Comment by bityard 5 days ago
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets. At least round the corners or add little ramps. I guess this is what happens when design folk are allowed to trump engineers.
A lot of people buy clothes for their looks with minimal weighting towards functionality (or rather that is the functionality). If you've got a body in reasonable nick then tight pants can look good.
The traditional solution to poor pockets is a purse or bag. Phones are interesting in that they can demand attention and that they are probably the most used item that people carry around with them. Thus people compromise their lines/comfort to actually use the faster accessibility of pockets. Probably explains the popularity of ridge wallets and key wallets too.
I don't wear tight jeans and I've come to loathe having to put my phone in my pants pocket. If you're walking around a lot, the feeling is just annoying, you can feel it pressing on your leg the whole time. When I sit down, the bunching feeling is even worse, so I immediately put the phone on the table.
This wasn't an issue when phones had 4.7"-5"-inch screens. Nowadays the phone goes into the cargo pocket if I'm wearing shorts, or back pocket if I'm walking.
I've got a single short that does that (re: bunching feeling) and it's just because the pocket isn't deep enough for the phone to sit flat against my thigh.
I'd rather choose my shorts more carefully in the future than switch to a smaller phone (that might still have the same problem if not tiny) just because of that.
Not that I'm trying to justify the prices, but I'm interested by the take that a phone should cost less than a computer. To me, the phone has an actual camera and is significantly smaller (and, if you are talking desktop, has a screen) so should cost more for the same sort of power. Of course, there are phones and computers at all different prices so it's hard to compare.
It's smaller, so it should cost less, not more. It's 2025, miniaturization isn't that expensive. It's less screen and less battery than a laptop, cooling the CPU can be done passively because it's so low-powered, it has less RAM and less flash and fewer ports and a simpler mechanical design, no keyboard or touchpad... it's a slab of glass with a plastic/aluminum case containing a PCB, battery, and camera.
Written on my $250 Motorola
> It's smaller, so it should cost less
That is... not how the physical world works. The laws of physics hate the large and the small. Or perhaps less glibly parameters do not scale equally. Making a phone is more difficult and expensive than making a laptop for the same reason a 30ft tall human would break their own legs attempting to walk.
To put it another way: A thread rolling screw machine can churn out 12mm/0.5" bolts all day long for a penny each. But if you want to make tiny screws for small pocket watches you're going to pay more (relatively) even though that tiny screw contains way less metal than the larger bolt and the operation is similar. A .00001" error in the larger bolt threads doesn't matter. That much error makes the tiny screw completely unusable. Making a thread-forming die with less than .00001" error is very difficult and expensive and the one for smaller screws accumulates error faster relative to allowable error so must be replaced more often. The steel is just as hard in both bolts but the form of the tiny one is proportionally much thinner.
And similarly if you want a 6m/12ft long bolt you are going to pay a lot more than just the proportional cost of the extra metal because finding machines that can even put that much tool pressure on the dies is not easy. It has to be lifted with a crane. It is just more difficult in every way.
Miniaturization is more expensive. Water and dust proofing is more expensive.
For most things there is a sweet range where cost is lowest and utility highest. Prices go up on either end of that middle ground.
By this logic a Ferrari should cost less than a Toyota Camry because it has less seats and luggage space.
I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.
As a side note, computers DO cost more than phones, in general. You can barely get a graphics card for that price these days, so you’re not really comparing apples to apples if your computer is that cheap.
> I.e. you’re conveniently leaving out the _entire_ set of reasons this isn’t the case.
Would you like to list those for the phone? I don't think your analogy is fair at all.
While I mostly agree with you that it is counterintuitive to have mobile costlier than laptop, this year's Pixel Pro models have 16GB RAM. That is better than most entry level laptops on the market right now.
The Pro having more ram than the average entry level laptop doesn't imply very much.
When I search '16gb laptop' on Amazon the first result is $320 and the third result is $220. The first one also has 512GB of storage, and I can upgrade to 24GB of ram and 1TB of storage for only $50. And it has a plenty good CPU with two fast cores and four slow cores.
The upgrade part is especially nasty for phones. Laptops and phones use the same production lines for ram and flash chips, so no price excuses there. And you can fit 2TB into a microSD these days. But if I want 1TB on my Pixel I have to start with a Pro and then add an extra $450.
> It's less screen and less battery than a laptop,
Phones have higher resolution, higher refresh rate, and brighter screens at the price point vs a $1000 laptop. (Also higher density screens are harder to make, 12" 1080p panels cost nothing, phone screens are often bespoke resolutions.)
RAM is the same or higher at the $1k price point - 16GB.
Fewer ports sure, but most ports are USB-C anyway, the cost of the connector is not the expensive part.
The mechanical design I'll push back on as well, phones are expected to put up with a lot more physical abuse than laptops, and also be resistant to dust and water. You can dunk a pixel phone in 3 feet of water for half an hour, good luck doing that with a laptop. As someone who got to watch the ME's sitting next to my team work on making our product water resistant, that process sucks, it takes multiple iterations ($, and time) and it is non-trivial to get right.
Tear downs of the Pixel 10 are obv not available yet, but the estimated BOM for a Pixel 9 is ~$400 USD. Figure ongoing support (7 years!), all the cloud services that come with it, and all the other costs that went into making it (the army of engineers, an entire OS team, all the apps that come with it, etc), the $800 I paid for it isn't half bad.
