[anonymouse008]

Hearing this and Steve Jobs’ critique of Microsoft, “they have no taste” is stunning.

Taking the iPhone as the mass consumer computer, must mean that as a computing device the iPhone has very little taste…

Which in a sense I can definitely see…

[jiggawatts]

iPhones are definitely aimed at the more discerning, up-market customer. Android meanwhile is for the mass-market.

iPhones have four levels of encryption designed to thwart the likes of the FBI trying to get data out of your confiscated phones. Androids have a checkbox tick that basically says "Encryption: Yes".

iPhones have 1000-nit OLED HDR screens that are colour-managed and calibrated out of the box, and have Dolby Vision HDR system-wide.

Etc, etc...

iPhones are for people that actually care about their privacy, aren't blind, and appreciate the "small touches". Androids are for people that don't mind factory-installed crapware, as long as it's cheap.

[jjeaff]

You aren't really comparing apples to apples here. Android is an open source operating system used by dozens of different hardware vendors. Crapware is only installed by some vendors. And iphone rarely has the best displays. They usually trade places with a few other Android vendors for best camera. As for security, iphone usually is the best. But it varies with different Android vendors in how well or how poorly they implement security.

[jiggawatts]

The iPhone 13 literally has the best display currently available, and more importantly, it's colour managed correctly. It is manufactured by Samsung, and they use the same panel in their own flagship phone, but they don't colour-manage as well or as consistently, making the iPhone the overall winner in my book. Other Android manufacturers have markedly worse displays in every metric.

The fact that you don't appreciate this just reinforces my point: you don't happen to have "taste" in phone screens. That's okay! I have bad taste in cars, wine, sport, and a bunch of other stuff.

[sudosysgen]

Actually, it just doesn't. Firstly Apple doesn't just use Samsung, they also use BOE and LG panels, so they'd have to be calibrated to the lesser of either.

Unless there is massive unit variance, which is even worse.

So much for taste :)

[kcb]

My android phone has a folding screen that allows it to double as a tablet. Checkmate.

[jazzyjackson]

wtf is dolby-vision HDR? Sounds like cheap marketing crap like “Extra Bass Boost”

I rock an iphone because the SE is cheap and the camera is good, if I cared about privacy I wouldn’t have a phone with always on microphones and cameras…

NSO group’s Pegasus was cross-platform, so as far as I’m concerned the security point is moot, people buy iphones and androids for various reasons, and it’s easier to judge someone’s “upmarketness” by the stickerprice of their flagship, not the OS it runs…

[jiggawatts]

HDR10 is the crap Samsung invented, which just extends 8-bit colour to 10-bit colour (from 256 shades of intensity to 1024). This is not enough to display smooth gradients when going from the blackest blacks to the brightest whites that a high-dynamic range (HDR) screen is capable of. Hence, it causes visible banding, especially in "blue skies" or similar smooth areas of slowly changing colour.

Samsung worked around this by applying a post-processing filter that smooths out the banding... sometimes. It also almost always smooths away fine detail, ruining the 4K details. (Similarly, their 8K screens appear less detailed than some 4K screens for other but equally silly reasons.)

Dolby Vision uses a more optimal allocation of signal "bits" to the spectrum of colours and intensities visible to the human eye. The ideal is that each colour and each shade would be perfectly evenly distributed, so that "512" would be exactly half as perceptually bright as "1024", etc... The Dolby Vision encoding does this very nearly perfectly, eliminating visible banding without having to hide them by smudging the decoded picture. This optimal colour-volume encoding also means that transforms like scaling or brightness changes don't introduce colour-shifts or relative brightness shifts.

If you've never seen a DV video taken with an iPhone Pro 13 displayed on its OLED, you just don't know what you're missing. Go to an Apple store and play with one for a few minutes.

But seriously, companies like Samsung like to shave 50 cents off their flagship products by not paying DV their licensing fees. They figure that cutting corners like this doesn't matter, because most customers have no taste in image quality anyway, and just want BRIGHTER! COLORS! and nothing else.

They're right.

You don't care, and you're happy to save 50c on a $10K television or a $1K mobile phone.

[fomine3]

Don't group $50 device and $2000 device as "Android".

[jiggawatts]

You can buy a $2000 Android loaded with crapware.

[AnyTimeTraveler]

You can also buy a $50 Android without.

What's your point?