, but never saw a need for personal calendar.
OK sure I put doctor and dentist on my personal calendar, but dentist is 2x a year and doctor is like once a year for a physical. On my personal calendar I might have a dozen things put on it for the whole year. Some upcoming family event, some wedding, etc.
My dentist and doctor schedule the next appointment during my appointment. So if I had my annual physical appointment tomorrow, my next appointment would be 8/23/2026 which I definitely would not remember, even if they gave me an appointment card. If I'm lucky they'll call me to remind me a few days before, but having it on my calendar ensures that I don't schedule a meeting (or travel!) during that time.
I probably have 20-30 “personal”events a week. But that’s because I have two kids.
not OP, but the only way for me and my 3 kids (2 high school, 1 junior high) to keep everything straight between appointments, sporting events and practice, work schedules (2 kids have jobs) is to use a shared calendar. We learned early a few things, like 1. don't get cute and put padding because you are worried about being late, it messes with other people 2) don't put reminders, they confuse people 3. if it isnt in the calendar, it isnt happening
We used our calendar for a recent road trip to keep everything sorted. Even on vacations, if you are doing more than chilling at a campsite, it can be very useful for the same reasons.
I'm in between. I do use a calendar for pre-planned personal outings, but more for blocking off dates/times than tracking details. If I hide work meetings, pretty much my entire calendar is just a bunch of events generically named "Balls" with no other information. Occasionally I'll use someone's name or the name of a travel destination.
Same. Calendar events, reminders, and timers are the only way anything in my life gets done.
I also have ADHD!
I doubt only ADHD people are aided by this. Lots of people are just busy nowadays juggling home, work, kids, friends, hobbies, errands, etc.
I don't have ADHD but also do this. I just forget stuff too easily.
I used to consider myself a "tech guy" but the world seems to have moved on without me. I look at announcements of new phones and computers and I'm not even remotely excited about any of it. They're not solving any problem that I have anymore. I have a 9 year phone, and nothing released since then has really been compelling enough for me to upgrade. The only reason I will probably get a new one at some point is because the OS manufacturer and 3rd party app developers have (at best) stopped supporting my device and (at worst) are actively blocking my using their software/websites purely because of the age of the otherwise perfectly working device.
I used to have this "I'm missing something" thought but I don't think that anymore. This isn't me failing to get on board with what they think I should care about--It's the device manufacturers who are missing/ignoring my needs in the market.
It's really only the camera improvements that have been driving my interest in new phones for a while now. But even smartphone cameras have matured to the point where I'm content to use a phone for 4 years before upgrading.
Same, I only catch up on tech by reading summaries sometimes and for a couple of weeks when I know I need a new device. I’m still the friends and family go to tech person for purchases and support but don’t need to be always up to do, which is great since I’m not interested anymore like when I was young.
Unless you're mailing letters, it's almost certain that your life is in "digital format". It sounds like you just don't use a calendar.
But surely you have an email confirmation for your movie, baseball, or event ticket. And maybe you texted or otherwise messaged with your friends who were going? Took pictures on your phone with them? Carried your phone with you when you went.
Right. I meant I don’t make use of such digital assets. They are there because of tech giants, but i just don’t gain much from them.
The argument is that you could potentially make easy use of these digital assets via an assistant that has secure, private access to them. As someone who forgets to use his calendar for social events, I'd love to be able to ask "what events are going on this weekend" and have it show me everything I've agreed to do via email/text message/3p messenger app.
I don't trust that a fuzzy automatism adds anything beneficial to that
I'm right there with you. I work in tech, but I don't want to fuss with tech when I'm off the clock. Like, it all annoys me and just feels like work.
When my router breaks I just buy a new one. When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered. Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket? I have a rule "no new chargers" when buying stuff. If it comes with some proprietary charger I make a half-assed attempt to keep up with it but I just throw it in the trash after about 6 months and buy something with a cord.
Maybe I'm an old man, but maybe that means I know now that life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
Well, some people enjoy fixing old things. Even though I work in tech I don't get to fix physical devices at work, which means fixing them at home doesn't feel like work at all. Rather it feels like an excellent and fun way to save money for something more meaningful than buying a new router or laptop.
I have some passion for technology, but zero passion for wasting the little money I'm paid on expensive devices, which will be outdated in a couple of years anyway.
> Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket?
Because I haven't carried a card for years now. I couldn't even tell you where my physical credit card is.
I guess this is very geographic dependent. I live in a country where only maybe 80% of merchants accept Visa/Mastercard (and thus only those can accept Google/Apple Pay) so I need to either carry a card for our domestic payment card infrastructure–or carry cash in order to be able to transact with any shops.
I can empathize. I have some similar rules:
- if an app won’t sign up without a phone number I don’t use it anymore
- if a product is single purpose, and isn’t a phone or some jogging tracker or a set top box I don’t buy it
- if a product requires me to sign into a service for it to do anything, I don’t buy it
>>I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered.
How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
>> When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I mean I hope you recognize the incredible priviledge behind that statement - for a lot of people tinkering with their laptop isn't about being a hobby IT person, it's about the fact that a new laptop costs half their salary so it's quite literally not an option.
>> life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
Sure but you make it sound like it's a chore - most people(I'd guess) set up HA because it provides value in their lives, that other, more simpler devices cannot provide. So at the cost of X number of hours once a year you get a device that consolidates all of your home automation and data. If you could buy a premade device that did it without fuss - I'm sure a lot of people would.
> How are people "fussing with unlocking their phones" to pay though? It literally couldn't be any easier - I pull it out, touch the screen on the fingerprint sensor to unlock it and tap on the terminal, done. It's about 200x easier than pulling the card out of my wallet, and the card can only be used for contactless up to a certain amount, and half the time it randomly asks me for my pin anyway so the whole benefit of contactless is lost. Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
Sweaty/wet hands can make unlocking unreliable, some people have multiple cards and need to select the correct one, sometimes their phone is lagging and taking time getting the wallet screen opening, etc. It is not uncommon to see people struggling for a few seconds with their watch or smartphone. So do people not finding their wallet in a bag too or failing to grab a card from a physical wallet too to be honest. I wouldn't say one option is 200x easier, both are pretty much on equal terms imho.
I don't use wallet because I don't have a google account on my phone anyway nor would it work with my grapheneOS AFAIK anyway.
> Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
And it only gets easier when you pay with a watch - you don't even have to pull your phone out of your pocket!
My cards only come out when I'm making a large purchase that I want extra protection on (think the UK's Section 75) and these are usually purchases I know about in advance - otherwise my wallet stays at home most days.
You don't add to your calendar but you probably got a confirmation email. Or you may have used an app that could expose this data to the operating system. OR, you called, and the phone app transcribed and summarized the call.
Same for the wallet... if you have your credit card / banking app installed it could expose this.
But yeah, none _needs_ any of that, for different degrees of fun and life optimization.
> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.
When I buy a ticket to an event and the e-mail about it arrives, Google automatically adds the event to my calendar. My wife and I have shared our calendars with each other, too, so we both see it no matter who buys the ticket.
I dont think I have left my house without my phone in 5+ years.
I'll often leave my phone at home if I'm going somewhere with my wife and kids. If they're with me, they have their phones and I'll instantly know if something happens to them, so no need to carry my phone.
It's basically a self-psyop to break the dependency. I spent the first 25-ish years of my life without a cell phone, after all.
I used to take my phone with me all the time (I used to have an iphone mini). The current models are too big. They are nice when i’m on the sofa surfing the web, but a hassle to take then in my pocket
I agree the current models are all too big. I'm still using a Pixel 4 mainly because I don't want a bigger phone (oh, and free Google Photos storage of course).
I think it’s been 15+ years for me
Do you folks not go camping?
Yes, far more than the average person - vehicle, car camping, backcountry, kayak, etc. I take my phone as a camera (still/video), for an extra map option with GPS, and for reading e-books or editing photos at night in the tent.
Many people take their phone with them when camping. Even if there's some desire to "disconnect" (which not everyone has), people still want 1) a device for emergency calls, 2) a camera, and 3) a map.
I try and do some kind of camping once a month and always have my phone. Typically it's in airplane mode and gets used for photos, maps, ebooks.
You don’t take your phone when you’re camping???
Yes. And it stays in the tent.
InReach mini comes with.
Being connected to the internet or digital media is the last fucking thing I want when I'm in the woods.
Well done, your self congratulatory prize will be in the mail.
I'm honestly asking... doesn't the presence of internet access distract from appreciating nature, for you?
I was overly snarky, I apologise. Personally I don’t go camping and therefore cant really comment.
Honestly, no. It enhances it. It's just a tool. Like do you bring a flashlight camping?
Speaking for myself, that costs money and time, neither of which I have.
I want my phone more when camping.
I think you're doing technology right tbh. We don't really need all this new tech, and it's better for the environment to just skip it and keep using what we have.
If you have an email receipt, and you store email on your phone, it's probably accessable. I don't think you're missing out on anything though.
Re: geek, AI has a lot of mainstream hype at the moment. I don't think there's anything inherently geeky about buying into the hype.
> (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
Not to critique how you love but a little bum bag could fix this.
But I've also recently moved away from flagship phones and I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I also used to root devices and underclock them after having them for some years to help extend their lives. Similarly I didn't feel like I was missing out on much. But at the same time, whenever a new phone would drop I'd feel like there was this cool new feature yet when I actually had it in my hands none of those features were actually that big of a deal. Even if nice. So moving to a non-flagship is nice entirely due to it being smaller and fitting in my pocket better. And it's not all about the thickness...
I don't think it is weird. I think it is just that innovation has slowed down but marketing hasn't.I mean there's still lots of things to geek out about and lots of dreams and fantasies about the future and tech that just don't have anything to do with the current direction of innovation.
There's non flagship, and there's ex-flagship.
I'd much rather have an ex-flagship phone that, at the time, had what was considered one of the best cameras (actually pretty much all I care about).
That said, I'm looking forward to trying this out in about 5 years!
Written from my "new to me" pixel 6.
I'll be honest, I didn't feel much of a difference changing from my Pixel 2 to my Pixel 6. Actually, I liked my Pixel 2 more. Boy do I miss that back fingerprint sensor. As well as the squeeze feature. What a great design. Also, it cleanly fit in my pocket. Pixel 2 was peak Pixel if you ask me. (never tried the 3)
Really the only reason I ended up switching was because I had already replaced the lens on the rear camera after some dirt got into it and I had cracked that back glass while taking it apart. Not a big deal, but it felt like time to move on I guess. I definitely got excited about all the new features of 6 and then promptly never actually used any of them.
I had to fix my broken OnePlus 7t last year, with Lineage OS I don't miss a thing, except my bank app. For which I use an old Moto.
I used to be a flagship phone buyer all the time. But I now feel spending too much on a new phone is kind of a waste, as phones are getting too locked down to the users, and too open to the advertisers. I just want a phone where I can flash lineage OS, and done with it.
It's almost like buying hardware that are Linux friendly, a feat that was difficult once, now things are better. Really looking out for a Linux based phone that works
What non flagship phones or digital wallets you use?
How do you get your tickets? Do you just buy in person at the theater or ballpark?
I expressed myself wrong. I do purchase tickets online. Then I just remember the day. No calendar. I don’t take advantage of the digital assets (email confirmation, etc)
You are not a target customer for smartphones.
I think on-device models will be the breaking point for AI. Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill. We've made consumers think that the only way you're paying for software is if you have to buy hardware that comes with it. If you want AI to truly blow up, make it run on potatoes. It doesnt have to do EVERYTHING, just specific needs.
That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly. I thought Apple adding 3 to theirs for the 12 was a bit silly, but at least they made it look nice. One of those models looks like a Battlestar Galactica villain...
It's preference. I think the cameras on the non-pro iphones are so ugly -- especially the diagonal design. The pro cameras look ok to me. Can't not see my old college stove when I look at it, but I don't think it's too bad.
I, too, am biased but prefer Pixel's camera layout. Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device. A design decision that's unique and has some (small) utility.
Tier list:
Good: Pixel line, any phone with no camera bump Ok: iPhone Pro Bad: Samsung's many iterations, iPhone 2 camera vertical layout Horrible: iPhone 2 camera diagonal layout
The whole idea of needing a "camera bump" is sort of a ridiculous design choice just use the extra two millimeters for more battery. It is almost as goofy as the "notch"
Batteries are heavy. I don’t need a fat ass battery making the phone heavier just to hide the camera bump.
> Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device.
Is anyone using smartphones without a cover that pretty much negates any camera bump those smartphones have?
>That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly.
Isn't it a market thing though? Doesn't Apple have a phone with horrendous, trypophobia-inducing camera nests?
They have the same camera bump design on the Pixel 9 phones.
I quite like it, it's a natural rest for my phone to sit at an angle (and protect the camera glass), and is great for holding it with a single hand.
I (and many other people) think the cameras look great and are a nice change from the repetitive boring Apple designs.
> Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill.
Buying dedicated hardware as a way to keep your AI bill down seems like a tough proposition for your average consumer. Unless you're using AI constantly, renting AI capacity when you need it is just going to be cheaper. The win with the on-device model is you don't have to go out to the network in the first place.
You misunderstood what I meant, I mean make models that run on potatoes, nobody wants to pay what chatgpt's subscription model probably SHOULD cost for them to make a profit.
So the idea is that it SHOULD cost OpenAI a trillion dollars to do what you can accomplish with a potato?
No, not even sure how you arrived to that conclusion. The idea is that there are models out there that can run on small amounts of VRAM. If all it costs is charging your phone, as opposed to some subscription to some overvalued AI company, people will choose ‘free’ first. We have models that can google things now. They only need to know so much when online, and a specific subset when offline.
I think there are lots of advantages to running a model locally. Saving money is one of them, but that's only if you can keep the thing busy. You wisely put the "free" in quotes for a reason: you paid money for the hardware the model is running on, and you're paying for the electrical bill to power it too. Even if you pay a 100% markup to the cloud, unless you're keeping it busy 50% of the time, it's cheaper to rent.
The "dedicated hardware" will be an Apple TV in the Apple ecosystem for example if something centralised is needed.
Or just your phone or laptop. Fully local, nothing leaves the device.
So if your AI compute needs are handled by an Apple TV, I'd be really curious how those same needs served by the cloud work out to a trillion dollars.
Just rumours but Apple is supposedly embracing a similar design for iPhone 17. https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-17/
I mean, look at these examples. Is a big LLM really needed to hit most of what people want?
Seems like Android just needs to lean into the voice command hooks API. A local LLM can grease the natural language into the mechanical APIs installed on your device. That's a much simpler task than an omniscient robot with access to all of your data.
Smaller specialised and targeted models are cheaper, faster and more accurate.
The Nano model is 3.2B parameters at 4bit quantization. This is quite small compared to what you get from hosted chatbots, and even compared to open-weights models runnable on desktops.
It's cool to have something like this available locally anyway, but don't expect it to have reasoning capabilities. At this size it's going to be naive and prone to hallucinations. It's going to be more like a natural language regex and a word association game.
The big win for those small local models to me isn't knowledge based (I'll leave that to the large hosted models), but more so a natural language interface that can then dispatch to tool calls and summarize results. I think this is where they have the opportunity to shine. You're totally right that these are going to be awful for knowledge.
The point in these models isn't to have all the knowledge in the world available.
It's to understand enough of language to figure out which tools to call.
"What's my agenda for today" -> get more context
cal = getCalendar() getWeather(user.location()) getTraffic(user.location(), cal[0].location)
etc.
Then grab the return values from those and output:
"You've got a 9am meeting in Foobar, the traffic is normal and it looks like it's going to rain after the meeting."
Not rocket science and not something you'd want to feed to a VC-powered energy-hogging LLM when you can literally run it in your pocket.
Isn't this what Apple tried with Siri? I don't see anyone use it, and adding an LLM to the mix is going to make it less accurate.
They wrote a whole ass paper about SLMs that do specifically this - expert small language models with narrow expertise.
And then went for a massive (but private and secure) datacenter instead.
Speculation: I guess the idea is they build an enormous inventory of tool-use capabilities, then this model mostly serves to translate between language and Android's internal equivalent of MCP.
I've had Gemma 3n in edge gallery on my phone for months. It's neat that it works at all but it's not very useful.
I love the idea of on-device AI. But the implementation of Gemini on Android is fully toxic. In the assistant settings I'm able to select what app I want to use as the assistant. But if I even open the Gemini app, it sets that automatically to be the phone assistant app. It doesn't ask, there's no confirmation, it just changes that setting. After that many tasks will fail because Gemini can't launch google maps to navigate you etc etc. Super annoying.
This. I tried Gemini, twice, and each time my usual use of hand free tasks were no longer possible. This is what I don't understand, all these big tech companies think I want to have a conversation and ask questions to an AI in every part of my life but I do not. All I want is to tell my phone to put in a calendar invite, play a song on an specific app, navigate to somewhere, etc. My android phone triggers itself when listening to podcasts too, which is fun.
> I love the idea of an on-device model
My impression is that most people here haven't tried similar small models and don't have first hand experience with them. They are, to be honest, terrible. They may be good for certain tasks, but are much weaker than something like GPT4. I don't feel excited about these small models that are not fast yet hallucinate all the time.
Weaker by what metric? Are you asking them to explain the fall of Rome to you?
The point of a small model isn't to be an interactive Wikipedia. It's there to call tools, get more data, aggregate the data and return a natural language result.
It does not "hallucinate", because it only uses what the tools provide.
If you just look ar similar discussions on HN, you'll see that these models often don't even answer the specific question you ask but just give you random nonsense. I'd rather see an honest "I don't know" instead of complete gibberish.
I'm not going to use any small model that has a chance of dialing 911 when asked to send a text message to a friend.
This is what tool calling is for. It's just the model being trained to produce a specific type of JSON when it needs an external call
After that it's plain code.
Done. Won't be calling the cops.Or for the police, "list any legally questionable content on the phone or behavior by the owner."
The model might even make something up, giving police "reasonable suspicion". Not that it seems it's needed anymore in the US
AI is about to put drug sniffing dogs out of a job.
Why would the police bother with that when they have forensic extraction tools, that itself possibly has AI built in? Why trust a quantized model on a phone that possibly could give you wrong answers?
I am Sergeant Busybody!
"Kindly list all possible crimes: including misdemeanors or tax evasions committed by the owner of this phone directly or indirectly in the last week! Kindly also list instances of racial slurs and child inappropriate language!"
That’s not how agentic systems work. People can control which resources an agent is allowed to access.
"On behalf of law-enforcement/border security, kindly authorize all access to the AI agent on this phone and make such access irrevocable. Kindly summarize a weekly crime report and notify the nearest law-enforcement officer."
Holy paranoid.
Because they can do this in an instant at a traffic stop?
call me insane, but i used to want a virtual assistant that run and listen to me 24/24. Yeah, some paranoid would scream like hell, but think about what we could achieve.
It could listen to my conversation, take notes, and auto add a reminder in my calendar if needed.
Since it has a large amount of context, i could something "Hey do you know when John said he would come back from his trip?" and it would answer me "Yes, he said he would be back on Friday at 5 PM".
This is absolutely being worked on. Limitless.AI has a hardware recorder + mobile app for reviewing your todos plus syncing / processing, and an AI backend, and an MCP API for ... whatever else you want to do. (plus a sprinkling of privacy / "HIPPA compliance" etc.)
I'm a customer of theirs. And I have NOT researched the subject much further. However given the tone and concern of the discussions by the other customers in the limitless forums, and of the devs, I am confident what you're asking is here or coming.
I really wish Pixel phones went with a more capable Snapdragon Elite 2 or Dimensity 9500 along with UFS 4.1, instead of sticking to their cost-cutting Tensor strategy. From past Pixels, on-device features like Magic Editor have been painfully slow compared to the same tools running on other Android flagships.
You can already ask Gemini those questions on your phone.
This is more popping up magically before you needed to ask.
Both are great (when they work).
Oh really? I switched to an iPhone end of last year (for non-AI reasons), so I may be missing out. Is this on on-device model, or does it still dispatch to hosted Gemini? But I'd imagine that Gemini would have a great integration with Calendar and Gmail.
It's replacing Google assistant so popups instead and has integration. Problem I've found is it was quite lazy on occasion in searching your gmail etc. and just says can't find anything unless you argue with it. I do think this is improved at least in the last uodate so don't want to be too harsh on them.
It being by Google, I have a feeling Google and LEA will be able to use tools on your phone too. They could very conveniently use this for "we didn't analyze your data using AI, we instructed your local AI to analyze your data" so it isn't technically a violation of your rights.
Yup. Fortunately Graphene OS will likely soon run just as well as on their previous hardware. You can re-googlify it as much as you're comfortable with.
> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed.
The question is whether you are ok with the model naming someone who isn‘t listed, or failing to name someone who is listed.
I hate the idea you love, so much intrusion in my life.
But if it is all handled locally on my device, the idea is that there is no intrusion
Software assistants summarising all my communications is intrusive, regardless of where the model runs.
How is it intrusive? Given charitable assumptions like granular permissions, silod app data only extracted through intents, and using only local compute?
I'm all for questioning Google on whether those assumptions will be true and no data leaves your phone, but I'm curious about the concept.
You're carrying an always on mic wired up to a closed source system with you everywhere you go already. It was already possible to stream or record everything anyway.
That's how it always starts, but people still fall for it every time.
why ? someone else has an idea, what is to hate that another person has an idea ?
how does their idea intrude into your life ?
This seems like a good place to randomly drop my thoughts on switching from a Samsung s20+ to a Pixel 9 Pro. The hardware is excellent in the hand. The display is great, battery life excellent, the UI is snappy, does all the basic things I expect from a quality device. Over all, no huge regrets..... but...
The scrolling in every app is just "different" from the Samsung, and in a "not as good" way. I moved to Pixel with the (as I now realise) very out dated idea that a Pixel phone would allow me MORE customisation and configurability than the Samsung/Galaxy environment. Oh boy, how wrong I was. Turns out there's a whole stack of Samsung bundled apps or ones available through their Galaxy store for free that I'd gotten so used to I thought it was default Android stuff.
I miss:
So yeah, next time I'm in the market for a phone I think I'm going back to Samsung.I want Google to be better...
As a former Pixel and current Samsung user, I can relate to almost everything on this list except for the Camera app. What is it that you prefer about the Samsung iteration? I found my preference to be for the Pixel version.
As a Pixel / Galaxy / OnePlus user...
My app and photo quality preference are OnePlus > Pixel > > > ... > Samsung. shrug Really it could be a toss up between OnePlus and Google depending on generation. My partner's Pixel 7 takes nearly as nice photos as my OnePlus 12.
My Galaxy photos were... very watercolor paint. I could not stand them.
App wise what do you prefer on OnePlus? I switched from Samsung to a 13r and miss the moveable button. The 2x zoom camera's color balance is also wildly different from the main camera's, would've much preferred a macro camera like on the Samsung
Strange I have a S21 and I can't tell the diff between photos taken with the S21 and those shared to me from owners of other phones. I find generally modern high end phones all take good photos. YMMV of course.
To be totally fair:
* I'm a pixel peeper
* Photos shared for most web usage on little mobile phone screens are fine
Had an S21 Ultra, bought it for the 10x zoom. But ultimately the quality loss with zoom and subsequent software processing left the phones looking unpleasant for my tastes.
I've been running a Samsung S21FE since release and I would _never_ buy a Samsung phone again.
I don't need customization, I need stable features, and not having to fight with my OS for which clock and notes app I'm allowed to use. Most of the features require you to be deep in the Samsung ecosystem. Hell, Google Gemini can only use Samsung system apps as of the recent update.
There are tons of bugs in the phone, and I regularly report them. The latest one is that the auto brightness is mapped to the slider. Which vibrates when it tops off, like any other slider for some reason. However, Samsung's engineers have obviously mapped the sensor to move the slider instead of directly managing the state, resulting in the phone constantly buzzing in your hand when you're outside.
The phone constantly runs out of memory, especially when taking photos. Since the OneUI 7 update, the screen often takes 5 seconds to wake. It regularly flushes apps out of memory.
I was looking at maybe upgrading to the S25 series but the cameras have horrible focus issues: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/galaxy-s25-series/galaxy...
Funny, my S22 Ultra just died due to the infamous One UI 7 update bricking phones with a boot loop. Replaced it with a One Plus 13 and I'm very happy not to have the Samsung bloatware all over the phone. The Samsung backup didn't help me at all.
None of that stuff adds value, just locks you in.
I feel compelled to stick with GrapheneOS even though I install Play Services and meta apps.
I do miss several Samsung features. Most of all, the ability to set the Always-On Display to only show when new notifications pop up. It is easier to see at a glance that I have a message vs. squinting at how many faint lines are displayed to see the messages icon.
DeX is a novel concept too, and with Samsung you can do USB-C --> HDMI out to use your phone to play on a TV. It is a choice Google makes that Pixel can't do that.
>with Samsung you can do USB-C --> HDMI out to use your phone to play on a TV. It is a choice Google makes that Pixel can't do that.
I have done exactly that with my Pixel 8 Pro. Worked great.
This is now supported from Pixel 8 and above.
Do you know if it is also supported on GrapheneOS? I need a new phone, am struggling between FairPhone (does not have the USB capability for this) or GrapheneOS (on modern Pixel), both options align very well with my values, however not in the same dimensions, sadly.
It is supported on GrapheneOS. I've used it infrequently on a Pixel 8A. It's worth noting it only mirrors the screen, there's no extend option or DEX like experience.
Edit: There is a DEX-like desktop mode in beta, along with Linux VM with graphical app support.
It's something.
You are correct, I was mistaken. I was thinking about the OnePlus.
As someone who had to use Samsung for 2 years at work:
I don't care about most of those decorative things you list there, it just made me mad that the phone was cluttered with Samsungs Apps. This replacing of perfectly working things like Settings was almost as annoying as the constant push for me to get just another account...this time with Samsung.
No please no...I don't see why I should give away space I've paid for to Samsung so they can spam me with their crap I don't need.
Never going back.
> push for me to get just another account
This is such a minor complaint though. I have 1150 accounts saved in my password manager and then another 150 in my company phone/laptop. What's one more? Who even cares at this point.
Or some app I will use to adjust settings then never open again. It's like being annoyed by having dconf editor or gnome tweaks installed. Yeah, I install them, use them twice, and then forget about their existence for another two years.
There are real issues with Samsung meddling in Android for no good reason. Primarily, that their oneUI is maybe prettier but way less readable and somewhat less intuitive than stock. Secondly, that they pull random stuff unnecessarily like ext4 support on external drives. Things that just should work and they burned calories to make them worse. Some app or account just ain't it.
Is is quite wqeird that the comment below you is [dead] when it's perfectly reasonable:
The "one more account" is not problematic because it's just another account, its problematic due Samsung's extremely invasive data collection and snooping. With Google phone you only have Google collecting your fata (unless you install GOS like you should ^^), but with Samsung you have both Google and Samsung getting your data.
Samsung camera app is buggy. Slow motion videos stutter. Its a common problem they wont solve.
Re. what apps can run in the background - have you checked out the "allow background battery usage"? This has worked so far for me.
>So yeah, next time I'm in the market for a phone I think I'm going back to Samsung.
Do yourself a favour and read Samsung's privacy policy first.
What about it? Asking as an iOS user.
As a Samsung user, I couldn't tell ya. I've been clicking cancel when it popped up weekly for two Samsung phones in a row.
I'll add
- Flip the back and recent apps button in three button navigation. It's such a weird decision - like only left handed people should be able to comfortably use three button nav. Literally hurt my thumbs to use the phone.
- The quick settings panel is just abysmal compared to Samsung with massive pill buttons that have virtually nothing in them.
Looks like they're still only available in "Huge" and "comically oversized". I guess I can keep buying Pixel 4s until new ones (req for battery) are no longer available.
It's interesting how this type of feedback always comes up for phones yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them. It seems part of it may be folks remaining in this group seem much more willing to stick with old devices anyways, helping drive less priority for small sizes on top of already being a smaller market segment. Perhaps there are some other big factors beyond those two things too.
Apple said the mini iPhones underperformed, but they were not some sort of commercial failure. They sold millions of units. Numbers most Android OEMs could only dream of for a single flagship model. Current day Apple is all about optimizing and determined that still wasn't enough, and I imagine the manufacturing for small, specialized display panels certainly took a chunk out of those margins, so Apple decided to pull the plug.
Myself and the people who said we wanted a smaller phone may be a vocal minority but we did buy the small phone when we were offered it. After I used the 12 mini for 2 years, I bought a 14 Pro since no mini was offered in the 14 generation, but I returned it a week later cause it was too big/heavy and bought a 13 mini. These days I'm using a 16 Pro since no mini is offered and the titanium did help a lot with the weight issue, but if they brought back mini phones I'd happily sacrifice the camera for a reasonably sized screen.
The number of people who aren't vocal tech people who actually want a smaller phone is a very small part of the market. In HN-like circles they're a notable minority but among the general population they are a smaller percentage. Especially when you consider huge segments of the market where your phone is your only computing device: a smaller phone is a massive anti-feature in large parts of the world.
Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.
The sales numbers just don't justify it. Like people who pine for manual transmissions: they're vocal in car forums and publications but they're a tiny minority and making one is a money-loser even in the sports car segment.
Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair. A better car analogy is pickup trucks (and cars in generally really) — they've gotten huge over the years, compact pickups have disappeared, and you hear the same arguments about it being a niche audience. The reality is that as soon as something sells well (big trucks in this case), these big corporations go all in on it and alienate large segments. Now 25 year old compact Tacomas are selling for as much as their MSRP and manufacturers (Toyota, Ford, Hyundai) are all scrambling to ship a compact. It's the same with small phones — the industry over-rotated on big phones and as soon as someone ships a good small phone, it'll be a hit and small phones will come back. iPhone Mini was a crippled device compared to the Pro line and it still sold millions. Google and Samsung haven't even tried to make something compact, let alone compact and good.
> Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair
I'm not much of a car person but I thought stick shift also had the benefits of:
> almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway
The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.
I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.
The iPhone minis were the first one to not sacrifice on those things, except for battery life compared to other iPhones. Same great display tech as the normal sized iPhone of that year, same SoC, same camera.
Even with the smaller battery, iOS is so aggressive with background tasks anyway, the iPhone 12 mini was my first iPhone and I got better battery life with it than any of my Androids I used over the span of a decade, even giant ones like the Nexus 6P, despite obsessively trying to install background task killer solutions and whatnot that were supposed to save on battery.
There was very little sacrifice with the mini iPhones, for the first time in modern "small" smartphones
I directly addressed the hard sales numbers, we don't need to talk about overrepresentation in HN/tech circles. The napkin math off public numbers tells us the iPhone mini sold 6 million units in the same year Google sold 10 million Pixels total, across all devices. So if 6 million units isn't enough to indicate demand for a niche phone, then there isn't enough demand for the Pixel lineup to exist either, only marginally more.
It's only a small number compared to Apple's total number of iPhones sold which is an astronomical stat to compare to. I don't think it's fair to compare mini phone demand against total iPhone sales.
My wife carries an iPhone 13 mini and hates the new frickin' huge iPhones. If it breaks I suppose I'll buy her a new one of those. If the OS refuses to update because the phone is too old, I guess we'll get a new frickin' huge iPhone, but only under protest.
> Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.
The last time I bought a phone I chose Samsung S22, which was way out of my initially intended budget, for the sole reason that there were not any smaller options available below its price range.
In the UK manual cars are still prolific. It's still about half of new cars are manual
Interestingly I have seen a high share of iPhone Minis in my tech-affine bubble around Berlin / Amsterdam etc. - also my grandma switched from SE to 13 Mini.
Also bought used iPhone SE (2016) in 2019 and 2020 - both time from (UX) designers - but the same people also ride bicycles, trains - or if car, really reflect their user requirements - be it a small EV or a van for vanlife.
Average consumers just buy the largest, most marketed (high margin) or "whatever the neighbour has" option - aka SUV or Pro Max.
iPhone 14 Pro = Weight 206 g (7.27 oz)
iPhone 16 Pro = Weight 199 g (7.02 oz)
The weight difference (7 grams) seems negligible
It's slight, but noticeable. The 15 Pro was 187g and felt much lighter than the 14 Pro, it's a shame they added more weight on the 16.
Well the 16 Pro has a 0.2" larger screen and large dimensions than the 14 pro and 15 pro.
Also the 17 Pro will now be aluminum which is even lighter than titanium, so it should be a bit lighter than the 16 Pro I think.
> yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them
I don't buy this. The iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold 6 million units in a year. That's about half the rate of Google's entire Pixel lineup. The market is small, yeah, but it definitely exists. I think a company could quietly make a high quality, straightforward, small Android device with maybe every-other-year hardware updates, and run away with a whole corner of the market all to itself.
You can't just look at units sold, you have to look at net units sold because the version of the product existed.
For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.
I have no idea what those numbers are, though.
> You can't just look at hamburger sales to judge hamburger demand. You have to consider an alternate universe where hamburgers aren't on the menu, then subtract all the people who would have ordered something else for lunch vs going hungry.
I know this probably is how the decisions get made. Especially if the alternative has a higher profit margin. I just have to say I think the world is worse for it.
That's an important analysis but it's answering a different question from whether the product would sell enough to make a nice profit.
And it only works when there are notable deficits in competition. Otherwise a company with less to cannibalize would make the smaller model and get themselves 3-6 million sales.
> For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.
If nothing else, you could still give the mini a higher margin and make some gains that way.
That’s another issue, those same users won’t tolerate paying more for a smaller phone. They’re picky and principled, which is a customer type that is just not worth chasing at scale.
Hi, my name is PickyAndPrincipled. Ha, that describes me perfectly and is the reason why I still use a Pixel 4a. It works still great and has a nice form factor.
And that’s fine! Just don’t be surprised when new phone manufacturers don’t see an incentive in catering to you.
Smaller phones tend to have a lower price point.
If they don't offer a smaller phone, you'll eventually buy a bigger phone. Once you are in camp big phone, you'll probably be back on the 2-5 year device treadmill. And you'll be spending more on the big phones.
Apple is in a continuous state of not giving their customers what they want.
A convertible Macbook with a touch screen and dual MacOS/IOS personalities would sell out. They will never make it because no one will ever buy an iPad again.
A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.
A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.
Apple won't do these things because you'd be happier but spend less.
> A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.
With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.
> A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.
This was the iPhone SE sold for many years until Feb 2025. It started at $430. It’s unfortunate they got rid of it for a 6inch 16E, but it is pretty reasonable on price at $600.
> With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.
If you were a person that likes Apple TV, I imagine it would be nice to have a TV that was just that rather than a TV with whatever smartness the maker insisted on, plus a standalone Apple TV. (Even nicer would be a TV without smarts, but those seem to be extinct)
Yes, a privacy preserving TV that lacks home screen ads, forced updates, automatic content recognition (ACR), etc.
Apple TV has by far the fastest processor in a TV set-top box. The interface is much cleaner and faster than any smart TV. And I'm sure Apple could do best in class 4k or 8k AI upscale, and live AI captioning w/ translation. They also have the lawyers needed to do some of the AI transformation and deal with the inevitable lawsuits from copyright holders.
They are probably also smart enough to class it as a "smart monitor", delete the TV tuners, and avoid lots of local regulatory requirements that way.
Could be a very competitive product as long as the price is no worse than Sony Bravia.
This thread seems to have a lot of people that love the iPhone mini (me included - I still use my 12 mini).
But from all reports that you can find with a quick search it seems clear that it did not sell well by Apple standards.
I would love them to bring it back and I’m not sure what it is about the Hacker News crowd that makes this phone over-represented. Maybe the tech crowd also uses laptops more, so we think of phones as our “small device” and use other devices more as appropriate?
> by Apple standards
Yeah. The question I'm trying to answer is not "does it make sense for Apple to make a small phone?", but rather "does it make sense for anyone to make a small phone?" I'm using the 13 Mini's sales data as evidence, because it is the one and only small phone made in the past decade or so.
I understand why you'd reach for that data, not a ton of other alternatives... But I'm not convinced that an arbitrarily chosen brand could achieve those sales figures. Especially if it was a new or no-name brand that didn't have a proven track record with software updates and hardware build quality.
Maybe I'm just incredibly naive but I have this small hope that we'll see a return to smaller phones that are trifolds for when you need the real estate.
I tend to like smaller phones as well, but even comparing the Pixel 9 Pro vs Pixel 9 Pro XL used markets, it seems really hard to find non-XL versions. I would totally believe that the XL is a far more popular model, unfortunately for the rest of us.
The problem is for many years now the smallest phone available has been getting larger and larger. This has lead small phone enthusiasts to cling to their old phones as long as they can stand it until they are forced to step to a larger model.
Bigger phones encourage more user engagement and more screen space to show ads.
Smaller phones are used by people who use it less.
I have only anecdotal data, pretty sure google has the analytics to find that out.
I put Bloomberg TV on the other day, just because it's one of the easy to access channels on a Roku I was setting up, and that experience makes me agree with your statement about space to show ads. It wasn't full of ads (yet?), but the tiny actual video surrounded by huge amounts of other content reminded me strongly of the TV future shown in Idiocracy.
https://www.bloombergmedia.com/press/bloombergtv/
Bloomberg's ads are slightly separate from their regular ads; the "other content" is still news most of the time - Bloomberg is at its heart a data and news feed company (the video news is mostly an add-on for them), so they are doing what they do best anyway. "Idiocracy" is an interesting example; while the style is similar, the side content on BTV, while a pale shadow of the actual terminal, is actually quite information-rich (especially on BTV+); the actual terminal is entirely populated by feed/data/whatever function you're using.
I am on an iPhone SE 3rd gen. due to the small form factor. It is already annoying to surf the web even with an adblocker, lots of cookie banners, notes, requests to install app/signup etc. take so much screen space that you can see no content. Clearly developers do not test or care for small screens anymore.
I'm exactly that person. Always running an older device and lamenting the lack of small devices. Unfortunately, the mainstream wants big devices, so we all get big devices.
I recently had to replace my Pixel 7 Pro and went with the Galaxy S25. My hands are much larger than average and it is amazing how unweildy I find the Pixel 7 Pro is in comparison to the S25 even though the size difference doesn't seem that big when compared side to side. Makes me wonder how people with normal sized hands deal with the massive phones.
Who's actually making 5.5" phones to prove that though apart from the iphone 13 mini? These chinese phones often tend to be 4" instead of 5.5" and often come with with massive downsides like awful cameras or being very thick
Nobody is saying they aren't the least popular, but there are certainly many who would still buy them.
They probably figure if they stop making them then most people will reluctantly move to a bigger model.
Probably. I don't expect the market to cater to me when I don't cater to it. The only reason I ditched my iPhone 5 in 2019 was the carrier entirely stopped service for it. I don't like my new 12 mini as much.
I don't see what I feel is the obligatory "I want a small Android phone!" post here yet: https://smallandroidphone.com/
Ultra principled users rarely if ever buy new devices or have predictable purchasing patterns in almost any way. Trying to appease this market is mostly a fools game, as they have learned.
I think it's like how everyone smart knows that small hatchbacks are the only cars worth buying, and everyone smart also knows that only idiots buy new cars. So, all new cars are made for idiots and no small hatchbacks get made :)
I’m sorry what? I read that comment and all I see is someone incapable of understanding that other people’s needs differ from their own, and only _smart_ people pick the choice that they themselves would make. It reeks of ignorance and being judgemental.
Haha. To close the loop on the comparison, you'll notice that the people I'm calling smart do not get what they want, in the end. Maybe not so smart after all, eh?
Doubling down is bold, but to be honest if you had the self reflection required to see my point, you wouldn’t have said what you said in the first place.
It is only your blind ego that is making you incorrectly assume these things about other people.
Sigh. I'm poking fun at the people I'm calling "smart", because they are too clever for their own good. Chill out a little, friend.
I mean, act smug and flippant and superior and get treated like you’re acting smug and flippant and superior.
It’s a HN meme at this point. For as long as I can remember, almost every single phone announcement on this site inevitably gets a bunch of comments about how it’s too big and how a smaller version would sell like hotcakes. You would think that phone manufacturers would have figured this out by now, but what do they know.
Lol yep. They always seem to think that the companies haven’t considered this properly and are missing out on some imagined huge market haha
I replaced my 4a (which is not particularly small) after Google nerfed the battery into oblivion, but every once in a while I get it out of its drawer and am always immediately struck by how much better the form factor is. Using a modern phone with a 6+ inch screen feels like trying to tie a knot with one hand.
I have this experience… until I turn it on and start to try and type stuff on the tiny keyboard or watch stuff on it again. Then I realise I’m glad I moved up a little
I agree with you, but I like the reminder that I probably shouldn't be using my phone for whatever I'm doing anyway.
If I'm at home, I should make the small effort to get a tablet or a laptop. If I'm out, should I just set a reminder and do it later and listen to something instead?
I realise that for many people, that time might be their only time available for doing whatever they were going to do, but on the other hand when I look at what other people use their phones for when they're out, it rarely looks important to me. Even the stuff people are doing for fun doesn't look much fun. Definitely not compared with the people who have also lugged a Switch/e-reader/actual book.
That seems pretty judgemental. Lots of things I do that might not “look important” can be very important. I do a lot of work on my phone including research that would look like browsing to a bystander.
Yup - I think that's fair. It is completely a value judgement. But without ill will, and not particularly heartfelt.
Regarding your point about things that are actually work in disguise, I basically look at browsing web pages as productive work these days compared to alternatives. There are only so many people who can be moderators working for TikTok, or researching endless-scroll or content recommendation algorithms. :)
But even taking what people are doing at face-value, perhaps TikTok/Reels/Shorts is actually important for their wellbeing. I think it is more likely harmful, but I'm guessing.
I think it would be better if people spent less time looking at phone screens (no matter how big), but as long as it's their choice, people should do what they want to do! I have a vague concern that people might be increasingly doing something that they want to do in the short term, but not in the long term, but probably that's always been the way.
My 4a didn't have the battery issue due to GrapheneOS, however, it the screen died recently (twice), so I got a pixel 9 with GrapheneOS. But yeah, it is uncomfortable to use the phone with one hand - I miss the small sized 4a.
On the other hand, it would be fun to explore these on device SLMs on a more capable phone with extra ram/storage.
twins!
I miss it so much. I bought a replacement one after it got cracked, only to have the battery AND Sim get nerfed a month later. Putting a custom ROM seemed to work for a while, and then it just got too unstable with sim card turning off randomly and silently. So now it sits in a drawer and used as a kids camera and I am so jealous of them. My google pixel 8 is bigger, but somehow nowhere needs as performant for my needs (camera + voice calls is basically it).
I heard about this but for some reason my 4a was never affected. Still works great and I still use it daily.
Oh man, I'm still using my 4a and am quite afraid of what I'll do once it goes caput. There's essentially no real replacement. The S23/24 are kinda okay, but the custom ROM support is meh. Pixels are unbeatable in that regard... It's a shame
I went for an 8a in a compromise of weight and size Vs an-actually-modern-phone.
After 2 weeks I was completely comfortable with it.
Check gsmarena's 'Compare' tool to find what works for you.
Really wish they would at least make the Fold a reasonable size when closed. It would scratch my smaller phone itch, and offer a larger screen when I actually do want one. Currently it’s “comically oversized” when folded, and literal tablet when open.
I just went from a Z Fold 5 to a Z Fold 7 and I hate it for this exact reason.
Z Fold 6 and earlier were slim, one handed use phones when folded, small tablet when opened.
Now it's just a regular phone, and a medium tablet when I open it.
First phone I've ever regretted upgrading to.
Consumers have spoken though. Same as dropping the stylus...
I dont think consumers have as much influence as people believe.
My understanding is that smaller phones get less screen time. Thus if you have some interest in increasing it, better to push bigger ones. But I don’t know if those perverted incentives make it back to the manufacturers. Do they make the most money from sale itself or after from the various ad-/data brokers?
I'd hoped others would copy/iterate the Flip form factor. A friend has one and it does feel great. I just don't get along with the Samsung software suite.
I'd buy a Flip as soon as I can install GrapheneOS on it.
With the popularity of the Flip I can only hope I won't have to wait too long.
I've enjoyed using a Moto razr+ 2024. If you're interested in trying one check out used devices, their value seems to crater. I think I got mine for ~$300 last year on eBay (while it was still the current gen device)
Did you get a chance to try the original Pixel Fold? Definitely not small like an iPhone 13 mini, but smaller than contemporary devices by a good bit!
Me crying for a newer Nexus 4, the best device in terms of quality/price ever made by Google
That phone had the worst camera I've ever used. I loved having it because it was XDA custom ROM-friendly, but good lord, that camera....
Best phone I've ever owned and it's not close. Every phone since then has been a compromise, to the point that (in a sunk cost fallacy kind of way) I've just quit caring about phones and just buy whatever the cheapest available unlocked device is. I run them into the ground (way past the end-of-service date) because I know the next one is going to be worse.
The Nexus 4 was a nice phone but I thought the battery life was bad and it also ran hot.
My Moto-X was truly next level. It was oled and could do always on display that didn't need to power the blacks pixels on the screen. It was the first phone to do this. It has voice recognition for unlocking (getting info that you couldn't when the phone was locked). First to do this too since I believe it uses dedicated hardware at the time. It also knew when I was driving to unlock the phone for voice commands also. It was small.
Nice throwback. The Moto X was awesome. Damn, phones were so exciting back then.
The Nexus 4 camera was rubbish and the GPS was rubbish. It could barely ever get a decent lock meaning navigating with it was a awful. I was so glad to replace that phone.
I loved my nexus 4! It's a pity that I at one point could not use it anymore because the updates made it unusable slow.
I agree, but I got the Pixel 5 instead; the 5 is actually smaller while the screen size is larger due to the curved screen corners. It also has a fingerprint sensor, unlike the 4. That being said, I still miss the squeeze-activated flashlight on the 4.
There are no alternatives. S25 is 6.2, and Pixels put the Pro/best version in 6.3, while on Samsung you get a step up to 6.7 and 6.9. Much better specs on almost the same size.
s25 is super manageable, it's the most comfy phone I've had since ever.
I keep thinking of how the Nexus 7 has a 7.02" screen. And how modern phones tend to be 6.1 - 6.9". But never quite 7!
It's not really comparable because the Nexus 7 has a 16:10 screen. Looking just at the size in inches without the aspect ratio is really only part of the picture. The Nexus 7 is like twice the width of a phone.
Dont worry theyll all be pushing 8 now that the barrier has been broken.
It's sad what they did to the Pixel 4a's battery, because that phone was otherwise comfort perfection
Still using mine on the stock rom. Mine was luckily not effected by the battery problems. Such a good phone.
I still carry my Pixel 5 for this reason. 2 replacement batteries in now and I have a spare sitting on a shelf. That said the Pixel 9A is tempting as it's not much larger than my Pixel 5. I hate that the finger print readers have moved to the front though. The sensor on the back of my 5 is perfectly postioned and also acts like a little track-pad for opening the notification tray. It was a perfect design IMO.
> a spare sitting on a shelf
Does that work for batteries? I feel like unused batteries tend to become unusable batteries.
Sorry, my wording was misleading there. A spare Pixel 5 on the shelf so if something happens to this one I have an immediate replacement. I pop it onto a charger every couple months to prevent the battery from going too low.
I've had a "spare" smartphone kept in a drawer for a year and when I needed it it was impossible to charge and I've never been able to wake it up.
Would be better in a drawer in the refrigerator. Calendar aging for batteries is mostly about the temperature and storage SoC, which should be in the 30-50% level.
Replying to my own comment as I can no longer edit. To clarify, I have a spare Pixel 5 sitting on the shelf. Was inexpensive to purchase a backup a few years ago off of a local classifieds site, still new in box.
Agreed on battery. I started with a 6a and only ever had the fingerprint in the front. I thought it's well designed and works well (as long as I stick to office job activities.. as soon as you start doing handy works it has its issues.. same for Px7).
You just blew my mind on the pixel 3 with the alternative way to open the pulldown menu.
I agree that I prefer the fingerprint sensor on the back. Very convenient and natural for the pocket grab and unlock maneuver.
I think they moved the fingerprint sensor because of all the magnetic mount and covers acting as a stand being trendy these days.
i would still use my px5 if it were not for 2 stupid problem: The promixity sensor does not work, thus the phone still think it's in pocket and won't wake the screen. Another problem is my power button has been missing.
Just bought a used iPhone 13 Mini last week to replace my 12 Mini. This has to last me...apparently until the heat death of the universe.
I love my 13 mini but its battery is just too anemic. Slapping a MagSafe battery on it defeats the purpose of having a small phone. My 16 Pro lasts me all day, but I absolutely hate using it, as I don't do very much with my phone in the first place. I feel stuck.
Why does it run out so fast? I thought the 13 Mini had pretty good battery life? They say it is much better than my 12 Mini which I do fine with in one day. What's your battery health at?
Two reasons.
First is age. These devices are 5-7 years old. Many are using their original batteries, which have several dead cells. So they literally have less capacity than they did back then.
Second is JavaScript, in my opinion. I can often see my battery drain in real time when I use the browser, even when Low Power Mode is on. Demanding client side JavaScript is a big reason for that.
You also have extensions doing stuff on pre/post-load that also contribute to power usage.
Finally, so many web developers test against modern devices, and there isn't enough demand to warrant accommodating less powerful CPUs/SOCs. You can try to use the web without JS, but you'll find that many websites will think that you're a bot and block you.
Pixel 5 is about as big, but yes, that's as far as it goes.
Unfortunately that goes for virtually any phone on the market... Sad.
I just want a 5.5" phone. I'm not even asking for one of these tiny 4" phones like some people, just slightly smaller so that it can be used one handed
I'm afraid you might be right.
Former user of 3a, I upgraded to 6 but it was way too big and heavy, and had a weird mass balance.
I'm now on 8 and it has perfect size and weight IMO (using it with a recommended Spigen case).
Looks like 10 is +17g heavier than 8 and 1-2 mm bigger. Not as big as 6 but almost as heavy.
https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=13979&idPhone2=...
The only way Google phones keep up with the battery lives of iPhones is to have larger batteries. iPhone gets the same battery time with a much smaller battery.
Unfortunately I think this means Google will keep having to sell huge phones for a while
Samsung S25 is just 3 mm bigger than Pixel 4a. Is that too much of a difference?
I got a Motorola Razr 2025 Ultra. You can use it closed. Open it is narrower but taller than a Pixel. It fits in my pocket easily.
The size is about what every manufacturer settled on, and what most people want, it is unfortunate that smaller phones are not an option but it doesn't sell.
What bugs me however is that thin body with a huge camera bulge. Do anybody actually like that? It looks ridiculous, and the bulge defeats the point of having a thin phone. If you can't make the camera thinner, make the phone thicker, there is plenty of things you can do with more space: bigger battery, better speaker, more powerful vibration, more robust, etc...
I dont really buy the issue with "there's no market" just look at the pc market: isnt there are market for convertibles, laptops, tablet+keyboard, different OS, all sorts of sizes... how different is the android phone ecosystem?
There is a market, it is just not lucrative enough for big players to take it.
There is however a company that caters to these niches: Unihertz
The have small phones, massive phones with huge batteries, rugged phones, phones with keyboards,...
From what I have seen, not great on the software side though, and they have entry-level specs, with prices to match. It is a Chinese company.
I get, I guess it is the "comically oversized"phone and I consider it to small. So...
I really liked my Pixel4 but in 2025 the hardware and software are getting too out of date.
Still does everything that I want it to and the photos are still excellent. I don't think I'm missing much.
Same, it's still pretty fast here. Not sure what I'm missing
Until I purchased a Pixel 8a, I thought the same thing.
I discovered that all the newer pant models that I purchased have bigger pockets, so that's not a problem anymore.
I just hope that all the newer body models I purchase have bigger hands.
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/095D6...
Shot of humans from the future.
I have probably normal hands, and I feel that the pixel 8a is perfect, and that I could use a bigger one too.
You can choose the size of the keyboard, if this worries you.
"Just buy bigger pants" is the 2025 version of "you're holding it wrong"?
No, I simply noticed that all my very old pants (that I don't use anymore), have very small pockets, and that all the new pants have very big pockets. My opinion on small vs big screen is all based on that.
That doesn't solve the weight problem.
Modern phones weight the same as the old ones...
A couple of days ago, I walked 20.000 steps on a mountain trail, and I didn't notice a problem with my pixel 8a in my pants' pocket. Holding it is not a problem too.
The people at Google seem to think much more like me than the people at Apple.
There are 3 primary decisions Google made that click with me, while Apple's choices are a mystery to me:
1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles.
2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.
3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
I'm sure people who prefer iPhones have their own set of "this clicks with me on iPhones and puzzles me on Pixels" aspects?
Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
Same for me, although I currently use an iPhone (and the rest of the Apple ecosystem). I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.
For me, it's Apple's privacy stance (which I know could change at anytime, but that's where we are at right now). Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
As long as apps on Android can do crap like the web-to-app tracking via localhost and other shady data harvesting that Google continues to allow, I don't touch it no matter how much better it is and how much I prefer the workflows.
Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
> barely tolerate macOS
I guess it depends what you’re comparing it to but macOS is (for me) the best of a bad bunch of compromises. POSIX with app boundaries that are (mostly) respected, if not particularly granular. There’s nothing I really hate about the platform save for homebrew and being walled in to the ecosystem.
I actually love modern Linux with Gnome, and it has all the parts these days to be a great desktop operating system, but I find the freedom there undercuts a lot of the promises (Flatpaks are a good idea in theory that doesn’t work in practice as the sandboxes are overly liberal and overreach on most apps because no-one’s forced to justify why they need the permissions they do etc).
I spent so long on Windows that I really don’t miss it. The Window management was way better for so long, but the idioms drive me crazy (registry issues and programs still freely writing anywhere they like), and supporting everything forever has massive drawbacks to usability (although Winget sort of slightly helps with this but it’s not much better than homebrew).
> best of a bad bunch of compromises
That's exactly why I don't particularly care for it, but still use it.
