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Comment by drcross | Hacker News Reader

I think it's overpriced. As someone with a Note 4 I don't really see m/any killer features to upgrade to. I half considered the iphone7, being waterproof is a decent feature but I'm not comfortable carrying a phone around that costs as much as a budget car in my pocket. I'd gladly miss this upgrade cycle because in my opinion we've hit "peak phone". A smartphone is a commodity item at this stage. What I do value is not having to work a day extra to afford a phone, those extra 8 hours are now mine.

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On the other hand, my phone is the one device that's always with me, so it's one area where I am tempted to spend a bit more. However, what I'd pay extra for is better stability and a better experience for core features rather than new features.

But two new features well worth it this round of phones: Water resistance has been a long time coming. Also hoping unlimited high-res storage for photos in the cloud becomes a standard across all vendors. I know you aren't supposed to trust these services with your precious files, but I've been a horrible steward of my own photos and I'm always out of space on the device.

> Also hoping unlimited high-res storage for photos in the cloud becomes a standard across all vendors. I know you aren't supposed to trust these services with your precious files, but I've been a horrible steward of my own photos and I'm always out of space on the device.

I, personally, absolutely refuse to use cloud storage of my photographs (or any data, really) that doesn't involve client-side encryption. Am I actually that concerned about my photographs themselves? No, not really — but it is the principle of the thing, as well as uncertainty about what the future might bring.

I feel the same way about my location history and other data. Can I guarantee that no government or employer for the rest of my life will penalise me for having attended a political meeting, a church or anything else? I really don't think so.

Once given to someone else, data can never be pulled back. None of us can know the future, and so it makes sense to be as conservative as possible about what we let go of.

Do you trust yourself to store things safely without data loss (even in the face of theft, house fires and natural disasters) more than the multi-level redundancy employed in the cloud?

Is data loss less important to you than possible leakage of your photographs?

These are the tradeoffs the GP made choices in.

> Do you trust yourself to store things safely without data loss (even in the face of theft, house fires and natural disasters) more than the multi-level redundancy employed in the cloud?

No: I encrypt my data locally, using protocols I believe/hope are strong enough, and then upload the encrypted data to cloud storage providing multi-level redundancy.

Right now, this is a somewhat painful process, since Google (quite deliberately, I think — 'Don't Be Evil' is now but a fading memory) choose not to facilitate it, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be as simple and straightforward as using the cloud without encryption.

Key management isn't really that difficult: have one master key, stored encrypted under the highest-strength passphrase one can remember, accessible using trusted client software (i.e. not something running in a browser). Done.

Honestly I'd imagine its more of an issue of, with encrypt then send, the only way you can browse your remote files, is to download them and then decrypt them

so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked).

the only real way is to cache all that information on each device that would want to access those photos, which is doable, but it would feel a bit awkward, especially if sharing any of the data with other devices

> Honestly I'd imagine its more of an issue of, with encrypt then send, the only way you can browse your remote files, is to download them and then decrypt them

That's the only way to view any information: it has to be downloaded.

> so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked).

An client-side-encrypted photo store could easily support uploaded thumbnails (just not server-generated ones), and separate downloads for them. A client-side-encrypted data store could easily support separately-encrypted metadata, and there are some protocols for cryptographically-secure queries too.

> I, personally, absolutely refuse to use cloud storage of my photographs (or any data, really) that doesn't involve client-side encryption. Am I actually that concerned about my photographs themselves? No, not really — but it is the principle of the thing, as well as uncertainty about what the future might bring.

> I feel the same way about my location history and other data. Can I guarantee that no government or employer for the rest of my life will penalise me for having attended a political meeting, a church or anything else? I really don't think so.

>...

> Once given to someone else, data can never be pulled back. None of us can know the future, and so it makes sense to be as conservative as possible about what we let go of.

Although I struggle many a times to convey this to people in a way they would understand the implications of, this is the reason why I use SpiderOak to backup photos and other files (I do have a few dislikes about the SpiderOak backup solution and the client application). Even there, some sensitive data is actually in an encrypted volume file (encrypted before the SpiderOak client re-encrypts it). I also have multiple offline backups on external drives (though none being off-site) because I have faced data loss due to hardware failures before and I know that doing regular backups is the best way to reduce risks.

I'm also planning to move out of Dropbox, which I mainly use to store some re-downloadable content from elsewhere.

I pay for the SpiderOak service and use it on my Linux and Mac laptops - works fine.

I looked at the Android app, and I thought it had some security concerns, in the sense that using the Android app was no longer zero-knowledge at there end. Is that so?

none of this is a breakthrough of 2016, it has been around for quite a few years from multiple manufacturers / service providers

Might I humbly suggest going camping, without your phone? The right beach is an amazing place to do this, the right time of year. You might discover why 8 hours can be so precious.

