What's the selling points here for upgrades? Comparing my five year old A50, I'm not seeing it. Presumably a better camera, and more RAM (why?). I felt compelled to upgrade in past years, but I feel like phone tech reached a plateau. The AI features, front and center, feel like hype. Haven't found them useful at all.
Google Pixel 9 Pro
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
I broke my iPhone 12 mini and part of me died that day. A tired dad moment – set the phone on the trunk lid when getting my kid in the car and then later opened the trunk. It slid down and crunched in the hinge. I could replace it with another mini but have been holding out hope for another updated version. I love the small form factor, even at the expense of battery life and camera quality. I just want a reasonable…
In the beginning, smartphones were all tiny, because it was universally agreed that smaller cell phones were better. Then there was a huge, neverending push to make phones as large as possible, or larger. Sometimes smaller phones have been offered as an unpopular option, but more often "enormous" is the minimum size. And as long as that's been going on, people have been complaining that they want their phone to fit i…
>Why are the manufacturers so insistent on not providing small phones?
They don't sell.
Apple killed the iPhone mini due to low sales. Asus replaced the universally lauded Zenfone 10 with a very large Zenfone 11. Google increased the size of the Pixel 6 when compared to its predecessor. Sales also increased.
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulations don't much care about what's technically possible.
Apple was able to make it work in most "developed" countries (do we have a better term for these countries now?). I guess they're just better at the regulatory game?
Not sure, but it may have to do with Apple using the Globalstar satellites.
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#574I'm surprised that no media outlet is seriously talking about its on-device inference capability, which is the biggest next thing for LLM. Apple did a better job on its PR here, but they didn't also get all the attention that it deserves. On-device inference improves not just its latency, this also removes a huge chunk of LLM's economical constraints from software companies. The biggest advantage of software is its m…
tokens per second is normally the biggest cause of latency, so amortized I would bet a decent LLM on the phone is still slower than groq/aopenai etc
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#575What's the selling points here for upgrades? Comparing my five year old A50, I'm not seeing it. Presumably a better camera, and more RAM (why?). I felt compelled to upgrade in past years, but I feel like phone tech reached a plateau. The AI features, front and center, feel like hype. Haven't found them useful at all.
The AI features. More RAM is needed for those. If you don't care about them then you're probably not going to want to upgrade.
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#576There's also the obligatory non-Pro model, and a refresh of the Pixel Fold: https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_9 https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_9_pro_fold Usually the Pro is bigger than the non-Pro but this time they're exactly the same size, and they've added a bigger Pro XL variant. https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Google-Pixel-9,Google... The Pro and Pro XL appear to have identical specs as…
The only thing that could pry an iPhone from my hands is a foldable screen. I have envy.
You and me both. I consider switching a few times a year just for this.
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#577Is Google Pixel (with default Android, not GrapheneOS) at least as secure as iPhone?
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#578Google really needs to improve the core offering of what a phone is supposed to provide instead of using half baked AI as a selling point.
I have been using Pixel 7 for almost the past 2 years. But the amount of basic core issues are crazy. Recently,since the July update, every place where the phone cannot catch network signal, it shutdowns. And with the update, somehow i feel it cannot catch network signal as strongly. That is such a crazy thing. Last year, my friend got locked out of all his valuable pictures with Android 14 upgrade on Pixel 6.
My experience of Google is so bad with hardware that it has finally pushed me towards buying an iPhone for the very first time in my life after having been exclusive with Android OS for over 10 years.
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#579What's the selling points here for upgrades? Comparing my five year old A50, I'm not seeing it. Presumably a better camera, and more RAM (why?). I felt compelled to upgrade in past years, but I feel like phone tech reached a plateau. The AI features, front and center, feel like hype. Haven't found them useful at all.
The AI features. More RAM is needed for those. If you don't care about them then you're probably not going to want to upgrade.
I thought Android was going to do AI features in the cloud rather than on the phone?
Re: Google Pixel 9 Pro
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Pixel and iPhone are really seeming homogenous with each other. The marketing seems similar, typefaces used, the naming conventions are close to the same, the airbrushed image generators, the photos app marketing that's turning your personal photos into a photoshoot with editing capabilities. On top of that you've got the same earbuds form factor, smart watches, etc.
I wish we had more than two phone giants. This is aggravating. Unfortunately due to their market dominance and muddling of (hardware, OS, software distribution, and platform ecosystem), it's almost impossible to disentangle. It'd be amazing if the DOJ made these companies only offer one slice of those four things. There would be so much competition and a wild variety of new things being tried.
> Unfortunately due to their market dominance and muddling of (hardware, OS, software distribution, and platform ecosystem), it's almost impossible to disentangle.
I think it is more complicated, and nuanced, than this.
I have a theory that the world can only support a maximum of 2 consumer computing platforms at a time, due to the cost of writing and porting software. Therefore causing a natural tendency towards either a monopoly (seen in the 90s and early 2000s) or a duopoly (the current smartphone era).
The fact is writing software is expensive. Developing cross platform frameworks is also incredibly difficult and in the case of Mobile, has taken a massive 3rd party entity (Facebook) the better part of a decade (React Native) to get even close to "working well" (with other solutions also being decade long projects). One can argue that during the first decade of Android vs iPhone, (2007 to 2017) that the cross platform solutions were all pretty terrible, thus the massive shakeup that React Native (for all its warts) caused.
Then there is the fact that developing a consumer OS is hard and expensive. Very few companies have the resources needed to make a consumer OS. Not just writing software, but localization, documentation, SDKs, UX work, security, update infrastructure, and so on and so forth.
Honestly I'd say today's current duopoly may even be a bad thing for small software companies, basically doubling development costs. Compare this to the 90s when releasing consumer software just meant compiling for a Microsoft OS and never worrying again because Microsoft handled forwards compatibility for you!
Contrast that to now days where you see applications to control smart appliances apps being discontinued left and right because companies cannot justify keeping 2 dev teams staffed so they can patch an app once every couple years when app store guidelines force changes.