alt Hacker News> The latest phone reviews have been eyebrow raising.
It's eyebrow raising for me in other ways.
I have a Pixel 9a and it's been quite good with really solid battery life. It's barely 6 months old and I got it new straight from Google.
A few days ago I noticed the battery started to drain much faster than usual. I also noticed at the same time Google is pushing the 10a.
Nothing changed on my end. I barely use the phone in my day to day. In 10 hours today I sent 3 text messages with Whatsapp and lost 60% of my battery in that time frame. Up until a few days ago, 60% would last me 3 days.
I find it weirdly coincidental that the battery life went from amazing to worse than a 5 year old device I had prior to this just as they are releasing new phones. I've powered it down and given it a full discharge / charge too. It's still draining at an alarming rate.
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I dont think Google is gimping your device to sell you new ones.
What you probably see is Google toggling on some new AI feature, which is now doing some initial on-device computation. It will usually calm down after a few days.
Probably just some broken code that got shipped.
Battery life, RAM usage, Performance, all suffer immensely from being leaky abstractions instead of creating hard faults.
Yup, I’ve heard of that “bug” from personal friends so you’re not imagining things.
I just noticed something called smart download in youtube: in the background download 1GB of videos I may or may not watch, enabled by default. That surely drains the battery. It might also affect longevity of the UFS storage.