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The people at Google seem to think much more like me than the people at Apple.

There are 3 primary decisions Google made that click with me, while Apple's choices are a mystery to me:

1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles.

2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.

3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.

I'm sure people who prefer iPhones have their own set of "this clicks with me on iPhones and puzzles me on Pixels" aspects?

Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?

Same for me, although I currently use an iPhone (and the rest of the Apple ecosystem). I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.

For me, it's Apple's privacy stance (which I know could change at anytime, but that's where we are at right now). Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.

As long as apps on Android can do crap like the web-to-app tracking via localhost and other shady data harvesting that Google continues to allow, I don't touch it no matter how much better it is and how much I prefer the workflows.

Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.

> barely tolerate macOS

I guess it depends what you’re comparing it to but macOS is (for me) the best of a bad bunch of compromises. POSIX with app boundaries that are (mostly) respected, if not particularly granular. There’s nothing I really hate about the platform save for homebrew and being walled in to the ecosystem.

I actually love modern Linux with Gnome, and it has all the parts these days to be a great desktop operating system, but I find the freedom there undercuts a lot of the promises (Flatpaks are a good idea in theory that doesn’t work in practice as the sandboxes are overly liberal and overreach on most apps because no-one’s forced to justify why they need the permissions they do etc).

I spent so long on Windows that I really don’t miss it. The Window management was way better for so long, but the idioms drive me crazy (registry issues and programs still freely writing anywhere they like), and supporting everything forever has massive drawbacks to usability (although Winget sort of slightly helps with this but it’s not much better than homebrew).

> best of a bad bunch of compromises

That's exactly why I don't particularly care for it, but still use it.

My first choice would be Linux + a tiling WM. I used DWM for years before Apple Silicon, and have been on mac ever since the M1. These new machines are so nice that I can't go back to anything else now, whether I hate the software or not.

But macOS is just baffling. There's POSIX underneath, and it's mostly reliable, and it has a lot of little nice touches - being able to search the menu with Cmd+Shift+/, emacs keybindings in nearly every text field, etc. But then there's stuff that makes no sense. Why do I need a third party app for any sort of sane window management? (and even then, I haven't fully replicated my preferred way of working, only gotten close enough with Aerospace, and more recently Raycast). A third party app to set a keyboard shortcut to launch an application. I can't disable the animations for switching virtual desktops, and when you switch there's a lag before it's responsive again for keyboard input (I just want this to be instant).

So much of how macOS expects you to interact with it seems to be mouse/touchpad driven, and that's just not how I prefer to use my computer. At least with Raycast I now have shortcuts to launch and switch to apps (but not specific app windows because of the app/window separation in macOS). Yet even still, I can't set a keyboard shortcut to move a window to a different space. I have to click and hold the title bar and then press my shortcut for moving to that space to move the window - Apple decided that action MUST involve the mouse.

I also can't set window rules. I can't tell my terminal to always open on workspace 2, or mail.app to always open on workspace 4 at a specific size, etc. Making an app full screen also creates a new ephemeral space that can't be switched to with the usual Ctrl+NUM keyboard shortcut. I can't set a window to be always on top.

I'm more or less waiting for Asahi Linux to get support for DisplayPort ALT mode & M4 support, although I'm not holding my breath.

I do appreciate having access to the big commercial apps though on macOS, but ultimately I want my M4 macbook pro w/ Linux & hyprland.

So much this.

I’ve migrated a home server to a Mac mini. It was awful to achieve. Trying to get a machine to boot, connect network shares and start containers was a week long effort. I can do it in Ubuntu in about 10 minutes from a clean install.

So much is disgusting UI options hidden deep some in the (awful) settings app.

But the result is a server that is fast, powerful and using 6-7W per hour, compared to the old Nuc 9 it replaced that used 70W.

It’s just so good. The OS lets it down.

Could anyone here waxing lyrically about Apple so called privacy stand explain to me what that actually is apart from a marketing point Apple keeps repeating?

Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.

What supposedly so good about it? Their track record seems awful to me.

E2EE (advanced data protection) without having to use something like Proton, so can stay in the very convenient "ecosystem." With it turned on, keys are on your device, Apple doesn't have them and can't use them and it covers all the main stuff - photos, messages, notes, etc.

It's still a compromise, sure, but it's a better compromise than what Google offers.

Plus small things. Apple's tracking protection for example is opt in instead of opt out on Android. Google's core business is ads, they won't push features that can negatively impact that. Apple also has an ad division but it's not their main focus, hardware is. They can implement better privacy without impacting their bottom line. Apple's refusal to unlock phones at the request of the FBI, etc.

It's not that Apple is the be all end all for privacy, but they are far ahead of Google and are by far the most convenient option if you are within the walled garden.

> With it turned on, keys are on your device, Apple doesn't have them and can't use them and it covers all the main stuff - photos, messages, notes, etc.

Or so they say. Has that actually been proven?

It's impossible to prove a negative, like "Apple doesn't have a backdoor". One can prove the existence of a backdoor by reverse-engineering suspicious code or network traffic, but not the nonexistence without poring over every byte of machine code, and quite a lot of the hardware too.

This is not unique to Apple, it's impossible to prove any system is free of a backdoor, including Linux distributions (see: the xz backdoor, or "Reflections on trusting trust"), unless you hand-crafted your whole smartphone from raw silicon.

You can raise that gripe with even something like signal. Sure, it's open source, but when was the last time someone reproducibility built it?

> Could anyone here waxing lyrically about Apple so called privacy stand explain to me what that actually is apart from a marketing point Apple keeps repeating?

The end-to-end encryption guarantees on this page seem pretty real to me and have little to do with marketing: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

Can any of this be verified or confirmed independently?

> Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.

It's very easy to completely disable iCloud. I've never used it and don't intend to, despite running a mac as my primary computer for ~12 years now.

Apple is much more strict on app tracking (and apps in general).

Yes.

As an example I think Androids have a single device ID which is given to all apps. But iOS has a per app device ID.

And the ID resets pretty often.

The marketing department exploded when Apple announced that change, it made user conversion tracking completely useless.

Yes, specifically both have some variant of "advertising ID", which is shared across all apps. The difference between iOS and Android is that iOS requires you to opt every app into receiving it, whereas Android is opt out. However on top of this Android has a "gsf" id, which is shared between apps, and can't be changed without a factory reset.

There is no device ID, only ones tied to a user login on a phone, and the app must request a permission to get it. You can, for example, know that the user ID (which you obviously also need to have a permission to retrieve), is being used on the same device as was used to access your service in the past. Or you can know that this particular otherwise-anonymous user/device combination is being used again. I'm pretty sure that's likewise possible on iOS, but folks can chime in.

And of course there are guidelines that disallow most of the abuse scenarios I suspect people want to imagine: https://developer.android.com/identity/user-data-ids

Not familiar with how Android does it anymore, but sounds fairly similar to iOS.

The main difference is it's opt in on iOS, but opt out on Android I believe.

On iOS, when the app pops up and asks to track, if the user says no, the app can't access the system advertising ID at all, and also is not permitted to track activity via other means like email address, user ID, etc (but the only thing that's technologically enforced is the system advertising ID, it's only forbidden by policy to not use other tracking methods).

Given the huge fit Meta threw after Apple implemented this, while they were silent about Android, I'm inclined to believe Apple's method has more of a privacy impact.

Also worth noting Google is hoping to move away from device-level advertising IDs with their "privacy sandbox" thing.

>Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google

https://grapheneos.org/

As a consumer, I lament most of all about Pixel devices (or any other Android device really) that I have to wipe the OS and install a different one to get features that matter to me, particularly around privacy.

Thats why I don't use Pixel devices, or any Android devices really. I know its a precarious situation with Apple since they could reverse their stance at any point and sometimes they get it wrong, but they have yet to completely fail me when it comes to privacy.

In any event, it'd be nice if there was a 3rd mainstream vendor in the mobile race[0][1]

[0]: Both design wise and conceptually, I miss WebOS when it was strictly under Palm. It could have really been something. Why they didn't embrace multitouch screens I haven't a clue, it was the one thing that baffled me.

[1]: The one project I really wanted Mozilla to take a long term view on - Firefox OS - was another great innovation of our time that didn't get the love or support it deserved. It was a blast using web technology to build apps that ran fluidly on modern hardware. Unfortunately, it was all too often relegated to cheap manufacturer hardware that couldn't support it ideally, but even with this being true, they pulled off alot of technical excellence with that project.

/e/ Foundation sells phones with /e/OS preinstalled if you'd like an ungoogled Android phone without having to wipe the OS and install an ungoogled Android yourself.

I haven't tried /e/, I prefer installing a raw lineage with microG myself (although I don't currently use the microG part), but it seems like you and your parent commenter would be in the intended target.

I do agree that an alternative would be great. I'd gladly use Linux mobile with good, realiable hardware.

I miss Nokia's maemo/meego based phones :( the n900 was really nice to use and even write my own little personal apps for (something I haven't done in over a decade of owning android phones)

It ran emacs. It was glorious.

Apparently the GrapheneOS folks are talking with an OEM[0], which would allow you to buy a phone with a secure, private, non-spyware operating system straight from the factory.

I already own a Pixel running GrapheneOS, but if this happens I'll probably order one as soon as they come out to cast a vote with my wallet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44678411

I hope this happens in 2026, not later. If they have a model with a removable / replaceable battery that would be heaven.

Did you try a Jolla phone?

Not expensive and work great. Was playing with one today. I am impressed.

I love Jolla and I wish more people used it so that there was a really good native browser and different chat + VoIP options. The rest is great, and you can always use Android applications via the emulation layer.

Apple isn't privacy oriented, please quit spreading this misnformation. The only thing you can say about them is that they are marginally better than google but that isn't saying much. Their supposed respect of privacy is just marketing.

>I miss WebOS when it was strictly under Palm. It could have really been something. Why they didn't embrace multitouch screens I haven't a clue, it was the one thing that baffled me.

Huh? WebOS was Palm embracing multitouch screens.

They didn’t embrace virtual keyboards if I recall correctly

Isn't battery life worse on it?

I did consider it at some point but not having google wallet(apparently nfc payments are only available via banks' apps there) was too big of a downside for me.

It is Google themselves choosing to prevent GrapheneOS from passing the validation checks required to make GPay work (which is the app that makes the actual payment).

Wallet is there, you can hold digital cards, and transit cards, and your Ikea member card, etc. It's GPay that won't work to do the payment. And it's Google the one being a bully and deliberately making you think like that towards any alternative that's not in their list of approved systems that can be used in your own phone.

The privacy stuff and the hardware quality are my main reasons as well. Oh, and Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS.

Another reason I stick with Apple is style/design. Aside from the latest Alan Dye-led stuff, Apple's design has been top-notch, they make every other company look like they lack class and design-sense.

With that said, I did like Nokia's Windows Phones and the the period of Microsoft's design revolution where Surface devices had suede or whatever. That massive Surface table thing was dope too but man, Windows just keeps getting worse...somehow!

I'm looking forward to getting a Framework laptop at some point and installing Linux.

> Apple's design has been top-notch

But only from the iPhone X to 14, after which the Dynamic Island took over.

(I'll see myself out)

No judgement here. I liked my touchbar, and was pretty productive with it before it got axed.

I maintain that if the Touch Bar had been made full height and had an affordance (like slightly more distance) to prevent accidental touches, it would have been way more practical.

Apple tends to have products on a design refresh schedule, and for the Mac is it about five years. I think the combination of user dislike of the initial implementation and limited developer integration caused the physical Touch Bar to be eliminated in the M1 design.

I don't think the touchbar was going to be worthwhile without haptic feedback. At the very least, it needed the force sensors used for the touchpad so that accidental touches could be properly rejected.

There’s a universe where the touchbar sits above the function row without trying to replace it and is a killer feature.

The amount of times I mute the audio with that stupid touch bar..

I've said this before but the trackpad is too big and they could have fit both function keys and touch bar and everyone would have been happy.

This might be the first time I've heard somebody complain about a trackpad being too big, usually it's the other way around.

There are a few unicode characters I keep finding myself needing to type when I transcribe, and the Touchbar would be perfect for this. Except, there's no good way to just "add keys for that". You have add quick actions, which means writing Applescript that copies those into the clipboard and pastes... this is slow enough that it's noticeable (never mind having to first hit the quick actions button). On top of that, even though the label for the quick action is that single character, the buttons that it renders are like 2 inches wide. So instead of being able to fit 20 such buttons/keys on it, I can fit exactly 6. You have to swipe left and right to see the others.

Is there a Minecraft extension so that the Touchbar becomes the game's hotbar with icons? I've never looked.

> Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS

Not sure I understand this? One assumes that "daily driver" involves Linux VM use in this context[1], and ChromeOS's Linux VM integration is just wildly ahead of WSL (which really isn't bad) or the mess on OS X (awful). Installed Crostini apps appear as native apps in the UI. Transparent cross-filesystem access works flawlessly. Wayland and X11 apps appear with native decorations. Clipboard/WM/IPC integration does exactly what you expect. USB devices prompt you if you want to connect to the VM on insert (and remember the setting) etc...

And yes, I'm biased because I work there. But really it's a great development environment.

[1] I mean, if you're doing iOS development or need an M4 Max for performance reasons, or need some legacy Mac tooling like Adobe stuff, you're probably not looking at alternative platforms at all. Someone making the choice you posit is like 99% likely to be a web or embedded person working at a Linux shell as their native environment.

> Apple's design has been top-notch

The only designs I'm fond of are the macs. The iPhone looks pretty meh these days. The software side is slowly getting worse, it was great and they've lost the plot making changes for changes sake

Same stance, iOS isn’t the best but the least bad. Google is an anchor to Android, supposedly Android is open source and everyone can contribute but at the end no device can be sold without Google play services and Google decides what is accepted in the aosp project.

If aosp was actually open, like managed by all biggest phone seller in a consortium, i bet we would actually have feature that people want to get. Instead of a thousand « material you » redesign, that honestly looked ugly from the get go and isn’t much better years later.

Many people want to be able to invert the recent and back button, most in fact, yet Google stubbornly refuse to add that setting. That’s just an example, but this repeat a thousand time over the whole Android project.

Linux performs quite well on M1/M2 Macs (I'd even argue they are the best laptops to run Linux), almost counter-intuitively to some people's expectations. The worst Macs to run Linux on are actually the last Intel models with T1/T2 stuff. It takes some time for folks to port to new M chips as they come out but once they do, due to the popularity and similar peripherals they work well.

I would love to have Android software on an Apple device. Their hardware is incredible!

Ultimately, I tolerate Android from a privacy standpoint because we're still able to fully modify our devices and use open-source app sources. The minute that goes away (and it feels like Google isn't as tolerant of it anymore), I go.

>Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.

GrapheneOS may interest you.

>Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.

GrapheneOS specifically supports this for all installed apps.

All of my banking apps that are required for 2FA would probably not work.

You might want to take a gander at this list: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

Looks like the list includes those apps that require access to Google Play services - which defeats the entire point of the OP wanting the privacy.

GrapheneOS not only provides a sandbox for Google Play (meaning it's just another app with no special privileges, and you can grant/revoke permissions (including network!) as you desire), it also heavily promotes user profiles for further isolation.

I have a "banking" profile set up with Google Play services installed. 98% of the time I'm using my phone, I'm using the primary Owner profile. All the other profiles are encrypted-at-rest, meaning that until I enter my Banking-profile-specific PIN, the apps and data (including the Google Play Services installed there) are just encrypted files, and unable to do anything at all. (There are provisions for allowing a secondary profile to run in the background, but in this case I have obviously left that disabled.)

That sounds great, how much friction does this setup cause you daily? Could you hand your phone to a firend or family easily if they needed it?

GrapheneOS sandboxes Google Play services, it's just a regular app without any special privileges. You can remove all of its permissions.

> Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.

This is literally GrapheneOS or LineageOS+microg x) which ironically is fully available on Pixel phones and and a slowly vanishing number of others...

I genuinely do not understand this claim and propaganda about Apple privacy.

1) it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud

2) the phone's always listening, always

3) once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody

To me apple is overly invasive with their icloud accounts and things, and password resets taking weeks, yet I see no evidence it is any harder to get my data than on other devices, if anything, it's easier.

So what is the claim here? Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy? An ad less about computers and one slightly less correct about idk wine?

The fact is that anybody with physical access to my devices has an easier time logging through the apple ones than the windows/androids i own and that I care more than advertising

Apple is the only one that offers actual E2EE with advanced data protection for all iCloud services. Without it, yes, Apple can see your data. With it on, they can't. The key is stored on device, encrypted with your device pin/passcode and covers iCloud backup, including messages, drive, photos, notes, reminders, bookmarks, shortcuts, voice memos, wallet, passwords, health data, journal, home, maps, etc. The only thing not covered under ADP is iCloud mail, contacts, and calendars because it uses CalDAV and CardDAV.

> once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody

Sounds like you didn't have FileVault (FDE) turned on. If you did, that wouldn't work you'd have needed your recovery key.

> it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud

They can't if you have ADP.

> Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy?

Yes, it is privacy. Let's not understate the massive surveillance that ad networks do, Google included.

Google is an advertising company, they have zero incentive to offer the same level of privacy that Apple does and probably never will, it would be directly detrimental to their core business.

Apple's E2EE is less safe than a proper one like Proton's (which also has storage, email, calendar). But one has to drink the Apple propaganda and believe it's true.

Also, ADP does not work in UK, at all.

The rest of the message I won't even comment. All things that if you care you get easier on any other device.

And Apple's ad business is booming while other are stagnant.

