My mom got one but she upgraded from a 3 so it's a big improvement. I got an 8 a couple month ago and see no reason to upgrade. Most of the changes seem to be AI related with very minor hardware improvements.
Pixel 9 isn't aimed at Pixel 8 or even 7 users. These 2 phones are still very much in software support period and have a decent hardware so as not to upgrade per year. Pixel 9 is aimed at gaining either new users or upgrading very old Pixel users.
Still, two problems persist, the phone still somewhat gets hot and charging is still on the slower side. Even Samsung has jumped on 45 W bandwagon, not to mention Chinese OEMs which can recharge more than twice as fast.
not to mention Chinese OEMs which can recharge more than twice as fast
Which absolutely fries your battery. That's one of the reasons Chinese phones would typically have horrible battery life, were it not for their stupid and aggressive "battery savers" and process killers that prevent basically anything from running in the background, which makes some tasks completely unfeasible/impossible on these devices. You want to receive push notifications outside of Google Play/FCM? Too bad, your app is gonna get killed after like 2 minutes of background usage. You want to sync your files/photos/contacts/calender/anything with your self-hosted server? Too bad, you can't do that, because some Chinese manufacturer wants to market their phone with some crazy 120W charging and doesn't give a fuck about the consequences. There's a reason why Apple has stuck to 5W charging for so many years. And it's not because they couldn't figure out how to make it faster...
I'm actually considering getting a 9 Pro, because I like the design. The past few generations of Pixels have been (in my opinion) ugly as hell. The Pixel 9 Series actually looks great though. I'll probably give the 6 Pro that I currently use to my mom (with GrapheneOS of course), because she needs a new phone anyway.