---
title: 'Why Google Makes the Pixel: A Critical Look at the Pixel 11 Pro XL'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=zRE4JxU2P2I'
video_id: 'zRE4JxU2P2I'
date: 2026-09-06
duration_sec: 996
channel: 'Austin Evans'
---

# Why Google Makes the Pixel: A Critical Look at the Pixel 11 Pro XL

> Source: [Why Google Makes the Pixel: A Critical Look at the Pixel 11 Pro XL](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zRE4JxU2P2I)

## Summary

This video critically examines Google's Pixel 11 Pro XL, questioning whether the phone justifies its premium price and whether Google's strategy for the Pixel brand makes sense. The reviewer acknowledges the phone's excellent camera and clean software but argues that the Pixel has become safe, expensive, and lacks the innovation that once defined it. The video also explores the complex relationship between Google and Samsung, revealing how Google pays billions to Samsung while also competing with it.

### Key Points

- **Pixel 11 Pro XL Overview and Controversies** [00:00] — The Pixel 11 Pro XL costs $100 more than last year, standard models dropped from 16GB to 12GB RAM, and the temperature sensor is removed. Instead, there's a light that glows when talking to Gemini with the screen facing down.
- **The Good: Camera, Screen, Battery, Software** [00:40] — The camera is genuinely fantastic, the screen is very bright, the battery lasts almost a full day, and it runs the proper Google version of Android. These are good phones, but the question is whether that's enough at this price.
- **Price Comparison and Value Proposition** [01:07] — The 11 Pro XL starts at $1299, matching the Samsung X26 Ultra and exceeding the iPhone's price. At this price point, there's zero room for 'good enough'—it needs to be a full, uncompromised flagship experience.
- **The Good Old Days of Pixel** [01:34] — The original Pixel, Pixel 2, and Pixel 3 were special phones with the best camera for the money, great software, and a solid price, especially the Pixel 3a at $399. Today, the value proposition is less clear.
- **Google's Awkward Relationship with Samsung** [02:18] — At Samsung events, Google promotes Gemini and Android features as if the Pixel didn't exist. Buying a Samsung gives you much of the same experience with advantages in design, features, and performance.
- **Why Buy a Pixel? Three Areas: Camera, Chip, Software** [03:14] — The camera is THE reason to buy a Pixel. Features like Top Shot, adjustable styles, and Magic Capture (which pulls stills from video with AI upscaling) are highlights. However, much of this isn't brand new.
- **Computational Photography and the Pixel Visual Core** [04:33] — Google won early by pushing computational photography. The Pixel 2's Visual Core was the first custom chip for camera processing, five times faster for HDR Plus and using a tenth of the power.
- **Tensor Chips: A Liability** [05:27] — Google's Tensor chips have been compromised since the Pixel 6. The Tensor G6 in the 11 is an improvement but still far behind the Snapdragon 811 M5 and A19 Pro. The phone gets hot under load, and there are reliability questions.
- **Software: The Main Reason People Buy Pixels** [07:15] — Pixels have no bloatware, get Android updates first, and have features like Call Screening and Now Playing. However, many features are not exclusive—Samsung gets them soon after, and Gemini launches on Samsung around the same time.
- **Pixel's Advantages Are Shrinking** [08:52] — The Pixel flavor of Android is the best, but not that much better. Most of the best parts of Pixel land on Samsung sooner or later. A commenter noted: 'Seven years of updates doesn't help you much on hardware that barely lasts.'
- **Google Pays Samsung Billions** [09:44] — Google pays Samsung a fixed amount per device to pre-install Gemini, plus a revenue cut. From 2020 to 2023, Google paid roughly $8 billion to Samsung for defaults. Google also pays Apple ~$20 billion a year for search default.
- **Google's Stated Purpose for Pixel** [12:21] — Google says Pixel's goal is not to dominate market share but to push Android overall to be more competitive. Executives have said Pixel is never beating iPhone or Samsung, and being a good business is enough.
- **Pixel's Strategic Value for Google** [13:28] — Every Pixel user is one less person Google has to pay to put Gemini on their phone and one less iPhone to pay for search default. Pixel also lets Google control timing of features without waiting for Qualcomm.
- **Lack of Transparency and Risk-Taking** [14:08] — Google doesn't break out Pixel spending, burying it with Play Store and YouTube Premium. The Pixel lineup is safe and generic—no Pixel Flip, no Pixel Mini, no weird form factors that push innovation.
- **Personal Experience and Final Thoughts** [15:38] — The reviewer daily drove a Pixel 9 and was hooked, but with the Pixel 11, they're counting down until they can go back to their Z Flip. The Pixel is a good phone, but it has potential to be so much more.

