Google mobile hardware has a long history of shoddiness. It absolutely shines in the components useful to marketing and completely falls down in the ones which aren't. The Nexus 4 had screen tint issues and a defective speaker that emitted a high pitched buzzing noise. The Nexus 5 overheated often and sometimes the camera just stopped connecting. The Nexus 5X had boot loop issues so bad there was a class action lawsuit. The Nexus 6P had the same boot loop issues as well as faulty battery sensors and poorly-designed frame that bent and snapped in the middle. Pixel 1 had faulty microphones that Google knew about and still sold, resulting in another class action lawsuit. The Pixel 2 emitted weird clicking and scratching noises from its speaker at all times. The Pixel 2 XL had a godawful POLED display with colors so uneven it looked like someone stomped on the panels before installing them. Oh and both their USB-C ports would spontaneously break and prevent charging the phone. Pixel 3XL included two wildly disparate speakers with no way to balance them, so the audio always feels like it's coming from one side.
Trust me, some wild-ass Pixel 6 hardware fault will emerge in the next twelve months.
It's unfortunate for the users who want to use CalyxOS to achieve a degree of separation from Google. If you purchase Google hardware, you're still financially supporting the company to some extent.
Also, while the Pixel 6 (non-Pro) is competitively priced for its hardware features, I don't think the Pixel 1-5 (excluding the A-series phones) were the best-value products on the market at their launch prices. CalyxOS users would benefit from having support for high-end devices that are a better value for the money, and for entry-level devices for users with limited budgets.
CalyxOS does support the Xiaomi Mi A2, but the device's 4G band coverage is limited in some parts of the world, and the support seems to be expiring immediately after this update: https://calyxos.org/docs/guide/device-support/
That's right. High-end Pixel phones (especially Pixel 1-3) have tended to depreciate quickly and become good secondhand buys after the first year. This is more valuable for LineageOS, which sometimes supports devices long after the manufacturers drop support, than for CalyxOS, which ends support within a year after the manufacturer support period ends. The Pixel 6's 5 years of vendor security updates might make it more attractive for CalyxOS as a secondhand device, if it depreciates at a similar rate.
