Are these comments from 2018? 'Pro' models of iPhones have been $999 or more, not adjusted for inflation, at their lowest tier since 'Pro' has been a thing. I would expect the same of a Samsung 'Ultra' flagship?
No one sane buys it for the list price. During launch there are always various discounts. I got S25U for 800 (without sending my old phone, just some coupons) with a 5eur/month contract last year at launch. If it really lasts 7 years it's not even that expensive.
It's market segmentation. Instead of charging what it's worth, maybe 700 EUR, they charge 1700 so they can get away with charging you 800 eur on "discount", dragging up the prices of the entire lineup below it.
People use their phone today to: Manage 100k+,1M+ bank accounts, 2FA, secret messaging, sensitive media, medication, credentials and more.
This privacy feature makes a lot of sense.
Give it a couple of iterations and I think this will be the standard in business. It never made sense to me the trust that we put on no one looking at the contents of a display at the same time as us.
I'm much less concerned about a rando looking over my shoulder than I am the wealth of information the software hands out to its owners. It's like the difference between being seen in public by other pedestrians versus being captured by thousands of fixed surveillance cameras. Look all you want, so long as you're not wired into a database. Different threat models, I guess.
Or displaying your card out in the open, flashing it in front of everyone in the restaurant, grocery store, etc. With remote workers scanning through video feeds of people in public, it won't be long before they figure out the Meta glasses and similar cameras are high enough resolution to capture sensitive information, even if the actual user is 100% innocent and not doing anything wrong.
There was a gas station cashier that was using a memory palace trick to memorize card numbers and details, then stealing money later on. The bar was one of a little effort - not many people can do the memory palace thing, so it wasn't a threat vector. Now, everything is being recorded all the time, and you basically have to trust that everyone in the long list of people who have access to the video won't use it maliciously. We absolutely don't live in the type of society where that type of trust is warranted - there's gonna be lots of crime from unexpected places.
Throw in capturing logins, secure pins, touchscreen swipe sequences, etc, it won't even matter if you have all the best security features in the world.
Maybe implanted cryptographic key devices are the way to go, and you have to go into a perfectly secure SCIF with a faraday shielded closet in order to enter in your personal key, which can be used to provide tokens for other logins, verify actions, etc.
The people who are genuinely concerned about shoulder surfing probably slapped on a privacy filter anyway. They're no different from a screen protector. What the S26 Ultra can do is cool and super useful for the few people who need it, but I'd bet that all the rest will just show it off as a cool party trick and nothing more.
I've seen this with laptops that came with integrated electronically controlled privacy filter. They were nice but eventually the added cost, complexity, and lowered image quality didn't make them a popular choice even for enterprise users. I think only HP still offers them from the big brands, Dell and Lenovo don't do it anymore.
Samsung has never respected the user. I remember having having a Galaxy S5 and every update it would reinstall all the bloatware like facebook and paypal. Everyone who cares about a platform that respects them and their time moved to iPhone long ago. Apple's AI features can be turned off with one global toggle, as well as more granular ones.
> Apple's AI features can be turned off with one global toggle, as well as more granular ones.
I’m an Apple user.
Turn off Siri and CarPlay gets painful from memory, and my AirPods won’t translate without it turned on.
In terms of privacy, they are slipping. The dialogs ‘ask apps not to track’, and don’t appear to block them. Watching Tim surrender to authority at ever at every opportunity makes me sad.
I mean that's what you'd expect turning off the whole of siri. They provide granular options to turn off individual aspects like the listening for "hey siri" and such. If you wholesale disable the entirety of siri you are going to find it annoying if you use features provided by siri.
significantly and dramatically are two different things. I was sceptic when buying it but have no problem using the display with privacy screen on, and dont see that much difference in brightness, even in direct sunlight, fwiw.
Bonus with it on you can stretch your battery life, only half the pixels actually active saves quite some battery, who knew!
This chip is faster in Geekbench than the Ryzen 3900X system I just upgraded. At the time, this was at the top-end for multithreading performance, with a 105W TDP. Now outclassed by a phone.
I just don't believe these geekbench numbers represent real world performance numbers. Like... Firefox compile times or late game civ 6 turn times or such things
It's not clear the android geekbench scores are comparable to the desktop ones. They seem to run different tests and the score is very likely not comparable between the different tests.
Yeah, watch out for those nosy people looking over your shoulder at your phone, they're spying on you.
Please ignore all the data mining we're doing on your phone and please don't make us continually harass you first thing in the morning every morning to accept new terms and conditions. (For what it's worth, my Fold 7 harasses me to accept two sets of updates to terms and conditions first thing in the morning every morning)
It is needed for a bunch of things including all bixby stuff (which is admittedly starting to get useful) but those constant ToS updates can drive a man mad.
