Original Post
Written by
Edited November 21, 2022
at 05:53 PM
by
Google Store has the Pixel 6a as an even trade for the Pixel 5a (you only have to pay taxes). At only $21.88 oiut of pocket this is a no-brainer for me, as the 5a has known issues with the display (mine required a motherboard replacement).
Trade-in values for other Pixels were also good- for example
Pixel 3 i@ $197
Pixel 4 @ $245.
As always, YMMV since trade-in values can (and do) change often.
Subtotal $449.00
Total savings today-$150.00
Shipping Free
Estimated tax $21.68
Estimated total $320.68
Estimated trade-in value-$299.00
Total after trade-in $21.68
https://store.google.com/product/...QwZFVGaiJ9
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Pixel 5 $299
Pixel 4 $245
Pixel 4XL $235
Pixel 4a or 4a 5G $250
Pixel 3a $200
Pixel 3 $197
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Use the 4a to transfer photos from my iPhone to google photos free as well as my Canon mirrorless camera
Personally paying for deep learning and ML in a CPU as apple/google new ones have and use a basic design otherwise with arm now and fab centers being the thing as hardware has hit its bottle neck with mores law and 5ghz and equivalent throughput were chosen for this to enter a new design realm unconvincing everything that was converged again, but allowing for the FPGA company's to see profitability and life into them for the 1st time in 25+ years and we have a lot of standards that have been designed and improved while approved for years already and couldn't utilize the increases not to mention the quick changes brought about and most devices having hit a point where even the hardcore geeks like myself don't realize an actual benefit from the hardware next version in desktops then laptops and servers along with eventually networking asides from the 1GB switching giving not many services would require a full 2Gb of throughput concurrently for a long time let alone in most users homes and it usually as seen with the Pentium 3 and 4 models just used for marketing hype to sell products as bottlenecks and other issues existed that its like having a car with 1000 hp plus but being stuck on an interstate that is 1 lane and the car in front is going 55mph and until then nice to have, but useless as the bottlenecks needed to get resolved first and they stopped the mhz to ghz marketing game around 4.8Ghz in a p4 in the laptop model and had hyper threading which software had to catch up as usually MSFT and Adobe were the first to take advantage of the software in the hardware extensions and utilizing those real improvements with encoding and the 64bit shift when RAM became reasonably priced where like today and with storage as well they add latency to each new major design release and eventually get the throughput and speed up on higher end products for workstations and business gear maybe gamer as well, but otherwise the reason for storage is usually to be able to get the cost down to the consumer grade market esp. since this was the longest and last part internally that hadn't seen much improvement being mechanical and all, but then took off and SSD's over SATA clogged the systems connection options for mainstream and really didn't make much difference anyway as the gains were huge and each PCIe version we get doubles the theoretical spec's in throughput ingress/egress and PCiE 4 drives have really only recently like a few months back reached the 7500 read and 7500 write with the Samsung 990 pro drive an update to the 980 pro, so they're clearing it out for pcie 5 and cxl which is acceleration with fpga's and zns (zoning for larger data capacity's) to allow for the 1.5 TB read/write capabilities even though we have pcie 6 and 7 already confirmed and ratified with standards for design and so forth. But as the trend continues we'll see more move to their own design and hardware which is somewhat arguable if compared to the drug market and patents plus no on follows them in tech anyway and it just goes to court and ties up the case and when apple lost to same sung or vice versa before that the courts have them pull sales of a then old product anyway and they've worked their code just enough to get around what the courts show as IP and do it all over again w/o the lawsuits until something worth the money (bottleneck or real improvements) and they copy each other, but moores law imo was always like a pricing model i mean really who gets a million bucks for it working for 25 years (though it didn't and really showed why in Intel's last few attempts to finish the designs) as i wondered in the late 90's that if heat was bad for a cpu then whats the point of us putting 2x transistors into something using half the space (ig 1/2) and not just make the issue worse along with how we were always a few version ahead and by the time 7nm design came around I guess my 1st teacher forgot Moore had a 2nd law or maybe he added it as it had to do with price will be higher due to heat blah... Toshiba had beloved they solved how we'd do 7nm through in the cpu around 08' ironically that's where we landed not long ago and are still using today on the gamer chips or whatever you want to call them.