Apple's privacy policy is like everything else Apple: it best compares to things outside of it's walled garden. But inside the walls Apple operates just like every other company. It gathers information on all it's users for it's own advertising business. They can claim they don't have third parties involved and that makes them more private, but they do all the same things to their users but just do it themselves. They're as much an advertising company as Google or Facebook (and would love to be as big as those advertisers), but their ads are all within the Apple walls, so they can claim they are much more private. When they really aren't.

Apple imposes "Artificial Incompetence" on their users. It treats them like children, gives them no agency, and limits their freedom, all while praising them for their taste and superior sense of... something.

This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.

Doing things weirdly and badly, and not allowing any other way, prevents skill transfer between operating systems and environments. It prevents easy transfer of software - it forces software to treat the weird and bad things as canonical.

Apple users, with their imposed muscle memory, not realizing how good things could and should be, insist on their high taste and discrimination, and point to things "just working" and other inanities as vehement cover for one of the darkest of dark patterns.

Interoperability, protocol, and freedom should be mandatory. Google is hardly better, but at least you can own the device you purchase.

If you cannot understand what made Apple successful then or today what makes you think you're not failing to grasp something? You head right on to making an argument when nakedly revealing that you can't comprehend the other side.

Not surprising, this site is made for the Woz's of the world (and that's fine!).

> Not surprising, this site is made for the Woz's of the world (and that's fine!).

I'm pretty sure Woz perfectly understands why iPhone has a larger market share.

I use a Pixel too, but I can see that an iPhone is more appealing to 80%+ of world's population.

Those are some very minor complaints, all of which would not affect my buying choice, given the larger differences. That said, I’ll tell you that I don’t notice (1), for (2) I would never sit there organizing my photos, I have other (mostly less productive) things to do with my time, and (3) seems like something I specifically _dont_ want.

No, two of those are some pretty fundamental complaints about how GP wants to use their device. Just because you don't have those complaints doesn't make them any less fundamental.

Ultimately the disagreement is primarily on the fact that Apple goes very far out of their way to hide the concept of a file and filesystem from the user.

The wobbling one is minor, in all fairness.

The wobbling one would be pretty major if you ran into it all the time in your regular workflow...

It's easily solvable with a case. I agree that it's silly that Apple does it this way, but I struggle to see how it rises to the level of being a fundamental flaw like file management is.

The wobble actually factors onto my device choice as well. It's just annoying to live with for the life of the phone if you can't find a case that widens it, which many don't.

3) reminds me of the web USB thing, like why

Absolutely. The camera bump is a complete non-issue, and probably easily solvable with a case if it's really the thing pushing you away from an entire smartphone platform.

I shudder at notion of feeling compelled to group every photo I take into exactly one folder. A directory tree makes very little sense for organizing everyday photos. If I for some reason had a natural temptation to do this, I'd be grateful to Apple for discouraging it in their Photos app.

> solvable with a case

The iphone 16's camera bump is 3.5mm. Short of making your own case that makes the bump a Pixel like bar, that wont be solved by just sticking a case.

On photos, it is indeed a very personal topic to many. In particular someone taking dozens of random pictures everyday won't have the same use case as someone being a lot more deliberate for each picture for instance. A one size fjts all approach isn't helpful IMHO.

I've been using Android for years but for reasons recently switched to an iPhone.

I gotta say Android is superior in a number of things like call and SMS spam.

Also typing on iOS is a frustrating experience. I type "Im" and the iOS keyboard won't offer "I'm" as a correction option. I've even tried using the Google Keyboard on iOS and the multilingual predictions are just not as good as on Android.

I would have preferred to get a Pixel but Google doesn't distribute their physical products where I live.

The keyboard is completely nonsensical. I really don't understand how iPhone keyboard is so bad. Even if you install the Google Keyboard, iPhone keyboard is still bad.

I can't fathom what is going on here, but I really dislike typing on an iPhone. It drives me bananas. Completely obvious suggestions are never made. Android--you can just faceroll on the keyboard a bit and it'll have everything perfect. I thought I was really good at fast text input on mobile devices until I switched to an iPhone and then realized that Google's ML and autocorrect integration is just way better in this area.

I've been using iPhones since the original, somewhere around the iPhone 6 they screwed up the keyboard and never fixed it.

On Android I rarely had typos (and never used autocorrect) but on iOS I make constant mistakes. And I mean constant. It's rare when I type a word without a typo.

I had the exact same experience when switching to iphone. Hasnt gotten better after... 4 years now? It actually seems to be getting worse, if anything.

Being dumb is cute on iOS.

> 2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.

This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me. If I am backing up my pictures to a hard drive, there is no easy way to select just the pictures taken on my phone. Seems like such an oversight but I suspect it's a way to drive people to sign up for iCloud storage.

The inability to sync albums as folders onto my Mac is my #1 complaint about iPhones. It's totally to sell iCloud.

> This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me.

This is WhatsApp's fault. "Settings > Chats > Save To Photos OFF" should fix it

iOS 26 fixes this with an option to only show photos not in an album.

Additionally, if you are backing up photos to a hard drive you will be much better off using an app like PhotoSync. It has a one time payment and transfers direct to whatever you want with far less errors and more control than Apple’s terrible buggy disaster that is transferring photos by wire.

I can’t believe there isn’t a fix for this. I thought I was the only person with these problems. How have they persisted for so long?

Isn't that something WhatsApp is specifically doing tho? I haven't seen this behavior.

Wobble or no wobble, I really want the camera tumours to disappear. Make the phones thicker or make the cameras more slender. Don't make these ugly protrusions. Those phones are 2cm thick anyway you're not fooling anyone with "thinness" when they still have those massive hunchbacks.

Optics say you’re not getting thinner cameras. Otherwise they’d do that, and all those foot-long lenses you see at sports events would just be phones.

Given thickness constraints at the lens,‘I don’t see any reason to make the rest of the phone that thick. Why? Extra battery and nearly double the weight of the phone? Empty space? Cord storage?

Sell a version of the phone that's 3 generations behind on camera tech, make it a little cheaper or make it the same price. I promise you I would buy it over your flagship if it means no camera tumor.

I am okay capturing daily moments I use my phone camera for at a lower fidelity than the bleeding edge optics and sensors offer. I have mirrorless cameras and DSLRs for photos I care to take at a good quality anyway.

Not to even mention with all the latest generation post processing done on photos automatically by phone cameras, I don't like how they turn out most of the time at this point.

> Sell a version of the phone that's 3 generations behind on camera tech, make it a little cheaper or make it the same price. I promise you I would buy it over your flagship if it means no camera tumor.

Two things:

1. Your desire is in a minority that would not be profitable to cater to.

2. Even if they tried, half the people sharing your opinion still wouldn't buy it. So many people claim they want something, but then don't buy it even when it's offered. I remember in 2011 being sad that physical slide-out QWERTY keyboards were disappearing and seeing some poll that showed that like 60% of smartphone users wish they had a physical keyboard, yet nobody was buying the Motorola Droid series which had them, opting instead for the sleek-looking iPhone. People complained about phones losing the headphone jack or getting a notch or hole punch in the screen for the front-facing camera, and yet they bought the phones anyways.

I use an iphone and have for many years. I was a phone geek who would always use custom ROMs and have everything dialed in just so. I'm sure this has changed over the years but back in the day it seemed like there was always some weird issue with my Android phone. Admittedly, a lot of that could have been my fault for constantly messing with the device. Eventually I got busy and just needed my phone to do the simple stuff and get out of the way.

iOS has a number of really annoying behaviors and general flaws that are never going to be addressed. I don't recall having the same frustrations with Android, but maybe I did.

I'm constantly annoyed that my iPhone can't do simple stuff my Android phone could do 15 years ago. I am also aware that if it could do all those things, I probably wouldn't spend the time to get everything set up, dialed in, and maintained anyway.

The things that keep me on iPhone are unrelated to all of that, though.

1. I like the small form factor. I have a 13 Mini and there's no decent equivalent that I've found in any ecosystem (sadly, even Apple now).

2. I use Facetime with both sets of parents a fair bit. Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app, sounds like a lot of work and frustration.

3. Real or not, my perception is that privacy in the Apple ecosystem has historically been, and currently is, far better than Google. I don't like the idea of the device I'm constantly relying on to be the product of an ad company, it just feels gross.

4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.

> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app

This seems like an argument for picking something third-party, perhaps Signal. It's probably not going away any time soon, and it supports both major mobile operating systems.

12 to 15 years ago, when I was teaching the elders in the family how to video call, there were only two reliable options, Google and Apple.

Google kept changing their solution, so we ended up with Facetime.

Whatsapp did end up coming out with video calls, and Whatsapp would have been an alternative had it been available on iPads sooner (is it even available today?). Signal also came out too late.

But once everyone was trained on Facetime, I, nor any of my cousins was going to put in the time to re-train on any other solution. Plus, if anyone has a problem with Facetime, or their Apple device, they can pop into an Apple store to get it fixed themselves. Or they can chat with an Apple tech support rep who can remote into their phone.

both iOS and Facetime are super slick and baked into the device. The end user doesn't even have to really know how to the app to use the feature as it were. It shows up on a contact as a button click.

Signal does not, even on Android. You have to deliberately use it.

That small friction isn't great when you're likely one of few people using it in day to day life of others.

FaceTime on the other hand, just works

When I view a contact on Android there are options for Signal message/call/video call. This is on LineageOS.

Does that mean Signal has access to my contacts? So much for privacy!

It does not, actually. Signal only gets the contact number if you click on the button.

Pixel has had face unlock since at least Pixel 7

Only the pixel 4 had face unlock that used IR hardware instead of camera nonsense that isn't as secure or reliable.

Edit. It seems like pixel 7 and up includes something that's more secure

> Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient

Except when you’re trying to pay with NFC and have to awkwardly tilt your phone to match your face.

I miss having a small phone. My iPhone 16 ironically seems small compared to lots of phones my friends have. But I wish they bring back the mini. I would buy it immediately.

You can buy a mini on secondary markets. Some are even new in box, though you might need to replace the battery.

Until about a year ago, Apple had 13 minis in their refurb store.[1] That's where I managed to get one. I'm going to hang on to it as long as possible. Previously I had an iPhone SE (the one that looks like an iPhone 5), and I still slightly regret upgrading to the mini. The mini's camera and display are significantly better, but it's a little wide for my hands.

1. https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/iphone

> 4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.

On this last point, Pixel's face unlock has been secure enough to use for banking/NFC transactions since Pixel 8.

How’s your 13 mini holding up? I have a recently refurbished one (6 months old) and I can’t make it to 2pm without recharging.

Additional my mail search and photo search broke with Apple Intelligence/iOS18 integration.

Debating jumping ship to a epaper phone or holding out for the rumored iPhone Air.

My 13 mini is also not great on battery. I've been debating ordering an iFixit battery and doing the swap, but in the past I've felt it was kind of mixed results from that. I don't think those batteries are newly manufactured units, but rather leftovers from the original production line that have been sitting on the shelf for 2-3 years. So although they'll be an improvement over one that's been through 1-2k cycles, they won't be like it was when it was brand new.

For now I'm just making do with having a power bank in my bag when I'm out and about.

I don't think the iPhone Air will actually be smaller in the dimensions I care about, just thinner which I assume will compromise battery life.

My mini is holding up ok. Battery needs replacing but I haven't done it. Like mikepurvis, I carry power banks around if I'm doing anything where I'm not going to be able to recharge easily. I use one like this https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Magnetic-Slim-B2C/dp/...

I was able to get a new battery and screen for my 13 mini via AppleCare, but even the new battery won't get me through the day. Recent OS updates also make my camera shooting experience really slow for some reason.

Even with all that, I'm keeping the mini as long as possible because every year brings bigger and heavier iPhones.

> Recent OS updates also make my camera shooting experience really slow for some reason.

I’m on a 16 pro and it’s bad. It’s worse if I use the side button or do it from lock Screen, quicker from actual camera app. However it’s by far the slowest camera I’ve had on an iPhone, and I find the speed and quality a disappointing.

I'm also holding tight on an iPhone 13 Mini (5.18 in x 2.53 in) and I'm honestly not thrilled that even that is a size up from the 5s (4.87 in x 2.31 in).

Pixel 10 is yet another step up, at 6.02 in x 2.83 in, and I just wish it didn't have to be that way.

>Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.

Being able to unlock my password manager with the fingerprint, rather than putting in the vault password every time was great, but my iPhone got too old for the other apps I needed and now I'm stuck typing in a gibberish 30-char password every time I need to use it on my phone. When are we going to get under-the-screen fingerprint sensors?

> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls

Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp these days. Both of which are cross platform, even web (so can use on a desktop browser).

Also, the current Google thing, Meet, doesn't need the person you're calling to have the app. You invite them, they get a link, it opens in their browser, mobile or desktop.

FaceID is terrible, not even reliable. It scans your face all the time, even when you are not unlocking it. Every 20-30 seconds or so, let's just scan your face.

I would love it if iPhones stayed with fingerprint unlock. Sometimes I put the phone on the desk and not pointing it to my face and I want to unlock it. I have to wait for the stupid FaceID timeout to be able to input my code.

Face ID is not terrible. Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc. They check to see if you’re looking at the screen and your eyes are open, so they can keep the screen on regardless of the auto lock setting. It’s a smart and useful feature which you can turn off if you don’t like it.

> It’s a smart and useful feature which you can turn off if you don’t like it.

If they hadn't gotten rid of the fingerprint sensor, I'd believe in the sincerity of that statement.

> It is not terrible

The fingerprint sensor was at the perfect location, it worked perfectly. FaceID has the downsides I have outlined and therefore in my opinion absolutely terrible.

> Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc.

I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.

The rotation doesn't help anyway, it is technically capable of detecting it is sitting still on my desk but it still does the FaceID dance first before showing me the passcode prompt which I also don't appreciate along with scanning my face every 30 seconds even when unlocked.

If it can scan it so rapidly, why not show me the passcode prompt or design the UX better so that I can already input my passcode before waiting for the device to decide it sees no face in there?

It can do it better but by design it is too eager to just perform the FaceID unlock and then turn itself into a user presence and attention sensor.

I'd easily pay $100 extra for an iPhone that didn't solely rely on FaceID to log me in and instead gave me a fingerprint sensor it had from generations ago.

I remember my iPhone, on my desk, turning up because of a notification, then hearing the vibration for a failed FaceID unlock. This very smart system wasn't able to understand that it was looking at a ceiling. So I always ended up having to type my password due to too many failed FaceID attempts. FaceID was highly ranked in the reasons why I disliked iPhones.

TouchID all the way. On an iPad, it's fantastic.

> I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.

Waiting for the day when Apple announces supporting recording videos horizontally and the Apple fanatics to go wild as they show off how amazing videos can be when the view is wider than it is tall.

> 3: On Android I can use Chrome.

On Android I can use Firefox (with uBlock Origin, and the ability to play Youtube videos in the background or with the screen locked).

There, I corrected it for you.

The Vinegar extension on macOS/iOS lets you use the system video player on YouTube. (It has a few glitches but works fine and let's you use PiP and play videos with the screen locked.)

I’m a reluctant iPhone user (nobody seems to be making music on Android and we make plugins) and I use Brave on it and have those features.

> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?

I don't think so. The stuff you mentioned is objectively better as there's no reason for Apple not to let you do it. It's more of a "I've been in the Apple walled garden for so long and so are all my friends" or the so-called network effects. Examples: you can't "Facetime" and "Airdrop" on Android, your text confirmation marks are green instead of blue, you don't have access to the same apps as your friends (sometimes), you don't have integration with iPad. If you grew up in certain circles you may be bullied for not having an iPhone, too.

Also there is a prevailing sentiment that Android doesn't "just work" as much as iOS, which is true tbh but not for Pixels which are basically the Android equivalent of an iPhone, where the device is pretty much tailor-made for the OS.

There’s still an element of subjective preference, as much as many like to say otherwise. To me, Android animations and gestures have always felt less polished and natural and more rough “forever prototype” and mechanistic, for example.

In terms of “just working,” a big weak point of Android that stands out to me is just how clunky it is if you’re not neck-deep in the Google ecosystem and use more standardized service providers like FastMail. iOS stock apps work great with IMAP, CardDAV, CalDAV, etc but on Android you have to hunt down third party service agnostic apps for everything, few of which are designed to work with each other. To be fair though, Windows also suffers this issue.

You can just add IMAP accounts to the Gmail app but generally you're right.

“There’s no reason for apple to not let you do it” - they have reasons. Whether you agree with them or not is fine but pretending they don’t have reasons is a little silly.

You also can’t put every option in for everything, because simplicity has value too.

Logical analysis, like using folders and file APIs, is "left-brained".

The left/right brain thing is pseudo-science and even worse - a false dichotomy. It's much more about cultural snobbery and cultural tribalism around which pursuits are regarded as "more worthy".

Look up C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures" - it was incredibly influential at the time but also described a prejudice we still labour under. It's pervasive in the English speaking world. I suspect less so in the non-anglosphere West and possibly even less so in Asia.

This is such a redditor comment

I prefer Android. Unlike iPhone, the Android notifications system actually makes sense, and I can use real Firefox on Android. But, I prefer phones sized to fit in a human hand even more, so I'm stuck on an iPhone 13 Mini. Please make a ~4.5" screen Pixel phone, Google :(

I just switched from an iPhone 13 mini to a Pixel 9 Pro, and it's tough to admit but I can do so much more with my thumb on a big Android than a tiny iPhone. Mostly due to the back gesture always works (never need to tap the top left corner in some cases, and also being able to return to the 3 button navigation) and being able to pull down the notifications by sliding down on the main screen.

iPhone notifications are leagues behind. Everyone you see with an iPhone has like 80 notifications--mostly stemming from how and when they're dismissed.

+1 SO MUCH After two years I couldn't understand them. Sometime one notification appear, then it disappear, is it in the bottom stack? No, it just disappear. Also when there's many of them grouped, will tapping expand them? open the app? It's random.

