(2018-01-14) Pixel-2-XL Screen Horizontal Gray Bar

I got my Pixel 2 XL on Friday, started setting it up that evening.

Sunday evening I suddenly realized there's this grayish horizontal bar running across the middle of the screen.

Jan15

• discover I'm not the only one with this issue.
• text-chat Google support at 5pm. They actually said "it's working as designed". Finally after 40min of run-around/escalation and sending them a photo I got told "we'll email you trouble-shooting instructions".
• it turns out those instructions are
  • generate a dev-debug report to email them: done
  • restart: done
  • if that doesn't work (and it didn't), reset to factory settings (wasting many weekend hours of setup). Not done yet, really annoyed because I know this is just a delaying tactic.

Jan16

• the gray-bar is even worse
• evening: now at various times the screen starts flashing, esp when in the car. The bouncing?
  • I turned off the Ambient Display, we'll see if that helps. Yep, haven't seen it since.

Jan17

• when going to bed I noticed that, having plugged it in, the screen kept turning on when I turned it off. Even if I left it face-down and hit the power button, it would go dark, then light up again 2sec later. Finally it stopped doing that.
  • same thing Jan19, but I just left it alone and after a minute the light went out

Jan20

• before doing reset want to copy my PDFs from my Download folder on the phone back over to my Mac. But I get the Android File Transfer issue, but a bit unusual. (I know to turn on USB file transfer on the phone.) Android File Transfer will let me see the top folder, and I can click into small/empty folders fine. But for my 'Books' and 'Download" directories it fails. Maybe long directories result in timeout which it mis-interprets?
• finally resort to using DroidNAS. Also doesn't work at first, but I eventually stumble on solution which I think was
  • use the Connect dialog
  • use the SD Card path in the connection string
  • that connects ok but gives you an empty window!
  • but then if you click on the phone choice in the Shared sidebar, you get a window with listing you can click into.

Jan21: finally about to do the reset, and... I realize the screen problem has gone away! I can see a tiny bit of stripe, tiny bit of dimple-on-left, but pretty gone. Probably not worth worrying about.

• and later even that's gone.

Jan23: still all clear