I’m in an interesting camp because I mainly reside in apple land, except for my desktop and tablet. I have the galaxy tab s7 plus and that thing is all I could ask for out of a tablet. As a media consumption device it does one thing well and that’s emulation. I love using an 8bitdo controller with it too.
I assume they can do this and I think they plan on something like it (pretty sure I heard this from Mishaal Rahman on a podcast). But yeah the way pixel devices come apart is way more granular which is a good thing but can end up in more issues from things breaking. Google doesn’t have the best rack record with build quality unfortunately.
I’d like to piggy back in this. I worked for Asurion and Assurant Both are authorized for Google in warranty and insurance repairs. They have to have your device factory reset. Google claims this is a security measure which it is to a degree but it’s mostly because the pixel diagnostic suite requires full access to the biometrics on the device.
I didn’t know they still locked this feature behind a payment, it’s scummy they can also tell you how much data you can use this way too. I remember there being a program that tunneled the stats a certain way to bypass it but you had to use usb or Bluetooth PAN. I think it was called easy tether.
If you want something you could throw a different ROM on you could always try a used pixel 6 or newer with lineage OS. What kind of carrier compatibility do you need?
I’m in an interesting camp because I mainly reside in apple land, except for my desktop and tablet. I have the galaxy tab s7 plus and that thing is all I could ask for out of a tablet. As a media consumption device it does one thing well and that’s emulation. I love using an 8bitdo controller with it too.