After the 6A appeared in my family, now there's a second Pixel, my own 7. I want to write a bit about this.
I don't change phones that often, my overall path in 12 years is now: HTC Hero → Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman → Nexus 4 → OnePlus 3 → OnePlus 6T → Pixel 7. The further, the less sense it seems. To record my attitude towards them, I'll say that OnePlus 3 for its time was the best of them.
I can't say about any of them that it was some completely failed position, but it's striking that in each next one some important thing for me disappeared or became worse than in the previous one. About the non-removable battery or the absence of 3.5 talking seems to be bad taste, but there's also a lot of things that changed for the worse in details.
Pixels are heavy and slippery, they're scary to hold. Compared to both previous OnePlus models, Pixels charge incredibly slowly. Moreover, they also heat up a lot. Because they heat up a lot - they charge even longer. You understand what a killer feature this is only when you lose it. Pixels don't have (though no one has) the famous DND switch. Volume and lock buttons are all on one side for some reason. But these are small things.
This can be attributed to the fact that I'm just too used to it, I agree. Although I still suffer that when transitioning between OnePlus phones they took away my LED for notifications. In fact, the only reasons for me to update phones are only that the previous one started to lag too much and it becomes impossible to update to fresh Androids, and I'm still a developer for them after all.
To the advantages of Pixels they most often attribute that the software flies here, and there are no bugs, and everything is optimized super well. For some reason I have a feeling that it flies only because of newness, on the previous ones it was exactly the same. If we look purely at the hardware, the previous ones still look pretty good, their lags are only a consequence of physical wear and the fact that software with updates starts to work worse and worse. Perhaps some phones lag right out of the box, but I don't even look at that category. Some Poco for 250 bucks works quite well, not counting a bunch of preinstalled Mi-trash.
But there are bugs on Pixels. Can you imagine, they managed with the last big update (2 months ago) to break Ripple right at the system level. In some settings the press effect exists, but in the absolute majority of third-party (and not only) apps - it's not there. How did this even pass through QA, any information? This is almost the main feature of Material design. The reference system to test apps, they said.
By the way, on Android 13 the feeling never leaves that I'm moonlighting as a beta tester. The vast majority of apps are clearly developed and tested on older versions and now and then something doesn't work specifically on the new one. Permissions there all sorts, everything that concerns the file system, well you understand yourself, where Google tightens the screws - that's where it doesn't work.
In defense of Pixels I'll say that it's not that it's bad in general, but life is like that. There's no choice. In price/quality I don't see anything even close.