[1-6]

Samsung has a dishonorable marketing department. 3nm is not actually 3nm. I'm fed up... OLED is superior so they had to take the path of calling theirs QLED which is actually just an LCD screen with phosphors on top of a blue backlight (and it's nothing new).

[rendall]

Their high-end phones have such dark patterns that I will flat-out not buy Samsung anything.

Even if you pay [€$]1000+ for one of their Smart Phones, you can look forward to:

* Uninstallable cruft, as if they were a telcom and you were on a contract and had not just handed over a grand

* ...like a confusingly-similar-looking competitor to Google Contacts that will upload your info to their servers

* GDPR? LOL

* A hard button on the side of your phone located just below the "volume down" button, easy to press accidentally, that is hard-coded and unconfigurable, that will launch their AI assistant Bixby. Don't want to use Bixby? Tough shit. Nothing you can do about it.

* Constant badgering by the phone's native notification to sign up for "Samsung Members", a social media platform. No, you can't turn that off.

* Other, similar bullshit.

3nm? These are such sketchy practices I cannot imagine it won't affect, say, their high-end TVs (they would totally monitor your house and show you advertisements).

Seriously, avoid that company. No, paying for their high-end options will not insulate you from their nonsense.

[solarkraft]

In a world of garbage electronics they’re actually a name I trust on some level. They build pretty decent stuf- with stupid caveats.

My Galaxy Buds Plus are pretty good and have unparalleled battery life - but you can’t use the companion app on Android because it won’t work unless you give it access to your contacts.

My Samsung TV is quite snappy and, besides my model being a special edition that doesn’t come with Bluetooth and them not specifying it anywhere, it’s actually pretty alright. Cold-boots quickly, has a snappy UI, theoretically comes with all the smart features you want ... but it’s full of ads the moment you enable internet access, plus you know the spying allegations. I guess I’ll still have to figure out proper firewall rules.

I’m going to guess that their other appliances are similar. Pretty good hardware, pretty good software underpinnings, just severely held back by some anti-consumer software decisions.

[orangepanda]

> * Constant badgering by the phone's native notification to sign up for "Samsung Members", a social media platform. No, you can't turn that off.

Apple does something similar. Every now and then I get a notification about "try tv+/arcade/music for x months".

Or few years back when wallet was launched, daily notifications to add my card.. in a country that doesnt support apple wallet.

[Lio]

Try saying no to the new iCloud terms and conditions.

The options are “I agree to everything” or “Keep bugging me until I agree to everything”.

[nicoburns]

You can at least turn off iCloud entirely on Apple devices. I have never enabled iCloud and I only get these screens when I update the OS to a new version.

[zibzab]

> turn off iCloud entirely

Then what's the point of using an iPhone?

[morsch]

A hard button on the side of your phone located just below the "volume down" button, ... Don't want to use Bixby? Tough shit. Nothing you can do about it.

That button is actually my favorite feature of the phone and it'll be very hard to give up. Obviously I'm not using it for Bixby. I have it mapped to play/pause on long press, toggle flashlight on double press and as a secondary unlock/lock button on simple press.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jamworks.b...

Works fine on my S10, ymmv.

Edit: And yes, the pre-installed crap is super annoying. You can remove some, but not all of it via adb, it's a hassle. Samsung is hardly the only offender in this regard, though they may be among the worst (aside from Google and Apple which get a free pass).

[formerly_proven]

I feel like this somewhat misses how conglomerates, especially the Japanese and Korean kind work. They're basically a bunch of hardly related corporations in a trench coat. Though you are probably right as far as TVs go, these likely come from closely related units.

[benatkin]

Google uploads to their servers. They aren't anointed.

You can turn off sync. Same as Google.

Samsung software isn't worse than Apple or Google IMO.

[spfzero]

Sure, you have a right to your opinion. IMO Samsung software is far worse than Apple's. Many reasons why, but for one, with an older Apple phone you will still get very timely upgrades to their latest software for many more years than you would with a Samsung phone.

