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How will the phone stack up against the phones of 2030?
What phones were launched seven years ago?
Look at that beautiful headphone port!
Most interestingly, 2016 was the yearGoogledropped its Nexus branding in favor of the new Google Pixel lineup.
ThePixelandPixel XLwere launched seven years ago, a month after Apples iPhone 7.
Could an original Pixel phone handle Android 14?
Look at that beautiful headphone port!
Lets take a closer look.
What’s changed in seven years?
Almost everything
First, consider the biggest changes in the past seven years.
Look at that beautiful headphone port!
The Galaxy S7, with its 5.1-inch display, was the largest phone of these three.
The iPhone 7 had a 4.7-inch screen, and the Pixel launched with a 5-inch display.
Both the Pixel and Galaxy usedOLED, while the iPhone was still using a high-quality IPS LCD.
Only one camera? How did we survive?!
The Galaxy S7 that year had one of the sharpest phone screens of all time.
Even todays Pixel 8, with its great Actua display, is only 428ppi.
Clearly the higher pixel density was unnecessary.
Seriously,Apple, why did you have to remove the headphone port?
Its the oldest and most revered port of them all.
Bring it back, hey!
The iPhone 7 was using a Lightning connector, introduced on theiPhone 5.
The Galaxy S7 used microUSB.
The Pixel used USB-C, one of the first phones with our contemporary connector.
Because the phones were a lot smaller back then, the batteries were also smaller.
Maybe within seven years well see another jump in size.
Could a seven-year-old phone run Android 14 or iOS 17?
How do these phones perform today?
Could they run iOS 17 and Android 14?
The iPhone 7 was updated for five years and reached iOS 15 before it was put to rest.
It had only 2GB of RAM, but Apple uses RAM more efficiently on its phones.
The older iPhones wouldnt be able to access those.
On the Android side, the story is much more dire.
The Galaxy S7 started at Android 6 and was only upgraded to Android 8.
The Pixel was the first Android 7 phone and it got updates only until Android 10.
The first Pixel got three updates, but Google swears that the Pixel 8 will get seven.
The biggest bottleneck may be in storage.
The phones in 2016 shipped with 32GB of storage on the base model.
You could buy up to 256GB or more, but most people got the smallest size.
On todays phones, 32GB of storage would be laughable.
Samsungs One UI system on the Galaxy S23 takes up more than 16GB of storage space.
Thats fine on a phone that has 128GB total, but on a 32GB phone it would be disastrous.
Other files on the phone have also gotten larger.
Photos and videos are much larger today, thanks to higher-resolution cameras.
That said, theres a better promise it could have made.
It is possible to make a flagship smartphone that is durable enough for military spec testing.
Check out theLenovo ThinkPhoneif you dont believe me.
Id love to see more phone makers give us phones that will never break.
That would be the innovation that really keeps a phone going for years.