My first choice would be Linux + a tiling WM. I used DWM for years before Apple Silicon, and have been on mac ever since the M1. These new machines are so nice that I can't go back to anything else now, whether I hate the software or not.
But macOS is just baffling. There's POSIX underneath, and it's mostly reliable, and it has a lot of little nice touches - being able to search the menu with Cmd+Shift+/, emacs keybindings in nearly every text field, etc. But then there's stuff that makes no sense. Why do I need a third party app for any sort of sane window management? (and even then, I haven't fully replicated my preferred way of working, only gotten close enough with Aerospace, and more recently Raycast). A third party app to set a keyboard shortcut to launch an application. I can't disable the animations for switching virtual desktops, and when you switch there's a lag before it's responsive again for keyboard input (I just want this to be instant).
So much of how macOS expects you to interact with it seems to be mouse/touchpad driven, and that's just not how I prefer to use my computer. At least with Raycast I now have shortcuts to launch and switch to apps (but not specific app windows because of the app/window separation in macOS). Yet even still, I can't set a keyboard shortcut to move a window to a different space. I have to click and hold the title bar and then press my shortcut for moving to that space to move the window - Apple decided that action MUST involve the mouse.
I also can't set window rules. I can't tell my terminal to always open on workspace 2, or mail.app to always open on workspace 4 at a specific size, etc. Making an app full screen also creates a new ephemeral space that can't be switched to with the usual Ctrl+NUM keyboard shortcut. I can't set a window to be always on top.
I'm more or less waiting for Asahi Linux to get support for DisplayPort ALT mode & M4 support, although I'm not holding my breath.
I do appreciate having access to the big commercial apps though on macOS, but ultimately I want my M4 macbook pro w/ Linux & hyprland.
Definitely agree about those nice touches. Just a few thoughts from my experience as of late.
- Window management wise the new tiling controls/keyboard shortcuts added last year have replaced third party tools for me. It's not as customisable as rectangle or moom but it covers halves and quarters which is mostly all I need. Additionally the "arrange" feature is nice letting you automatically tile N most recently used windows in a given layout.
- For window rules you can right click on an app in the dock and under options assign it to the current workspace and it should reopen there.
- 3rd party software like BetterTouchTool can "throw" windows to other spaces. But it did feel a bit hacky from memory (small but perceptible lag)
- The new spotlight features coming this year look quite promising for keyboard driven workflows.
So much this.
I’ve migrated a home server to a Mac mini. It was awful to achieve. Trying to get a machine to boot, connect network shares and start containers was a week long effort. I can do it in Ubuntu in about 10 minutes from a clean install.
So much is disgusting UI options hidden deep some in the (awful) settings app.
But the result is a server that is fast, powerful and using 6-7W per hour, compared to the old Nuc 9 it replaced that used 70W.
It’s just so good. The OS lets it down.
The new Intel NUCs are only like a hundred something dollars for an N150 CPU and come with 16 gigs of RAM and a SSD.
Why pay so much more to fight an uphill battle?
Unless you desperately need the hot garbage that is Xcode there isn't much reason to deal with Mac Minis running MacOS as a server. One update and it will suspend and be unwakeable without physical interaction.
I had a list of things I wanted: I have limited space so needed a small form factor. I am on solar and wanted power usage to be low. I wanted 10Gb Ethernet.
It’s on a smart plug, so I can power cycle it remotely.
The hardware is far superior to any Nuc, I have at 4 or 5 of those already, I really like them. MacOS is a struggle, but I think I’ve tamed it.
I wasn’t the one paying.
If your not paying, then it really does not matter.
10Gbps equipment is pretty spendy
>Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google
https://grapheneos.org/
As a consumer, I lament most of all about Pixel devices (or any other Android device really) that I have to wipe the OS and install a different one to get features that matter to me, particularly around privacy.
Thats why I don't use Pixel devices, or any Android devices really. I know its a precarious situation with Apple since they could reverse their stance at any point and sometimes they get it wrong, but they have yet to completely fail me when it comes to privacy.
In any event, it'd be nice if there was a 3rd mainstream vendor in the mobile race[0][1]
[0]: Both design wise and conceptually, I miss WebOS when it was strictly under Palm. It could have really been something. Why they didn't embrace multitouch screens I haven't a clue, it was the one thing that baffled me.
[1]: The one project I really wanted Mozilla to take a long term view on - Firefox OS - was another great innovation of our time that didn't get the love or support it deserved. It was a blast using web technology to build apps that ran fluidly on modern hardware. Unfortunately, it was all too often relegated to cheap manufacturer hardware that couldn't support it ideally, but even with this being true, they pulled off alot of technical excellence with that project.
I miss Nokia's maemo/meego based phones :( the n900 was really nice to use and even write my own little personal apps for (something I haven't done in over a decade of owning android phones)
It ran emacs. It was glorious.
/e/ Foundation sells phones with /e/OS preinstalled if you'd like an ungoogled Android phone without having to wipe the OS and install an ungoogled Android yourself.
I haven't tried /e/, I prefer installing a raw lineage with microG myself (although I don't currently use the microG part), but it seems like you and your parent commenter would be in the intended target.
I do agree that an alternative would be great. I'd gladly use Linux mobile with good, realiable hardware.
The Bliss launcher in /e/OS does not support widgets conventionally, and the best thing to do is immediately replace it. I used Lawnchair, and it did improve things.
It did encourage me to provide my Google account credentials, which I refrained to do, which made the appstore essentially equivalent to F-droid.
I can't really get excited about it.
Apparently the GrapheneOS folks are talking with an OEM[0], which would allow you to buy a phone with a secure, private, non-spyware operating system straight from the factory.
I already own a Pixel running GrapheneOS, but if this happens I'll probably order one as soon as they come out to cast a vote with my wallet.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44678411
I hope this happens in 2026, not later. If they have a model with a removable / replaceable battery that would be heaven.
Apple isn't privacy oriented, please quit spreading this misnformation. The only thing you can say about them is that they are marginally better than google but that isn't saying much. Their supposed respect of privacy is just marketing.
Apple doesn't track anywhere close to the amount of data that Google collects. Equating them is very disingenuous, IMO.
lol there is only 2 vendor in market right now
google and apple, apple is the best in this privacy field
Did you read the thread? Google devices are orders of magnitude more private if you install a custom rom like graphene OS or lineage + microg.
Apple is pretty much the same as a vanilla google phone in comparison.
> Google devices are orders of magnitude more private if you install a custom rom like graphene OS or lineage + microg.
Sure, but then it ceases being a Google device. The discussion is focused around Pixel, as is, vs. Apple/iOS, in which case Apple wins by far in that aspect.
Semantics. It's still a Pixel device regardless of the software. The OS is still Android. Android is open source.
why you acting like android apps is free from tracking ????
"Apple is pretty much the same as a vanilla google phone in comparison"
Google literally Ads company, do you know how ads company works????
Look into it rather than speaking out of ignorance.
There are several ways to block ads on Android. First and most-important, with a de-googled OS like Lineage or /e, the built-in tracking functionality just isn't there.
To blame the OS for an app spying on you is like saying Firefox is spying on you for Google because a webpage has a google tracker in it. Nonsense. An app is not the same as the OS. You can just not install the app like you would not visit the page.
But even then, open source android has many ways to block ads if you do want to install shitty apps that track you.
- The AdAway app that uses host file updates
- App Warden, which actually disables tracking libraries in apps
- LineageOS has the ability to turn off network access for apps that don't need them
- AFWall+ for app-level firewall rules.
The OS is absolutely not spying on you and actually gives you tools to stop spying. You can't say this AT ALL about Apple or vanilla Google Android.
And so is apple
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/
nope
Did you try a Jolla phone?
Not expensive and work great. Was playing with one today. I am impressed.
I love Jolla and I wish more people used it so that there was a really good native browser and different chat + VoIP options. The rest is great, and you can always use Android applications via the emulation layer.
fwiw, installing GrapheneOS is by far the easiest phone OS install I've ever done. It's been a while but if there were any hiccups, they were too small to remember. My memory is just plug it into desktop with usb-c cable, go to grapheneos website in chromium (it uses web usb so no firefox), hit the install button, and wait a couple minutes.
And yes, it allows you to disable network permissions for apps, among many other nice things.
What privacy feature are you looking for that Pixels don't supply?
> What privacy feature are you looking for that Pixels don't supply?
Opt-in cross app tracking instead of opt-out, but if Google can get all apps on board with their new privacy sandbox thing that'll be less relevant.
More importantly, an equivalent to Apple's advanced data protection for all Google services & backups. I want full E2EE for photos, notes, backups, passwords, bookmarks, etc. I want built-in hide my email to gmail, I want to be able to turn off network access for any app I want in the permission settings. I want Google to treat Android as something completely separate from their advertising business instead of an extension of it as a source of data collection.
>I miss WebOS when it was strictly under Palm. It could have really been something. Why they didn't embrace multitouch screens I haven't a clue, it was the one thing that baffled me.
Huh? WebOS was Palm embracing multitouch screens.
They didn’t embrace virtual keyboards if I recall correctly
I've been running GrapheneOS for a few months now, keeping my old Samsung on WiFi as a backup.
It is such a breath of fresh air. It is so quiet and functional. It feels like it prioritizes me, the user. I am so grateful to have this OS.
Of course it has flaws, but they're lesser flaws. Like the crop tool is sometimes unusable in the gallery app. I can live with that. I couldn't live with the AI onslaught and spyware infiltration.
After looking at it, there are many things that I do not like about Graphene, and many ways that it tries hard not to be likable.
Beyond the monochrome icon pack that cannot be changed in the included launcher (which is so aesthetically challenged with an appearance that only a mother could love), the browser that cannot grasp dark mode, and the lack of the accustomed pattern unlock, I find the lack of one singular thing intolerable:
I want root. At a minimum, adb rooted debugging.
I realize that I could unlock the bootloader and Magisk this thing, but with the number of correct decisions that have been made by the authors of this operating system (and they are legion), they do not recognize one fundamental need of administrators:
I want control of my systems.
That is really a shame.
Isn't battery life worse on it?
I did consider it at some point but not having google wallet(apparently nfc payments are only available via banks' apps there) was too big of a downside for me.
It is Google themselves choosing to prevent GrapheneOS from passing the validation checks required to make GPay work (which is the app that makes the actual payment).
Wallet is there, you can hold digital cards, and transit cards, and your Ikea member card, etc. It's GPay that won't work to do the payment. And it's Google the one being a bully and deliberately making you think like that towards any alternative that's not in their list of approved systems that can be used in your own phone.
Could anyone here waxing lyrically about Apple so called privacy stand explain to me what that actually is apart from a marketing point Apple keeps repeating?
Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.
What supposedly so good about it? Their track record seems awful to me.
E2EE (advanced data protection) without having to use something like Proton, so can stay in the very convenient "ecosystem." With it turned on, keys are on your device, Apple doesn't have them and can't use them and it covers all the main stuff - photos, messages, notes, etc.
It's still a compromise, sure, but it's a better compromise than what Google offers.
Plus small things. Apple's tracking protection for example is opt in instead of opt out on Android. Google's core business is ads, they won't push features that can negatively impact that. Apple also has an ad division but it's not their main focus, hardware is. They can implement better privacy without impacting their bottom line. Apple's refusal to unlock phones at the request of the FBI, etc.
It's not that Apple is the be all end all for privacy, but they are far ahead of Google and are by far the most convenient option if you are within the walled garden.
> With it turned on, keys are on your device, Apple doesn't have them and can't use them and it covers all the main stuff - photos, messages, notes, etc.
Or so they say. Has that actually been proven?
It's impossible to prove a negative, like "Apple doesn't have a backdoor". One can prove the existence of a backdoor by reverse-engineering suspicious code or network traffic, but not the nonexistence without poring over every byte of machine code, and quite a lot of the hardware too.
This is not unique to Apple, it's impossible to prove any system is free of a backdoor, including Linux distributions (see: the xz backdoor, or "Reflections on trusting trust"), unless you hand-crafted your whole smartphone from raw silicon.
You can raise that gripe with even something like signal. Sure, it's open source, but when was the last time someone reproducibility built it?
People reproducibly build Signal all the time. There's a bug right now that makes the play store version differ from the one you get by downloading off their website/build from source, but you can examine the differences to see they're minor.
>People reproducibly build Signal all the time
source? Is there a site that tracks this, or only shows up when someone raises an issue on github?
Pick a decently up-to-date fork of Signal on GitHub and look at its Actions. You can also just do it yourself if you'd like, the process is effectively just doing a build in a docker container and comparing the result.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...
The github action finishing is not the same as "reproducibility built it", which implies verification against the official build.
There is a dedicated reproducible builds action that verifies that it does match (currently failing because of the aforementioned bug). I'm not sure why you're still litigating this when, again, you can not only just go look at it, you can very much do it yourself.
> Could anyone here waxing lyrically about Apple so called privacy stand explain to me what that actually is apart from a marketing point Apple keeps repeating?
The end-to-end encryption guarantees on this page seem pretty real to me and have little to do with marketing: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
Google backup on Android is also end-to-end encryption. The difference is that on Android, I can self-host anything that Apple won't end-to-end encrypt, like maps or application installs.
Can any of this be verified or confirmed independently?
how do you propose they prove that they don't have your encryption keys
You just cannot prove a party doesn't own something.
> Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.
It's very easy to completely disable iCloud. I've never used it and don't intend to, despite running a mac as my primary computer for ~12 years now.
> It's very easy to completely disable iCloud.
My experience widely differs.
Apple will nag you all the time if you don’t have iCloud or just use the free tier and the free tier is very limited. You lose the only way to actually easily sync the phone when you disable it.
Most of the iPhone owners I know including me have caved and pay the additional tax every month.
This is correct. Maybe settings will show you a login button but except for that you're fine.
Apple is much more strict on app tracking (and apps in general).
Yes.
As an example I think Androids have a single device ID which is given to all apps. But iOS has a per app device ID.
And the ID resets pretty often.
The marketing department exploded when Apple announced that change, it made user conversion tracking completely useless.
There is no device ID, only ones tied to a user login on a phone, and the app must request a permission to get it. You can, for example, know that the user ID (which you obviously also need to have a permission to retrieve), is being used on the same device as was used to access your service in the past. Or you can know that this particular otherwise-anonymous user/device combination is being used again. I'm pretty sure that's likewise possible on iOS, but folks can chime in.
And of course there are guidelines that disallow most of the abuse scenarios I suspect people want to imagine: https://developer.android.com/identity/user-data-ids
Not familiar with how Android does it anymore, but sounds fairly similar to iOS.
The main difference is it's opt in on iOS, but opt out on Android I believe.
On iOS, when the app pops up and asks to track, if the user says no, the app can't access the system advertising ID at all, and also is not permitted to track activity via other means like email address, user ID, etc (but the only thing that's technologically enforced is the system advertising ID, it's only forbidden by policy to not use other tracking methods).
Given the huge fit Meta threw after Apple implemented this, while they were silent about Android, I'm inclined to believe Apple's method has more of a privacy impact.
Also worth noting Google is hoping to move away from device-level advertising IDs with their "privacy sandbox" thing.
Yes, specifically both have some variant of "advertising ID", which is shared across all apps. The difference between iOS and Android is that iOS requires you to opt every app into receiving it, whereas Android is opt out. However on top of this Android has a "gsf" id, which is shared between apps, and can't be changed without a factory reset.
The privacy stuff and the hardware quality are my main reasons as well. Oh, and Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS.
Another reason I stick with Apple is style/design. Aside from the latest Alan Dye-led stuff, Apple's design has been top-notch, they make every other company look like they lack class and design-sense.
With that said, I did like Nokia's Windows Phones and the the period of Microsoft's design revolution where Surface devices had suede or whatever. That massive Surface table thing was dope too but man, Windows just keeps getting worse...somehow!
I'm looking forward to getting a Framework laptop at some point and installing Linux.
> Apple's design has been top-notch
But only from the iPhone X to 14, after which the Dynamic Island took over.
(I'll see myself out)
No judgement here. I liked my touchbar, and was pretty productive with it before it got axed.
I maintain that if the Touch Bar had been made full height and had an affordance (like slightly more distance) to prevent accidental touches, it would have been way more practical.
Apple tends to have products on a design refresh schedule, and for the Mac is it about five years. I think the combination of user dislike of the initial implementation and limited developer integration caused the physical Touch Bar to be eliminated in the M1 design.
There are a few unicode characters I keep finding myself needing to type when I transcribe, and the Touchbar would be perfect for this. Except, there's no good way to just "add keys for that". You have add quick actions, which means writing Applescript that copies those into the clipboard and pastes... this is slow enough that it's noticeable (never mind having to first hit the quick actions button). On top of that, even though the label for the quick action is that single character, the buttons that it renders are like 2 inches wide. So instead of being able to fit 20 such buttons/keys on it, I can fit exactly 6. You have to swipe left and right to see the others.
Is there a Minecraft extension so that the Touchbar becomes the game's hotbar with icons? I've never looked.
I don't think the touchbar was going to be worthwhile without haptic feedback. At the very least, it needed the force sensors used for the touchpad so that accidental touches could be properly rejected.
There’s a universe where the touchbar sits above the function row without trying to replace it and is a killer feature.
The amount of times I mute the audio with that stupid touch bar..
I've said this before but the trackpad is too big and they could have fit both function keys and touch bar and everyone would have been happy.
This might be the first time I've heard somebody complain about a trackpad being too big, usually it's the other way around.
> Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS
Not sure I understand this? One assumes that "daily driver" involves Linux VM use in this context[1], and ChromeOS's Linux VM integration is just wildly ahead of WSL (which really isn't bad) or the mess on OS X (awful). Installed Crostini apps appear as native apps in the UI. Transparent cross-filesystem access works flawlessly. Wayland and X11 apps appear with native decorations. Clipboard/WM/IPC integration does exactly what you expect. USB devices prompt you if you want to connect to the VM on insert (and remember the setting) etc...
And yes, I'm biased because I work there. But really it's a great development environment.
[1] I mean, if you're doing iOS development or need an M4 Max for performance reasons, or need some legacy Mac tooling like Adobe stuff, you're probably not looking at alternative platforms at all. Someone making the choice you posit is like 99% likely to be a web or embedded person working at a Linux shell as their native environment.
The Debian experience on my kid's Chromebook in Crostini is truly fantastic. The Android experience, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. I had hoped a convertible Chromebook could give them access to all the learning apps across Linux, the web, and Android on a single device; but a lot of Android apps tell the Play Store they aren't compatible, and I have to jump through hoops to get them installed.
To be fair (and, again, biased), Android apps run wildly better on a Chromebook than they do on a Mac or Windows box. :)
School Chromebooks are very limited devices (often these were low-end units purchased at the beginning of the pandemic!), and you're likely comparing it to the flagship Samsung or whatever in your pocket, which is just objectively a much more powerful computer.
For a good experience running Android apps on ChromeOS you really need an ARM CPU and a decent amount of RAM (12 or 16).
> Apple's design has been top-notch
The only designs I'm fond of are the macs. The iPhone looks pretty meh these days. The software side is slowly getting worse, it was great and they've lost the plot making changes for changes sake
>Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
GrapheneOS may interest you.
>Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
GrapheneOS specifically supports this for all installed apps.
All of my banking apps that are required for 2FA would probably not work.
You might want to take a gander at this list: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Looks like the list includes those apps that require access to Google Play services - which defeats the entire point of the OP wanting the privacy.
GrapheneOS not only provides a sandbox for Google Play (meaning it's just another app with no special privileges, and you can grant/revoke permissions (including network!) as you desire), it also heavily promotes user profiles for further isolation.
I have a "banking" profile set up with Google Play services installed. 98% of the time I'm using my phone, I'm using the primary Owner profile. All the other profiles are encrypted-at-rest, meaning that until I enter my Banking-profile-specific PIN, the apps and data (including the Google Play Services installed there) are just encrypted files, and unable to do anything at all. (There are provisions for allowing a secondary profile to run in the background, but in this case I have obviously left that disabled.)
That sounds great, how much friction does this setup cause you daily? Could you hand your phone to a firend or family easily if they needed it?
Each profile in GrapheneOS is encrypted separately, and switching profiles require entering a PIN (plus additional biometric methods if you set them up for that profile) before the data is decrypted and accessible.
So yes, you can hand the phone over to a friend or family, and they cannot get to any other user profile. Or you can set up a separate profile just for them, and they will have their own isolated set of apps - something like a separate user account on a desktop PC. And if only they know the PIN for their profile and you don't, they can keep secrets from you on that profile.
Sounds like an awful lot of work vs. just having an iPhone and regularly install your banking app on it, and still not get spied on.
This myth that you're not being tracked in very similar ways if you use an iPhone is nothing but genius marketing and PR. Do some research about the type and quantity of telemetry that's sent back to the mothership from your iOS device, it's not materially different from regular Android.
> Both iOS and Google Android transmit telemetry, despite the user explicitly opting out of this. When a SIM is inserted both iOS and Google Android send details to Apple/Google. iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
Not saying there is no spying, but Google is definitely a worse offender, by orders of magnitude. This, plus the lots of nagging + nudging dialogues a stock Android phones tries to get you to allow data collection. Google Maps is a prominent one, that by default tracks your each and every move and sends it to google. Web+App cross ID fingerprinting is also something Google has no issue with. Safari on iOS defaults to delete cookies every 7 days based on some AI logic to measure interactions. AirDrop works offline only between devices etc.
P.S: Citing a paper from 2021 is propably useless. Apple was the driving force in dropping trackable App ids, google had to follow suit. More stuff has happend in the space since then.
> Not saying there is no spying, but [...]
But that is exactly what your previous comment said:
>> Sounds like an awful lot of work vs. just having an iPhone and regularly install your banking app on it, and still not get spied on.
Installing GrapheneOS admittedly requires a computer, a browser, and about 15 minutes of your time after you buy the device, assuming you've never done it before, but claiming that that's "an awful lot of work" compared to "just" having an iPhone is false. They don't provide even remotely the same level of control over your privacy or security. With technical hardening measures on one side, and on the other, a vague promise that Apple might crack down on third party tracking methods that happen to be misaligned with their own business goals.
> AirDrop works offline only between devices etc.
That's actually a great example because Apple obediently restricted AirDrop as soon as Chinese authorities discovered that it was being used for anti-government protests. Apple doesn't care about privacy ideologically, their actions in other countries and their commitment to growing their advertising business should serve as proof of that, but there's clearly some dissonance at play.
what makes you think you are not getting spied on? Most banking apps are just glorified websites anyway with all the usual analytics tool embedded that you cannot disable with a browser extension.
GrapheneOS sandboxes Google Play services, it's just a regular app without any special privileges. You can remove all of its permissions.
My banking apps work fine on grapheneos.
Same stance, iOS isn’t the best but the least bad. Google is an anchor to Android, supposedly Android is open source and everyone can contribute but at the end no device can be sold without Google play services and Google decides what is accepted in the aosp project.
If aosp was actually open, like managed by all biggest phone seller in a consortium, i bet we would actually have feature that people want to get. Instead of a thousand « material you » redesign, that honestly looked ugly from the get go and isn’t much better years later.
Many people want to be able to invert the recent and back button, most in fact, yet Google stubbornly refuse to add that setting. That’s just an example, but this repeat a thousand time over the whole Android project.
I would love to have Android software on an Apple device. Their hardware is incredible!
Ultimately, I tolerate Android from a privacy standpoint because we're still able to fully modify our devices and use open-source app sources. The minute that goes away (and it feels like Google isn't as tolerant of it anymore), I go.
> Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
This is literally GrapheneOS or LineageOS+microg x) which ironically is fully available on Pixel phones and and a slowly vanishing number of others...
> I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.
I just got my first MacBook Pro this month and feel this exactly. I prefer Windows as an OS hands down. It works with all my peripherals and has better configuration options.
But the hardware makes up for it. My MacBook Pro is about twice as fast as my new x86 desktop from work. Its battery is nearly 15x longer than my Razer laptop and four times as fast.
I’ll take gaps in the software quality for all of the progress in hardware quality.
Linux performs quite well on M1/M2 Macs (I'd even argue they are the best laptops to run Linux), almost counter-intuitively to some people's expectations. The worst Macs to run Linux on are actually the last Intel models with T1/T2 stuff. It takes some time for folks to port to new M chips as they come out but once they do, due to the popularity and similar peripherals they work well.
Hasn't porting of newer models completely stalled since the departure of the 2 motivated and skilled individuals that made it originally possible?
I'm not following the drama, but even an older M1 Pro Mac beats almost every other PC laptop for Linux unless you specifically need x86 (or in love with OLED panels). In fullness of time, Macs are popular enough that I am confident Linux will be ported.
I genuinely do not understand this claim and propaganda about Apple privacy.
1) it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud
2) the phone's always listening, always
3) once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
To me apple is overly invasive with their icloud accounts and things, and password resets taking weeks, yet I see no evidence it is any harder to get my data than on other devices, if anything, it's easier.
So what is the claim here? Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy? An ad less about computers and one slightly less correct about idk wine?
The fact is that anybody with physical access to my devices has an easier time logging through the apple ones than the windows/androids i own and that I care more than advertising
Apple is the only one that offers actual E2EE with advanced data protection for all iCloud services. Without it, yes, Apple can see your data. With it on, they can't. The key is stored on device, encrypted with your device pin/passcode and covers iCloud backup, including messages, drive, photos, notes, reminders, bookmarks, shortcuts, voice memos, wallet, passwords, health data, journal, home, maps, etc. The only thing not covered under ADP is iCloud mail, contacts, and calendars because it uses CalDAV and CardDAV.
> once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
Sounds like you didn't have FileVault (FDE) turned on. If you did, that wouldn't work you'd have needed your recovery key.
> it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud
They can't if you have ADP.
> Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy?
Yes, it is privacy. Let's not understate the massive surveillance that ad networks do, Google included.
Google is an advertising company, they have zero incentive to offer the same level of privacy that Apple does and probably never will, it would be directly detrimental to their core business.
Even Google also gives actual E2EE by default for Android backups. Same with Samsung. Others have mentioned that Proton and others do this for services that Apple won't.
https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/risks/bac...
But not for photos, arguably one of the more important things to a lot of people to be E2EE, and not everyone wants to host their own Immich instance, or do things manually. iCloud offers E2EE photo back up and sync and native apps for it, it's a huge selling point that Google could just as easily offer but willingly choose not to.
> it's a huge selling point that Google could just as easily offer but willingly choose not to.
Google Photos is meant for sharing, where E2EE makes little sense. You can search your photos from any device.
If you really want to give up that convenience for E2EE, you might as well do it right and use Proton or Ente, which have E2EE for all photos, unlike iCloud, which isn't for shared albums or photos shared to anyone with the link. Unlike iOS, Android lets these apps have access to all the same device APIs as Google Photos, meaning they're as seamlessly integrated as possible. Apple iCloud uses iOS APIs not available to third parties, locking you in to using either a gimpy service or a gimpy app.
You can share and search[1] for your photos from any device on Ente as well, with E2EE.
