マリウス . I Do Not Recommend Google Hardware
After several years of buying Pixel phones and a Pixel Tablet solely<br>because GrapheneOS runs on them, I’ve come to the conclusion that<br>Google’s consumer hardware is really bad.
I’ve been a GrapheneOS user for years now. Back in 2022 I<br>switched away from /e/OS on a Samsung Galaxy S10 to a Google<br>Pixel 6a that I had bought, because at the time it happened to be one of the<br>cheapest devices on the<br>short list of officially supported Pixels. However, my history<br>with Google phones goes way past the 6a and ever since I got my first<br>Nexus, every single piece of Google (branded and manufactured) hardware that<br>has passed through my hands has eventually broken on a hardware level, way<br>quicker than expected. At this point I have run out of patience with Google’s<br>consumer electronics and have decided to stop giving the company any more of my<br>money.<br>This post is part personal post-mortem, part survey of the wider Pixel<br>landscape, and part forward-looking note on what I’m going to do instead.<br>Disclosure: The opinions in here are entirely my own, formed from years of<br>using Google hardware as a paying customer.
Why a Pixel to begin with?<br>To be very clear up-front, I have never been a fan of Google as a company, and<br>I have certainly never been a fan of their hardware design language. I<br>normally do not run Google’s software on any of my devices, I<br>avoid Google services, and I would prefer not to give the company a<br>single cent.<br>The only reason I have nevertheless ended up with a stack of Pixel devices on<br>my desk is GrapheneOS. Graphene, to this day, requires Pixel hardware<br>because Google’s phones are essentially the only consumer Android devices that<br>ship with a verified-boot chain, a relockable bootloader after flashing, and a<br>security coprocessor (Titan M2) that the project considers sufficient for its<br>threat model. There is no other Android manufacturer in this market that offers<br>a comparable hardware security surface for an alternative OS. So if you want the<br>strongest privacy- and security-hardened Android, you buy a Pixel. That’s<br>literally the only reason.<br>In my original write-up of the switch to GrapheneOS I went into the why in<br>much more detail. The short version is that, I no longer trusted any stock<br>smartphone OS, and after years of bouncing between CyanogenMod, LineageOS,<br>and /e/OS, GrapheneOS was the first ROM that felt like actual<br>engineering rather than a community paint-job over a vendor blob.<br>In my follow-up post about the Pixel 8 I went so far as to call<br>the Pixel 8 “a solid piece of hardware, if you happen to find a fully<br>functional device”. In hindsight, I have to admit that I was wrong.<br>Google hardware graveyard<br>Let me start with the actual Google devices that I have owned, in<br>chronological order.<br>Nexus 5<br>The Nexus 5 was the first Google-branded phone I bought, back<br>when the device was still being manufactured by LG and GrapheneOS was not<br>yet a thing. I ran it for a while on Google’s stock Android and, after the<br>initial honeymoon period, switched it over to CyanogenMod, the<br>project that, years later, would be reborn as LineageOS.<br>For its first year or so, the Nexus 5 was actually a likeable phone, as it was<br>compact, light, with a clean software experience that, at the time, felt<br>refreshing compared to the bloated OEM skins on competing Android devices.<br>Then the hardware started giving up. The battery, which had been mediocre to<br>begin with, became unreliable and the phone would report 40% charge one moment<br>and shut off entirely the next, and over time it began to randomly reboot and<br>power off without any obvious trigger. The decline was not gradual either and<br>once the battery started misbehaving, the device was effectively unusable within<br>a matter of weeks. Combined with a charging port that became increasingly<br>finicky about which cables it would accept, the phone went from likeable to<br>unusable in well under two years of moderate use.<br>Nexus 6 (Motorola)<br>The Nexus 6, which, ironically given where this post is heading,<br>was actually built by Motorola rather than by Google itself, replaced the<br>Nexus 5 once the latter had given up on life. As with its predecessor,<br>GrapheneOS was still years away, so I alternated between Google’s stock<br>firmware, CyanogenMod, and eventually LineageOS over the course of owning<br>it.<br>What made the Nexus 6 particularly memorable was the way in which its<br>internals seemed to fail one component at a time, almost like a series of<br>unfortunate but separate events. First, the microphone began cutting out during<br>calls, with the other end of the line hearing nothing or only a faint, crackling<br>signal. Then the loudspeaker and earpiece started developing distortion,<br>eventually to the point where music and call audio were barely intelligible.<br>Finally, true to the pattern that would later repeat on every subsequent<br>Google/Pixel device I owned, the battery rapidly lost capacity and...