After many leaks, official teases, and months of waiting, Google has finally given its latest Pixel phones a formal launch. The new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are the latest high-end phones from the company that hasn’t traditionally been able to make much of a dent in the high-end phone market. Both are available for preorder starting today, October 19th, and will begin shipping on October 28th. Google says all the major US carriers, plus retailers such as the Google Store, Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and others, will be selling the phones.
There are a lot of things to cover with the new Pixels, but the most important place to start is this: $599 and $899. Those are the starting prices for the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, respectively. That pricing is aggressive compared to similar iPhones, Samsungs, or even OnePlus phones, especially when you consider that Google is providing 128GB of storage in both base models. (The 6 can be equipped with up to 256GB, the 6 Pro has options up to 512GB.)
Ars Technica has more on the new Tensor SoC by Google that powers these new Pixels. I’d love to say more about these new Pixels, but Google refuses to actually sell them anywhere, so I’m not even sure Pixel phones even exist in the first place. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but until Google sells these things in more than like 3 countries, I’ll just keep calling them an elaborate hoax.
I’m still fuming over Google not providing a standard 4G API in Android. This gave Samsug an excuse to work with telecoms vendors on an individual basis who would support 4G on a whim. The day 3G/2G is switched off my 4G phones lose voice capability. They have the hardware to support LTE but as default not the software or telecoms vendor support. Even today UK telecoms vendors only support all 4G LTE capability properly on a phone by phone basis.
So telecoms standards have just become yet another way of enabling forced obsolecence. This really does rock my sense of stability with the world.
I think “elaberate con” is a good way to describe the IT industry today.
From what I’ve heard, 2G won’t be switched off anytime soon because there’s way too many IoT devices depending on it out there. Cross your fingers.
Ah, interesting about the IoT devices on 2G. The cynic in me says that such a move would do the wider internet community a favor by pulling the plug on the botnets that depend on those things…
Going back to the main topic, in what sort of a world are we living where a $599 phone can be considered a “small price” if it will only receive feature updates for 3 short years and security updates for just 5 years? I’m the sort of person that will only upgrade hardware when it’s worn out, and I would gladly pay even more than the asking price for a phone like this if I could be sure it would be supported indefinitely **by software developers**, like a normal x86 computer. But the whole paradigm of hardware manufacturers (or even mobile phone carriers) being in charge of software updates is so fundamentally messed up and such an incredible conflict of interest for the vendors that it’s basically irreparable. So I have no interest in investing into such a twisted ecosystem, and I’ll continue to buy the cheapest throwaway phone I can possibly find (like $80 cheap), and spend my money elsewhere on a real computer that gives me more software and hardware freedom.
rahim123,
+1
It’s always argued that long term support is financially unreasonable, but this argument is invalid when the users have all the tools and source to support themselves. Long term community support is very easily achievable without adding long term support costs to the manufacturer. However the reality is that planned obsolescence is a feature (for manufacturers) and not a con. This is why a lot of things are the way they are.
We’re lucky personal computers have owner controlled norms that pre-date most of the restrictions that are corrupting other technologies. But even with PCs, I worry about inching closer towards closed platforms. I believe our corporations will take all the control that we let them get away with. I don’t trust companies like apple and microsoft to protect owner freedoms.
Totally agreed. Inasmuch as the apologists have tried to say that UEFI and SecureBoot have not proven to be a problem for alternate OS installations, I can say with absolute certainty through lots of experience with the users that I support that it has made things much much more difficult for less technical users (and even more technical ones) to install anything that’s not Windows on an x86 PC.
And as for ARM computers, I’ve never gotten into them because I don’t like being limited to a specific few Linux distros, and even within the “ARM” architecture there is so much fragmentation and subarchitectures that require doing lots of research before purchase to see if there is any OS support for it, to say nothing of the problem of locked bootloaders and other limitations.
LTE has been a thing for over a decade. What are you using a Nokia from the 90s?
The problem isn’t LTE, it’s Voice over LTE, and how carriers decided to go for a model of validating each individual model of phone in some markets.
So, you have things like, a specific SKU of the BlackBerry KeyOne was sold by AT&T, so that specific SKU was validated for “HD Voice” (AT&T’s branding of VoLTE). However, other SKUs, even though they had basically the same hardware, weren’t validated. And, AT&T didn’t sell the Key2, so no Key2 SKU was ever validated, to the point that AT&T sent me a garbage-tier phone from 2018 (older than the Key2, and garbage-tier in 2018) and deactivated my Key2 for not “supporting” VoLTE. (It supported it, they just refused to allow it.)
(I ended up dealing with that piece of garbage for a month before deciding not to wait on OnwardMobility to release a Key2 successor, and got a Pixel 5a.)
Ugh, that sounds like a PITA and a good reminder why I haven’t used AT&T for a while now.