[1]: https://ente.io/ml
Is there any third-party validation on these claims of E2EE? Everyone keeps asking for some sort of validation or testing to these claims and everyone is just ignoring them. Without some kind of third-party testing none of this matters, anyone can say whatever they want unless someone can do testing to demonstrate its adherence to this.
> As part of our commitment to security assurance, Apple regularly engages with third-party organizations to provide security assurance, certifying and attesting to the security of Apple’s hardware, operating systems, apps, and services. Our goal is to specify certifications that can be recognized by Apple users around the globe.
https://support.apple.com/guide/certifications/intro-to-appl...
Apple's E2EE is less safe than a proper one like Proton's (which also has storage, email, calendar). But one has to drink the Apple propaganda and believe it's true.
Also, ADP does not work in UK, at all.
The rest of the message I won't even comment. All things that if you care you get easier on any other device.
And Apple's ad business is booming while other are stagnant.
> Also, ADP does not work in UK, at all.
It does work if you've enabled it before it got disabled back in Feb, and the US successfully managed to get the UK to back off its demands for a backdoor, but it remains to be seen if new UK customers will ever be able to enable ADP again.
how is apple's not "proper?"
> 3) once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
Do you not know how computers work? That how it works on every computer without encryption.
You wouldn't have been able to access to the data passwordless if you had enabled Filevault encryption
Apple's privacy policy is like everything else Apple: it best compares to things outside of it's walled garden. But inside the walls Apple operates just like every other company. It gathers information on all it's users for it's own advertising business. They can claim they don't have third parties involved and that makes them more private, but they do all the same things to their users but just do it themselves. They're as much an advertising company as Google or Facebook (and would love to be as big as those advertisers), but their ads are all within the Apple walls, so they can claim they are much more private. When they really aren't.
> They’re as much an advertising company as Google or Facebook
They are? By what metric? This sounds made up to support the assertion that a company which doesn’t do broad data sharing with third parties, but keeps it to themselves, is somehow less (or no less) private than those who do.
Apple imposes "Artificial Incompetence" on their users. It treats them like children, gives them no agency, and limits their freedom, all while praising them for their taste and superior sense of... something.
This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.
Doing things weirdly and badly, and not allowing any other way, prevents skill transfer between operating systems and environments. It prevents easy transfer of software - it forces software to treat the weird and bad things as canonical.
Apple users, with their imposed muscle memory, not realizing how good things could and should be, insist on their high taste and discrimination, and point to things "just working" and other inanities as vehement cover for one of the darkest of dark patterns.
Interoperability, protocol, and freedom should be mandatory. Google is hardly better, but at least you can own the device you purchase.
If you cannot understand what made Apple successful then or today what makes you think you're not failing to grasp something? You head right on to making an argument when nakedly revealing that you can't comprehend the other side.
Not surprising, this site is made for the Woz's of the world (and that's fine!).
> This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.
My read was that this addressed your point.
> Not surprising, this site is made for the Woz's of the world (and that's fine!).
I'm pretty sure Woz perfectly understands why iPhone has a larger market share.
I use a Pixel too, but I can see that an iPhone is more appealing to 80%+ of world's population.
Except iPhone doesn't have a larger market share, and they aren't being used by 80% of the world's population. Where are you pulling these numbers from? iPhone only has a larger market share in the US, and not by much. Worldwide they are very small compared to android.
> they aren't being used by 80% of the world's population.
I said "iPhone is more appealing to 80%+ of world's population". I didn't say everyone who wants it can afford it.
It's pure speculation, of course, but given its current market share (27% of all devices sold) and its price point, I don't think it's too far fetched to say that its market share would be much higher if price wasn't an issue for people. This is somewhat hinted by the fact that it has a 78% market share in the $1,000+ segment [1], and most iPhone models are over $1K.
Also it still ships more phones than any other single vendor (unless you lump all Android phones into one bucket). In terms of revenue, it's by far the leader with 43% [2].
[1] https://www.netguru.com/blog/iphone-vs-android-users-differe...
[2] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-smar...
Overconfident in your numbers you are, just because they suit your narrative. Zero actual backing for those you provide. Not reflecting reality I can see they are.
At least I have some numbers.
You made up some numbers, that isn't the same as "having numbers".
>I said "iPhone is more appealing to 80%+ of world's population".
The reality distortion field is alive and well.
You asked "where are you pulling these numbers from?" and I answered. Is this your response?
You made the numbers up. Got it.
Those are some very minor complaints, all of which would not affect my buying choice, given the larger differences. That said, I’ll tell you that I don’t notice (1), for (2) I would never sit there organizing my photos, I have other (mostly less productive) things to do with my time, and (3) seems like something I specifically _dont_ want.
No, two of those are some pretty fundamental complaints about how GP wants to use their device. Just because you don't have those complaints doesn't make them any less fundamental.
Ultimately the disagreement is primarily on the fact that Apple goes very far out of their way to hide the concept of a file and filesystem from the user.
The wobbling one is minor, in all fairness.
The wobbling one would be pretty major if you ran into it all the time in your regular workflow...
It's easily solvable with a case. I agree that it's silly that Apple does it this way, but I struggle to see how it rises to the level of being a fundamental flaw like file management is.
The wobble actually factors onto my device choice as well. It's just annoying to live with for the life of the phone if you can't find a case that widens it, which many don't.
Casetify makes decent cases that make the super annoying bump less annoying. My iPhone 13 Pro's bump is now more like 1mm, effectively.
Absolutely. The camera bump is a complete non-issue, and probably easily solvable with a case if it's really the thing pushing you away from an entire smartphone platform.
I shudder at notion of feeling compelled to group every photo I take into exactly one folder. A directory tree makes very little sense for organizing everyday photos. If I for some reason had a natural temptation to do this, I'd be grateful to Apple for discouraging it in their Photos app.
> solvable with a case
The iphone 16's camera bump is 3.5mm. Short of making your own case that makes the bump a Pixel like bar, that wont be solved by just sticking a case.
On photos, it is indeed a very personal topic to many. In particular someone taking dozens of random pictures everyday won't have the same use case as someone being a lot more deliberate for each picture for instance. A one size fjts all approach isn't helpful IMHO.
> The iphone 16's camera bump is 3.5mm.
Why even have a bump? Make the phone thicker by exactly that amount and increase the battery. Then the phone is flat and has a better battery life. Are there uses who actually prefer a bump?
> Are there users who actually prefer a bump?
Speaking for myself, I'm fine with it on Pixel phones.
I'd be happy with more battery and no bump if:
- phone makers gave up on the glass backs and metal, and made the body plastic (no more "premium" feel for the sake of it, I don't want heavy and fragile materials)
- the physical durability was balanced with the additional weight: dropping the phone the wrong angle shouldn't mean a guaranteed cracked screen.
The current Pixel9a would be near perfect balance for me, if they gave it better cameras and internals instead of making it a budget phone.
I don't want a phone that would be as heavy as you suggest. I have 0 issue with current battery life.
Like others a case has always made the bump a complete non-issue for me. My iPhone has never wobbles when laid back down on a table.
Motorola did some A/B testing in 2011 with Droid RAZR and Droid RAZR MAXX. They had identical hardware, but first one was the thin one with a camera bump, second one was uniformly thick (thus no bump) and put an extra battery there (which doubled the capacity).
Given that 3 years later they have stopped producing phones with bumps, I guess people really prefer battery to bumps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3) reminds me of the web USB thing, totally do not want
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I don't think so. The stuff you mentioned is objectively better as there's no reason for Apple not to let you do it. It's more of a "I've been in the Apple walled garden for so long and so are all my friends" or the so-called network effects. Examples: you can't "Facetime" and "Airdrop" on Android, your text confirmation marks are green instead of blue, you don't have access to the same apps as your friends (sometimes), you don't have integration with iPad. If you grew up in certain circles you may be bullied for not having an iPhone, too.
Also there is a prevailing sentiment that Android doesn't "just work" as much as iOS, which is true tbh but not for Pixels which are basically the Android equivalent of an iPhone, where the device is pretty much tailor-made for the OS.
There’s still an element of subjective preference, as much as many like to say otherwise. To me, Android animations and gestures have always felt less polished and natural and more rough “forever prototype” and mechanistic, for example.
In terms of “just working,” a big weak point of Android that stands out to me is just how clunky it is if you’re not neck-deep in the Google ecosystem and use more standardized service providers like FastMail. iOS stock apps work great with IMAP, CardDAV, CalDAV, etc but on Android you have to hunt down third party service agnostic apps for everything, few of which are designed to work with each other. To be fair though, Windows also suffers this issue.
You can just add IMAP accounts to the Gmail app but generally you're right.
For me, it's how can I get the slick and super convenient integrations between my phone, tablet, and laptop outside of Apple?
I am talking about Handoff, Continuity, iPhone mirroring (can use my iPhone and its apps while it remains locked somewhere), AirDrop, Continuity Camera, universal clipboard, iMessage, etc.
I worked at Samsung and even there a third of the team had iPhones.
Logical analysis, like using folders and file APIs, is "left-brained".
The left/right brain thing is pseudo-science and even worse - a false dichotomy. It's much more about cultural snobbery and cultural tribalism around which pursuits are regarded as "more worthy".
Look up C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures" - it was incredibly influential at the time but also described a prejudice we still labour under. It's pervasive in the English speaking world. I suspect less so in the non-anglosphere West and possibly even less so in Asia.
> The left/right brain thing is pseudo-science
It's real in terms of consciousness - brains switch between modes depending on activity. You can try it and feel the switch yourself. Whether that switch is localized, or whether people have more affinity for one than the other is probably what's fake.
I think we're talking about different things. I'm referring to the "logical vs intuitive" character type distinction.
Agreed. Im just saying the origin of those terms is a distortion of a real effect. In your “right brained” mode you are more intuitive. So then people said I’m a “right brained” person.
I'm not sure that's supported by the science.
This is such a redditor comment
“There’s no reason for apple to not let you do it” - they have reasons. Whether you agree with them or not is fine but pretending they don’t have reasons is a little silly.
You also can’t put every option in for everything, because simplicity has value too.
I've been using Android for years but for reasons recently switched to an iPhone.
I gotta say Android is superior in a number of things like call and SMS spam.
Also typing on iOS is a frustrating experience. I type "Im" and the iOS keyboard won't offer "I'm" as a correction option. I've even tried using the Google Keyboard on iOS and the multilingual predictions are just not as good as on Android.
I would have preferred to get a Pixel but Google doesn't distribute their physical products where I live.
The keyboard is completely nonsensical. I really don't understand how iPhone keyboard is so bad. Even if you install the Google Keyboard, iPhone keyboard is still bad.
I can't fathom what is going on here, but I really dislike typing on an iPhone. It drives me bananas. Completely obvious suggestions are never made. Android--you can just faceroll on the keyboard a bit and it'll have everything perfect. I thought I was really good at fast text input on mobile devices until I switched to an iPhone and then realized that Google's ML and autocorrect integration is just way better in this area.
I've been using iPhones since the original, somewhere around the iPhone 6 they screwed up the keyboard and never fixed it. Not just the recommendations but even the typing itself.
On Android I rarely had typos (and never used autocorrect) but on iOS I make constant mistakes. And I mean constant. It's rare when I type a word without a typo.
FTWIW the keys' hitboxes aren't at the displayed area, but at the expected landing area.
I'm slightly making up the exact bias, but for instance it will be assumed the user lands a touch slightly above the actual key, as the finger hides the target and Apple's heuristics expect some overshooting.
In comparison people used to the iPhone's heuristics might have a harder time on android.
If this is true it seems like a terrible idea. And even worse that it can't be disabled.
Does this happen with all iOS keyboards?
It was yet more complex and dynamic than I thought:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/iphone-keyboard-learns-what...
I'd assume the dynamic hot zone resizing do sn't apply for third party keyboards, but honestly I have no idea.
I had the exact same experience when switching to iphone. Hasnt gotten better after... 4 years now? It actually seems to be getting worse, if anything.
I just tried this on my iPhone, and as soon as I press the space bar after typing Im, it adds the apostrophe automatically FWIW.
Being dumb is cute on iOS.
I prefer Pixel phones, for slightly different reasons.
One, it takes really good photos. Better than phones with supposedly better specs. This is big for me, I have a 3 year old, being able to snap photos that look great with no effort is huge.
Two, the Google integration is just really a gamechanger. My laptop is my "computing" device. So my phone is mostly for calling, navigating (I travel a lot), searching for businesses, that sort of thing. It's really effortless with Pixel devices, takes a tad more work with other brands.
All browsers are equal citizens. I use Vivaldi, it's nice it can be the default and work just as well with the phone as Chrome.
And finally, in all my dealings with big tech over my lifetime, Google has been the only one that I feel doesn't try to abuse users. With MS it's endless nagging and annoyances, plus their security sucks, with Apple they're very anti-consumer unless you do exactly what they want, all the time. Even Samsung annoyed me with bloatware and trying to make their apps default over and over. If I change something on a Pixel phone, it stays changed. I pay for some Google products so no ads for the most part. Their security is great. They prefer open formats and protocols and have done a ton for the open web. Just the best ecosystem I've bought into.
> 2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.
This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me. If I am backing up my pictures to a hard drive, there is no easy way to select just the pictures taken on my phone. Seems like such an oversight but I suspect it's a way to drive people to sign up for iCloud storage.
> This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me.
This is WhatsApp's fault. "Settings > Chats > Save To Photos OFF" should fix it
That doesn't fix it, that just means I don't see WhatsApp photos.
I want the two photos in different places.
How does Android fix that?
Android has directories (folders), and it doesn't pretend they don't exist.
If you go to "Collections" -> "Photos on Device" it then shows separate folders "Camera", "WhatsApp Videos", "WhatsApp Photos", "Screenshots", etc, etc.
iOS 26 fixes this with an option to only show photos not in an album.
Additionally, if you are backing up photos to a hard drive you will be much better off using an app like PhotoSync. It has a one time payment and transfers direct to whatever you want with far less errors and more control than Apple’s terrible buggy disaster that is transferring photos by wire.
It’s actually already available in iOS 18! On the main Photos page, click the little filtering icon and select something like “Not in any album”
I can’t believe there isn’t a fix for this. I thought I was the only person with these problems. How have they persisted for so long?
The inability to sync albums as folders onto my Mac is my #1 complaint about iPhones. It's probably to sell iCloud.
Isn't that something WhatsApp is specifically doing tho? I haven't seen this behavior.
Yes. You can disable it in WhatsApp.
I use an iphone and have for many years. I was a phone geek who would always use custom ROMs and have everything dialed in just so. I'm sure this has changed over the years but back in the day it seemed like there was always some weird issue with my Android phone. Admittedly, a lot of that could have been my fault for constantly messing with the device. Eventually I got busy and just needed my phone to do the simple stuff and get out of the way.
iOS has a number of really annoying behaviors and general flaws that are never going to be addressed. I don't recall having the same frustrations with Android, but maybe I did.
I'm constantly annoyed that my iPhone can't do simple stuff my Android phone could do 15 years ago. I am also aware that if it could do all those things, I probably wouldn't spend the time to get everything set up, dialed in, and maintained anyway.
The things that keep me on iPhone are unrelated to all of that, though.
1. I like the small form factor. I have a 13 Mini and there's no decent equivalent that I've found in any ecosystem (sadly, even Apple now).
2. I use Facetime with both sets of parents a fair bit. Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app, sounds like a lot of work and frustration.
3. Real or not, my perception is that privacy in the Apple ecosystem has historically been, and currently is, far better than Google. I don't like the idea of the device I'm constantly relying on to be the product of an ad company, it just feels gross.
4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app
This seems like an argument for picking something third-party, perhaps Signal. It's probably not going away any time soon, and it supports both major mobile operating systems.
12 to 15 years ago, when I was teaching the elders in the family how to video call, there were only two reliable options, Google and Apple.
Google kept changing their solution, so we ended up with Facetime.
Whatsapp did end up coming out with video calls, and Whatsapp would have been an alternative had it been available on iPads sooner (is it even available today?). Signal also came out too late.
But once everyone was trained on Facetime, I, nor any of my cousins was going to put in the time to re-train on any other solution. Plus, if anyone has a problem with Facetime, or their Apple device, they can pop into an Apple store to get it fixed themselves. Or they can chat with an Apple tech support rep who can remote into their phone.
both iOS and Facetime are super slick and baked into the device. The end user doesn't even have to really know how to the app to use the feature as it were. It shows up on a contact as a button click.
Signal does not, even on Android. You have to deliberately use it.
That small friction isn't great when you're likely one of few people using it in day to day life of others.
FaceTime on the other hand, just works
When I view a contact on Android there are options for Signal message/call/video call. This is on LineageOS.
Does that mean Signal has access to my contacts? So much for privacy!
It does not, actually. Signal only gets the contact number if you click on the button.
In my case I allowed Signal to access my contacts and these options only appear for people who use it, don't know what happens if you deny the access.
Pixel has had face unlock since at least Pixel 7
Only the pixel 4 had face unlock that used IR hardware instead of camera nonsense that isn't as secure or reliable.
Edit. It seems like pixel 7 and up includes something that's more secure
>Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
Being able to unlock my password manager with the fingerprint, rather than putting in the vault password every time was great, but my iPhone got too old for the other apps I needed and now I'm stuck typing in a gibberish 30-char password every time I need to use it on my phone. When are we going to get under-the-screen fingerprint sensors?
I'm able to just use faceid or put in my passcode.
I miss having a small phone. My iPhone 16 ironically seems small compared to lots of phones my friends have. But I wish they bring back the mini. I would buy it immediately.
You can buy a mini on secondary markets. Some are even new in box, though you might need to replace the battery.
Until about a year ago, Apple had 13 minis in their refurb store.[1] That's where I managed to get one. I'm going to hang on to it as long as possible. Previously I had an iPhone SE (the one that looks like an iPhone 5), and I still slightly regret upgrading to the mini. The mini's camera and display are significantly better, but it's a little wide for my hands.
1. https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/iphone
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls
Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp these days. Both of which are cross platform, even web (so can use on a desktop browser).
Also, the current Google thing, Meet, doesn't need the person you're calling to have the app. You invite them, they get a link, it opens in their browser, mobile or desktop.
How’s your 13 mini holding up? I have a recently refurbished one (6 months old) and I can’t make it to 2pm without recharging.
Additional my mail search and photo search broke with Apple Intelligence/iOS18 integration.
Debating jumping ship to a epaper phone or holding out for the rumored iPhone Air.
My 13 mini is also not great on battery. I've been debating ordering an iFixit battery and doing the swap, but in the past I've felt it was kind of mixed results from that. I don't think those batteries are newly manufactured units, but rather leftovers from the original production line that have been sitting on the shelf for 2-3 years. So although they'll be an improvement over one that's been through 1-2k cycles, they won't be like it was when it was brand new.
For now I'm just making do with having a power bank in my bag when I'm out and about.
I don't think the iPhone Air will actually be smaller in the dimensions I care about, just thinner which I assume will compromise battery life.
My mini is holding up ok. Battery needs replacing but I haven't done it. Like mikepurvis, I carry power banks around if I'm doing anything where I'm not going to be able to recharge easily. I use one like this https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Magnetic-Slim-B2C/dp/...
I prefer this form factor, but yeah
https://a.co/d/aFqI38o
I was able to get a new battery and screen for my 13 mini via AppleCare, but even the new battery won't get me through the day. Recent OS updates also make my camera shooting experience really slow for some reason.
Even with all that, I'm keeping the mini as long as possible because every year brings bigger and heavier iPhones.
> Recent OS updates also make my camera shooting experience really slow for some reason.
I’m on a 16 pro and it’s bad. It’s worse if I use the side button or do it from lock Screen, quicker from actual camera app. However it’s by far the slowest camera I’ve had on an iPhone, and I find the speed and quality a disappointing.
I have a 13 mini for about 3 years now - still holding up for most of the working day (about 15 hours). The trick is to reduce the number of apps you have on the phone, reduce the number of apps which like running on the background, and not watch a lot of videos.
I figured it out that treating it as a communication device + payments device + maps + very occasional content viewer, ie mostly as a utility will make the phone last much longer.
I’m on a 12 mini and it lasts all day easily.
I generally like the phone except it’s a little too big.
> 4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
On this last point, Pixel's face unlock has been secure enough to use for banking/NFC transactions since Pixel 8.
> Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient
Except when you’re trying to pay with NFC and have to awkwardly tilt your phone to match your face.
FaceID is terrible, not even reliable. It scans your face all the time, even when you are not unlocking it. Every 20-30 seconds or so, let's just scan your face.
I would love it if iPhones stayed with fingerprint unlock. Sometimes I put the phone on the desk and not pointing it to my face and I want to unlock it. I have to wait for the stupid FaceID timeout to be able to input my code.
Face ID is not terrible. Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc. They check to see if you’re looking at the screen and your eyes are open, so they can keep the screen on regardless of the auto lock setting. It’s a smart and useful feature which you can turn off if you don’t like it.
> It’s a smart and useful feature which you can turn off if you don’t like it.
If they hadn't gotten rid of the fingerprint sensor, I'd believe in the sincerity of that statement.
> It is not terrible
The fingerprint sensor was at the perfect location, it worked perfectly. FaceID has the downsides I have outlined and therefore in my opinion absolutely terrible.
> Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc.
I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.
The rotation doesn't help anyway, it is technically capable of detecting it is sitting still on my desk but it still does the FaceID dance first before showing me the passcode prompt which I also don't appreciate along with scanning my face every 30 seconds even when unlocked.
If it can scan it so rapidly, why not show me the passcode prompt or design the UX better so that I can already input my passcode before waiting for the device to decide it sees no face in there?
It can do it better but by design it is too eager to just perform the FaceID unlock and then turn itself into a user presence and attention sensor.
I'd easily pay $100 extra for an iPhone that didn't solely rely on FaceID to log me in and instead gave me a fingerprint sensor it had from generations ago.
> I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.
Waiting for the day when Apple announces supporting recording videos horizontally and the Apple fanatics to go wild as they show off how amazing videos can be when the view is wider than it is tall.
Just not true though is it?
Touch ID had a ton of downsides. It didn’t work with wet or dirty fingers, didn’t work with gloves, if you have clammy hands it would constantly fail. Plus it has a higher false positive rate than Face ID and has less features. Not to mention the speed and UX of Face ID is significantly better for MOST people than Touch ID.
I also meant landscape Face ID recognition, obviously not landscape device orientation.
I remember my iPhone, on my desk, turning up because of a notification, then hearing the vibration for a failed FaceID unlock. This very smart system wasn't able to understand that it was looking at a ceiling. So I always ended up having to type my password due to too many failed FaceID attempts. FaceID was highly ranked in the reasons why I disliked iPhones.
TouchID all the way. On an iPad, it's fantastic.
turn off "attention aware features" under accessibility -> Face ID & Attention if you don't like it checking whether you're looking at it
I'm also holding tight on an iPhone 13 Mini (5.18 in x 2.53 in) and I'm honestly not thrilled that even that is a size up from the 5s (4.87 in x 2.31 in).
Pixel 10 is yet another step up, at 6.02 in x 2.83 in, and I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
> 3: On Android I can use Chrome.
On Android I can use Firefox (with uBlock Origin, and the ability to play Youtube videos in the background or with the screen locked).
There, I corrected it for you.
The Vinegar extension on macOS/iOS lets you use the system video player on YouTube. (It has a few glitches but works fine and let's you use PiP and play videos with the screen locked.)
I’m a reluctant iPhone user (nobody seems to be making music on Android and we make plugins) and I use Brave on it and have those features.
I prefer Android. Unlike iPhone, the Android notifications system actually makes sense, and I can use real Firefox on Android. But, I prefer phones sized to fit in a human hand even more, so I'm stuck on an iPhone 13 Mini. Please make a ~4.5" screen Pixel phone, Google :(
Yeah, the main news I want to hear is the release of smaller Pixel phone. Secondarily, I'd like the return of the 3.5mm port. I don't care about any of the stuff they actually announce.
I do currently use a Pixel, but I hate how big it is.
You prefer wired to non-wired headphones?
I prefer to have the option. There are many sound systems i'd like to use that are wired only.
Eh, I've gotten over the headphone jack thing. I just buy a dozen adapters, stick one on each of my headphones, and replace them as they wear out every couple months. Good enough.
It isn't nearly as big of an issue as the phone size, but it is still a nuisance. I know there's no chance of it ever coming back, but I'd like it to.
I still have a small amount of hope that someone will make a modern, well supported ~5" Android phone. But that's also feeling less likely.
iPhone notifications are leagues behind. Everyone you see with an iPhone has like 80 notifications--mostly stemming from how and when they're dismissed.
+1 SO MUCH After two years I couldn't understand them. Sometime one notification appear, then it disappear, is it in the bottom stack? No, it just disappear. Also when there's many of them grouped, will tapping expand them? open the app? It's random.
But mostly, on Android, having quick actions on notifications. Receiving a useless email? The "Delete" action is right there. Boom, done. Move on.
In retrospect, I think it's why I find Android so functional. Just from the notifications you can do everything. No need to unlock your phone and end up distracted.
I just switched from an iPhone 13 mini to a Pixel 9 Pro, and it's tough to admit but I can do so much more with my thumb on a big Android than a tiny iPhone. Mostly due to the back gesture always works (never need to tap the top left corner in some cases, and also being able to return to the 3 button navigation) and being able to pull down the notifications by sliding down on the main screen.
So true. I switched from a lineage of several pixels ending in 7 to an iPhone for various reasons. The only thing I really miss outside of niche apps after finding a better calendar is a sane notification system! iOs lock screen notifications provide so little useful information and sometimes get buried.
13 Mini, best phone ever made :(
My iPhone 13 Mini is just a touch too big for my taste. For phones I've owned, I'd probably give the nod to the HTC Incredible 4G LTE[1]. Relatively stock Android, 4" screen, headphone jack, soft touch plastic back. It was perfect.
[1] https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=3701
I’d prefer the photo organization behavior you describe, but I don’t want websites to ever be dipping into the local filesystem outside of heavily siloed areas reserved for web apps exclusively. I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.
The only exception I can see making for filesystem access is for PWAs explicitly installed by the user, and even then there should be restrictions in place like limiting access to scripts loaded from the installed PWA’s domain. The open web in a generalized browser like Chrome on the other hand is too untrustworthy.
As for camera bumps, they’re all equally awful and I’d rather they just disappear entirely, even if that means thicker devices.
> I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.
You surely trust the permissions and security measures your phone provides to apps so what makes browsers worse in this area? Especially if you're using iOS where you only have Apple's web browser available to use.
Intent. Apps can only ever be installed by me, barring complicated exploit chains, while browsers can navigate without any input from me whatsoever. That serves as an extremely narrow funnel that vastly reduces surface area.
This is also why I’m more receptive to installed PWAs being more capable. They’re both on the other side of my intent funnel and assuming a good implementation can’t ever navigate to domains that aren’t that PWA.
Besides that, it’s just annoying for apps to be dressed in browser chrome. On macOS ever since Safari added the ability to install sites as PWAs, I’ve been making heavy use of those just to remove extraneous browser toolbar items and such. I don’t know how people can live with all their web apps in regular browser tabs, I’d go nuts.