Though with anything 1st gen esp CPU's i'd hold off and wait as we've seen how the arm design has worked so far and really all they do is send them to twain semi fab centers, so the IP is minimal and both the 1st apple and google ones have had some serious issues and cheapened rapidly with little change from pixel 4-5 and 6-7 but the data collection and cpu using machine learning and data that requires us to pay for them to get our likely more valuable data now so it can be used for ai which is so far from being human or non bias having heard an intel talk with some old timers that have been working on AI since the 80's and giving basic info on how and why they've not been able to make much improvement even today when creating human like things with ai vs. repetitive tasks was I really sold that it won't happen in my lifetime not from lack of hardware to keep up but rather the types of questions that have to go into it and also I don't think a person can have no bias entirely with anything as we may call it preference or whatever, but really their chips now are focused on getting us to do the ML and pay for the design and use of the hardware to process it and send it back and that just seems like they should give it to me, plus really most things are cool ish when and if they work but it always takes way to many years and usually the risks and data loss and/or hidden crap they do that we have no choice in except demand side control but apple will market to people and get them to believe anything it seems, like the virus less mac commercials, perfect sized phone and never going to use a stylus just a fake pencil for 125 or whatever it was when they did and then the secure face id being un hack-able and hackers that had already beat it on the release given the costs alone would have been to high to actually do facial rec on the hardware available unless they wanted to lose more money (see their bond debt not just stock info), so they did the typical response no its not and then that is always a challenge to the hackers who actually followed responsible disclosure for a change as the newer gen wants to just dump this stuff w/o giving the vendor a change to fix it first, at least as a popular vote seems to show then money for 0day's came around so all the open source is essentially owned by closed source now, but hey work for free on a project and display your skills it is good if you want to enter the field and get actual experience and more so if you really think you are then shit you can prove it and the code or website or unshakable web host or whatever it maybe is there for you to prove it and the rest to see it and likely the job you wanted will be the job you want to make or didn't exist yet as offers and such will come if you learn the mentor game and get them in place early on ideally outside the geek field with maybe 1 or 2 max so someone knows your world and can help navigate through it or explain to your other board members when they miss something otherwise the best answer for most business, but tech is still new where manufacturing and industrialist's really same industry are near human perfection being 100's of years old now and defects are down hand over fist on autos and such nearly a six sigma.
to the topic, think about this one, they told us growing up if it sounds too good to be true it probably is, well many forgot their own advise as they got malware from free porn starting out with the PC at home and sadly dial up I guess it was round 2 or 5 by the time a large image in pixels as a measure or a short video clip would download like seconds not minutes here as the measure but why would Google give you a 6a for a 5a version and what's with the tax (I know but way to long see international tax requirements on big company's except amazon that is), but free likely because they want to get these devices out there and get as much data to work with so the next version 8 can offer something without microcode issues in the CPU and run faster like Samsung or qualcom's designs as google makes the money after the data is in and if the results are favorable not at the point of sale and well apple has moved to using google for just about all of its core asides from the outside designs.
My situation is I have an old Pixel 3 that I accidentally dropped in the middle of a highway. It was run over multiple times. Amazingly the phone still works. But it is bent, really, really smashed. Sometimes wifi won't connect. The plastic near the back of the camera has fallen off completely.
Is google really only checking that the phone will turn on if it is smashed? Says $197 trade-in for good condition and $194.50 for not good condition but turns on. But, I'm, a bit worried google might look at the phone and say even though it turns on its in too bad of condition. I actually am able to use this phone as a backup if really needed even though its in horrible condition.