[MikusR]

You don't need full system updates on android to update browser and other apps.

[short12]

It is far worse than the Google and apple experience. They routinely make inferior versions of an app that would be redicously easy to clone. They need to realize they are a hardware company, not a software company

And that goes for all of their product lines across the board. It's all garbage software. Its a shame they intentionally cripple excellent hardware with crap

Until they stop that practice they are not even a potential option for me. I don't get why they can't save the money and just make a good pure Android experience

[benatkin]

Nope, I use Camera, Notes, and Gallery every day and prefer them to the Google ones. Those aren't simple apps.

[MikusR]

Google Contacts is a confusingly-similar-looking competitor to Samsung contacts.

[rendall]

I can take Google Contacts off my phone, while I cannot remove Samsung Contacts

[Zardoz84]

Also, add that you can't believe in any promise about updates of his phones. I did one time, when they launched his phones with Bada OS. Never again.

[MikusR]

The only thing common between Samsung that makes phones and Samsung that fabs chips is name.

[wyattpeak]

> 3nm is not actually 3nm

It's a stretch to blame that on Samsung, processor generations described in nanometres haven't been based on actual component size for years now, by any manufacturer.

[KronisLV]

I feel that if numbers were all wrong in, say, the automotive or aerospace industries, there'd be more of an upheaval about it.

Then again, the nanometer sizes aren't always completely indicative of performance and aren't necessary to be used in any capacity when actually using a computing device, so maybe it's not as bad.

Dishonest marketing, though? Most certainly.

[rurounijones]

GamersNexus on Youtube have a great video detailing all the issues with processor naming with regards to sizing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxKGFxmwcDo

[p1necone]

I agree calling their display tech QLED is pretty shady, and clearly just intended to confuse people. But I'm glad their high end display tech is not OLED yet, because nobody seems to have solved burn in satisfactorily yet (if you play a lot of games or use them with a PC).

[dota_fanatic]

I've been using an LG OLED for 5 years with an HTPC. Lots of gameplay and leaving it on all day with eg a web browser open. I haven't experienced any burn in.

[ndiddy]

Would you mind taking a photo of your TV showing a 50% gray screen?

[dota_fanatic]

https://imgur.com/a/mMuy5fj

Poor lighting in this room, taken w/ an iPhone 12 Mini. Just grabbed the first result of "50% gray screen" from youtube.

I can see some vertical stripes if I look closely, but that seems to be general aging and not burn in. At least I can't think of any images that could have burned in that pattern with what I've used the screen for. Tbh this picture makes it look worse than it appears but you'll just have to take my word on that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This TV has gotten a lot of (ab)use, much more than a typical home I would think.

I'm glad you suggested this test because now I have some fuel for upgrading in 2022. ;) I wouldn't say the aging I can see from this test is noticeable in most cases, but it's a tool I'll use in the future to see how the striping worsens.

[pcurve]

oh god, I shudder at the thought of trying this test on my old screen because I know what the result is going to be like.

[tbonebrad]

My 3 year old 65” LG OLED is having the red pixels burn out already and it looks horrible. My 85” Samsung looks just as good to me (even better some times because it gets brighter).

[dota_fanatic]

That really sucks, especially given how expensive these things are. Mine is a 55" fwiw. :/

I went ahead and ran a pixel test and they're all working fine still. Maybe LG has been cutting costs as their OLED lines have matured? Or it could be bad luck of the draw.

[thetinguy]

There’s an lg oled soon to be released that “solves” the problem by basically underscanning and using the unlit pixels at the edges to allow for much more significant pixel shifts. It’s this one, but I can’t find the review. https://www.dpreview.com/news/0394947539/lg-new-32-4k-ultraf...

[MikusR]

Oled tvs have had Screen Shift for years.

[thetinguy]

Yes but oled TVs don’t have the same spare pixels as the monitor.

[hajile]

I'm really starting to believe that mini-LED displays are generally better for long-term use.