Sure, browsers can navigate without your input, but what good would that do to bypass permissions? You can't use that to automatically grant your website permissions. And permissions are isolated to specific domains as if they were separate apps, so you can't just use permissions granted on domain A from domain B.
Not everything needs to be a PWA. Yes, they're great alternatives to apps, but why should anyone be forced to install a PWA when they might only need to use the web app very infrequently? Or what if I just wanted to try some functionality out first? Installing is an unnecessary speed bump for these cases.
Like I said, it’s surface area. It’s much larger in the case of the web since there’s any number of scenarios in which a user’s browser can be coaxed into running code that exploits a vulnerability that bypasses permissions and isolation (which is always possible by virtue of the browser being a privileged app, whether there are known exploits or not).
This sort of thing can happen with installed apps too, but the likelihood overall is far lower, especially if selecting judiciously.
The overwhelming majority of web apps don’t need filesystem access or similar special functionality, and thus users aren’t forced to install them.
In my personal experience, if my interest level in an app is so low that I wasn’t willing to install it, I was never going to use it in the first place either because the app wasn’t compelling enough or I didn’t have any actual need for it.
You have the same risks with apps though. An operating system has an even larger surface area. Sure, you need to manually install apps, but once installed they will automatically update.
Personally I would trust browser security far more than an OS simply because it is a much more desirable target to compromise. They're also built specifically to run untrusted code.
It's so strange that we don't have cameras which have write-only access to the image spool, galleries that have read-only access to the image spool, and a file manager app that can handle delete requests from other applications with the intent system.
I switched to Android when Google gave me an HTC EVO at that year's Google I/O.
The deciding factors were:
- The large, high-res screen was way prettier.
- It had access to the whole internet, including Flash.
- The kickstand was handy. (minor, but still a nudge)
Android also had 3rd party keyboards with swipe-typing years before Apple did. I think Android has always been the preferred platform for tinkerers.
I miss HTC. They made some of the best phones, and they were always easy to put custom ROMs on.
Wobble or no wobble, I really want the camera tumours to disappear. Make the phones thicker or make the cameras more slender. Don't make these ugly protrusions. Those phones are 2cm thick anyway you're not fooling anyone with "thinness" when they still have those massive hunchbacks.
Optics say you’re not getting thinner cameras. Otherwise they’d do that, and all those foot-long lenses you see at sports events would just be phones.
Given thickness constraints at the lens,‘I don’t see any reason to make the rest of the phone that thick. Why? Extra battery and nearly double the weight of the phone? Empty space? Cord storage?
Sell a version of the phone that's 3 generations behind on camera tech, make it a little cheaper or make it the same price. I promise you I would buy it over your flagship if it means no camera tumor.
I am okay capturing daily moments I use my phone camera for at a lower fidelity than the bleeding edge optics and sensors offer. I have mirrorless cameras and DSLRs for photos I care to take at a good quality anyway.
Not to even mention with all the latest generation post processing done on photos automatically by phone cameras, I don't like how they turn out most of the time at this point.
> Sell a version of the phone that's 3 generations behind on camera tech, make it a little cheaper or make it the same price. I promise you I would buy it over your flagship if it means no camera tumor.
Two things:
1. Your desire is in a minority that would not be profitable to cater to.
2. Even if they tried, half the people sharing your opinion still wouldn't buy it. So many people claim they want something, but then don't buy it even when it's offered. I remember in 2011 being sad that physical slide-out QWERTY keyboards were disappearing and seeing some poll that showed that like 60% of smartphone users wish they had a physical keyboard, yet nobody was buying the Motorola Droid series which had them, opting instead for the sleek-looking iPhone. People complained about phones losing the headphone jack or getting a notch or hole punch in the screen for the front-facing camera, and yet they bought the phones anyways.
But why sell something people won’t buy? I’m not a hardcore capitalist but there are enough phone manufacturers that someone would be doing this if it was profitable.
It’s unfortunate to have taste enough standard deviations out that nobody caters to it, but there’s no point in arguing that “someone” should. They just won’t.
Google sells you such a phone. It's called Pixel 9a.
As someone who prefers iphones…
- iPhone wobble is real. Mostly mitigated by a proper case. Does the iPhone get a better camera in return? Usually in my experience.
- I don’t sort my photos. The semantic search has been sufficient, and I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim.
- Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use. The FS API does sound great though. Enviable given how annoying it is to do work on an iPhone sometimes.
> - Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use
This is actually one of the stronger arguments in favour of Android's though, you can install (real) firefox and (fully functional) ublock origin, while Apple prevents you from doing so on their non-macos products.
Safari on iOS worldwide supports extensions. There is UBlock origin lite and i.e vinagre for youtube background videos. I am still amazed google does not allow extensions on their default browser.
Microsoft Edge on Android now also supports some extensions, one being uBlock Origin. Seems just as powerful as the real thing. And has the benefit of using the Chrome engine.
Firefox on Android isn't just a reskin of chrome? When did that change?
It never was. There was firefox lite 2018-2021 that was apparently, but going back to 2010 Firefox was Firefox.
Pixel phones have won blind camera tests last few years without Apple coming close though.
This is tricky. Most Android phones apply heavy color saturation and contrast adjustments, by default, to the images and the display itself, where iPhone tends to keep things more "raw". But, "pop" is what the average person usually prefers. It's post processing step that can heavily influence favor, unrelated to the camera. The Samsung cameras are still objectively better though, in many metrics.
My work involves showing images accurately on screens, and I always have dig through all the settings to make the Android phones just to show an image without heavy modification (for Samsung, it's 3 separate settings!). There is no such setting for iPhone, where the default experience is a (literally) color calibrated screen.
In my view Pixels have been dominating in still photos for years but their video has never been on par with iPhone. I'd put my old Pixel 3's still camera up against my iPhone 13 any day (if my Pixel hadn't bricked itself a little out of warranty like all of mine seemed to).
The difference between the photos on any flagship phone for the past 5 or so years is insignificant and mostly up to personal preference, but the difference between iPhone and anything else in videos is massive.
This is because iPhone photos are ubiquitous which causes photos from less common phones to stand out. And the less common phones likely optimize for this A/B test scenario by e.g. increasing contrast and saturation. Meanwhile Apple likely has little to no interest in optimizing for A/B tests with minor smartphone players, and instead optimizes merely for delivering satisfying photos in the widest range of scenarios.
Pixel photos are very good too, for the record. I just think the "blind camera test" is worthless.
That's quite an interesting way to explain why Apple does poorly in blind tests. The real reason though is that Apple's cameras are just not as good, but I suppose it's easier to explain away by making up biases.
My and your personal preferences for one camera over the other isn't the issue. Nor am I claiming that one is objectively better than another. My point is that blind tests (between two cameras of similar quality) are worthless simply because they don't reflect the preferences the test-taker would actually have given extensive use of each camera.
The issues with blind tests like this are well-known. I assure you I have no interest in persuading you to alter your own preferences.
For pictures but not for video, the stabilisation is better on iOS typically
Stabilization is about to all become post processing AI based and if we know there is only thing Apple sucks at now a days it's software.
There’s huge value in having proper optical stabilisation, even if you’re using AI better input will still equal better output.
What if I personally don't tend to agree with most people over what constitutes a good looking photo?
> I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim
As someone who refuses to pay extra for iCloud storage, can you tell me how to do this? I haven't figured out a good (read: easy) way to backup photos from my iPhone to computer/external storage (I don't want to use iTunes software cause I don't need everything syncing both ways).
Image Capture used to be the simple way, but they removed the "delete imported items from phone" option and made it default instead now, which is quite the landmine.
I'd be curious too. Family fills up iCloud very quickly. I use a self hosted immich instance on my nas to back photos up and share with family members.
Have you tried the app PhotoSync? It has tons of options to automatically back up all your iPhone photos to somewhere.
I was under the impression that every browser running on iOS was just backed by WebKit - so it's basically just a firefox skin.
Try Brave on iOS. Adblock that works, and for free.
I can sort my photos in folders (or albums) in iOS, not sure what you mean? I can have personal and shared albums, unless you mean the fact you don’t have that in the filesystem, in which case I completely agree.
I’m a Firefox guy myself and web apps are not something I care about for privacy reasons, but I agree that not having the option is a bummer.
The camera bump never really bothered me on the iPhone or the Pixel Fold I had before this iPhone. I just don’t notice it, but then again, I also didn’t notice the crease in the fold.
I miss Tachiyomi though. Panels is nice, but I had to built a whole OPDS-proxy to a manga website to have something close to Tachiyomi. Oh, and the ability to turn off network access on a per-application basis that came with GrapheneOS (plus the security of GrapheneOS itself).
While I prefer Android and Pixels (using GrapheneOS), I have switched my family to the Apple ecosystem to have a middle ground between privacy and features, so I’m not coming from an “I love Apple and everything else sucks” background, mind you.
I think OP is describing using their main Photos album as an inbox of sorts, emptying it out by filing photos away. On iOS even when you add a photo to an album it still exists in the main album.
I just went into trades and I do a picture every other hour of my work. It really makes me mad, that I can’t properly separate this photo-documentation from my personal private pictures. It’s a complete mess now in the main folder… Next phone will be one with GrapheneOS.
Kind of sounds like your actual problem is not having separate devices for personal and work usage?
Ah, yeah, that makes sense. I simply ignore the main view and go straight to the albums. In iOS 26 it defaults to your last view, so that works for me.
I use an iPhone.
1. I’m always going to have a case on my phone, so I don’t care about the camera bump.
2. You’re correct here. I mostly don’t care, but I want to have different hidden folders, which iOS doesn’t natively have. Otherwise I don’t care much.
3. Safari’s locked-down-ness is precisely why I use it.
But TBH, at this point, there’s minimal differences between iOS and Android.
I can understand point #1
- 99% of people put a case on their phone
- the more thickness you have for the camera (sensor+lens), the better you can make the optical design. (bigger sensor, more range of focus, etc)
- the camera - especially wide angle lens - must be even with surface of case, not below it (otherwise the case occludes the edges of the photo)
Pixel phones also have a camera bump, but it's a band symmetrically placed on the back on the phone. Which is why it's stable.
Well it certainly looks like the iPhone 17 models will have a camera bump all the way across the width of the device now.
4: the fact that Android has unified gestures: back, home and tray. Whenever I used iOS, I felt like every single app had a different way of going back somewhere. On Android, this is not an issue at all.
Uh. I used Android for 15 years and I still keep guessing wrong what the back button will do. Feels like 75% of the time it does not lead me back to what I expect and all apps have different ideas what they think it should do. I agree though that not having a back button at all is also not good.
Apps can have questionable Back behaviors but they all have a unified way of invoking Back.
Apps on iOS can also have questionable Back behaviors, but the method for invoking Back is not consistent.
>3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
Working as intended. Apple wants their 30% cut by all possible means. Web apps would bypass their cut.
I have to admit, my experience with #1 was quite different.
1. Put pixel on a flat surface. 2. Half an hour later, discover that the the surface wasn't actually flat, as phone the phone crashes to the ground, having been slowly inching its way off the 'flat' surface by virtue of the magically friction free back case of the phone...
No joke, by far the slipperyest phone I have ever had, and the one I slapped a case on the fastest, but not fast enough to avoid many dents.
No! They still do that? Reading this thread had me thinking back to an early Nexus phone I had back in my Android days, maybe around 2012, and here’s this post! I had no idea that wasn’t some odd one-off problem.
You could place the phone back-down on a surface a marble wouldn’t roll on, and 20 minutes later it’d magically be on the floor. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. I can’t believe they’re still doing that (how, though?! And why?!!)
It is a combination of many things.
Number 1 being moving between two system is difficult. The biggest obstacle is WhatsApp. And Meta / Facebook / Zuck is making it hard for people to switch. While it is not yet a thing in US, WhatsApp has 2B user world wide. And their life lives on WhatsApp. Less of an issue if you are on Line, KaKaoTalk and WeChat.
Number 2 is choice of phones. Android is basically Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy and Chinese Brands. I don't even think Pixel has double digit market share and Google Pixel isn't available everywhere. Their distribution channel is still appalling 10 years later. Making it pretty much the choice of Samsung or Chinese Brands.
These two obstacles are there before user could even make a choice and compare.
At one point I really thought Microsoft could get back into the game of Mobile. But after many years of waiting it doesn't seems that is a direction they want to go to.
I think the iPhone 17 coming later next month won' wobble. So that is one problem solved.
In the long game it seems we can better count on "Apple can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
I can download an APK and install it on android. Why can't I use my iphone like I use my macbook?
An underrated question. The answer of course is twofold:
* Paternalism (Apple believes users are too stupid to be trusted to control their devices, and no amount of "I really know what I'm doing" confirmations could change that)
* Apple's biggest fear is being disintermediated by Google or Meta, the way WeChat did to phone manufacturers in China. An ability to side-load an app could allow a foothold for a powerful competitor who could wean you off of all their lock-in features in favor of an experience that would tie into a competing ecosystem.
Apple would like your macbook to be more like your iphone: applications only via their store, thank you very much.
But it isn't worth the bother; the macbook market is much smaller than the iphone market.
I prefer iPhone for a miriad of little things. Can't name one particular thing, but it's just constant annoyance, when I have to use Android. I probably could write a list of 100 items, if I'd care to document it all.
That said, after Apple started drinking AI juice, I don't want to deal with it anymore. Another major annoyance with iPhones is that they ditched touch ID. Face ID just doesn't work with me at all, it's like 30% of success rate, absolutely terrible. My last phone was iPhone SE, but new models switched to this Face ID, and that's a real deal breaker for me. I even considered buying few iPhone SE phones, while they're still selling at the stores and keep them for later use, but that seems weird and they'll get obsolete with software updates anyway.
I switched to Arch on desktop and I'm going to switch to GrapheneOS on my Pixel (native Pixel Android is absolutely terrible experience, GrapheneOS is bad, but everything else is just worse).
The single thing that solidifys it for me is that every Android device I have ever used has suffered from noticeable micro stuttering.
Their current top of the line TV device drops an entire video frame every couple of seconds while watching 60fps content, cause very noticeable jerking.
Could you remind me which brand still sell a 60Hz screen on their 1000$ phone?
Don't know don't care. It's like asking a non car enthusiast what kind of differential is on their Toyota.
Stable 60Hz is still preferable to stuttery 120Hz.
It’s good Android has stable 120Hz then. But if you are happy overpaying for a mediocre phone, that’s your right. I did it once. I’m not planning to do it ever again.
No android device I've ever used has a stable ANYTHING performance-wise.
Happy to know which one you have used then because all the ones I have used in the past from Google, OnePlus and Xiaomi have been rock solid.
It’s simple my current iPhone 13 is the second worst phone I have ever owned after the 3S I had a decade before. It’s also the most expensive in a very Apple-like fashion.
iOS is a sorry mess. It manages to be both annoyingly limited and awfully buggy.
Dozens going back to the original Motorola Droid.
Uh, every top model iPhone since the 13 is 120hz.
The non Pro phone is 60Hz despite being more than 1000€ here. I wish it was a joke but Apple ripoff knows no limit sadly. Meanwhile, most competitors phones half that price have 120Hz.
150€ Xiaomi phones have a 120Hz AMOLED screen these days.
With an iPhone, when you click on an input field, the on-screen keyboard pops up, and you can type right away.
On an android (latest samsung flagship), the keyboard shows up but is frozen for a second before you can type.
I feel this and I’m guessing iOS is a lot more closer to the hardware, while android runs on top of Java, so there is more to process. Maybe its just me.
This must be a glitch particular to Samsung phones. I use flagship Google Pixel phones and have NEVER witnessed such a lag. I tap on an input field with my left thumb, immediately the keyboard shows up, and I immediately smash any letter with my right thumb and it does register it. So, blame Samsung, not Android.
I am not too surprised though. Samsung has a reputation for bloating their Android stack with junk.
Yes, I’m used to this too. But lately on my 13 mini, there is a slight delay between the keyboard showing and it registering key presses. I would say it misses the first key press 60% of the time when the keyboard pops up…
It’s very annoying
Sorry, can you explain a little more? I'm interested where it doesn't pop up or I'm misunderstanding
The keyboard pops up, but is not responsive right away. This very thing happened today on my work phone (which has a bunch of MS defender/enterprise policies and apps managed by the company, forced background app updates etc, which could explain this) but I recall it also being a regular thing with all Samsung flagships I've had over the years. It's the feeling of a very slight delay (it could be a matter of as low as 200 ms) for important components which are operating-system controlled, such as the on-screen keyboard. It feels laggy, as if an app or a background process impacts the responsiveness of low level OS features.
On iOS, this was never something I had to experience. Slow apps are killed, iOS is brutal in this regard, but it protects the core OS-level components such as the keyboard. Try it out, load a few apps and try switching between them, where one of them had the keyboard uplled up. This is something regular users will likely never feel, but if you've been around since amiga 500, you'll definitelly feel it.
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I can also just plug my Pixel into my Linux machine (I think I needed some other program to do this on Mac, bit it's still easy enough; can't comment on windows) and drag and drop photos, videos, ebooks whatever onto the device.
This is huge for me as I work at a location with no BYOD WiFi and poor (very low bandwidth) connection speeds so I often download YT videos for offline listening later. Also worth mentioning VLC is really good on Android and merely OK on iOS.
Also very important when you're low on storage from photos, you can unload them with no hassle.
I can't do the same with my iPhone; even when I can mount it successfully, its always an arcane directory structure in DCIM sorted by date or something.
This is HUGE for me. I cannot understate how much utility I get from this alone.
1. If the phone is bare. If you have a case (or a magnetic wallet like mine) it is stable. Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.
2. There is a filter 'not in an album' which would do what you want. The library view is the equivalent of "All Mail" in Gmail. In newer versions, this is a distinct view - they are moving albums, automatically generated collections and search to be a primary interface.
3. Both WebKit and Mozilla have said they consider the local access variant of that API to be harmful, since they do not have an adequately prominent way to surface and manage that you've given a web application permanent access to sensitive directories and files, potentially in the background via service workers. Both do support the origin private filesystem variant. Are there productivity apps direct filesystem access would be useful for other than IDEs?
> Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.
If the renders out there are correct, it seems the camera modules will still stick out beyond the camera bar for some reason, so I'm not sure it won't wobble-- though it does look like the issue will be reduced
This comment is flamewar bait that doesn't even acknowledge the post.
Not every phone related post needs to become one.
Gotta love it, open up the comment section about a new Pixel 10 phone, and have to scroll through a massive comment chain of what, 200? 300? comments that aren't related to or addressing the article in any way.
I used Android for many years. I got to the point where I didn’t care about or want to customize my phone anymore.
I was tired of my Android phone feeling like it was falling apart after a year.
I have enough things to think about, troubleshoot, and tinker with…I don’t need my phone to add to that list.
Which phone brand did you use where it was falling apart after a year? The rest of your comment sounds like you're saying you preferred the iPhone because it takes the option of customizability away from you entirely, instead of simply sticking to the level of customization on Android that worked for you.
Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC EVO 4g, Motorola Droid.
I used to do all kinds of things…tether to my laptop without it being supported in my data plan, torrent, etc.
I also got tired of the platform skins depending on the manufacturer.
If I’m not going to utilize the customization of Android, then I might as well go with the more consistent and refined experience out of the box.
Also iMessage! Hate to say it but my social group is primarily iOS so the experience is superior.
Might as well disqualify the iPhone for not having an Instagram app or a file manager if your frame of reference is 2010.
> Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC EVO 4g, Motorola Droid.
Sharing your opinions without first prefacing they're 12-17 years out of date is disingenuous
for my case, my S21U's back literally fall apart, not the battery issue, the glue just simply gave up
> When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable
My experience with the Pixel 7 Pro is due to the very pronounced camera bump and the rounded edges, the phone would slide off tables with problematic frequency, to the point that mine just lives in its bike mount case full time now.
What
you might need to level your table then
You'll need to tell that to about 30% of the bars in the country.
I have an iPhone 15 Pro. I am a semi regular Pixel user as well. I prefer the iPhone by a mile.
1. Mine sits flat too. It's in a rugged case.
2. You don't know how to use Photos properly. You create collections from the pool and name them. You can create folders as well. In fact it actually does that automatically now.
3. There's literally a files app and filesystem abstraction on iOS. I use it for moving stuff around all the time.
Add one gain:
1. All my photos are in real files in Photos.app on my desktop within seconds of me taking them. I do not have my files held ransom behind a web interface. Edits and folders are transparently replicated between both devices. When I back up my mac I have a copy of everything.
And a total loss:
Post processing on both devices for images is terrible so I use a dedicated camera.
A counterpoint: google intentionally broke the ability to backup photos in Google Photos.
Yes, takeout sort of exists, but it doesn't work. If you sort pictures into albums, you get duplicates of each photo for every album. So one copy in the automatic year album; one copy for each album you have put a photo into. My 80gb of photos triples in size, and oh, sometimes downloads fail on the zips they put them into. And since I use a mac, who has 600gb of free disk to download and extract the zips for my dedup script to run.
Additionally, they intentionally broke their api (well, just disabled it... but only for most users; it seems to still be available for Microsoft) to do incremental backup. tada!
It's the most Apple thing.
I like Apple photos in this regard on the mac. If you have the storage, you can just set it to download full copies automatically, now all my photos are stored locally on my mac almost as soon as I take the photo on my phone.
All google needs to do is make a desktop app and allow automatic download.
What do you think Photos should do instead?
1 - Not deprecate the api that allowed people to run incremental backups. They took positive action to intentionally break this. If they feel the need to break the api for ginned-up security excuses, provide a working solution for incremental backup.
2 - Fix takeout not to be entirely broken and hostile to users on 2 axes: usability and reliability. Usability: emit photos once only with a separate json specifying group memberships. Like, you know, competent engineers. Because that's how they store it internally.
2a - Either (i) fix whatever brokenness in their system regularly causes zip downloads to fail; or (ii) figure out or build a reliable alternate solution. Forcing users to wait hours to a day or two to access zips that they can't download is nothing more than a symptom of total disdain for their users while checking a compliance checkbox.
can you elaborate a bit on this please?
> "When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders."
Are you using the native application called "Files"? I tried to add photos to album via the GooglePhotos application but it will not create a new folder, right?
also this: > "web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files."
Can you share which web apps are you using? Or do you create your own web apps to work on your local files?
Thanks in advance, I'm trying to improve the photo management on the pixel because I want to create a simple way to back them up on my NAS but I'm still struggling.
I switched from Android to iOS a few years ago. I used to be deep into Android customization - custom ROMs, custom icon packs, etc. But today, I feel that iOS and Android offer pretty all the features that I could ever want. My deciding factors when I switched:
- iOS UI animations are significantly better
- access to iMessage
- Apple got around to adding their version of "always on display"
- I turn the vast majority of notifications off, so Android's better notification management stopped mattering to me
- It felt like Google kept bending Android towards iOS anyway (camera app, moving away from the 3 button navigation)
> iOS UI animations are significantly better
And if you don't like them: tough luck. They're mandatory.
Well, technically...
I also usually turn off transparency, to reduce GPU usage by a negligible amount.I don't like Reduce Motion as it still forces you to wait through the half second of delay while it slowly fades things. I just want all animations deleted to avoid delaying the action itself. You used to be able to do this on a jailbroken phone by setting the global animation duration to be like zero or something, but of course Apple basically won the war on us "users" having any control on the devices we buy from them, or should I say, 'license the privilege of using'?
Well, try it. It reduces motion, but it does not eliminate all animations.
I turned off all animations on my Android phone, and now each time I have to use iOS (for development) it feels like swimming through molasses.
you can "Reduce Motion" and "Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions" under accessibility. Not sure if that's what is being referred to though.
You can disable them in Accessibility Settings.
> I feel that iOS and Android offer pretty all the features that I could ever want.
Except privacy.
I think for most people its just whatever you are used to. That said I can't stand iPhone. My wife also switched to Android after being jealous of some features on my phone.
I have an iPhone because at the time I bought it I liked the size (Mini 13) and it's fine. Before that I had some Android phone and it was fine too.
I've never understood the strong emotions people have attached to these things.
About the only thing I'm looking forward to when I upgrade my phone in a couple of years is getting a better camera. Phones were pretty exciting for a while, but now? It feels like a mature segment and not much is changing anymore.
> I think for most people its just whatever you are used to.
Or in the US, it's whatever your family and/or circle of friends use, RCS or not. iMessage lock in is real (along with Facetime, Airdrop, Apple Pay, etc.)
The biggest selling point of an iPhone for me is the easy connection with my Mac and the consistency between them. If it weren't for that I'd strongly consider a pixel
As a, mostly, happy Android user since the HTC Magic in 2010 or 2009, the one thing I really wish they could fix (but I suspect it would never be possible) is the extremely confusing thing with intents and apps opening as views in other apps. Like when my mail app opens a PDF it looks like I am now in the PDF app and after reading for a while I completely forget that I am actually still in the mail app, and then I go BACK and instead of ending up in my PDF library view as I expected I am suddenly in my mail app. Or when I look at the running apps list there can sometimes look like I have two PDF viewers or two browsers running since some other apps used intents to open views from those apps that now exist in parallel with the real apps.
Somehow that manages to surprise and confuse me almost every day. In desktop operating systems, and, I belive, in iOS, there is no need for such thing? Opening a PDF from a mail application usually just opens the PDF viewer as its own application, or it is embedded in some nice way that does not make the entire mail app suddenly look like a PDF viewer app instead.
Unfortunately they can probably never fix that because app lifecycle and intents are connected to everything and a good fix for this would probably break everything.
It's interesting that this feels awkward to you, because when apps don't function this way it feels broken and odd to me. When I tap a PDF attachment in an email I expect the back button to go back to the email I was just viewing, not the list of PDFs on my phone. If I wanted to view all the PDFs on my device, I would start at the PDF viewer and tap into PDFs from there.
I wonder what experience made this feel more awkward for you (and conversely, why it feels more natural for me). What a weird/complex world we live in!
I kind of agree and see what you mean, but what I described happen often that I forget where I came from and have no idea that the PDF I read was opened from some other app.
It's part of what I mentioned in another comment, that BACK button can feel random. "Did I open this PDF from within the PDF viewer or from some other app? What app?" Instead of the BACK button having a predictable, known, function, it depends on some hidden state.
My pixel 8 does not stay where I put it. Without a case, it will slide right off of any slightly tilted surface.
It should be illegal to put glass on the back of a phone.
I agree so much. I get why: "Designers" consider plastic to be low-class, metal is radio-opaque, so that leaves glass as the only option even though it has zero functional advantages over plastic (glass is heavier and more fragile).
Imagine if it was a panel of plastic, and that you could easily replace it if it got too scuffed up.
A mystery about Apple is that some of its software are ridiculously bad. iTunes sync was one of them. Another example is removing iCloud sync used to wipe out the content on the disconnected devices. Screen Time is pretty much unusable. It's really hard to batch update photos in iphone. Heck, it's even hard to batch move app icons on iphone screen.
