The Pixel 5 and 4A 5G play it safe

Google’s fall hardware presentation was a slickly-produced 30-minute affair with four products, as expected. You can experience it with our liveblog here or catch up on the biggest announcements here. Outside of some very neat software tricks, there were no big surprises.

But it turns out that we didn’t know every single detail there was to know about the Pixel 5 and the Pixel 4A 5G. And with every new small detail it became clear that Google has decided to play it extremely safe with these phones. Every decision it made was about bringing costs down without compromising the fundamentals.

“What the world doesn’t seem like it needs right now is another $1,000 phone,” hardware boss Rick Osterloh told a small group of reporters after the...

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