But mostly, on Android, having quick actions on notifications. Receiving a useless email? The "Delete" action is right there. Boom, done. Move on.

In retrospect, I think it's why I find Android so functional. Just from the notifications you can do everything. No need to unlock your phone and end up distracted.

Yeah, the main news I want to hear is the release of smaller Pixel phone. Secondarily, I'd like the return of the 3.5mm port. I don't care about any of the stuff they actually announce.

I do currently use a Pixel, but I hate how big it is.

You prefer wired to non-wired headphones?

I prefer to have the option. There are many sound systems i'd like to use that are wired only.

Eh, I've gotten over the headphone jack thing. I just buy a dozen adapters, stick one on each of my headphones, and replace them as they wear out every couple months. Good enough.

It isn't nearly as big of an issue as the phone size, but it is still a nuisance. I know there's no chance of it ever coming back, but I'd like it to.

I still have a small amount of hope that someone will make a modern, well supported ~5" Android phone. But that's also feeling less likely.

13 Mini, best phone ever made :(

My iPhone 13 Mini is just a touch too big for my taste. For phones I've owned, I'd probably give the nod to the HTC Incredible 4G LTE[1]. Relatively stock Android, 4" screen, headphone jack, soft touch plastic back. It was perfect.

[1] https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=3701

I’d prefer the photo organization behavior you describe, but I don’t want websites to ever be dipping into the local filesystem outside of heavily siloed areas reserved for web apps exclusively. I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.

The only exception I can see making for filesystem access is for PWAs explicitly installed by the user, and even then there should be restrictions in place like limiting access to scripts loaded from the installed PWA’s domain. The open web in a generalized browser like Chrome on the other hand is too untrustworthy.

As for camera bumps, they’re all equally awful and I’d rather they just disappear entirely, even if that means thicker devices.

> I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.

You surely trust the permissions and security measures your phone provides to apps so what makes browsers worse in this area? Especially if you're using iOS where you only have Apple's web browser available to use.

Intent. Apps can only ever be installed by me, barring complicated exploit chains, while browsers can navigate without any input from me whatsoever. That serves as an extremely narrow funnel that vastly reduces surface area.

This is also why I’m more receptive to installed PWAs being more capable. They’re both on the other side of my intent funnel and assuming a good implementation can’t ever navigate to domains that aren’t that PWA.

Besides that, it’s just annoying for apps to be dressed in browser chrome. On macOS ever since Safari added the ability to install sites as PWAs, I’ve been making heavy use of those just to remove extraneous browser toolbar items and such. I don’t know how people can live with all their web apps in regular browser tabs, I’d go nuts.

Sure, browsers can navigate without your input, but what good would that do to bypass permissions? You can't use that to automatically grant your website permissions. And permissions are isolated to specific domains as if they were separate apps, so you can't just use permissions granted on domain A from domain B.

Not everything needs to be a PWA. Yes, they're great alternatives to apps, but why should anyone be forced to install a PWA when they might only need to use the web app very infrequently? Or what if I just wanted to try some functionality out first? Installing is an unnecessary speed bump for these cases.

Like I said, it’s surface area. It’s much larger in the case of the web since there’s any number of scenarios in which a user’s browser can be coaxed into running code that exploits a vulnerability that bypasses permissions and isolation (which is always possible by virtue of the browser being a privileged app, whether there are known exploits or not).

This sort of thing can happen with installed apps too, but the likelihood overall is far lower, especially if selecting judiciously.

The overwhelming majority of web apps don’t need filesystem access or similar special functionality, and thus users aren’t forced to install them.

In my personal experience, if my interest level in an app is so low that I wasn’t willing to install it, I was never going to use it in the first place either because the app wasn’t compelling enough or I didn’t have any actual need for it.

It's so strange that we don't have cameras which have write-only access to the image spool, galleries that have read-only access to the image spool, and a file manager app that can handle delete requests from other applications with the intent system.

With an iPhone, when you click on an input field, the on-screen keyboard pops up, and you can type right away.

On an android (latest samsung flagship), the keyboard shows up but is frozen for a second before you can type.

I feel this and I’m guessing iOS is a lot more closer to the hardware, while android runs on top of Java, so there is more to process. Maybe its just me.

This must be a glitch particular to Samsung phones. I use flagship Google Pixel phones and have NEVER witnessed such a lag. I tap on an input field with my left thumb, immediately the keyboard shows up, and I immediately smash any letter with my right thumb and it does register it. So, blame Samsung, not Android.

I am not too surprised though. Samsung has a reputation for bloating their Android stack with junk.

Yes, I’m used to this too. But lately on my 13 mini, there is a slight delay between the keyboard showing and it registering key presses. I would say it misses the first key press 60% of the time when the keyboard pops up…

It’s very annoying

Sorry, can you explain a little more? I'm interested where it doesn't pop up or I'm misunderstanding

The keyboard pops up, but is not responsive right away. This very thing happened today on my work phone (which has a bunch of MS defender/enterprise policies and apps managed by the company, forced background app updates etc, which could explain this) but I recall it also being a regular thing with all Samsung flagships I've had over the years. It's the feeling of a very slight delay (it could be a matter of as low as 200 ms) for important components which are operating-system controlled, such as the on-screen keyboard. It feels laggy, as if an app or a background process impacts the responsiveness of low level OS features.

On iOS, this was never something I had to experience. Slow apps are killed, iOS is brutal in this regard, but it protects the core OS-level components such as the keyboard. Try it out, load a few apps and try switching between them, where one of them had the keyboard uplled up. This is something regular users will likely never feel, but if you've been around since amiga 500, you'll definitelly feel it.

I switched to Android when Google gave me an HTC EVO at that year's Google I/O.

The deciding factors were:

- The large, high-res screen was way prettier.

- It had access to the whole internet, including Flash.

- The kickstand was handy. (minor, but still a nudge)

Android also had 3rd party keyboards with swipe-typing years before Apple did. I think Android has always been the preferred platform for tinkerers.

I miss HTC. They made some of the best phones, and they were always easy to put custom ROMs on.

As someone who prefers iphones…

- iPhone wobble is real. Mostly mitigated by a proper case. Does the iPhone get a better camera in return? Usually in my experience.

- I don’t sort my photos. The semantic search has been sufficient, and I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim.

- Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use. The FS API does sound great though. Enviable given how annoying it is to do work on an iPhone sometimes.

> - Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use

This is actually one of the stronger arguments in favour of Android's though, you can install (real) firefox and (fully functional) ublock origin, while Apple prevents you from doing so on their non-macos products.

Safari on iOS worldwide supports extensions. There is UBlock origin lite and i.e vinagre for youtube background videos. I am still amazed google does not allow extensions on their default browser.

Microsoft Edge on Android now also supports some extensions, one being uBlock Origin. Seems just as powerful as the real thing. And has the benefit of using the Chrome engine.

Firefox on Android isn't just a reskin of chrome? When did that change?

It never was. There was firefox lite 2018-2021 that was apparently, but going back to 2010 Firefox was Firefox.

Pixel phones have won blind camera tests last few years without Apple coming close though.

This is tricky. Most Android phones apply heavy color saturation and contrast adjustments, by default, to the images and the display itself, where iPhone tends to keep things more "raw". But, "pop" is what the average person usually prefers. It's post processing step that can heavily influence favor, unrelated to the camera. The Samsung cameras are still objectively better though, in many metrics.

My work involves showing images accurately on screens, and I always have dig through all the settings to make the Android phones just to show an image without heavy modification (for Samsung, it's 3 separate settings!). There is no such setting for iPhone, where the default experience is a (literally) color calibrated screen.

In my view Pixels have been dominating in still photos for years but their video has never been on par with iPhone. I'd put my old Pixel 3's still camera up against my iPhone 13 any day (if my Pixel hadn't bricked itself a little out of warranty like all of mine seemed to).

The difference between the photos on any flagship phone for the past 5 or so years is insignificant and mostly up to personal preference, but the difference between iPhone and anything else in videos is massive.

This is because iPhone photos are ubiquitous which causes photos from less common phones to stand out. And the less common phones likely optimize for this A/B test scenario by e.g. increasing contrast and saturation. Meanwhile Apple likely has little to no interest in optimizing for A/B tests with minor smartphone players, and instead optimizes merely for delivering satisfying photos in the widest range of scenarios.

Pixel photos are very good too, for the record. I just think the "blind camera test" is worthless.

That's quite an interesting way to explain why Apple does poorly in blind tests. The real reason though is that Apple's cameras are just not as good, but I suppose it's easier to explain away by making up biases.

My and your personal preferences for one camera over the other isn't the issue. Nor am I claiming that one is objectively better than another. My point is that blind tests (between two cameras of similar quality) are worthless simply because they don't reflect the preferences the test-taker would actually have given extensive use of each camera.

The issues with blind tests like this are well-known. I assure you I have no interest in persuading you to alter your own preferences.

For pictures but not for video, the stabilisation is better on iOS typically

Stabilization is about to all become post processing AI based and if we know there is only thing Apple sucks at now a days it's software.

I was under the impression that every browser running on iOS was just backed by WebKit - so it's basically just a firefox skin.

> I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim

As someone who refuses to pay extra for iCloud storage, can you tell me how to do this? I haven't figured out a good (read: easy) way to backup photos from my iPhone to computer/external storage (I don't want to use iTunes software cause I don't need everything syncing both ways).

Try Brave on iOS. Adblock that works, and for free.

I have to admit, my experience with #1 was quite different.

1. Put pixel on a flat surface. 2. Half an hour later, discover that the the surface wasn't actually flat, as phone the phone crashes to the ground, having been slowly inching its way off the 'flat' surface by virtue of the magically friction free back case of the phone...

No joke, by far the slipperyest phone I have ever had, and the one I slapped a case on the fastest, but not fast enough to avoid many dents.

I can sort my photos in folders (or albums) in iOS, not sure what you mean? I can have personal and shared albums, unless you mean the fact you don’t have that in the filesystem, in which case I completely agree.

I’m a Firefox guy myself and web apps are not something I care about for privacy reasons, but I agree that not having the option is a bummer.

The camera bump never really bothered me on the iPhone or the Pixel Fold I had before this iPhone. I just don’t notice it, but then again, I also didn’t notice the crease in the fold.

I miss Tachiyomi though. Panels is nice, but I had to built a whole OPDS-proxy to a manga website to have something close to Tachiyomi. Oh, and the ability to turn off network access on a per-application basis that came with GrapheneOS (plus the security of GrapheneOS itself).

While I prefer Android and Pixels (using GrapheneOS), I have switched my family to the Apple ecosystem to have a middle ground between privacy and features, so I’m not coming from an “I love Apple and everything else sucks” background, mind you.

I think OP is describing using their main Photos album as an inbox of sorts, emptying it out by filing photos away. On iOS even when you add a photo to an album it still exists in the main album.

I just went into trades and I do a picture every other hour of my work. It really makes me mad, that I can’t properly separate this photo-documentation from my personal private pictures. It’s a complete mess now in the main folder… Next phone will be one with GrapheneOS.

Kind of sounds like your actual problem is not having separate devices for personal and work usage?

Ah, yeah, that makes sense. I simply ignore the main view and go straight to the albums. In iOS 26 it defaults to your last view, so that works for me.

What good is optimizing for the open web when the Pixels lack a sufficiently fast processor for bloated web pages. Haven't tried the 10 yet, but Pixel 9 is sufficiently slow that you can see tearing artifacts when you scroll. This is at least two or three years behind the modern Qualcomm in Samsungs let alone Apple.

This comment is flamewar bait that doesn't even acknowledge the post.

Not every phone related post needs to become one.

Gotta love it, open up the comment section about a new Pixel 10 phone, and have to scroll through a massive comment chain of what, 200? 300? comments that aren't related to or addressing the article in any way.

I can understand point #1

- 99% of people put a case on their phone

- the more thickness you have for the camera (sensor+lens), the better you can make the optical design. (bigger sensor, more range of focus, etc)

- the camera - especially wide angle lens - must be even with surface of case, not below it (otherwise the case occludes the edges of the photo)

Pixel phones also have a camera bump, but it's a band symmetrically placed on the back on the phone. Which is why it's stable.

I prefer iPhone for a miriad of little things. Can't name one particular thing, but it's just constant annoyance, when I have to use Android. I probably could write a list of 100 items, if I'd care to document it all.

That said, after Apple started drinking AI juice, I don't want to deal with it anymore. Another major annoyance with iPhones is that they ditched touch ID. Face ID just doesn't work with me at all, it's like 30% of success rate, absolutely terrible. My last phone was iPhone SE, but new models switched to this Face ID, and that's a real deal breaker for me. I even considered buying few iPhone SE phones, while they're still selling at the stores and keep them for later use, but that seems weird and they'll get obsolete with software updates anyway.

I switched to Arch on desktop and I'm going to switch to GrapheneOS on my Pixel (native Pixel Android is absolutely terrible experience, GrapheneOS is bad, but everything else is just worse).

The single thing that solidifys it for me is that every Android device I have ever used has suffered from noticeable micro stuttering.

Their current top of the line TV device drops an entire video frame every couple of seconds while watching 60fps content, cause very noticeable jerking.

Could you remind me which brand still sell a 60Hz screen on their 1000$ phone?

Stable 60Hz is still preferable to stuttery 120Hz.

It’s good Android has stable 120Hz then. But if you are happy overpaying for a mediocre phone, that’s your right. I did it once. I’m not planning to do it ever again.

No android device I've ever used has a stable ANYTHING performance-wise.

Happy to know which one you have used then because all the ones I have used in the past from Google, OnePlus and Xiaomi have been rock solid.

It’s simple my current iPhone 13 is the second worst phone I have ever owned after the 3S I had a decade before. It’s also the most expensive in a very Apple-like fashion.

iOS is a sorry mess. It manages to be both annoyingly limited and awfully buggy.

Uh, every top model iPhone since the 13 is 120hz.

The non Pro phone is 60Hz despite being more than 1000€ here. I wish it was a joke but Apple ripoff knows no limit sadly. Meanwhile, most competitors phones half that price have 120Hz.

4: the fact that Android has unified gestures: back, home and tray. Whenever I used iOS, I felt like every single app had a different way of going back somewhere. On Android, this is not an issue at all.

Uh. I used Android for 15 years and I still keep guessing wrong what the back button will do. Feels like 75% of the time it does not lead me back to what I expect and all apps have different ideas what they think it should do. I agree though that not having a back button at all is also not good.

Apps can have questionable Back behaviors but they all have a unified way of invoking Back.

Apps on iOS can also have questionable Back behaviors, but the method for invoking Back is not consistent.

I use an iPhone.

1. I’m always going to have a case on my phone, so I don’t care about the camera bump.

2. You’re correct here. I mostly don’t care, but I want to have different hidden folders, which iOS doesn’t natively have. Otherwise I don’t care much.

3. Safari’s locked-down-ness is precisely why I use it.

But TBH, at this point, there’s minimal differences between iOS and Android.

1. If the phone is bare. If you have a case (or a magnetic wallet like mine) it is stable. Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.

2. There is a filter 'not in an album' which would do what you want. The library view is the equivalent of "All Mail" in Gmail. In newer versions, this is a distinct view - they are moving albums, automatically generated collections and search to be a primary interface.

3. Both WebKit and Mozilla have said they consider the local access variant of that API to be harmful, since they do not have an adequately prominent way to surface and manage that you've given a web application permanent access to sensitive directories and files, potentially in the background via service workers. Both do support the origin private filesystem variant. Are there productivity apps direct filesystem access would be useful for other than IDEs?

> Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.

If the renders out there are correct, it seems the camera modules will still stick out beyond the camera bar for some reason, so I'm not sure it won't wobble-- though it does look like the issue will be reduced

I used Android for many years. I got to the point where I didn’t care about or want to customize my phone anymore.

I was tired of my Android phone feeling like it was falling apart after a year.

I have enough things to think about, troubleshoot, and tinker with…I don’t need my phone to add to that list.

Which phone brand did you use where it was falling apart after a year? The rest of your comment sounds like you're saying you preferred the iPhone because it takes the option of customizability away from you entirely, instead of simply sticking to the level of customization on Android that worked for you.

Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC EVO 4g, Motorola Droid.

I used to do all kinds of things…tether to my laptop without it being supported in my data plan, torrent, etc.

I also got tired of the platform skins depending on the manufacturer.

If I’m not going to utilize the customization of Android, then I might as well go with the more consistent and refined experience out of the box.

Also iMessage! Hate to say it but my social group is primarily iOS so the experience is superior.

Might as well disqualify the iPhone for not having an Instagram app or a file manager if your frame of reference is 2010.

> Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC EVO 4g, Motorola Droid.

Sharing your opinions without first prefacing they're 12-17 years out of date is disingenuous

As a, mostly, happy Android user since the HTC Magic in 2010 or 2009, the one thing I really wish they could fix (but I suspect it would never be possible) is the extremely confusing thing with intents and apps opening as views in other apps. Like when my mail app opens a PDF it looks like I am now in the PDF app and after reading for a while I completely forget that I am actually still in the mail app, and then I go BACK and instead of ending up in my PDF library view as I expected I am suddenly in my mail app. Or when I look at the running apps list there can sometimes look like I have two PDF viewers or two browsers running since some other apps used intents to open views from those apps that now exist in parallel with the real apps.

Somehow that manages to surprise and confuse me almost every day. In desktop operating systems, and, I belive, in iOS, there is no need for such thing? Opening a PDF from a mail application usually just opens the PDF viewer as its own application, or it is embedded in some nice way that does not make the entire mail app suddenly look like a PDF viewer app instead.

