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Pixel 8 Pro

store.google.com

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Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#421

Post by marcellus23 »

proee wrote: post #203
hbn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people expect to be blown away every year? Most people upgrade their phone every 2-3 years. This isn't the early smartphone days where there was tons of room for improvement. Moore's law has gotten increasingly closer to ending, screens are as pixel dense as necessary, and people generally are satisfied with the capabilities of their phone. Starting around 2017 smartphones as we know them peaked and so they ju…

There is tons of room for innovation in phones, but most companies don't want to risk deviating from what consumers think they want (just like Hollywood movies). I'm sure the HN crowd could come together and form a list of 100 ideas that are truly innovative in the phone space. However, these ideas are quite risky to bring to market. Some ideas: 1. Super Amazing Sound playback (next level) 2. Rollable display 3. More…

> Super Amazing Sound playback (next level)

What does this even mean?

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#422

Post by alamortsubite »

tredre3 wrote: post #362
patall wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly because you have cracked the screen on two of them. I (and many others with a case) am at 0 cracked screens.

We can throw anecdotes to each other all day. I've been using smartphones since 2010 as well. Never used a case. Never cracked a screen.

That was exactly my situation, too. Until just recently, when I cracked two almost back-to-back.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#423

Post by alamortsubite »

jfengel wrote: post #159
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they not make a budget phone? It's not like the BOM + assembly for a touchscreen, first(!) battery, motherboard, and plastic case cost that much. Check out some of the public reports from counterpointresearch.com: the profit margin on flagships is often double the BOM cost, the profit margin on budget phones is a little tighter but still not bad. Who cares what the revenue is per year? What matters is how m…

One of the OP's requirements was a vanilla Android. Vendor Android versions aren't features, they're profit centers. I know the Samsung phones come with a fair bit of crapware, cuz I used to have one. How's the Moto?

Motorola is a lot better than Samsung on that front.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#424

Post by tootie »

0xDEF wrote: post #236
kimbernator wrote: post #178

It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very li…

Nobody is demanding that you buy a new smartphone every year. Modern smartphones have 3-5 years of security/bug updates and the batteries no longer degrade as fast as they used to.

Yeah, I think I'm going to pull the trigger on a Pixel 8 and that's partly because I've been rocking a Pixel 4a for several years.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#425

Post by tshaddox »

kimbernator wrote: post #178

It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very li…

I think it's more likely that if they spaced the releases out to every 5 years, there would just be a 5x reduction in the pace of changes, and you could issue the same complaint "Why do they release every 5 years when hardly anything changes?"

It's not like the incremental physical changes just automatically happen independently of designing, mass manufacturing, and releasing new phone models. The incremental physical changes happen because companies are trying to develop new phone models.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#426

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

tootie wrote: post #418
kimbernator wrote: post #178

It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very li…

Tell it to the car industry. They invented it and it's been going strong.

Both car and phone trade ins get resold and used until their actual EOL, no? I imagine most of these Pixel 8s that physically survive to year 7 (no cracked screen, etc) will have been traded in and will continue to be used in the 3rd world.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#427

Post by tshaddox »

kimbernator wrote: post #229
sanswork wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't update my phone every year but I also don't really want the progress of software or tech in general determined by the laggards.

I think that a new phone release should just be warranted. The trigger should be "we made significant improvements that couldn't be applied in software to the old device" instead of "it's October"

But it's silly to imply that there would be a new release every October even if they hadn't designed a new phone and prepared it for mass manufacture. What determines whether each release is "warranted" is, roughly, whether people buy the new one.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#428

Post by TaylorAlexander »

whatscooking wrote: post #373
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because if they did not release a new phone every year, the old phones would be useful for longer. I recently had to replace my iPhone 7s plus because it was getting so slow I sometimes could not get the camera to open as it loaded the system down too much. This was despite the fact that the system said my battery was not degraded (it had been replaced with Apple Care a couple of times). Of course when it…

There’s no such thing as the iPhone 7S Plus, but nice story

Ah I was always a bit foggy on that, I bought it about 7 years ago. I guess it was just the normal 7 Plus.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#429

Post by Xeamek »

bmcahren wrote: post #240
Xeamek wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do pixels set the standard any differenty then samsungs?

Samsungs are non-standard by default. They take the AOSP experience which Pixel fully embraces then they hack in cute fonts, water drop overlays, and replace the default tooling that comes with Android to build their samsung experience. Pixel drives and creates the innovation like cut-out display support, notification APIs that support multi-media control for instance across multiple apps, sound multi-plexing between…

Except there is no such thing as "AOSP" experience anymore. Why? Because AOSP stopped providing majority of apps that would be considered core for functioning smartphone. There is no more "phone" app on AOSP. There is a Google one, that is closed source, full off unnecessary integration and telemetry. Sure, both are made by the same company (google), but that's not remotely what the original idea of AOSP was about. And we should stop giving google a pass treating it as if it's somehow better when doing the exact same shit as other third party vendors, simply because it has the brand. Either you are part of AOSP, or You are a third party vendor's custom. No in-between.

You are mixing pixel with AOSP, but those are completely separate projects.

Sure, aosp development is sponsored and managed by google, but that doesn't make it synonymous with pixels.

I assure you that people who develop AOSP work with all the major vendors and definitely aren't just driven by what pixel team wants and nothing more.

>foldables Seriously? Samsung had first foldable 4 years ago, while first foldable pixel launched this year. In what world does pixel contributed to foldableAPI more? I mean, I guess in the world we're you treat AOSP and pixel team unanimously maybe, but that's not the real one.

>pixel is standardized experience

Just because google says so? Standardized experience of AOSP is AOSP. Everything else is addition.

Your debian and Ubuntu analogy fails to acknowledge that Google apps are NOT open source.

More apt comparison would be samsung being modern ubuntu 22 with all the bloat that it has, while Google being "only" 14.04 ubuntu with less bloat, but still far from the true purity

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#430

Post by grumpyprole »

sanswork wrote: post #376
hamandcheese wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything it seems to me like hardware advances are directly correlated with increasingly worse software.

People have been saying this literally since the release of the pentium and probably earlier. From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this(usually complaining about developers using C++ instead of assembly). Even just on the iphone the improvements in software have been dramatic over the past 10 years. Go install one of the ea…

> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this.

Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The modern C++ one does crash, often.

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