KITA

AppleInsider said:

In terms of overall raw performance, the iPhone 7 Plus with its A10 Fusion chip is comparable to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 670 on the Pixel 3a XL.

StrangeDays said:

Bahaha — so much for the argument on another story that Apple “lost” the secure chat platform space, because WhatsApp is more popular and cross-platform than iMessage. Oops. So much winning when you put your privacy into Facecrook’s hands, lol.

baconstang said:

WhatsApp, Instagram & Facebook.   Lie down with dogs, wake up with who-knows-what.

macseeker said:

Apple needs to remove the entire universe of facebook apps from the app store. Also needs to find a way of making sure the prior installed apps doesn't work. Apple needs to get serious of its privacy policy.

EsquireCats said:

On one hand we have people complaining that Apple won't let developers write their own web browser engines. Software that is extremely complex and notoriously prone to security issues.

On another we have one of the most popular chat apps, under the management of a company that has bucket loads of cash and programming talent - and it has such serious flaws that an entirely different app could be installed covertly through one of its main features.

frantisek said:

I am telling people not to use Facebook owned apps and they stare on me like a fool. Everyone use it..... Not that it is spyware by itself, but it allows other spyware in as well as we see now. That is a deal!

From the article above:

AppleInsider said:

NSO develops and markets a well-known and notoriously effective piece of spyware called Pegasus. Typically reserved for government buyers, Pegasus is often used by law enforcement agencies to gain wide access to key device functions and data stores.

Apple has in the past attempted to patch flaws in iOS and macOS leveraged by Pegasus, but NSO continues to uncover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in iOS to keep its product functional.

fasterquieter said:

I wonder why the Qualcom's single core performance is so far behind.

AppleInsider said:

Microsoft's Surface unable to say "no"

So who is troubled in PCs as the world enters 2019? Certainly Microsoft, which has proven unable to move beyond the conventional PC in either smartphones or mobile tablets or other form factors. Its PC platform shrank twice as fast as Apple's iPad grew, and its own Surface vision of hybrid computing has remained tepidly flat for a decade at a number that's only about a twelfth of the revenue Apple is generating from its range of non-phone computing hardware.

Yet the Surface lineup includes so many various experiments-- Microsoft seems almost unable to say no-- that the cost of developing and maintaining all those SKUs is significant, crushing any hope of profitability. That makes Surface a profit sink, a distraction away from things Microsoft could be doing.

Microsoft is spending tons of money to look cool but isn't creating a viabile business

That's the very types of projects that Jobs canceled when he took over Apple in 1997, yet today's pundits demand that Apple take note of the whimsical things being done under the Surface brand and follow Microsoft, rather than pursuing the strategies that Jobs used to turn Apple around. Since 2011, Tim Cook has exercised the same strategies to dramatically grow Apple's sales even as the industries around it continue to slide sideways with distractions that were a waste of resources.

macplusplus said:

KITA said:

macplusplus said:

foregoneconclusion said:

macplusplus said:  Because that "staff" know how they will be ridiculed if they put the battery benchmark in the article. The battery life is most probably two hours or so, because a gaming laptop is expected to be used mostly plugged in. That one is a laptop for teens, who want it to carry their games alongside when hanging out with friends. Teens like that brand's flashy keyboards and mice too.

Right on the money: it's specifically intended for gaming, so it isn't really a very good comparison to begin with. For example, how many people working in a typical corporate office that use PCs are going to be given a Razer Blade Stealth as their working laptop? I doubt that ever happens. They would get a PC model that was specifically intended for use as a working PC, not a gaming PC. 

The article doesn't even mention the low-res 1080p display of that mid-range model. Moving less pixels than the Retina display of MBP it can barely compete despite the boost from the discrete GeForce MX150. The Macbook Pro moves twice as much pixels as that gamers' machine:  compare 2560x1600 to 1920x1080. And it does that without the boost from a discrete GPU. 

I'm not sure what you mean by "barely compete", the graphics tests are all running at the same resolution. The native display resolution doesn't change that.

The NVIDIA GPU with CUDA is also useful for compute workloads, something none of these benchmarks highlight.

The native display resolution DOES change the performance in real world usage. Yet the MBP performs better than the Razer considering that it doesn't have the discrete GPU.  31075 OpenCL without the discrete GPU versus 47516 with GeForce MX150 means that MBP performs even better.

That must be a new trend, comparing a machine with discrete GPU to a machine without one...

And whatever benchmarks say, the inclusion of a discrete GPU affects the thermal balance and battery life, all other specs being equal. And those are not equal in that comparison, there is a huge difference in display resolutions.