[gergles]

> Even iPhone X shows they can still bet big with their flagship.

Does it? The iPhone X (which is a great phone and one that I own) is a Galaxy S8 with a Face ID scanner. They didn't "bet big" on it, it was the only logical place to take their market.

[awinder]

Also doesn't have that Bixby shovelware or exploding battery feature. I get that a lot of Samsung phones are shipped and sold, but there's a difference in shipping shit at scale and shipping quality engineering at scale, and it's a tale told in decades, not single years.

[ekianjo]

> exploding battery feature

Stop spreading misinformation. That did not occur with the S8 at all since its release. http://bgr.com/2017/06/12/galaxy-s8-battery-explosions/

[jayd16]

>there's a difference in shipping shit at scale and shipping quality engineering at scale

Ok guys, do we tell him how much Samsung hardware is in an iPhone?

[jrs95]

I generally agree that they didn't "bet big" on iPhone X, but I really hate equating it with the S8 because that was a terrible device in my opinion.

First off, just from being in my empty pocket for 2-3 days, the screen was covered in scratches that made it difficult to see a portion of the screen in direct sunlight. I've never had this experience with any other phone.

Then I dropped my S8 from less than a foot and it cracked the glass on both the front and back of the screen. I haven't dropped my iPhone X yet, but based on my experience with recent iPhones it can probably take a lot more abuse.

The S8 also had some pretty annoying design/UX flaws. The fingerprint reader placement next the camera was amazingly stupid, and everything related to Bixby has been somewhat of a disaster. I had tried to reprogram the Bixby button to do something useful, but then it was still slow and Samsung insisted on breaking that functionality repeatedly in updates. They ought to know well enough that nobody wants to use their stupid assistant. Or cover their camera with fingerprints.

[zimpenfish]

> based on my experience with recent iPhones it can probably take a lot more abuse.

I closed a taxi door on my iPhone X just before Christmas - phone fell out of my pocket, door caught it horizontally. Cracked the (thin) screen protector but no damage to the phone itself.

[simonh]

In hindsight, knowing how well Face ID works yes, but going all in on Face ID and ditching Touch ID completely early on in the design process was a real risk. I don't see how anyone can deny that.

[macintux]

They could have easily compromised their vision by including touch ID and/or a button. Samsung does this all the time: include every option, just so no one is left unhappy.

[pwinnski]

Alternatively, "include every option so everyone is left slightly unhappy."

I can't imagine ever going back to a phone with a button. Every time I pick up my daughter's iPad, I try to use gestures on it before remembering that I have to press that button, which already seems like a relic from the past.

It took minutes to get used to swiping up instead of pressing a button. It now feels like the most natural thing in the world, and I wonder why they ever started with a button. (Not really, but that's how natural the swipe gestures feel)

[pjmlp]

Software buttons are great until the OS freezes, then the only hope is that at least hard reboot works.

[simonh]

Which is why the iPhone X uses hardware buttons to do a forced reset. What has that got to do with home buttons?

[dingo_bat]

They did compromise their vision, in a way much worse than including a fingerprint sensor on the back. They put in an ugly notch.

[jrs95]

Personally I don't think it's ugly. I think having a solid bezel across the top but not the bottom would actually look worse. And it actually makes the new gestures more intuitive: swiping down from the left of the notch does the same thing that swiping down did before, and swiping down from the right of the notch opens control center.

[dingo_bat]

> I think having a solid bezel across the top but not the bottom would actually look worse.

Doesn't need to be asymmetric. Have a look at Galaxy Note8.

[macintux]

The notch creates a distinctive silhouette for iconography, it vanishes during use. It's certainly not a net loss.

[dingo_bat]

Unless having a notch was their vision (which you are implying, but I highly doubt), they compromised. And as I said, the compromise was much bigger than having a discreet sensor on the back.

That you got used to it is irrelevant. People got used to not having control on their own hardware too, doesn't mean anything.

[ltnublet]

Not who you responded to, but I think that it's clear Apple intended on using the notch as a visually distinct identifier to an onlooker, "This is the new iPhone." Multiple times since I got mine at launch, people have noticed me using it and commented/asked about it. The hardware designers at Apple are clearly smart enough to be able to work out something if they didn't want the notch, but they (and marketing) decided to use the size of the sensor package to their advantage. Without the notch, there's no easy way to distinguish at-a-glance what brand the featureless-slab-of-glass is.

Regarding the second part of your comment ("that you got used to it is irrelevant"), during normal usage the notch doesn't obstruct any content on the screen. The screen real estate was gained by the removal of the bezels on the older models, so there's been an effective increase in vertical resolution despite the notch. In 16:9 content viewed in landscape, the notch is hidden by the black of the OLED, and is not noticeable. There's nothing to get used to other than there being a black notch at the top of the screen when used in portrait mode, which is made less abrasive by apps not normally taking control of the upper-left and -right corners (and so that vertical section would be unused anyway).

[dingo_bat]

> The hardware designers at Apple are clearly smart enough to be able to work out something if they didn't want the notch

I don't think it's clear. Do you have anything to support this assumption? I haven't seen an iphone that is bezel-less without any encroaching notch. They haven't yet been able to eliminate the camera bump, either. This is basic stuff. Don't have crappy cut-out on the screen, don't have protruding camera from the back. Also, even with thew notch, the side bezels aren't nearly as thin as they are on competitor phones.

Pretty clear that they weren't able to reach a design they truly wanted.