You know what? Good. Endless increases in speed/soc is unsustainable. I would much rather have increases in QoL things, like a larger battery (or in the case here, a brighter screen). Make the only change from the previous year adding back in a Micro SD card tray, something like that. And a $499 price tag seems reasonable for 7 years of software support. Now if we could get the wild form factors from the non-smartphone era....
Google fi is running it for preorder at 249 for 128gb and 349 for 256gb.
But I agree unless there are some major upgrades the yearly releases in most of the phones are no longer needed. Until we have holographic screens or direct to brain support or something else that is ground breaking I doubt there are going to be much more than incremental changes.
fuck google. fuck the pixel. and fuck grapheneos.
imposing an artificial entry barrier of hundreds of dollars/euros for not getting assraped on the reg gets a well deserved fuck you and die. the vast percentage of gos functionality can be had with lineageOS and a few tweaks, for a tenth of the price.
$500 for a phone is not fucking "reasonable"! shit's supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time. but if your easily breakable slab of glass costed $99, that's not hella much profit for their gaping assholes.
and miss me with the "refurbished" (isn't) - $200 for a used phone that was spat on and rubbed and used in the shitter and now has a bad battery is not reasonable.
my sincerest apologies to the huge population beset by nation-state actors, who got no alternative to locked bootloaders and are exposed to evil-maid scenarios. the rest of us can get two $50 used phones, run lineageos on one (while that's still a thing), postmarketOS on the other, and accelerate the latter's progress by shipping like a quarter of the remaining balance to its developers.
shit's supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time.
It has. $500 in 2026 doesn’t go as far as $500 in 2008.
I wouldn’t buy a pixel again because of the quality control issues but that’s beside the point.
brah, phones haven't changed significantly in the past decade. competent devices should (and do) cost like $100. chinese phones cost that much, made at the same place where these things are made. that's enough for all the parts and a healthy profit and that thing can run the same software as the $500 one or the $1000 one.
those things nowadays ain't nice-to-have, they're must-have and poor people shouldn't be excluded from safely participating in the global communication sphere. gos could at any time ship gos-lite that isn't based on a hardware-backed TPM that's exclusive to pixels and I'd shut the fuck up. that thing would cover the 99% of us that ain't a buncha jason bournes with nation-states after us.
So what you’re now saying is phones have gotten better and cheaper.
No jack? Send it back.
I think they should drop the a series. The used phone market can fill the gap.
The a series phones have been the best bang for your buck android phones since they have released imo. Plus they support GrapheneOS.
At 299 or 399, but at 499?? That's a hard pass. You can get a used pixel for less and better specs. I get it that people like new, but phone innovation has mostly stalled.
If you're buying an a series phone, you're probably not buying it for the features. You're buying it for the simplicity, long support life, and sturdiness. That phone will last 7+ years.
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