https://9to5google.com/2018/06/27/google-pixel-3-xl-leak-render-notch-camera-speaker/
Looks nice but despite the shit Samsung catches for bloat and TouchWiz, in general, I'd miss Pay too much.
We'll wait for more details and maybe some hardware specs can sway me but until NFC payment picks up more than it has already in the US, it's hard to ditch Samsung Pay.
But as usual a direct pipeline from Google for updates has always been a plus.
I'm not a fan of those designs. I still can't treat phones with a notch seriously. I much prefer Samsung's solution of just making the bezels as small as possible without cutting a part of the display out. Even better would be if the screen was flat. And to think that even the rounded corners used to bother me..
But now we actually have phones that are technologically better. At this point, we are getting much more innovation from the Chinese makers. I'm not kidding. This is the newest Vivo phone:
https://www.gsmarena.com/vivo_nex_s-9227.php
And this is the newest Oppo phone:
https://www.gsmarena.com/oppo_find_x-7885.php
They are now ahead of the big makers in terms of hardware. They managed to implement in-screen fingerprint sensors that apparently work great, embedded the other sensors under the screen and they have pop-out front facing cameras. They also squeezed in larger batteries and exclusively top-tier components. Google is way behind in terms of hardware design, and having HTC engineers isn't helping, as they've been struggling with the exact same thing for many years now. Slapping its own software to help that and a ridiculous price tag to go with it doesn't count as making good phones in my book.
Heck, even Samsung isn't up there with what Oppo and Vivo did, as Samsung have been trying to do the same thing for years, but couldn't deliver. I assume they will have to catch up with the S10, but the fact that this is happening is a sign of the times . The only thing the Chinese makers are missing now is some polish in terms of software and aesthetics, but they overtook the giants in terms of pure tech, which really had it coming.
So about a week of using Oreo and I haven’t seen any bugs. It’s like Sprint and Google really took their time with this. Of course, it’s nearly a year late now so they had plenty of time.
But I’m happy with it. I had no hype for Oreo but after upgrading to it and not seeing anything ruined, it’s nice to see.
My girlfriend's had Oreo on her S7 for a while now. She couldn't tell a difference except for the changes to the notification area and fonts. Basically, everything she found to be different was attributed to the new Samsung UI version, not Android.
The battery life and performance are about the same, and most actual features that Oreo brought have always been there on Samsung phones already.
Well, when a new chip has been released, it usually has been in development for years prior, right? So we won't see the good or bad his plans bring about until a few generations from now, if that's true.
I guess he can alter the bullying Intel did to AMD and just not do it and try and make something truly competitive, but that still wouldn't be seen until a few years from now.
A design from scratch takes several years. If you're making modifications or planning SKUs (which goes as far as core counts, clock speeds, amounts of threads, even cache to some extent, not to mention the whole marketing thing and pricing) can still be completely changed mere months before the product would hit the shelves. For instance, the changes that Intel made between Skylake and Coffee Lake could be accomplished within weeks of engineering work and a couple of trial manufacturing runs. It's the exact same architecture with an upgraded interconnect to facilitate 2 extra cores, plus some minor tweaks to the chip's behavior. Any performance increase is purely due to higher clock speeds which could be achieved due to updated manufacturing (14nm+++, as Intel calls it).
Considering Coffee Lake came out just months after Ryzen and was a direct response to it, I bet those changes were actually accomplished within weeks of engineering work, plus prolonged QA to make sure they are market ready. The engineering samples started leaking a month or two prior to the release and they were still different chips at that point, running on the Skylake platform. If Intel decides to release a mainstream 8-core processor now, they can do that anytime with the existing tech, and I'm sure they have the chips ready. It's just a business decision for them, and they will have to do it to compete with the latest mainstream Ryzen, which is faster than what Intel offers in the mainstream.
We know that Intel is working on a new CPU architecture, which they will likely finish in a few years, and it might be quite great, as Jim Keller was poached to work on it (he designed some of the greatest AMD chips, including Ryzen, and his work is the heart of Apple's ARM CPUs). But the architecture is just one half of the story. The second half is what products it will be powering, and that's as much of a business decision as it is a tech decision.
After seeing how Windows performs with Snapdragon 835, I have some doubts about ARM on laptops/desktops. Even more so since the hyped "Windows" Snapdragon 1000 was announced to be as power hungry as Intel's ULV i5s. The combined performance hit of having to emulate to run the software and being a more barebones architecture without advanced instruction sets ends up taking 9 seconds to launch chrome on the fastest device so far, and provides about the same battery life as Intel's finest (and several times faster). Apple's chips surely perform better than Qualcomm's, but that still doesn't solve the fundamental issue and still would offer sub-par performance. I'm sure Apple have been working on potential solutions for a long time, and we don't have ARM Macbooks because it's not easy to find good solutions.
Probably the best one they figured out so far is making an ARM version of MacOS with basic programs running natively, and third-party programs being emulated, but the performance hit to those emulated programs would be way too severe to pack it into a 1000$ device, which is why there are still no ARM Macs.