### Conclusion

The Pixel 11 Pro XL is a good phone with a great camera and clean software, but it's expensive, safe, and lacks the innovation that once defined the brand. Google's strategy seems to be about pushing Android forward and maintaining a small premium presence, not winning market share. For consumers, the Pixel's value proposition is increasingly questionable, especially with Samsung offering similar features sooner.

## Transcript

This is the Pixel 11 Pro XL, and it is a controversial phone. It's $100 more than it was last year. The standard models have dropped from 16 gigs of RAM down to 12. There's no temperature sensor.
Instead, you get a light that glows when you're talking to Gemini with the screen facing down, which is a thing that you do, I guess. Hey Google, what's the weather today?
Look, you saw the title of this video. We are not here to talk about how amazing this latest Pixel is. This generation you've got a very safe and some might say boring line up with the standard Pixel 11, the Pro and XL as well as the Fold.
And I do want to be fair, these are good phones. The camera is genuinely fantastic. As someone who hasn't daily driven a Pixel for a couple of years, shooting with this phone has been incredibly fun. The screen is very bright, the battery is 24 almost anyone to make it through a full
day and you are getting the proper Google version of Android. But is all that actually enough? Because the days of pixels being reasonably priced... Well, I guess the days of everything being reasonably priced are over.
But let's start with the pixels. This 11 Pro XL starts at $1299, which is exactly what stands in charge for the X26 Ultra, and it's more expensive than the iPhone, at least for now.
There is zero room at this price point for good enough. It needs to be the full, uncompromised flagship experience to be remotely worth it. But the Pixel PIX wasn't always like this. If you look back on the good old days, the original Pixel, the Pixel 2 and the 3, these
were the special phones that had a clear reason to exist. They can give the best camera on a phone, and just for the money, the best. Period. You had that great software, and a legitimately fairly solid price, especially on the A series,
where that Pixel 3a was like 399 bucks. But looking at where things are here today in 2026, how much of that value proposition is still actually true? Because yes, the camera is still something special, but the software is kind of complicated
if you get into it and the value is actually just a top sell, at least unless you're a patient person who waits for these things to go on sale, which the pixels inevitably do after a few months. The thing for me is, do you ever notice how every year at Samsung events, Google gets
up on stage to talk about how great Gemini is and the Google experience and all the new Android features as if the Pixel didn't even exist. I mean, sure, it feels hard enough for some exclusives that keep the Pixel, but in large part, it feels like buying a Samsung
phone gives you a lot of the same stuff with some legitimately big advantages in terms of designs, features, and especially performance. It's an awkward relationship, right? It's like the enemy needs to love her, sometimes enemy needs to, I don't want to know what's
going on over there. It only looked bad at the hotel. I was like, oh no. I actually pretty sure I made a graphic of f**k. Now, I will be really clear that this is all coming from a place of genuinely liking the
pixel, and I absolutely want Google to keep making them. But from a consumer standpoint, I've got to ask, why does Google make the pixel? I think it comes down to three areas. The camera, the chip, and the software.
So, let's start with the obvious one. The camera is not all reason to buy the Pixel. It is THE reason. Now, there's a whole laundry list of features. So, there's Top Shot, which helps you grab the right shot, even if some of it's moving or blinking.
There's the new adjustable styles on the 11 series, which makes it a little more like the iPhone. You can actually change, not just like the filters, but actually how the images themselves are processed. But as a dad, Magic Capture is really where it's at.
Now, I get real, I thought I was gonna get first because essentially it's a video mode that automatically pulls still photos from the video and it uses a little bit of AI to upscale and sharpen things and it's legitimately fantastic.
Now the video itself is a little bit more of a mixed bag because the range from ultra wide to 5x is really good and I've gotten some great videos but I've also run into some issues like frame drops and audio pops especially if you going between the lenses that you need a little bit of a hazard to trust me But here the thing while Magic Capture and the improved telephoto lens are here almost none of this is actually brand new Now for still I do think Pixel is on top in the smartphone space but it is a lot
closer than it used to be. Because let's not forget, the camera is how Google really got the Pixel started. The early Pixel phones didn't run on hardware, in fact they kept the same camera and it's been there for like five years. Google won by really pushing the idea
of computational photography to pull more out of the smartphone camera than was possible with just raw image quality. Now it really kicked off with the Pixel 2 and the Pixel Visual Core, which was the first time that Google put a custom chip
on a phone that was specifically designed to enable more advanced camera processing. It was something like five times faster for HDR Plus and you used a tenth the power. But here's the thing, this is a Google chip alongside the proper flagship silicon in the Snapdragon 835 at the time.
This is the thing that I think a lot about when you consider where controllers today. Because in the past, they took the best ship on the market, added a meaningful upgrade on top of that, and so sold the whole package for a reasonable price.
