It's so ugly; why do people keep buying those ugly phones?
Pixel 8 Pro
711–720 of 885 posts
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turbo C++ was my first IDE(a birthday present when I was a kid) and I will always be grateful of it for triggering my love of programming but to say that is even in the same category as a modern IDE is a huge stretch. Of course modern stuff is laggier for most IDE's as it's doing real time analysis on your code as you type. If you want to compare it with a Borland IDE from the 90s open up notepad and start typing.
Borland IDEs were definitly better than Notepad.
The editor did nothing more than notepad does today and the IDE at least back when I was using it was basically just a compiler, debugger with basic inspection window and stepping and a make system. It wasn't doing realtime formatting of your code, inspection for errors, referencing to other parts of code, autocompletion, syntax highlighting, etc.
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#713It'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…
Try this: don’t upgrade your phone for five years. The annual incremental release cycle is fine—what’s silly is thinking phones need to be upgraded every year.
I'll probably end up like this with my Pixel 4a because every single of modern phones feels like a downgrade. Larger, heavier, no headphone jack, unnecessarily more powerful CPU to drain the battery faster, all that stuff.
I used to be excited about technology. I no longer am. I may consider upgrading to something with a 4" screen however. That would truly be an upgrade.
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
both can be true. software has become objectively more abominable each passing year. spyware is being normalized, locking down and taking away control from users is being spoonfed to hipster users as "opinionated" and "curated". Have you taken a look at the chromium codebase lately? 1.5GB of compressed (lzma) "code". W T F. Just look 10-15 years ago and look at khtml, look at webkit a few years after the fork, then l…
All those things you're complaining about existed in the past in the form of applets, flash scripts, and activex. They were way worse than a bunch of web* standards. As for curated/opinionated, most people don't want to be power users. Most people never did it was just in the 90s you had little choice. If you want to be a power user today the options are still there.
applets were largely unused and flash was mostly used for ads, neither of which were even remotely as huge and gross as the chromium codebase.
nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.
The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sure ARM based Mac laptops are great. But x86 laptops are still just as loud, hot with horrible battery life as they always have been.
Hyperbole much?
2003 x86 laptop: 1-2h battery life, fan ~always on, annoying tonal fan noise
2023 x86 laptop: 6-10h battery life, fan off in idle, some kind of wide spectrum whooshing sound when on
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#716It'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…
> Think not only of people upgrading for the sake of it
This is actually a very small part of the market. Virtually no-one upgrades their phone every year. 3-4 years is more typical.
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#7176.7 inch screen. My Pixel 5 is already big. This one is an inch bigger in my hand and in my pockets. Price increase. 875€ in Europe. The Pixel 5 was 630€. Do you really get 40% more phone?
Fun fact: Google did a Nexus 7 tablet with a 7" display.
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try this: don’t upgrade your phone for five years. The annual incremental release cycle is fine—what’s silly is thinking phones need to be upgraded every year.
> Try this: don’t upgrade your phone for five years. Try that and monitor your quality of life. See if you can avoid therapy. It's not that people think they need to upgrade their phones every year, or two, or three. It's that the phones are designed for short usable life on hardware side, and on software side, neither first-party nor third-party developers give a damn about performance.
Eh? I just replaced my four year old iPhone 11 Pro with a 15 Pro. The upgrade's nice, but it was a pure luxury purchase, the old phone was still running fine (mostly I wanted the 120hz display, and 5G). There was a time when a 4 year old smartphone was verging on unusable, but that's long past now.
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#719Earlier 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…
I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow. Flash storage doesn't last foreve…
Interesting, finally I have an idea of why my phones have always gotten slower over time. Is there a way to measure error rates and/or average storage latency on my (Android) phone somehow?
Re: Pixel 8 Pro
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
"significant" is the key word here. I'd be hard pressed to think of a generational release of an existing phone line in the last 5 years that I would describe as a "significant" improvement. The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean not…
Depends on your use case. For me, the addition of satelite SOS introduced on iPhone 14 is a game changer. I do enough out of cell range activity that I carry a SPOT device. The ability for one more device (and pricy subscription) to be eaten by my phone is fantastic. For others it might be onboard ai capabilities. Each incremental hardware update to an iPhone tips the utility scales for someone, and is a completely i…
Yeah. Don't do that.
This is not a replacement for a SPOT device. It's a backup. You might need to move around reportedly, point it very carefully to find a satellite, coverage isn't great, even minimal tree cover is a problem, etc. Plenty of cases where a SPOT device would be a life saver and where this would not.
I too would like to ditch mine. But I'd rather be alive in a real emergency than die because I broke my leg and can't walk around in a circle pointing the phone right.