This is a placeholder thread that will eventually discuss the Pixel 2, to be announced on October 4.

Meanwhile, Google is announcing other things, including the Android One Moto X4 for $399 as part of Google Fi. (Related coverage.) You get what looks to be an entirely reasonable smartphone with dual rear cameras and for an entirely reasonable price, albeit not as outrageously cheap as the Nexus 5 and 5X. Still, the reviews of the phone itself place it solidly in the "mid-tier", which two years ago would be outrageously beyond the top tier, and now it's supported directly by Google. This is the phone I'd get for my kid if her phone died tomorrow.

There's some kind of trade-in deal, but I don't have the numbers yet. Clicking through required me to go through all the "sure, convert my Google Voice to Google Fi" stuff, which I am most certainly not doing right now.

News today: Google is buying out the Pixel team from HTC for >$1 billion. I can confirm that the Pixel is a very nice piece of kit, and it makes some sense for Google to continue to offer a high-end phone with high-end specs under its own name, assuming they can do that without pissing off all the other OEMs. Of course, Microsoft is also offering its self-branded computers while simultaneously having a giant OEM community, and life marches onward.

The Pixel 2 is the phone I've been most curious about for the last couple of months. Even more so now I've seen Apples keynote and saw their progression (or lack thereof) with the iPhone X. I've been an iPhone user for more than 5 years now, but the Pixel 2 could be the phone that makes make me switch sides.

Can't wait for October 4th!

What? A talking poop emoji is not progressive?

Ok, granted, there is *that* of course...

I find this post humorous for reasons that will soon become clear...

Oooh... do spill!
Are you a beta tester for Google or something?

Not at all. I'm laughing because, much to the surprise of folks here, I went the opposite direction this year...

I think I just felt a slight disturbance in the force.

The delta between what is possible on iPhone and what is possible without iPhone has been widening for years now. That delta seems to be a primary driver of exit from Android and retention of existing iPhone owners.

I am rarely surprised to learn of someone moving to iPhone from not-iPhone, but curious as to the individual reasons for doing so.

Like what? Anecdotally, I've heard a few people moving from iPhone, but not the other way.

Android is great if you're very careful.

I think the curated iOS app store is a prime motivator. Very little malware makes it onto an iphone. (Again, be very careful if you jailbreak.)

Android has such fragmented updates (or no updates) that is's a cesspool waiting for attacks.

(I was happy when my HS senior kid chose an iphone to replace her ancient galaxy.)

-jk

Apple hardware continues to impress. CPU power is a multiple faster than anything available to Android manufacturers, and iPhone GPU keeps ramping up. Camera quality is excellent, now moving well beyond high quality lens and pixels into accessible computational photography, with ARkit poised to leverage the entire iPhone platform.

Service and Support are well regarded. When I have needed to resolve a problem with Apple’s help, the people have been generally excellent. In person at the Apple stores, via online support chat and telephone support. Even when traveling overseas, Apple can resolve problems in a consistent and useful manner.

On top of the Apple hardware, almost all Google services are available via iPhone. Apps for Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, and so on.

And of course the enormous range of third party apps and services, some of which are only available for iPhone/Apple. Microsoft’s current Word for iPad was available before it was released for Surface. A lot of Microsoft productivity apps. Every major app is available on iPhone*.

Plus all of the Apple only apps and services, and the trustworthy security underpinning them. iMessage, Apple Pay, iCloud (which includes many different services), Apple Maps, Photostream, Find my iPhone, Find Friends. Probably a bunch more I am forgetting about.

If one also has other Apple devices, such as Mac and iPad, the iPhone with iCloud allows for a variety of near seamless task/app/data interchange and hand off between devices.

Apple Watch is a functional and useful companion for iPhone owners. AirPods are impressive and work well with iPhone and Watch. Android wearables are on a different trajectory.

iMessage is a rather special thing. Much more than just SMS ‘text messages’ to mobile phone numbers. SMS is by comparison quite limited, even with MMS and the recent RCS hacks layered on. Yes, there are a variety of ‘other messaging apps’. iMessage matters, a lot.

