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Pixel 8 Pro

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Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#671

Post by distances »

trey-jones wrote: post #281
kenhwang wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends regularly have to have their Pixels replaced/retired due to hardware failures around the 2 year mark. The 7 years of support is nice, but these phones don't last anywhere near that long.

All anecdotal but I would still be using my Pixel 1 if there was software support. 4a5g still going strong for both my wife and me.

4a 5G was my favourite phone since Nokia N9. Fast and lightweight, great photos, fingerprint reader in the back.

I switched to Pixel 7 so that my partner can get the 4a 5G to replace their aging device. But this 7 is clearly heavier and while a good device, I just don't like it quite as much.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#672

Post by aerique »

ethbr1 wrote: post #456
rurp wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last three phone upgrades have been decidedly 'meh', and I only upgrade every 2-3 years. There have been some marginal improvements in battery life and performance, and some software niceties; but those get counteracted by bloat, regressions, and UX churn. Replacable battery and storage becoming less common is categorically worse for users. A phone with upgradable parts and minimal bloat would be better than any r…

Honestly, one of my favorite phones was the Motorola (what's now) Power. Middling specs. Huge battery. I'm still on a Pixel 4a 5G now, because I haven't seen any reason to upgrade. But I'm a "I want to be able to accidentally run over my phone with a car, shrug, and go get another one" type of person. (Despite the fact I've never actually cracked a screen...)

I hold no love for Apple but the phone I used the longest was my iPhone 3GS. I think 5 years or so but only because it was jailbroken. (Thanks saurik!) Otherwise it would have been half as useful (or secure since I got fixes to exploits faster than Apple made then).

The initial SailfishOS phone from Jolla was supported for 7+ years and was also a really nice experience.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#673

Post by dlubarov »

thebruce87m wrote: post #660
dlubarov wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Apple's claim, yes. But if they were genuinely just concerned about battery health, and not about their sales numbers, then why do the throttling covertly? Why not tell the user that throttling was happening, that it was related to power issues, and that they should consider a replacement battery?

If they wanted a new sale, why not do nothing and let the phones reboot? Why only target individual handsets with degraded batteries? Why bring the phone back to full speed when the battery was changed? Why does the feature still exist? The only thing that has changed is they now tell you if it’s happening.

> why not do nothing and let the phones reboot

Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern, and not just a fabricated excuse... it's better for Apple's reputation for old phones to be slow than to be flaky.

With the former, people were assuming that Apple's shiny new OS required state-of-the-art hardware to run smoothly. It just appeared as if technology was advancing rapidly, and one had to buy the latest iPhone every year or two to keep up.

With the latter, there would be noone to blame but Apple, and they would develop a reputation for unreliable hardware, like Samsung or worse.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#674

Post by saiya-jin »

guappa wrote: post #652
vel0city wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you say this when I was just in a pretty bad rainstorm tonight and got absolutely soaked. I've lost a couple of portable devices getting drenched like that in the past but this time it was just the USB-C port wouldn't charge for an hour while it dried out. So yeah I would have needed a new phone tomorrow if it wasn't for my phone being waterproof. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I've lost many things f…

I live in a very rainy city, I got soaked several times. I never once lost a phone to water damage, despite most of the phones I've owned not being waterproof. My pocket made of regular fabric seems to be sufficient protection.

my old Samsung Galaxy s2 died when tripping around Australia, just by being in the car overnight (where I was sleeping too). Apparently enough humidity that in the morning it was dead, board fried up

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#676

Post by rimliu »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #192
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…

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…

So you think, when someone upgrades their phone they throw perfectly working "old" phone into trash?

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#677

Post by blkhawk »

vel0city wrote: post #614
Dylan16807 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most people don't realize how slow SD cards are compared to conventional flash, too. When you put apps on a SD card on Android, it's always been dog slow. And you're at the mercy of the manufacturer to put a reasonably high-speed interface on it. It's been a long, long time since I couldn't fit all the apps I wanted on the phone storage. My SD card is mainly for multimedia files, and it's plenty fast for th…

UHS SD can be fast in consecutive read and writes but I've rarely seen good performance in random I/O or lots of small actions.

It doesn't have to be that way. Its entirely feasible to make a microsd card with a better controller and some ram buffer for fast wear leveling. The best we see today is some mild tuning for IO in A1 and A2 cards.

You have to remember that a current microsd cards is just a general purpose micro-controller and some (probably SPI) flash in a plastic case.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#679

Post by saagarjha »

winter_blue wrote: post #635
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…

> Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl. Realistically what exactly could it be doing more on startup, that would slow it down so much? I wonder if there’s code that simply intentionally slows it down. Like the Camera app calculating the value of PI for some number of digits before opening up. There would be a ma…

Opening the Camera app on iPhone is one of the most demanding tasks it can possibly do. Doing it and doing it fast means powering up the image sensor and its supporting hardware (ISP, ML hardware, etc.) and immediately terminating all non-essential tasks on the device so it can dedicate it to this.

If you don’t believe me, there are paths hardcoded in the kernel (I’m not joking: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple-oss-distributions%2...) to very quickly reclaim memory for Camera to launch.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#680

Post by wraptile »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #3

I'm really glad to see both the partnership with iFixit and the 7 years of support. Because everything else seems mostly meh to me, and while I'm upgrading this year from a Pixel 6 Pro, the continued diminished returns make it seem likely that 2-3 years from now I won't have as much reason to.

If only this support existed outside US. For a "global" company Google surely fails to deliver outside the borders of it's headquarters.
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