[marcodiego]

What is the best metric nowadays? Dhrystones/MIPS/FLOPS per MHz/Watt per square inch? As a complete outsider, millions of transistors per square inch sounds like a very intuitive metric of how small things are.

[p1necone]

Performance per watt is a pretty decent measure (and I would argue really the only measure that matters - assuming it's possible to get it "fast enough", and with the exception of IoT type stuff where you probably only care about getting power consumption as low as possible because pretty much any amount of processing power is enough).

You still need to somewhat segment into low/medium/high power chips when comparing them though as it's generally not possible to just take a very high perf/watt low power part and scale up the same design with the same level of efficiency.

[skissane]

If we are just looking at the fabrication process, as opposed to CPU architecture, MTr/mm² – million transistors per a square millimetre. But transistor density can be variable depending on the type of circuit, so the standard calculation uses a weighted average of two different cell types – NAND2 and SFF (scan flip-flop)

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mtr-mm%C2%B2

[perl4ever]

A while ago, I just tried taking any figure I could find for transistors per area, for various processes/chips, ignoring all the nuances, and taking the square root to get the implied linear density, and if I recall correctly, it was pretty consistently 1/10th of the usually quoted figure.

Whatever the ratio was, it seemed to be roughly consistent going back like 30 years, which surprised me.

So now I don't believe there actually has been a drift towards marketing and inaccuracy. And believe the details of what kind of cells is just excessive precision.

[monocasa]

If you were comparing it to the Nnm figures, that actually checks out and is higher than I thought it would be. Nnm has been "feature size" not transistor size for eons now. It's the size of the smallest single shape the process node can do. So, like the width of a corner of a fin on a finfet.

[rrss]

https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-better-way-to-measure-progress-i...

[vondur]

I prefer bogomips.

[worrycue]

> 3nm is not actually 3nm

To be fair, I read the Xnm labelling is pretty much pure marketing at this point - since 45nm; https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Meaning_lost

[cycomanic]

I'm a photonics/optics and I find the Xnm figure really fascinating. It is based on a real metric which is the smallest feature size they can make (roughly the resolution of the lithography process). It is absolutely amazing that we have been able to scale things down to image at that level.

[Hypx_]

Note that with the rise of finFETs we can pull some of those numbers into the 3rd dimension. The effective gate length is higher than the amount of length it takes on the flat plane of the chip.

https://semiengineering.com/moving-to-gaa-fets/

[MikusR]

And cpus are just sand

[imtringued]

3nm means the process is equivalent in density and performance to a 3nm planar transistor that Samsung designed. I don't see how that is dishonorable marketing because every company designed their own reference planar transistors.

[lend000]

I thought the Q stood for quantum dot, which they actually use? (Not that that makes them unique nowadays).

[p1necone]

Yeah but do you really think they didn't choose that acronym, with that upper case Q with no intention to make people think they were OLEDs/similar to OLEDS.

QLED

OLED

[refulgentis]

Yes. Occam's Razor would demand it

[PetahNZ]

So it should be QLCD

[refulgentis]

No, that would be Quantum Liquid Crystal Display instead of Quantum (Dot) Light Emitting Didode

[MobiusHorizons]

Quantum (dot) Liquid Crystal Display is an accurate description of the display technology, unless you think LED backlight is more important than the LCD tech that drives the pixels.

[cgriswald]

As much as I'd like everyone to be more honest in their marketing, I think it's a bridge too far to blame Samsung for how televisions have been marketed by all manufacturers and retailers alike for nearly two decades.

[refulgentis]

I do. Hence the importance of OLED.

[benatkin]

> I'm fed up

Cool. I'm excited to get another Samsung phone. Suit yourself.

[philg_jr]

I might be excited about a Samsung phone if it didn’t have a lame version of Android on it.

[benatkin]

The Samsung apps and interface are fine. Google apps cause me the most frustration - particularly Google Maps. I don't use the OK Google feature, so am fine that Bixby is occasionally getting in my way rather than OK Google.