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The fastest smartphone CPU was last year's chip from Apple. The old Apple chip just got beaten by the new Apple chip which is 40% faster than second place--whic

The fastest smartphone CPU was last year's chip from Apple. The old Apple chip just got beaten by the new Apple chip which is 40% faster than second place--which is still the old Apple chip. Even if the camera stuff wasn't better in any proprietary way (it is), it still operates on the best chipset in the world by a huge margin. So I guess if you're looking for a marketing gimmick in all this, you might say Apple's engineering dominance is a pretty good marketing gimmick. I mean, I can't really think of a better 'marketing gimmick' than designing better core technology, patenting it, and using it as a platform for launching other new tech that also contains better core technology. I'm even hesitant to call it a gimmick. It's more like... the actual way capitalism is designed to work.

emilsedgh 10y ago
Is the CPU speed the most important and only factor? How does iphone compare to other phones in a bigger picture?
- tommymachine 10y ago
  Chip performance is the bottleneck everything on a phone has to run through. It can give a proprietary boost to a brand if they put out better performing chipsets. Is it the only thing in a phone that matters? God no! But a better chipset allows the peripheral tech (touchscreens, cameras, etc) to do more sophisticated stuff more easily. So chipset performance affects the big picture more than any other component. It's hard to zoom out and compare peripherals and overall design without getting into personal taste and preference. To measure personal taste empirically, you could look at profits. Higher profit means people aren't buying on price but on perceived value and personal preference. iPhone is a huge winner here. Apple actually books a majority of the smartphone industry profits every quarter -- more profit than every other company combined (in 2015 it was 91%). It's hard to charge high margins when you don't have some proprietary unfair advantage like faster CPUs. Samsung et. al sell more phones and have more revenue, but they make a fraction of the money because their value prop competes on price. In fact, Samsung is the only other company that made a profit selling smartphones in 2015, everyone else lost money or broke even. CPU performance is a huge part of that story. Samsung has the second fastest CPUs. That's a difference between first place and second place of almost 100 billion dollars. Third place is you're fired.

emilsedgh 10y ago

Is the CPU speed the most important and only factor? How does iphone compare to other phones in a bigger picture?

tommymachine 10y ago
Chip performance is the bottleneck everything on a phone has to run through. It can give a proprietary boost to a brand if they put out better performing chipsets. Is it the only thing in a phone that matters? God no! But a better chipset allows the peripheral tech (touchscreens, cameras, etc) to do more sophisticated stuff more easily. So chipset performance affects the big picture more than any other component. It's hard to zoom out and compare peripherals and overall design without getting into personal taste and preference. To measure personal taste empirically, you could look at profits. Higher profit means people aren't buying on price but on perceived value and personal preference. iPhone is a huge winner here. Apple actually books a majority of the smartphone industry profits every quarter -- more profit than every other company combined (in 2015 it was 91%). It's hard to charge high margins when you don't have some proprietary unfair advantage like faster CPUs. Samsung et. al sell more phones and have more revenue, but they make a fraction of the money because their value prop competes on price. In fact, Samsung is the only other company that made a profit selling smartphones in 2015, everyone else lost money or broke even. CPU performance is a huge part of that story. Samsung has the second fastest CPUs. That's a difference between first place and second place of almost 100 billion dollars. Third place is you're fired.