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The 2020 iPhone SE

daringfireball.net

31–40 of 317 posts

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#31

Those benchmarks are impressive. iPhone SE beating the 2019 MBP in single core performance? That's fantastic! I wish I could comment on or know what he was talking about with the iPhone X vs "old iPhone" interaction paradigm. I personally thought the "single button" hardware interface was an incredible innovation that changed everything. Even Android relies on it. My Galaxy S9+ has a "software home button" (like most…

Something has got to be screwy. The iPhone has a TDP of 6W and a clock speed of 2.5GHz. The MBP has boost clocks of 5GHz and a 45W TDP.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#32
post #10

> a $400 iPhone SE bests a > $3,000 top-of-the-line > MacBook Pro in single-core > CPU performance. Whenever I see these sorts of benchmarks, it just makes me focus on how much iOS is the limiting factor of these devices.

When I see those benchmarks I wonder what they are actually measuring because it's very likely not general purpose compute.

Geekbench is a fairly understood metric isn’t it?

It at least attempts to simulate ‘general’ workloads.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#33
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: iPhone's buttons are not mechanical buttons starting with iPhone 7. The click you feel when you press it is just the taptic engine. If you have an iPhone 7 or 8, try turning it off and try to press the button.

You can also adjust the "clickiness" of the button from your phone settings, which is amazing.

Took me a while to realize this also applies to the magic trackpad and integrated trackpad on macbooks, but it is nice to be able to customize it. The trackpads even have two clicks the second being a "deep" click which requires even more pressure than a regular click.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#34
post #13

I don't really see his attempts to use the new gestures on the old-design iPhone as proof that the new UI is better. People still tell me to "tape" long after it was obvious that DVRs are better. It's simply muscle memory. Still not sure that this my next phone though, probably going to stick with the old school SE. I had asked work for an upgrade, got the giant XR, and after five days put it right back in the box an…

> "It's cool that Apple made a cheap phone"

It's only cheap relative to Apples other phones, it's still outside of the range I'd consider reasonable. Although it seems the reason most people spend so much on phones is to get better cameras? Which I'm not particularly bothered about - maybe it's worth it for that.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#35

> So, yes, a $400 iPhone SE bests a $3,000 top-of-the-line MacBook Pro in single-core CPU performance. This is baffling.

Beating the laptop is impressive, but the top of the line part was unnecessary and counter productive. More expensive CPUs often have more cores running at a slower speed. For example, the bottom end 16" MacBook Pro comes with a 2.6 GHz CPU and the top end one comes with a 2.4 GHz CPU. Yes, there is Turbo Boost which can in some cases turn off cores in exchange for higher clock frequencies, but good luck getting much out of that given Apple's thermal design.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#36
post #18

> Once you get used to the post-iPhone-X interaction model, there’s no going back. A week with the new SE has not shaken my belief that the X-style interaction design is superior. Not one iota. I have an iPhone 8 (TouchID) and an iPad Pro (FaceID) and personally the multi-tasking gestures are ridiculously inferior to the home button. FaceID is nice (ApplePay, unlocking, etc) but switching to another app (multi-taskin…

I don’t find getting into the multitasking switcher meaningfully harder on the newer devices— it’s just a swipe-up-and-hold gesture, which I’ll occasionally time wrong and end up at the home screen, but not often enough to be “painful” (and it’s just another swipe away if I do mess up).

What is vastly better on the X-series devices, though, is switching between your two or three most recent apps. Just swipe left and right at the bottom of the screen (on the bar)— this lets you flip between apps in the order that they’re in the switcher. This means I very rarely actually enter the full multitasking switcher in normal use.

(The other, minor benefit of the new-style gestures is that they’re all cancellable and map directly to finger movement, but that’s more of a “feel” thing than a major usability win. Makes it feel Apple-y, though.)

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#37

> So, yes, a $400 iPhone SE bests a $3,000 top-of-the-line MacBook Pro in single-core CPU performance. This is baffling.

Why? Taking it at face value, I assume that they sell more phones than laptops, and can put more resources into the phone.

I mean, maybe you're suggesting they should just use the phone CPU for a laptop, but I guess it's not suitable?

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#38

I'm not sure why DaringFireball is still relevant in 2020.

What exactly about $current_year stops an Apple-related blog being relevant when Apple still exists, makes products worthy of scrutiny, and is one of the biggest companies in the world?

I fail to see what it is about $current_year that makes careful, cogent, and balanced discourse about Apple irrelevant.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#39
post #13

I don't really see his attempts to use the new gestures on the old-design iPhone as proof that the new UI is better. People still tell me to "tape" long after it was obvious that DVRs are better. It's simply muscle memory. Still not sure that this my next phone though, probably going to stick with the old school SE. I had asked work for an upgrade, got the giant XR, and after five days put it right back in the box an…

Not likely to be cheap, but the rumor for this fall's iPhone update is 4 phones, the "standard" model coming in small and medium, and the "pro" model in medium and large. Unfortunately what passes for the small size isn't as small as I'd like it to be, with the screen diagonal supposedly dropping from 5.8 in the iPhone 11 Pro down to 5.4" in the new base model. Overall size is probably similar to the iPhone SE (2020)…

It's strange that we have yet to see a phone (from anybody, not just Apple) that's the size of the old SE but with a full bezel-less display. I feel like so many people would want one. When you've got 100% screen-to-body ratio, you don't need the screen to actually be all that big, for it to be "big."

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#40
post #31

Those benchmarks are impressive. iPhone SE beating the 2019 MBP in single core performance? That's fantastic! I wish I could comment on or know what he was talking about with the iPhone X vs "old iPhone" interaction paradigm. I personally thought the "single button" hardware interface was an incredible innovation that changed everything. Even Android relies on it. My Galaxy S9+ has a "software home button" (like most…

Something has got to be screwy. The iPhone has a TDP of 6W and a clock speed of 2.5GHz. The MBP has boost clocks of 5GHz and a 45W TDP.

Synthetic benchmarks are extremely unreliable.
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