[NoPicklez]

Why waste an entire button to just be responsible for powering the device on or off? It's not something I do very often at all and if can be repurposed as a functional button then I am all for it.

It's especially helpful as an accessibility option.

[SR2Z]

Short and long presses of the power button are the STANDARD ways to control the power of a device, be it a PC, phone, tablet, or even random things like my sous vide cooker or an aircraft GPS.

Reliably being able to determine and set if a device or computer is running is a critical aspect of making sure that machines serve their users. If a device is doing shitty, undesirable things, I want to know that I can quickly and easily power it all the way off. That includes if the screen becomes unresponsive or otherwise damaged.

Considering that Google Assistant (and Gemini now, I guess - the distinction isn't clear) have somehow managed to get LESS functional and useful as time has gone on, I found it extremely irritating that some promo-chasing PMs and engineers at Google tried to hijack this basic, established device control to push a garbage product which I KNOW is getting discontinued, migrated, or cancelled in the next few months.

I'm not even much of a zealot for free or pro-user software, but this is an insane idea from Google that speaks to a deep misunderstanding about how much control I think they should have over my phone.

[jerlam]

The author acknowledges normal users rarely power off their phone; but goes on to mention that they are a tech reviewer and constantly switching phones, applying updates, restarting to reproduce glitches, etc. So it is not a real problem.