Any 8a or 9 owners that have opinions, please let me know them. I'm deciding between these 2 devices.
The price difference is understood, and support life will be almost identical.
It seems like main 8a->9 performance differences are RAM, the wide-angle camera, and slightly faster charging.
Do the 8a/9 owners have any input? Or perhaps you've chosen between these 2 GOS devices?
When I read the thread title, my two points were price and support.
What do you do with your phone?
I personally would not know how to bring even the 6a into its performance limit.
For me, the only question would be: Is the additional support time worth the additional money?
The new design of the 9 might be an additional factor for you.
I sold my pixel 8a and bought a 9 but went back after short time. In my opinion the 8a is absolutely perfect. Save your money and buy a 8a :)
8a owner here. In my humble opinion, prices for fearures for everything above 8a are not worth it. It is either -a either -pro. The middle ones existance is questionable.
It will really depend on what you plan to do with your phone.
My main point was price divided by number of months (support) remaining. The 8a won this comparison on the used market. Admittedly 9 series had just been released when I got my 8a.
If you consider using your phone as a PC replacement with external mouse, keyboard and monitor (maybe once desktop mode is stable) a more powerful device, possibly with big internal memory (UFS), will certainly be helpful.
For me the 8a is severely overpowered already; I don't do any video editing/encoding or gaming on a phone. But MTE and the very long remaining support made the 8a more attractive than older Pixels.
The 9 pro devices are superior but the benefits are small. Personally I like how good the fingerprint reader is. 16GB of memory compared to the 8GB on the 8a doesn't hurt either.
TalentedQuill i think the 16gb are only for AI Things.... With graphene OS 8gb are more then enough. What do you think?
I use a Pixel 8a. I'm very happy with it. Battery life and general performance are absolutely sufficient.
Google will provide it with updates for a long time, so it is future-proof.
Google didn't like something about 8 series because they returned from nona-core to octa-core cpu architecture. I wonder why. 8 series seemed to output consistently better performance, on account of something I don't understand.
phone-company The extra memory is still useful if you use multiple profiles or many apps.
Somewhere in May the Pixel 9a will be released, it might be worth the wait, it has a large capacity battery. (5100mAh)
https://www.gsmarena.com/google_pixel_9a-13478.php
However, it does not sport the large RAM of the other Pixel 9's. (It is 8GB)
I assume GrapheneOS will be supported.
But then again, the Pixel 10 will be just around the corner by that time... It is a difficult choice indeed.
For GOS, a 9 Pro with lots of storage is nice if you can afford it.
If you use multiple profiles (of of the bigger advantages of GOS) then they will eat up storage and the number that can be used is reliant on the RAM.
The 9 also has a far superior fingerprint sensor to the 8.
Ultimately it comes down to what your use case is going to be and cost. If you are price sensitive then I would go with the 8A 256 GB, if you aren't then go with a 9 Pro 1 TB. The 9 256 GB is about 300 USD more than the 8a, whether the feature difference is worth the price to you is up to you.
JollyRancher You have to test the fingerprint sensor. In my case, the one from the Pixel 8 series worked better than the one from the 9 series
I really appreciate all of the input and opinions. Perfectly considered insights, exactly what I needed, and hopefully it helps someone in the future who is weighing a large (for me) purchase of a used device that will need to last 6yrs or so.
I personally would not know how to bring even the 6a into its performance limit.
This is exactly how I look at it, the 6a is enough for me. I felt the same about the 3a... such a shame to give up on these devices due to arbitrary EOL (although I do understand the device/support/dev/lifecycle game).
It seems the 8a is the device for me. Aesthetic/design matters little, and I think the performance gap to the 9 is something I would never notice/appreciate.
Many thanks to all who provided their insight :)
Three1989 you will love it :)
When I referred to EOL, i was talking mostly about my old 3a, which i really miss. Alas.. 7yr support was not a thing back then. Even when the 6a reaches EOL-according-to-Google, I'll think it a shame to abandon the (millions of?) devices left out in the cold.
for the 6a, yes it still has 2yrs 5mos left... which means I can still sell it on. My thinking here is to get into a device that will be unaffected by global economy / tariff / inflation issues. Call me paranoid, but with 7yrs support on the 8a, a current sale running on the 8a, and good residual value from the 6a, there's a non zero chance that there will not be a better time to jump.
YMMV