Perhaps most important, a wide swath of humanity finds the iPhone to be useable and accessible. For many it is their primary daily computing device. People love their iPhones. And it rubs off on the people around them.


* Some apps run counter to Apple’s restrictions, so these tend to be found elsewhere. I tend to value the other positive aspects of the platform and tolerate the restrictions.

I'm absolutely certain that this is not the reason that Android users switch to iOS. The Play Store is fine.


I thought this ancient narrative died years ago. This might have been the case a while back, but it matters less these days. Besides, the average consumer doesn't care about this either.

Those people are wrong. The iOS (and apps) UI is utter shit.

I feel the same about Android

You said there was a huge delta between what was possible with the iPhone and without and that it was growing, but haven't show anything that fits that category.

Apple hardware is impressive, no doubt. But if a CPU is already fast enough to do anything you need, does making it even faster matter? Based on the latest benchmarks, there is a huge different between the iPhone and S8 when editing and rendering 4k video. I would suggest if you are editing and rendering 4k video on a phone, especially one who's display is incapable of showing that resolution, you are doing it wrong. ARCore is the Google equivalent of ARkit, and it also uses the entire platform. There really isn't a difference in capability between them.

Service and support certainly aren't only available on the iPhone.

What third party apps aren't available on Android and only for the iPhone? MS Office apps, which you specifically mentioned, have been available for Android since 2015. They are probably even easier to use on the S8, since you can get a dock that uses the phone as a computer and hooks it up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse with the Samsung Dex Station.

Apple only apps are replicated on Android. It is silly thinking Android Pay is less secure than Apple Pay. Google Photos does the same thing as PhotoStream, but isn't limited to just iOS devices, and it is free unlimited storage if you have a Pixel. The biggest difference in chatting with somebody in iMessage from an Android device is your name shows up in green. Yes, that was one journalist's reason for not switching, so I guess it is a big deal (for some).

Google Drive does the same thing as iCloud, but again, not limited to just iOS devices. It allows access across all your devices with Drive.

Android also has wearables, so again it isn't exclusive. Even better, the watch face isn't limited to one form factor. So, not only is it not exclusive, but there are more choices if you don't use iOS.

How does iMessage matter, especially a lot? What does it do that can not be done on other devices?


I'm not sure if you noticed, but your own link shows that Android is a larger swatch of humanity.

Everybody says there are so many things that can only be done with Apple devices, but I haven't seen it.

I do a fair bit of video editing on my iPhone, some of it in 4K. When you are away on holiday with your drone the iPhone + iMovie makes a great platform for some video editing without having to drag a laptop along.

I obviously can’t do everything I can do on the laptop, but it impressive just how much you can achieve on the phone and some of it is easier to use than on the desktop.

Areas like this is where a better CPU makes a massive difference.

I could see that, but in those cases, I'd probably just copy the movies to a Micro SD and take care of them when I got back home.

When I'm away for a couple of weeks I like to share my footage with friends and family. There is far more chance of me actually getting round to editing it if I do it then and there rather than waiting until I get home.

I get some reasonable results, for edits done on a phone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l7OK0SbYUQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WpeLRNncB4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaB5jacBdrA

All shot at 2.7k, edited on the iPhone and output at 1080p for upload (holiday cottage Internet was slow).

Google has been very aggressive about computational photography as well. No less than Stanford Emeritus Professor Marc LeVoy wrote the real-time HDR support for Google's camera app. I'm also impressed at the Google Photos backend to do all kinds of searches you wouldn't expect. Like, I search for "Tesla" and I get all the photos I've taken of my car, inside and out. Behold the power of machine learning. It's really amazing. The Sony camera module that was standard in the Nexus 5X, 6P, and Pixel is astonishingly high quality, all by itself. I rarely find myself wishing I had my "real" camera long given how good the built-in cameras have gotten these days.

As a security person, I'm fascinated by all the back and forth about which platform is more or less secure. The best conclusion I can reach is that Google Nexus/Pixel devices, at least while they're still being supported by Google, are comparable in some aspects, superior in some, worse in others. If you're running an older device that Google no longer supports (e.g., my wife's Nexus 5) or if you've got a third-party Android phone from any of the millions of OEMs, then security starts falling off a cliff. (Incidentally, I'll be replacing that Nexus 5 shortly, probably with the new Moto X4 "Android One" device once I can get it without having to sign up for Google Fi.)

