Rene is a little bit one sided when it comes to his Apple articles
That's an understatement.
How many other manufacturers are capable of spinning their own, custom silicone like the Apple A6 and Apple A7?
Samsung build its own chips for their phones. Not knowing this doesn't get him off to a good start.
Most just throw whatever Qualcomm's making into their phones.
Qualcomm makes the baseband for Apple. They did it for the iPhone 5 (
here) for example.
How many other manufacturers are capable of shrinking down a camera to fit into the ludicrously thin chassis of the iPhone 5 series?
The iPhone 5s is 7.6mm thick, the Galaxy S4 is 7.9mm and the HTC One is more than 9mm thick. So, in terms of the "big" players, it is the thinnest (barely compared to the S4) but that fails to recognize that phones such as the Droid Razr, a two year old phone, were smaller (that phone was 7.1mm thick). This is not to mention the Huawei Ascend P1s which is a ridiculous 6.7mm thick (that's getting way too thin!). So, it would seem that at least Motorola and Huawei can fit a camera into a chassis that thin.
How many other manufacturers are capable of producing displays as advanced as the in-cell Retina? Some go OLED and even PenTile to save battery life and improve yield rates at the expense of image and color fidelity
That's not only a subjective call but it also neglects the quality of displays elsewhere. So, a variety of other developers can do this.
How many other manufacturers are capable of producing aluminium unibody chassises?
The fact that he isn't aware of the HTC One here makes me think he doesn't know what he's talking about.
How many other manufacturers are capable of engineering 10 hours of battery life on a phone that small?
LG gets nearly 14 from the G2 (
here) and Samsung gets 11 from the Note 3 (
here). Sure, they're larger than the iPhone 5s but they also have larger screens and internals to manage. So, I'm not sure what the size qualification here is supposed to prove.
And other companies do great things as well. Nokia's build quality is amazing. But they don't make their own chips. Samsung's processors are impressive. But their build quality still tends towards the creaky. HTC's panels and speakers are fantastic. But they don't make their own operating system. They each have priorities and areas of excellence. But none of then, so far, have seen the value in doing all of the pieces Apple's done, including design from the chipset on up, manufacturing from the machinery on down, and experience from the atoms to the bits.
*cough* unrestrained fanboyism *cough*. First, Apple doesn't make everything despite what this guy wants to say. So, the criticism of Nokia is ridiculous. The critique of Samsung is subjective and contains no empirical proof (say what you will about the whole package that is their phone but their mobile processors are pretty solid). The critique of HTC not making their own OS? That's a critique that could be shared with just about every other developer so it makes me think that he doesn't have a valid entry point for critiquing their phones.
But as it stands today, no one, not Samsung, not Nokia, not HTC, not Motorola, not BlackBerry, not anyone else in the world could have manufactured an iPhone-class device.
Subjective and baseless claim at its finest. I could make the opposite claim and be no more right/wrong than he is.
None of them invested in as much, early enough, to have all the elements in-house and able to execute at scale, and profitably so.
Scale and profit? Someone needs to read up on the Samsung production process.
Sorry Brent, but I think this guy (don't know anything about him) is still stuck in his one-sidedness. I'm happy that you love your iPhone but if you want arguments to support your passion for it (should you ever need them in a discussion), please don't refer to this article. Stick to areas that can be supported with some sense of evidence - performance, security metrics, application support. Each of those aforementioned areas are areas that Apple excels at and are notably absent.
It took all of five seconds for each point of his to be addressed with counter arguments that, although at least partially subjective as well, also involve some element of objective fact to back them up. I'm glad that you share his views (and god knows I have views of phones that can be torn apart by counter evidence) but you may want to find another person who has a positive review (there are many and for good reason) to help support them.