Discussion - Google just made the Pixel 11 wait pointless for many buyers

Pssssssss Let me let you in on a little secret.

YOU DON'T NEED TO UPGRADE EVERY YEAR!

In the states, where people still mostly buy on contract, & carriers want you to stay on an overpriced contract, so they offer "free" upgrades.

Unless your phone is damaged, YOU DON'T NEED A NEW ONE EVERY YEAR.

Heck, unless there is a HUGE upgrade from the manufacturer, you could probably keep your current phone until the manufacturer stops updating it.

This will be another example of shrinkflation, if device manufacturers provide higher priced devices with less memory. I have seen numerous comments and discussions about the possibility of this. It is ironic, given that the demands of AI processing naturally push the hardware requirements higher, not lower. We are already seeing this with laptops, which were shipping with 16-32 GB of RAM and now are as low as 4-8 GB. It strikes me as odd that the pendulum swings back to what we had in the far distant past with mainframe computing and data centers. There was a PC revolution after that, shattering the constraints of not having computing power in your own hands. Now here we are again. The healthiest ecosystem will have an abundance of both data center computing and high powered personal devices, not a vacuum where data center computing sucks away all the resources of both. We need both. So therefore this is a supply issue that needs to be solved ASAP.

It's weird to me that AI companies are all fighting for ram. I just have doubts it's sustainable and I don't understand why investors are fine buying ram at 6x the cost.

I know the AI leaders insist AI is the greatest thing and not over hyped, I really feel like real long term changes take decades.

Most current uses of AI don't seem important to me. Science research and text conversion to interactive graphs are neat. It can make coding faster, but I still don't see it replacing decent SWE yet. But is that really enough for these sky high costs?

I just bought a Pixel 10 Pro. I upgraded from an S20, which was still working perfectly and hadn't been updated in years. The Pixel 10 Pro is my fourth ever smartphone.

While I don't think AI is as useless as 3D TV's, it is not worth all the hype either. It improves all the time, but talk to be when It can truly be used as an AI assistant, like in the movies, which can understand ordinary conversation without having to be phrased just right. Hell, Gemini can't even navigate to my Dad's house despite having a contact named Dad!