I was planning to skip the Pixel 11. These 5 upgrades changed my mind

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On paper, the Google Pixel 11 doesn’t seem like anything special. It looks like another 2026 smartphone with relatively minor upgrades and a higher starting price, thanks largely to the ongoing RAM and memory crisis.

As someone who owns a Pixel 9 from a couple of years ago, upgrading to the Pixel 11 didn’t initially make much sense to me. After all, the Pixel 11 doesn’t look dramatically different from the Pixel 9, and my current phone still works perfectly fine.

But after digging deeper and comparing the Pixel 11 vs. Pixel 9, I started noticing several meaningful differences that aren’t immediately obvious. In fact, five upgrades have convinced me that Google’s latest Pixel might finally be worth the jump.

Google may have fooled a lot of us with the Tensor G6. Early reports suggested the chipset would be built on TSMC’s 2nm process, potentially making it one of the first flagship smartphone chips to use the new architecture. As it turns out, though, the Tensor G6 is once again a 3nm chipset .

And while the Tensor G6 isn’t the massive performance jump some of us expected, it’s still a meaningful upgrade over the Pixel 9’s hardware. The Pixel 9 uses the Samsung-made Tensor G4, which wasn’t exactly known for efficiency and frequently drew complaints about heat and cellular performance.

The bigger upgrade for me is actually the modem. Google has finally ditched Samsung’s Exynos modem in favor of a new MediaTek modem across the Pixel 11 series.

In our recent testing, the new modem consistently delivered faster download speeds than the Pixel 10 Pro and was better at holding onto a 5G connection in weaker reception areas. Given that the Pixel 9 uses a similar Samsung modem, you can expect a noticeable improvement in cellular performance here as well.