Unfortunately they can probably never fix that because app lifecycle and intents are connected to everything and a good fix for this would probably break everything.

It's interesting that this feels awkward to you, because when apps don't function this way it feels broken and odd to me. When I tap a PDF attachment in an email I expect the back button to go back to the email I was just viewing, not the list of PDFs on my phone. If I wanted to view all the PDFs on my device, I would start at the PDF viewer and tap into PDFs from there.

I wonder what experience made this feel more awkward for you (and conversely, why it feels more natural for me). What a weird/complex world we live in!

I kind of agree and see what you mean, but what I described happen often that I forget where I came from and have no idea that the PDF I read was opened from some other app.

It's part of what I mentioned in another comment, that BACK button can feel random. "Did I open this PDF from within the PDF viewer or from some other app? What app?" Instead of the BACK button having a predictable, known, function, it depends on some hidden state.

> When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable

My experience with the Pixel 7 Pro is due to the very pronounced camera bump and the rounded edges, the phone would slide off tables with problematic frequency, to the point that mine just lives in its bike mount case full time now.

you might need to level your table then

You'll need to tell that to about 30% of the bars in the country.

What

File System Access API has some serious issues. To quote Mozilla's position on the topic

> There's a subset of this API we're quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read/write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user's local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.

I think most users would probably be better off without this proposal.

It sounds like this would prevent users from backing up their own data, which is hard with localStorage and sessionStorage, and instead having to rely on the site owner.

However this doesn't go into any detail, so maybe they have some convenient way of being able to access these files in mind, but we'll never know. It reminds me of another shallow dismissal by Mozilla: https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/36294 https://webreflection.medium.com/mdn-doesnt-trust-you-should...

I’d love to use the android phone, as they seem to have much better and actually useful AI integration, but they are not phones but “advertising company tracking devices with tacked-on end user functionality”. Similarly, Chrome is not User Agent, it’s Corporation Agent.

I switched from Android to iOS a few years ago. I used to be deep into Android customization - custom ROMs, custom icon packs, etc. But today, I feel that iOS and Android offer pretty all the features that I could ever want. My deciding factors when I switched:

- iOS UI animations are significantly better

- access to iMessage

- Apple got around to adding their version of "always on display"

- I turn the vast majority of notifications off, so Android's better notification management stopped mattering to me

- It felt like Google kept bending Android towards iOS anyway (camera app, moving away from the 3 button navigation)

> I feel that iOS and Android offer pretty all the features that I could ever want.

Except privacy.

> iOS UI animations are significantly better

And if you don't like them: tough luck. They're mandatory.

Well, technically...

    Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion

I don't like Reduce Motion as it still forces you to wait through the half second of delay while it slowly fades things. I just want all animations deleted to avoid delaying the action itself. You used to be able to do this on a jailbroken phone by setting the global animation duration to be like zero or something, but of course Apple basically won the war on us "users" having any control on the devices we buy from them, or should I say, 'license the privilege of using'?

Well, try it. It reduces motion, but it does not eliminate all animations.

I turned off all animations on my Android phone, and now each time I have to use iOS (for development) it feels like swimming through molasses.

you can "Reduce Motion" and "Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions" under accessibility. Not sure if that's what is being referred to though.

My pixel 8 does not stay where I put it. Without a case, it will slide right off of any slightly tilted surface.

It should be illegal to put glass on the back of a phone.

I agree so much. I get why: "Designers" consider plastic to be low-class, metal is radio-opaque, so that leaves glass as the only option even though it has zero functional advantages over plastic (glass is heavier and more fragile).

Imagine if it was a panel of plastic, and that you could easily replace it if it got too scuffed up.

I can download an APK and install it on android. Why can't I use my iphone like I use my macbook?

An underrated question. The answer of course is twofold:

* Paternalism (Apple believes users are too stupid to be trusted to control their devices, and no amount of "I really know what I'm doing" confirmations could change that)

* Apple's biggest fear is being disintermediated by Google or Meta, the way WeChat did to phone manufacturers in China. An ability to side-load an app could allow a foothold for a powerful competitor who could wean you off of all their lock-in features in favor of an experience that would tie into a competing ecosystem.

Apple would like your macbook to be more like your iphone: applications only via their store, thank you very much.

But it isn't worth the bother; the macbook market is much smaller than the iphone market.

The biggest selling point of an iPhone for me is the easy connection with my Mac and the consistency between them. If it weren't for that I'd strongly consider a pixel

A mystery about Apple is that some of its software are ridiculously bad. iTunes sync was one of them. Another example is removing iCloud sync used to wipe out the content on the disconnected devices. Screen Time is pretty much unusable. It's really hard to batch update photos in iphone. Heck, it's even hard to batch move app icons on iphone screen.

I think for most people its just whatever you are used to. That said I can't stand iPhone. My wife also switched to Android after being jealous of some features on my phone.

I have an iPhone because at the time I bought it I liked the size (Mini 13) and it's fine. Before that I had some Android phone and it was fine too.

I've never understood the strong emotions people have attached to these things.

About the only thing I'm looking forward to when I upgrade my phone in a couple of years is getting a better camera. Phones were pretty exciting for a while, but now? It feels like a mature segment and not much is changing anymore.

> I think for most people its just whatever you are used to.

Or in the US, it's whatever your family and/or circle of friends use, RCS or not. iMessage lock in is real (along with Facetime, Airdrop, Apple Pay, etc.)

As someone who used Android for years and only recently switched to iOS the lack of file system access is really the only dealbreaker. It's damn annoying. The hardware is reliable and solid but why do we get such a crippled operating system ?

I think a lot of developers think like you, but most users of phones don't.

I don't think most people care enough to put time into organizing their photos, but would rather the phone or backend AI just find the photo they want by searching for it.

I'm not sure if most users even have a strong conception of "file" or really understand what data is physically on their phone vs "the cloud".

(The symmetry thing though probably does bother a lot of people regardless of their level of technical expertise.)

Well I’m a very technical person, and sorting photos into folders seems like a colossal waste of time to me, when I can also just search for a thing on the image, the place or time when or where it was taken, a person or animal on it; I could add it to an album, star it, add tags to it; that should be more than enough sorting facilities, I think.

Same. In fact, I don't organize much of anything that's digital, photos or files. I just use search, it's pretty good these days, and with OCR even better.

Just give me a big flag structure with robust search and I'm happy. Heck I don't even bother to organize or layout the apps on my home screen. quicker for me to search with spotlight than scroll around and find what I want.

I think photos on the pixel are messed up (long-time iphone user who switched for the pixel 9 folding pro), you have all these folders that by default don't get backed up, it took me ages to understand I had to go in settings and manually check all new apps that I install for photos to back them up (and display them in my gallery). It's never clear what's the "offline" vs "online" view of google photos (and why there are other google photos apps).

With a bit of fiddling I can finally backup my whatsapp photos, but oh boy why aren't the default saner?

For Chrome, it's inconsistancies after inconsistancies. First, I couldn't read PDFs from there, now I can but I can't edit the URL when I edit a PDF, also no built-in app to read PDF, it's crazy.

2/3 of your complaints seem to be down to Apple's insistence that filesystems are silly and should be hidden from users. Unless it's iCloud, then show the user 2 identical filesystems and scatter everything at random between the two. Really, it's a write-only filesystem. Apps will constantly save things there, but god help you if you ever want to find something.

2: you can organize photos into folders but nobody does

3: I actively don’t want this nor would I want anybody I care about to have to deal with this.

But props to you for having an argument for Android aside from the usual “I have more control”

I prefer an iPhone but only because it has generally given me the best experience where I am not having to fiddle with anything.

Maybe android has changed but I made the swap, maybe a decade ago, because android had very weak boundaries on apps running in the background.

The older I get the more I value screen real state. And that foldable phone is really calling me.

Aside from that the fact that I can sideload apps. Run a VM. Work. All this with 16Gb of Ram.

And the list goes on and on.

Honestly having an iPhone these days feels more a punishment than something else.

My first smartphone was a cheap Android and then I switched to iPhone about eight years ago and mostly haven't looked back.

That said, Apple's behaviour around locking out wearables from key system APIs does have me reconsidering. I found the inconsistent sync and notifications on my Fitbit to be a pretty big source of annoyance and if that continues on the new Pebble I would consider switching back to Android just for that.

I think the EU or the US (one of them) is trying to force Apple to give third parties access to the things Apple Watch has access to, so there might be relief coming for one of those continents (one assumes that the petulant child that is Apple's leadership will, after appealing to the maximum, region-gate any remedy, exactly as they did for third-party app stores in EU).

For #2, on iOS, you can move photos to shared albums and then safely delete them from library while retaining them in shared album. Shared albums use iCloud space, so it’s not ideal.

To your 3: On iOS Safari, I can use extensions. That includes adblockers (uBlock origin lite) and others like Vinegar (allows youtube videos to play in background while display is off). No ads boosts productivity more than the file API - what would I need that for?

FYI rumour has it the iPhones about to be released will have the same sort of full width camera module so the “wobble” won’t be an issue. Not that it ever was for me before, I have a case on it.

> When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders.

This is exactly the sort of thing a lot of smartphone users (including Android users) won’t do.

The point of post-PC devices is to actually be post-PC. For many, futzing around with files isn’t the answer.

For instance I gave up doing this to my email years ago. It was very liberating. If I want something, I search. I can save searches I frequently perform.

iOS’s Photos app isn’t perfect but it allows me to find stuff just fine. I can search for places (“Seattle”), for things (“bicycle”) or even combinations (“plants Vancouver”). It’s pretty neat. And you can actually add stuff to folders (‘albums’) if you really want to.

> local files

iOS has them too. There are apps which allow you to access and manage local files — including the built in file manager. It’s not as laissez-faire as Android, though. Even the file manager has come a long way, and it’s improving further in iOS 26.

tl;dr — iOS isn’t for everyone, but it’s not like it’s not well-designed with a certain audience in mind.

I knew apple wasn't for me when I tried to sync and backup my stuff on something that wasn't iCloud. Its just plain unusable if you don't want to be fully entrenched in their cloud services.

I’m an iphone user and I’ve always used Dropbox and google photos as my general backup mediums.

Isn't that photo specific backup rather than general backups? Last I tried, Dropbox on iPhone cannot backup any files owned by other apps automatically. You'd have to export it manually to Dropbox.

Edit; It looks like this is possible on iOS for apps to access other app's file sandboxes with a somewhat recent iOS update. MobiusSync (Syncthing client for iOS) has beta support for it. But I see no mention of Dropbox adding support for anything similar

I think most HNers prefer iPhones because they seemlessly integrate with the rest of the ecosystem.

Assuming you mean the rest of the Apple ecosystem this is kind of like saying most countries speak French because all the road signs are in French. Someone who doesn't have an iPhone doesn't necessarily have twenty other Apple devices around.

I prefer Pixel phones, for slightly different reasons.

One, it takes really good photos. Better than phones with supposedly better specs. This is big for me, I have a 3 year old, being able to snap photos that look great with no effort is huge.

Two, the Google integration is just really a gamechanger. My laptop is my "computing" device. So my phone is mostly for calling, navigating (I travel a lot), searching for businesses, that sort of thing. It's really effortless with Pixel devices, takes a tad more work with other brands.

All browsers are equal citizens. I use Vivaldi, it's nice it can be the default and work just as well with the phone as Chrome.

And finally, in all my dealings with big tech over my lifetime, Google has been the only one that I feel doesn't try to abuse users. With MS it's endless nagging and annoyances, plus their security sucks, with Apple they're very anti-consumer unless you do exactly what they want, all the time. Even Samsung annoyed me with bloatware and trying to make their apps default over and over. If I change something on a Pixel phone, it stays changed. I pay for some Google products so no ads for the most part. Their security is great. They prefer open formats and protocols and have done a ton for the open web. Just the best ecosystem I've bought into.

What web apps do you use that use the File System Access API?

Nope, i wish Apple would do this the way Android does. Most people here prefer Apple, not because of the crap iOS but because of the hardware.

>3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.

Working as intended. Apple wants their 30% cut by all possible means. Web apps would bypass their cut.

I like Pixels because I can put Graphene on them.

For me, it is the ability to tether my laptop to an iPhone to use the data service on my iPhone. This alone made me give up on Windows laptops and Android phones. Sure, you can tether Windows laptops to Android phones. But, it is a slow and cumbersome process. I use this functionality frequently enough that it was worth it to switch platforms over it.

When I switched off Android >5 years ago, even then, it was as simple as turning on the hotspot and connecting to it. It was no more cumbersome than any other wifi network. This was with a Pixel device and Linux laptop, and I am sure it works on Windows too.

It's the same now. Turn on hotspot->Connect to it on the PC. After that one step it's in your saved networks and you're good to go.

The only difference is Apple will do this automatically for you. If you open up your mac, and don't have network, you get a little pop up that says "use iPHone's connection?" and will turn on hotspot and connect automatically. Nice, but hardly any different or time saving really.

I’m a former Android user (bought a Nexus One on release!) that switched to iOS many years ago and I don’t miss Android as much as I thought I might.

To me the biggest thing to reflect on is how depressing it is that we must all fit ourselves into one of two boxes. My kingdom for a flourishing mobile OS ecosystem where we can all find the exact combination that scratches our itches.

Well, we have 3 main boxes and 1 got mostly rejected (windows).

One is a worse version of OSX and the other is basically what would have happened if Linux was initially created by a huge corp.

My dream is for a top-notch Ubuntu for mobile. I'm still waiting for Desktop to catch up, so won't hold my breath.

I do t think I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t use a phone case, all of which fix #1

I've never used a phone case. I don't understand why they make these things so small and then everyone just slaps on an extra couple mm. What's the point? If we're making them bigger anyway, at least use that space for more battery.

Anyway, the wobble is real, and sucks.

Similar, but I did use a phone case once because it came with the phone and included a pretty big feature. The LG V60 with dual screen case.

It made the phone entirely way too thick. But it was still thinner than the 2 phones I was carrying around previously.

I run caseless too and would be willing to sacrifice a few mm for better durability and no bump. Plastic is fine too. Bring back designs like the iPhone 3GS which were curved to fit your palm and if dropped would just bounce and tank it!

Phones are too slippery these days. Everyone makes them of smooth glass or metal.

Remember soft touch plastics? Grippy and didn't waste all the space of a case? Then some dingleberry marketer decided slippery metals and glass were "premium" and braindead phone reviewers happily parroted that crap and now everyone buys several mm thick cases made of soft touch plastics to cover up the "premium" materials they bought. Sigh.

They also screw up the hardware.

When I use a fingerprint scanner on other phones, it works.

When I used it on my last Pixel (6 or 7, I cant remember) it failed over half the time.

How does one screw up biometrics this badly? Lack of care/QA on a $1k device.

GL with your Pixel.

Note: I'm not an Apple fan boi. I swap every couple of years so I maintain skills in both OSes.

If it was the Pixel 6, I can attest that the 6 (at least the 6 Pro XL) had issues with the fingerprint scanner. I had no issues with my 5 series (when the fingerprint scanner was on the back) but the 6 series always gave me trouble. I'd wager a guess the reason why was because it was the first generation with an under-display fingerprint scanner and they hadn't yet worked out the quirks.

I've since upgraded to a 9 series and it works flawlessly so I can assume they've figured it out some time since then.

How much of your money for the pixel 6 garbage did they refund?

Same here.

A counterpoint: google intentionally broke the ability to backup photos in Google Photos.

Yes, takeout sort of exists, but it doesn't work. If you sort pictures into albums, you get duplicates of each photo for every album. So one copy in the automatic year album; one copy for each album you have put a photo into. My 80gb of photos triples in size, and oh, sometimes downloads fail on the zips they put them into. And since I use a mac, who has 600gb of free disk to download and extract the zips for my dedup script to run.

Additionally, they intentionally broke their api (well, just disabled it... but only for most users; it seems to still be available for Microsoft) to do incremental backup. tada!

It's the most Apple thing.

I have an iPhone 15 Pro. I am a semi regular Pixel user as well. I prefer the iPhone by a mile.

1. Mine sits flat too. It's in a rugged case.

2. You don't know how to use Photos properly. You create collections from the pool and name them. You can create folders as well. In fact it actually does that automatically now.

3. There's literally a files app and filesystem abstraction on iOS. I use it for moving stuff around all the time.

Add one gain:

1. All my photos are in real files in Photos.app on my desktop within seconds of me taking them. I do not have my files held ransom behind a web interface. Edits and folders are transparently replicated between both devices. When I back up my mac I have a copy of everything.

And a total loss:

Post processing on both devices for images is terrible so I use a dedicated camera.

I recently switched to an iPhone.

I legitimately struggle to find anything better.

(Battery, perhaps?)

Decision 3 is a no brainer.

Apple want you to use the apps they've curated , not web apps, not apps or games from 3rd party stores etc.

None of those things matter to me. What does matter to me is that to get stuff off my iPhone I have to do a weird sync process and/or use iCloud. Infact, a lot of my issues with the iPhone stem from refusing to use iCloud. Can’t use Apple Pay or FindMy.

For now I use Airdrop to move photos from my iPhone to the computer but it’s very error prone and fails 1/5 times and way more often if you try to do it with more than 30 images/videos. Is this situation better in the Pixel?

> This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.

The thing is that web apps are always a worse experience if you have native apps. Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps. For Apple devices you can always find a top quality native app to use, so web apps aren't any concern. The only people I have met who want to use apps in their browser on MacOS are Linux refugees who were attracted by the "specs" of Apple devices. It's a bit like buying an electric car and lamenting the lack of a gearbox. You don't need it anymore.

> Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps.

I fail to see any iOS without an equivalent native application on Android when the Android application is not actually significantly better.

iOS really is a minority os here and it shows.

