Things like large 1” camera sensors, SiC batteries that offer 6-8k mAh, and other cool tech that would improve phones a lot. It’s not just Chinese brands either (e.g. Sony has an optical zoom camera on their flagship, Nothing has some excellent budget to midrange offerings).
It seems really weird, Apple/Samsung/Google are massive companies with so much money, yet they don’t try to offer this kind of tech on even their most expensive phones. In contrast, other phone makers have budget to midrange phones with insane battery capacities, Ultra models with innovative cameras, etc.
To me, it makes sense that Apple isn’t offering these kinds of things. They’re already extremely profitable and have the whole walled garden ecosystem that draws people in. Google focuses more on software rather than hardware, and their cameras are helped by software magic.
What surprises me is that Samsung isn’t trying to get better hardware to get more market share. If they had huge SiC batteries, large camera sensors, or other cool tech, it would definitely help sway buyers from Apple and other brands.
Especially since Samsung is struggling against both Chinese competition and, to a lesser extent, Indian competition. And in the U.S., they certainly want to steal market share from Apple.
What is with the reluctance of these massive tech companies from using the latest tech in their phones?
There was a video by PolyMatter recently on the economics of why Apple cannot yet move the bulk of iPhone manufacturing away from China (available on Nebula and on YouTube). This is perhaps the singular quote which helps answer your question, around the 02:35 mark:
Any country can assemble the iPhone. But Apple doesn’t need to make an iPhone, it needs to make 590 every minute, it needs 35,000 per hour, 849,000 per day, 5.9 million per week. That’s the challenge facing Apple.
The sheer scale of Apple’s manufacturing – setting aside Samsung’s also humongous scale – means that there might not be a supplier for that quantity of large image sensor or new-tech batteries. Now, Apple could drive that sort of market, and they probably are working on it. But as the video explains, Apple’s style is more about finding an edge which they can exclusively hone, up to and including the outright buying out of the supplier. This keeps them ahead of the competition, at least for long enough until it doesn’t matter anymore.
In some ways, this might sound like Apple has a touch of Not Invented Here Syndrome, but realistically, consumers expect that Apple is going to do something so outlandish and non-standard that to simply be jumping onto a bandwagon of “already researched” technology would be considered a failure. They are, after all, a market leader, irrespective of what one might think about the product itself.
Historical example of heavy R&D paying dividends until it stopped being relevant: Sony’s Trinitron CRT patent expired just around the time that LCDs started showing up in the consumer space. Any competitor could finally start producing CRT TVs with the same qualities as a Sony Trinitron TV, but why would they? The world had moved on, and so had Sony.
In brief, Apple probably can’t deliver to the world a new iPhone with massive image sensors right now. But that certainly doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have their camera team looking into it and working with partners to scale up the manufacturing, such as by increasing yield or being very clever, probably both. Ever since that one time an iPhone prototype was found in a Bay Area bar, their opsec for new prototypes has been top notch. So we’ll only know when we know.
Oh, that makes sense. Apple/Samsung manufactures way too many phones for the new and upcoming tech like SiC batteries and super large image sensors. Hopefully Apple (eventually) innovates again instead of adding yet another button.
Turning the question around, too, it is clear why small manufacturers MUST use all the top spec parts: they don’t have Apple or Google’s brand and ecosystem of services to fall back on. Who’s going to buy a phone from a nobody brand with no services or ecosystem that also has crappy specs? Apple and Google can get away with it, and cheaper parts are cheaper which helps their profit margins. Small brands have to try hard to wow the world and get noticed. One way to do that is to compete on specs. In my opinion it’s a crappy way. But it’s a way.
The latest tech isn’t proven to last, might be harder to integrate, might require making design choices that affect the production line, the reliability of the phone, the battery longevity, the supply chain, the operating system, etc. Using the newest tech is a surefire way to make sure you have to do a recall, if you’re the biggest companies on the planet.
Ask any apple fanboy/fanatic and they will tell you, and they will be correct: Apple rarely leads the charge. They wait and they bide their time, and they watch how a technology is applied and how it works well and how it fails, and then they engineer a solution that they believe to be a smoother user experience to everyone else, and only then do they drop a new tech.
Budget phone makers are trying to stand out and captivate a much smaller market segment, so they have to go big or go home, or else no one will care.
The big guys are so big that they can actually use the market itself as market research, and the big guys are so big they can hold out until they know they have a stable, proven solution.
that would be more believable if they didn’t release the apple vision pro.
Or the years they took biding their time before they finally implemented battery charge time estimation on ios.
Or the time biding their time refining, erm, copy and paste?
Come on!
Why does every rebuttal have to strawman me saying “Apple is perfect and get it right every time”?
I’m offering nothing more than an explanation of how they try to operate. I’m not defending them, or saying they never miss.
Copy paste has been available since iOS 3.0, launching alongside the iPhone 3GS.
I don’t know what you’re trying to say with the other two statements
three, point, oh
for copy and paste.
Not one, but three point oh!
Same for Windows Phone 7 when it launched. No copy and paste there either.
so?
Love that the downvote and blunt reply suggests you think I’m not agreeing with you.
It was another example of a massive computer company surprisingly being unable to include a bread-and-butter feature at the launch of their new mobile computing devices.
the downvote wasn’t from me
:cough: AI :cough:
Yeah Apple really dropped the ball in AI. I heard an interesting take that it’s because Apple collected way less used info o er time compared to like Google (which has all the writings of man both pre and post internet, every video ever uploaded, the habits of every human user, and most of the messaging/calendars/contacts for a significant portion of the planet) va Apple who has like, App Store usage for iPhone users, photo libraries since 2009-ish, that kinda thing.
It just wasn’t enough to paint a holistic picture to train a useful model on, and this is why Apple Intelligence was a bigger flop than the Vision Pro.
