>The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.

This is the one thing I don't understand. How many people actually need the top end SoCs that other flagships come with. Phones have been more than fast enough for a long time now. Other than playing some games with tough visuals mid range SoCs are still more than powerful enough.

Complaints about battery life and the modems are fair (though I never had complaints about my Pixel 7 Pro battery life until it failed).

I also found that the photos from my Pixel were by far the best I'd ever seen from a phone. Every phone I had prior was only used for quick snapshots, if I was expecting to want to take something decent I would make sure to pack my mirrorless, with the Pixel I could actually trust it to take an acceptable photo.

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fariszr 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It matters when the phone is supposed to last more than two years.

Poor battery life is a symptom of a slow CPU, things that don't require full performance on a snapdragon 8 elite take double the time in a pixel while needing full turbo performance.

Don't get me started on the terrible modem efficiency.

These issues are there since the Pixel 6, and Google clearly just doesn't care.

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lawn 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I used a Fairphone 4 (a clearly underpowered phone already at release) for almost 4 years and it still performed just as well. This issue is overblown.

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starky 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The Pixel 7 Pro is essentially 3 years old and I notice next to zero difference compared to my Galaxy S25. I argue for most people they wouldn't notice a speed difference between even a 3 year old mid-range SoC and today's flagship SoCs.

Poor battery life has much more to do with the size of the battery and how the CPU speed is managed in software. Today's SoCs, even mid range ones could suck a battery to zero in short order. At the end of the day, even if you have a newer SoC built on a more efficient smaller process node they turn around and run it at a higher clock speed and you lose the benefit.

	▲	fariszr 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		5000mah is the standard battery size for XL phones. Still the pixels battery falls apart immediately on cellular, while heating up like crazy. Have you used your phone for navigation while on cellular? My pixel would be dead in two hours with this. Even just normal browsing on cellular data would get it to heat up and kill the battery life.

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lopis 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't personally care about top performance at all (I've been a happy user of Fairphones for several years). But as phones start doing more and more AI tasks (from camera post-processing to computer vision tasks, and now LLMs) the added processing power does make a difference in how usable and snappy the phone feels. For most users it's not about being constantly fast (like for gaming or for long AI tasks), but for being able to handle peak load more smoothly.

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mrheosuper 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

race to idle, if your soc has the same power consumption, you want to finish the job as soon as you can and go to sleep.