As someone who started on Android but switched to Apple many many many years ago, I still find things like this that are quibbles for me, but in general my preference for Apple is because of security/privacy, battery life management, performance, update longevity, and hardware quality.

That said, I think it's worth noting that #1 hardly bothers anyone because most people put their phone in a case, and that can quickly resolve this. #2 isn't a real problem, because you can absolutely sort your photos into folders, they're call albums though, and this is a first-class workflow in the Photos app since they switched from iPhoto to Photos about 6-7 years ago. For #3, I don't want my web browser having file system access via an API and I don't use Chrome.

>1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles

So? Big deal...

Frankly, iOS could be a giant turd of an OS, at least it's somewhat privacy respecting(for the time being), I would still prefer it.

As long as it's that, it's light years ahead of Android. Which is a vehicle for Google to spy on you so they can sell your data.

These are all extremely minor issues. 2 and 3 are not even relevant to 99% of normal users. Very few people want to spend time manually organizing photos like that, and albums do essentially the same thing. The wobbling thing is a non-issue. It doesn't even wobble unless you're pounding down on the phone on a table.

> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.

Running Gemini Nano on device is the most interesting thing here. Magic Cue sounds exactly like the Siri improvements that Apple failed to launch this past year (and have stayed mostly quiet about for this coming year, except saying "eventually"). I hope it works well, because on-device AI for simple lookups and such is actually one of the most interesting use cases for LLMs on mobile phones to me.

I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions. There are so many possibilities. I assume this kind of thing would just be implemented as tool calls with app intents. I hope we see this across the board in the next three years.

> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions.

It's probably just me (or a few like me) but I don't really keep my life in digital format as much as others (and I'm a "geek" for my family/friends since i work in the software industry). If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar. I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).

The features described in the Pixel 10 left me with a sense of "I think I am missing something! But... oh well, whatever, I don't need any of that". Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".

> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.

If I don't have it in my calendar, it doesn't happen. I would fail to actually go to the event otherwise.

I'm calendar-driven to such an extent that I joke that all it would take to murder me would be to insert "jump off a cliff" in my calendar.

I'm in between. I do use a calendar for pre-planned personal outings, but more for blocking off dates/times than tracking details. If I hide work meetings, pretty much my entire calendar is just a bunch of events generically named "Balls" with no other information. Occasionally I'll use someone's name or the name of a travel destination.

Same. Calendar events, reminders, and timers are the only way anything in my life gets done.

I also have ADHD!

> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.

When I buy a ticket to an event and the e-mail about it arrives, Google automatically adds the event to my calendar. My wife and I have shared our calendars with each other, too, so we both see it no matter who buys the ticket.

Unless you're mailing letters, it's almost certain that your life is in "digital format". It sounds like you just don't use a calendar.

But surely you have an email confirmation for your movie, baseball, or event ticket. And maybe you texted or otherwise messaged with your friends who were going? Took pictures on your phone with them? Carried your phone with you when you went.

Right. I meant I don’t make use of such digital assets. They are there because of tech giants, but i just don’t gain much from them.

The argument is that you could potentially make easy use of these digital assets via an assistant that has secure, private access to them. As someone who forgets to use his calendar for social events, I'd love to be able to ask "what events are going on this weekend" and have it show me everything I've agreed to do via email/text message/3p messenger app.

You don't add to your calendar but you probably got a confirmation email. Or you may have used an app that could expose this data to the operating system. OR, you called, and the phone app transcribed and summarized the call.

Same for the wallet... if you have your credit card / banking app installed it could expose this.

But yeah, none _needs_ any of that, for different degrees of fun and life optimization.

If you have an email receipt, and you store email on your phone, it's probably accessable. I don't think you're missing out on anything though.

Re: geek, AI has a lot of mainstream hype at the moment. I don't think there's anything inherently geeky about buying into the hype.

I dont think I have left my house without my phone in 5+ years.

I used to take my phone with me all the time (I used to have an iphone mini). The current models are too big. They are nice when i’m on the sofa surfing the web, but a hassle to take then in my pocket

I think it’s been 15+ years for me

How do you get your tickets? Do you just buy in person at the theater or ballpark?

I expressed myself wrong. I do purchase tickets online. Then I just remember the day. No calendar. I don’t take advantage of the digital assets (email confirmation, etc)

I think on-device models will be the breaking point for AI. Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill. We've made consumers think that the only way you're paying for software is if you have to buy hardware that comes with it. If you want AI to truly blow up, make it run on potatoes. It doesnt have to do EVERYTHING, just specific needs.

That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly. I thought Apple adding 3 to theirs for the 12 was a bit silly, but at least they made it look nice. One of those models looks like a Battlestar Galactica villain...

It's preference. I think the cameras on the non-pro iphones are so ugly -- especially the diagonal design. The pro cameras look ok to me. Can't not see my old college stove when I look at it, but I don't think it's too bad.

I, too, am biased but prefer Pixel's camera layout. Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device. A design decision that's unique and has some (small) utility.

Tier list:

Good: Pixel line, any phone with no camera bump Ok: iPhone Pro Bad: Samsung's many iterations, iPhone 2 camera vertical layout Horrible: iPhone 2 camera diagonal layout

They have the same camera bump design on the Pixel 9 phones.

I quite like it, it's a natural rest for my phone to sit at an angle (and protect the camera glass), and is great for holding it with a single hand.

>That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly.

Isn't it a market thing though? Doesn't Apple have a phone with horrendous, trypophobia-inducing camera nests?

I (and many other people) think the cameras look great and are a nice change from the repetitive boring Apple designs.

> Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill.

Buying dedicated hardware as a way to keep your AI bill down seems like a tough proposition for your average consumer. Unless you're using AI constantly, renting AI capacity when you need it is just going to be cheaper. The win with the on-device model is you don't have to go out to the network in the first place.

You misunderstood what I meant, I mean make models that run on potatoes, nobody wants to pay what chatgpt's subscription model probably SHOULD cost for them to make a profit.

I mean, look at these examples. Is a big LLM really needed to hit most of what people want?

Seems like Android just needs to lean into the voice command hooks API. A local LLM can grease the natural language into the mechanical APIs installed on your device. That's a much simpler task than an omniscient robot with access to all of your data.

Smaller specialised and targeted models are cheaper, faster and more accurate.

The Nano model is 3.2B parameters at 4bit quantization. This is quite small compared to what you get from hosted chatbots, and even compared to open-weights models runnable on desktops.

It's cool to have something like this available locally anyway, but don't expect it to have reasoning capabilities. At this size it's going to be naive and prone to hallucinations. It's going to be more like a natural language regex and a word association game.

The big win for those small local models to me isn't knowledge based (I'll leave that to the large hosted models), but more so a natural language interface that can then dispatch to tool calls and summarize results. I think this is where they have the opportunity to shine. You're totally right that these are going to be awful for knowledge.

Speculation: I guess the idea is they build an enormous inventory of tool-use capabilities, then this model mostly serves to translate between language and Android's internal equivalent of MCP.

Or for the police, "list any legally questionable content on the phone or behavior by the owner."

Why would the police bother with that when they have forensic extraction tools, that itself possibly has AI built in? Why trust a quantized model on a phone that possibly could give you wrong answers?

The model might even make something up, giving police "reasonable suspicion". Not that it seems it's needed anymore in the US

AI is about to put drug sniffing dogs out of a job.

I love the idea of on-device AI. But the implementation of Gemini on Android is fully toxic. In the assistant settings I'm able to select what app I want to use as the assistant. But if I even open the Gemini app, it sets that automatically to be the phone assistant app. It doesn't ask, there's no confirmation, it just changes that setting. After that many tasks will fail because Gemini can't launch google maps to navigate you etc etc. Super annoying.

This. I tried Gemini, twice, and each time my usual use of hand free tasks were no longer possible. This is what I don't understand, all these big tech companies think I want to have a conversation and ask questions to an AI in every part of my life but I do not. All I want is to tell my phone to put in a calendar invite, play a song on an specific app, navigate to somewhere, etc. My android phone triggers itself when listening to podcasts too, which is fun.

You can already ask Gemini those questions on your phone.

This is more popping up magically before you needed to ask.

Both are great (when they work).

Oh really? I switched to an iPhone end of last year (for non-AI reasons), so I may be missing out. Is this on on-device model, or does it still dispatch to hosted Gemini? But I'd imagine that Gemini would have a great integration with Calendar and Gmail.

It being by Google, I have a feeling Google and LEA will be able to use tools on your phone too. They could very conveniently use this for "we didn't analyze your data using AI, we instructed your local AI to analyze your data" so it isn't technically a violation of your rights.

Yup. Fortunately Graphene OS will likely soon run just as well as on their previous hardware. You can re-googlify it as much as you're comfortable with.

I hate the idea you love, so much intrusion in my life.

This seems like a good place to randomly drop my thoughts on switching from a Samsung s20+ to a Pixel 9 Pro. The hardware is excellent in the hand. The display is great, battery life excellent, the UI is snappy, does all the basic things I expect from a quality device. Over all, no huge regrets..... but...

The scrolling in every app is just "different" from the Samsung, and in a "not as good" way. I moved to Pixel with the (as I now realise) very out dated idea that a Pixel phone would allow me MORE customisation and configurability than the Samsung/Galaxy environment. Oh boy, how wrong I was. Turns out there's a whole stack of Samsung bundled apps or ones available through their Galaxy store for free that I'd gotten so used to I thought it was default Android stuff.

I miss:

  - per app volume control  
  - nav bar customisation  
  - lock screen config  
  - many of the good lock apps  
  - shake for torch  
  - the samsung camera app  
  - control of what apps CAN run in the background (the pixel murders everything)  
  - subtle ways that Nova Launcher has problems

I want Google to be better...

Looks like they're still only available in "Huge" and "comically oversized". I guess I can keep buying Pixel 4s until new ones (req for battery) are no longer available.

The size is about what every manufacturer settled on, and what most people want, it is unfortunate that smaller phones are not an option but it doesn't sell.

What bugs me however is that thin body with a huge camera bulge. Do anybody actually like that? It looks ridiculous, and the bulge defeats the point of having a thin phone. If you can't make the camera thinner, make the phone thicker, there is plenty of things you can do with more space: bigger battery, better speaker, more powerful vibration, more robust, etc...

It's interesting how this type of feedback always comes up for phones yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them. It seems part of it may be folks remaining in this group seem much more willing to stick with old devices anyways, helping drive less priority for small sizes on top of already being a smaller market segment. Perhaps there are some other big factors beyond those two things too.

Apple said the mini iPhones underperformed, but they were not some sort of commercial failure. They sold millions of units. Numbers most Android OEMs could only dream of for a single flagship model. Current day Apple is all about optimizing and determined that still wasn't enough, and I imagine the manufacturing for small, specialized display panels certainly took a chunk out of those margins, so Apple decided to pull the plug.

Myself and the people who said we wanted a smaller phone may be a vocal minority but we did buy the small phone when we were offered it. After I used the 12 mini for 2 years, I bought a 14 Pro since no mini was offered in the 14 generation, but I returned it a week later cause it was too big/heavy and bought a 13 mini. These days I'm using a 16 Pro since no mini is offered and the titanium did help a lot with the weight issue, but if they brought back mini phones I'd happily sacrifice the camera for a reasonably sized screen.

The number of people who aren't vocal tech people who actually want a smaller phone is a very small part of the market. In HN-like circles they're a notable minority but among the general population they are a smaller percentage. Especially when you consider huge segments of the market where your phone is your only computing device: a smaller phone is a massive anti-feature in large parts of the world.

Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.

The sales numbers just don't justify it. Like people who pine for manual transmissions: they're vocal in car forums and publications but they're a tiny minority and making one is a money-loser even in the sports car segment.

iPhone 14 Pro = Weight 206 g (7.27 oz)

iPhone 16 Pro = Weight 199 g (7.02 oz)

The weight difference (7 grams) seems negligible

> yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them

I don't buy this. The iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold 6 million units in a year. That's about half the rate of Google's entire Pixel lineup. The market is small, yeah, but it definitely exists. I think a company could quietly make a high quality, straightforward, small Android device with maybe every-other-year hardware updates, and run away with a whole corner of the market all to itself.

You can't just look at units sold, you have to look at net units sold because the version of the product existed.

For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.

I have no idea what those numbers are, though.

> You can't just look at hamburger sales to judge hamburger demand. You have to consider an alternate universe where hamburgers aren't on the menu, then subtract all the people who would have ordered something else for lunch vs going hungry.

I know this probably is how the decisions get made. Especially if the alternative has a higher profit margin. I just have to say I think the world is worse for it.

That's an important analysis but it's answering a different question from whether the product would sell enough to make a nice profit.

And it only works when there are notable deficits in competition. Otherwise a company with less to cannibalize would make the smaller model and get themselves 3-6 million sales.

> For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.

If nothing else, you could still give the mini a higher margin and make some gains that way.

Smaller phones tend to have a lower price point.

If they don't offer a smaller phone, you'll eventually buy a bigger phone. Once you are in camp big phone, you'll probably be back on the 2-5 year device treadmill. And you'll be spending more on the big phones.

Apple is in a continuous state of not giving their customers what they want.

A convertible Macbook with a touch screen and dual MacOS/IOS personalities would sell out. They will never make it because no one will ever buy an iPad again.

A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.

A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.

Apple won't do these things because you'd be happier but spend less.

> A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.

With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.

> A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.

This was the iPhone SE sold for many years until Feb 2025. It started at $430. It’s unfortunate they got rid of it for a 6inch 16E, but it is pretty reasonable on price at $600.

> With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.

If you were a person that likes Apple TV, I imagine it would be nice to have a TV that was just that rather than a TV with whatever smartness the maker insisted on, plus a standalone Apple TV. (Even nicer would be a TV without smarts, but those seem to be extinct)

This thread seems to have a lot of people that love the iPhone mini (me included - I still use my 12 mini).

But from all reports that you can find with a quick search it seems clear that it did not sell well by Apple standards.

I would love them to bring it back and I’m not sure what it is about the Hacker News crowd that makes this phone over-represented. Maybe the tech crowd also uses laptops more, so we think of phones as our “small device” and use other devices more as appropriate?

> by Apple standards

Yeah. The question I'm trying to answer is not "does it make sense for Apple to make a small phone?", but rather "does it make sense for anyone to make a small phone?" I'm using the 13 Mini's sales data as evidence, because it is the one and only small phone made in the past decade or so.

I understand why you'd reach for that data, not a ton of other alternatives... But I'm not convinced that an arbitrarily chosen brand could achieve those sales figures. Especially if it was a new or no-name brand that didn't have a proven track record with software updates and hardware build quality.

Maybe I'm just incredibly naive but I have this small hope that we'll see a return to smaller phones that are trifolds for when you need the real estate.

Bigger phones encourage more user engagement and more screen space to show ads.

Smaller phones are used by people who use it less.

I have only anecdotal data, pretty sure google has the analytics to find that out.

The problem is for many years now the smallest phone available has been getting larger and larger. This has lead small phone enthusiasts to cling to their old phones as long as they can stand it until they are forced to step to a larger model.

I'm exactly that person. Always running an older device and lamenting the lack of small devices. Unfortunately, the mainstream wants big devices, so we all get big devices.

Ultra principled users rarely if ever buy new devices or have predictable purchasing patterns in almost any way. Trying to appease this market is mostly a fools game, as they have learned.

I think it's like how everyone smart knows that small hatchbacks are the only cars worth buying, and everyone smart also knows that only idiots buy new cars. So, all new cars are made for idiots and no small hatchbacks get made :)

It’s a HN meme at this point. For as long as I can remember, almost every single phone announcement on this site inevitably gets a bunch of comments about how it’s too big and how a smaller version would sell like hotcakes. You would think that phone manufacturers would have figured this out by now, but what do they know.

I replaced my 4a (which is not particularly small) after Google nerfed the battery into oblivion, but every once in a while I get it out of its drawer and am always immediately struck by how much better the form factor is. Using a modern phone with a 6+ inch screen feels like trying to tie a knot with one hand.

Oh man, I'm still using my 4a and am quite afraid of what I'll do once it goes caput. There's essentially no real replacement. The S23/24 are kinda okay, but the custom ROM support is meh. Pixels are unbeatable in that regard... It's a shame

I have this experience… until I turn it on and start to try and type stuff on the tiny keyboard or watch stuff on it again. Then I realise I’m glad I moved up a little

I heard about this but for some reason my 4a was never affected. Still works great and I still use it daily.

Really wish they would at least make the Fold a reasonable size when closed. It would scratch my smaller phone itch, and offer a larger screen when I actually do want one. Currently it’s “comically oversized” when folded, and literal tablet when open.

Did you get a chance to try the original Pixel Fold? Definitely not small like an iPhone 13 mini, but smaller than contemporary devices by a good bit!

I just went from a Z Fold 5 to a Z Fold 7 and I hate it for this exact reason.

Z Fold 6 and earlier were slim, one handed use phones when folded, small tablet when opened.

Now it's just a regular phone, and a medium tablet when I open it.

First phone I've ever regretted upgrading to.

Consumers have spoken though. Same as dropping the stylus...

I dont think consumers have as much influence as people believe.

I'd hoped others would copy/iterate the Flip form factor. A friend has one and it does feel great. I just don't get along with the Samsung software suite.

I've enjoyed using a Moto razr+ 2024. If you're interested in trying one check out used devices, their value seems to crater. I think I got mine for ~$300 last year on eBay (while it was still the current gen device)

I'd buy a Flip as soon as I can install GrapheneOS on it.

With the popularity of the Flip I can only hope I won't have to wait too long.

Me crying for a newer Nexus 4, the best device in terms of quality/price ever made by Google

That phone had the worst camera I've ever used. I loved having it because it was XDA custom ROM-friendly, but good lord, that camera....

