Like everything else in the tech industry, Google’s Pixel 11 series appears to be getting a price increase, but there are a few factors that make this a little harder to swallow.
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First things first: it’s official. Google will launch the Pixel 11 series during an event on August 12.
But just hours before it was announced, a report revealed potential pricing for the Pixel 11 series and, ouch!
According to this week’s reportThe Pixel 11 series is getting €100 (probably $100) price hikes across the board. The good news is that the 128 GB tiers are going away, but this pushes Pixel firmly in top-tier flagship territory, with Pixel 11 at €999, Pixel 11 Pro at €1,199, Pixel 11 Pro XL at €1,399, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold at €1,999. If we translate these to US prices and assume there are no regional changes here, we’re looking at the Pixel 11 at $899, the Pixel 11 Pro at $1,099, the Pixel 11 Pro XL at $1,299, and the Pixel 11 Pro Fold at $1,899.
Again, Oh.
Price increases are, at this point, inevitable. Google’s next Pixels were always going up in price, but there are a few reasons why this particular price increase is hard to swallow.
That starts with the Tensor of everything.
While I have personally long felt that Tensor is perfectly acceptable in overall performance and more than capable of what most users really want to do on their phones, I would be foolish not to acknowledge that, objectively, these chips are not as good as a Snapdragon flagship. Given that Google charges the same prices for its phones as we see on Snapdragon-powered flagships like the Galaxy S26 series, it’s hard to ignore that at the end of the day, you’re looking at a drop in performance in specific areas like gaming, as well as other drawbacks, like the Pixel’s long struggles with heat management (which is largely due to Tensor).
Tensor G6 looks quite promising But unless something incredible happens, the Pixel 11 series will still be less powerful than comparably priced devices.
The storage change helps a little here. That the Pixel 10 still has a base 128GB was a big detractor last year, but it’s also hard to accept a price increase for that. Google’s abandonment of that base storage level was long overdue, possibly two generations ago. That “update” that finally arrives softens the blow of this price increase, but it also seems like the least Google could do in this situation.
But storage is also part of the problem I see. The Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL were only $100 apart: $999 and $1,099. That changed in the Pixel 10 generation, with the Pixel 10 Pro (128GB) at $999 and the Pixel 10 Pro XL at $1,199, but with 256GB of storage as a base. Comparing equal storage levels, there was no price increase. But this time, Google is raising the price of the XL to the point where there’s a $200 difference between these devices. That’s pretty much the industry standard, but I think Google had it right before, and this is a bit of a sneaky change as such.
In my opinion, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold has no right to increase in price. You’re recycling the same design that simply doesn’t measure up to the rest of the foldable world. No one should pay $1,899 for a Pixel 11 Pro Fold when they could get a Galaxy Z Fold 8 for $100 more with a slimmer design. best form factor (or, you know, a used Fold 7 for less).
The other elephant in the room is the alleged drops in RAM allocations on certain models. A previous leak suggested that the base Pixel 11 could drop to 8GB of RAM, while the Pixel 11 Pro models could drop to 12GB. If so, that makes price increases virtually impossible to accept, since while memory prices are skyrocketing, paying more money for less hurts even more, especially considering Google is he smartphone brand more focused on RAM-hungry AI than anyone.
Once again, price increases were inevitable, and these supposed prices might not even be the worst, since RAMageddon continues. But these Pixel-specific factors make Google’s supposed increases a little harder to deal with.
What do you think?
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