Google Pixel 10 series review

My older Pixel got the UI updates and I hate them. The look is inelegant, even childish, and like Apple they've decided to hide things under extra button presses.

The insistence on adding AI just makes startup slower. I have not had a single use for AI on my phone ever, though I'm a big fan of it for software dev.

The AI tax is crazy, Pixels now reserve 3.5GB of RAM to keep Googles local models permanently loaded regardless of how much you use them, or whether you use them at all. The base Pixel 10 has 12GB of RAM so that's nearly a third set aside for something you may never use!

Last year they had the relative sense to only enable that "feature" on the higher end SKUs with 16GB of RAM, while the lower end SKUs with 12GB would load the models on-demand, but starting with the Pixel 10 series it now applies across the board.