Pixel 6, 7 series get an extra two years of software upgrades

Indeed. However the root problem were CPU and other hw drivers AFAIK, not Google. Making their own SoC made it possible to bypass those greedy manufacturers and extend support.

Samsung's update policy for their lower end models is pretty atrocious. While on paper they offer updates for a couple of years, it you look more closely, you'll notice that the update intervals get larger and larger as time goes on. You might not get important updates for half a year. Sure, still better than not updates at all, but a pretty awful policy for security updates.

It’s one of those rare and fleeting moments when competition works to our benefit.

More competition is always better for the consumer.

IMHO, security updates are more important than OS updates, and Fairphone is good in that regard. I'd be hard-pressed to even name a killer feature from the last few versions of Android (or iOS, for that matter).

The fairphone 5 is on android 14 and android 15 has only started to be deployed 2 months ago.

Isn't the main reason for GrapheneOS to choose Pixels that Pixels have the Titan security chip?

Fairphone has a great approach and I would love to buy an EU phone with replaceable parts, however I've read pretty underwhelming things about their software support. in that sense, paying 90€ every 3-4 years to get the battery replaced on a pixel,would be a better bet. That,plus the pixel a variants are very competitively prices and you get huge bang dor your buck.

I wish fairphones were cheaper...

And wireless charging, the reason i own a pixel not an fairphone. Maybe next it will be a shiftphone, but thats hopefully far in the future.

Huh, they support a lot more hardware than they used to, that's pretty amazing! I may have to try it out.

Any idea if MMS is supported properly yet? That has been my main hurdle, and it looks like my other issues (battery life and audio quality) may be resolved by picking other hardware than the PinePhone.

Exactly the same here. I went Nexus->Pixel 2->Pixel 6

Works flawlessly, except of course that I only get like ~28h of battery life instead of the ~48h in the beginning

My old Nokia easily outlasted those.

I replaced my OS on day 1 so it's not the same but I've also had no issues aside from a brief power draining issue that got patched shortly after.

The 4a was beast tbh. Loved that one.

Here's some BS. My phone's battery replacement cost $220. ($100 for battery, and $120 to be serviced) That was the same price as buying a refurbished version of the upgrade.

I missed the days of just replacing the battery with a screwdriver.

Coincidentally, that's the almost exactly the longest life we had in our family. Then, one day my wife performed an update which immediately killed the screen. My Pixel failure was far more frustrating: After a system update I learned that if the screen wasn't clean enough on post-update reboot, Google disabled multi-touch forever.

Consider that an S23 FE (one model behind the flagship and with lesser CPU) is 70-75% the cost of a Pixel 9. The only differences that most users would notice is: The Samsung has a telephoto and Google an ultrawide; The Samsung won't unexpectedly die due to a software issue.

My wife and I'd Pixels were rock solid until one day a Google update came along and killed them with an unrecoverable loss of critical functionality. The only way I'd recommend one of these is if one heavily values having the newest thing for cheap, or for the wide angle camera.