Haven't put a sim in it yet so I can't speak on reception issues. So far I'm just using it on WiFi. The phone did get pretty hot while downloading all of its updates. Coincidentally, the iPhone 7 needed a major iOS update too, so i was able to compare them side by side and interestingly enough, they both heated up real good during their updating.
The Pixel was noticeably warmer, but it's a smaller phone and I think the cpu is positioned closer to the edge, or you could say the iPhone has more buffer around the cpu, being the bigger phone. Both phones felt extremely hot on the backside over where their CPU's are.
This is pretty normal though. During big ass updates (whether full OS version updates or batch app updates) the cpu runs at 100% for way longer than what's considered normal usage. Once all the updates were done, I didn't have any heat issues whatsoever, but again, this is only on WiFi (5ghz) at the moment. Been streaming YouTube 4K vids while going through all the features for most of the past 6 hrs and it's been great. I'll test it on cellular 4G/5G tomorrow.
The finger print scanner has been solid. It makes me wonder if people are having issues with it because they have a crappy screen protector or a case with a built in screen protector, which is even worse for in-display finger print readers. In either event, you can go into settings and increase the touch sensitivity and I'm guessing that will probably solve the problem. I have no case or screen protector yet. Based on what people have been saying, I was expecting it to be bad, but nope it's worked great so I'm stoked.
So far I'm very tempted to buy a Pixel for myself at the current price. Right now my main phone is an iPhone pro max that was over 3x the price but doesn't feel any faster in my usage. Mainly got it so I wouldn't have to carry a separate camera.
Will have to wait and see how the cellular performance is first.
Update: I've been playing with the Pixel 6a for 4 days now and it's been great.
Finger print reader still works fine, but not without some minor issues that I've dealt with on other phones in the past. When I installed a screen protector the other day, I did have to go into settings to increase the touch sensitivity. It worked better but wasn't 100%. I then deleted the finger print entries and set new ones and its solid again.
Haven't had any further overheating issues during Norma use except for when testing video recording with the camera. It got quite hot when trying to film 4K but I believe this part is completely normal. I set it to 4K 60fps and it shut down after about 10 mins from overheating. The phone was very hot.
Here's the kicker: my iPhone pro max also shuts down from overheating after about 10 mins of filming outside on a hot day too. Taking vids at high resolution/fps is extremely taxing on the cpu/gpu/memory and creates a lot to heat.
If you're familiar with action cams like GoPro/DJI/Insta360/etc, you'll know their various models have been well known to overheat over the past several years. It's unavoidable when you squeeze more and more power hungry tech into a tiny package. Now that phones are more commonly getting decent image stabilization, it's really making the heat noticeable.
With the Pixel 6a being a smaller phone with larger battery, the heat is much more noticeable Than my iPhone. I suspect that the metal bezel on the bigger Pixel 7/7pro is actually a heat sink. The Pixel 6a only has its aluminum frame to dissipate heat, and that's all around the edges of the phone where you would feel it most.
Haven't noticed a problem with phone reception, but I haven't used it enough since it's not my phone. I did notice that it prompts you about enabling/disabling WiFi/Bluetooth scanning. If you have it enabled, and have a lot of hotspots saved, I suspect it will try to switch your connection when in the vicinity of them. I'm guessing this could be a problem for people who have those hotspot benefits from their mobile plan or tv plan. For example if you have cable modem account from Spectrum and happen to wander into a Spectrum hotspot area like driving through the parking lot of a Walmart or Home Depot, I think it will switch your connection which then causes a disruption. You can turn that feature off.
I think I'm going to take the plunge and switch over from iPhone to Pixel. I was considering the OnePlus phones for their fast charging and lower prices, but I can get better trade in value on my iPhone from Google.
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yes. we did.
Still waiting. Tracking shows it's coming by USPS and they have not received it yet.
finally the package started moving in usps network
Use the 4a to transfer photos from my iPhone to google photos free as well as my Canon mirrorless camera
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