imergingenious

While I don't disagree that raw performance in most real world use is now probably close to a wash between these two flagships, I find it interesting that an Apple centric site would come to this conclusion given the raw data (iPhone winning nearly every test, and still dominating in several). The thing that I believe this study misses when comparing graphics is the efficiency/throttling performance under sustained load. Apple's devices have been able to sustain close to peak performance without thermal throttling while competitors have not. This difference doesn't show itself in standard gfx benchmarks that usually don't run long enough to overheat the system. Also, the graphics tests are off-screen measurements of raw computing power, which means when you try to run a game on-screen, the higher resolution on the Galaxy screen will result in even lower frame rate despite not providing much of a perceivable sharpness benefit.

michael scrip said:

pjs_socal said:

The Verge... literally gave the Apple Watch 3 a rating of 5 out of 10 while In the same week, they gave the Fitbit Iconic a rating of 7.  WTF?

The Verge tested the Apple Watch LTE... and the LTE part didn't work very well.

That's... like... the most important part of the Apple Watch LTE.   

Apple admitted the problem and has provided a fix... but it appears that The Verge doesn't ever update scores after an initial review.

Maybe they should  take into account a company‘s reputation when doing product reviews.  Apple has a reputation for providing ongoing service to their products for many years, including regular software updates that fix bugs and even add new features. My original AppleWatch just received a new OS after being sold to me years ago... does Fitbit do the same?

Blunt said:

Who cares about The Verge? They have no impact on the average buyer. These tech sites are so overrated. They need Google and Samsung spends millions of dollars advertising on these sites.
Back in the day you had the MacWorld magazine. Sometimes an add for lets say a scanner had four pages and in the same magazine that scanner got a real bad review! Those days are gone. Now we have tech sites that suck.

While I’ve generally lost faith in the Verge, I think they have an audience of millions. They definitely have a lot of influence and advertising dollars are being spent on editorial influence for a reason. I still frequent their site and listen to the podcast even though I see so many logical inconsistencies in their writing. 

unphocus said:

sector7g said:

Just like digital stabilization is worse than optical. The artificial blur will never be as good as real optical focus.

Optical and digital stabilization has their own advantages over the other. I wouldn’t say that one is better than the other. 

Here are are some advantages of digital stabilization:
1. I can use decades old manual lenses
2. In DSLR cases, I only have to pay for stabilization once—in the camera—not in every lens I buy
3. Makes my overall gear lighter
4. Six axis stabilization while optical has three

I don’t need to point out the advantages of optical since you already know that. Cheers! 😊

I think you’re mistaking digital with in-body sensor stabilization.  On some digital cameras, the sensor is gimballed to provide stabilization with any old lens. This is different than digital stabilization, which takes a fixed sensor and lens and just crops and stretches the resulting image in such a way to stabilize the subject. The cropping and stretching causes a drop in resolution and sometimes odd distortions in the background.

VP9 is fraught with patent liability as Google took a lot of the inventions in the MPEG standards and reverse engineered them up into a new codec and is giving it away for free. By having zero licensing fees due to this largely stolen open standard, and constant violations of copyright in their content library, this is how YouTube (and Google in general) makes a profitable business. Costs are so low because they copy IP/ software innovations and make them free to the end user (then monetize through ads). This is not news, folks. 4k/HDR on Youtube is a bit silly, though, since the quality of the content is generally garbage as well.