Google Pixel 2: Should You Still Buy It?

The Pixel 2 came out in October 2017. As of mid-2018 the Pixel 3 is widely rumored for a fall release, the Pixel 2 is sitting at $200 to $300 below original retail, and the buyer-shopping question becomes: is the year-old phone at the lower price a smarter buy than waiting six months for the new one. After spending a couple of months with one as my daily driver, the honest answer is "it depends, but more often than people think, yes."

What the Pixel 2 Got Right

The camera. This is the part most reviewers led with in 2017 and it's still true a year later. Google's HDR+ pipeline produces photos that hold up against, and often beat, the iPhone X and the Galaxy S9 from the same era, despite the Pixel 2 having a single rear lens against their dual setups. The trick was that Google was doing computational photography (multi-frame stacking, ML-based exposure) better than anyone else's hardware was doing optical photography. Two years later that's now the industry standard. In 2018 the Pixel 2 was still ahead of it.

Software updates. The Pixel 2 was the first phone to ship with Android 8.1 Oreo, got Android 9 Pie at the same time as the Pixel 3 a year later, and is on Google's three-year update commitment. That's the longest Android update window outside of the Pixel line itself, and it changes the math on a year-old phone meaningfully: a 2017 Pixel still feels current in 2020 in a way that a 2017 Galaxy does not.

Stock Android. No Samsung skin, no Xiaomi launcher, no manufacturer bloatware. The phone runs the version of Android that Google actually intended, which is faster, cleaner, and closer to what gets demoed at I/O. For someone coming off a phone with a heavy skin, the difference is immediate.

What It Got Wrong

The display. The Pixel 2 XL had a real OLED problem at launch (color shift, blue tint at off-angles) that LG, the panel supplier, never fully fixed. The smaller Pixel 2 has a Samsung-supplied panel that's fine, not great. Either one is below the Galaxy S9 and the iPhone X on display quality.

The chip. Snapdragon 835 in 2018 is no longer cutting-edge. The Pixel 3 will ship with the 845 and the next iPhone will ship with the A12, both meaningfully faster on benchmarks and in real-world app launch and ML workloads. For most users this gap doesn't matter (the phone is fast enough), but if you keep a phone for three or four years, the older chip ages out earlier.

Headphone jack. The Pixel 2 was the first Pixel to drop it, mid-2018 still has plenty of wired-headphone holdouts who care, and the included USB-C dongle is one more thing to lose.

The Pixel 2 vs Pixel 3 Decision

At July 2018 prices, the Pixel 2 64GB is around $499, the Pixel 2 XL is around $649, and the Pixel 3 will likely launch at $799 to $899 in October. That's a $300 to $400 spread for what will probably be a 20% performance bump, an updated camera (likely with Night Sight), and a refreshed design with a notch.

If the camera is your main reason for going Pixel, the Pixel 2 is still excellent at it and the Pixel 3 will be incrementally better. If you keep a phone for two years, the Pixel 2 is the better deal. If you keep it for four, wait for the 3. If you're sensitive to display quality, the Pixel 2 is not the right answer either way; look at the Galaxy S9 instead.

The honest take: the Pixel 2 in 2018 is the smart buy for someone who values the camera and the update cadence over the latest spec sheet. That's a bigger chunk of the market than reviewers tend to assume. The Pixel 3 will be better. The Pixel 2 at $300 less will be enough.