Isn’t it a wonderful thing ?

Just as some people never felt the need to upgrade their DSLR once it hit 24M pixel, or change their TV for the last decade, or buy a new car, or buy a new house.

That’s arguably how things should be for the vast majority of people, if we consider the product getting marketed to have any lasting value.

have phone sales gone down?

They're mostly flat since a few years now: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

Quality of the basics matters. Folks like to say they don’t need a fast processor, because all they do is browse the web.

If you open the messages app and browser 50x per day (which seems like a conservative estimate) and load the maps app a few times a week, the speed differential between devices adds up. Personally, I find the annoyance factor more bothersome than the raw hours of wasted human lifetime.

Side by side, my iPhone 12 takes several seconds less to open Firefox than pixel 4. 1.5 seconds faster to open Slack. 5s faster to launch Sonos. 5s faster launching The Economist. 0.5s faster launching phone. 4s faster launching Spotify. This is with iPhone running several other apps, android idling with no background apps.

Recent phone launches look boring, but getting the basics right absolutely matters. I was hoping Tensor would bring iPhone level performance, but we may have to wait a few years, since they’re only focusing on AI, which iPhone already does quite well.

Personally, I think it is totally valid to count performance and quality as features. Imagine if instead of performance, there was a feature where the phone cut your need for sleep by 5 minutes a day, or cut 5 minutes off your commute, or dropped your cortisol levels x%. Or shortened your wait for the elevator/grocery store by 5 minutes. That’s ultimately what performance means - time saved from the pure waste of waiting for apps and content to load.

Edit: to clarify, this isn’t iPhone elitism. I absolutely believe android users deserve best in class hardware. It is a shame that the vast majority of phone users are having their time stolen from them by Android and Qualcomm. I really wish I had the option of switching to android but I’m just not willing to tolerate it anymore; I have these devices side by side because I just gave up on my post-CSAM scanning switch after two months.

It's kind of sad too, because any phone built in the last 5 years should be able to launch apps nearly instantly. As always, software gets slower and then hardware has to improve to bring latencies back to where we started.

> Side by side, my iPhone 12 takes several seconds less to open Firefox than pixel 4.

It takes seconds for your phones to open Firefox?! My Xiaomi Mi A3 opens it without a noticeable delay.

My Pixel 4a opens Firefox in ~ a second from a cold start. I’d have to film it to get an accurate figure, but it’s definitely not multiple seconds.

Maybe they’re opening a very Javascript heavy homepage (and what site isn’t Javascript heavy in the modern ad-laden world?) and is including the download & render time in that measurement?

Test was closed all apps, launched Firefox, and waited for it to complete loading news.ycombinator.com. iPhone and pixel were on the same network.

Just showing the app filling the viewport isn’t fair because iOS and android handle splash screens differently. All of my side-by-side comparisons are waiting until the initial load completes.

I am running grapheneOS, so slightly different, and you might say that’s unfair. I’d expect a distro without the bloat to perform better, but it does have extra hardening to try to get closer to an iOS level of security. I do consider that a fair comparison, since that is the bare minimum you need to trust the device. Looking at the network traffic of an android device really gives one goosebumps, even in the best of circumstances.

Well, you’re not exactly comparing like to like then, are you? Graphene OS is optimised for other things than raw speed.

Fwiw, I’ve just filmed my 4a at 60Hz & imported the video in a non-linear editor & it takes 2.1s to go from a tap on the icon to displaying the HN homepage.

It takes 0.7s for curl to load the HN homepage (compression on, but ignoring CSS & images) on the same network.

I agree with your premise that speed makes a difference and should not be ignored, but your conclusion about android seems a bit off.

The pixel 4 is older and much more of a budget device compared to the iphone 12, I am not sure why you are comparing the two.

That being said, my even older oneplus 6t takes around 200ms to open Firefox so I am not sure what is wrong with your pixel 4. Same on my partner's pixel 4a (which should be even slower).

> The pixel 4 is older and much more of a budget device compared to the iphone 12, I am not sure why you are comparing the two.

The Pixel 4 and the iPhone 12 both MSRP'd at $799 when they were released. Not sure how the Pixel is considered "much more of a budget device" in comparison. Technically the iPhone 12 mini is $100 cheaper than either of those, with the same basic hardware as the larger 12.

Slow phone here - It’s not a bug it’s a feature for my muscle memory safari-> news.y… habit lol

This is precisely why I wish more manufacturers would start adding physical keyboards again...at least 60% of my phone use involves writing. I still hate touch-screen keyboards, and am easily twice as slow as I used to be on physical ones.

