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.
Plus AI upscaling. Fuck no.
As far as AI upscaling though, agreed. At least make a setting so we can do our own A/B tests.
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.
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.
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.
This is more popping up magically before you needed to ask.
Both are great (when they work).
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".
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 I don't have it in my calendar, it doesn't happen. I would fail to actually go to the event otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Isn't it a market thing though? Doesn't Apple have a phone with horrendous, trypophobia-inducing camera nests?
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.
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
That's the only thing I found on there. Doesn't even say if it lasts longer than the previous generation.
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...
They're not releasing them on your personal upgrade schedule
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.
100x "composite" zoom is nice but not sure if it's worth it.
Seems like a privacy nightmare.
Not that I like this feature or think there aren't privacy concerns.
* Windows Copilot is different from Recall, which is the one that saved screenshots of what you were doing periodically
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.
Maybe I'm old but no two phones today seem as different as e.g. Nokia 8800 was from Motorola Razr
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1ano09x/pixel_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jzo5hu/pixel_...
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, ...)
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.
So if Pixel still has this bug, that's just another reason not to buy a Google product.
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?
https://isthisphoneblocked.net.au/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-03/brand-new-phones-unab...
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.
A few days later, they called me and said that I could make the test call right now. Worked fine.
Phone cases are doing heavy lifting to smooth out the back of this phone.
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.
That bump is more than 1/4 of the phone's total thickness. This is becoming comical.
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...
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).
Weight. Many people already don't like how heavy their phones are.
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.
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 still using my Pixel 6 pro and have had zero hardware issues with this phone or my previous pixel 4.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Written on my $250 Motorola
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.
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.
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.
Would you like to list those for the phone? I don't think your analogy is fair at all.
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.)
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.
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....)
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.
[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.
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.
Heard a rumor that Google was going to take eye strain seriously for this version. Hope that's true.
I don't know why they assume that someone buying a $2000 phone doesn't want the best available camera.
Can anyone report if that's still the case? I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.
I've been using Nova Launcher for so long I couldn't tell you what the normal homescreen looks like right now.
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.
Amazing how good my mental adblocker is for things I've been looking at every day for 2 years.
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
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?
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.)
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.
- 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.
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.
Pixel photos are very good too, for the record. I just think the "blind camera test" is worthless.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
You also can’t put every option in for everything, because simplicity has value too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
For now I'm just making do with having a power bank in my bag when I'm out and about.
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/...
Even with all that, I'm keeping the mini as long as possible because every year brings bigger and heavier iPhones.
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 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.
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.
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.
TouchID all the way. On an iPad, it's fantastic.
Edit. It seems like pixel 7 and up includes something that's more secure
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.
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.
On this last point, Pixel's face unlock has been secure enough to use for banking/NFC transactions since Pixel 8.
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?
Except when you’re trying to pay with NFC and have to awkwardly tilt your phone to match your face.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Huh? WebOS was Palm embracing multitouch screens.
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 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.
Not expensive and work great. Was playing with one today. I am impressed.
google and apple, apple is the best in this privacy field
It is such a breath of fresh air. It is so quiet and functional. It feels like it prioritizes me, the user. I am so grateful to have this OS.
Of course it has flaws, but they're lesser flaws. Like the crop tool is sometimes unusable in the gallery app. I can live with that. I couldn't live with the AI onslaught and spyware infiltration.
Beyond the monochrome icon pack that cannot be changed in the included launcher (which is so aesthetically challenged with an appearance that only a mother could love), the browser that cannot grasp dark mode, and the lack of the accustomed pattern unlock, I find the lack of one singular thing intolerable:
I want root. At a minimum, adb rooted debugging.
I realize that I could unlock the bootloader and Magisk this thing, but with the number of correct decisions that have been made by the authors of this operating system (and they are legion), they do not recognize one fundamental need of administrators:
I want control of my systems.
That is really a shame.
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.
But only from the iPhone X to 14, after which the Dynamic Island took over.
(I'll see myself out)
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.
Is there a Minecraft extension so that the Touchbar becomes the game's hotbar with icons? I've never looked.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
Why pay so much more to fight an uphill battle?
Unless you desperately need the hot garbage that is Xcode there isn't much reason to deal with Mac Minis running MacOS as a server. One update and it will suspend and be unwakeable without physical interaction.
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
> 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.
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.
Do you not know how computers work? That how it works on every computer without encryption.
You wouldn't have been able to access to the data passwordless if you had enabled Filevault encryption
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.
