[Google Pixel 4 XL Questions & Answers] krabman:
Some people are not going to like it and the value proposition for many users, possibly most, would not be there; the reviewers agree on this almost unanimously and no one here should have to get it from them to know it is true. Pixel has never been a good value based on hardware. Considering how much better cameras have become everywhere else I'm not even sure you could tout that as a slam dunk for buying in.

For the right buyer however, it's excellent. If you're like me root isn't an option, it's mandatory. This knocks a whole bunch of phones out of consideration While I'm getting rid of those which are not even an option lets add the iphone: It's the answer to a question I never asked and I will never buy one no matter what it offers. Now suddenly the list of potential buys has gone down considerably. Samsung, Apple, Huawei, and many others are already gone. The only real competitor left that meets my needs is OnePlus, I've owned them and I do like them. The "but" is that there is always something wrong or annoying with a OnePlus for me. The camera is just now getting to where it can even be considered as a viable option. Not a good option, just that you can actually expect to point and get a picture that isn't always bad. People say put the Goog cam on there and I always do but that is never fully working either and inevitably has some bugs. It's not there on the camera. There is more but you get the idea.

So all of a sudden there isn't a long list of options and those I have are not exactly perfect either. They are all however cheaper, that's for certain. So where is the value in this phone? It does what I do well but I don't much come up against it's weaknesses: As an example I don't take videos accept on the very rare occasion so the weakish video camera isn't a problem to me. I also find that Pixel phones have a way of getting better over time because they add features from upcoming pixels and update the ones that are there. I don't expect Soli to remain as it is today, I think it's going to grow and do so in the near term as well as long term. I also like the things that Pixel does well. No one anytime soon will have the improved assistant working as well. I like the assistant and I use it extensively. There is more but the cliff notes are I'm not affected by what it doesn't do well but what it does well are things that matter to me.

So you go back to money. yeah it costs too much and there has been some talk of their pricing model. You don't see Apple dropping their pricing within weeks of their phones coming out. and the latest wont be on sale for as much as a couple hundred off on Black Friday for instance, this phone will see that. It will continue to go down bit by bit over the year with a sale going on somewhere most of the time. Several have opined that they should price it lower to start and not with an instant 100 dollars off everywhere which makes the actual starting price of the phone 100 less. People have been showing the 11 as being 100 cheaper but it's actually not because it's almost impossible to buy a Pixel at anything other than 100 dollars off. The reality is they are the same price but on a list of bullet points it's 100 dollars more expensive than the 11. Take it further and you've got more and more aggressive sales throughout the year. This is not an accident, they have modeled this pricing strategy and are using it based on those models. Some think it's a mistake and I fall in that camp. I think the phone would be much easier to buy into now if the pricing was made more average which would give you something like a 200 dollar lower buy in right now.

That leads me to my last thought here. It is too expensive. I bought it without thought because I have money to spare and it doesn't mean much to me to save a couple hundy. A younger version of myself would have waited until Black Friday and picked it up at a substantial discount because young me would still want the phone but would need to be a little smarter with his money. This is not smart money now IMO. This isn't a knock on the phone, I know I'm going to like it when it gets here on Thursday but it's a much better deal a month from now and still the same phone. That is the one I might recommend if a friend asked, the Black Friday Pixel. Unless of course I knew he was a nutcase like me and wouldn't miss the money, I'd tell him to jump in, the water's warm!