Pixel 11 Release Date: Price Reveal Hands Advantage To iPhone 17

Source Domain: www.forbes.com

After higher Galaxy S26 prices, and a likely more expensive Galaxy Z Fold 8, it looks like the RAM crisis has claimed another victim: Google’s Pixel 11. The main reason to buy a Google phone: its comparatively cheap price, may soon be lost.

Deleted Amazon listings, spotted by an Android Authority reader and corroborated by Droid Life, reveal the base Pixel 11 starting at $899 for 256GB, $100 more than the iPhone 17’s $799 starting price. An Apple phone being cheaper at launch than a Pixel is a collector’s item.

That’s a real problem for Google’s pitch. Yes, the base model jumps from 128GB to 256GB, which explains some of the increase. But the main reason to buy a Pixel for the last decade has always been its price and camera, although Apple has caught up on the latter. Take the former away and Google needs a different argument.

Gemini Intelligence On The Pixel 11 Is Google’s Winner

Will the Google Pixel 11 be meaningfully different from the Google Pixel 10? (Photo by Future Publishing via Getty Images)

That argument is almost certainly Gemini Intelligence, Google’s agentic AI suite that can handle multi-step tasks with minimal oversight, booking reservations, managing your calendar, or pulling items from your notes into a shopping cart.

It goes further than simple voice commands or app shortcuts, the whole pitch is a phone that can reason through a task across multiple apps on your behalf: checking your emails, drafting a reply, adding the result to your calendar, and confirming a purchase, all without you tapping through each step yourself.

If Google can’t win on price anymore, expect the pitch to shift hard toward claiming the Pixel 11 can actually do things for you that an iPhone can’t…yet. And if it turns out to be true that Gemini Intelligence will be restricted to only the latest Samsung and Google phones, that argument becomes more persuasive.

There are risks with agentic AI suddenly being available on millions of Android phones, though. Prompt injection…

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