Pixel 8

And the second trap is the pairing flow.

On a Pixel 8, someone reported Flick Universal Keyboard Mode not working at all.

The fix was to press save and disconnect in the Flick app, then go into the phone's Bluetooth settings and pair the button as a keyboard.

Press the button once to advertise.

But here's the reality.

The most expensive, bleeding-edge flagship on the market is fundamentally less resilient against a zero-day memory corruption exploit than the Pixel 8 you bought years ago.

Today, we're breaking down what MTE actually does at the register level...

Why ditching it breaks the hardened operating system model.

Number one, hold on to your legacy silicon.

Do not automatically upgrade to the latest hardware generation, assuming newer means safer.

If you're running Graphene OS on a Pixel 8, 9, or 10, stay put.

Those devices retain full hardware MTE support alongside years of active firmware update commitments.

And this gets very complicated and in the weeds of kind of chip architecture and things like that.

But just to kind of break it down simply, Google introduced chip-based ARM hardware, MTE, back on the Pixel 8, and it's been on the Pixel 9 and the Pixel 10.

And it's important because memory safety bugs make up over 60% of… the really severe vulnerabilities on mobile devices.

And Graphene OS builds this entire OS around the memory tagging extension.

Like, okay, if we kind of keep treading this direction, we could really do something interesting.

And I think something kind of disruptive, oh no, Pixel 8 was different.

Again, I don't want to spoil the rest of my article.

Obviously, the win for the Pixel is not file compression.

And Google kind of learned their CPU config strategy from Samsung.

It's not a Samsung anymore, but that's kind of where they got it from.

So especially with like Pixel 8, Pixel 9, it's a lot of Samsung influence.

So I don't know.

How Google and Apple think differently about night video.

Back when I was using the Pixel 8 Pro as a secondary phone, I tried shooting some night video.

It was choppy, ugly.

There was a feature called Video Boost, but I remember taking an incredibly long time back then.

And you could kind of feel that, that, uh, the compromise...

Like, where, where you were compromising on power, you were seeing where it was coming back around, right? On the, on the, on the Pixel 8 and into the Pixel 9.

But the problem was by the time the Pixel 9 comes out, you have...

That's, that's 2024.

...

when people started talking about it.

Yeah, I think there was a roadmap from what Pixel 8 was.

I think it was, I wanna say it was-

Yeah.

And in order to get away from that, you've got to go back to the Pixel 8, I reckon.

That's my theory.

The Pixel 8 and before were unique, kind of looking not Apple-ish.

Yeah.

And as soon as the 9 came along, which is the one I ended up with, it all feels very, very Apple.

8...

You can start to think about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if, like, the Pixel 8 Pro has aged fairly well, to be honest with you.

I wouldn't be...

Like, you could probably wait another year and be fine.

Yes, I agree.

And, yeah, so this highlight feature is replacing what – there was a temperature sensor, I don't know if you remember this, listener, in the LED from starting with the Pixel 8 Pro, and it went through the Pixel 10.

And I don't like that was never something I would have used.

I don't know anybody that did use it there.