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Pixel 8 Pro

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Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well since even the average Android phone’s selling price is $285 the last time I checked, maybe it says more about your lack of insight than anything else?

I don't know, I have had company issued high end phones and apart from better camera quality[1] these devices weren't doing things significantly better than my personal 240$ smartphone. Also, generally people spend an awful lot of money on things out of vanity and social pressure, regardless of their needs and if it is a good decision. Look at new cars prices and how most vehicles purchases are usually overkill for e…

Yes I’m sure 60% of Americans care about “social pressure” enough to buy a different phone. Trust me, my 80 year old mother doesn’t care about what TikTok influencers think.

Low end Android phones just plain suck when it comes to performance and battery life. Not to mention they rarely get operating system updates.

If you did force me to buy an Android phone, it would be the Pixel.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#792
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do that many people need their phone to be waterproof rated? I realize it's mandatory from a marketing perspective, but how often is it used? Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.

After working wireless retail in the early '00s, I will always choose a phone with a high IP rating. Other scenarios I've seen - Phone pushed into sink without realizing while doing dishes and walking away for an hour long phone call, parked convertible with phone in the cupholder, boob sweat, working in a greenhouse going in and out of air conditioning, leaving on a picnic table overnight while camping, water bottle…

> Phone pushed into sink without realizing while doing dishes and walking away for an hour long phone call

How did they talk on their phone for an hour without realizing their phone was underwater?

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem to annoy people who buy cars. In fact usually cars that were released 5 years before had most of their quirks known and ironed out through a midlife revamp or the model or scheduled preventive replacement of known parts breaking at a specific mileage. Just released one tend to be more of a problem to first gen owners reliability wise. I rely on my smartphone for work, I'd rather buy a 4y old model kno…

Used car sales outstrip new car sales 3:1.[1] I didn't bother looking up the same number for cellphones but it's nowhere near that ratio. That should be your second clue that cars and phones are very different. Obviously the first clue is cars are not phones. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183713/value-of-us-passe...

Well I set a rule fairly recently 3years ago that I would only buy second hand electronic devices unless I can't find anything decent.

Most people don't care about waste so I know I am part of a small fraction.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#794
post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that as a personal attack. It is factual. No teenager - except the richest ones - can afford buying a new smartphone every year, neither do their parents. And most of those that can afford it would still want to buy other things instead when they already have one, which means only the richest of the richest ones really do that.

Have you ever heard of financing for things like that? Great way to get people to get stocked up on things they can't actually afford.

There are so many things you can finance at the same time until it isn't sustainable anymore.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used car sales outstrip new car sales 3:1.[1] I didn't bother looking up the same number for cellphones but it's nowhere near that ratio. That should be your second clue that cars and phones are very different. Obviously the first clue is cars are not phones. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183713/value-of-us-passe...

Well I set a rule fairly recently 3years ago that I would only buy second hand electronic devices unless I can't find anything decent. Most people don't care about waste so I know I am part of a small fraction.

No snark: that's very admirable. Have an upvote.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#796

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. There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large and create inefficiencies in the phone shell (even M.2 2230, when you take into account the moun…

> 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…

> Ignoring SD Express as a failure to launch, UHS SD cards can be plenty fast if they're designed to be. A hundred megabytes per second is not a significant bottleneck if individual IO operations are fast and it can do many of them.

As mentioned, random I/O tends to fail, but the other tradeoff here is that fast microSD card slots tend to get extremely hot. Not necessarily "failure" hot (stuff like the ROG had issues from other parts), but uncomfortable to hold, depending on where the thing is going to go.

> As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.

The thing is, price anchoring is a thing, and people are going to look at a phone that costs $400 and needs a $40 Extra Thing and a $500 phone and go "the latter is easier".

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't have to, but it is, and an effort like this is going to be off-the-shelf if it ever exists at all.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#798

I hope they will improve the photo post-processing. Currently, I have the pixel 7 pro, and the camera app really alters people more than I like. Fortunately, you can also save RAW files. The rumors on Reddit said that the processing algorithm may have been developed for cameras with lower resolutions - if that's true, the results on pixel 8 will be even worse

Agreed. I was quite happy with my Pixel 6 until the 7 was released, which I got for my wife. Immediately noticed that both phones cameras were worse.

In particular, shots of light-eyed people show as fine initially and then when the software processing finishes they have almost black eyes from all the contrast they add. If you choose raw you need a whole other processing pipeline, not to mention you get to see how shitty these sensors and lenses are without software doing a herculean lift.

I was able to work around it on my 6 with a GCam APK but couldn't find one for the 7.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#799

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…

Continuous improvement is the bedrock of pretty much everything modern. It’s a lot easier to make frequent minor revs than it is to do rare, gigantic revs.

If you work in software, think of it as normal SDLC versus once-a-decade waterfall style total respec and rebuild. Which is more efficient?

It also spreads demand more consistently, rather than having 90% of demand landing in the first year and 10% spread over the next four. What would that mean for production capacity?

Continuous processes beat batch processes every time. See also: Tesla’s ideas about model years.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#800

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…

You reminded me the 90's joke: "What is Windows? An 386 emulator for Pentium".
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