If someone would come out with a smaller phone with decent battery life, a processor that's not underpowered, physical keyboard, a headphone jack, and mediocre camera, I'd definitely jump on it. Almost the entirety of this press release is camera based, which I just don't care about that much...but maybe I'm not the target market.

I'm also quite slow at typing with my thumbs, but swipe keyboards are getting surprisingly good.

I thought the same, but the video quality on the iPhone 13 Pro is just absurdly good. I already had the X, but the upgrade is very significant.

Similarly several people have commented that the front facing camera makes me look noticeably sharper and clearer in video calls.

Some basics might not be changing much, but cameras still are.

Btw, I just came across this: https://www.engadget.com/google-assistant-call-hold-18123642...

“It understands the difference between a recorded message and an actual representative on the line.”

If it can really understand that hold music stopped to play a periodic voice recording of “your call is important to us” is still a recording (and not have the urge to smash phone at the wall) I’m completely sold!

Also automatically recall silently, if the line timed out. Basically notify me when it got through to a human. Maybe record my interactions with automated systems and then offer me a dialog for a pre-fill next time. Would be a real, valuable edge for me. I hate spending life time in phone queues.

I have pixel 4a and it has some things like call screening and low light photography. I have used them on occasion but they aren't things I consider reasons to buy a phone.

I broke a Pixel and went back to my spare iPhone 7. I thought the spam calls and texts would send me past the edge of sanity. I suffered through that for six months and went back to another Pixel.

The original Motorola Droid is the only phone I look back on and wish I still had (with current hardware). There’s not been as good and usable a device since then in my opinion. However the X, at least for me, was pretty buggy and never lived up to the quality of the Droid with the slide out keyboard.

The camera quality of phones has increased significantly in the past several years. This is due both to hardware and the algorithms that can really do wonders in terms of focus and lighting.

OLED screens and high refresh rate are a treat for the eyes, especially if scrolling through text for an hour or more per day.

Same with cars. people will often buy them to show off or other irrelevant reasons. It's one of those items where people will spend irrationally more than they would e.g. in a desktop, despite spending far longer time on the latter due to pandemic.

Phones are boring commodity devices at this point. The good news is even the cheap ones are pretty good these days. Which is why the market is so boring these days because it is strictly incremental updates to features that barely matter.

I have Fuji camera with a nice lens. So, I have no use/patience for ever disappointing phone cameras. I'm well aware that the high-end phone cameras are pretty decent at automatically getting the most out of mediocre sensors and lenses. However, this is something I enjoy doing manually with the best sensors and lenses I can get my hands on and the results just don't really compare. I think it's great complete amateurs can also take nice photos now but just not my thing. I actually care about my photography. And since cameras are just about the only feature either Apple or Google seems to talk about, I kind of lost interest in the whole market ages ago. Bla bla lenses bla bla sensors bla bla AI. Could not care less about megapixles, fake bokeh (aka. blurring), overly saturated and noise reduced (more blurring) photos (aka. night vision), etc.

Phone cameras are just not something I care about fundamentally. I use my phone as a glorified document scanner occasionally and that's about it. I also don't play games on my phone. Just not a thing for me. Otherwise, all smart phones I've had in the last ten years are fine for light browsing, consuming news, some audio, etc. which is pretty much all I do with them. Even answering phone calls from recruiters is not a thing I care about and that is quite literally the only incoming calls on this thing. Everything else I do with either my laptop or my desktop. Typing on a phone is not a thing for me either. Endlessly frustrating for me to use touch screen keyboards. It's an output only device. All the input modes are mediocre and tedious and I have no patience for them.

So, I've been carrying a cheap Nokia Android phone since 2018 and it's the best phone I've owned in recent years. It no longer receives security updates because of Google basically twisting people's arms to buy their new but hardly improved versions of the same shit they've been shipping since 2008 that I've owned before. Other than that it's fine. Battery lasts me two days; even more than three years in. And after having owned a few Nexus phones, I don't trust Google to deliver a device that will actually last as long as my Nokia has. Best phone I've had since I actually worked for Nokia when it did not license the brand to a generic Android phone manufacturer.

So, not really eager to buy a Pixel phone. I'll probably buy another Nokia when I need to. The Nokia X20 looks pretty good to me. 5G and using it as a dumb modem would be the big headline feature for me.

> taking pictures with the rear camera.

I think taking better pictures in low light, etc. can be thought of being a "new phone feature" (for any phone).