I recently upgraded from the Pixel 7 to the 10. Nothing but regret - the phone isn't worse, but it's not better either, and I had to reinstall everything. Why did I do this?
The cool thing about Pixels is that not only will you have to pay extra for RAM because of AI, but some of the RAM you paid for will also be permanently reserved for local AI features, regardless of whether you use them.
On a Pixel phone you have only Google spyware. On another brand's phone you have all the same Google spyware, plus the spyware from that brand and a permanently locked bootloader.
You can remove 3rd party spyware/bloat in 15 minutes with Shizuka/canto and a usb cable and you won't notice anything changed in the phone. Unfortunately the Google spyware is so deeply integrated that you can't really do that unless you accept a ton of things not working - not just Google apps but also lots of third party apps that require Play services.
Yes, if you want full degoogling you need a custom ROM like Graphene on Pixels or Lineage. The main issue these days is that bootloaders are locked. Phone manufacturers mostly refuse to give you control over your own hardware.
And you can set it up without a laptop (although it's easier to so the initial setup with a laptop) and once setup, you have an app that can enable/disable things.
Maybe for fortnite players. If you just call/text/email whats the point in upgrading? At this point I pretty much just ride out whatever iphone se I happen upon on deep discount until Apple finally walls me off from the OS version I need to access my bank account (thanks to very helpful flow of bank website forcing app store redirect to their app for mobile users). Then it's on to the next se.
Now that I think on it maybe I ought to just pay attention to jailbreakable OS version numbers again. If I stuck on one of those OS versions I could just spoof my user agent for the bank website with a jailbroken phone.
Strange comparison. If you just call, text and check on bank apps, then the market is not for you. Just buy a used phone from 10 years ago.
It's like saying why should you get a new gaming laptop to replace your 6 year old current gaming laptop, when all you do is office work. If all you do is office work, why buy a gaming laptop at all? Just use a standard okish smartphone or tablet.
Who are these phones even for? I see people out in public and all they do with their phone is scroll instagram reels or ticktock. They need all this horsepower for that? I don't think so either. This is why I brought up fortnight because gaming is one example where there probably is a marked difference in frames per second between models. But 99% of people are probably just looking at images and videos and text on their smartphone, pretty low stakes stuff.
Strange attack on a very valid point. An extremely small segment goes outside the regular phone/social media/video space that actually uses these faster chips. For others the experience haven't gotten better relative to the faster hardware. Where are those cycles going?