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.
Or so they say. Has that actually been proven?
source? Is there a site that tracks this, or only shows up when someone raises an issue on github?
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...
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.
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.
The marketing department exploded when Apple announced that change, it made user conversion tracking completely useless.
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
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.
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
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.
This is literally GrapheneOS or LineageOS+microg x) which ironically is fully available on Pixel phones and and a slowly vanishing number of others...
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.
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’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.
Working as intended. Apple wants their 30% cut by all possible means. Web apps would bypass their cut.
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.
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.
Same here.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 do currently use a Pixel, but I hate how big it is.
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.
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.
But it isn't worth the bother; the macbook market is much smaller than the iphone market.
* 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.
- 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)
And if you don't like them: tough luck. They're mandatory.
Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion
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.
Except privacy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyway, the wobble is real, and sucks.
It made the phone entirely way too thick. But it was still thinner than the 2 phones I was carrying around previously.
Apps on iOS can also have questionable Back behaviors, but the method for invoking Back is not consistent.
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.
All google needs to do is make a desktop app and allow automatic download.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally I would trust browser security far more than an OS simply because it is a much more desirable target to compromise. They're also built specifically to run untrusted code.
It should be illegal to put glass on the back of a phone.
Imagine if it was a panel of plastic, and that you could easily replace it if it got too scuffed up.
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.
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.
This is WhatsApp's fault. "Settings > Chats > Save To Photos OFF" should fix it
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
- 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)
Not every phone related post needs to become one.
So? Big deal...
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Apple want you to use the apps they've curated , not web apps, not apps or games from 3rd party stores etc.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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'm slightly making up the exact bias, but for instance it will be assumed the user lands a touch slightly above the actual key, as the finger hides the target and Apple's heuristics expect some overshooting.
In comparison people used to the iPhone's heuristics might have a harder time on android.
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.
It’s very annoying
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 am not too surprised though. Samsung has a reputation for bloating their Android stack with junk.
I legitimately struggle to find anything better.
(Battery, perhaps?)
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
Sharing your opinions without first prefacing they're 12-17 years out of date is disingenuous
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.
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.
I can also just plug my Pixel into my Linux machine (I think I needed some other program to do this on Mac, bit it's still easy enough; can't comment on windows) and drag and drop photos, videos, ebooks whatever onto the device.
This is huge for me as I work at a location with no BYOD WiFi and poor (very low bandwidth) connection speeds so I often download YT videos for offline listening later. Also worth mentioning VLC is really good on Android and merely OK on iOS.
Also very important when you're low on storage from photos, you can unload them with no hassle.
I can't do the same with my iPhone; even when I can mount it successfully, its always an arcane directory structure in DCIM sorted by date or something.
This is HUGE for me. I cannot understate how much utility I get from this alone.
Safari has support File System Access API since 2022. Maybe you haven't kept up but Apple has done a 180° on PWAs in the past few years
That's why flame wars about anything don't make sense, whether it is about Operating Systems, browsers, gaming platforms, text editors, phones, cars, coffee, or whatever else you can come up with to arbitrarily argue about.
That was the first thing I noticed. I assume the extra protuberance is to enable the insane zoom level but it goes full width for stability.
I have G85 Motorola - great phone (and primarily a phone/modem/camera) for the price, but it wobbles slightly.
Yes, I prefer Android, but have a M4 Air that goes everywhere with me to do actual work.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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 :(
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.
> 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.
More details at: https://blog.google/products/search/google-flights-ai-flight....
If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo
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.
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...
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.
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...
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)
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.
* 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
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.
>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
# 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 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.
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.
There's no end of times that the IR sensor has come in useful one way or another.
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.
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?
That said, as other commentators have mentioned, it might also be wider in real life, so not necessarily an artifact at all.
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.
EDIT: https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-10-pro-fold/...
^ this should be the main post
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
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.
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.
I feel your pain.
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.
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.
Obviously genai upscaling. The details are not there on the original photo.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/132929200?hl=en
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.
However it is nuts how they just can't be bothered supporting so many countries.
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.
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.
If there was a hypothetical phone with this hardware with iOS, that would be really nice.
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...
My app and photo quality preference are OnePlus > Pixel > > > ... > Samsung. shrug Really it could be a toss up between OnePlus and Google depending on generation. My partner's Pixel 7 takes nearly as nice photos as my OnePlus 12.
My Galaxy photos were... very watercolor paint. I could not stand them.