Depends how long it takes to get to the beach.

I'm sorry for fixating on this a bit, but I'm confused. On the one hand you say you're not comfortable carrying around something that costs as much as "a budget car", on the other you say you're happy to not have to work an "extra eight hours" to afford the thing.

If you can earn enough to buy a new iPhone outright in eight hours of work, then 1. I think a "budget car" might be just a tad more expensive than $1000, relative to your income and 2. carrying around eight hours of work in a product that you will use every day for two years isn't a leap, is it?

I'm just confused because I'm coming up empty when I imagine the Venn overlap of "people who earn $1000 in 8 hours", "people who are concerned about carrying $1000 on their person", "people who price a budget car at $1000" and "people who derive small enough value from upgrading to the newest device that they'd rather have an extra day's worth of income."

Did I misunderstand you somewhere?

>I think a "budget car" might be just a tad more expensive than $1000, relative to your income.

My income is in no way connected to what constitutes a budget car.

>carrying around eight hours of work in a product that you will use every day for two years isn't a leap, is it?

Yes it is if my current phone already does >90% of what this phone does.

You seem to think you have to buy more expensive things as your income increases. This is luxury creep and has disastrous consequences. I have a long term view and don't intend to work for all of my life.

Agreed. Watched the Pixel announcement, looked at the price, bought a Nexus 6P. Nothing in there that excites me hardware wise and a quick look at the Nexus subreddit yesterday noted that most of the software improvements are available on 6P anyway.

Edit: And what I really wanted was for my LG G4 to actually be fixed rather than for the retailer to give up and give me a credit. Loved that thing.

I just did the same thing. The 6P is still an incredible phone despite its age. Plus the Pixel may not handle OTA updates with rooting as seamlessly as the 6P.

The V20 looks like LG finally getting their stuff together, too bad they want an arm and a leg for it.

You may never see this now, but for the record the reason I didn't get a V20 was because LG refuses to tell Australians when we're going to get it. It's like they're stuck in the 90s with their distribution model.

I check my comments often for replies since there are no notifications on HN.

LG treats both the V10 and V20 the same way. They're absolutely retarded to do so by treating the international market that way. I live in Uruguay, a third world south-american country and people sure love their phablets, with Galaxy Notes everywhere. Yet the V10 didn't see the light of day here and there are no news about the V20.

I take it you don't use your phone as a primary camera and/or have kids then? The camera alone is enough of a selling point to me. Having high performance internals in a reasonably sized package with constant android updates are all just icing on the cake.

I am in the same position. I have a Note 4 and I am not sure what a Pixel or iPhone 7 would really get me as far as hardware goes.

I like Google Now, and I use it with location turned on when traveling, but for regular life I tend to keep the Note 4 more in "privacy mode", as much as possible. I watched Google's Pixel presentation, and it is tempting to go all in, forget about privacy, and use their vision of a Star Trek style computer/personal assistant. But, I can't get past my privacy concerns.

I think (hope) we've hit the "peak phone" argument in that phones now are as flashy and hyped as they're ever going to be. Hopefully we'll see superfluous features and sparkles fade away as people start to want something that feels like a more natural extension of their person.

Her (2013) executed this well -- the in-universe "phones" looked natural and offered the same functionality as our current top-of-the-line models. (Of course, this was in a world where voice recognition and ML were more refined, but that's even more off-topic.)

There are lots of incremental improvements that eventually amount to something major, depends on how old is the device you're coming from. Compared to my Nexus 6, the Pixel XL is a major improvement.

Could you describe how major the jump is? I'm looking to get a new phone, but I'm thinking of seeing if the Nexus 6P price drops rather than going for the Pixel, as they didn't seem that different to me.

Coming for someone with the Nexus 6 as well, which i am incredibly happy with. I have wondered if it is worth making the jump and getting the Pixel as well.

Those phones are mostly the same. The Pixel XL is slightly smaller but offers a premium design and improvements in hardware, including a faster processor and more RAM.

Both offer pure Android, but the Pixel receives a handful of exclusive features.

At least for me, i believe that i will not switch phone for another year. Pixel is a bit overpriced at that range ( as iphones ). I expected it to be at least a bit cheaper.

Either i will wait a few months to see if the prices drops for the pixel or wait for the next year phone.

As a previously happy note 4 owner (until I managed to lose it) - I agree. The waterproof part is nice though, which is why the Sony Z3+ is still such a nice phone IMO. I get my note-fix on a Surface 4 Pro - and it it's much more of a notepad/sketchpad - so I can settle for a phone that is a little less comfortable to use as an ebook reader, or as a notepad.

An iPhone 7 costs about $750 and lasts about 2 years. That's about $7,50 a week. How do you have to work a day to afford $7,50?

If my current phone, that cost me 750, runs for four years that halves the total weekly ongoing costs to 3.50.

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