If any Samsung employees are reading this: whoever is pushing those ToS changes is probably a on Apples payroll ;)
I've had Samsung phones for years and never made a Samsung account. Every few weeks my phone suggests signing in or accepting new terms and conditions, and I refuse.
I know Google is mining my information, but I convince myself I'm "sticking it to the man" and taking at least one small stand...
There are a bunch of free or cheap alternative apps. Probably not as smoothly integrated, but years ago a change to Samsung's terms popped up in the health app; I saw it said they could do anything they want with my private health data, so I rejected the terms and stopped using it.
It blows my mind that Samsung has been sitting on a premium hardware gold mine for so long, but insists on these anti-features. I would be buying expensive premium samsung phones if they just offered something not so maddening. I was so hoping (but certainly not holding my breath) that Samsung was GrapheneOS's partner. Oh well, I guess S doesn't want my money, so I'll give it Moto.
I wouldn't call it a "Premium Hardware gold mine", apart from the screens, the battery, cameras, CPU/GPU, etc are all on par or surpassed by Apple and Google.
I was hoping, this being Wired, the article would have at least a surface-level technical description of how a software-defined privacy filter works, but alas.
How does it work? I'm guessing it's some kind of extension of the LCD polarizer, but all I can find online are explanations of the software like in the Wired article.
Its not a filter or layer, its the pixels themselves. Half are normal wide viewing angle pixels, the other half are pixels with a much more narrow viewing angle. When activated they just ... switch off the normal ones.
Basically half of the pixels have a narrow view angle, the others don't, when you activate the privacy mode, only the narrow pixels remain, so you can see the screen only looking straight.
I wonder if this is how those privacy screen protectors work. Where it's just like looking at the screen through a cell structure with walls that prevent light coming out at an angle.
Everything has become so incredibly expensive it just isn't fun to buy anything anymore.
My iPhone 11's FaceID broke a few weeks ago and despite that I think I will just stick with it with today's phone prices.
Right, thats the top specced 1TB version isnt it?
Amazon Germany has the basic 256g version for 1200€
There was a gas station cashier that was using a memory palace trick to memorize card numbers and details, then stealing money later on. The bar was one of a little effort - not many people can do the memory palace thing, so it wasn't a threat vector. Now, everything is being recorded all the time, and you basically have to trust that everyone in the long list of people who have access to the video won't use it maliciously. We absolutely don't live in the type of society where that type of trust is warranted - there's gonna be lots of crime from unexpected places.
Throw in capturing logins, secure pins, touchscreen swipe sequences, etc, it won't even matter if you have all the best security features in the world.
Maybe implanted cryptographic key devices are the way to go, and you have to go into a perfectly secure SCIF with a faraday shielded closet in order to enter in your personal key, which can be used to provide tokens for other logins, verify actions, etc.
The world is so ridiculously insecure.
I've seen this with laptops that came with integrated electronically controlled privacy filter. They were nice but eventually the added cost, complexity, and lowered image quality didn't make them a popular choice even for enterprise users. I think only HP still offers them from the big brands, Dell and Lenovo don't do it anymore.
Why is this "a few minutes" and "most of them"? Why isn't it "a few seconds" and "all of them with a single toggle in Settings"?
I’m an Apple user. Turn off Siri and CarPlay gets painful from memory, and my AirPods won’t translate without it turned on.
In terms of privacy, they are slipping. The dialogs ‘ask apps not to track’, and don’t appear to block them. Watching Tim surrender to authority at ever at every opportunity makes me sad.
AFAIK it significantly decreases the brightness. Jerry Rig Everything demonstrates this here - https://youtu.be/TRW4W7KkJXs?t=32
Bonus with it on you can stretch your battery life, only half the pixels actually active saves quite some battery, who knew!
It's good enough to use on the go I'd say but not beyond that.
Please ignore all the data mining we're doing on your phone and please don't make us continually harass you first thing in the morning every morning to accept new terms and conditions. (For what it's worth, my Fold 7 harasses me to accept two sets of updates to terms and conditions first thing in the morning every morning)
It is needed for a bunch of things including all bixby stuff (which is admittedly starting to get useful) but those constant ToS updates can drive a man mad.
If any Samsung employees are reading this: whoever is pushing those ToS changes is probably a on Apples payroll ;)
I know Google is mining my information, but I convince myself I'm "sticking it to the man" and taking at least one small stand...
How does it work? I'm guessing it's some kind of extension of the LCD polarizer, but all I can find online are explanations of the software like in the Wired article.
See for example:
https://gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s26_ultra-review-2939p3....
Or from the official Samsung presentation:
https://youtube.com/shorts/qnUVGPkeCCc
I got this explanation for the mkbh video: https://youtu.be/nfHRMqqO578?t=141&si=iEhVrdCuLN0fkasd which illustrates it very well (2m24 if timestamp doesn't work)