Best phone I've ever owned and it's not close. Every phone since then has been a compromise, to the point that (in a sunk cost fallacy kind of way) I've just quit caring about phones and just buy whatever the cheapest available unlocked device is. I run them into the ground (way past the end-of-service date) because I know the next one is going to be worse.

The Nexus 4 was a nice phone but I thought the battery life was bad and it also ran hot.

My Moto-X was truly next level. It was oled and could do always on display that didn't need to power the blacks pixels on the screen. It was the first phone to do this. It has voice recognition for unlocking (getting info that you couldn't when the phone was locked). First to do this too since I believe it uses dedicated hardware at the time. It also knew when I was driving to unlock the phone for voice commands also. It was small.

I loved my nexus 4! It's a pity that I at one point could not use it anymore because the updates made it unusable slow.

I agree, but I got the Pixel 5 instead; the 5 is actually smaller while the screen size is larger due to the curved screen corners. It also has a fingerprint sensor, unlike the 4. That being said, I still miss the squeeze-activated flashlight on the 4.

There are no alternatives. S25 is 6.2, and Pixels put the Pro/best version in 6.3, while on Samsung you get a step up to 6.7 and 6.9. Much better specs on almost the same size.

s25 is super manageable, it's the most comfy phone I've had since ever.

I'm afraid you might be right.

Former user of 3a, I upgraded to 6 but it was way too big and heavy, and had a weird mass balance.

I'm now on 8 and it has perfect size and weight IMO (using it with a recommended Spigen case).

Looks like 10 is +17g heavier than 8 and 1-2 mm bigger. Not as big as 6 but almost as heavy.

https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=13979&idPhone2=...

It's sad what they did to the Pixel 4a's battery, because that phone was otherwise comfort perfection

Still using mine on the stock rom. Mine was luckily not effected by the battery problems. Such a good phone.

I still carry my Pixel 5 for this reason. 2 replacement batteries in now and I have a spare sitting on a shelf. That said the Pixel 9A is tempting as it's not much larger than my Pixel 5. I hate that the finger print readers have moved to the front though. The sensor on the back of my 5 is perfectly postioned and also acts like a little track-pad for opening the notification tray. It was a perfect design IMO.

> a spare sitting on a shelf

Does that work for batteries? I feel like unused batteries tend to become unusable batteries.

Would be better in a drawer in the refrigerator. Calendar aging for batteries is mostly about the temperature and storage SoC, which should be in the 30-50% level.

Agreed on battery. I started with a 6a and only ever had the fingerprint in the front. I thought it's well designed and works well (as long as I stick to office job activities.. as soon as you start doing handy works it has its issues.. same for Px7).

I keep thinking of how the Nexus 7 has a 7.02" screen. And how modern phones tend to be 6.1 - 6.9". But never quite 7!

It's not really comparable because the Nexus 7 has a 16:10 screen. Looking just at the size in inches without the aspect ratio is really only part of the picture. The Nexus 7 is like twice the width of a phone.

Dont worry theyll all be pushing 8 now that the barrier has been broken.

Just bought a used iPhone 13 Mini last week to replace my 12 Mini. This has to last me...apparently until the heat death of the universe.

Pixel 5 is about as big, but yes, that's as far as it goes.

Unfortunately that goes for virtually any phone on the market... Sad.

I really liked my Pixel4 but in 2025 the hardware and software are getting too out of date.

Still does everything that I want it to and the photos are still excellent. I don't think I'm missing much.

Until I purchased a Pixel 8a, I thought the same thing.

I discovered that all the newer pant models that I purchased have bigger pockets, so that's not a problem anymore.

I just hope that all the newer body models I purchase have bigger hands.

https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/095D6...

Shot of humans from the future.

That doesn't solve the weight problem.

"Just buy bigger pants" is the 2025 version of "you're holding it wrong"?

The tech specs: https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_10_specs?hl=en-US Says it has vpn capabilities..But then there is a footnote:

>12. Restrictions apply. Some data is not transmitted through VPN.... See https://g.co/pixel/vpn for details.

Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?

On the positive side it lists a 24+ hour battery life!! This is huge for me!! ..but it has a footnote, as well

> 6. Battery life depends upon many factors and usage of certain features will decrease battery life. Actual battery life may be lower. Over time, Pixel software will manage battery performance to help maintain battery health as your battery ages. See https://g.co/pixel/battery-tests and https://g.co/pixel/batteryhealth for details.

Which I guess is understandable

The help section article lists

# Data that isn’t protected by the VPN

Not all network data from your device is protected by the VPN. Examples of data that aren’t protected by the VPN include:

- Tethering traffic

  - This includes USB and Wi-Fi hotspot.

- Wi-Fi calling and other IMS services

- Work profile app traffic

  - This applies if a work profile is configured on your device.

All of which make sense to me except push notifications. My guess is they might mean syncing notifications to e.g. a watch.

I think it might be because push notifications use long-lived connections that are already open when the VPN is turned on.

I bought a Xiaomi 14T and bought my gf a pixel 9.

I like my phone more, but battery life on hers is way better to the point I regret buying mine, it barely lasted a day out when on vacations, and I'm not a super heavy phone user, but look for restaurants, open maps, take pictures, ask Gemini stuff and I'd be at 50% by the time she was at 75.

> Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?

I can't speak to exactly what data doesn't go through their VPN but I know carrier apps tend to not play nice with VPNs, especially the Google Fi app (as it relies on its connection and what IP its on to coordinate switching between their various carrier contracts and that seems to break under a VPN).

And also seemingly Wi-fi calling has been problematic over VPN for as long as I can remember so that's usually a safe bet for exclusion.

That fake zoom with AI is gross ugh

If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo

I find it kinda scary that this is marketed as "zoom" and "recovering details", when the reality is that it quite literally makes stuff up and hopes you won't notice the difference. You and I know that it's completely fake, but we (or at least I) don't even know how much is faked, and probably 99% of people won't even know that it's fake at all.

How long until someone gets arrested because an AI invented a face that looks like theirs? Hopefully lawyers will be know to throw out evidence like that, but the social media hivemind will happily ruin someone's life based on AI hallucinations.

It becomes misleading to even keep calling it "Zoom".

More like "Interpolation" with a pinch of hallucination. I can see this becoming a thing though, it is after all the mythical 'zoom & enhance' from csi...

I actually think it's a cool feature, but it shouldn't be called "zoom". "Zoom & Enhance" would make sense. The UI should also have a clear visual indicator of which modes are pure optical zoom, which (if any) are substantially just cropping the image, and which are using genAI.

agree. allow toggling between the blurry pixels and enhanced version and we're golden.

> If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo

Then don't take pictures with phones because it's been like that since more than half a decade at this point even on midrange phones.

Digital has never been light-to-pixel.

At a minimum, you have demosaicing, dark frame subtraction, and some form of tone mapping just to produce anything you'd recognise as an photo. Then to produce a half-way acceptable image will involve denoising, sharpening, dewarping, chromatic aberration correction - and that just gets us up to what was normal at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays without automatic bracketing and stacking, digital image stabilisation, rolling shutter reduction, and much more, you're going to have pretty disappointing phone pics.

I suspect you're trying to draw a distinction with the older predictable techniques of turning sensor data into an image when compared to the modern impenetrable ones that can hallucinate. I know what you're getting at, but there's not really a clear point where one becomes the other. You can consider demosaicing and "super-res zoom" as both types of super-resolution technique intended to convert large amounts of raw sensor data into image that's closer to the ground truth. I've even seen some pretty crazy stuff introduced by an old fashioned Lanczos-resampling based demosaicing filter. Albeit, not Ryan Gosling[0].

Of course, if you don't like any of this, you can configure phones to produce RAW output, or even pick up a mirrorless, and take full control of the processing pipeline. I've been out of the photography world for a while so I'm probably out of date now, but I don't think DNGs can even store all of the raw data that is now used by Apple/Google in their image processing pipelines. Certainly, I never had much luck turning those RAW files into anything that looked good. Apple have ProRAW which I think is some sort of hybrid format but I don't really understand it.

[0] https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...

By my understanding, demosaicing almost always just "blurs" the photo slightly, reducing high-frequency information. Tone mapping is unavoidable, invisible to most people, and usually doesn't change the semantic information within an image (the famous counterexample is of course The Dress). Phone cameras in recent years do additional processing to saturate, sharpen, HDR, etc., and I find those distasteful and will happily argue against them. But AI upscaling/enhancement is a step further, and to me feels like a very big step further. It's the first time that an automatic processing step has a very high risk of introducing new (and often incorrect) semantic information that is not available in the original image, the classic example being the samsung moon.

It's just crazy that demo they show, imagine the vehicle is actually a truck but you zoom in and it becomes a porsche...

conspiracy tangent, try to take a picture of something you're not supposed to and your phone won't let you ha, well money could be an example which I get the reason (it's printers but that idea)

Agreed, not a fan. The world has enough fakery in it already without people accidentally generating even more (I assume quite a lot of casual users will mistake this zoom for zoom in the traditional sense).

I find it cool, it's pretty much the CSI enhance tool.

You can see the original image.

It's giving "Samsung fake moon". If generative AI is going to make up details why bother zooming in, you could just ask to make up a whole AI slop picture.

This does seem to actually, ya know, do the upscaling though instead of clumsily faking it. Like yeah it's AI with AI failure modes but upscaling models are quite good and have less 'weird artistic' liberties than imagegen models.

The other thing that was annoying me with a cheap phone I bought, it was applying this generic surface to your face so your face didn't have pores but it looked wrong.

Unfortunately these new phones don't fix the main issue with the Pixel: the hardware.

The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.

This affects everything, pixels just don't last nor have great battery life for this reason.And the big issue is they aren't even much cheaper anymore.

I like GrapheneOS, but my pixel just randomly stopped working after being laggy and having the worst battery life on cellular (less than 2h SOT with a 5000mah battery)

It's hard justifying buying another pixel after such a horrible experience, were it not for GrapheneOS I would never consider buying a pixel in the first place.

Heck even the camera isn't that good anymore, most photos are just gray, and the hardware is also very lacking.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-image-processi...

I found Mrwhosetheboss overview really good, he explains how the pixel just comes short in every way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRegbipwCsc

My last two Pixel phones - 6a and 7a - were both "recalled" with battery issues. I got almost a complete refund for both, and got keep the phone (my 7a died a few months after the recall, 6a is still going strong).

I got a 9a to replace them just because I didn't want to have to deal with learning iPhone, but I'm fully expecting the 9a to fail with a similar issue so looking at buying an iPhone soon as a backup so I can get up to speed.

At least you are buying the cheap A series, my experience was with the XL/Pro phones.

The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden. eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(

>The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden.

Seems to be US only? iPhone also has the same thing, so it's probably something that US carriers are pushing, not something from OEMs.

>eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(

OpenEUICC works fine

does this mean no GrapheneOS either?

GrapheneOS found a way to provide eSIM support, but it depends on installing a patched version of Google's proprietary LPA app. I don't know how future-proof that is..

you don't even need google's proprietary esim app. OpenEUICC works fine if you grant it priv-app permissions.

[1] https://gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/OpenEUICC/

It supports eSIM. Two months ago, I bought a Pixel 9a, immediately put GrapheneOS on it, and registered an eSIM.

GrapheneOS support eSim : https://grapheneos.org/usage#esim-support

Graphene supports eSIM https://grapheneos.org/usage#esim-support

better than what they did with pixel[6-9] where they shipped a dual injection crap to save 0.00001c on production and if you traveled 5x and swapped local SIMs, the tray just crumbled and you had to buy another for $20 on ebay because they don't stock it or replace under warranty.

Similar experience with my Pixel 5 but different outcome. My SIM tray crumbled and they sent me a new phone under warranty.

Have they fixed the ability to easily transfer your existing Android data to the new Android phone? I find that every time I upgrade, despite choosing the options to transfer apps/settings, that 90% of the apps I open just greet me with the login screen and I have to set everything up completely from scratch. I remember maybe a handful of apps, I think one was Uber, that were able to transfer everything including the login session. That was truly magic. That's how it should be for all apps. I understand banks might have special security requirements and I already know for Google Wallet, your cards need to be reactivated even if they transfer over, but most apps are not banks.

Blame the app developers, not google. They specifically added a backup/restore mode for device to device transfer, that bypasses backup blacklists[1]. However apps can still opt out by registering a backup agent, and returning no data.

[1] https://developer.android.com/identity/data/testingbackup

Pixel to Pixel has been smooth for me since the Pixel 4. Haven't don't cross manufacturer for a while.

"your" data

I am considering switching to Google, I am getting annoyed by Apple more and more, but the critical feature for me is AI assistant.

I am the first to criticize the LLM hype and I do not expect much out of them - but the fact that I cannot get Siri to turn a single light in my room instead of all of them is just FUBAR from my perspective. Siri is such garbage at this point that the gap between it and ChatGPT app is unbelievable. I can't even get it to reliably call people in my contacts, meanwhile my 4 year old can talk to ChatGPT in Croatian. Google Gemini seems to be on par so their assistant should be at least semi competent.

I switched to the previous google phones (9) for the folding phone, even though I'm not too much of a fan of the android experience I cannot switch back to Apple right now because:

* the AI integration on google phones is just amazing

* the folding phone has insane screen estate on-demand anywhere any time, I wouldn't be able to go back to a single screen

> the AI integration on google phones is just amazing

Genuinely curious, what's your favorite aspect of AI on the Pixel? I'm on a 9 pro, coming from a Pixel 6 and a Pixel 3 before it. I don't think I'm ever using AI on this thing, so I'm interested in hearing where it turns up for you.

What do you like about the AI integration? I'm considering leaving iPhone just to have basically native chatGPT integration, assuming gemini works that way, and assuming it can read and write to my calendar and access other personal data.

https://imgur.com/a/sDJTiyK

That 100x zoom looks a bit... sloppy...

The car has one wing mirror and the rear tire is wider than the front. Edit: this might be real, see child comments.

Is there someone who knows more about cars who can confirm that this is in fact, not real?

This looks to me like something resembling a 65 mustang.

If you look at some 65 mustangs they only had a driver side wing mirror as that was the law back then. The wider rear tire also makes a lot of sense, as it's a RWD car that needs wider rear tires to support the traction.

If the car in the photo is a 65 mustang, I think the AI did pretty good.

This is like using a 6-fingered person in an AI imaging advert.

This is an old classic car/truck. Only one mirror was somewhat common back then. Also, wider rear tires are not unusual. Especially on anything with a bed, since you want additional loading capabilities in the back.

What looks off the most is the fact that the blinkers under the bender aren't even remotely close to looking similar. The rest of the car could pass as a restomod, but the fact that so many things are asymmetrical between the two sides just looks completely wrong. Blinkers, hood clips, mirror-no-mirror, etc.

That looks vaguely similar to a 60s Mustang (although also has a lot of details that are wrong) and old muscle cars like that often have wider rear tires for better traction

I think the rear looking bigger is an artifact of the zoom, where your brain expects it to look smaller, but it's actually the same size due to the extreme cropping

No, it's definitely wider in the photo. The rear tire is about double the width of my mouse pointer while the front tire is about 1x the width.

That said, as other commentators have mentioned, it might also be wider in real life, so not necessarily an artifact at all.

> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.

Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.

Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets. At least round the corners or add little ramps. I guess this is what happens when design folk are allowed to trump engineers.

>Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.

As much as I loathe the consumerism of buying the latest phone every year, I realized that if the trade-in value is good enough, it's a pretty good strategy in terms of overall technology spend.

With iPhones, I upgraded every third generation. With Pixels, I went from 3 to 6 to 9, but given that I'm on Google Fi, I get a $450 discount on the phone, and I can get a base Pixel 10 Pro for $217, after trade-in. I got a surprisingly generous trade-in on my Pixel 6 when I bought the 9, and buying the Pixel 3 with Google Fi was pretty cheap too.

The last computer I bought was an M1 Max Macbook Pro w/ 36gb of RAM and a 1TB drive, for $2499, in 2023 (thank you B&H). Hopefully it'll be a long time before I'm paying that much for a phone.

> This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.

I'm interested to hear more about this, because it's always interesting to understand how other people interact with things who have different use cases or usage models.

How tight are your jeans, and how do you fit anything else in your pocket if something ~1in thick doesn't fit comfortably (without having to force the pocket open in a way that would require a "ramp")?

Are you using your back pockets? I have never once understood the utility of those; I have no desire to sit on anything in my pockets.

A lot of people buy clothes for their looks with minimal weighting towards functionality (or rather that is the functionality). If you've got a body in reasonable nick then tight pants can look good.

The traditional solution to poor pockets is a purse or bag. Phones are interesting in that they can demand attention and that they are probably the most used item that people carry around with them. Thus people compromise their lines/comfort to actually use the faster accessibility of pockets. Probably explains the popularity of ridge wallets and key wallets too.

I don't wear tight jeans and I've come to loathe having to put my phone in my pants pocket. If you're walking around a lot, the feeling is just annoying, you can feel it pressing on your leg the whole time. When I sit down, the bunching feeling is even worse, so I immediately put the phone on the table.

This wasn't an issue when phones had 4.7"-5"-inch screens. Nowadays the phone goes into the cargo pocket if I'm wearing shorts, or back pocket if I'm walking.

Not that I'm trying to justify the prices, but I'm interested by the take that a phone should cost less than a computer. To me, the phone has an actual camera and is significantly smaller (and, if you are talking desktop, has a screen) so should cost more for the same sort of power. Of course, there are phones and computers at all different prices so it's hard to compare.