So what happens when Google stops doing that and instead built the entire thing themselves, including the processor? It all starts with the Google censorship. The first mobile phone was a mobile phone.
Not good things! The idea seems great, but in reality, Google's Tensor chips have been compromised in a bunch of ways since they first launched with the Pixel 6.
The Tensor G6, which is in the 11, it is a real improvement, but it's also still pretty far behind the excellent Snapdragon 811 M5 in Samsung phones and the A19 Pro in the iPhone, both of which are nearly a year old at this point.
Now I don't want to overblow it, Tensor is still perfectly fine, and the Pixel 11 does feel snappy. But this lack of horsepower, it will likely catch up with you over the life of the phone, and it does feel like Google are pushing this phone hard.
So for normal usage it's fine, but when you're updating firmware or running something more demanding, the phone gets legitimately hot, and there are still lingering questions about long term reliability. Now look, this shouldn't be a deal breaker for anyone thinking about a Pixel.
Google is clearly investing huge amounts of money in making their own chips, and they're largely just works in the competition, you gotta ask, why? Because here's the thing, chips are expensive to make, especially these days.
Apple and Samsung sell in huge numbers, so they have some economies of scale, but even Samsung largely use Snapdragon on their flagships, and they keep their own Samsung-made chips for mid-range phones. And while Pixel is growing, it's generally only about 1% market share globally.
There are long-term arguments for investing in tensors, so I've got to assume they'll put them in Google Books at some point. And optimizing for on-device AI could be a big deal. And as you would expect, knowing it's Google, of course AI is the reason for everything.
But like, in my opinion, it's simple. For years now, tensor has been a real liability for pixels. You buy the phone despite the chip inside, not because of it. Which brings us to the reason I think most people buy pixels.
The software. So what really got me going down this rabbit hole was a short I made a couple weeks ago when I asked the simple question of why does Google make the pixel? And the comments were very clear. Software, software, software!
The key to success is software, software, software! And people do have a good point here because pixels have basically no bloatware. There's no second app store you can't delete and kind of duplicate apps and do the same
thing. You've got call streaming, now playing. now playing, the fact that you do get the latest Android updates first, I mean it's a great experience. But here's the thing, how many features are actually exclusive to Pixel? I say this as a
guy who's mostly been using Samsung One UI. I mean, yes, call streaming is better on the Pixel, but the latest Samsung phones have a decent version. You've got the highlight, you know, the glowing flash, which I think is so useful and such a great, great thing to have on my Pixel. I
I look forward to never ever actually opening it again There a ton of Gemini which again almost always launch on Samsung around the same time There support for AirGrop which launched on Pixel first and
Samsung like a couple months later. Even the new random voice vacation feature is great on Pixel, but how long will it be exclusive? Especially considering that Google already ships an app called Eloquent, which mostly does the same thing, including on iOS. Not to mention the new Siri is
is based on Gemini, so why am I buying a Pixel again? Someone in the comments of my short video the other day put it way better than I could. Seven years of updates doesn't help you much on hardware that barely lasts for.
And look, I want to be clear, I do think the Pixel flavor of Android is the best out there. It's just, at least for me, it's not that much better. I mean, there are other advantages to Pixel hardware,
like you can easily flash another OS, like graphing if you're a nerd, But like, when you put the big selling points together, it's easy to cut stuff in. Now, I think a lot of this stems from thinking about the old Nexus days where those phones,
they weren't like huge sellers or anything, but they did stuff differently. But these days, it kind of feels like most of the best parts of Pixel land on Samsung sooner or later, and usually it's sooner. It's a strange way to sell the Google phone,
unless of course, that's not actually the point of Pixel. All right, so we've got to talk about Samsung and Google, because it really is a situation shift. Because think about what Google is to Samsung.
They supply Android, iOS on every Galaxy phone. Google also pays Samsung a lot of money to put this software on Galaxy phones as a customer. And Google makes the Pixel a direct competitor to Galaxy.
Now, I don't know about you, but that's how my relationship with all my friends actually goes. It's like I give Jerry Everything the phone for his teardowns, And I also sponsor his videos, but then I make my own weird slightly less good teardown videos on the side.
That's totally normal. Well, just swap Zach and Austin for Google and Samsung, and I think you get the idea. Maybe you don't because that was a bad analogy. Here's the thing. Google pays for PlaySense basically everywhere.
Being the default search engine on the iPhone, that's worth something like $20 billion a year that Google pay Apple for the privilege. Most of Mozilla's revenue, the maker of Firefox, is also directly paid from Google for the same thing.
But Samsung, they're a little different, and we actually know a lot of the details through a recent court case. Each month, Google pays Samsung a fixed amount per device to pre-install Gemini. Plus, we get a cut of revenue on a long-term contract.