The only place where Apple seems to be clearly superior is their hardware-assisted "enclave" for storing fingerprint and other vital crypto keys. This helps protect you against your phone being read out if it's confiscated from you while locked. Most Android phones are still relying on the ARM "TrustZone", which turns out to be riddled with holes.

Beyond that, most Android apps and half of the Android system are written in Java, which means no buffer overflows. There's a lot more C and Objective-C floating around the Apple universe, so more opportunities for buffer overflows, both in apps and the system.

App store curation seems to be comparable these days. Google has some really strong static analysis, fuzzing, and machine learning people beating up on their app store. It's still far from perfect, but it's getting much, much better. Apple is relatively quiet about exactly what they're doing in this regard. They might be great, they might be awful. We don't really know.


Beyond that... the main win that Apple seems to have is a giant ecosystem of third-party stuff: chargers, cases, alarm clock docks, etc. Now that the Android universe seems to be standardizing on USB-C for all sorts of things, I expect to see alarm clock docks and other such contrivances become just as available for Android.

I'm less convinced that there are any particular "killer apps" on either platform. For example, people do texting with all kinds of things these days. I have literally six different texting apps on my phone, because there's somebody, somewhere who uses it that I need to interact with. The most common things I do with my phone I could do just as well with virtually any other phone on the market, Apple or Android.

After a week with the iPhone, the one thing I can say is that there's certainly no "huge delta" between them. It's largely a question of preference and what works for the user.

I think that, as computer users, we try to assign objective measures to these platforms, when it's really more subjective.

Apologies to Dan for twisting the thread. Feel free to make a new one when the actual October announcement happens!

If there's one thing that the empegbbs has always done, it's twisted threads. When October 4 rolls around, and Google formally announces the Pixel 2 or whatever it's called, that still fits here.

Okay, here's the ten cent summary of Google's new goodies.

Pixel 2 / Pixel 2 XL:
- added water resistance
- removed the headphone jack
- less bezel, but not zero bezel; no notch
- stereo front-firing speakers
- many LTE bands, but not band 71 (the 600MHz spectrum that T-Mobile is planning to roll out)
- buy the phone get a free Home Mini
- priced at $649 / 64GB (Pixel 2), +$200 for Pixel 2 XL, +$100 for 128GB of Flash

Modest price drop on the Pixel / XL from last year:
- $549 for the Pixel, +$120 for the XL, +$100 to jump from 32GB to 128GB Flash.

Google Home Mini:
- $49 for the same basic thing as a Google Home, just smaller, included free with a Pixel 2

Google Home Max:
- $400 for a Google Home attached to a bookshelf-class speaker

Google Pixelbook:
- Roughly a $1000 Core i5 laptop, running ChromeOS, aluminum body, flips around into a tablet

Oh, and an awful lot of "Google Assistant all the things!"

Oh, and I forgot one more thing. They have a weird little standalone camera gadget. ("Google Clip") Which you simply leave alone and crazy AI decides when to keep a picture. They did a bunch of nifty privacy stuff, like the pictures never leave the device until you connect to it with your phone.

This seems like it could be a great dashcam, except you really have no idea if the AI will decide to keep "interesting" events or not. For $249, it's on the high end of "random impulse buy".

And one other other thing: Google's now doing real-time language translation. I have no idea how well it works, but it's the Babel Fish. In real life. In real time. This appears to work with their fancy new "Google Assistant" Bluetooth headphones, and presumably also works with others.

I think it's pretty clear that the cell phone market is leveling off. Both the Pixel 2 and iPhone 8 don't really bring that much new stuff to the table, and at this point it's all about incremental upgrades.

Anyway, folks have heard me whine about Apple for years, so get ready for the other shoe:

As I predicted, Google is all in on the assistant, and they're obsessed with it, even if it's not always the most useful thing. I just hope they can get it to be smarter, because I only found that voice searches got dumber the longer I owned the Pixel XL.