[1] https://developer.android.com/identity/data/testingbackup
But so far as I can tell D2D transfers don't hit the cloud?
>For a D2D transfer, the Backup Manager Service queries your app for backup data and passes it directly to the Backup Manager Service on the new device, which loads it in to your app.
LGTM
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.
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.
So it's not just a crop. It's a crop + hallucinate.
Wondering if anyone on HN could shine any light as to why.
the__alchemist•8h ago
tetris11•8h ago
mnmalst•8h ago
metalliqaz•8h ago
andrepd•8h ago
sudokatsu•8h ago
ortusdux•8h ago
lawn•7h ago
With the popularity of the Flip I can only hope I won't have to wait too long.
borgel•2h ago
leetharris•8h ago
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.
AshamedCaptain•7h ago
sylos•6h ago
borgel•2h ago
andrepd•8h ago
Unfortunately that goes for virtually any phone on the market... Sad.
51Cards•8h ago
bsimpson•7h ago
Does that work for batteries? I feel like unused batteries tend to become unusable batteries.
avidiax•5h ago
_blk•7h ago
slumberlust•1h ago
I agree that I prefer the fingerprint sensor on the back. Very convenient and natural for the pocket grab and unlock maneuver.
jauntywundrkind•8h ago
mmmlinux•4h ago
kcb•1h ago
markasoftware•8h ago
_giorgio_•8h ago
I discovered that all the newer pant models that I purchased have bigger pockets, so that's not a problem anymore.
bityard•7h ago
throw-the-towel•7h ago
Mistletoe•6h ago
Shot of humans from the future.
layer8•7h ago
madduci•7h ago
bscphil•7h ago
Grazester•6h ago
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.
nuancebydefault•5h ago
rchaud•3h ago
poisonborz•7h ago
pelagicAustral•7h ago
daemonologist•7h ago
jama211•6h ago
wkjagt•5h ago
Tmpod•1h ago
neumann•1h ago
I miss it so much. I bought a replacement one after it got cracked, only to have the battery AND Sim get nerfed a month later. Putting a custom ROM seemed to work for a while, and then it just got too unstable with sim card turning off randomly and silently. So now it sits in a drawer and used as a kids camera and I am so jealous of them. My google pixel 8 is bigger, but somehow nowhere needs as performant for my needs (camera + voice calls is basically it).
zamadatix•7h ago
battesonb•7h ago
silotis•6h ago
coldpie•6h ago
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.
wijwp•6h ago
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.
ethersteeds•5h ago
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.
Dylan16807•5h ago
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.
PoignardAzur•4h ago
If nothing else, you could still give the mini a higher margin and make some gains that way.
avidiax•5h ago
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.
lotsofpulp•3h ago
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.
toast0•2h ago
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)
avidiax•1h ago
Apple TV has by far the fastest processor in a TV set-top box. The interface is much cleaner and faster than any smart TV. And I'm sure Apple could do best in class 4k or 8k AI upscale, and live AI captioning w/ translation. They also have the lawyers needed to do some of the AI transformation and deal with the inevitable lawsuits from copyright holders.
They are probably also smart enough to class it as a "smart monitor", delete the TV tuners, and avoid lots of local regulatory requirements that way.
Could be a very competitive product as long as the price is no worse than Sony Bravia.
expensive_news•4h ago
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?
coldpie•4h ago
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.
baby_souffle•2h ago
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.
hbn•6h ago
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.
zamadatix•5h ago
Of course that doesn't mean 0 people who say they like small phones bought a new one, just perhaps not a large enough fraction of those willing to say they are interested in smaller phones as a whole to kept the development justifications up.
xenadu02•5h ago
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.
edm0nd•3h ago
iPhone 16 Pro = Weight 199 g (7.02 oz)
The weight difference (7 grams) seems negligible
jama211•5h ago
coldpie•5h ago
littlecranky67•5h ago
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.
Cyph0n•5h ago
Mistletoe•6h ago
jakub_g•4h ago
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=...
GuB-42•1h ago
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...
627467•1h ago
GuB-42•29m ago
There is however a company that caters to these niches: Unihertz
The have small phones, massive phones with huge batteries, rugged phones, phones with keyboards,...
From what I have seen, not great on the software side though, and they have entry-level specs, with prices to match. It is a Chinese company.
abrahadabra•1h ago
culi•56m ago
Unfortunately I think this means Google will keep having to sell huge phones for a while