[Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Guides, News, & Discussion] @rbiter:
Component standard still lower? Do you mean quality or price? And the X screen is going to cost Apple more even though Apple gets an economy of scale price. Samsung makes the screens in house so they are able to price it better for Samsung smartphone division. Samsung's screen is much larger than the X's and curved, not to mention higher resolution. Without trying to make it too complicated Apple's cost my be higher for other considerations like the glass used, digitizer, 3D touch, cherry picked bin tax for color accurate screens, how much screen Apple is actually buying to accommodate the notch as there is more screen but folded over I think to be accommodated for complex manufacturing and other engineering considerations. I wish I could find out more details but I read a few articles about Apple telling suppliers to slow down parts manufacturing for components exclusive to iPhone X because sales weren't high as expected. One of the articles mentioned how this is affecting sales to other companies because they are basically buying overflow of unsold screens. Some questions and answers to be gleaned from that specific article might be why we are seeing so many OEMs 'copy' the notch. Excess inventory that Samsung still needs to sell so I speculate that is part of the reason many OEMs are so 'blatantly' copying when in fact it might be engineering decisions to accommodate the market conditions and excess manufacturing. The screen in the iPhone X is actually bigger than 5.8" so I don't know exactly how that is transitioning to other companies phones. I am glad to see Samsung sticking to their guns and they aren't exactly innovating but their iterations have slowly made a better whole product. I haven't played with the X enough but I do wonder how 3d touch, the notch and the reflective coating used on the X that have produced the best screen for sunlight legibility even over Samsung factor into Apple's cost of display.

I kind of wish I had an X to play with for awhile to see how well Apple's engineering played into the X and Apple's first smartphone with OLED. Apple fanboys always proclaim how much better battery is on iPhone from review testing but after getting iPhones for work the battery life is just average, even though the "but the battery is smaller" in iPhone and so have been the screens and resolutions requiring far less horsepower so Apple chips are able to run in lower power states for less intensive stuff. When I finally was able to do apple to apples comparisons of daily driving Plus versions of iPhones it was apparent that battery life was just average even though reviews always put out big numbers on a closed loop repeating test. By average I mean Android phones with much larger and lesser high quality screens with bigger batteries were pulling down about the same numbers over daily usage and I keep iOS at a minimum (so far less syncing and data usage) and just use it for work and work calls. So with bigger batteries, bigger screens and much heavier workload with lesser quality LCD screens my Android phones were pulling down about the same SOT or more. And many people are overlooking the fact that the last 2 or 3 SOC's in iPhones have silicon surface area about twice as big as usual than Qualcomm, Exynos and Kirin. That is part of why Apple's chips have been benching better than Qualcomm and Exynos plus they're optimized for a very specific vertical environment where Qualcomm's chips have been a little more versatile for general use like Intel CPUs.

The few iPhone X owners I've asked haven't been that enthusiastic about the X's battery life. But when you try compare it to an Android phone all of a sudden the story changes to battery life is fabulous because Apple. Many people overlook that Android has been at far higher resolutions than iOS has for awhile and that is a major reason why iPhones always bench well for SOT but real life usage the numbers do not pan out. It would seem the closed loop rundowns are more accurate for Android phones. By accurate I mean the numbers claimed in iPhone reviews typically are about half (50-60%) in real life daily usage. For Android phones you could get about 75-80% SOT stated in reviews if you optimized your Android environment well.

I am eager to see the new iPhones and S10 battery life in the near future. Eager to see if Samsung and Apple start making a darker themed OS across the board as an option in the settings. People don't realize how huge a role that can play in daily usage. After heavily modifying a Note3 with team blackout options which included many Google apps that were blacked out I was getting double digits SOT for a couple months and changing the brightness barely affected battery life. This is something that would help battery longevity considering we are stuck with sealed batteries until OEMs start considering the environment more and putting in user swappable batteries again on flagships. Well all their phones actually.