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Art et designTranscription
00:00Hey what's up, MKBHD here, and I've been using Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro for about three weeks now,
00:23and this is it. This is the first year we're expecting a real Google flagship, right? So,
00:29previous Pixels have been pretty nice, and they've had great cameras and pretty cool software features,
00:34but overall pretty lackluster hardware, but this is a step up. We're expecting big things,
00:40a big new camera array, a new design language, they made their own chip, there's a lot going for
00:45it, so this is their moonshot, alright? This is their chance to compete with the big dogs. So now
00:50that I've used them, I will say, these are my favorite Pixels ever, and they are the most
00:55Google phones ever made for sure, but, reality check, they're not perfect, and there's definitely
01:01some areas where they come up a little bit short, so I'm going to go over those things, but off the
01:04top I just want to hit you with the prices first, okay? So $599 for Pixel 6 starting, and $899 for
01:12the Pixel 6 Pro. Those are both at 128 gigs. That's really competitive. So there's a lot of action
01:18already at that like $599 price range, but also the one they keep calling a flagship, which is
01:24the 6 Pro. This is the one that's here to take shots at the iPhones and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultras
01:30of the world, and it competes, but the 6 is the real deal. So I've grown to really like this camera
01:37bar design for the Pixels, and the fact is, it is polarizing, like it doesn't look quite like any
01:43other phone. Theoretically, you know, the huge new camera sensors need all this thickness here,
01:49but it could have looked like any other phone. Like the Vivo X70 Pro Plus has the same 50 megapixel
01:54sensor, but they went with a camera rectangle. But this visor, it's a look. This is the Pixel
02:01phone look now. It's very easily recognizable, and I think that's on purpose, and they can keep it
02:05this way for at least a few years. And the bar design is functional, I will say. My index finger
02:11does end up resting nicely underneath the camera bar when I'm holding it, which is nice. It doesn't
02:15rock on a table either, if you're typing or using it out of your hand. The only weird part is, it
02:20doesn't quite like blend nicely into the aluminum sides of this phone. Like, I think it would have
02:25been really cool if it was like a seamless blend, like one piece, like what Samsung did with the S21
02:31Ultra. But there are a lot of seams all over this camera module. But hey, at the end of the day,
02:36if you're just going to toss the case on it, like this grip case from channel sponsor dbrand,
02:40it's basically just going to cancel the bump anyway. But now you've got, you know, a flat,
02:44even phone, you've got your icons logos, but it's still obviously a pixel underneath that. You
02:49still have the visor across the back. So I think it's a win, unless you think it's incredibly ugly,
02:53in which case, try not to look at the back of the phone too much. But come on, visors look cool.
02:58But the part you look at on the front of the phone is huge. On both screens, both of these
03:03phones are huge. And I think the question naturally is, why didn't they make a smaller one?
03:08And I think Google's answer would be, well, there are people who want to spend less on a phone,
03:13but most of those people still want a big screen. So they gave it to them. So pixel six,
03:18a screen is a pretty massive 6.4 inches from corner to corner, 90 hertz, 1080p and flat,
03:25and with pretty small bezels overall and a hole punch in the top middle for the selfie camera.
03:29It's a pretty good screen again for a $600 phone. But how about that flagship though? So with the
03:356 Pro, we're looking at 6.7 inches, 1440p and up to 120 hertz. It is super, super sharp,
03:43very responsive and has been an absolute pleasure. But since they're saying it's a flagship,
03:49I can get a little more nitpicky here. These curved edges, they're kind of going out of style.
03:55I know that gets you even smaller bezels and they are a little bit smaller, but the fact that it
03:59gets kind of a bit darker in the very corners isn't doing the screen any favors. And there also
04:05is a little bit of color shift off axis that you really straight up just don't see on the
04:09more expensive screens like on the S21 Ultra or the iPhone 13 Pro. Also the fingerprint reader
04:14on the display of both of these phones is kind of slow. So it appears to be an optical sensor
04:19shining a light on your finger instead of those new ultrasonic ones Samsung is using. And yeah,
04:24it's gotten kind of annoying after a while. Often it will take a full like half second,
04:30at least long enough for me to get annoyed that I'm waiting for it to read my finger.
