> If you look at the progress not just in design, but software, hardware and everything. Samsung, HTC, Nokia, all the major manfs have come miles further than Apple in the last 5 years when it comes to hardware design.
Are you serious? The iPhone 5 came out six months ago, and still holds its own hardware-wise. It's the thinnest and lightest of the flagship phones. Dual Core A6 is entirely competitive with the Snapdragon S4 in the new Nokia on a CPU basis, and while the quad core Snapdragon in the U.S. version of the Galaxy S4 will have more cores, it's not clear phone software can effectively use the extra cores. It had the fastest GPU of any phone at release. The Adreno 320 in the new HTC One and the 544MP3 in the international Galaxy S4 simply bring Samsung and HTC to parity with Apple's 6 month old phone (and the Adreno 225 in the Nokia 920 is comparable to the GPU in the iPhone 4s).
There are certain design decisions Apple makes versus its competitors. It has so far chosen to spend its transistor budget and TDP on more GPU cores than CPU cores. It has also chosen to favor weight and size over screen size. Given the popularity of the iPhone 5, it's hard to say that these are the wrong trade-offs to make.
Are you serious? The iPhone 5 came out six months ago, and still holds its own hardware-wise. It's the thinnest and lightest of the flagship phones. Dual Core A6 is entirely competitive with the Snapdragon S4 in the new Nokia on a CPU basis, and while the quad core Snapdragon in the U.S. version of the Galaxy S4 will have more cores, it's not clear phone software can effectively use the extra cores. It had the fastest GPU of any phone at release. The Adreno 320 in the new HTC One and the 544MP3 in the international Galaxy S4 simply bring Samsung and HTC to parity with Apple's 6 month old phone (and the Adreno 225 in the Nokia 920 is comparable to the GPU in the iPhone 4s).
The iPhone 5 owned the benchmarks when it was released: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6324/the-iphone-5-performance-....
There are certain design decisions Apple makes versus its competitors. It has so far chosen to spend its transistor budget and TDP on more GPU cores than CPU cores. It has also chosen to favor weight and size over screen size. Given the popularity of the iPhone 5, it's hard to say that these are the wrong trade-offs to make.