The Pixel 11 Pro: It’s Fine.

One of my splurges is that I buy myself a new phone each year, and for the last several years, the phone I splurge on is the latest iteration of the Pixel phone by Google, usually the “pro” version of the phone, because it’s feature-packed without being too ridiculously large (that’s the “pro XL”). This year, however, I caught myself wondering if I might skip the upgrade, because on paper the Pixel 11 Pro looked something close to a step back from the Pixel 10 Pro. Part of this was due to the fact that, thanks to the RAMpocalypse, in which nearly all computer memory is now being eaten by “AI” data centers, the Pixel 11 Pro starts off with 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB. Then there was the new Tensor G6 chip, which has one fewer processing cores than the Tensor G5 chip. Even the battery was a teeny bit smaller. All this, starting for $100 more than last year. Nothing about any of that screams “pick this up now.” So why did I pick up the new one? Am I just that addicted to the shiny? Well,…