Prefer WhistleOut in Google
From as far back as its original incarnation, the Pixel has been my go-to Android phone. A decade later, Google's smartphone line feels poised on the precipice of its flop era.
The performance part of the picture doesn't tell the whole story, but it's a good place to start.
When the Tensor first made its debut, it felt like the first step on a path that would see the Pixel’s processing power follow a trajectory akin to that of Apple’s own silicon. With each generation, the returns on that investment seem to diminish.
It says a lot that Google’s big performance benchmarks it uses for the hardware inside the Pixel tend towards AI workloads more than anything else. In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that instead of setting the Pixel up for favourable comparisons with the rest of the Android market, the gap between it and the Snapdragon-powered competition has only widened for the worse.
While the difference in what flagship performance looks like on Google's hardware versus its competition isn't necessarily new, that shortfall has become a lot harder to stomach as the Pixel has moved away from its roots as a smartphone that does more with less.
Google's early bets on computational photography and parts that worked smarter rather than harder meant that earlier incarnations of the Pixel could afford to be cheaper than its competition. More recent efforts are every bit as expensive, but earlier ones made for an argument against accepting the ever-increasing asking prices that the high-end of the Android market has normalised.
Most people do not – and probably should not – spend thousands of dollars on their next smartphone, and while the Pixel A series has kept that idea alive in a fashion, it’s become hard to deny how far we’ve come from the affordability of the Pixel 5 – the rare flagship phone to launch at a lower price than its predecessors – Google’s handsets have come.
Where buying a Pixel phone once meant paying less, now it means paying pretty much the same as what you’d be looking at elsewhere. Every year, that asking price creeps up just a little more. Faced with both the chip shortage and wider inflation, it’s almost certainly going to happen again when the Pixel 11 arrives later this year.
It’d be one thing if these yearly updates came with significant upgrades or design changes, but the last few generations of Pixel hardware have largely settled into a familiar groove. This year’s Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro will likely conform to that convention, combining familiar looks with a few new software tricks and camera capabilities.
I don’t know if there’s much upside to trying to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily, but I’m certainly getting increasingly tired of seeing the price go up on that increasingly identical old wheel all the same.
What's more, every new generation of Pixel hardware comes with new AI-powered features that push on the boundaries of privacy and sensibility. With only a handful of exceptions, these features are hit or miss, and usually eventually make it out to the wider ecosystem if you’re willing to wait a few months.
As the shine has continued to rub off when it comes to generative AI writ large, Google continues to take swings at finding use cases for it. By the numbers, most of these miss the mark. Regardless of what things look like once the dust settles, the noise created around these features does plenty to detract from the straightforwardness and simplicity that drew me to the Pixel line in the first place.
I don’t need a phone that lets me offload my life to an AI assistant. I want one that lets me stay connected with friends, lets me listen to podcasts and take nice pictures when I’m out and about.
The first few Pixel phones were paragons that embodied these ideas really well, but more recent efforts continue to drift off into the wilderness and spiral ever downward into the AI rabbit hole. The original Pixel came with a perk – unlimited cloud storage for your photos – that’s arguably more generous and practical than anything any other manufacturer has ever mustered, and the second stab cemented Google’s smartphone with a two-tone aesthetic that’s still miles more likable than most of the competition.
However, in the years since, the series has lost much of its charm. You don’t have to search too far to find online complaints and first-hand accounts of Pixel fans that have turned on Google outright after software updates that brick devices to display issues that were prevalent enough to justify an extended warranty for affected Pixel 8 owners.
Early on, these kinds of problems were easy to overlook or dismiss as bad luck. Google hasn’t been making devices as long or at the same scale as someone like Samsung has, and when you’re shipping significantly fewer devices, the chances of the odd faulty one slipping through quality control and making its way into the wild seem that much greater. If you step back and zoom out, these smaller missteps form part of a broader downward trend.
It’s not impossible to imagine the Pixel 11 returning to form, but a return to what worked about the earliest versions of the line remains beyond the pale. Google could start building devices with Qualcomm silicon inside them tomorrow, but even the world where it cuts back on its AI antics isn't likely to be one where the RRP of the next Pixel phone goes down rather than up.
Fergus Halliday
Digital Content Editor
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