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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

This smells like the MHz comparison of the G4 vs Pentium, when they claimed that their 500Mhz was equivalent to a 1GHz Pentium.

There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit.

Only this time they put themselves in this position. They should own it, either admit that they couldn't keep their margins otherwise or take the US$ 50 or so profit hit and avoid the bad press on an otherwise great machine.

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It actually was true in benchmarks, but Mac OS was in such a bad state at the time that it didn't really matter. It didn't even have real multitasking!

It was true for some benchmarks. I’m sure you can find cases where memory pressure is significantly less on macOS.

But it’s not the “mine is twice as good as theirs” situation they try to sell.

They also claimed that mAh in the iPhone are different than in all other phones, that's why packing shitty battery was alright.

Right. Also the same argument used with RAM in iPhones. If you’re not running Java all the time, you can save some Amps and RAM. But not that many for most cases.

Remember that time they removed the headphone jack and claimed it was better without one?

remember when that was back in 2016 and the faithful have bought airpods in the 7 years since, and realized they were right?

Did airpods only work on iphones without a jack?

Never seen this claimed, but apple absolute does trounce qualcomm and everyone else in terms of perf/w. iPhones with 3300mah batteries are getting longer sot than android flagships with 5000mah (and greater) batteries. The state of the android ecosystem is a complete joke and has been for years.

Of course they don't, it is simply not possible, outside of some awful models maybe. For instance in the current gen, iPhone 15 Pro with 3300 mAh gets 86 score at GSMArena, and S23 Ultra with 5000 mAh gets 126. A dramatic difference. S23 non-plus, which is a better opponent to 15 Pro as they are the same size, has 3900 mAh and scores 101 at that site. So all is quite proportional to the battery size. Or we can throw in for comparison newest Sony 5 5, with the same 6.1" form factor and 5000 mAh battery (shame on all other vendors, not fitting such batteries in flagship phones), it has a score of 130!

So, anyway, iPhone has a just a little bit better optimizations in some specific usage modes and that difference is mostly long gone. Today if we see 3300 battery in a phone it will definitely have a shitty autonomy.

Taking those scores on GSMArena at face value is bullshit (if anyone is wondering, that's 86h and 126h on their 'endurance rating').

The S23 Ultra only gets 126h 'endurance' because it can do 40 hours of phone calls, a lot more than the iPhone. How many phone calls do you make? It has worse battery life for things you actually do on a phone.

From their data, S23 5000mah vs iPhone 15 3300mah:

- games: 8h44m vs 8h16m

- video playback: 15h47m x 18h20m

- web browsing: 10h51m x 11h43m

Comparing against the iPhone 15 Max (still a smaller battery at 4400mah) it's a lot worse.

Max is better, but non-Max is bad. Call duration metric is actually good and useful. For example new Pixel 8 and 8 Pro have crap call score. What does it mean in real life - some people say that their pixel 8 has ok autonomy but after some investigation they admit that they use it at home/work on wifi. And then people using it on a cell network, especially in the bad reception zone, report atrocious life time, due to bad modem or something in that area. So it is important metric too.

Basically optimizations of the iphones can compensate maybe a few hundreds of mAh, but not 2000, that's not possible.

Nothing to do with margins. It’s price discrimination. Anybody who has $200 more to spare will buy the upgrade because you’d be crazy not to. People on a budget, or who don’t know any better, will get the base model.

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