Edit: Oh and phones also have a modern miracle of an RF stack in them. My phone can hold onto a BT connection across my yard and through 2 brick walls! And they do this with barely any space to but the antennas. Meanwhile laptops can run antennas willy-nilly with the absurd amount of volume they have to work with.
(Apple's Laptops also have really good wireless performance, but the base models aren't trying to support the three generations of cellular protocols and standard that phones do.)
The high resolution is a waste of money. The camera is a waste of money. The number of buttons is small. The issues like a hinge are non existant. The ability to pop out the battery is the kind of complicated thing I would expect from someone competent like a laptop maker.. The lack of Ram slots and now other slots is simplifying.
Really Apple made the game field very simple and its no problem making a perfectly good $50 phone. Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems. Basically forcing you to buy a "middle level" phone that has all the pointless features only a teenager has time/eyes for to get the minimum security updates.
Also Google stuff always lacks SD card slots and have tiny storage. The $250 Motorola can add a $50 1 TB SD Card, which is enough to fit your entire music collection, all of wikipedia, and an offline ad-free routable map of the world from OSM, and still have probably like 700 GB left over for photos/videos. Google meanwhile charges $100 for a 128 GB storage upgrade. Probably because they want to funnel you into their cloud storage, want you to use their online maps/music services, etc.
Phone cameras are also absolute trash anyway, and pulling up some comparisons in Google Photos right now, I'm fairly certain that my Pixel 6a takes obviously worse photos than my Nexus 5x did 10 years ago, even comparing high light for the 6a to low light for the 5x. I'll probably buy a Motorola when my current phone dies because the only ostensible reason to buy a Pixel is the camera. Or I suspect the real big-brained solution lives in the handheld gaming PC space.
>Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
As much as I loathe the consumerism of buying the latest phone every year, I realized that if the trade-in value is good enough, it's a pretty good strategy in terms of overall technology spend.
With iPhones, I upgraded every third generation. With Pixels, I went from 3 to 6 to 9, but given that I'm on Google Fi, I get a $450 discount on the phone, and I can get a base Pixel 10 Pro for $217, after trade-in. I got a surprisingly generous trade-in on my Pixel 6 when I bought the 9, and buying the Pixel 3 with Google Fi was pretty cheap too.
The last computer I bought was an M1 Max Macbook Pro w/ 36gb of RAM and a 1TB drive, for $2499, in 2023 (thank you B&H). Hopefully it'll be a long time before I'm paying that much for a phone.
> _starting_ at $799, $999 and $1199.
At 126GB storage, which is basically unusable in 2025 and it's a phone you want to last to 2030. This storage bait needs to be made illegal, it literally costs almost nothing to manufacture and exists purely to punish and trick the consumer.
That's beside the point but I don't game on my phone (s22 with 128gb) and constantly have to shuffle storage just for photos, videos and music streaming cache. Storage is so cheap it makes no sense to pay 1,000$ for a device and then be a slave to manually managing it. It's insulting.
I feel the same way about paying more for a phone than for a computer, but is it rational? I'm not sure. Sure you get a smaller screen and a smaller battery, and the phone doesn't have a keyboard and a trackpad (assuming you were referring to a laptop), but does the militarisation make up that difference?
Disclaimer: I'm not really invested in thinking about it carefully. I don't like any of the huge phones available now, and so far I'm getting by with the small phone I have, and buying into the idea of the Framework laptop either means I won't have to replace the whole thing or that I'll just go back to buying refurbished enterprise laptops.
Edit: I see other people have already picked up on the computer/phone cost thought more productively than I did! :)
I always amortize the coat of the phone over the months of security updates remaining. Sometimes the last gen is a better deal, on a per month basis, sometimes the new one is only a couple bucks a month more. i dont mind a few more dollars per month.
/s: B-b-b-but if you buy the Pixel 10 Pro Fold you can pay $1799 and, assuming your bank account can only hold amounts $1699 and lower, the amount needed to purchase will overflow at some point in the purchasing process, making it SEEM like you only pay $100 for that new phone!?
> Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
My computer is ~$6,000, so that would be a pretty high bar for me.
Well, minor nit- cell providers offer it for 60% Google’s price to start[0], while locking it into a phone contract that subsidizes it. This is effectively bundling a loan for the hardware with your data plan. That price is more of a down payment on said loan.
[0] actually in the US at least they’ll frequently offer it for “free” with a new plan, that of course locks the phone to said plan.
Yeah, I bought a Pixel 10 Pro 256 GB yesterday. Should have been $1,099. But Google e-mailed me a $150 off coupon code, I got $450 off for being a Google Fi subscriber, plus $100 as a trade-in for my Pixel 6. My actual price for the 10 Pro was $399.
> This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.
I'm interested to hear more about this, because it's always interesting to understand how other people interact with things who have different use cases or usage models.
How tight are your jeans, and how do you fit anything else in your pocket if something ~1in thick doesn't fit comfortably (without having to force the pocket open in a way that would require a "ramp")?
Are you using your back pockets? I have never once understood the utility of those; I have no desire to sit on anything in my pockets.