Google’s latest entry-level phone, which costs $500, is just good as devices nearly double its price.
Not long ago, there were plenty of compelling reasons to spend upward of $900 on a smartphone. Nowadays, you’ll have to come up with an excuse to pay that much.
I ran out of reasons to splurge and stopped buying fancier phones with the “Pro” moniker over the past two years. That’s not just because I’m frugal. Cheaper phones have increasingly become indistinguishable from high-end ones, and the few features that set them apart rarely justify the extra cost.
Bear with me as I break from the tradition of reviewing a phone’s features. Putting the Pixel 7A’s value into perspective requires a history lesson on smartphones.
Many Android phone makers struggled to keep up with software updates because they relied on chips and components from an array of different manufacturers, and it was difficult to make new operating systems continue to work with all those parts.
So for a long time, spending more on an Android phone made sense. Samsung’s high-end Galaxy smartphones, which cost roughly $700 to $1,000, got software updates for several years longer than other Androids in part because the South Korean manufacturer tightly controlled its hardware production.
But Google recently gained an edge. In 2018, the search giant acquired the handset maker HTC, which allowed it to make its own mobile computing chip, called Tensor. Google now controls its Pixel hardware and the Android software, so it can guarantee software updates for its Tensor-powered Pixel phones for at least five years.
