First sentence of the current top voted comment. What's constructive about that?
You could argue the rest of the comment makes up for it, but I don't agree. It reads like a standard negative rant against change to me. I don't see much constructive here.
> I just hate modern phones, all of them. I want an adequate one-hand screen size (~6"), a headphone jack, and an even camera bump (just so it lies flat on the table). I love the pixel 8a, the size, curvature and camera bump seems ideal. Ofc they removed a freaking 3.5mm jack, but I can make a compromise here and buy 100 type-c to 3.5mm adapters, but I'm super disappointed with the new 9x series, they are now even more blocky and square-ish which i really don't like, plus no "a" model which is usually looking much better for me than the main one.
> Does anyone know the phone which is small, has a headphone jack, even camera bump and is still buyable to this day?
Essentially get the same product with improvements that are only another iteration. The Pixel 9 might be a good device comparatively, but I would be more surprised if people were too hyped about it. The larger context of hype and Google is relevant here as well.
First question I had when hearing about a Google phone is, if they try to make it harder to block advertising. I don't believe the thought is too unreasonable, is it?
Would you be surprised if a post about the new iPhone would look like this looks here?
Call it disappointment I guess. No phone from any manufacturer has felt totally “right” to me in years in the way that phones from a decade ago did. It makes sense from a business perspective since smartphones were effectively complete way back then. The business needs a way to justify selling me a new one so it's been a long slow downhill of shit-I-don't-care-about ever since. I especially miss the era of HTC flagships. HIGH TECH COMPUTER!
The software is disappointing too even though today was not really a software announcement. To me it feels like since they're both from Google the Pixel hardware direction also signals what Android itself will prioritize. I used to be a huge Android-the-OS fan but found that my enjoyment of the platform peaked at 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. Version 4.3 was the first version to remove something I loved (the “Phablet” UI layouts that were great on my Galaxy NoteⅡ). Announcements like today's push that point of Peak Android even further away in my mind, and I'm sad about it.
* excellent battery life - can't complain about it. I'm not streaming YouTube on 5G on the phone, and I've found out that it can last about two days per charge with light use - messenger apps, phone calls, emails. YMMV of course. * a great OLED screen - it's bright & crisp. I haven't seen a better screen in person yet. * a great camera - it's a very good camera IMO. Takes good shots of people and nature and shoots impressive videos of music shows in dark basements. * durable/rugged - not sure about 15, but my SE2 was abused and dropped. The metal sides were dinged, the screen had a few nasty scratches, but the phone held up together very well. * fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy - iOS is much nicer and snappier that any of the Android phones (HTC Desire S, Galaxy Note II, Xperia Z3, Xiaomi Mi6) I've had. * don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two - I think iPhones do last a few years, given the fact that my wife uses 13 and has zero desire (or reasons, really) to upgrade.
The only requirement the iPhone doesn't fit is the storage - Apple charges an absurd price for storage upgrades on all of their devices. I went with the cheapest option and pay for a large iCloud subscription, and it seems to work well - the photo and file sync between the phone, Macbook & even my Windows machine is seamless and quick.
It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat. Apple are not saints, they collect a lot of data and telemetry that I'm not a fan of, but at least they are not a corporation that is built on advertising.
Not listed on software, is the ability to install whatever I want, not what Apple decides I'm allowed to install.
Not because it's particularly great (it's not), but because it's the only somewhat mainstream manufacturer to retain the headphone jack on their flagships as well as microSD card slot.
My only gripe is that it's mostly likely going to be a 180+ gram brick.
On paper, it’s largely the same as prior years for the SoC at least. I think the fold has the most obvious upgrade but nothing I’d consider really major. Other than that, it seems like mostly a camera bump year?
Not even the same. The 9P screen has lower PPI than my 7P, the camera has worse field of view and the battery has lower capacity.