04:34I think they could have used a better sensor here or at least done this a little faster. I am
04:37comparing it to thousand dollar phones though. So again, this is what I was talking about earlier.
04:41It's impressive that it's hanging with the big dogs, but it is just undercutting it a little bit.
04:46Now the top hole punch in the middle of these displays houses the selfie camera. It's a pretty
04:50decent eight megapixel wide camera on the Pixel 6, but it's closer to an ultra wide selfie on the
04:566 Pro, which I really like a lot. And it's also bumped up to 11 megapixels. So it can also shoot
05:014K selfie video. If it's more people on the frame, big fan of the 6 Pro's selfie camera.
05:07And then also, you know, the little things that you sort of expect a great phone to do well,
05:11but that you don't want to have to think about too much like clicky buttons, check. Both phones
05:17are fully water resistant and the haptics are really good on both phones as well. So that's a
05:23pixel thing, but the biggest new piece Google's adding to these phones is definitely on the inside.
05:28And that would be the new tensor chip. So designed by Google for this phone, this is going to let
05:34them do in theory, things that they couldn't do with the off the shelf Qualcomm chip they'd used
05:39before, you know, machine learning, better AI, better computational photography, all kinds of
05:44things they want to focus on with just this phone, they can do it. And it's done that. It's
05:49really impressive. Now, a lot of people were wondering how tensor would benchmark just,
05:53and I don't think that's the right way to think about this new chip. But just out of curiosity,
05:57I threw a geek bench at it and we have the numbers that got 1035 on single core,
06:022800 multicore. So that's maybe 8 to 10% slower with the CPU on paper than the Snapdragon 888,
06:09but also still way, way ahead of the Snapdragon 765G they used on the Pixel 5 last year. But
06:14then also I did some GPU benchmarks from 3DMark, and it was looking at 10 to 12% faster than the
06:20Snapdragon 888. But that's clearly not what tensor is about. This, this might be the biggest,
06:25this is what makes it a googly phone. This is the biggest difference between the benchmarks
06:31and what the phone is actually capable of that I've ever seen. So first of all,
06:34these phones have been really quick and responsive, no performance problems for me,
06:39I've mostly been dailying a 6 Pro, which has got the adaptive refresh rate up to 120 hertz.
06:44And I've been loving that. But it's not about the performance as much as it's about the features.
06:48And this continues the tradition of the Pixel phone being the smartest smartphone to come out
06:54every year. So you know, besides the stuff we've already seen, like call screening,
06:58where Google Assistants can filter incoming calls for you, or now playing, which ambiently detects
07:04whatever song is playing in the background in your environment, and just keeps a running list
07:08so you can remember what song was going on in the background in the grocery store an hour ago.
07:12And we've seen live captioning of any and all videos and phone calls and movies in real time.
07:18Besides all of that, there is some new improved stuff thanks to tensor and dedicated pieces of
07:24that chip. So first of all, speech to text, unreal on this phone, absolutely incredible,
07:29to the point where it actually changes the way I use the phone. I try to use voice more often on
07:35this phone because it's so good. So anywhere I'd normally be typing, I use that mic button
07:39anywhere I can. And no matter how fast you talk, you can basically rap at it, you can talk 200
07:44words per minute, like Eminem, if you want to, and it'll just keep going quick. It also adds
07:48punctuation really accurately. So you don't really even have to think about that you're just
07:52automatically grammatically accurate all the time. This is going to make sitting in lectures
07:57and people in class taking notes way less stressed. And basically anywhere else transcription is
08:01useful. And even on top of all that, it's smart. So if you say a name, it will pull from the names
08:07in your contacts, try to make sure it spells it right. If there's multiple different spellings
08:10of names for something and you correct it once, it will remember that corrected spelling of a name,
08:16things like that. If you say, delete this or send, it doesn't type those words. It knows what you're
08:21trying to do and will actually delete the words or send the message. Now there's also a new feature
08:25in Google photos for pixel six that lets you go back to any picture in your library and erase the
08:31things that you don't want. Now, this isn't blowing your mind. If you've seen content aware,
08:35Phil and Photoshop before, but I'm mostly really impressed with how easy and simple it makes the
08:41process. So you go into any image, go to tools and it's called magic eraser, and it automatically
08:48selects what it thinks you want to remove, usually a background photo bomber of some sort.
