Labor Day weekend I did the thing I said I wasn't going to do, which is spend an hour and a half in a Best Buy parking lot reading spec sheets on my phone instead of going inside. The Pixel 10 lineup went on sale Thursday, a week and a half after Google's "Made by Google" event out in Brooklyn, and I'd told myself I was skipping this cycle. I'm two phones behind on updating this blog's "what I use" page, so you can guess how well that's going.
Here's the thing about the Pixel 10 that actually got my attention, and it's not the new Tensor G5 chip, which Google now has TSMC building instead of Samsung (first time that's happened for a Pixel chip, for whatever that's worth to you). It's not Magic Cue either, the AI thing that's supposed to read your messages and calendar and suggest stuff before you ask. I used something similar on a loaner Pixel 9 last year and it mostly just told me things I already knew, three seconds after I already knew them. No, the thing that got me was magnets. Actual magnets, built into the back of the phone, so wireless chargers and cases snap into place instead of you doing that thing where you slide a phone around a charging pad for ten seconds hoping it catches. Google's calling it Pixelsnap. It's basically MagSafe, seven years after Apple didn't invent inductive charging but sure made everyone think they did.
I know how that sounds (man gets excited about magnets), but I charge my phone wrong constantly, on a stand next to my bed, and half the time I wake up to 40% battery because it wasn't seated right. That's a real problem I have every single day. An AI that drafts my text replies is not.
Base Pixel 10 is $799, same as last year, which I'll give Google some credit for, since everyone else has spent 2025 finding new reasons to charge more for the same box of parts. The Pro starts at $999. I didn't get all the way through the Pro XL pricing before my own phone died in the parking lot (irony noted), but it's north of $1,200 once you bump the storage, and the Pro Fold is up near $1,800, which is its own kind of insane for a phone that folds a screen in half.
I ended up not buying one. Partly because my Pixel 8 is fine, genuinely fine, the battery still gets me through a full day without babying it, and I'm allergic to spending a thousand dollars to fix a charging habit I could fix by just putting the phone down straight. But mostly because the second I got home and looked up cases, half the magnetic ones from the launch lineup were already backordered. There's something very on-brand for this industry about a company solving a real, small annoyance and then not stocking enough of the one accessory that makes the fix actually work.
Small tangent, unrelated except it happened the same weekend: Apple sent out invites for their September 9th event, the "Awe dropping" one, which is obviously the iPhone 17 reveal. I have opinions about event names but I'll spare you most of them. What I will say is that late August into early September has turned into this odd little stretch every year where Google and Apple both want your attention within about two weeks of each other, and I always end up reading everything about both and buying neither, which at this point I've decided is just the correct move for anyone whose current phone still works.
If you're actually due for an upgrade, and you're the kind of person who gets irrationally annoyed by wireless charging alignment the way I apparently am, the Pixel 10 is worth a look in person. It's on shelves now too, not stuck in preorder purgatory for three weeks like some launches. But if your phone works, it works. Mine works. I'm going to go find my Pixel 8 a better charging stand instead of buying a new phone to solve a problem a five-dollar stand could probably fix, which is either the responsible choice or just me being fourteen years into running this blog and finally learning something about impulse tech purchases. Probably the first one. Ask me again in a year.