Do you have an example of a device priced at $300 with competitive hardware to the base iPhone 14, without bloatware subsidizing the cost of the device? I’d accept that generally iPhones are ~$100-200 above the price of devices with competitive hardware, but a current gen iPhone having $300 hardware? The specs are very similar to other devices in similar price ranges
Not to mention that iPhones are literally best in the world in terms of the SOC. No other phone in the world matches them. Saying “their hardware is on average 1-2 generations behind other devices on the market” shows how wrong that person is.
Yeah tbh I started to write a comparison of phones like the fairphone and the purism librem 5, and even the pixel 7, but they are laughable in comparison to just the base iPhone 14 hardware wise. Sure, one is $150 less, but the Librem is like 1300 dollars by comparison to the iPhone 14’s $800, and they are performing at maybe 1/3 of the A15 Bionic SOC. The pixel 7 doesn’t fair much better by price comparison, and again, it’s making google money by selling user telemetry more actively.
I encourage competition, I don’t think apple should own the market forever. And they haven’t. They almost failed before the first iPod and iPhone. But they’ve come back in terms of their ability to produce powerful silicon. The M series of processors solidifies it.
Competition is good, and when a company is pushing the market and also pushing a real security agenda? It’s a good thing, let the competitors catch up with security, and then work to beat apple at the SOC game.
Apple has been dethroned at silicon before, once PowerPC died, it can (and probably will) happen again.
That’s a good thing.
Let competitors build better E2E encryption and on-device security. The competition of better security is good for everyone.
I would love to see apple be de-throned, but I think until there is a shift on a combined focus of hardware/software/security as a product (and having users pay the premium for that) it won’t happen for awhile
