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Consider that by the time a phone arrives in your hands that the SoC has been in development for at least a year or two, and the phone has been in development f
by ndesaulniers 8y ago
Consider that by the time a phone arrives in your hands that the SoC has been in development for at least a year or two, and the phone has been in development for up to 18 months. The SoCs in all modern phones are years old, even if someone shipped one sooner than others. And there's much more to the phone than the SoC. Single threaded performance is one number that's easy to point to and say "up == good; down == bad" but it's a single number that's not the end of the conversation when it comes to the full experience of owning a modern smartphone, and doesn't matter that much to a majority of the smartphone market.
- awill 8y agoWhat I was saying was, if the SoC is 8 months old (8 months since it began selling in retail devices), then the 8 month old device will likely be on sale. Getting a device that just launched (but contains the same 8 month old SoC) likely won't be on sale. In this example, a Galaxy S9 is 8 months old. It retailed for $720 8 months ago. Now it sells for $520. The Pixel 3 (with the same SoC) sells for $800. So it's not just $80 more. It's really like $280 more.
- ndesaulniers 8y agoOEMs have different release cycles to maximize their sales; you see the same thing with blockbuster movies releases and television programming. If there's one high end CPU from your favorite CPU manufacturer that comes out each year, guess what? I guess it seems $280 more expensive for the same SoC, but consider that Pixel has plenty of custom silicon in it to justify a higher price (than simply the SoC). The camera literally relies on it.