200MP smartphone and first premium PC spearhead Samsung's pro push Samsung Electronics has unveiled its first premium PC, the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, and positioned it very much as a MacBook alternative for professional creative types who need to work with colossal image files. The Galaxy Book 3 Ultra packs an unspecified 13th-gen Intel Core i7 or i9 CPU – Samsung did not provide precise …
8 GB RAM? 256 GB storage? On a machine expected to play with large images/video/whatever? They're out of their tiny minds. My Lenovo laptop has 12 GB RAM and 512 GB storage, and I regret buying it as that ain't enough. And the RAM and storage are soldered in and can't be upgraded. I should have got the version which has 16 GB RAM and 1 TB storage. And I don't play with large images/video for a living. Any 'creative professional' who depends on Android + Windows talking to each other without issue (yeah, right) and uses under 12 GB RAM and 512 GB storage is going to have serious problems.
Samsung is the classic example of a company too big to fail. I mean they could allow one divison - like home appliances, shipbuilding or batteries - to fail, but cutting edge tech gadgets are too much of a symbolic representation of greatness in our zeitgeist. If they'd make a line of really junk products some big investment bank or the South Korean government itself would just step in and buy a year of production to save its credits and keep the music playing. But it looks like the customers are still happy to shell out 1000-2000 $ for a Samsung phone, so we are not there just yet.
Overcharging for less than you need is Samsung's business model.
They learned everything they know from Apple in that regard.
Need a charger cable for that? Sure thing, our proprietary one, made with trade secrets™ so nobody can copy it? For you, £50, mate.
To be fair, I wouldn't buy anything from either of those companies. The only Samsung devices I've ever bought have been a monitor that died after a couple of years, and a TV, on which only one of the three HDMI ports works any more, and the case is so badly made, the internal speaker causes it to vibrate loudly at certain mid-range frequencies. As for Apple, well, I've had a strong dislike of them ever since being forced to use one of their computers back when they were called Mackintoshes and were beige, and found it to be far less capable than the equivalent PCs of the time, and even back then, full of proprietary nonsense designed to tie people in. I know some people love them, because they "just work"*, but each to their own...
*Not if you plug a parallel-port Zip drive into their SCSI port (yes, they used the same connector). That one never worked again. The Mac, not the Zip drive, that is...
To be fair, if you sign up ahead of time and order the phone at launch, Samsung does offer your choice of accessories (in this case $150 worth of accessories) so you can get a charging pad or two and a charger or two or a case and charger and charging pad etc.
That might work better for a lot of folks who upgrade from Samsung to Samsung as the same wireless charger or charger plug you had for your phone 2 generations ago still works just fine and you could pick anything else you wanted to apply that credit to.
There was a lensless sensor developed in the last year or two that is entirely software driven (because the sensor itself can't focus). I'm sure that's where small form factor cameras are headed eventually.
Edit: Apparently Caltech did it almost 6 years ago, so it may come sooner than I thought.
Don't need more megapixels, need more space.
Got the Xiaomi 12S Ultra after my Samsung Galaxy Note 22 Ultra 5G+ made it the last Samsung I felt like owning, barely an upgrade on the previous Note 8, massive step back in some regards and terrible life quality (the Note 8 itself similar in some regards compared to the Note 4 prior to it..). The 1inch sensor in the Xiaomi is head and shoulders over any other smartphone camera I've used or seen - as one of these "creative types" Samsung wish to appeal to (ie I own multiple cameras and have a lens range that cost more than a nice car), then do it right, and use the right tech, stop trying the "more numbers is more betterer" - you don't even have to invent it, Sony make the sensor and are selling it (which is where Xiaomi got it).
I got the Xiaomi RedMi Note 11 5G, a pretty capable phone, with a decent camera and perfectly good performance. At less than a quarter of the price of these flagship phones, with their "high end" cameras. It serves my need, and it didn't break the bank.
I strongly suspect that nobody buying a "flagship" Samsung or Apple phone needs a very high pixel count in their images, and I predict that the vast majority are only taking pictures that are going to be immediately downsampled when they post them to Instagram, or whatever the latest social media fad is tomorrow.
The real "creative types" I know use real cameras. They know the important thing is the optics, and colour reproduction, not the sensor density.
Having stuck with the S range until my S10e, I think I'm going to go with one of the simpler models when this comes up for replacement. If only the names weren't so bewildering, but you can get an extremely capable Samsung phone with a big battery for less than € 300. Of course, other manufacturers such as Xiaomi are available, but I'm quite used to the UI and have been impressed by Samsung's QA improvements in the last few years.
I sweated my old Note4 for ages, largely because the later ones lacked features I liked. It broke, and accepting I was going to lose those features no matter which way I went, I ended up with a Moto G Pro Stylus (as I still wanted a stylus) and well, for £200, a fraction of the cost of later Note models, I'm quite happy with it. It does phone stuff. It does internet stuff. It has a decent camera. I won't cry if I break it.
…. that while people may buy this or that piece of Apple kit because they find it so desirable, what keeps them buying more is the level of integration among its products. Having tried for years to slavishly copy Apple design language, they decided some years back to come up with their own, and now they’re back to copying — this time the integration experience and hopefully the customer loyalty it produces — at least if the experience isn’t built on the thin reed of how well Microsoft and Alphabet’s offerings work together.
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