Beyond that https://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Google-Pixel-9-vs-Pixel-8... shows:
- Much brighter screen - Next gen tensor chip - 50% ram upgrade - Better camera + battery - SOS functionality - Better ultrasonic fingerprint sensor
Holistically felt like meaningful improvements across the board to me, but I understand where you're coming from. I think maybe I have lower expectations for improvements year to year
I think perhaps one of the reasons for the negativity here is that the price is approaching flagship from other companies, but that Tensor G4 performs like chips from four years ago.
I think that overshadows a lot of the improvements. Perhaps if the whole package was significantly cheaper, the reception would be more balanced.
on an average, HN crowd is pretty clueless about
a) running a profitable business
b) foreseeing technological progress -- say two iterations down the line.
c) mass adoption of features
On an average, they tend to be elitist and don't represent the average brand popularity (e.g Google, Meta, Amazon). They only mildly upvote technology that helps their extremely privileged life.
E.g Current AI / Metaverse features helps plenty of poor, underprivileged people around the world, especially non-english speaking. But HN is the first to mock such features.
Because of this, they tend to be poor individual stock pickers. They are highly risk-averse and typically bring an SRE mentality to the world.
Your bias is heavily US centric. HN is not SF or SV. Plenty of users in Serbia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, Vietnam, in war thorn Ukraine.
Arguably the average user is above average for their area's COL but to claim everyone is swimming in VC money is as dilusion as the people you want to portrait in your comment.
Some days HN feels like an echo chamber, where thinking outside the box is heavily downvoted.
No quicker way to signal how little you know about technology than to promote something niche that doesn't function well on most cheap electronics.
You are personally invested in those technologies being game changers. It couldn't be more clear given your aggressive, substance-less posts.
AI features in phones from Google are English only or maybe a few languages, even if you know English try to use "AI" to set a route using your voice when the locations are not english words. Sure, some free AIs on the web will help poor people but the best ones are under payment wall and not only that you need a specific way to pay, what I mean for example is Netflix, Steam do not need my credit card, they have alternative ways to pay like PayPal but Google, Microsoft, OpenAI they only allow credit card , so I conclude they do not care for my money they really need that credit card for some reason.
If we were getting opinions on the latest PhD paper on attention mechanisms than I’d trust someone with a PhD versus a random person, but for getting opinions on the new Google phone? Think for yourself.
Two things:
1. He's held / seen the phone live, I buy online so won't get a chance to before I decide.
2. He's also held hundreds (thousands?) of phones which I haven't.
While he does have preferences that differ from mine, his perspective is still interesting.
>what qualifies them?
19.3m subscribers on yt
Valuing someone by reach makes no sense at all. Most professors at MIT have no social media reach at all, I still value their opinions extremely highly.
In fact, valuing someone's opinion purely based on the size of their megaphone is partly why we're the world is in such a bad state politically (and in other ways) these days. E.g. people listening to social media influencers opinions on vaccines.
The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
The only thing I’d like is a better integration with ALL actions possible on my phone.
If this were a "killer-app", then Amazon would still be selling those quick-buy Amazon Dash[1] buttons, and Alexa would be making a profit[2]
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47416440
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/alexa-had-no-profit-...
AI has been totally useless to me in my life. Give me a headphone jack and better SMS spam filtering. No new phone has better features than my Pixel6a and it isn't even that great.
That was Assistant right up until they killed it for a new thing.
> The killer-app (that isn't porn) is going to be asking your phone to order food and it guesses correctly what you want while cross-checking availability, pricing, and discounts. Then a Waymo or Wing Drone delivers it.
This killer app of yours can be stealthily enshittified, you aren't privy to its decision-making process.
What you're actually going to get is a None pizza with left beef from a ghost kitchen at the least competitive price you've ever seen with the branding of a YouTuber.
„Top“ in the sense that a lot of people watch them. Please don’t take seriously what they say. Luise Rossman did an excellent video on marques apple propaganda.
It's not really Google specific either - if you look at any other topic, even Linux or OSS related, there's going to be bunch of highly upvoted people ranting and raving. That pushes out any kind of positive discussion and normal people leave.
