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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

Ah, so it's actually pretty simple to avoid this vulnerability: all I need to do is upgrade to an Android phone based on one of the several competitive Snapdragon alternatives that are bound to be widely available given the staggering size of the market.

Hold on, I'm sure I'll find one any minute now...

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There was KIRIN from Huawei which was quite good before US killed it due to national security concerns.

And now US chip is genuine security concern for rest of the world.

What about samsung exynos and mediatek?

The new Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra ships with Exynos in the UK and EU but performance drops against the same phone running Snapdragon (shipped in the US).

So whilst the security might be better, we're (tech geeks in EU/UK) don't want to pay the same price for a less performant phone sadly :/

But maybe in a few iterations!

I'm wondering why do people need the "performant phone". All the Android phones that I've had or seen in the last few years run the OS and apps with no issues. The amount of RAM might limit the multi-tasking, but otherwise I can't imagine a real-life use-case where I may want a "performant phone".

Can you maybe shed some light on this for me, please?

It starts to matter a lot with things like AR, video games etc. I work on an AR mobile product and the performance advantage for iOS is substantial. Outside of flagships, the performance of AR on android is pretty bad, while as far back as iPhone 8 you’re maintaining 60fps no problems. I haven’t tested older than that but I tend to believe the oft-quoted 5 year performance lead on the A series chips.

Nobody gives a crap about phone AR. And of those who play games the vast majority play games that don't need performance.

It has nothing to do with performance in all honesty for my own use case.

It has to do with being short-handed when comparing the "same" product in the US to the one I would receive here in the UK. I rarely update my phone so if I spend £1,000+ on a flagship, I expect a flagship especially when it's available elsewhere.

As far as I can tell, in the US market they're almost entirely confined to low-end models and non-phone devices (tablets/Chromebooks/smart TVs). Importing, as a practical matter, seems to mean no support/warranty, and it looks like most models intended for other regions don't have full support for the bands used by US networks.

MTK is open by default (no bootloader lock, easy unbrickable recovery), or at least that's what it was a few years ago when I bought one. Great for the modding scene, but probably not liked by the authoritarian-paranoid.

There is no reason to believe Qualcomm is more broken than competitors wrt this class of vulns.

(read the article or the original blog, q: "The more than 400 distinct bugs")

True, but the larger point is that the monoculture arguably makes the impact of any given vulnerability worse. Similar to how any given CDN/cloud provider probably has much better uptime than old-school web hosts, but now roughly half the Internet can be broken by one provider having an outage.

Using sarcasm is against HN guidelines - covered by "Don't be snarky". Personally I enjoy being sarcastic, but I less enjoy the sarcasm of others!

Sarcasm is not against the Hacker News guidelines.

I didn't think so either, until I was corrected by the moderators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23482110

The grand-parent comment of dang's response is of very similar tone to the one above. I am just trying to follow what dang has said.

I'm pretty sure 'dang's referring to snark, which you called out in the comment he's responding to ("but being snarky is against the hn guidelines"), not sarcasm there. Though, I do think you're right that the community often reacts negatively to sarcasm. It usually doesn't add much substance to the conversation.

Often because sarcasm can be hard to detect textually.

You are right - there is some nuance between sarcasm and snarkyness. Dang alludes to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187460

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