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Phones are about to change forever. Okay, that title might be a little dramatic, but let me ask you a question. What does the Razer Ultra 2026 and the Pixel 10a both have in common, and you might not think about it straight away or be able to guess it, but they are 2026 phones using 2025 chips. They are both pretty identical to the phone that came beforehand. The Pixel 10 has the same Tensor G4 and change so little. And looking back at my briefing notes, I only had 138 words written down about this thing. Something similar could be said for this year's Razer Ultra. While I had more than 138 words, the phone was pretty much identical. Same display, same cameras, and more importantly, the
same chipset. And I think 2026 might be the first year that if you buy yourself a new phone, you could be getting a worse deal. Boring. That's the word that I've heard a lot when I've been speaking to people about phones released in 2026. They're just not that exciting. The S26 series kind of proved this. Besides a privacy display, a new Snapdragon chip, and some slightly quicker charging, it was basically the same phone as the year before and the year before that. If you look at the upgrades, they were mostly from Galaxy AI, which I'm not sure anyone is a big
fan of, especially since you never get told what AI features are exclusive to the new models and what is going to trickle down to those older models. And that really, really annoys me, but that's like a whole other video. This is not just Samsung. This can be said for Google with the Pixel as well. Their focus is mainly on AI and what Gemini can do. the hardware upgrades from the Pixel 9 Pro to the Pixel 10 Pro practically didn't exist. And if you had both those phones next to each other and even using them, it can be really hard to tell what phone is what. But there is a bigger issue that I've noticed in 2026. And it's not just the fact that phones are using the same hardware. In
some cases, some of the newer phones are actually using worse hardware. A very obvious example of this was the OnePlus 15. Everybody loved the 13, but with the weaker cameras on the 15. It didn't really get a lot of praise. And then you look at the rumors for the Pixel 11, and this is apparently about to use an old GPU from 2021. This is not a good trend, and there has to be a reason that it is happening. And I think, especially for the US companies, this is just down to cost. The lack of hardware improvements are almost too expensive. I feel like no matter what you look at, everything seems to cost 30% more than it used to. And it isn't just phones being hit by this problem. Have a look at the PS5.
It's now about $100 more expensive than it was when it was released. The Switch 2 that got a bump in price. Even look at the Steam Deck. That just got a massive jump in price. And this is where it brings me back to the start of the video where I said that your phones are about to change forever. And I think there are three scenarios that could happen. Scenario one is that we stopped seeing yearly releases. Going back to the Pixel 10a and the Razer 2026, they kind of didn't need to exist. They didn't fix any of the issues from the year before. They also didn't bring anything new to the table that excited me or anyone else I know. They didn't innovate in any way at all. And I'm not saying that every
release has to have some major innovation, but I feel that there should really be some hardware upgrades. And granted, the Razer Ultra did have a couple, but the Pixel 10a that really barely had anything. I feel like these two phones are an example of a yearly release cycle that they had no choice but to hit. I'm not sure anyone's going to be arguing with an 18month or a 24-month release cycle at this point. Then we have scenario two. This is where we would keep seeing those yearly releases. Hardware basically stays the same. Then we live in an AI world where the only updates that we see are software. And that's a place that I really don't want to be in because then we lose the excitement of new Samsung
devices and new pixels. And sadly, I feel like that's already where we're heading. Google IO was all about Gemini intelligence and what Gemini can do for you. And this is almost certainly a nod to what we're going to see on the Pixel 11s, but then we also had the Android show, which almost all of the features mentioned here were AI focused. But then we have scenario 3. Scenario 3 is where we still get the yearly release cycles and we still get big innovations in hardware. This is where phonear they do get better. Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi, they are still doing this. We see new hardware that makes us want to upgrade. But then this is the problem. These year-on-year upgrades get monumentally
expensive. And even if the phone is better, we're just priced out of buying it. So then in that case, you might be sat there thinking, "Well, I just won't upgrade my phone and I'll just get all those AI software updates coming to my older phone." Yeah, about that. The OEMs are way ahead of you on this. Let's take the Galaxy ZFold 7 as an example. It has the Snapdragon 8 Elite. It's powerful enough to do almost anything you might want. So surely that would get Gemini intelligence. Then you look at the Pixel 9 Pros, only a year old. So surely they would also get Gemini Intelligence. But Google isn't going to let that happen. And why? It's because Nano V3 is not on those devices because they both have
Nano V2. But Google hasn't exactly told us the difference between what V2 is and what V3 is because both these phones have more than enough RAM. It's just that we don't really have an idea what that difference is and why it's not getting Gemini intelligence. And this is why you might need to keep buying those phones because you will potentially just get locked out of any new AI updates because you can be. And then this is where that issue comes full circle. You are going to end up paying more for less. The hardware is either taking a step down or it's going to be staying the same. But the phones, they're not getting any cheaper. we're just going to end up in a place where phones physically change less, cost more, and
the main reason to upgrade is the software because that's been locked to a newer release. And if that's the way these phones are going to go, which I think it is, it's going to be pretty sad. I want better cameras, better batteries, new designs, new form factors, hardware that actually feels different when you use it. But if the next few years are just the same phone with higher prices and more AI features hidden behind newer chips, then yeah, phones really are about to change forever and they're not changing in the way that we hope. But I'm curious to know your thoughts about all of this in the comments below because this is what I think is going to happen in the next 12 and 24 months. But I want to hear
what you say. So let me know in the comments. If you can subscribe to the channel before you head off, I would massively appreciate it. And if you do that, then I'll see you in the next one.