Now, we don't know exactly how much this is, other than a quote-unquote, enormous sum. Which is, I think that's actually better than actually learning the number. It just sounds cool.
And that's on top of the original deal, which from 2020 to 2023, equals roughly $8 billion in payments to Samsung to make Google Search, the Play Store, and Google Assistant the defaults. Again, none of that's illegal.
Google went to court over it, and, well, actually, they were found to have had an illegal monopoly over locking competitors out of search. But it was not that much of a monopoly because they weren't forced to stop paying for placement in deals like Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, and others.
But the idea that Google has this huge amount of power, and yet they're absolutely forced to write billion-dollar checks to Samsung, shows just how f***ing weird this relationship is. Not that I'm judging, but I'm kind of judging.
So we see Rick Osterloh, the guy who's in charge of hardware at Google, including Pixel, coming out on stage at a Samsung event to talk about just how great Gemini is on the Galaxy, quite as weird as it seems because Google are paying Samsung for this, not the
other way around. Which really brings us around to the core question of the video. Why does Google make the Pixel anyway? Well, it's not really speculation, because they've actually said it directly. Google's this as the ideal standard for how Android should look.
Their main goal is for Pixel not to dominate market share but to push Android overall to be more competitive Google executives have so much straight up said that the Pixel is never beating the iPhone or even Samsung and that being a good business is enough
which is what I would say if I only had 1% market share. Now I'll admit, you know, you hear a quote like that and I certainly think it sounds like an excuse for why the Pixel isn't more popular, but if you think about it from Google's perspective,
they are clearly spending a lot of money on Pixel. And yeah, a lot of what they developed does run on Galaxy. Meanwhile, Google themselves have that small but important slice of that premium market,
which makes it a legitimate competitor to the iPhone. I mean, how many people do you know who go, oh, do I get an iPhone? Well, I want to get the Google phone. I want to get the Pixel, right? There's a brand cache case to that, that we are the actual real Google competitor
to the high-end smartphone space, even though most people still go out buying a 20K Ultra. Maybe all the Pixel needs to do is keep a small percentage of users loyal to Android instead of buying an iPhone,
and that's enough for Google. Because remember, every user on a Pixel is one less person they have to pay to stand some course or put Gemini on their phone, and that's one less iPhone that they have to pay to use a default search engine for.
And there are other advantages. While Tensor is largely a downgrade from Snapdragon, it means that Google controls the timing when you can release features on day one without waiting for Qualcomm. Google own their own chips, they own Android, and with Pixel, they do get to create the
ideal Android phone. Now this is all valuable as a business, but for you the consumer, you just spent $1300 on a phone with the worst chip. Whoops. I also don't think it's a coincidence that after a decade of Pixel, Google still doesn't
break out exactly how much money they spend on Pixel, as it's buried in the same line item as the Play Store YouTube Premium. That's how I bury my Pokemon cards in my tax return at business expenses and hope that no one notices. He said it's a joke. IRS. Sapphire.
Sapphire. I don't do tax fraud. I don't do tax fraud. But look, man, there is no doubt that Pixel is pushing forward. Do you want companies to support devices for longer? Well, as soon as the Pixel started supporting
for seven years of software updates, oh, wow, look at that. Now, Samsung also supports for seven years. This is nowhere near enough experimentation. Cover up this logo. What is this phone? I guess you can kind of tell from the camera bar,
but it is just so generic. And, like, to me, where is the... I don't think it's experimentation. Where is the risk-taking? Where is the Pixel flip? Where is the Pixel Mini? Where is that weird form factor that doesn't make sense today,
but everyone copies it two years from now because the Pixel team pioneered it, right? Like, I just think that the Pixel has been playing way too safe, because there's just every reason for Pixel to be the experimental, weird, and different brand.
Instead, it's the same every year, except more expensive, like Los Rans. And look, some of this is definitely fueled by the fact that I keep thinking about how, as I've been using the Pixel 11, the last time I daily drove a Pixel with a 9,
I didn't actually plan on it, right? I just picked it up to test for a few days and didn't stop using it, right? There was something about that experience that really hooked me. And that's happened to me with Pixels in the past. With the Pixel 11,
I've been carrying down the days until I can go back to my Z Flip. And look, I fully admit, it's a neat thing. If you have a Pixel take on Android and this genuinely great camera, it is a good phone that'll probably be on sale soon.
But I just think Pixel has the potential to be so, so much more. Now, if you enjoyed it, make sure to subscribe to the channel and ring that ding-a-ling button and let me know, how do you feel about the Pixel these days? It's a situation shit.
I think that's what it really is. And the thing is, don't you think that Google should keep the good stuff with, you know, their own Pixel phone? Look, try and tell me the same thing. That the Google Samsung thing isn't weird. There's weird bites, okay?
There's weird bites. There's so much psychic damage. It's all true.