Google set to cancel “7 years of software updates for the Pixel 8”.
Google will be shuddering its “7 years of software updates” program next month, just 1 year after launch. The company sites unforeseen economic changes for the decision.
Your Pixel 8 will continue to work, but no new updates will be coming.
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You still have unlimited Google photos storage with the first Pixel. I’d say they keep their promises just fine.
Tell that to my otherwise perfectly functioning OnHub router.
Never been so god damn mad, I got three devices replacing it that still can’t match the consistent coverage that thing provided.
It looks like hardware improvement is shifting to AI capabilities. If so, in 7 years pixel 8 will be hardly interesting for anyone from the target audience.
I can barely get a phone to last three years, let alone seven. The way we use these devices anymore, there’s no way in hell it’s going seven years without some sort of maintenance and upkeep. The battery won’t last that long, and by year six the thing will be chugging like a commodore trying to run Android 19. I respect the promise, but don’t trust Google with their track record, and very few people will limp these devices into year seven, and they know it.
What was the very first thing Android 14 marketed to me on install this aft? Google Podcasts…
Complete opposite here. Typing this on an iPhone 8, and I’ve never retired a phone sooner than 4 years. Usually I give up around 6 due to lack of updates becoming a problem.
A longer support cycle would definitely sway my purchase decision.
Edit: though I am the type to replace batteries, buttons and screens myself as necessary
While this is a reasonable take, the tensor chips are supposedly focused on AI (which would make sense given their push into the AI space for phone tools like spam, photo/video editing, assistant, etc.) and this refresh builds upon AI stuff they rolled out to previous gen phones. I doubt any of it is so cpu intensive that whatever AI they’ve created in a few years wont also run on the older phone, it just might not be as snappy.
I have a different impression about new AI features backporting plans, but we will see. My point is that ai targeting HW can potentially drive the next smartphones evolution, which is slowed down currently.
Training AI models takes a lot of development on the software side, and is computationally intense on the hardware side. Loading a shitload of data into the process, and letting the training algorithms dig down on how to value each of billions or even trillions of parameters is going to take a lot of storage space, memory, and actual computation through ASICs dedicated to that task.
Using pre-trained models, though, is a less computationally intensive task. Once the parameters are defined on that huge training set, that model can be applied by software that just takes the parameters already defined in training and applies it to smaller data sets.
So I would expect the AI/ML chips in actual phones would continue to benefit from AI development, including models developed many chip generations later.
The thing is more complicated than than. Moreover, there is a wish/needs to train/fine-tune models locally. This is not comparable to initial training of chatGPT like models, but still require some power. Juts today I read that some pixel 8 video improvement features will not be ported to pixel 7 because they need tensor 3 power.
7 years support for (new & future) Pixels & 10 years of support for Chromebooks. WATTBA