That Google Clip is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Nobody is going to buy that, there's no use for it, and it's going to fail miserably. I mean seriously, what is that for? Do you just carry it around everywhere and whenever you enter a room you just put it down someplace? I'm sure that'll work great. This product baffles me.

Are people really buying a $1K Chromebook? It seemed to me that the only price points for a Chromebook were the $250 and $500 levels. Anything higher than that and what are you getting? You can open Google Sheets faster? I can get a Dell XPS 15 for that kind of money and have a real operating system.

Home Max - should have figured this would come out after I jumped ship, but it's even more expensive than the HomePod. It'll be interesting to hear sound quality comparison reviews, though.

The translation stuff is cool. Can't knock that.

Lastly, what's in the new Daydream, Dan? I couldn't tell. I have the first one and was underwhelmed by it. What's the deal there?


To be clear, this isn't sour grapes because I'm an iPhone user now. I moved to iPhone because I'm not a fan of the moves Google is making right now. I'm fine with some of this, and I think the Pixel was already the best phone Google had ever made and is capable of holding its own against the competition.

I fail to understand all things related to Daydream. It's just a toy, so far as I can tell.

The Google Clip would be brilliant as a dashcam, but that's not what it's designed to do. The best way to understand what it actually is: look at the high-end pro sports photographers. They'll set up "remote" cameras all over the place and trigger them with expensive radio contraptions. This is the same idea. It's a "remote" camera that decides for itself when to click the shutter. If it were $100, I'd probably get it to play with it. For $250, meh.

The fancy Chromebook market is something I've never entirely understood, but the justification for extra horsepower is that it can also run Android apps. Also, my daughter is currently on her third Chromebook after destroying the first two. Something a little better built might have survived.

But who on earth is the Clip for? I assume the most-used scenario is that you put one in a corner of the room during a party and it gets a bunch of shots. At best, that's a bunch of shots from a single angle to be mixed in with the ones you're presumably taking with your phone as well. Seems like a classic solution in search of a problem situation to me.

What Chromebooks was she using? I thought there were some nice ones in the $500-600 range these days that were constructed a little better. Kids kill computers. Nothing can prevent that

Let's say I was a wedding photographer. I could paste those things up to the walls and see if they get anything interesting. Low cost, possible payout.

Dell*, and others, make Chromebooks for the education market, with abuse in mind. "School tough: The Dell Chromebook 11 is MIL-STD (U.S. Military Standard) tested for durability, pressure, temperature, humidity, shock and vibration so it can handle student life." Though that doesn't mean it is kid proof

*I work for Dell, but don't have a preference one way or another (we have two Toshibas and an Asus at home, right feature set at the time) or endorse the product - I only know public info, but if you want a coupon hit me up.

So far, Chromebook #3 seems to be holding up pretty well.

#1 got knocked off a table while plugged in and the plug/connector was torn right out, along with a corner of the plastic case.

#2 has a weird failure to do with the connector from the base to the monitor. The top of the case came unpeeled/unglued or something and whenever you touched it the whole computer freaked out and you had to restart it. Touch it funny, and it freaked out again.

#3 is one of the flippy-hinge models and seems to be holding up reasonable well so far.

If/when #3 dies, then I'd be tempted to get something more robust.

Still, when a $200 Chromebook dies, you feel modestly sad and you get another one. When a $2000 high-end Macbook dies, you're far more pissed...

Agreed

Fun fact: The Pixel 1, bottom of the line, with the new discount, would have been the perfect phone to buy for my wife to replace her current ailing Nexus 5. But guess what? The bottom-of-the-line Pixel is sold out. You can pay extra for 128GB of storage and get it right away, or for the same price, get a Pixel 2, albeit with "only" 64GB.

So now I've got a Pixel 2 on order. Delivery in mid-November.

What's at least nice about this is that our whole family will now be exclusively USB-C to charge all our phones. Sadly, there are still too many Micro-B things floating around here (e.g., the charger for my watch) and Mini-B (bicycle lights). I really would like to go all USB-C and call it a day, but that day is going to take a while to arrive.