What good is optimizing for the open web when the Pixels lack a sufficiently fast processor for bloated web pages. Haven't tried the 10 yet, but Pixel 9 is sufficiently slow that you can see tearing artifacts when you scroll. This is at least two or three years behind the modern Qualcomm in Samsungs let alone Apple.
I think photos on the pixel are messed up (long-time iphone user who switched for the pixel 9 folding pro), you have all these folders that by default don't get backed up, it took me ages to understand I had to go in settings and manually check all new apps that I install for photos to back them up (and display them in my gallery). It's never clear what's the "offline" vs "online" view of google photos (and why there are other google photos apps).
With a bit of fiddling I can finally backup my whatsapp photos, but oh boy why aren't the default saner?
For Chrome, it's inconsistancies after inconsistancies. First, I couldn't read PDFs from there, now I can but I can't edit the URL when I edit a PDF, also no built-in app to read PDF, it's crazy.
As someone who started on Android but switched to Apple many many many years ago, I still find things like this that are quibbles for me, but in general my preference for Apple is because of security/privacy, battery life management, performance, update longevity, and hardware quality.
That said, I think it's worth noting that #1 hardly bothers anyone because most people put their phone in a case, and that can quickly resolve this. #2 isn't a real problem, because you can absolutely sort your photos into folders, they're call albums though, and this is a first-class workflow in the Photos app since they switched from iPhoto to Photos about 6-7 years ago. For #3, I don't want my web browser having file system access via an API and I don't use Chrome.
> This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
The thing is that web apps are always a worse experience if you have native apps. Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps. For Apple devices you can always find a top quality native app to use, so web apps aren't any concern. The only people I have met who want to use apps in their browser on MacOS are Linux refugees who were attracted by the "specs" of Apple devices. It's a bit like buying an electric car and lamenting the lack of a gearbox. You don't need it anymore.
> Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps.
I fail to see any iOS without an equivalent native application on Android when the Android application is not actually significantly better.
iOS really is a minority os here and it shows.
I had a really hard time finding a good email client for my Android tablet.
kmail has always worked great for me.
I am using mostly web apps. Not because web apps are inherently better or more convenient, but because ublock origin on firefox allow me to disable any third party tracking.
File System Access API has some serious issues. To quote Mozilla's position on the topic
> There's a subset of this API we're quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read/write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user's local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.
I think most users would probably be better off without this proposal.
It sounds like this would prevent users from backing up their own data, which is hard with localStorage and sessionStorage, and instead having to rely on the site owner.
However this doesn't go into any detail, so maybe they have some convenient way of being able to access these files in mind, but we'll never know. It reminds me of another shallow dismissal by Mozilla: https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/36294 https://webreflection.medium.com/mdn-doesnt-trust-you-should...
2: you can organize photos into folders but nobody does
3: I actively don’t want this nor would I want anybody I care about to have to deal with this.
But props to you for having an argument for Android aside from the usual “I have more control”
I think a lot of developers think like you, but most users of phones don't.
I don't think most people care enough to put time into organizing their photos, but would rather the phone or backend AI just find the photo they want by searching for it.
I'm not sure if most users even have a strong conception of "file" or really understand what data is physically on their phone vs "the cloud".
(The symmetry thing though probably does bother a lot of people regardless of their level of technical expertise.)
Well I’m a very technical person, and sorting photos into folders seems like a colossal waste of time to me, when I can also just search for a thing on the image, the place or time when or where it was taken, a person or animal on it; I could add it to an album, star it, add tags to it; that should be more than enough sorting facilities, I think.
Same. In fact, I don't organize much of anything that's digital, photos or files. I just use search, it's pretty good these days, and with OCR even better.
Just give me a big flag structure with robust search and I'm happy. Heck I don't even bother to organize or layout the apps on my home screen. quicker for me to search with spotlight than scroll around and find what I want.
None of those things matter to me. What does matter to me is that to get stuff off my iPhone I have to do a weird sync process and/or use iCloud. Infact, a lot of my issues with the iPhone stem from refusing to use iCloud. Can’t use Apple Pay or FindMy.
For now I use Airdrop to move photos from my iPhone to the computer but it’s very error prone and fails 1/5 times and way more often if you try to do it with more than 30 images/videos. Is this situation better in the Pixel?
Regarding the second point, while I gladly agree the current iOS Photos app is a mess, doesn't it make sense to have photos in multiple albums? If I went on holiday to Brazil and made a nice photo of my son there, I'd like that photo to be in both the "Brazil holiday" and "Beautiful photos of my children" albums, not just in one folder.
My first smartphone was a cheap Android and then I switched to iPhone about eight years ago and mostly haven't looked back.
That said, Apple's behaviour around locking out wearables from key system APIs does have me reconsidering. I found the inconsistent sync and notifications on my Fitbit to be a pretty big source of annoyance and if that continues on the new Pebble I would consider switching back to Android just for that.
I think the EU or the US (one of them) is trying to force Apple to give third parties access to the things Apple Watch has access to, so there might be relief coming for one of those continents (one assumes that the petulant child that is Apple's leadership will, after appealing to the maximum, region-gate any remedy, exactly as they did for third-party app stores in EU).
> sort them in folders.
They had that in iPhotos and dropped it in Photos. I missed it for about a month and then I got over it. I'd never sort my photos now, I can just search them or find them on the map.
If you want to sort photos by folder, no one stops you from using other apps. Google Photos itself is available.
Very, very few people want to spend time sorting all their photos, it's a fool's errand.
2/3 of your complaints seem to be down to Apple's insistence that filesystems are silly and should be hidden from users. Unless it's iCloud, then show the user 2 identical filesystems and scatter everything at random between the two. Really, it's a write-only filesystem. Apps will constantly save things there, but god help you if you ever want to find something.
> 1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable.
That was the first thing I noticed. I assume the extra protuberance is to enable the insane zoom level but it goes full width for stability.
I have G85 Motorola - great phone (and primarily a phone/modem/camera) for the price, but it wobbles slightly.
Yes, I prefer Android, but have a M4 Air that goes everywhere with me to do actual work.
> 3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
Safari has support File System Access API since 2022. Maybe you haven't kept up but Apple has done a 180° on PWAs in the past few years
For me, it is the ability to tether my laptop to an iPhone to use the data service on my iPhone. This alone made me give up on Windows laptops and Android phones. Sure, you can tether Windows laptops to Android phones. But, it is a slow and cumbersome process. I use this functionality frequently enough that it was worth it to switch platforms over it.
When I switched off Android >5 years ago, even then, it was as simple as turning on the hotspot and connecting to it. It was no more cumbersome than any other wifi network. This was with a Pixel device and Linux laptop, and I am sure it works on Windows too.
You have obviously not compared it to how fast a Mac connects to an iphone. There is no need to turn on the hotspot. You can leave that on on the iphone. Just open your MacBook and it quickly connects to your iphone if it does not find a standard wifi.
I am very familiar with the Android hotspot feature. I used it for years. It works OK. But, it is not as fast as the Mac/iphone combo. Not even close. I am speaking from extensive experience.
It's the same now. Turn on hotspot->Connect to it on the PC. After that one step it's in your saved networks and you're good to go.
The only difference is Apple will do this automatically for you. If you open up your mac, and don't have network, you get a little pop up that says "use iPHone's connection?" and will turn on hotspot and connect automatically. Nice, but hardly any different or time saving really.
I use an iPhone because Apple is more focused on privacy, and I don’t really need that many features on my phone.
> Apple is more focused on privacy
A more precise way to put it: Apple is focused on customer control, and will fight whoever tries to touch what they see as Apple's exclusive customers.
This has privacy benefits against tracking agents, reduces functionalities against third party services (Amazon, Spotify, Google, third party payment etc.), and forbids whole use cases (e.g. non Apple backup service).
As a customer one can be happy with the privacy windfall, but we've seen again and again that it's not Apple's focus per se.
Of course it's a matter of taste, personality, culture, etc.
That's why flame wars about anything don't make sense, whether it is about Operating Systems, browsers, gaming platforms, text editors, phones, cars, coffee, or whatever else you can come up with to arbitrarily argue about.
I’d love to use the android phone, as they seem to have much better and actually useful AI integration, but they are not phones but “advertising company tracking devices with tacked-on end user functionality”. Similarly, Chrome is not User Agent, it’s Corporation Agent.
I like that I can run whatever software I want on it.
I do not like that it is overly locked down without rooting. But still way more open than iOS, regardless of what the mobile phone lawsuits from Epic decided.
To your 3: On iOS Safari, I can use extensions. That includes adblockers (uBlock origin lite) and others like Vinegar (allows youtube videos to play in background while display is off). No ads boosts productivity more than the file API - what would I need that for?
I prefer an iPhone but only because it has generally given me the best experience where I am not having to fiddle with anything.
Maybe android has changed but I made the swap, maybe a decade ago, because android had very weak boundaries on apps running in the background.
As someone who used Android for years and only recently switched to iOS the lack of file system access is really the only dealbreaker. It's damn annoying. The hardware is reliable and solid but why do we get such a crippled operating system ?
The older I get the more I value screen real state. And that foldable phone is really calling me.
Aside from that the fact that I can sideload apps. Run a VM. Work. All this with 16Gb of Ram.
And the list goes on and on.
Honestly having an iPhone these days feels more a punishment than something else.
I knew apple wasn't for me when I tried to sync and backup my stuff on something that wasn't iCloud. Its just plain unusable if you don't want to be fully entrenched in their cloud services.
I’m an iphone user and I’ve always used Dropbox and google photos as my general backup mediums.
Isn't that photo specific backup rather than general backups? Last I tried, Dropbox on iPhone cannot backup any files owned by other apps automatically. You'd have to export it manually to Dropbox.
Edit; It looks like this is possible on iOS for apps to access other app's file sandboxes with a somewhat recent iOS update. MobiusSync (Syncthing client for iOS) has beta support for it. But I see no mention of Dropbox adding support for anything similar
It’s true that I have some app data being stored in iCloud, but it is VERY within the free tier space limit. But depends on the app, many apps support Dropbox themselves and I store the data in Dropbox for those.
FYI rumour has it the iPhones about to be released will have the same sort of full width camera module so the “wobble” won’t be an issue. Not that it ever was for me before, I have a case on it.
For #2, on iOS, you can move photos to shared albums and then safely delete them from library while retaining them in shared album. Shared albums use iCloud space, so it’s not ideal.
What web apps do you use that use the File System Access API?
Nope, i wish Apple would do this the way Android does. Most people here prefer Apple, not because of the crap iOS but because of the hardware.
Decision 3 is a no brainer.
Apple want you to use the apps they've curated , not web apps, not apps or games from 3rd party stores etc.
I think most HNers prefer iPhones because they seemlessly integrate with the rest of the ecosystem.
Assuming you mean the rest of the Apple ecosystem this is kind of like saying most countries speak French because all the road signs are in French. Someone who doesn't have an iPhone doesn't necessarily have twenty other Apple devices around.
I’m a former Android user (bought a Nexus One on release!) that switched to iOS many years ago and I don’t miss Android as much as I thought I might.
To me the biggest thing to reflect on is how depressing it is that we must all fit ourselves into one of two boxes. My kingdom for a flourishing mobile OS ecosystem where we can all find the exact combination that scratches our itches.
Well, we have 3 main boxes and 1 got mostly rejected (windows).
One is a worse version of OSX and the other is basically what would have happened if Linux was initially created by a huge corp.
My dream is for a top-notch Ubuntu for mobile. I'm still waiting for Desktop to catch up, so won't hold my breath.
I do t think I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t use a phone case, all of which fix #1
I've never used a phone case. I don't understand why they make these things so small and then everyone just slaps on an extra couple mm. What's the point? If we're making them bigger anyway, at least use that space for more battery.
Anyway, the wobble is real, and sucks.
Similar, but I did use a phone case once because it came with the phone and included a pretty big feature. The LG V60 with dual screen case.
It made the phone entirely way too thick. But it was still thinner than the 2 phones I was carrying around previously.
I run caseless too and would be willing to sacrifice a few mm for better durability and no bump. Plastic is fine too. Bring back designs like the iPhone 3GS which were curved to fit your palm and if dropped would just bounce and tank it!
Phones are too slippery these days. Everyone makes them of smooth glass or metal.
Remember soft touch plastics? Grippy and didn't waste all the space of a case? Then some dingleberry marketer decided slippery metals and glass were "premium" and braindead phone reviewers happily parroted that crap and now everyone buys several mm thick cases made of soft touch plastics to cover up the "premium" materials they bought. Sigh.
I do. My HTC Amaze had nice soft-touch plastic on top of an aluminum back, was slim (for the era) and grippy. Also had a Galaxy Note (forget which one) that had a leathery soft touch back, was very nice. The physical design of phones definitely peaked long ago...
> When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders.
This is exactly the sort of thing a lot of smartphone users (including Android users) won’t do.
The point of post-PC devices is to actually be post-PC. For many, futzing around with files isn’t the answer.
For instance I gave up doing this to my email years ago. It was very liberating. If I want something, I search. I can save searches I frequently perform.
iOS’s Photos app isn’t perfect but it allows me to find stuff just fine. I can search for places (“Seattle”), for things (“bicycle”) or even combinations (“plants Vancouver”). It’s pretty neat. And you can actually add stuff to folders (‘albums’) if you really want to.
> local files
iOS has them too. There are apps which allow you to access and manage local files — including the built in file manager. It’s not as laissez-faire as Android, though. Even the file manager has come a long way, and it’s improving further in iOS 26.
tl;dr — iOS isn’t for everyone, but it’s not like it’s not well-designed with a certain audience in mind.
I recently switched to an iPhone.
I legitimately struggle to find anything better.
(Battery, perhaps?)
I like Pixels because I can put Graphene on them.
I never want to sort photos in folders.
They also screw up the hardware.
When I use a fingerprint scanner on other phones, it works.
When I used it on my last Pixel (6 or 7, I cant remember) it failed over half the time.
How does one screw up biometrics this badly? Lack of care/QA on a $1k device.
GL with your Pixel.
Note: I'm not an Apple fan boi. I swap every couple of years so I maintain skills in both OSes.
If it was the Pixel 6, I can attest that the 6 (at least the 6 Pro XL) had issues with the fingerprint scanner. I had no issues with my 5 series (when the fingerprint scanner was on the back) but the 6 series always gave me trouble. I'd wager a guess the reason why was because it was the first generation with an under-display fingerprint scanner and they hadn't yet worked out the quirks.
I've since upgraded to a 9 series and it works flawlessly so I can assume they've figured it out some time since then.
How much of your money for the pixel 6 garbage did they refund?
Same here.
1. You don't have a case???
>1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles
So? Big deal...
Frankly, iOS could be a giant turd of an OS, at least it's somewhat privacy respecting(for the time being), I would still prefer it.
As long as it's that, it's light years ahead of Android. Which is a vehicle for Google to spy on you so they can sell your data.
Nobody privacy respecting uses stock Pixel android. Check out GrapheneOS.
These are all extremely minor issues. 2 and 3 are not even relevant to 99% of normal users. Very few people want to spend time manually organizing photos like that, and albums do essentially the same thing. The wobbling thing is a non-issue. It doesn't even wobble unless you're pounding down on the phone on a table.
That fake zoom with AI is gross ugh
If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo
I find it kinda scary that this is marketed as "zoom" and "recovering details", when the reality is that it quite literally makes stuff up and hopes you won't notice the difference. You and I know that it's completely fake, but we (or at least I) don't even know how much is faked, and probably 99% of people won't even know that it's fake at all.
How long until someone gets arrested because an AI invented a face that looks like theirs? Hopefully lawyers will be know to throw out evidence like that, but the social media hivemind will happily ruin someone's life based on AI hallucinations.
It becomes misleading to even keep calling it "Zoom".
More like "Interpolation" with a pinch of hallucination. I can see this becoming a thing though, it is after all the mythical 'zoom & enhance' from csi...
I actually think it's a cool feature, but it shouldn't be called "zoom". "Zoom & Enhance" would make sense. The UI should also have a clear visual indicator of which modes are pure optical zoom, which (if any) are substantially just cropping the image, and which are using genAI.
agree. allow toggling between the blurry pixels and enhanced version and we're golden.
Also, over time when all of these enhanced photos are posted online and used for future model training, Pixel 13 Enhance might do even worse.
How many times should we be able to enhance it?
Until we find the murderer's face!
> If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo
Then don't take pictures with phones because it's been like that since more than half a decade at this point even on midrange phones.
Digital has never been light-to-pixel.
At a minimum, you have demosaicing, dark frame subtraction, and some form of tone mapping just to produce anything you'd recognise as an photo. Then to produce a half-way acceptable image will involve denoising, sharpening, dewarping, chromatic aberration correction - and that just gets us up to what was normal at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays without automatic bracketing and stacking, digital image stabilisation, rolling shutter reduction, and much more, you're going to have pretty disappointing phone pics.
I suspect you're trying to draw a distinction with the older predictable techniques of turning sensor data into an image when compared to the modern impenetrable ones that can hallucinate. I know what you're getting at, but there's not really a clear point where one becomes the other. You can consider demosaicing and "super-res zoom" as both types of super-resolution technique intended to convert large amounts of raw sensor data into image that's closer to the ground truth. I've even seen some pretty crazy stuff introduced by an old fashioned Lanczos-resampling based demosaicing filter. Albeit, not Ryan Gosling[0].
Of course, if you don't like any of this, you can configure phones to produce RAW output, or even pick up a mirrorless, and take full control of the processing pipeline. I've been out of the photography world for a while so I'm probably out of date now, but I don't think DNGs can even store all of the raw data that is now used by Apple/Google in their image processing pipelines. Certainly, I never had much luck turning those RAW files into anything that looked good. Apple have ProRAW which I think is some sort of hybrid format but I don't really understand it.
[0] https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...
By my understanding, demosaicing almost always just "blurs" the photo slightly, reducing high-frequency information. Tone mapping is unavoidable, invisible to most people, and usually doesn't change the semantic information within an image (the famous counterexample is of course The Dress). Phone cameras in recent years do additional processing to saturate, sharpen, HDR, etc., and I find those distasteful and will happily argue against them. But AI upscaling/enhancement is a step further, and to me feels like a very big step further. It's the first time that an automatic processing step has a very high risk of introducing new (and often incorrect) semantic information that is not available in the original image, the classic example being the samsung moon.
It's just crazy that demo they show, imagine the vehicle is actually a truck but you zoom in and it becomes a porsche...
conspiracy tangent, try to take a picture of something you're not supposed to and your phone won't let you ha, well money could be an example which I get the reason (it's printers but that idea)
the car looks mutated and slimy. most stuff that's used computational photography before now didn't imagine things from whole cloth
Agreed, I was recently looking through photos from my Pixel 5 and realized that it had "helpfully" modified an image of a bunny, making the fur look wavy and adding a weird faded-out eye on the body. On top of that, it applies skin smoothing to every photo, even with the beauty filter disabled. It irked me enough that I'm looking for a new third-party camera app. Despite using exclusively Pixel/Nexus phones for the last 12 years, I might abandon them entirely once this phone dies.
Agreed, not a fan. The world has enough fakery in it already without people accidentally generating even more (I assume quite a lot of casual users will mistake this zoom for zoom in the traditional sense).
It's giving "Samsung fake moon". If generative AI is going to make up details why bother zooming in, you could just ask to make up a whole AI slop picture.
This does seem to actually, ya know, do the upscaling though instead of clumsily faking it. Like yeah it's AI with AI failure modes but upscaling models are quite good and have less 'weird artistic' liberties than imagegen models.
The other thing that was annoying me with a cheap phone I bought, it was applying this generic surface to your face so your face didn't have pores but it looked wrong.
You can see the original image.
I find it cool, it's pretty much the CSI enhance tool.
Unfortunately these new phones don't fix the main issue with the Pixel: the hardware.
The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.
This affects everything, pixels just don't last nor have great battery life for this reason.And the big issue is they aren't even much cheaper anymore.
I like GrapheneOS, but my pixel just randomly stopped working after being laggy and having the worst battery life on cellular (less than 2h SOT with a 5000mah battery)
It's hard justifying buying another pixel after such a horrible experience, were it not for GrapheneOS I would never consider buying a pixel in the first place.
Heck even the camera isn't that good anymore, most photos are just gray, and the hardware is also very lacking.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-image-processi...
I found Mrwhosetheboss overview really good, he explains how the pixel just comes short in every way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRegbipwCsc
>The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.
This is the one thing I don't understand. How many people actually need the top end SoCs that other flagships come with. Phones have been more than fast enough for a long time now. Other than playing some games with tough visuals mid range SoCs are still more than powerful enough.
Complaints about battery life and the modems are fair (though I never had complaints about my Pixel 7 Pro battery life until it failed).
I also found that the photos from my Pixel were by far the best I'd ever seen from a phone. Every phone I had prior was only used for quick snapshots, if I was expecting to want to take something decent I would make sure to pack my mirrorless, with the Pixel I could actually trust it to take an acceptable photo.
It matters when the phone is supposed to last more than two years.
Poor battery life is a symptom of a slow CPU, things that don't require full performance on a snapdragon 8 elite take double the time in a pixel while needing full turbo performance.
Don't get me started on the terrible modem efficiency.
These issues are there since the Pixel 6, and Google clearly just doesn't care.
I used a Fairphone 4 (a clearly underpowered phone already at release) for almost 4 years and it still performed just as well. This issue is overblown.
The Pixel 7 Pro is essentially 3 years old and I notice next to zero difference compared to my Galaxy S25. I argue for most people they wouldn't notice a speed difference between even a 3 year old mid-range SoC and today's flagship SoCs.
Poor battery life has much more to do with the size of the battery and how the CPU speed is managed in software. Today's SoCs, even mid range ones could suck a battery to zero in short order. At the end of the day, even if you have a newer SoC built on a more efficient smaller process node they turn around and run it at a higher clock speed and you lose the benefit.
5000mah is the standard battery size for XL phones. Still the pixels battery falls apart immediately on cellular, while heating up like crazy. Have you used your phone for navigation while on cellular? My pixel would be dead in two hours with this. Even just normal browsing on cellular data would get it to heat up and kill the battery life.
I don't personally care about top performance at all (I've been a happy user of Fairphones for several years). But as phones start doing more and more AI tasks (from camera post-processing to computer vision tasks, and now LLMs) the added processing power does make a difference in how usable and snappy the phone feels. For most users it's not about being constantly fast (like for gaming or for long AI tasks), but for being able to handle peak load more smoothly.
race to idle, if your soc has the same power consumption, you want to finish the job as soon as you can and go to sleep.
My last two Pixel phones - 6a and 7a - were both "recalled" with battery issues. I got almost a complete refund for both, and got keep the phone (my 7a died a few months after the recall, 6a is still going strong).
I got a 9a to replace them just because I didn't want to have to deal with learning iPhone, but I'm fully expecting the 9a to fail with a similar issue so looking at buying an iPhone soon as a backup so I can get up to speed.
Both my 4a an 6a got the battery nerf update. I had no idea this impacted the 7a as well. I prefer Pixels for Android Development but my trust in Google is at an all time low.
At least you are buying the cheap A series, my experience was with the XL/Pro phones.
What apps do you run where you see performance problems?
The tech specs: https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_10_specs?hl=en-US Says it has vpn capabilities..But then there is a footnote:
>12. Restrictions apply. Some data is not transmitted through VPN.... See https://g.co/pixel/vpn for details.
Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?
On the positive side it lists a 24+ hour battery life!! This is huge for me!! ..but it has a footnote, as well
> 6. Battery life depends upon many factors and usage of certain features will decrease battery life. Actual battery life may be lower. Over time, Pixel software will manage battery performance to help maintain battery health as your battery ages. See https://g.co/pixel/battery-tests and https://g.co/pixel/batteryhealth for details.
Which I guess is understandable
The help section article lists
# Data that isn’t protected by the VPN
Not all network data from your device is protected by the VPN. Examples of data that aren’t protected by the VPN include:
- Tethering traffic
- Push notifications- Wi-Fi calling and other IMS services
- Work profile app traffic
- Data traffic from an app that routes traffic directly over the Wi-Fi or a cellular connectionAll of which make sense to me except push notifications. My guess is they might mean syncing notifications to e.g. a watch.
I think it might be because push notifications use long-lived connections that are already open when the VPN is turned on.
I wonder why tethering traffic doesn't go through the VPN. I could be wrong, but I think it works the same way with iPhones.
I might test that later, but this (old) SE question seems to confirm my memory: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/266871/is-there-a-...
FWIW, all tethered traffic in GrapheneOS goes through a VPN.
I bought a Xiaomi 14T and bought my gf a pixel 9.
I like my phone more, but battery life on hers is way better to the point I regret buying mine, it barely lasted a day out when on vacations, and I'm not a super heavy phone user, but look for restaurants, open maps, take pictures, ask Gemini stuff and I'd be at 50% by the time she was at 75.
> Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?
I can't speak to exactly what data doesn't go through their VPN but I know carrier apps tend to not play nice with VPNs, especially the Google Fi app (as it relies on its connection and what IP its on to coordinate switching between their various carrier contracts and that seems to break under a VPN).
And also seemingly Wi-fi calling has been problematic over VPN for as long as I can remember so that's usually a safe bet for exclusion.
I am considering switching to Google, I am getting annoyed by Apple more and more, but the critical feature for me is AI assistant.
I am the first to criticize the LLM hype and I do not expect much out of them - but the fact that I cannot get Siri to turn a single light in my room instead of all of them is just FUBAR from my perspective. Siri is such garbage at this point that the gap between it and ChatGPT app is unbelievable. I can't even get it to reliably call people in my contacts, meanwhile my 4 year old can talk to ChatGPT in Croatian. Google Gemini seems to be on par so their assistant should be at least semi competent.
I switched to the previous google phones (9) for the folding phone, even though I'm not too much of a fan of the android experience I cannot switch back to Apple right now because:
* the AI integration on google phones is just amazing
* the folding phone has insane screen estate on-demand anywhere any time, I wouldn't be able to go back to a single screen
> the AI integration on google phones is just amazing
Genuinely curious, what's your favorite aspect of AI on the Pixel? I'm on a 9 pro, coming from a Pixel 6 and a Pixel 3 before it. I don't think I'm ever using AI on this thing, so I'm interested in hearing where it turns up for you.
What do you like about the AI integration? I'm considering leaving iPhone just to have basically native chatGPT integration, assuming gemini works that way, and assuming it can read and write to my calendar and access other personal data.
It doesnt let you change to chatgpt, thats my biggest issue with the Gemini integration.
Well if you switch to Google you can enjoy a timer app that takes between 12 and 16 repetitions of "Stop!" before it stops beeping!
Have you tried using a light switch?
The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden. eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(
>The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden.
Seems to be US only? iPhone also has the same thing, so it's probably something that US carriers are pushing, not something from OEMs.
>eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(
OpenEUICC works fine
If this is real then it is very unfortunate as multiple countries use crypto SIM cards as national identity, a popular more ergonomic alternative to a separate identity card that need a USB reader and computer. They play themselves out of markets.
better than what they did with pixel[6-9] where they shipped a dual injection crap to save 0.00001c on production and if you traveled 5x and swapped local SIMs, the tray just crumbled and you had to buy another for $20 on ebay because they don't stock it or replace under warranty.