It's smaller, so it should cost less, not more. It's 2025, miniaturization isn't that expensive. It's less screen and less battery than a laptop, cooling the CPU can be done passively because it's so low-powered, it has less RAM and less flash and fewer ports and a simpler mechanical design, no keyboard or touchpad... it's a slab of glass with a plastic/aluminum case containing a PCB, battery, and camera.

Written on my $250 Motorola

> It's smaller, so it should cost less

That is... not how the physical world works. The laws of physics hate the large and the small. Or perhaps less glibly parameters do not scale equally. Making a phone is more difficult and expensive than making a laptop for the same reason a 30ft tall human would break their own legs attempting to walk.

To put it another way: A thread rolling screw machine can churn out 12mm/0.5" bolts all day long for a penny each. But if you want to make tiny screws for small pocket watches you're going to pay more (relatively) even though that tiny screw contains way less metal than the larger bolt and the operation is similar. A .00001" error in the larger bolt threads doesn't matter. That much error makes the tiny screw completely unusable. Making a thread-forming die with less than .00001" error is very difficult and expensive and the one for smaller screws accumulates error faster relative to allowable error so must be replaced more often. The steel is just as hard in both bolts but the form of the tiny one is proportionally much thinner.

And similarly if you want a 6m/12ft long bolt you are going to pay a lot more than just the proportional cost of the extra metal because finding machines that can even put that much tool pressure on the dies is not easy. It has to be lifted with a crane. It is just more difficult in every way.

Miniaturization is more expensive. Water and dust proofing is more expensive.

For most things there is a sweet range where cost is lowest and utility highest. Prices go up on either end of that middle ground.

By this logic a Ferrari should cost less than a Toyota Camry because it has less seats and luggage space.

I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.

As a side note, computers DO cost more than phones, in general. You can barely get a graphics card for that price these days, so you’re not really comparing apples to apples if your computer is that cheap.

> I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.

Would you like to list those for the phone? I don't think your analogy is fair at all.

While I mostly agree with you that it is counterintuitive to have mobile costlier than laptop, this year's Pixel Pro models have 16GB RAM. That is better than most entry level laptops on the market right now.

The Pro having more ram than the average entry level laptop doesn't imply very much.

When I search '16gb laptop' on Amazon the first result is $320 and the third result is $220. The first one also has 512GB of storage, and I can upgrade to 24GB of ram and 1TB of storage for only $50. And it has a plenty good CPU with two fast cores and four slow cores.

The upgrade part is especially nasty for phones. Laptops and phones use the same production lines for ram and flash chips, so no price excuses there. And you can fit 2TB into a microSD these days. But if I want 1TB on my Pixel I have to start with a Pro and then add an extra $450.

> It's less screen and less battery than a laptop,

Phones have higher resolution, higher refresh rate, and brighter screens at the price point vs a $1000 laptop. (Also higher density screens are harder to make, 12" 1080p panels cost nothing, phone screens are often bespoke resolutions.)

RAM is the same or higher at the $1k price point - 16GB.

Fewer ports sure, but most ports are USB-C anyway, the cost of the connector is not the expensive part.

The mechanical design I'll push back on as well, phones are expected to put up with a lot more physical abuse than laptops, and also be resistant to dust and water. You can dunk a pixel phone in 3 feet of water for half an hour, good luck doing that with a laptop. As someone who got to watch the ME's sitting next to my team work on making our product water resistant, that process sucks, it takes multiple iterations ($, and time) and it is non-trivial to get right.

Tear downs of the Pixel 10 are obv not available yet, but the estimated BOM for a Pixel 9 is ~$400 USD. Figure ongoing support (7 years!), all the cloud services that come with it, and all the other costs that went into making it (the army of engineers, an entire OS team, all the apps that come with it, etc), the $800 I paid for it isn't half bad.

Edit: Oh and phones also have a modern miracle of an RF stack in them. My phone can hold onto a BT connection across my yard and through 2 brick walls! And they do this with barely any space to but the antennas. Meanwhile laptops can run antennas willy-nilly with the absurd amount of volume they have to work with.

(Apple's Laptops also have really good wireless performance, but the base models aren't trying to support the three generations of cellular protocols and standard that phones do.)

The high resolution is a waste of money. The camera is a waste of money. The number of buttons is small. The issues like a hinge are non existant. The ability to pop out the battery is the kind of complicated thing I would expect from someone competent like a laptop maker.. The lack of Ram slots and now other slots is simplifying.

Really Apple made the game field very simple and its no problem making a perfectly good $50 phone. Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems. Basically forcing you to buy a "middle level" phone that has all the pointless features only a teenager has time/eyes for to get the minimum security updates.

> The camera is a waste of money.

Camera is the main selling point for new phones. It may not be for you, but for most customers, camera performance is the key differentiator.

Modern smartphone camera modules are incredibly high bandwidth. They are hooked up to custom chips that handle everything from video encoding to the massive amount of post-processing it takes to make those tiny sensors output high quality images. Up until the last few years, cameras were regularly held back by the media processing ICs available.

I suggest you look at teardowns of a modern high performance phone. The telephoto lens alone are marvels of engineering that involve a large number of high precision parts, all of which have to stand up to years of horrible abuse unlike anything real professional gear would ever see.

Camera features are pretty much the sole reason why people pay extra for higher end phones.

> Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems.

Google has spent years putting systems in place to allow for longer support periods, they had to write a bunch of abstraction layers first, hardware abstraction not being something Linux is exactly famous for.

Also those small low cost phone manufacturers don't offer lifetime support because they cannot afford to keep engineers and engineering resources around for 7+ years. Have you ever worked on a team trying to support multiple builds of old hardware that use completely different driver stacks? I have, it sucks. After a year people just forget how to even setup a dev environment for the previous version, test hardware breaks down or just gets lost, tooling gets out of date and doesn't work anymore (or has conflicts with newer tooling installed on a dev machine).

Apple can do it because apple controls the entire stack from top to bottom, and because they have an army of engineers devoted to just one thing. Your average Kickstarter Boutique Phone Company has maybe a dozen engineers and they have almost no control over the underlying platform.

> The high resolution is a waste of money.

Once resolutions and refresh rates get higher you can start to do things that make readability better for everyone, but even ignoring those techniques, higher refresh rates feel better, and a wider color gamut makes everything look better.

> The number of buttons is small.

Try making a button survive water, sweat, sun screen (which royally messes up a lot of finishes) and pocket lint some time. Also it has to feel good to press even through a protective case, and it needs to be durable over 5+ years. Again, I've been on teams doing these things, it is not easy. The big phone makers have been doing it for decades now, and they are good at it, but "we've solved it" is also why you don't see large changes in button layouts, shapes, materials, etc, now days.

To give an example of just a volume button - You need to setup a robotic test fixture that presses the button thousands upon thousands of times. This needs to run on each of your engineering revisions that comes in. You hopefully run it on a decent sample size of devices (ideally ones you've sent engineers overseas to pull off the lines directly to avoid the factory choosing golden samples!). Spray the device down with a variety of substances, test again, and you'll need lab managers and engineers to program and run all the different robotic harness tests.

Making quality durable goods is hard. Making a $200 smart phone that'll fall apart in a couple years is easy.

(Now even with all of this, I've had 3 Google made/branded phones that failed due to wide spread hardware issues....)

Also Google stuff always lacks SD card slots and have tiny storage. The $250 Motorola can add a $50 1 TB SD Card, which is enough to fit your entire music collection, all of wikipedia, and an offline ad-free routable map of the world from OSM, and still have probably like 700 GB left over for photos/videos. Google meanwhile charges $100 for a 128 GB storage upgrade. Probably because they want to funnel you into their cloud storage, want you to use their online maps/music services, etc.

Phone cameras are also absolute trash anyway, and pulling up some comparisons in Google Photos right now, I'm fairly certain that my Pixel 6a takes obviously worse photos than my Nexus 5x did 10 years ago, even comparing high light for the 6a to low light for the 5x. I'll probably buy a Motorola when my current phone dies because the only ostensible reason to buy a Pixel is the camera. Or I suspect the real big-brained solution lives in the handheld gaming PC space.

How reliable is an SD card that size?

They're no less reliable than 128GB cards. The bottleneck is likely going to be whether the phone's filesystem can actually index 1TB worth of files without crashing. No such problems on a real computer.

Which motorola?

Pro tip: Buy the second-to-latest generation. Costs half as much and it was literally the best that even billionaires could have purchased just a year ago.

I always amortize the coat of the phone over the months of security updates remaining. Sometimes the last gen is a better deal, on a per month basis, sometimes the new one is only a couple bucks a month more. i dont mind a few more dollars per month.

Few people are paying those prices. Cell providers sell these at far less: on the order of 60% of Googles retail price.

Well, minor nit- cell providers offer it for 60% Google’s price to start[0], while locking it into a phone contract that subsidizes it. This is effectively bundling a loan for the hardware with your data plan. That price is more of a down payment on said loan.

[0] actually in the US at least they’ll frequently offer it for “free” with a new plan, that of course locks the phone to said plan.

AI assisted zoom is interesting. Will it invent license plate numbers, guess what faces look like, or just output high resolution blurs?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the AI is using video (i.e. multiple frames) to put together enough information for the zoom to be as accurate as possible. That said, I don't know if there's enough information to do 100X.

They already have this on the pixel 9s with their 20x super zoom. I haven't noticed any weird artifacts like this from my usage. It just appears as indistinguishable camera fuzz - hard to describe.

> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.

So it's not just a crop. It's a crop + hallucinate.

My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station. With the memory and CPU this phone could easily replace my work laptop (vscode and ssh for the most part). Sadly I haven't found any phone that would make this possible (Samsung Dex doesn't count because it's proprietary)

> My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station

Sounds like you're thinking of the stock Pixel 10. Google worked with Samsung to bring the Dex experience to upstream Android, and their Linux VM work is almost fully baked in Android 15. Running VSCode and ssh can be done today with a Pixel phone plugged into a USB-C hub, keyboard, mouse and a monitor. I don't know why Google isn't promoting this capability yet,

I think they're waiting for the the big point release this fall.

When they rolled out 16 earlier this spring almost nothing changed from the user's perspective because it was just shipping a lot of the underlying supporting apis that aren't exposed via user accessible things at this point.

I guess that's better than nothing! Still, it wouldn't allow connection to a thunderbolt dock with 2 displays, network and peripherals I guess.

Ideally it would run stock Linux with Android apps via waydroid.. reliance on banking apps makes this fully converged experience using only open source a bit of a pipe dream :(

Android 16 will have this (at least for a single external display): https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/developer-...

Looks like a minor improvement to the pixel 9 series. Honestly, that's fine, I'm pretty happy with my Pixel 9 Pro.

The built-in magsafe charging magnets are a nice addition, although a case with magnets in it works for me for now.

Of course, the #1 feature I'd like to see is expandable storage, which Google seems to be strangely against. #2 would be a headphones jack - Google has already reversed course on that one once, but another reversal seems unlikely.

Oh, and it's too late to edit, but I just noticed they removed the physical SIM and force you to use an eSIM now. That feels like a significant downgrade.

Yeah, I am on Pixel 9 pro too and quick trade in check shows that upgrade would cost net ~500$(256Gb). Arguably ~250$ if buying 10 would extend the gemini subscription for a year -- not sure about the verbiage of the terms here.

100x "composite" zoom is nice but not sure if it's worth it.

As much as I'd love if phones still had headphone jacks, the inertia sure seems to be going the other direction. I fully anticipate the power port will be the next to go and wireless charging will be the only way to charge (and I don't want that either).

> For instance, when you're calling an airline, it can automatically find your flight details from your email and display it during your phone call.

Is this really the best example usecase they can think of? How often does an individual call an airline? I'm sure in aggregate they get a lot of calls, but I don't think I've ever had to.

It just seems really weird that this is the top example of on-device AI. The other examples mentioned, like "finding the right photos to share with a friend", seem more relatable.

> How often does an individual call an airline?

It's a very simple example that people can see the value for right away. It also acts as a good placeholder for hotel, car rental agency, restaurant, etc. Any place you'd have a ticket/reservation for that you might need to call.

It is odd that they considered that a common usecase.

Perhaps they really wanted to show a good looking widget and I suppose flight info was the best candidate.

I have had some calls with family or friends about an upcoming flight where this could've saved a few seconds.

Would I want to save a few seconds in exchange for their processing of my whole conversation even if offline? That's another story.

I just want a little phone that I can use with one hand and doesn't stretch out my pocket...

If you own a pixel phone remember to do regular emergency call tests. They have a bug that has stuck around for generations but for some reason they get a pass.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1ano09x/pixel_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jzo5hu/pixel_...

> regular emergency call tests

This sounds like a huge waste of time for the dispatch operators if everyone starts to do such tests regularly.

On a similar note, it would be great (especially for these tests) if carriers provided a non-emergency / echo number that gets treated the same way as an emergency call (works w/o SIM card, gets preferential treatment, ...)

When phones are no longer considered reliable to make emergency calls in certain places, what alternative is there?

Sure it sucks for the operator to get a call, "Sorry, just testing to make sure emergency calling works, thanks, bye" and it would also suck, probably even more, for an individual to not be able to make an emergency call. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, hopefully someone improves the system, lol.

You can't just say A less bad then B so we should all do A.

You have to consider number of A * badness A vs number of B * badness B.

If thousands of pixel users start doing test calls in mass you will actually start causing that unable to make an emergency call issue.

And then maybe we will act and hold Google accountable for having a potentially lethal bug on their phone.

Frequently calling the alarm number without a valid reason can be fined up to 6700 euro, or result in 3 months detention here.

So if Pixel still has this bug, that's just another reason not to buy a Google product.

What I've done is write the dispatch center a friendly email explaining what I want and suggesting that they choose any off-peak time they find convenient.

A few days later, they called me and said that I could make the test call right now. Worked fine.

What's the threshold by which a phone isn't considered reliable enough to make emergency calls?

I've never personally had an emergency call fail on a Pixel device, and I don't know the broader statistics of how often they fail for other people compared to other phones. Do you?

For Australia, it needs to be on a whitelist.

https://isthisphoneblocked.net.au/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-03/brand-new-phones-unab...

One of the most important features of the phone. A huge reason to not buy if there is any uncertainty. You might die if it is not working.

And here i was thinking it was irresponsible to have a decorative phone in my house because someone might try to call 911 with it in need. but these guys are selling phones that randomly may or may not? and people are still like but but apple?

> It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.

Unclear what "intelligently recover and refine" means here, and I'd like to make a request of people who might also be unclear yet influenced by this idea...

If you build features that sound like this into the image-capturing stage (from the user perspective), and your target users include serious photographers who care about authenticity, please be sure to make any kind of "generative"/inferencing of image details be optional.

And fall back to nth previous generation of sensor processing, autofocusing, and anti-shake technology -- where the compute still influences the images, but errs on the side of missing/fuzzy detail rather than fabrication.

Imagine the priorities of photojournalists as a category of user -- not only users who want appealing snapshots, selfies, or professional editorial fashion/lifestyle shoots.

There's still a place for consciously fabricating/enhancing/fixing in interactive post-processing, when you you choose to do it, and it's clear to you what is being done.

> Unclear what "intelligently recover and refine" means here

Obviously genai upscaling. The details are not there on the original photo.

What is the best way for a Brazilian to trade in a pixel 8 pro for the newer model?

I want to know how the TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compares to Samsung-manufactured Tensor processors and also how TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compare to TSMC-manufactured Snapdragon processors. Samsung's Tensors (also Exynos) had the fame of getting superhot. I want to know if these problems persist in new Tensor chips.

Don't hold your breath, the tensor g5 is slower than a snapdragon 8 Gen 3

Google is being deceptive with their zoom demo.

They zoom from 100x to 0.5x and present 0.5x as "what it actually looks like."

They're making 100x zoom appear twice as impressive by using ultra-wide (0.5x) as fake 'normal' vision.

Kind of moot anyway; 100x zoom is equivalent to a 2400mm lens (with no stabilization assist). If you can hand-aim that on target, you're an elite marksman.

I'm pretty sure that was just an accident, if you pinch all the ways out it goes seamlessly to the wide angle lens.

0.5x is 0.5x, not "what it actually looks like."

The deceptive part is using AI to creatively fill in gaps in the picture, and saying "recover and refine intricate details" when the details are actually hallucinated, making that blue car look like a drawing of a toy.

Yay, it has native wireless charging via Qi2, AKA Pixelsnap. The rumors on the internet were that you needed a special case to use the wireless charging. But that is not true after all and those rumors were false.

You can just plop a Qi2 charger right on your phone and it will charge! Only bummer is that the 10 pro charges at 15w while the 10 pro XL charges at 25w. And I really prefer the smaller phones that fit in my pockets. Not some huge monster phone.

I recently discovered Pixel 7 (maybe older too, I dunno) is actually Qi compatible it just doesn't have the magnets to lock in place.

But if you have a case with those magnets in, it works great. And it turns out QuadLok cases (which I can generally recommend for cyclists) are compatible.

So now I just plonk my phone against the wall and it charges on an Apple MagSafe charger I mounted. This is actually really nice, turns out it's really convenient to have your phone in a fixed position, also not taking up any surface space!

Always thought wireless charging was a bit of a gimmick but with the magnets it's genuinely useful.

The hardware and features seem great, but I'm not gonna buy another pixel phone. I've had a pixel 8 for 2 years the stability of the software has gone down so much. I frequently have an unresponsive UI, requiring me to turn off my phone with the side buttons. I also have had many issues with the keyboard and it not responding when using chrome, requiring me to kill chrome and restart it.

It seems like Google only tests on their latest device when releasing android because people I know who always get the latest phones don't have these problems. It's a very poor customer experience. It's the phone experience of an old super car. It's fast and does lots of cool things, but it feels like the wheels are gonna come off at any minute.

