The Pixel 11 barely changed, but Gemini now orders coffee for you: the 128-gigabyte model quietly vanished from the line-up

Google has unveiled the Pixel 11 and, as in the past few years, it is hard to find what is new about the phone itself. The screen is the same size. The design is almost identical to last year's. The processor is new - Tensor G6, with 20 percent better energy efficiency and 25 percent faster browsing. That is it for hardware you can see.

Which is why the whole presentation was about Gemini. Google's artificial intelligence can now order groceries, book transport or buy coffee on the user's behalf. It can also phone a restaurant to reserve a table. Google says the user can interrupt the task at any moment and read a transcript of the conversation the machine held. A nice guardrail - provided somebody actually reads those transcripts.

The list of apps that will work with Gemini is long: Granola, Otter.ai, Wix, Fever, Get Your Guide, Localiza, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Angi, Thumbtack, Zocdoc. Notice what is missing from that list - almost nothing that operates in this part of Europe. An agent that books you a table through OpenTable in London has nothing to hook onto in Skopje. The ordering features apply for now only to users in the US.

Where the price actually moves

The Pixel 11 starts at 899 dollars (around 830 euros), the Pro at 1,099 dollars and the Pro XL at 1,299 dollars. Google raised the price of the most expensive model by 100 dollars compared with last year and justified it with more expensive components. There is also a quieter way the price went up for everyone: base storage is now 256 gigabytes on every model. Last year there was a 128-gigabyte version for a hundred dollars less. That one is gone. If you needed the cheaper phone, it simply vanished from the line-up while the figure on the label stayed the same.

The camera does bring real upgrades. Zoom on the Pro models goes from 100 to 120 times, on the basic one from 20 to 30. Night capture is 4.5 times faster. There is support for 8K video and a new „Magic Capture” feature that picks the best frame from hundreds of photographs on its own, straightens it and readies it for sharing. There is also a feature that translates sign language into text through the camera - of everything shown, this is the only one solving a genuine human problem rather than a problem marketing invented.

What remains is the question every phone maker tries to dodge. If the hardware barely changes, and everything new lives in software running over the internet on somebody else's servers - why would anyone change phones every year? Google answers with an agent that orders your coffee. People in Macedonia, who keep their phones for several years, most likely have a different answer.