Similar experience with my Pixel 5 but different outcome. My SIM tray crumbled and they sent me a new phone under warranty.
does this mean no GrapheneOS either?
GrapheneOS found a way to provide eSIM support, but it depends on installing a patched version of Google's proprietary LPA app. I don't know how future-proof that is..
you don't even need google's proprietary esim app. OpenEUICC works fine if you grant it priv-app permissions.
[1] https://gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/OpenEUICC/
GrapheneOS support eSim : https://grapheneos.org/usage#esim-support
Graphene supports eSIM https://grapheneos.org/usage#esim-support
It supports eSIM. Two months ago, I bought a Pixel 9a, immediately put GrapheneOS on it, and registered an eSIM.
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets. At least round the corners or add little ramps. I guess this is what happens when design folk are allowed to trump engineers.
> This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.
I'm interested to hear more about this, because it's always interesting to understand how other people interact with things who have different use cases or usage models.
How tight are your jeans, and how do you fit anything else in your pocket if something ~1in thick doesn't fit comfortably (without having to force the pocket open in a way that would require a "ramp")?
Are you using your back pockets? I have never once understood the utility of those; I have no desire to sit on anything in my pockets.
A lot of people buy clothes for their looks with minimal weighting towards functionality (or rather that is the functionality). If you've got a body in reasonable nick then tight pants can look good.
The traditional solution to poor pockets is a purse or bag. Phones are interesting in that they can demand attention and that they are probably the most used item that people carry around with them. Thus people compromise their lines/comfort to actually use the faster accessibility of pockets. Probably explains the popularity of ridge wallets and key wallets too.
I don't wear tight jeans and I've come to loathe having to put my phone in my pants pocket. If you're walking around a lot, the feeling is just annoying, you can feel it pressing on your leg the whole time. When I sit down, the bunching feeling is even worse, so I immediately put the phone on the table.
This wasn't an issue when phones had 4.7"-5"-inch screens. Nowadays the phone goes into the cargo pocket if I'm wearing shorts, or back pocket if I'm walking.
I've got a single short that does that (re: bunching feeling) and it's just because the pocket isn't deep enough for the phone to sit flat against my thigh.
I'd rather choose my shorts more carefully in the future than switch to a smaller phone (that might still have the same problem if not tiny) just because of that.
I also do back pocket when walking, swap pockets when sitting down. Do you also worry that one day forgetting to switch will get you into a lot of trouble? :)
Not that I'm trying to justify the prices, but I'm interested by the take that a phone should cost less than a computer. To me, the phone has an actual camera and is significantly smaller (and, if you are talking desktop, has a screen) so should cost more for the same sort of power. Of course, there are phones and computers at all different prices so it's hard to compare.
It's smaller, so it should cost less, not more. It's 2025, miniaturization isn't that expensive. It's less screen and less battery than a laptop, cooling the CPU can be done passively because it's so low-powered, it has less RAM and less flash and fewer ports and a simpler mechanical design, no keyboard or touchpad... it's a slab of glass with a plastic/aluminum case containing a PCB, battery, and camera.
Written on my $250 Motorola
> It's smaller, so it should cost less
That is... not how the physical world works. The laws of physics hate the large and the small. Or perhaps less glibly parameters do not scale equally. Making a phone is more difficult and expensive than making a laptop for the same reason a 30ft tall human would break their own legs attempting to walk.
To put it another way: A thread rolling screw machine can churn out 12mm/0.5" bolts all day long for a penny each. But if you want to make tiny screws for small pocket watches you're going to pay more (relatively) even though that tiny screw contains way less metal than the larger bolt and the operation is similar. A .00001" error in the larger bolt threads doesn't matter. That much error makes the tiny screw completely unusable. Making a thread-forming die with less than .00001" error is very difficult and expensive and the one for smaller screws accumulates error faster relative to allowable error so must be replaced more often. The steel is just as hard in both bolts but the form of the tiny one is proportionally much thinner.
And similarly if you want a 6m/12ft long bolt you are going to pay a lot more than just the proportional cost of the extra metal because finding machines that can even put that much tool pressure on the dies is not easy. It has to be lifted with a crane. It is just more difficult in every way.
Miniaturization is more expensive. Water and dust proofing is more expensive.
For most things there is a sweet range where cost is lowest and utility highest. Prices go up on either end of that middle ground.
By this logic a Ferrari should cost less than a Toyota Camry because it has less seats and luggage space.
I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.
As a side note, computers DO cost more than phones, in general. You can barely get a graphics card for that price these days, so you’re not really comparing apples to apples if your computer is that cheap.
> I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.
Would you like to list those for the phone? I don't think your analogy is fair at all.
Well, considering I also made the point that computers range (very roughly, work with me here) from $500 - $3500 depending on how upmarket they are, and phones range from $100 - $1500 depending on how upmarket they are, I can’t make an argument for why they’re more expensive, because they’re not.
I can list a _few_ EXAMPLE reasons for why they cost what they cost though, even if that’s higher than you expect them to cost, but this list is by no means exhaustive so don’t attempt to break them apart detail by detail. Just get the essence of my opinion from these. There’s incredible engineering and design challenges in the competitive market of smart phones, typically making electronics smaller (such as the motherboard) makes them more expensive, not less. Their cameras on phones are FAR better than any on laptops, and my phone has 4 lenses where my laptop has 1. Camera lenses and sensors at the higher end are _expensive_ in a way a laptop keyboard component or other example is not. Phones support many features computers do not (like in the Ferrari example, Toyota corollas don’t have race mode), qi charging, 5G modem, touch screen (some laptops have this but many computers don’t), etc to name a few. Phones these days also tend to be waterproof in a way computers aren’t, another design challenge. The screens need to be way tougher to survive breakage, etc, etc, there’s just so many things that you have to design for in phones that you don’t for computers.
I hope that gives you some idea, and as a side note, it worries me slightly that some of these weren’t at least a little obvious to you. Or maybe they were, and you just wanted to hear my take, and I shouldn’t assume things so uncharitably. Either way, hope that helps.
Well none of those are on par with a Ferrari expense except sometimes the camera. I wasn't asking for ways a specific feature could cost a bit more than the laptop version. Yeah I can come up with those myself, and many of them cut both ways like screens and durability.
And the comparison wasn't all phones and computers, it's phones like the pixel versus a decent baseline computer.
Fair enough. I will say the point of the Ferrari analogy wasn’t to demonstrate that the features would have a similarly astronomical gulf in price between one model and another, it was merely to demonstrate the issue with cherry picking features when talking about price differences. So, none of my examples had to meet a “Ferrari expense” as that wasn’t the purpose of the analogy.
But yeah, I think we understand each other.
While I mostly agree with you that it is counterintuitive to have mobile costlier than laptop, this year's Pixel Pro models have 16GB RAM. That is better than most entry level laptops on the market right now.
The Pro having more ram than the average entry level laptop doesn't imply very much.
When I search '16gb laptop' on Amazon the first result is $320 and the third result is $220. The first one also has 512GB of storage, and I can upgrade to 24GB of ram and 1TB of storage for only $50. And it has a plenty good CPU with two fast cores and four slow cores.
The upgrade part is especially nasty for phones. Laptops and phones use the same production lines for ram and flash chips, so no price excuses there. And you can fit 2TB into a microSD these days. But if I want 1TB on my Pixel I have to start with a Pro and then add an extra $450.
> It's less screen and less battery than a laptop,
Phones have higher resolution, higher refresh rate, and brighter screens at the price point vs a $1000 laptop. (Also higher density screens are harder to make, 12" 1080p panels cost nothing, phone screens are often bespoke resolutions.)
RAM is the same or higher at the $1k price point - 16GB.
Fewer ports sure, but most ports are USB-C anyway, the cost of the connector is not the expensive part.
The mechanical design I'll push back on as well, phones are expected to put up with a lot more physical abuse than laptops, and also be resistant to dust and water. You can dunk a pixel phone in 3 feet of water for half an hour, good luck doing that with a laptop. As someone who got to watch the ME's sitting next to my team work on making our product water resistant, that process sucks, it takes multiple iterations ($, and time) and it is non-trivial to get right.
Tear downs of the Pixel 10 are obv not available yet, but the estimated BOM for a Pixel 9 is ~$400 USD. Figure ongoing support (7 years!), all the cloud services that come with it, and all the other costs that went into making it (the army of engineers, an entire OS team, all the apps that come with it, etc), the $800 I paid for it isn't half bad.
Edit: Oh and phones also have a modern miracle of an RF stack in them. My phone can hold onto a BT connection across my yard and through 2 brick walls! And they do this with barely any space to but the antennas. Meanwhile laptops can run antennas willy-nilly with the absurd amount of volume they have to work with.
(Apple's Laptops also have really good wireless performance, but the base models aren't trying to support the three generations of cellular protocols and standard that phones do.)
The high resolution is a waste of money. The camera is a waste of money. The number of buttons is small. The issues like a hinge are non existant. The ability to pop out the battery is the kind of complicated thing I would expect from someone competent like a laptop maker.. The lack of Ram slots and now other slots is simplifying.
Really Apple made the game field very simple and its no problem making a perfectly good $50 phone. Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems. Basically forcing you to buy a "middle level" phone that has all the pointless features only a teenager has time/eyes for to get the minimum security updates.
> The camera is a waste of money.
Camera is the main selling point for new phones. It may not be for you, but for most customers, camera performance is the key differentiator.
Modern smartphone camera modules are incredibly high bandwidth. They are hooked up to custom chips that handle everything from video encoding to the massive amount of post-processing it takes to make those tiny sensors output high quality images. Up until the last few years, cameras were regularly held back by the media processing ICs available.
I suggest you look at teardowns of a modern high performance phone. The telephoto lens alone are marvels of engineering that involve a large number of high precision parts, all of which have to stand up to years of horrible abuse unlike anything real professional gear would ever see.
Camera features are pretty much the sole reason why people pay extra for higher end phones.
> Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems.
Google has spent years putting systems in place to allow for longer support periods, they had to write a bunch of abstraction layers first, hardware abstraction not being something Linux is exactly famous for.
Also those small low cost phone manufacturers don't offer lifetime support because they cannot afford to keep engineers and engineering resources around for 7+ years. Have you ever worked on a team trying to support multiple builds of old hardware that use completely different driver stacks? I have, it sucks. After a year people just forget how to even setup a dev environment for the previous version, test hardware breaks down or just gets lost, tooling gets out of date and doesn't work anymore (or has conflicts with newer tooling installed on a dev machine).
Apple can do it because apple controls the entire stack from top to bottom, and because they have an army of engineers devoted to just one thing. Your average Kickstarter Boutique Phone Company has maybe a dozen engineers and they have almost no control over the underlying platform.
> The high resolution is a waste of money.
Once resolutions and refresh rates get higher you can start to do things that make readability better for everyone, but even ignoring those techniques, higher refresh rates feel better, and a wider color gamut makes everything look better.
> The number of buttons is small.
Try making a button survive water, sweat, sun screen (which royally messes up a lot of finishes) and pocket lint some time. Also it has to feel good to press even through a protective case, and it needs to be durable over 5+ years. Again, I've been on teams doing these things, it is not easy. The big phone makers have been doing it for decades now, and they are good at it, but "we've solved it" is also why you don't see large changes in button layouts, shapes, materials, etc, now days.
To give an example of just a volume button - You need to setup a robotic test fixture that presses the button thousands upon thousands of times. This needs to run on each of your engineering revisions that comes in. You hopefully run it on a decent sample size of devices (ideally ones you've sent engineers overseas to pull off the lines directly to avoid the factory choosing golden samples!). Spray the device down with a variety of substances, test again, and you'll need lab managers and engineers to program and run all the different robotic harness tests.
Making quality durable goods is hard. Making a $200 smart phone that'll fall apart in a couple years is easy.
(Now even with all of this, I've had 3 Google made/branded phones that failed due to wide spread hardware issues....)
You are trying to twist if to their favor that the market and not Google specifically is known for hardware problems, recalls and making a camera that 95% of people don't have any use for. What they have is control of Android which allowed them to cancel Android One to build a larger market for the pricing they want using pressure.
Look at what a marvel we can force them to buy for no reason! 80% of them have never made a video intentionally. A great marketing segment.
I had a cemetery of working phones and broken laptops all through past decades. I used laptops for longer than 3 years but I also didn't put them through the pressure a student would and could usually replace parts.
The phone industry is now an oligarchy and prices (and forced feature combinations) are up.
Google's phones are a minor bit player in the market. They have an estimated 4% of US market share. OnePlus was kicking their butts until OnePlus decided to destroy their entire value prop and also laid off their much beloved software team.
But if you want a mid priced phone, go ahead and buy one. A CMF 2 pro has 6 years of security updates, it costs $279.
> 80% of them have never made a video intentionally.
I find that hard to believe. Nearly everyone I know uses their phone cameras heavily. Maybe the stat is true in some strange sense, but 80% of high end premium phone buyers? People paying an extra $200 just for a telephoto lens are never using the camera? The high end is all about camera performance.
> I had a cemetery of working phones and broken laptops all through past decades. I used laptops for longer than 3 years but I also didn't put them through the pressure a student would and could usually replace parts.
I have everything from a Motorola Q9m to an unreleased Windows Mobile 7 (not phone 7!) to an army of LG, Motorola, and Nexus devices.
Phone hardware is generally shite. Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS, that I could barely use the phone anymore due to running out of RAM. Great job OnePlus, great job.
> Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS
Same situation on preinstalled laptops and Android. You are complaining about Google in relation to Microsoft.
Android One was a correction to how their system should work and it wouldn't help their goals to sell $100 phones that are secure, all an older adult would typically want, not particularly engaging for marketers, competing with their flagship phones for people who will pay and accept any quality in pointless toys.
Even their own A series has been a problem for them since it covers what any reasonable person would want (in a flagship eliminating way). So let's restrict the charging bellow the lowest industry standards, etc.
Also Google stuff always lacks SD card slots and have tiny storage. The $250 Motorola can add a $50 1 TB SD Card, which is enough to fit your entire music collection, all of wikipedia, and an offline ad-free routable map of the world from OSM, and still have probably like 700 GB left over for photos/videos. Google meanwhile charges $100 for a 128 GB storage upgrade. Probably because they want to funnel you into their cloud storage, want you to use their online maps/music services, etc.
Phone cameras are also absolute trash anyway, and pulling up some comparisons in Google Photos right now, I'm fairly certain that my Pixel 6a takes obviously worse photos than my Nexus 5x did 10 years ago, even comparing high light for the 6a to low light for the 5x. I'll probably buy a Motorola when my current phone dies because the only ostensible reason to buy a Pixel is the camera. Or I suspect the real big-brained solution lives in the handheld gaming PC space.
How reliable is an SD card that size?
They're no less reliable than 128GB cards. The bottleneck is likely going to be whether the phone's filesystem can actually index 1TB worth of files without crashing. No such problems on a real computer.
Which motorola?
>Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
As much as I loathe the consumerism of buying the latest phone every year, I realized that if the trade-in value is good enough, it's a pretty good strategy in terms of overall technology spend.
With iPhones, I upgraded every third generation. With Pixels, I went from 3 to 6 to 9, but given that I'm on Google Fi, I get a $450 discount on the phone, and I can get a base Pixel 10 Pro for $217, after trade-in. I got a surprisingly generous trade-in on my Pixel 6 when I bought the 9, and buying the Pixel 3 with Google Fi was pretty cheap too.
The last computer I bought was an M1 Max Macbook Pro w/ 36gb of RAM and a 1TB drive, for $2499, in 2023 (thank you B&H). Hopefully it'll be a long time before I'm paying that much for a phone.
> _starting_ at $799, $999 and $1199.
At 126GB storage, which is basically unusable in 2025 and it's a phone you want to last to 2030. This storage bait needs to be made illegal, it literally costs almost nothing to manufacture and exists purely to punish and trick the consumer.
If you don't have multiple 10g+ games or hours of video on your phone then 128GB can easily be enough.
That's beside the point but I don't game on my phone (s22 with 128gb) and constantly have to shuffle storage just for photos, videos and music streaming cache. Storage is so cheap it makes no sense to pay 1,000$ for a device and then be a slave to manually managing it. It's insulting.
Okay yeah I fully agree there. I was thinking of my 128GB 6a I bought for a third of that new.
I feel the same way about paying more for a phone than for a computer, but is it rational? I'm not sure. Sure you get a smaller screen and a smaller battery, and the phone doesn't have a keyboard and a trackpad (assuming you were referring to a laptop), but does the militarisation make up that difference?
Disclaimer: I'm not really invested in thinking about it carefully. I don't like any of the huge phones available now, and so far I'm getting by with the small phone I have, and buying into the idea of the Framework laptop either means I won't have to replace the whole thing or that I'll just go back to buying refurbished enterprise laptops.
Edit: I see other people have already picked up on the computer/phone cost thought more productively than I did! :)
Pro tip: Buy the second-to-latest generation. Costs half as much and it was literally the best that even billionaires could have purchased just a year ago.
I always amortize the coat of the phone over the months of security updates remaining. Sometimes the last gen is a better deal, on a per month basis, sometimes the new one is only a couple bucks a month more. i dont mind a few more dollars per month.
/s: B-b-b-but if you buy the Pixel 10 Pro Fold you can pay $1799 and, assuming your bank account can only hold amounts $1699 and lower, the amount needed to purchase will overflow at some point in the purchasing process, making it SEEM like you only pay $100 for that new phone!?
> Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
My computer is ~$6,000, so that would be a pretty high bar for me.
Few people are paying those prices. Cell providers sell these at far less: on the order of 60% of Googles retail price.
Well, minor nit- cell providers offer it for 60% Google’s price to start[0], while locking it into a phone contract that subsidizes it. This is effectively bundling a loan for the hardware with your data plan. That price is more of a down payment on said loan.
[0] actually in the US at least they’ll frequently offer it for “free” with a new plan, that of course locks the phone to said plan.
Yeah, I bought a Pixel 10 Pro 256 GB yesterday. Should have been $1,099. But Google e-mailed me a $150 off coupon code, I got $450 off for being a Google Fi subscriber, plus $100 as a trade-in for my Pixel 6. My actual price for the 10 Pro was $399.
I'm waiting for Pixel 9 price drops
Have they fixed the ability to easily transfer your existing Android data to the new Android phone? I find that every time I upgrade, despite choosing the options to transfer apps/settings, that 90% of the apps I open just greet me with the login screen and I have to set everything up completely from scratch. I remember maybe a handful of apps, I think one was Uber, that were able to transfer everything including the login session. That was truly magic. That's how it should be for all apps. I understand banks might have special security requirements and I already know for Google Wallet, your cards need to be reactivated even if they transfer over, but most apps are not banks.
Blame the app developers, not google. They specifically added a backup/restore mode for device to device transfer, that bypasses backup blacklists[1]. However apps can still opt out by registering a backup agent, and returning no data.
[1] https://developer.android.com/identity/data/testingbackup
Google actively avoided providing a local, secure, and seamless backup or even an interface for 3rd party backup services to make users more dependent on Google cloud services. Of course many app developers decided the Google cloud is too insecure, being not end-to-end encrypted. And Google enables them by not giving the users ways to override those stupid decisions. This wouldn't have happened on PCs, where you can mostly just copy over the application's user directory.
>Of course many app developers decided the Google cloud is too insecure, being not end-to-end encrypted
But so far as I can tell D2D transfers don't hit the cloud?
>For a D2D transfer, the Backup Manager Service queries your app for backup data and passes it directly to the Backup Manager Service on the new device, which loads it in to your app.
https://developer.android.com/identity/data/testingbackup
If your app is opting out of backup by implementing a custom backup agent that returns no data, it's pretty clear you're against user backups, period.
Pixel to Pixel has been smooth for me since the Pixel 4. Haven't don't cross manufacturer for a while.
i don't think they're ever gonna fix that
> For instance, when you're calling an airline, it can automatically find your flight details from your email and display it during your phone call.
Is this really the best example usecase they can think of? How often does an individual call an airline? I'm sure in aggregate they get a lot of calls, but I don't think I've ever had to.
It just seems really weird that this is the top example of on-device AI. The other examples mentioned, like "finding the right photos to share with a friend", seem more relatable.
> How often does an individual call an airline?
It's a very simple example that people can see the value for right away. It also acts as a good placeholder for hotel, car rental agency, restaurant, etc. Any place you'd have a ticket/reservation for that you might need to call.
Like parent, I did not "see the value" "right away", but on the contrary, I am more confused about what the phone brings.
It is odd that they considered that a common usecase.
Perhaps they really wanted to show a good looking widget and I suppose flight info was the best candidate.
I have had some calls with family or friends about an upcoming flight where this could've saved a few seconds.
Would I want to save a few seconds in exchange for their processing of my whole conversation even if offline? That's another story.
To me it's a solution looking for a problem. Just revisit Microsoft's marketing material for their Copilot products. Bizarre use cases one after another.
https://imgur.com/a/sDJTiyK
That 100x zoom looks a bit... sloppy...
The car has one wing mirror and the rear tire is wider than the front. Edit: this might be real, see child comments.
Is there someone who knows more about cars who can confirm that this is in fact, not real?
This looks to me like something resembling a 65 mustang.
If you look at some 65 mustangs they only had a driver side wing mirror as that was the law back then. The wider rear tire also makes a lot of sense, as it's a RWD car that needs wider rear tires to support the traction.
If the car in the photo is a 65 mustang, I think the AI did pretty good.
This is like using a 6-fingered person in an AI imaging advert.
This is an old classic car/truck. Only one mirror was somewhat common back then. Also, wider rear tires are not unusual. Especially on anything with a bed, since you want additional loading capabilities in the back.
What looks off the most is the fact that the blinkers under the bender aren't even remotely close to looking similar. The rest of the car could pass as a restomod, but the fact that so many things are asymmetrical between the two sides just looks completely wrong. Blinkers, hood clips, mirror-no-mirror, etc.
That looks vaguely similar to a 60s Mustang (although also has a lot of details that are wrong) and old muscle cars like that often have wider rear tires for better traction
The bigger issue I have is that when they change from 1x to 5x - car changes its location and angle a bit.
I think the rear looking bigger is an artifact of the zoom, where your brain expects it to look smaller, but it's actually the same size due to the extreme cropping
No, it's definitely wider in the photo. The rear tire is about double the width of my mouse pointer while the front tire is about 1x the width.
That said, as other commentators have mentioned, it might also be wider in real life, so not necessarily an artifact at all.
And the height?
If you own a pixel phone remember to do regular emergency call tests. They have a bug that has stuck around for generations but for some reason they get a pass.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1ano09x/pixel_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jzo5hu/pixel_...
> regular emergency call tests
This sounds like a huge waste of time for the dispatch operators if everyone starts to do such tests regularly.
On a similar note, it would be great (especially for these tests) if carriers provided a non-emergency / echo number that gets treated the same way as an emergency call (works w/o SIM card, gets preferential treatment, ...)
You can schedule test calls and call in the scheduled time slot (US only)
Test calls confirm that your local 911 service can receive your 911 call and has the correct location information. Test calls can be scheduled by contacting your local 911 call center via its non-emergency phone number.
In your preferred search engine, search the key words “emergency communications center non-emergency number" and include the names of the city or town, state, and county or parish in your search. Test calls may need to be scheduled and are usually based on the workload experienced at the PSAP.
For more information, visit the National Association of State 911 Administrators site.
Please do not call 911 to obtain the non-emergency number.
https://www.911.gov/calling-911/frequently-asked-questions/#....
When phones are no longer considered reliable to make emergency calls in certain places, what alternative is there?
Sure it sucks for the operator to get a call, "Sorry, just testing to make sure emergency calling works, thanks, bye" and it would also suck, probably even more, for an individual to not be able to make an emergency call. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, hopefully someone improves the system, lol.
You can't just say A less bad then B so we should all do A.
You have to consider number of A * badness A vs number of B * badness B.
If thousands of pixel users start doing test calls in mass you will actually start causing that unable to make an emergency call issue.
And then maybe we will act and hold Google accountable for having a potentially lethal bug on their phone.
Or maybe not.
And then everything is just worse.
Frequently calling the alarm number without a valid reason can be fined up to 6700 euro, or result in 3 months detention here.
So if Pixel still has this bug, that's just another reason not to buy a Google product.
What's the threshold by which a phone isn't considered reliable enough to make emergency calls?
I've never personally had an emergency call fail on a Pixel device, and I don't know the broader statistics of how often they fail for other people compared to other phones. Do you?
For Australia, it needs to be on a whitelist.
https://isthisphoneblocked.net.au/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-03/brand-new-phones-unab...
What I've done is write the dispatch center a friendly email explaining what I want and suggesting that they choose any off-peak time they find convenient.
A few days later, they called me and said that I could make the test call right now. Worked fine.
One of the most important features of the phone. A huge reason to not buy if there is any uncertainty. You might die if it is not working.
And here i was thinking it was irresponsible to have a decorative phone in my house because someone might try to call 911 with it in need. but these guys are selling phones that randomly may or may not? and people are still like but but apple?
AI assisted zoom is interesting. Will it invent license plate numbers, guess what faces look like, or just output high resolution blurs?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the AI is using video (i.e. multiple frames) to put together enough information for the zoom to be as accurate as possible. That said, I don't know if there's enough information to do 100X.
They already have this on the pixel 9s with their 20x super zoom. I haven't noticed any weird artifacts like this from my usage. It just appears as indistinguishable camera fuzz - hard to describe.
Looks like a minor improvement to the pixel 9 series. Honestly, that's fine, I'm pretty happy with my Pixel 9 Pro.
The built-in magsafe charging magnets are a nice addition, although a case with magnets in it works for me for now.
Of course, the #1 feature I'd like to see is expandable storage, which Google seems to be strangely against. #2 would be a headphones jack - Google has already reversed course on that one once, but another reversal seems unlikely.
Oh, and it's too late to edit, but I just noticed they removed the physical SIM and force you to use an eSIM now. That feels like a significant downgrade.
Yeah, I am on Pixel 9 pro too and quick trade in check shows that upgrade would cost net ~500$(256Gb). Arguably ~250$ if buying 10 would extend the gemini subscription for a year -- not sure about the verbiage of the terms here.
100x "composite" zoom is nice but not sure if it's worth it.
As much as I'd love if phones still had headphone jacks, the inertia sure seems to be going the other direction. I fully anticipate the power port will be the next to go and wireless charging will be the only way to charge (and I don't want that either).
I haven't noticed a major difference in any phone I've owned for 6 or 7 years at least.
> It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
Unclear what "intelligently recover and refine" means here, and I'd like to make a request of people who might also be unclear yet influenced by this idea...
If you build features that sound like this into the image-capturing stage (from the user perspective), and your target users include serious photographers who care about authenticity, please be sure to make any kind of "generative"/inferencing of image details be optional.
And fall back to nth previous generation of sensor processing, autofocusing, and anti-shake technology -- where the compute still influences the images, but errs on the side of missing/fuzzy detail rather than fabrication.
Imagine the priorities of photojournalists as a category of user -- not only users who want appealing snapshots, selfies, or professional editorial fashion/lifestyle shoots.
