knowitall

apple ][ said:

fastasleep said:

So you'd have been happier if we plowed ahead full steam and hit the high ends of the mortality projections? A few million dead would be fine, because the economy? Fuck right off.

The projections are garbage, about as accurate as AAPL stock price projections, or even worse.

A huge amount of deaths are from nursing homes. Close them off, quarantine them  and isolate them completely, leave everything else open.

That method would have been far more effective than sending infected patients straight back into nursing homes, so that they could infect everybody else there. Good job politicians and governors in certain states, lol. And those are the people who we should be listening to? No thanks.

avon b7 said:

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious...


"Now, even Apple's $399 iPhone SE uses a more powerful brain than even the most advanced Android flagships with prices above $1,000. How is this possible?" 

Apple sacrificed practically everything else to reach that price point. That's how it was possible. Other brands of course could do exactly the same if they wanted to. The difference is that they have no need to do so. 

"The A13 is a stronger chip than the Snapdragon 865 for daily use in every category," Hildenbrand noted."

Perhaps Hildenbrand was just plain wrong. Most important catagories also include Wi-Fi and Modem. Is the iPhone stronger in those areas? Ok, I know that Apple has yet to put a modem in its SoC. That is a disadvantage IMO. And how is he even comparing DSPs and ISPs? And are we now brushing aside years of subpar intel modems? 

On a wider note, the Apple graphic says 'fastest' CPU, 'fastest' GPU, but only 'faster' NPU. They are not comparing the NPU to Android SoCs, just other iPhones. 

It seems the whole point only boils down to CPU/GPU performance but we have long seen far beyond that, as all flagships now fly and have done for years.

We also know that CPU/GPU performance is definitely not the only key metric involved. If it were, there would literally be no Android flagship market. 'Fastest' CPU/GPU lost their key selling factors long ago. Now though, we are focused, among many other non-CPU aspects, on their perceived performance chops with elements like screen refresh rates and the claimed silky smooth enhancements in UI response (although once again, few if any flagship users were even seeing a 'problem' in the first place). 


"Apple's A13 Bionic isn't just faster, it's deployed wider than any high-end Android chip" 

What's the takeaway here? I can see zero relevance to anything. Android phones use varying SoCs at varying price points to offer wider value points - by design. And I'm not limiting this to just 'older' SoCs but new SoCs too.

That means for a so called 'lesser' SoC the consumer gains options in other areas. The SE sacrifices most of that for its price point and the A13.

Neither approach is right or wrong. They are simply options. No doubt some SE users would have preferred a 'lesser' SoC in exchange for other features. Either way, more choice for iPhone users can only be a good thing.

Seeing as Android manufacturers have a far wider choice of SoCs available to them, obviously 'deployment' of each one isn't t as wide as it could be. Not that it is even remotely relevant. 

"However, 2020 is turning out to be a bad year to be pushing 5G as your only strength. It will be some time before 5G becomes broadly available outside of a few leading markets such as South Korea and specific urban markets. For budget phone buyers, 5G offers little more than faster battery drain and often the requirement to pay extra for mobile service, whether that 5G service is consistently available and capable of delivering noticeably better, real-world mobile data speeds than the best 4G LTE or not."

No one foresaw (or can foresee) the Covid-19 pandemic. The 5G roll out may have been hampered for few months in 2020 but that is completely and utterly irrelevant. The situation is exactly the same for potential purchasers as it was before the pandemic. The roll out continues and in some places (China for example, will be accelerated more - again). In fact, the roll out never even stopped as ICT is considered an 'essential' industry and Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei have been working around the clock on increasing network capacity to meet confinement demands. COVID-19 has served to spur industrial use of 5G too. 

As a smartphone purchaser in 2020 (budget or not) , if you have 5G in your area you should have 5G on your phone wishlist. Even if you don't have 5G in your area yet, it should be on your list of features all the same if 5G is scheduled for your area. As a result, 5G remains a vital strength to have and many budget purchasers will simply put off purchases altogether to futureproof the phone purchase when it does happen, depending on their personal 5G circumstances or buy now. For example, some may choose to only bite on an on-SoC modem, NSA and SA support etc. Whichever way you look at it, not having 5G support for your phones is not a comfortable place to be. 

As for the reference to 4G LTE and 5G speeds, yesterday I was checking out UK 5G speeds against 4G LTE in a range of different cities. None of the sites checked had 4G in the same ball park as 5G.

You might say that 'fast 4G' is sufficiently fast to make 'faster' 5G an unimportant aspect in the real world but in pure performance terms that would be as futile as trying to claim the A13 is faster than Android SoCs while ignoring reality, where Android SoCs 'perform' better in other key areas like WiFi, modem, photography, battery, biometrics etc.

That is, 5G towers and phone hardware can offer benefits that go beyond the speed of just downloads and uploads. Obviously latency being one of those.

Or that certain vendors are using proprietary enhancements to existing standards to improve their hardware's performance. 

Huawei claims its late 2018 WiFi 5 is faster than Apple's WiFi 6 and Huawei has just rolled out its 'WiFi 6+' on phones (there was already an entire suite of WiFi 6+ products on the market) which draw on its 5G technology to improve baseline WiFi 6 performance. 

Like Huawei is offering 40W wireless charging too. 

Is there anything stopping Samsung, Huawei et al from stripping most of their phones' features away and plunking in a high end chipset? No. Nothing. 

In fact the high end chipsets are not reserved for the high end at all. In 2018, Huawei launched the Mate 20 Pro with the Kirin 980. A month later it appeared on Honor phones (Huawei's sub brand). Last year it was the same with the Kirin 990/Kirin 9905G.

The difference is they didn't strip most of the bells and whistles away just to reach the lower end. That makes a lot of sense in their markets because they also have new SoCs for other price bands which allow them to add desired features like, you guessed it, 5G, along with full screens and tri-cameras. 

Apple needed the new SE, as stripped down as it may be, but do you really think Apple was all in on the idea or that it felt that market conditions simply made it something they had to do? 

StrangeDays said:

knowitall said:

Apples prices are still too high to overcome a new wave of DIY and opensource hardware/software designs hitting the market/home.
Industrie in the future will be totally distributed, and as such non existent.

Oh yes, any year now the DIY neckbeards will inherit the earth. Hasn't happened in the past twenty years of Linux, but it's comin'! Riiight.