08:53And then you can just do it. And if there's other stuff you want to remove, you can draw a sloppy
08:58outline around it. It will auto detect the edges usually really well with any sort of contrast,
09:02finds the object you're talking about and just removes it just like that. So it kind of reads
09:06like magic and people on Twitter loved it, but just like Photoshop's content aware fill,
09:12it has certain things that works really well on and other things, not so much. So it works best
09:16with simple repeating backgrounds, you know, maybe gradients or textures and with a lot of contrast.
09:22But if you try to get rid of like a large object that's in front of several different backgrounds,
09:27well, that's just going to look bad. Like that's difficult for AI, but I was very impressed with
09:32some of the things that pulled off just messing around with it. It's probably a gimmick feature
09:36still for most people, but this is yet another demo of the powerful AI and tensor that can be
09:42pretty great sometimes. Now, something I thought would be better with tensor is battery life.
09:48And, you know, maybe I was getting my hopes up too high because what I saw Apple do with their
09:52silicon has been amazing. Like their chips are basically the pinnacle of efficiency,
09:57not to compare too much, but when I see iPhone 13 Pro Max getting eight plus hours of screen on
10:03time easy with a 4,300 milliamp hour battery, that's pretty amazing. So now I see Pixel 6 come
10:10out 4,600 milliamp hour battery in the Pixel 6 and 5,000 milliamp hours in the 6 Pro and they
10:17designed their own chips. So I was thinking this would be amazing. It's not. So I was consistently
10:23getting three and a half to four and a half hours of screen on time on the Pixel 6 Pro and
10:29slightly less on the 6, which is just average at best. It's not that great. Like that's dead by the
10:36end of a long day pretty often. Now on a $600 phone, that's not too crazy. You can probably
10:42forgive that, but on a flagship, that's a weakness. And then also on top of that, you got to remember
10:48there is no charging brick in the box, like we saw, and it supports up to 30 watts of wired
10:52charging, which is not super fast, but it's okay. And the wireless charging that's supported is even
10:59a little bit slower than that. So the battery situation for me has been overall kind of a
11:04bummer on the flagship. I can get around it by just charging all the time, like in my car, at my
11:09desk at work, but you never really want to have to do that. You kind of just want to be able to use
11:14your phone normally and not think about it. But hey, using this phone when it's not running low
11:18on battery has been awesome thanks to Android 12. I want to use it all the time. Totally made over
11:23aesthetic, material you, and all kinds of visual overhaul happening here. So I made an entire
11:28video about all the new features here, which I'll link below that like button. But yeah, I really
11:33like most of it. At first, it definitely feels like a little spread out. Like there's a lot of
11:38extra blank and like white space in the UI. There's these huge UI elements and really big
11:43buttons. And especially on a huge phone with a huge screen, it feels kind of cartoonish at first,
11:48but it all comes together. It's sort of this big, flowing, bouncy UI with matching colors and lots
11:55of nice scrolling physics and haptics. It all ties together. But yeah, it's just nice that no
12:00matter what wallpaper I choose, for example, the quick settings and the settings app and all the
12:05menu backgrounds and widgets all find an accent color in the wallpaper and match it right away.
12:12It's just, it's so sweet. It's nice. It's nice. My only little gripe with Android 12
12:17is two things actually. One, that the brightness slider is two swipes away. It's all the way at the
12:22top and you got to drag it down. I just think that could be way more reachable and way more
12:26accessible. And the other thing is I don't like the new internet toggle. I usually just want to
12:32turn Wi-Fi on or off, but now that takes an extra tap. And I feel like they could just add a Wi-Fi
12:37toggle in the quick settings, but just a general internet one exists. But you know what? When you
12:42think about Pixel, what do you think of? You think of the software and the camera. I think the
12:47software is pretty great. So let's talk about the most distinctive part of this phone, the camera.