Same here (on a Pixel 7). Apart from there being absolutely no reason to upgrade, really, even with the generous trade-in values offered by Google around the time of release. I kind of miss the time when a new smartphone release was exciting.

Looks slick.

> automatically find your flight details

I appreciate this but can they please go beyond search and instead legitimately find me cheapest price and overall best time to fly? Or strategies to find cheaper fight using different plans or maybe integrated credit point I have, coupons?

I'd love to see AI saving me big money and doing all the hassle for me.

Google launched a new tool for finding flights: https://www.google.com/travel/flights/deals.

More details at: https://blog.google/products/search/google-flights-ai-flight....

If you mean impossible to hold without the silicone case (not included) then I concur based on my experience with the older Pixels :-]

I really wish they'd upgrade the Pro Fold to have the Pro camera system. :(

I don't know why they assume that someone buying a $2000 phone doesn't want the best available camera.

You can't install any of the AI models on the Pixel 9 if you have the bootloader unlocked. Wouldn't be surprised that Gemini Nano or Pro Res Zoom didn't work, either.

12 years later and still no availability in Middle East or Africa. Only available in 30-something countries. Google can't figure out retail, while upstart Chinese companies hit the global market immediately.

If you buy it in a country that's not officially supported you don't get 5G, most unique features, and of course no warranty, support, or repairs.

I've got a 7a International version and 5G works in my unsupported country (New Zealand). Not sure what other unique features don't work.

However it is nuts how they just can't be bothered supporting so many countries.

It's a shame the Pixels don't have IR sensors. One of the most underrated features that some Androids have - I was in a hotel in Poland this year and it had Aircon in the room (and was rather warm), but there was no remote. The IR sensor on my phone saved my butt as it could turn on the AC!

There's no end of times that the IR sensor has come in useful one way or another.

> Magic Cue ... to proactively offer the right information at the right time

That's one way to justify a permanent snoop on everything you are doing and saying in all your messages and calls.

Even if your data is kept on device, their telemetry could still reveal your activity and patterns.

I hope there's an improved screen. I bought a 9 Pro XL with hopes of running GrapheneOS but the PWM on the Pixel was terrible. Instant headaches. I can more or less get by ok with recent iPhone screens but the Pixel screen didn't work at all for me.

Heard a rumor that Google was going to take eye strain seriously for this version. Hope that's true.

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I really like their AI strategy. It’s much stronger than Apple’s, which seems to be nonexistent. The problem I have is I really like my Apple Watch Ultra. There is nothing like it in the android space and I can’t rely on Google. Actually caring about building a great product the way Apple does. Googles hardware products always seem to be some strategic wedge play to keep the ecosystem in check. They don’t seem to exist because they really care about building the very best watch, or phone, or whatever and at any point they might just cancel the effort.

> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.

YES! Here we talk.

The fact we can now host a version of an AI model, and make sure everything is processed locally and is not sent to the cloud is the best feature of those phones. I just hope that data do not leave the phone OR are encrypted to be stored in Google servers...

That camera bump is huge. I guess that's how you get the great zoom?

Phone cases are doing heavy lifting to smooth out the back of this phone.

On the other hand I much prefer the full-width bump than a corner bump. It helps when holding your phone (a ledge for your fingers) and means that the phone doesn't rock around when used on a table.

I made a leather pouch with a belt loop for my Pixel 6. Great when travelling or hiking. The camera band sits above the edge of the front of the pouch with the 'lid' covering that when the pouch is closed with a tuck lock.

The full-width band is just perfect for grabbing the phone and lifting it out of the form-fitting pouch, and doubles as a sort of safety preventing it from slipping from your grip.

Atleast these type of bumps don't cause the phones to wobble.

I'd be curious to know if they did any surveys/research on how many people use a case or not. If the vast majority do (my anecdata-based hunch), why not just thicken the phone to add battery and use a thinner case rather than just having the case space the back of the phone out to be flat?

My partner got a Pixel 9a and it's nice that they went completely flat on that one, though it's obviously almost a straight rip-off of the recent non-pro iPhones aesthetically (not a bad thing imo).

> why not just thicken the phone to add battery

Weight. Many people already don't like how heavy their phones are.

Good point. Even my regular iPhone 13 is the heaviest phone I've ever owned and it's kind of annoying in that it actually hurts to drop on your face if you're vegging out watching a video while laying down.

Too bad it can't be smoothed out (with more battery or something) to start with.

That bump is more than 1/4 of the phone's total thickness. This is becoming comical.

The camera bump (rather than a full-size thickness increase) makes the phone feel less massive, especially in your pocket.

I don't need it to "feel" less massive. Most wallets are thicker and I don't hear anyone complain.

not sure if you mean clip-on cell phone wallets (I assume that people that don't want a thick cell phone don't add a wallet since it makes their cell phone too thick), or actual wallets... plenty of people complain about those:

https://lifehacker.com/how-can-i-downsize-my-ridiculously-la... https://veryexcellenthabits.com/downsize-ridiculously-enormo... https://www.reddit.com/r/onebag/comments/5blfkt/my_wallet_is...

And a thick wallet causes enough health problems for it to be called "Fat Wallet Syndrome".

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fat_Wallet_Syndro...

All I really want to know is CPU/other efficiency and battery life.. If I use G1-G5 with exactly the same app that G1 CPU was adequate for the theoretical efficiency for the CPU is maybe improving 20% a generation but that manifests as some worthwhile (battery time) result or is drowned out by stupid features like even higher screen refresh?

I wonder how they'll screw it up this time. I have to deal with a pink line down my Pixel 8's screen, because while there is an extended warranty for that issue, you need to flash the stock firmware (wiping the device) to put it in "service mode" so uBreakIFix can do their thing.

That's the problem with pixel. Everytime I try to switch from iPhone, ever year's line up has some glaring GC issue. I've tried every year since the 2XL. Most recent is the 9 Pro XL (only the XL size) the camera bar falling off.

The pixels could be amazing phones if Google could fix their crappy QC and invest in some actual customer support.

People like Apple - you can go to a physical store and get support. You can get AppleCare+ and have accidental damage replacements, battery replacements, etc just take it to the store.

Google doesn't have that, they don't have a physical presence, and it's nearly impossible to get a human and if you do, they are really stingy about RMAs.

Wow. Either you're extremely unlucky or I'm extremely lucky.

I'm still using my Pixel 6 pro and have had zero hardware issues with this phone or my previous pixel 4.

You have bought and returned new Pixel phones every year for the last 7 years due to QC? That sounds like a tall tale.

I'm really picky. Creaks, screen issues (got the line down the middle of the screen on a 2XL, 3, and 6), speaker went out on 5, cell radio would randomly stop working on the 8, having to reboot multiple times per day. Most recently a 9 Pro XL, flexed more than my wife's, and the screen creaked when pressed (which my wife's didn't). The camera bump falling off didn't happen to me, but I've seen it on others.

If I'm going to pay Apple prices, I expect the same level of quality. I really want to like the pixel, but I can't trust Google's quality until they prove otherwise. Every generation of Pixel has had some sort of QC problem.

I'm delighted to see that they don't make you get the biggest phone in order to get the best cameras. I've been using Pixels since the Pixel 3 and always feel like I'm making compromises in the camera department in order to get a phone that will actually fit in my hand/pocket.

I'm curious what kind of performance the Tensor G5 would have with llama.cpp, compared to a 16gb desktop gpu.

Interesting phones, but the snark in the live video wasn’t that amazing. Aren’t the products enough in and out of themselves to be attractive?

Complaining about Apple walled garden, but only able to pull off their AI help if you are part of their Google garden and a lot of it on the cloud.

Same for Pixel Snap being MagSafe (sounds like a camera feature at first).

7 years of software updates promised, that’s actually nice.

I love Android, besides a few accessibility issues, especially when typing to Gemini and TalkBack not speaking the reply, but I don't like how sluggish TalkBack is on Pixel phones. I had the 8 and hated that.

I wonder will this make some of the older Pixels (say 7-9) cheaper on eBay. I have been toying with the idea of replacing my Samsung S10 for ages now, and the battery life is really starting to degrade so I might pull the trigger soon.

I wonder if these new devices will finally have support for the elusive APV codec.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Professional_Video

The link you posted says Android 16 support. Why wouldn't Pixel run it?

This codec needs hardware support to be practical (ie recording live video rather than just transcoding). So far, I think that's only available on certain Samsung models.

I'm not an Android user, so pardon me if this is a stupid thing to say, but it's weird to me that these phones apparently have some new UI unique to them. I thought Android was just Android. Won't other Android phones get this update?

Android is not just Android. The device vendors have to customize it to fit their devices by including drivers for example. Device vendors have the option to change the look pretty heavily, Samsung TouchWiz was infamous, Chinese vendors also offer very customized versions, including making it look like iOS. What you are seeing is material design 3 "expressive" which will be rolled out in the next minor Android version and Google apps

Not all phones capable of running Android (everything?) have the hardware to host the local LLM models at a useful level of performance.

Only one question. Can you disable the stupid date on the home screen. No I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a phone and then load another launcher on it. Just hire someone competent at programming to make this an option.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/132929200?hl=en

Insanely hideous.

They look like Bender from the back. "Bite my shiny metal phone!"

the camera bump you mean? otherwise they're almost identical to iPhones, sans dynamic island.

I still have a Samsung Galaxy S8. It runs fine. I don't really need more from a phone. Maybe I am missing something but I really cannot see myself getting a new phone.

If we can somehow put AI agent locally on a phone that could use tools (cough: APIs) I think it will be the wildest revolution after the invention of a smart phone. How about a truly smart phone!

I'm sorry, is that car in the 100X zoom even a real model?

So 16GB of Ram will be the norm from now on?

LGTM

Hardware: looks nice. Software: big NO. Anything from Google is a red flag for me.

If there was a hypothetical phone with this hardware with iOS, that would be really nice.

Try Pixels with GrapheneOS. Most of that software is still "from Google" technically, but it's reworked in some important ways, especially on a service level. For example, by default it has no Google apps or services, you can install Play store sandboxed, etc.

What about a degoogled OS? Whenever my current pixel phone dies I'm going more private.

Why do we need brand new models every year?

So that people that buy that year can get the latest improvements

They're not releasing them on your personal upgrade schedule

Because even if your phone only breaks every 5 years on average do you want to get a new 5 year old phone because your last one died right before the refresh cycle? Having regular releases means that when you do get the phone you have a relatively up-to-date device with latest hardware improvements. You don't need to upgrade yearly because they release a new phone yearly.

You probably don't, as your current phone ought to last for years. But hardware manufacturers, like software developers, benefit from faster release cycles.

People are on different phone cycles. Even if most people update once every 5 years, it only takes 5 distinct groups to warrant a yearly new phone.

That 100X zoom example is pretty amazing

Yes, but hard to know how much detail is hallucinated out of thin air.

The famous "enhance" of CSI is finally here!

Judging by existing implementations, all of it.

In fairness it's AI "upscaled". What kind of car that is isn't actually present in the original image's data, it's a best guess from the AI.

It's probably impossible to use as well. Just a 10x is fairly difficult to control.

Plus AI upscaling. Fuck no.

Shouldn't be impossible. Samsung already offers Space Zoom which has a good UX and a LOT of image stabilization so your hands shaking isn't magnified by 100x.

As far as AI upscaling though, agreed. At least make a setting so we can do our own A/B tests.

Ever since magic eraser we've been slip-sliding down the slippery slope that ends with all our picture memories being half-AI-generated with the same "look" based on whatever flavor generated them at the time.

Yeah that. I'm not up for that. The post-processing is bad enough on my iPhone that I bought a mirrorless camera to use instead.

can these guys now actually make phones that don't overheat or have battery problems ?

No fold phones???

EDIT: https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-10-pro-fold/...

^ this should be the main post

I hope they stop superglueing the batteries inside the phones.

I know it's a petty thing, but I quit using the Pixel when they forced an unmovable and unhideable search bar onto the bottom of the homescreen.

Can anyone report if that's still the case? I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.

You can just use a custom launcher.

I've been using Nova Launcher for so long I couldn't tell you what the normal homescreen looks like right now.

I was gonna say it's definitely not there on mine but I just checked and it is.

Amazing how good my mental adblocker is for things I've been looking at every day for 2 years.

its still there on my pixel 9 in the stock/default launcher, but you can still use an alternative launcher if you like. many of those do not have the bar or let you toggle it off.

Nova launcher is fantastic.

> I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.

If you switched to a different phone, it is using a different launcher. If your only complaint is the launcher, it doesn't make sense to change the whole phone.

The look of the phone reminds me of Bender from Futurama.

Yet again, Google announces another lineup of phones where a vast majority of the announcement is about software features that could be implemented on existing devices, highlighting the wastefulness of the yearly release cycle.

> Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.

Reminds me of https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...

I guess we'll never be able to trust any photos taken with a Pixel 10 or above.

Yeah.

So basically the trend now is to stop actually improving things and have AI make shit up to fill the gaps and pretend we're improving things.

"Smoothing" of photos has already been on by default in Android and iOS for years at this point. You'd need to go way back to "trust" any of them.

I look forward to the news stories about people getting lost because they used 100x "zoom" to read a distant sign.

Getting confused by distant street signs with a $1K GPS device in your pocket. Come now.

Really hope that can be disabled.

So far all the camera features are available through the API (and not hidden behind drm), so you could potentially use something like ProShot.

How so? I was under the impression that gCam uses proprietary algos.

Battery life looks great

> They feature our biggest batteries

That's the only thing I found on there. Doesn't even say if it lasts longer than the previous generation.

still a low frequency pwm phone.. what i would give for a modern no-pwm / high frequency pwm phone

Meanwhile my Pixel 2 is still rocking after 7 years of daily use.

You are also rocking a bunch of security vulnerabilities then, because this thing is EOL for a long time.

Phones are not the hot commodity they used to be anymore and that's a good thing IMHO. I just bought a Px7 after breaking my 6a that I had for 3 years. I did look at the Px10 specs but with the price/value it was an easy decision. I'm now expecting the same 3y worth of battery I was getting out of my 6a (a day started getting tight at the end). Bigger still seems to be the definition of better but I had a CAT S60 for a while, so it's still small compared to that brick.

Overall very happy with the Px series and I'm happy they keep making them. On the software side it runs Graphene OS just as well as the 6a. Setup was super easy with the Chromium WebUSB based installer. I expect the Px10 to be supported soon too.

After trying out 6000/7000mah phones, I'm never ever using any phone with a smaller battery. Especially not the 3580mah or whatever pixel phones. I like pixel otherwise, but it's just impossible to revert back to a smaller battery once you've experienced the truly multi-day -- even for a unhealthy screen user like me -- battery life.

meta: It's getting to the point where I need to pay for The Verge or stop reading it. Every one of their Pixel articles is behind a paywall.

archive.org

So, any of these features gonna be available for non-US regions/system region settings?

Does the camera module still fall off like on the Pixel 9?

https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+pixel+camera+falling

God, what an ugly device.

Don't all phones look extremely similar today?

Maybe I'm old but no two phones today seem as different as e.g. Nokia 8800 was from Motorola Razr

> all phones

Eh...

https://www.samsung.com/ca/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip7/buy/

https://www.samsung.com/ca/smartphones/others/galaxy-xcover7...

Both from the same company and I think about an equal distance between them as the Nokia 8800 and a similarly dated Motorola Razr.

Yes, I don't know why they bother showing the phone turned off anymore. They all look the same.

The materials might be different, and that's where a lot of companies go wrong. The Pixel 10 uses polished glass, which is too slippery. It slides off uneven surfaces and is harder to hold.

> A camera with Gemini

and im out

> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.

bro in your demo the car is a half el-camino half mustang

Still boring, indistinguishable from the rest, and still hideous. Hire a proper designer for fucks sake. Ridiculous everugly phone.

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The only downside is that all of these new features will be supported for about 3 weeks, and then rapidly turn into another Google abandoned strip mall.

Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me (hundreds of times), shame on me

Bet the people who launched these are already interviewing for their next gig.

.. as I sit here with my Apple devices that are 90% abandonware.

I feel your pain.

samsung is a lot better with keeping products staffed at least

> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.

No Pixel 10a was announced, and frankly Google's track record with hardware is a bit discouraging for someone thinking about spending a grand on a phone.

The -a models are typically released in the spring, the Pixel 9a was only just released in April of this year, so I wouldn't expect to see a Pixel 10a until March or April of 2026.

I got my entire family Pixel 4XLs when they were new. Every single one had the battery replaced once under warranty, and then they denied more batteries (it was actually the fragile connector). So I started replacing them myself. I even slightly modified the connector mount so it would stop failing. The third batteries ended up lasting years because of my modification. Finally, all 3 died around 2023 from motherboard problems apparently. Otherwise great phones. Sad that some weird hardware problems killed them all for most people.

The "magic cue" sounds like Windows CoPilot but isn't getting the same backlash for some reason. Why would I want AI tightly woven into everything I'm doing on my phone?

Seems like a privacy nightmare.

They said Magic Cue is done entirely on device and as far as I can tell does not involve saving screenshots of your activities to the device like Windows Recall* did- rather it can look at things like your email and other data that is on the device to determine what to suggest

* Windows Copilot is different from Recall, which is the one that saved screenshots of what you were doing periodically

I would guess because the windows recall stores screenshots of everything you do forever while this just watches and pops up without storing information that could later be used against you. Of course, it could be secretly recording but if you are concerned about that you need to install grapheneOS or something.

Not that I like this feature or think there aren't privacy concerns.

Its a google phone. Wouldn't be surprised if this one too forgets the WiFi credentials every second day.

That's likely your unreliable AP dropping offline and coming back frequently. Pixel thinks this is an attacker and stops joining it until it can hear the SSID consistently.