Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: I see that Apple is doing great engineering, but where is this engineering better than Samsung's? Or is it not?

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This was fascinating, but I am not very knowledgable when it comes to hardware and I have a burning question.

Everybody here seems to think this was a great feat of engineering. I am looking also at the teardown of the Samsung Galaxy S8. Where is Apple doing a better work than Samsung? Is it just the fact that Apple are "doing it themselves" that is impressive? (not implying it isn't.)

The only thing I can see is that the iPhone X seems to devote much more space to battery, by cramming up all of the components tighter together. Does this mean the iPhone X will have a better battery life?

I truly have no dog in the fight, and have no interest in starting a flame war. I'm just curious.

PD: Yeah, the A* CPUs are fantastic, no doubt. But that doesn't show in this teardown.

I only had this quote to go by:

> and the OLED is well supported by a frame, unlike some displays we know.

"Some displays" linked to the S8 tear down, and "we know" to the Note 4.

I too wish they had taken a stronger tack and clearly compared against other flagships. (Including the iPhone 8 too)

Basically, this "cramming up all of the components tighter together" is worth being impressed with. We're at the point in manufacturing where every square millimetre of space saved on a logic board, or within a collection of components, is bringing us ever closer to the limit of what we are capable of producing based on our current understanding of physics.

Aside: I'm excited to see how far technology advances in my lifetime. The general consensus seems to be that we are approaching some supposed limit. I'm hoping this turns out to be wrong, and that our technology continues to experience "horse => car" types of leaps. All I've been reading is that we only have "faster horses" in our future. With any luck, this kind of narrative is short-sighted and naive, and we have some incredible technological advances to look forward to.

We're nowhere near the theoretical limit.

Biological brains are much more energy efficient (up to 100,000x depending on who you ask) than our current offerings, and beyond that one can make an entropic argument as to how much energy information processing should require, to which the answer is "not much".

What makes you believe that we are only destined for incremental improvements?

My favorite component in the Samsung Galaxy S8+ is the headphone jack. Looks like they weren't able to find one in the iPhone X during this teardown.

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