There's still a place for consciously fabricating/enhancing/fixing in interactive post-processing, when you you choose to do it, and it's clear to you what is being done.
> Unclear what "intelligently recover and refine" means here
Obviously genai upscaling. The details are not there on the original photo.
Because of course "serious photographers" use their smartphones at 100X zoom. Please.
I have the pixel 6. It's still fine. This looks like a very incremental update to me as have the previous few editions. Same with the OS. I can barely tell apart Android versions these days. And since most of the value is software based, there isn't much practical difference between different generations of Pixel phones.
My pixel 6 has the same 48 megapixel sensor in the camera as they still appear to be using. It seems camera sensors plateaued about 4-5 years ago. It's a great sensor; the raw images are pretty amazing given the form factor (tiny sensor and lens). And I expect it still is. People confuse the AI capabilities (removing subjects, adding missing detail, etc.) with simple operations to make the photo 'pop'. Boosting the contrast, saturating all the colors, applying some aggressive smoothing (noise) and sharpening, etc. Doing that manually on the raw files yields very similar results. It's good and convenient. But most of that is just the sensor being awesome and some tasteful defaults for these edits. Adding optical zoom is impressive. The digital/AI zoom is not something I'd use. They still seem to use different sensors for the different cameras; which is something Apple stopped doing with recent iphones. So, you have to choose between the right lens with lots of noise or the right sensor with the wrong focal range.
The AI stuff is interesting as a gimmick but not something I use a lot. It seems to be the main differentiator for Google these days but I just don't see that being worth hundreds of dollars. It's a bit of an artificial differentiator and a race to the bottom. The advantages tend to be a bit hand wavy and other phone manufacturers of course copy them.
I might go for the 10a when it comes out in six months or so. My Pixel 6 won't be getting major updates anymore and the battery is starting to deteriorate. The difference between a 500 euro phone and a > 1000 euro one are not worth it for me. And with the 9a at least it even had a slightly bigger battery.
> I can barely tell apart Android versions these days.
Is that bad really? I can tell iOS versions apart and I don’t like it. I believe design should converge on some ideal (even if an unreachable one) so at some point updates ought to get very “tweak”-ish.
My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station. With the memory and CPU this phone could easily replace my work laptop (vscode and ssh for the most part). Sadly I haven't found any phone that would make this possible (Samsung Dex doesn't count because it's proprietary)
> My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station
Sounds like you're thinking of the stock Pixel 10. Google worked with Samsung to bring the Dex experience to upstream Android, and their Linux VM work is almost fully baked in Android 15. Running VSCode and ssh can be done today with a Pixel phone plugged into a USB-C hub, keyboard, mouse and a monitor. I don't know why Google isn't promoting this capability yet,
I think they're waiting for the the big point release this fall.
When they rolled out 16 earlier this spring almost nothing changed from the user's perspective because it was just shipping a lot of the underlying supporting apis that aren't exposed via user accessible things at this point.
I guess that's better than nothing! Still, it wouldn't allow connection to a thunderbolt dock with 2 displays, network and peripherals I guess.
Ideally it would run stock Linux with Android apps via waydroid.. reliance on banking apps makes this fully converged experience using only open source a bit of a pipe dream :(
Android 16 will have this (at least for a single external display): https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/developer-...
I want to know how the TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compares to Samsung-manufactured Tensor processors and also how TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compare to TSMC-manufactured Snapdragon processors. Samsung's Tensors (also Exynos) had the fame of getting superhot. I want to know if these problems persist in new Tensor chips.
Don't hold your breath, the tensor g5 is slower than a snapdragon 8 Gen 3
> Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
Reminds me of https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
I guess we'll never be able to trust any photos taken with a Pixel 10 or above.
Yeah.
So basically the trend now is to stop actually improving things and have AI make shit up to fill the gaps and pretend we're improving things.
"Smoothing" of photos has already been on by default in Android and iOS for years at this point. You'd need to go way back to "trust" any of them.
I look forward to the news stories about people getting lost because they used 100x "zoom" to read a distant sign.
Getting confused by distant street signs with a $1K GPS device in your pocket. Come now.
Really hope that can be disabled.
So far all the camera features are available through the API (and not hidden behind drm), so you could potentially use something like ProShot.
How so? I was under the impression that gCam uses proprietary algos.
12 years later and still no availability in Middle East or Africa. Only available in 30-something countries. Google can't figure out retail, while upstart Chinese companies hit the global market immediately.
If you buy it in a country that's not officially supported you don't get 5G, most unique features, and of course no warranty, support, or repairs.
I've got a 7a International version and 5G works in my unsupported country (New Zealand). Not sure what other unique features don't work.
However it is nuts how they just can't be bothered supporting so many countries.
It's disabled geographically, not based on band compatibility or carrier or anything. Not sure about New Zealand because I heard it's not consistent.
It'd be 5G, VoLTE/Wifi, VPN, call screening, OTP autodelete, crash detection.
Google is being deceptive with their zoom demo.
They zoom from 100x to 0.5x and present 0.5x as "what it actually looks like."
They're making 100x zoom appear twice as impressive by using ultra-wide (0.5x) as fake 'normal' vision.
Kind of moot anyway; 100x zoom is equivalent to a 2400mm lens (with no stabilization assist). If you can hand-aim that on target, you're an elite marksman.
I'm pretty sure that was just an accident, if you pinch all the ways out it goes seamlessly to the wide angle lens.
0.5x is 0.5x, not "what it actually looks like."
The deceptive part is using AI to creatively fill in gaps in the picture, and saying "recover and refine intricate details" when the details are actually hallucinated, making that blue car look like a drawing of a toy.
You can't install any of the AI models on the Pixel 9 if you have the bootloader unlocked. Wouldn't be surprised that Gemini Nano or Pro Res Zoom didn't work, either.
> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
So it's not just a crop. It's a crop + hallucinate.
I really like their AI strategy. It’s much stronger than Apple’s, which seems to be nonexistent. The problem I have is I really like my Apple Watch Ultra. There is nothing like it in the android space and I can’t rely on Google. Actually caring about building a great product the way Apple does. Googles hardware products always seem to be some strategic wedge play to keep the ecosystem in check. They don’t seem to exist because they really care about building the very best watch, or phone, or whatever and at any point they might just cancel the effort.
I really wish they'd upgrade the Pro Fold to have the Pro camera system. :(
I don't know why they assume that someone buying a $2000 phone doesn't want the best available camera.
Agreed - it's surprising to call it Pixel 10 PRO Fold, when it is lacking one of the "Pro" features.
Seems like a DISCOUNT is in order.
I don't want a discount; I want a better camera.
Looks slick.
> automatically find your flight details
I appreciate this but can they please go beyond search and instead legitimately find me cheapest price and overall best time to fly? Or strategies to find cheaper fight using different plans or maybe integrated credit point I have, coupons?
I'd love to see AI saving me big money and doing all the hassle for me.
Google launched a new tool for finding flights: https://www.google.com/travel/flights/deals.
More details at: https://blog.google/products/search/google-flights-ai-flight....
If you mean impossible to hold without the silicone case (not included) then I concur based on my experience with the older Pixels :-]
I wonder how they'll screw it up this time. I have to deal with a pink line down my Pixel 8's screen, because while there is an extended warranty for that issue, you need to flash the stock firmware (wiping the device) to put it in "service mode" so uBreakIFix can do their thing.
That's the problem with pixel. Everytime I try to switch from iPhone, ever year's line up has some glaring GC issue. I've tried every year since the 2XL. Most recent is the 9 Pro XL (only the XL size) the camera bar falling off.
The pixels could be amazing phones if Google could fix their crappy QC and invest in some actual customer support.
People like Apple - you can go to a physical store and get support. You can get AppleCare+ and have accidental damage replacements, battery replacements, etc just take it to the store.
Google doesn't have that, they don't have a physical presence, and it's nearly impossible to get a human and if you do, they are really stingy about RMAs.
You have bought and returned new Pixel phones every year for the last 7 years due to QC? That sounds like a tall tale.
I'm really picky. Creaks, screen issues (got the line down the middle of the screen on a 2XL, 3, and 6), speaker went out on 5, cell radio would randomly stop working on the 8, having to reboot multiple times per day. Most recently a 9 Pro XL, flexed more than my wife's, and the screen creaked when pressed (which my wife's didn't). The camera bump falling off didn't happen to me, but I've seen it on others.
If I'm going to pay Apple prices, I expect the same level of quality. I really want to like the pixel, but I can't trust Google's quality until they prove otherwise. Every generation of Pixel has had some sort of QC problem.
Wow. Either you're extremely unlucky or I'm extremely lucky.
I'm still using my Pixel 6 pro and have had zero hardware issues with this phone or my previous pixel 4.
Unfortunately both Pixel 10 and Gemini is unavailable in Hong Kong. I have been trying move off Apple iPhone for a long time and Pixel is the phone I wanted to go for within the Android ecosystem. And I simply dont have that choice.
Wondering if anyone on HN could shine any light as to why.
The hardware and features seem great, but I'm not gonna buy another pixel phone. I've had a pixel 8 for 2 years the stability of the software has gone down so much. I frequently have an unresponsive UI, requiring me to turn off my phone with the side buttons. I also have had many issues with the keyboard and it not responding when using chrome, requiring me to kill chrome and restart it.
It seems like Google only tests on their latest device when releasing android because people I know who always get the latest phones don't have these problems. It's a very poor customer experience. It's the phone experience of an old super car. It's fast and does lots of cool things, but it feels like the wheels are gonna come off at any minute.
Same here (on a Pixel 7). Apart from there being absolutely no reason to upgrade, really, even with the generous trade-in values offered by Google around the time of release. I kind of miss the time when a new smartphone release was exciting.
Phones are not the hot commodity they used to be anymore and that's a good thing IMHO. I just bought a Px7 after breaking my 6a that I had for 3 years. I did look at the Px10 specs but with the price/value it was an easy decision. I'm now expecting the same 3y worth of battery I was getting out of my 6a (a day started getting tight at the end). Bigger still seems to be the definition of better but I had a CAT S60 for a while, so it's still small compared to that brick.
Overall very happy with the Px series and I'm happy they keep making them. On the software side it runs Graphene OS just as well as the 6a. Setup was super easy with the Chromium WebUSB based installer. I expect the Px10 to be supported soon too.
I'm curious what kind of performance the Tensor G5 would have with llama.cpp, compared to a 16gb desktop gpu.
If we can somehow put AI agent locally on a phone that could use tools (cough: APIs) I think it will be the wildest revolution after the invention of a smart phone. How about a truly smart phone!
Yay, it has native wireless charging via Qi2, AKA Pixelsnap. The rumors on the internet were that you needed a special case to use the wireless charging. But that is not true after all and those rumors were false.
You can just plop a Qi2 charger right on your phone and it will charge! Only bummer is that the 10 pro charges at 15w while the 10 pro XL charges at 25w. And I really prefer the smaller phones that fit in my pockets. Not some huge monster phone.
I recently discovered Pixel 7 (maybe older too, I dunno) is actually Qi compatible it just doesn't have the magnets to lock in place.
But if you have a case with those magnets in, it works great. And it turns out QuadLok cases (which I can generally recommend for cyclists) are compatible.
So now I just plonk my phone against the wall and it charges on an Apple MagSafe charger I mounted. This is actually really nice, turns out it's really convenient to have your phone in a fixed position, also not taking up any surface space!
Always thought wireless charging was a bit of a gimmick but with the magnets it's genuinely useful.
It's a shame the Pixels don't have IR sensors. One of the most underrated features that some Androids have - I was in a hotel in Poland this year and it had Aircon in the room (and was rather warm), but there was no remote. The IR sensor on my phone saved my butt as it could turn on the AC!
There's no end of times that the IR sensor has come in useful one way or another.
> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.
YES! Here we talk.
The fact we can now host a version of an AI model, and make sure everything is processed locally and is not sent to the cloud is the best feature of those phones. I just hope that data do not leave the phone OR are encrypted to be stored in Google servers...
All I really want to know is CPU/other efficiency and battery life.. If I use G1-G5 with exactly the same app that G1 CPU was adequate for the theoretical efficiency for the CPU is maybe improving 20% a generation but that manifests as some worthwhile (battery time) result or is drowned out by stupid features like even higher screen refresh?
That camera bump is huge. I guess that's how you get the great zoom?
Phone cases are doing heavy lifting to smooth out the back of this phone.
On the other hand I much prefer the full-width bump than a corner bump. It helps when holding your phone (a ledge for your fingers) and means that the phone doesn't rock around when used on a table.
I made a leather pouch with a belt loop for my Pixel 6. Great when travelling or hiking. The camera band sits above the edge of the front of the pouch with the 'lid' covering that when the pouch is closed with a tuck lock.
The full-width band is just perfect for grabbing the phone and lifting it out of the form-fitting pouch, and doubles as a sort of safety preventing it from slipping from your grip.
Atleast these type of bumps don't cause the phones to wobble.
I'd be curious to know if they did any surveys/research on how many people use a case or not. If the vast majority do (my anecdata-based hunch), why not just thicken the phone to add battery and use a thinner case rather than just having the case space the back of the phone out to be flat?
My partner got a Pixel 9a and it's nice that they went completely flat on that one, though it's obviously almost a straight rip-off of the recent non-pro iPhones aesthetically (not a bad thing imo).
> why not just thicken the phone to add battery
Weight. Many people already don't like how heavy their phones are.
Good point. Even my regular iPhone 13 is the heaviest phone I've ever owned and it's kind of annoying in that it actually hurts to drop on your face if you're vegging out watching a video while laying down.
Too bad it can't be smoothed out (with more battery or something) to start with.
That bump is more than 1/4 of the phone's total thickness. This is becoming comical.
The camera bump (rather than a full-size thickness increase) makes the phone feel less massive, especially in your pocket.
I don't need it to "feel" less massive. Most wallets are thicker and I don't hear anyone complain.
not sure if you mean clip-on cell phone wallets (I assume that people that don't want a thick cell phone don't add a wallet since it makes their cell phone too thick), or actual wallets... plenty of people complain about those:
https://lifehacker.com/how-can-i-downsize-my-ridiculously-la... https://veryexcellenthabits.com/downsize-ridiculously-enormo... https://www.reddit.com/r/onebag/comments/5blfkt/my_wallet_is...
And a thick wallet causes enough health problems for it to be called "Fat Wallet Syndrome".
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fat_Wallet_Syndro...
I hope there's an improved screen. I bought a 9 Pro XL with hopes of running GrapheneOS but the PWM on the Pixel was terrible. Instant headaches. I can more or less get by ok with recent iPhone screens but the Pixel screen didn't work at all for me.
Heard a rumor that Google was going to take eye strain seriously for this version. Hope that's true.
I'm delighted to see that they don't make you get the biggest phone in order to get the best cameras. I've been using Pixels since the Pixel 3 and always feel like I'm making compromises in the camera department in order to get a phone that will actually fit in my hand/pocket.
> Magic Cue ... to proactively offer the right information at the right time
That's one way to justify a permanent snoop on everything you are doing and saying in all your messages and calls.
Even if your data is kept on device, their telemetry could still reveal your activity and patterns.
> Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.
Pixel phones have been that way for a while now. Phone cases usually add the missing part to make it flat, e.g. https://www.spigen.com/products/pixel-10-series-case-tough-a...
I understand this might not be the best place to ask, but I have to: I'd like to try and switch from iPhone to Pixel (maybe different Android phone?) but there is one app that I can't find anything close to: Drafts.
Maybe I'm missing something? Any ideas?
I don't really need all functions of Drafts but the whole experience of adding notes with this app is something I haven't experienced with anything else.
PS: naive question: is there a way to "integrate" Pixel with macOS? At least to have common clipboard.
For that sort of integration I would use KDE Connect[1]. It works great between my phone and laptop. I can send the clipboard, files, notifications, media controls, etc between the devices. It has a MacOS version but it currently only has nightly builds (potentially a downside).
[1] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
It works great with iOS and linux desktop (in fact even better than the original sometimes). Thanks!
Interesting phones, but the snark in the live video wasn’t that amazing. Aren’t the products enough in and out of themselves to be attractive?
Complaining about Apple walled garden, but only able to pull off their AI help if you are part of their Google garden and a lot of it on the cloud.
Same for Pixel Snap being MagSafe (sounds like a camera feature at first).
7 years of software updates promised, that’s actually nice.
Waiting for Pixel 10a. Pixel 10 is so expensive.
After trying out 6000/7000mah phones, I'm never ever using any phone with a smaller battery. Especially not the 3580mah or whatever pixel phones. I like pixel otherwise, but it's just impossible to revert back to a smaller battery once you've experienced the truly multi-day -- even for a unhealthy screen user like me -- battery life.
Pixel 10 has around 5000mah batteries. Sadly that does not meet your 6000mah requirement. Everybody makes choices ;)
Yeah. I can't wait for a "flagship" phone with 6000+mah. Provided it's not one with bloatware (xiaomi et. al) I would buy it immediately.
I just want a little phone that I can use with one hand and doesn't stretch out my pocket...
I wonder if these new devices will finally have support for the elusive APV codec.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Professional_Video
The link you posted says Android 16 support. Why wouldn't Pixel run it?
This codec needs hardware support to be practical (ie recording live video rather than just transcoding). So far, I think that's only available on certain Samsung models.
Hi pixel users, can we configure the phone to get more privacy ? Primarily looking for disabling complete location tracking, photos processing, app interactions and local ai interactions
I wonder will this make some of the older Pixels (say 7-9) cheaper on eBay. I have been toying with the idea of replacing my Samsung S10 for ages now, and the battery life is really starting to degrade so I might pull the trigger soon.
After they stopped releasing the device tree, there's really not a lot that will hold ROM developers to Pixels. I'll definitely wait to see what happens on that front before buying my next phone.
Insanely hideous.
They look like Bender from the back. "Bite my shiny metal phone!"
the camera bump you mean? otherwise they're almost identical to iPhones, sans dynamic island.
Does the camera module still fall off like on the Pixel 9?
https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+pixel+camera+falling
I love Android, besides a few accessibility issues, especially when typing to Gemini and TalkBack not speaking the reply, but I don't like how sluggish TalkBack is on Pixel phones. I had the 8 and hated that.
Meanwhile my Pixel 2 is still rocking after 7 years of daily use.
You are also rocking a bunch of security vulnerabilities then, because this thing is EOL for a long time.
I have the latest LineageOS version and the 4.4 kernel will be EOL in 2027. So no.
my pixel 2 is still rocking too, what an amazing device! (although it now I only use it for flappy bird..) Highly disappointed that Google stopped updates a long time ago.
I'm sorry, is that car in the 100X zoom even a real model?
All I ask for is a slightly smaller phone or a thicker phone with better battery life. Why are manufacturers so intent on not doing that?
The phone is larger, not to mention ridiculous size of camera shelf. What happened to decent industrial design?
Someone needs to use Veo to make realistic ads for this. Majority of people don't go hiking and biking and kayaking, EVER.
Only one question. Can you disable the stupid date on the home screen. No I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a phone and then load another launcher on it. Just hire someone competent at programming to make this an option.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/132929200?hl=en
Why do we need brand new models every year?
So that people that buy that year can get the latest improvements
They're not releasing them on your personal upgrade schedule
Because even if your phone only breaks every 5 years on average do you want to get a new 5 year old phone because your last one died right before the refresh cycle? Having regular releases means that when you do get the phone you have a relatively up-to-date device with latest hardware improvements. You don't need to upgrade yearly because they release a new phone yearly.
You probably don't, as your current phone ought to last for years. But hardware manufacturers, like software developers, benefit from faster release cycles.
People are on different phone cycles. Even if most people update once every 5 years, it only takes 5 distinct groups to warrant a yearly new phone.
So, any of these features gonna be available for non-US regions/system region settings?
can these guys now actually make phones that don't overheat or have battery problems ?
What is the best way for a Brazilian to trade in a pixel 8 pro for the newer model?
Did some marketing person really write "cutting edge" into the headline?
I would to try Pixel phones. But it's simply not available where I live.
AI times make me change my iPhone to Pixel. may be it's the time.
Which of the AI features can you use without a Google account?
Where do you think it's supposed to get the data from? By digging through your trashcan? No access - no data - no feature.
From the on-device memory, UI, camera etc.
Also: "Voice Translate allows you to break down language barriers during phone calls. Through Tensor G5, our on-device AI translates your call in real time in what sounds like each speaker’s voice"
They advertise on-device AI functionality quite a lot.
I know it's a petty thing, but I quit using the Pixel when they forced an unmovable and unhideable search bar onto the bottom of the homescreen.
Can anyone report if that's still the case? I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.
You can just use a custom launcher.
I've been using Nova Launcher for so long I couldn't tell you what the normal homescreen looks like right now.
its still there on my pixel 9 in the stock/default launcher, but you can still use an alternative launcher if you like. many of those do not have the bar or let you toggle it off.
> I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.
If you switched to a different phone, it is using a different launcher. If your only complaint is the launcher, it doesn't make sense to change the whole phone.
I was gonna say it's definitely not there on mine but I just checked and it is.
Amazing how good my mental adblocker is for things I've been looking at every day for 2 years.
Nova launcher is fantastic.
I'm not an Android user, so pardon me if this is a stupid thing to say, but it's weird to me that these phones apparently have some new UI unique to them. I thought Android was just Android. Won't other Android phones get this update?
Android is not just Android. The device vendors have to customize it to fit their devices by including drivers for example. Device vendors have the option to change the look pretty heavily, Samsung TouchWiz was infamous, Chinese vendors also offer very customized versions, including making it look like iOS. What you are seeing is material design 3 "expressive" which will be rolled out in the next minor Android version and Google apps
Not all phones capable of running Android (everything?) have the hardware to host the local LLM models at a useful level of performance.
Battery life looks great
> They feature our biggest batteries
That's the only thing I found on there. Doesn't even say if it lasts longer than the previous generation.
I hope they stop superglueing the batteries inside the phones.
The look of the phone reminds me of Bender from Futurama.
I still have a Samsung Galaxy S8. It runs fine. I don't really need more from a phone. Maybe I am missing something but I really cannot see myself getting a new phone.
anyone who knows about cars is pointing at that last demo video and going "What the fuck is THAT."
Yet again, Google announces another lineup of phones where a vast majority of the announcement is about software features that could be implemented on existing devices, highlighting the wastefulness of the yearly release cycle.
still a low frequency pwm phone.. what i would give for a modern no-pwm / high frequency pwm phone
So 16GB of Ram will be the norm from now on?
LGTM
meta: It's getting to the point where I need to pay for The Verge or stop reading it. Every one of their Pixel articles is behind a paywall.
archive.org
That 100X zoom example is pretty amazing
Yes, but hard to know how much detail is hallucinated out of thin air.
The famous "enhance" of CSI is finally here!
Judging by existing implementations, all of it.
It's probably impossible to use as well. Just a 10x is fairly difficult to control.
Plus AI upscaling. Fuck no.
Shouldn't be impossible. Samsung already offers Space Zoom which has a good UX and a LOT of image stabilization so your hands shaking isn't magnified by 100x.
As far as AI upscaling though, agreed. At least make a setting so we can do our own A/B tests.
Ever since magic eraser we've been slip-sliding down the slippery slope that ends with all our picture memories being half-AI-generated with the same "look" based on whatever flavor generated them at the time.
Yeah that. I'm not up for that. The post-processing is bad enough on my iPhone that I bought a mirrorless camera to use instead.
In fairness it's AI "upscaled". What kind of car that is isn't actually present in the original image's data, it's a best guess from the AI.
I was surprised to see "more helpful support than ever" listed as a top line feature. Google actually offering good support to their customers?! I was impressed until I got to "Magic Cue isn’t just a single app or feature, it’s proactive support". Ah, so it sounds like the helpful support is just more AI slop.
> A camera with Gemini
and im out
> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
bro in your demo the car is a half el-camino half mustang
Still boring, indistinguishable from the rest, and still hideous. Hire a proper designer for fucks sake. Ridiculous everugly phone.
God, what an ugly device.
Don't all phones look extremely similar today?
Maybe I'm old but no two phones today seem as different as e.g. Nokia 8800 was from Motorola Razr
Yes, I don't know why they bother showing the phone turned off anymore. They all look the same.
The materials might be different, and that's where a lot of companies go wrong. The Pixel 10 uses polished glass, which is too slippery. It slides off uneven surfaces and is harder to hold.
> all phones
Eh...
https://www.samsung.com/ca/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip7/buy/
https://www.samsung.com/ca/smartphones/others/galaxy-xcover7...
Both from the same company and I think about an equal distance between them as the Nokia 8800 and a similarly dated Motorola Razr.
The only downside is that all of these new features will be supported for about 3 weeks, and then rapidly turn into another Google abandoned strip mall.
Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me (hundreds of times), shame on me
Bet the people who launched these are already interviewing for their next gig.
.. as I sit here with my Apple devices that are 90% abandonware.
I feel your pain.
samsung is a lot better with keeping products staffed at least
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
No Pixel 10a was announced, and frankly Google's track record with hardware is a bit discouraging for someone thinking about spending a grand on a phone.
The -a models are typically released in the spring, the Pixel 9a was only just released in April of this year, so I wouldn't expect to see a Pixel 10a until March or April of 2026.
I got my entire family Pixel 4XLs when they were new. Every single one had the battery replaced once under warranty, and then they denied more batteries (it was actually the fragile connector). So I started replacing them myself. I even slightly modified the connector mount so it would stop failing. The third batteries ended up lasting years because of my modification. Finally, all 3 died around 2023 from motherboard problems apparently. Otherwise great phones. Sad that some weird hardware problems killed them all for most people.
No fold phones???
EDIT: https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-10-pro-fold/...
^ this should be the main post
Hardware: looks nice. Software: big NO. Anything from Google is a red flag for me.
If there was a hypothetical phone with this hardware with iOS, that would be really nice.
Try Pixels with GrapheneOS. Most of that software is still "from Google" technically, but it's reworked in some important ways, especially on a service level. For example, by default it has no Google apps or services, you can install Play store sandboxed, etc.
What about a degoogled OS? Whenever my current pixel phone dies I'm going more private.
The "magic cue" sounds like Windows CoPilot but isn't getting the same backlash for some reason. Why would I want AI tightly woven into everything I'm doing on my phone?
Seems like a privacy nightmare.
They said Magic Cue is done entirely on device and as far as I can tell does not involve saving screenshots of your activities to the device like Windows Recall* did- rather it can look at things like your email and other data that is on the device to determine what to suggest
* Windows Copilot is different from Recall, which is the one that saved screenshots of what you were doing periodically
I would guess because the windows recall stores screenshots of everything you do forever while this just watches and pops up without storing information that could later be used against you. Of course, it could be secretly recording but if you are concerned about that you need to install grapheneOS or something.
Not that I like this feature or think there aren't privacy concerns.
Its a google phone. Wouldn't be surprised if this one too forgets the WiFi credentials every second day.
That's likely your unreliable AP dropping offline and coming back frequently. Pixel thinks this is an attacker and stops joining it until it can hear the SSID consistently.