12:52So Pixels have had the same camera more or less since the Pixel 2, right? This small 12 megapixel
12:59sensor on the Pixel 2 was pretty revolutionary for its time. And so they kept the same one in
13:04Pixel 3 and then kept the same one in Pixel 4 and then kept the same one in Pixel 5. And it was
13:10fine because others were catching up around them with better hardware, but Google had figured out
13:15a really great way to compensate for the small sensor with incredible software, amazing computational
13:21photography, great HDR and multi-frame bracketing and all this stuff that made their images, their
13:27night sight, all of those photos look incredible. It was almost like they just proved with these
13:32cameras that the software is more important than the hardware itself. But now here we are in 2021,
13:38everyone's catching up. And so now Pixel 6 has launched with a brand new camera system
13:43featuring a much better hardware suite, a huge 50 megapixel main sensor, but you can't actually
13:49take 50 megapixel photos. There's no high-res mode or anything for it. It's always binning
13:54and everything is down to 12 and a half megapixels. And then there's a new 12 megapixel ultra-wide
14:00and the pro phone also gets a 4X telephoto camera as well. So, okay, I've been shooting with it.
14:08I think Google's still running all of their camera algorithms at 11, like when they don't
14:14need to anymore. So this has much better hardware and they had been compensating, like I said,
14:20for a smaller weaker sensor to bring it up and bring out all the magic. And now running that
14:26same type of look starts to make photos look a bit over-processed, a little over HDR-y pretty
14:33frequently. So there are a bunch of interesting things about this camera, but like I said,
14:3750 megapixels doing four-to-one binning with no option to keep all 50 means you're only really
14:42getting a small amount of improved sharpness over the previous. But photos are sharp. White
14:46balance is pretty good, but still bias is a little bit too cool sometimes. But you can see
14:51in regular lighting, the pixel does an enormous amount of HDR and it almost looks like someone
14:56turned up the clarity slider in Photoshop just a little bit too high. So shadows never quite get
15:01all the way to black. And it's very rare that highlights like the sky are ever blown out,
15:07but then yeah, that also gives you a bit of an exaggerated, like over-processed look when the
15:10photo should just have regular lighting. Now, the thing is, this sensor is amazing. So it's
15:16taking in a ton of light and a lot of information. So actually the more difficult high dynamic range
15:21shooting situations are handled great, like shooting directly into the sun or shooting at
15:26night with bright lights. These more difficult shots are actually very impressive looking now
15:31because the processing is keeping so much information in the final shot, but even so
15:35these darker scenes tend to overexpose when you don't adjust the slider in the viewfinder. So
15:40it's really impressive. Believe me, having all this sharpness and almost no noise in a nighttime
15:46shot, that's technically incredible, but it shouldn't look this bright. So here's a comparison
15:52shot with the iPhone 13 pro on full auto, just to give you an idea of the difference between
15:56night modes. It's almost turning night into day on the Pixel. But here's a pretty perfect example
16:01to visualize all this processing. On the left is a raw shot from the Pixel's camera that we colored
16:07with just a quick boost to the vibrance. And on the right side is a Google process JPEG.