I see a lot of resentment and projection in people’s comments.
And most of the time the ,comments are useless and don’t represent the general consumer/citizen opinion.
This is specially true for anonymous profiles
Mental health is notoriously declining and I myself feel the difference when there are days where I don’t touch social media.
I also found that some social media affect me more than others, namely X.
Before the acquisition I remember feeling like I was under an authoritarian regime censoring everything and that made me feel bitter.
After Elon there were short periods where there were no bots, and the algo was actually adapting to me, I didn’t feel bad using it.
But right now its so toxic and full of fear mongering posts, making it unbearable.
I hope society figures this out quickly because AI is only quickening the decline.
20 yrs ago, most of the Internet users were teenagers and very young adults.
Most of these people are in their late 30s to 40s now. Did new kids join too? Sure! But if you look at the birth rates of our societies, you'll notice that it's a bell curve. Consequently, the average age is going up.
Furthermore, there is a strong selection bias with this demographic: the happier they're, the less likely they're going to be on these platforms, because they'll prioritize family, hobbies or whatever else over ... Well... "shit posting with random strangers".
Ultimately you're left with a significant chunk of people that are often disgruntled, jaded or outright mentally unwell.
It takes curated communities in order to overcome. Some places do better than others. It's also all to easy for biases to become policy in some of these communities/sites which can wind up almost worse than the shit posting to begin with.
The only thing I like is the possible better camera sensors, but that won't make me shed thousands of dollars for it. If I have the choice I'd rather have a more compact model with the camera quality of the previous iteration which was already great.
I can understand it will sell because a lot of people have the feeling they live a crappy life and wants to cheat by taking crappy pictures and videos and have a some magic inventing a better imaginary life that they can share on instagram and tiktok but I am not one of them. If I take a picture, I want to get the moment, with all its imperfections including the sad face of a stranger or dog peeing leg up against a wall in the background.
And yes I understand I am not everyone, but I really don't care what everyone want because I am not the one trying to sell that phone.
Which phone are you using then? I presume your usage is totally non-representative of the average normal user, but curious nonetheless.
I do the usual stuff, navigation, whatsapp, music, video...except I tend to avoid installing apps when the corresponding website works well (but I still have lots of different apps) and the only social media I am connecting to is the fediverse through the browser.
I've tended to like the close to stock experience, but I do turn off all. the assistant features that I can.
The next killer-feature in the race to the bottom is probably software, not hardware, and is near realtime translation. Samsung is airing an advert for that right now, but it's not real time.
Better "AI" with a faster CPU and everyone has their own Babel fish.
I own a Pixel 8 Pro and it is without a doubt the worst phone I have owned in at least a decade. The amount of bugs for such an expensive product is mind boggling.
One of main features is the camera but I've found myself taking far fewer photos with the phone than I expected I would, mainly because the camera UX just kind of sucks in a 100 small to medium ways that add up to an unpleasant experience. Just for example: you need to reenable the manual focus slider after ever picture, focus peaking is flawed and impossible to disable, there's a very noticeable lag with the telephoto mode when adjusting the camera, setting are buried in several different menus, and more.
The only reason I would even consider another Google phone after this one is that the phone landscape has gotten pretty bad as a whole. Samsung phones have their own list of flaws and I won't buy a phone that Apple dictates what I can do with; and those are the alternatives for buying a nice phone that I'm aware of, but if anyone has other suggestions I'm all ears. I loved LG phones and wish those were still around.
I found this useful https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/
Using a Xiaomi now, but Android Auto doesn't work for me (other brands on the same car work fine)
Mostly just curious as to why there are ~0 positive comments here. I suspect could be:
1) anti-google HN bias - perhaps deserved? 2) it's simply more tempting/satisfying/rewarding to complain about rather than to praise big companies 3) any other ideas?
I'm guessing the 95% negative comment proportion isn't representative though so I was curious if anyone had any explanations for the HN skew