The Pixel 11 is the first Pixel phone to be released after the RAMpocolypse. It has made a lot of compromises in the name of lowering cost. I am definitely going to skip that generation. I tend to upgrade every 3 years, but there really isn't a big driver to do so right now. My Pixel 8 is holding up great. If I broke it and needed to buy a new phone today, I'd probably get a used Pixel 10 instead of a new 11.

Just be careful with the 8 because their motherboards tend to randomly fry themselves - both me and a friend had this happen around 2 years into owning ours and there are a decent number of people online with the same issue. Switched to the 10a on sale right before the price hike and man I'm glad I did. It'll probably be the last great Pixel if hardware costs keep getting worse and Google keeps shoving Gemini down everyone's throats.

I have Pixel 9a and considered Pixel 10 for a while, but seeing Pixel 11 show up with absurdly microscopic improvements over 10 made me realize, that this smartphone line is just a solved problem since years ago.

Is there a point in changing a phone so often if it's not broken?

Same thing here, I will keep my 10a for the foreseeable figure. It's unclear if future Pixels will support GOS at all, and the new Motorola is almost certainly going to be a $1000+ phone. Hopefully mid-range models will follow. I don't need a huge, expensive phone with five cameras.

Yeah, I've got a 10 Pro, jumped up from an 8. Looked briefly at upgrading to the 11 but it's clearly not worth it.

Huh, good point. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of constant phone upgrades. It used to be that new phones had much better hardware, so software that was only tested on new phones would make an older phone grind to a halt. But if the upgrades are much more incremental, perhaps a phone will last a lot longer?

To be fair, the trade in offers are larger this year than during P10 release window, at least where I live. So I was able to go from 10 Pro 16/256 to 11P 16/512 for something like 650 eur. It's a great deal IMHO as the SoC + modem combo is at least 30 to 40% more efficient. The phone runs faster, cooler and I don't have the battery anxiety that I got after 10 Pro.

I used the OP15 in the meantime and its ram management and (ironically enough) performance in day to day apps was somehow much worse. It unloaded apps, skipped notifications, apps took longer to open. Google have put in a lot of work into software ahead of the rampocalipse.

I tend to "upgrade" to the previous release, I always got them as their stocks dwindle and their prices are low. Did this with the last nexus, pixel 6, 7, and now I got a pixel 9 from work so the pattern is broken.

My Pixel 3 is still going strong! :)

The only reason to update from my pixel 7 is to get more storage. Otherwise a perfect phone

The Pixel 10 Pro is even fairly cheap in many countries if you can live with 128GB storage and the base model still has 16GB RAM.

why upgrade every 3 years when there are 7 years of updates?

I dropped my Pixel 8 and replaced it with a Pixel 10a. I'm perfectly happy and the lack of a camera bump is awesome. I don't intend to upgrade for quite some time.

I never thought about it like that, damn.