16:12And that sensor you can see is getting a ton of information and detail. And the processing is to
16:18make it look like what it thinks we want on a phone screen. Again, bringing up the shadows,
16:23bringing down the highlights, sharpening everything. But I think the ideal might be
16:29somewhere in between these. Now the ultra-wide is pretty good. It's not amazing, but it has a lot
16:33of the same traits as last year. And I'm glad there's still an ultra-wide. There's no macro
16:37mode with it though. And then the telephoto on the pro was surprisingly good. When you're moving
16:41around handheld, although you still get much better sharpness out of like an S21 ultra,
16:47Google's super res zoom is pretty good at sharpening up and improving shots that would
16:51normally be soft, but they can still tend to look a little bit like a watercolor painting
16:55at the extremes. But overall, you know, as someone who's loved the Pixel's rich contrast
17:00look and really honestly preferred it for years over pretty much anything else,
17:06I think this is an almost great camera that can take some tweaks and maybe some software updates,
17:12at least I'm hoping, to get better. Because I've taken some incredible sharp photos with this
17:17camera and I've also taken some weird looking ones. So basically, I guess the question is,
17:20would you rather have a camera that's a 10 out of 10 sometimes, but also a 7 out of 10 some other
17:27times, or just a camera that just gives you 9 out of 10, 9, 9, 9, every single time. Because that's
17:33the iPhone. That 9 out of 10, that consistent shot, the iPhone 13 Pro's camera system is more
17:39consistent, but the Pixel's camera aces some shots sometimes, but then also gives me a really weird
17:46HDR-y looking shot that I wouldn't even want to share. So, bounces back and forth. I will say the
17:51video from the Pixel did really level up, kind of the same style as the photos. It has great
17:57dynamic range, great stabilization, and that big sensor is giving you real background blur
18:02and impressively staying in focus most of the time. And in some of these harder scenes, you can
18:07definitely see the processing working. Like here, when it's trying to bring up the shadows, it's
18:11pretty noisy, but still, overall, color and exposure and white balance and the details are
18:17all great with the Pixel 6's video, and I'm really happy to see that. And then, another thing I
18:22noticed, the Pixel really cranks ISO all the way up in the viewfinder. So, you can see a lot of
18:28noise before you snap a photo and start the processing. Like, it's very easy to see this
18:33here in a screen recording, but that's what it's doing. You can see in the selfie viewfinder
18:36especially, it'll look super jacked up and really noisy just to keep a high frame rate and shutter
18:42speed when you're taking the selfie, and then you take it, and you see it process, and then
18:47everything sharpens up, and it looks miles better. And while that seemed kind of weird to me at first,
18:52I actually think this is a good move. So, Tensor has the horsepower to just run the stuff at high
18:56ISO, and the preview might not look great, but at least it's not choppy and laggy, and then it
19:01basically under-promises and over-delivers. People will see the viewfinder and think,
19:05this will be a bad photo, and then they'll be shocked at how good the final photo is. And when
19:09you're taking photos with faces in them, the ultrawide camera is always running at a higher
19:13shutter speed. So, if you get someone moving too quick, and the primary camera has a blurry face,
19:19it can merge in the faster, sharper face from the ultrawide camera into your shot automatically.
19:26I mean, you kind of just never have blurry faces in your photos. Overall, just as someone who's
19:31used now both of these phones for a couple of weeks, iPhone's camera system is better than the
19:37Pixel's. It just is right now. It's more consistent. It doesn't struggle with over-processing.
19:43It shoots to more formats. It's a better overall camera system. But the hardware is so good in the
19:49Pixel's, and you can see that promise in those 10 out of 10 shots that the Pixel fan in me is like
19:55hoping maybe in one or two software updates, it'll be a 10 out of 10 more often. But until then,
20:02because we don't know if that's ever going to happen, yeah, you saw the sample shots. That's
20:06what it does. That's how it looks. So, yeah, I want to come back to the price at the end here.
20:11Like I said, 599 for Pixel 6, 899 for Pixel 6 Pro. It's a $300 Delta, and for that difference,
20:18you're getting 120 Hertz over 90, 1440p over 1080, a curved screen over a flat one,
20:26some glossy sides over the matte sides. I like the matte sides better. Then you get an extra
20:30telephoto camera on the back, and you get a wider selfie camera on the front. A little more RAM,
20:35a little bit bigger screen. That's kind of it. So basically, my conclusion is Pixel 6,
20:42really good phone. Really, really great deal because for 600 bucks, this is one of the best
20:46phones you can get. And then the difference in money to get to 6 Pro, it makes it a better phone
20:52than the Pixel 6. Sure, a lot of good stuff here, but this stuff doesn't vault it over the top of
20:58all the other flagships. I would get this phone if you've really got to have the telephoto
21:03or the ultra-wide selfie camera or the bigger, faster screen. That's kind of the main bullets,
21:08but I think Pixel 6 is almost incredible. And the truth is, this is the most important Google
21:14phone yet. This pivot from enthusiast phones and really cool cameras and software features to
21:21still being the smartest smartphone in the world, but also now having much better hardware,
21:25this new design, and making their own chip and competing, like really competing, I'm into it.
21:31I'm super into it. So that's fun to see. That's Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. It's Techtober, so there's
21:37still a lot more to talk about, so stay tuned for that stuff. Subscribe if you haven't already.
21:40Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.