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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>Apple has had better mobile hardware for years

Are you joking? Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now. From batteries to cameras and screens, apple is way behind on hardware tech. Yeah they are better than Samsung - but Samsung has also massively fallen behind what's the state of the art.

>>is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.

Last time I checked, it's apple paying Google, billions of dollars a year? And it will be even more now that Apple announced they are going to use Gemini as their AI base model.

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> Last time I checked, it's apple paying Google, billions of dollars a year?

You checked wrong. Google pays Apple on the order of $20 billion to be the default search on iOS - this is so significant it accounts for ~5% of Apple's annual revenue

  > Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now.

If any of these manufacturers decide to include an EMR pen in the body of the phone, like Samsung's S-Pen, they'll have me as a customer. The S-Pen so completely changes the experience that I am unwilling to go back.

Shame Samsung decided to nerf the pen by removing bluetooth, I was one of those users who used it all the time to take photos with, now that they removed that function in the S25 Ultra I traded in my S24U and bought an Oppo instead. And I'm very glad that I did, it's a superior phone in many aspects.

I didn't know that. I'm on the S24U right now.

What did the Bluetooth provide? I use third party EMR pens when at my desk, I've not noticed any missing features.

You could use the button on the pen and use gestures with it at a distance. So for example I would put the phone somewhere, take the pen with me and use the button as camera trigger. Now they removed bluetooth from the pen so it only acts as a pen - while the button on it still works, it only works when the tip is touching the screen.

I see, thank you.

> Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now.

This is true, but their phones don't ship with Google services out of box (at least the last time I checked). So in reality, "Google's Android" is really mostly Samsungs and Pixels.

>>This is true, but their phones don't ship with Google services out of box (at least the last time I checked)

I have an Oppo Find X9, purchased directly from them in the UK, and it came with all google services the same as my previous samsung.

They do when purchased outside China (largely EU, UK, also Singapore and others)

They don't in the EU. Not in Slovenia, so not the entire EU. I've seen it first hand. It's also not some special law that we'd have invented here so I'm pretty sure there are other EU countries where it's the same.

>>They don't in the EU. Not in Slovenia, so not the entire EU.

In Poland you can buy Vivo phones with google services out of the box just fine.

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