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Pixel 8 Pro

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371–380 of 885 posts

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#371
post #313

I recently bought a Pixel 7 after my Huawei P30 pro broke. The older Huawei model is so much better than the newer Pixel that it makes you think why they don't allow them to access the Play store anymore.

In what way was the Huawei better? Not disagreeing, I myself regretted upgrading to the Pixel 7 from an S10e. Screen, portability, and speaker quality were all downgrades. And wasn't the whole play store debacle part of some US ban on Huawei? Something outside of Google's control?

I "upgraded" from a Samsung Galaxy S9 to a Pixel 7 this year, only because Samsung stopped doing security updates. Big disappointment for me, too. The fingerprint scanner from that 2018 phone was 10x more reliable than the in-screen thing that the Pixel uses.

I don't miss the battling software ecosystems (Samsung vs Google) on that old phone, though.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#372
post #225

This is a meta comment, but I think it's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers. Consider how long it took PCs to reach the same stage (with a fraction of the adoption). It was like 20 years from Kenbak-1 to the 90s PC era.

Windows Mobile and Palm phones were around int the early 2000s. I think they would absolutely need to be included if considering the history of smartphones.

Don’t forget Symbian! I had a NES emulator on my Nokia phone back in the day. Wonderful stuff.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#373

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…

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

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#374

This is a meta comment, but I think it's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers. Consider how long it took PCs to reach the same stage (with a fraction of the adoption). It was like 20 years from Kenbak-1 to the 90s PC era.

Waiting when button phones will become the trend again

Since buying a larger-screen e-ink device, I have been wanting to go back to a dumb phone. But just a few features preclude this.

1. Dialing in the dumb phone. No dumb phones support CardDav syncing.

2. Very few dumb phones can function as wifi hotspots for the e-ink device.

3. Few dumb phones can record calls.

4. I forget what eight was for... seriously I had one or two other issues but I don't remember what they were.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#375
post #256

This is a meta comment, but I think it's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers. Consider how long it took PCs to reach the same stage (with a fraction of the adoption). It was like 20 years from Kenbak-1 to the 90s PC era.

> It's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers. I think people are not yet ready to accept the exact same thing is about to happen to cars. Some company will have a perfectly usable electric self-driving vehicle and will produce tens of millions of them a year. They will be an…

People have been saying self driving cars are just around the corner for a decade or so now.

I do believe the future you outline will happen but IMO the timeline is very far from clear. Significant challenges remain for self driving cars.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#376

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.

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 early versions of ios on the simulator some time to see how far we've come.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about that. Google seems to be a lot more open with its hardware compared to other manufacturers. This attitude apparently even extends towards their laptops. It's certainly something I've come to appreciate about Google.

Why does no one ever consider Sony? They let you unlock the bootloader and the hardware is excellent.

I stopped when they started permanently breaking camera procesing on bootloader unlock.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company will ever make a 5-8 year phone at that price. That's $47-76 a year. People pay that amount or more for apps that help manage their fantasy football team... Comparitively that would be an insane bargain for a phone and it's absurd for that to be your requirement. I do wonder what the right price point would be for a subscription model. At the moment the average replacement time is every 2 years which would…

The current iPhone SE starts at $430 and will (probably) get at least 5 years of updates. If budget phone makers can't do something cheaper than the iPhone SE then surely their entire business model is just fucked?

Economies of scale. The SE is basically the hand me downs from the mainline iphone and couldn't exist without it. It's not surprising that no name brands can't compete with the richest company in the world.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#379

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…

Your premise is wrong. Old phones that have economic life get cleaned up and re-sold. The fact that manufacturers tweak phones annually does not change this.

Based on the numbers I found from a few minutes of searching you are incorrect. Some phones get resold or reused, most do not. Only 25% of people are using a secondhand phone and the phone population is increasing at 5x the human rate.

Re: Pixel 8 Pro

#380

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 makes sense for gaming consoles, I don't see what is so different (these days) about phones.
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