Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 2020 iPhone SE

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 317 posts

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#81

Post by paypalcust83 »

wus wrote: post #19
jachee wrote: post #9

This is exactly the phone my wife wants to upgrade from her showing-its-age, 5-year-old 6S. It'll fit into her existing case. It's not too big. It's affordable. It still has a home button. She's hardly a power user, so this might be the one phone she gets for the next five year, too.

She won't be able to re-use the same phone case because of the bigger camera lens size in SE.

Yep. It's much closer to an 8 than a 6S.

I stayed with the 6S because of the headphone port and Touch ID. It also was a testbed for the water-resistance for the 7, so it more-or-less is IP67 except for the headphone jack.

The SE seems a compelling upgrade because it doesn't have a notch, unlocks without requiring lighting and a camera, isn't a massive brick, and doesn't cost several fortunes.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#82

Post by Hamuko »

kitotik wrote: 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.

How usable would that single-core performance even be?

Say that I got an iPhone SE and a 16-inch MacBook Pro, hooked both up to power and started doing some single thread video encodes - would the iPhone actually beat the MacBook Pro? My suspicion at least is that it'd start throttling fairly fast.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#83

Post by eigen »

kitotik wrote: post #32
rubber_duck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf

Looks like a variety of workloads, but lots of things that can be greatly improved with co-procesors. Like cryptography, image compression, image processing, etc.

"Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1,000 (which is the score of a Dell Precision 3430 with a Core i3-8100 processor)"

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#84

Post by lonelappde »

rubber_duck wrote: post #21
kitotik wrote: 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.

Why not? What's wrong with geekbench?

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#85

Post by efrafa »

conception wrote: post #25
mbesto wrote: 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…

FaceId is trash but swipe multitasking on the iPhone is an amazing iteration. That said, the tap to hold for an hour to move icons around is also trash. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You dont have to hold. Just tap the and move your finger.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#86

Post by culturestate »

jolux wrote: post #70
riffraff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew this was true, as you can't click it when battery is off, but I still don't get it: how does it work, and why?

How: haptic feedback using a weighted linear actuator. Why: I suspect because it debuted with the iPhone 7, the first officially water resistant iPhone, that it was a waterproofing move to get rid of possible ingress points.

> I suspect...it was a waterproofing move

I've always assumed it was partially about reliability and partially about saving space, since water-resistant physical buttons are fairly standard components.

The phone needs to have some form of haptic motor anyway, and switching to a virtual button allows them to eliminate a complex moving part - removing one potential point of failure - while freeing up a few cubic millimeters of internal volume.

Anecdotally, the home buttons always seemed to be one of the more fragile parts of an iPhone, to the degree that many people started to use the on-screen assistive touch dialogs to avoid wear and tear.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#87

Post by skavi »

p1necone wrote: post #58
freepor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But relatively few desktop computing applications are single threaded.

With a higher power target I don't see why this architecture couldn't have more cores (but I also have no idea what I'm talking about) - looks like it currently has 2 "big" cores and 4 "small" cores.

the A12X/Z iPad variant already has 4 big cores. I wonder what interconnect they use and whether it could be stretched further than that.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#88

Post by ip26 »

p1necone wrote: post #62
berti wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specint benchmarks conducted by Anandtech show the A13 going toe-to-toe with the 9900K [0], although x86 still has a decent lead for floating point. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... (scroll down to the 2nd last plot, look at the right half)

Do mobile chips focus less on floating point for some reason? Could that explain the seemingly massive difference in perf/watt?

Floating point tends to matter for classic 'number crunching' workloads- crypto, media encoding, anything to do with modeling the physical world, image processing, AI.

Phones tend towards 'control flow', e.g. display an interface, accept a user input, communicate with a server, display information... and media decoding & gps both have dedicated hardware.

FP workloads can be incredibly power hungry, so it's fortunate mobile devices mostly manage to avoid them. But any chip with an FP unit is going to shut it off when running integer code.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#89

Post by chrizel »

riffraff wrote: post #59
noncoml wrote: 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.

I knew this was true, as you can't click it when battery is off, but I still don't get it: how does it work, and why?

On the older iPhones, the home buttons got problems after a couple of years. My old iPhone 4 had this problem. They got unreliable in registering being pushed. I think that’s also the reason it makes sense to not be an actual hardware button. Less moving parts makes it more reliable and it’s more likely to work after many years.

Re: The 2020 iPhone SE

#90

Post by strogonoff »

lukifer wrote: post #49
pb7 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It still has a home button. Why is this a benefit? The removal of the home button might have been the best thing since the home button itself. The gesture that replaced is an order of magnitude better.

There's no disputing preferences. I still feel weird about face ID, and would rather have buttons.

For a good chunk of the day I can’t unlock my iPhone with Face ID while wearing a mask. At night and in the morning I can’t unlock it because I’m horizontal, hair obscures part of my face and/or it’s too dark. Punching in the passphrase gets old quick.

I read about Apple’s patent on buttonless Touch ID underlying the screen and I’m holding off until next event to get either a phone with that technology, or SE 2.

Post reply on HN