More Pixel Photo Love, More Pixel AI Angst (Premium)

We have friends in town for a long weekend. This is distracting, but it also gave me a good chance to test the cameras on the Pixel 9 Pro XL in a fairly natural way. We were out and about over the past few days, visiting some new sights in Pennsylvania (to us, at least) and eating out more. And during the downtime, I started exploring the growing collection of AI services that Google now provides with its phones.

That these things are intertwined is somewhat obvious: As I wrote recently in Google Pixel 9 is at the Nexus of Hardware, Software, and AI (Premium), the history of Pixel is, in many ways, the history of Google's use of AI as a differentiator for its mobile devices. And the first and most popular way it's expressed that expertise is through computational photography. And there's almost too much going on in both cases with the Pixel 9 series. It's a bit overwhelming.

What's curious about that, to me, is that you could almost ignore it all. Aside from a few pop-ups to remind you about new features like Gemini Advanced--which Pixel 9 series customers get for free for one year, a $240 value--it's possible for someone to buy one of these devices, get it set up and configured, and just go about their lives normally, using apps, sending emails, marking text messages as spam, and taking photos, without really thinking about AI or how it's quickly being sprinkled throughout the system. It's just ... kind of there.

And who knows? Perhaps it would reveal itself to the user, in time, as needed. I assume so. But I can't wait for that. After a few days of trying to organize in my mind, by which I mean in a Notion list, what's new from an AI perspective in the Pixel 9 series, our friends arrived, and away went the weekend. I took hundreds of photos. And I started my first experiments with the Pixel's AI capabilities, most notably those related to photo editing.

People are going to freak out. A lot.

Last year, some of the less sophisticated tech reviewers lost their minds because of the AI photo editing features in the Pixel 8 series smartphones. What a difference a year makes: The AI advances this year are so extreme we'll look back at 2023 and the Pixel 8 as the good old days. This is both good and bad, of course. You know, like all technology.

That said, the initial round of photos I took delivers nothing but good news: Google is deservedly suspect because of the up-and-down reliability of various Pixel devices over time. But it is likewise deserving of admiration for the quality of the photos anyone can take with a Pixel. This was true when the hardware was lacking, as it was for many years, and it's even more true--truer, I guess--now that it has terrific camera hardware. If what you're looking for is point-and-click perfection, the Pixel 9 Pro XL--and, I'd imagine, any 9-series Pixel--is your best bet. The iPhone is terrific, too, but it requires a lot of configuration to get there.

You can, of course, configure...