Tech

Somehow, Google’s midrange phone just keeps getting better. The Pixel 8a improves on many things over the Pixel 7a—it has a better display, a longer support cycle, and the usual yearly CPU upgrades, all at the same $499 price as last year. Who could complain? The Pixel A series was already the best bargain in smartphones, and there’s now very little difference between it and a flagship-class device.

Year over year, the 6.1-inch, 2400×1080 display is being upgraded from 90 Hz to 120 Hz, giving you essentially the same experience you’d get on the “flagship” Pixels. The SoC is the same processor you’d get in the Pixel 9, a Google Tensor G3. That’s a 4 nm chip with one Arm Cortex X3, four Cortex A715 cores, four Cortex A510 cores, and a Mali G715 GPU.

Previously, the 120 Hz display was the primary thing A-series owners were missing out on compared to the more expensive Pixels, so its addition is a huge deal. Any comparison between the “midrange” Pixel 8a and the “flagship” 6.2-inch Pixel 8 will now just be splitting hairs. The flagship gets an extra 0.1 inches of display, 2 percent more battery, and Wi-Fi 6E instead of Wi-Fi 7. The cameras are technically newer, but since they all run the same image-stacking software, the images look very similar. Are those things worth an extra $200? No, they are not.

It looks like the Pixel 9 will end up with a third model, a small “Pro” model with three cameras, presumably to try to put some distance between the flagship Pixels and the A series. The company will still ship a base-model Pixel 9 that will probably be consumed by the Pixel 9a, but if they cut that model, that could arrive at a cohesive lineup.

The other big upgrade is seven years of update support. Just like on the Pixel 8, you’ll now get monthly security updates and major Android OS updates for a whopping seven years, the longest promise in the industry. Whether a phone like this can actually run what would presumably be “Android 21” in 2031 is anyone’s guess. Previous Pixel models have often felt like they were being prematurely killed due to the short three-year update window.

When planning this far ahead, you most likely do have to pick one situation or the other as hardware ages: Do you want the phone to die a premature death due to software limits or have a years-longer life cycle with an eventual software update that runs poorly because the hardware is too slow? Even if running Android 21 is a challenge for this little midranger, the phone will at least be allowed to die a natural death due to actual hardware limitations. Google won’t be creating e-waste due to an artificial software timeline; the phone will actually be e-waste, and now users will be allowed to squeeze as much life as possible out of it. That’s a good thing!

Over those seven years, don’t be surprised if the Pixel 8a misses out on some of Google’s future AI features. The phone has 8GB of RAM, and Google is already saying that’s not enough for some of the AI features it wants to make in the future. The company says something like a generative AI-powered smart reply system would require keeping models in memory 24/7, and that would cut down on memory available for the OS, so phones need more memory. One leaked Pixel 9 model had 16GB of RAM, which is wild.

I’m someone who views a phone as a piece of hardware for running apps and just wants the OS to be simple and clean and get out of the way. I don’t need any of Google’s generative AI features, so I don’t consider this a big loss at all. Hopefully, future builds of Android allow you to turn AI features off. If Google actually wants to support these 8GB of RAM devices for seven years, it will need to do that.

OpenAI is eventually coming for the most popular website on the Internet: Google Search. A Reuters report claimed that the company behind ChatGPT is planning to launch a search engine as early as this Monday, but OpenAI denied that Monday would be the day.

The company recently confirmed it’s holding a livestream event on Monday, though, but an OpenAI rep told Ars that “Despite reports, we’re not launching a search product or GPT-5 on Monday.” Either way, Monday is an interesting time for an OpenAI livestream. That’s the day before Google’s biggest show of the year, Google I/O, where Google will primarily want to show off its AI prowess and convince people that it is not being left in the dust by OpenAI. Google seeing its biggest search competition in years and suddenly having to face down “OpenAI’s Google Killer” would have definitely cast a shadow over the show.

OpenAI has been inching toward a search engine for a while now. It has been working with Microsoft with a “Bing Chat” generative-AI search engine in Microsoft’s search engine. Earlier this week, The Verge reported that “OpenAI has been aggressively trying to poach Google employees” for an upstart search team. “Search.chatgpt.com” is already being set up on OpenAI’s server, so it’s all falling into place.

When the launch of OpenAI search does happen, one thing to really watch for is what types of search queries it can handle. Right now, ChatGPT can really only replace search queries that are questions. The primary reason Google Search is the No. 1 most visited website is not answers to questions; it’s because many people use Google as their gateway to the Internet. Here’s a list of the top Google queries; most of them are not questions, they are other websites. The No. 1 Google query is “youtube,”  No. 2 is “facebook.” Also in the top 10 are “amazon,” “gmail,” “instagram,” and “whatsapp web,” and truly sad is No. 16, where people go to Google and search for “google” to get the homepage. That link is a top-100 list, and I don’t think I would categorize a single one as a “question.”

These navigational queries are the bread and butter of a search engine, not answers. If you want to make a purchase or reservation, view a map, download software, do research, watch a video, or read news, these are all things Google can help with that chatbots typically can’t. These types of navigational queries used to be the only thing Google could do—the obsession with answers only happened around 2012 when Google was 14 years old. Before then, it was all about the 10 blue links.

So, exactly how much of a threat OpenAI is to the big incumbent will depend on how much of Google it’s actually able to replace. One attempt at a chatbot search engine is Perplexity AI, where the primary text on the page shouts “Ask questions, trust the answers.” Again there’s that “answer” obsession, and that’s not how Google built its fortune. If you type “youtube” into Perplexity, it doesn’t show a link to YouTube; it shows a Wikipedia-style response.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported a few details on the forthcoming OpenAI search engine and said it would “allow users to ask ChatGPT a question and receive answers that use details from the web with citations to sources such as Wikipedia entries and blog posts” and that “one version of the product also uses images alongside written responses to questions.” That does not quite sound like a Google Killer and other than the source citation, it does not sound all that different from the ChatGPT of today.

The other issue is speed. Google became the gateway to the Internet by being really fast. Google is so proud of its speed that it actually displays the time it takes for a response to be generated, and it’s always fractions of a second. Generative AI, on the other hand is probably best measured in “words per minute,” like you’re judging a typist. When you just want to do something simple or go somewhere, sitting there for several seconds waiting for text to slowly appear word by word can be agonizing. My last Google Search took 0.41 seconds to “generate” a full page of text. How long will OpenAI’s search engine take?

This article was updated to reflect OpenAI’s denial of the search engine launch day reports.