They're brilliant. Water/mud/dust/salt resistant, you can drop them however many times you feel like without cracking the screen, battery life is alomost two days (and that is while using the thing).
They're also pretty big and clunky, the camera is unimpressive, and the performance is middling at best, but I honestly don't mind that at all.
Also, it turns out that the camera sometimes matters more than you might expect. Other people in my family care somewhat that the pictures and videos I took of my kids using the Moto were pretty meh--and some pictures didn't get taken because the camera system was so slow. (Oh, and the audio on those videos was poor.) The Pixel has a much, much nicer camera and microphone.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I became a Google employee a few months after purchasing my Pixel.)
Anyway, I'd love to support Fairphone as well, but I'm upset that they removed the headphone jack in order to sell their new wireless earbuds. For a company that's supposedly all about sustainability, repair-ability, etc. that's a pretty stupid move. Removing a basic feature in order to sell another product is the opposite of sustainable. It's greedy, and I thought Fairphone was against that.
They don't "require" it per se, but the power does help. Apps will load and start faster, scrolling social media will stutter less, more processing can be applied on photos to make them look better, more processing can be done locally to avoid latency, and everything will be generally more responsive. More powerful hardware doesn't only serve compute-intensive tasks, it helps for everything. If you have money to spare, it's worth it.
So what happens is that phone A has a latency of 0.2s to perform a task and people are like, that's fine. Then phone B comes out with a latency of 0.05s and people are like, oh, that's so snappy, I love it, so they buy that. Then developers are like, we know 0.2s was fine, so we've got 0.15s of budget to add some features. It's kind of a vicious circle, because every step is logical: it's logical for people to buy faster devices to get snappier operation, and it's logical for developers to use the margin between snappy and slow to add new features.
TBH, if we could freeze all hardware development at all levels for a few years, it would do wonders for software and I think we'd ultimately come out ahead, but we all know that's never going to happen.
People who use the same apps and do the same things as 10 years ago don’t upgrade until it fails them, or they upgrade anyway because of other reasons that were worth the money. People who do benefit from the improvements do upgrade. People who do benefit from the improvements and can afford them do upgrade and are happy with the power and features.
Why is it even a discussion, and who among us can categorically say “yes” or “no” beside what we see in our small life circle ?
The old joke about Microsoft Word driving an upgrade treadmill (no matter how fast your computer gets, Word will still take 30 seconds to boot) still applies, except it's to web browsers. Welcome to the future, where every tweet will include its own multi-megabyte, cpu hungry javascript app.
As someone with an years old iPhone 6, I haven't once said, I wish this phone was faster. Maybe a better camera would be nice, but that's about it.
Maybe with the ability to plug a phone into a screen and keyboard and use it as a computer (As is starting to happen) I'd want more power but right now I'm good as long as my battery is holding.
I just wish more of these phones still had headphone jacks...
I don't take photos and browsing hacker news is probably the most computing-intensive thing I do on my phone, but I'm really enjoying the longer battery life and general responsiveness of the new device. I kinda wish I'd upgraded sooner.
Yes, many many people. The simplest widespread example would be that anyone recording for Tiktok or Instagram clips will be re-encoding and downscaling 4k video while applying ML transforms to the video stream. And it's all done live. You might not do it, but your local neighbourhood teens do.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/the-google-silicon-t...
My problem is they are too good. If they were duller, harder to use, jerky video, crashing games etc I wouldn't be so addicted.
When I think about how powerful I need my phone to be I don't need the best. I want something I can fix and update myself; something that's supported for more than a couple of years; something that is a little "better" for the planet.
Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices?