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Phones · Google Pixel

Google Pixel 6 Pro

25owners with an opinion
52%of verdicts positive
10/8positive/negative since 2024
4 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and ease of use; criticized for battery and display.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 4 years
As a another data point, on E4B, my Pixel 6 Pro (Tensor v1, Oct 2021) is getting about 4.4 t/s decode on a picture of a glass of milk, and over 6 t/s on text chat. It's amazing, I never dreamed I'd be viably running an 8 billion param model when I got it 4 years ago. And kudos to the Pixel team for including 12 GB of RAM when even today PC makers think they can get away with selling 8.
Doesn’t like itOwned 2 years
Curious that you say this, because I had a 6 Pro and while all the rest was amazing, what ended up making me hate the phone was the battery. My experience in that respect was just the opposite of yours: just barely OK at the beginning, and quick degradation in spite of the adaptive battery. In 2 years it wouldn't even make it to 3 PM in days of heavy usage. Definitely much worse than the batteries in my friends' iPhones, and of course also than all the other Android phones I've had, some of which lasted (or are still lasting) for more than 5 years with battery being a complete non-issue. I wonder if it's a 6 vs 6 Pro issue or I just got a bad unit (I'm not the only one I know with the complaint, though, so if it's the latter, bad units were rather common).
Doesn’t like itOwned 2 years
I had the Pixel 6 Pro and everything was amazing... except for signal and battery. Which are two of the most important things in a phone. The battery was quite bad from the very beginning, barely lasting a day of normal usage, but I thought "well, at least they seem to have taken lots of care to avoid battery aging - slower charging than other phones, intelligent charging speed, etc. - so it won't degrade much". Two years later it wasn't even making it to 6 PM, or 3-4 PM on heavy use days (such as trips). OTOH my previous phone (Huawei P30 Pro), with much faster charge and no "intelligent" anything, still has amazing battery after more than 5 years of use (now in my wife's hands). That was my first and last Pixel. A pity because the software was amazing, but that's no use if you operate under constant battery anxiety and can't even use Google Maps and camera on a trip without spending hours charging at the hotel.
Likes itOwned 2 years
Opposite of my experience, I daily drove a Pixel 6 Pro from launch until 8 Pro launched and have been using 8 Pro since. I upgraded because I can, my Pixel 6 Pro is working just fine, I've added it to my growing device catalog for testing during mobile development. Over the course of the 6 Pro, I replaced it twice, once for a cracked screen and the second time for cracked back glass using preferred care (both close in time to each other from similarly stupid drops). I do not use a case for my phone. None of those three devices had any issues with battery. My partner is using a 7, two of my friends have 6 Pros, and I just upgraded my parents from 4a to 7a and battery hasn't really been a serious problem from any of them. It's not insanely good but it's also not a pain point for me. As an engineering lead I do a lot of my non-programming work directly on Pixel, including tons of remote desktop, meetings, GitHub/productivity, k8s management, etc. I don't get to write code nearly as much any more, probably around 10-20% of my work week. At least for those workloads, things are fine. But the workload you run can dramatically change things, especially if you've got particularly power hungry apps involved. The OS gives you tools to identify what those apps might be when you dig into the battery area of settings. > even without google play services. (came from a 5a) Since you can't remove GMS from a Pixel without flashing a ROM to it as far as I know, can I assume you are not using
Doesn’t like itOwned 2 years
"when pigs fly"... Edit: I've owned almost 10 Google android devices: nexus 5, 6, 5x, pixel 1, 2, 3, 6 pro, and a couple tablets Of those, maybe 2 of them were stable after 2 years. Who cares if Google "promises OS updates" for 5 years if the updates are so unstable that the phone is unusable. Meanwhile, it's not uncommon for people to be using 3+ year old iphones with no complaints. My iphone 11 (~4 years old) feels much snappier than my pixel 6 pro (~2 years old).
Neutral
Does this guide eliminate google play services? If not, then you still don't really control it. For reference, on my Pixel 6 Pro, GrapheneOS gets 2x the advertised battery life until you add Google Play Services back into a sandbox. At that point, it gets advertised battery life. I assume the TVs Google backdoors are even worse (video scraping, etc, etc) since they are not power constrained.
Doesn’t like it
I agree with you that, when sharing, location should be stripped by default with an option to include it. After seeing this post I checked my recent photos. I'm using a Pixel 6 Pro with the most recent android release and the stock camera app. None of my recent photos have location in the EXIF, even locally, and there's no option to turn it on. It's particularly galling that the Camera app still wants location permissions and if you view a photo in the Google Photos app, the location is still there. Google can have those exact locations, but no one, not even the user, can. It's abusive as hell.
Likes it
I'm still "clinging" to my Pixel 6 Pro. I have an unboxed pixel 8 pro from 2 years ago. My corporate contract subsidizes a new phone every two years from the time of contract renewal. I really think the phone update cycle needs to be lengthened, and that updates are so slightly incremental. I would like to dip my toes into the fold phone pond, but that seems excessive. In November, Vodafone will call me and ask me which phone I want. It all seems ridiculous. I haven't noticed a difference in photo quality nor performance for years now have I felt the need to upgrade to the two-generations-later sitting in a drawer just meters way from me. The only comment/complaint I have about newer software updates is the f*king voice which kicked in while taking a photo. "One pet cropped, move phone slightly down".
Likes it
I have a Pixel 6 Pro. I played a bit with it's raw format when I got it. It's fairly impressive; especially for night time photography. When that came out, both Apple and Google sourced their sensors from Sony. I think that's still the case. At the hardware level, there's not that much difference between cameras in different phones. Most of the differences are created in software. The dng files that come out of my Pixel phone down sample from 50 mega pixels to 12.5. You can't access the original 50 mega pixels. So each pixel has information from 4 "real" pixels. That's fairly effective for getting rid of noise. I took some night shots with it and it holds up pretty well. It actually makes Google's night vision AI mode a bit less impressive because the starting point isn't that bad. My other camera is a Fuji X-T30. The lenses and sensor are clearly better on that one if you look at the raw files. More detail, dynamic range, etc. But at night it's kind of weak (noise). And if you are into that, Fuji's film emulation produces pretty pleasing jpg files without a lot of work. I shoot raw so I tend to ignore that. But it's a somewhat fair comparison because in both cases there isn't much post processing. Except the Fuji isn't doing a lot of AI trickery and is just relying on a good results that come out of the camera and applying a prefab tone mapping that resembles what film used to do. The difference of course is that with the Fuji, you are making lots of creative choices with fo…
Doesn’t like it
I think there's a lot of manipulation of public opinion in the camera processing as well. I got rid of Pixel (6 Pro) because of its camera - it does quite well for landscapes, but on people's faces it's really bad - I used to get gray skin, eye color turning blue to black etc. This usually happened in low / incandescent light. Never seen something like this on other phone cameras. I guess it's just overreliance on AI which then just "guesses" wrong.
Doesn’t like it
I have owned a Pixel 1, Pixel 2, Pixel 6 pro. The Pixel 6 pro has had its screen break 4x and I have to pay every time despite having the insurance. Terrible, weak screen. The phone feels cheap too. Lots of software errors now. This is the result of Google moving away from merit based hiring. I will never buy another Google phone.
Doesn’t like it
When my Pixel 6 Pro screen died, I could still hear the haptic feedback from button presses. So I plugged in a USB C to HDMI adapter, and I couldn't believe I couldn't see it on the screen! I needed to get access to my Google Authenticator (I had not saved the backup codes). That resulted in months of recovering accounts by taking my picture holding up handwritten signs and my ID. Of course I should have saved the backup codes, but it would have been really nice to have an alternate way to see my screen when my phone was otherwise still working.
Doesn’t like it
This feature is also a lifesaver when your phone screen breaks! A mishap on the bus led to this happening with my old OnePlus phone, and with a USB C to HDMI adapter I was able to navigate around and salvage anything I needed from that device. I actually assumed this was the standard, so when the same thing eventually happened to the Pixel 6 Pro I got after that, I was distraught to learn that Pixels didn't support video-out at all. I ended up managing to get TalkBack (Android's audio assistance tool for the visually impaired) turned on, use that plus screenshots I referenced online to get USB debugging enabled and authorize my computer, and then use scrcpy [0] to control my phone over an ADB connection. [0] https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy
Doesn’t like it
Huawei had achieved phones with a really strong hardware+software combination. Before sanctions, it had surpassed 20% market share in Europe ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/1232281/huawei-smartphon... ). Then the US sanctions, supposedly unrelated to the mobile phone market, hit Huawei hard making it pretty much undesirable to buy their phones in the Western market, and its market share in Europe plunged to near zero. How convenient. Spanish forums and social networks are still full of "Huawei orphans" who can't find any Android phone in the current market that can match the quality of the pre-sanctions Huawei P20/P30/P20 Pro/P30 Pro flagships. It's a recurrent post topic. I'm one of them, and I'm even considering switching to Apple. My current phone (Pixel 6 Pro) doesn't even come close to my previous Huawei P30 Pro in battery life, signal reliability, heating issues, etc. and it's the same for every other Android model I've seen from family/friends. While it does have great camera and software, in many respects it feels like more of a downgrade than an upgrade. At least I can keep using my Huawei smartwatch which gives me two weeks of battery life, rather than a few days like most of the competition. With this I mean... China is very capable of developing high-quality products like California, but California can leverage its political and military power to tilt things in their favor. At least at the moment.
Likes it
For fun today I booted up my Pixel 3 XL and it works just fine. It was slow at first, probably as it synced a bunch of stuff, but after that it was about as snappy and useful as I remember it. Everything still works. I used that for 3 years before the Pixel 6 Pro. Before that I had a Pixel XL for 3 years. I still have that phone too in my device collection. I'm getting the Pixel 8 not because the 6 Pro has any problems (personally I've had none), but rather because I have a bit more disposable income to spend on tech and I'm excited about a phone with a 7 year software support window (with incidental coverage to support 5 years of accidental damage). If all goes well, I hope to take advantage of more than 3 years of that, assuming some insane new development doesn't happen in the interim.