I played with my friends new $480 Pixel 3a XL today and it’s crazy how much phone you get for $500 and change after taxes. This is a brand new, midrange phone with pretty decent specs. The most important things from the more expensive 3 XL are there: stock android, rear camera and google support. It loses a front camera, some processor speed, lower resolution screen and a few other things. But it actually gains better battery life (bigger size) and a headphone jack. The 3a is even cheaper, and still solid.
If you have $500 to buy a phone, Apple has nothing for you except for a phone several years old and refurbished.
If they want to charge $1600 for the next Max, that’s ok with me. They are missing out on people who want midrange phones at affordable prices. $500 is as much as a lot of people will spend for a phone, and Apple has nothing new for them. If the se successor comes out, there’s no chance it’s $500. It’s hard to go into a store and pay $500 for a refurbished 7 or 8 when you see a phone like the Pixel 3a series.
The problem here.... is the Pixel 3A in some scenario feels like something from 4 generation back. Another words the iPhone 8 with an A11 chip would be a much better performer in spite of it’s age. Much less the iPhone XR which to me is the best value iPhone currently available.
Quoting Anandtech on pixel 3A performance
CPU - It was extremely snappy in everyday usage, and if all you do on a smartphone is social media-like activity, then you’d be hard to press to find any differences between the 3a and other flagship devices. Where the Pixel 3a more notably fell behind in was web browsing and loading of heavier pages. Here it was evident that there is indeed quite a generational performance gap and the mid-range SoC isn’t quite able to give the same experience.
GPU - Graphics performance of the Snapdragon 670 is something I admittedly didn’t have too much expectations for. The Adreno 615 of the chipset is a very cut-down version of last year’s Adreno 630 in the Snapdragon 845. In fact you shouldn’t be expecting much of an experience beyond light gaming. Over the rest of the GFXBench benchmarks we continue to see quite lower-end performance. In general the Snapdragon 670’s GPU performance is around ½ to 2/3rd of that of a Snapdragon 835 which puts it about 4 generations behind the top of the line right now.
Quoting Anandtech on iPhone XR
CPU - We’ve had the opportunity to test the newer generation SoCs from HiSilicon as well as Qualcomm, both employing Arm’s new Cortex A76 CPU cores. While both SoCs have shown fantastic gains, especially in regards to energy efficiency at peak performance, absolute CPU performance and ISO perf/W of the Android vendors are still very much lagging behind Apple’s best. As a result, these latest-generation Android SoCs are having trouble competing with even last year’s A11, never mind the A12. The new Exynos 9820 is the only other important chip for 2019 on which we don’t have data on – and I’m not expecting any miracle on Samsung’s side, which means the A12 and subsequently the iPhone XR will remain very much a top performer for the rest of the year.
GPU - Because of the relatively low screen resolution on the part of the XR’s display – a sub-FHD 1792×828 – I’ve had a lot of trouble actually getting workloads to push the A12's GPU to its peak frequencies in on-screen scenarios. This causes an interesting dilemma for the iPhone XR: It has absolutely abundant GPU performance that won’t be used any-time soon. As game developers on iOS will be targeting and tuning their workloads to run smoothly on the most demanding devices of a generation, it means that games will most likely be setting their baseline as the higher-end iPhone XS Max, which has to push over twice the pixel resolution. The net result is that for any given 60fps graphics workload, the iPhone XR will run cooler and with a longer battery life than what you would experience on the XS or XS Max. If gaming and gaming performance (and battery efficiency) is important for you, then the iPhone XR is definitely the phone to get. Not only does it deliver class-leading performance, but it also will be quite future proof in terms of performance thanks to the lower-resolution display.
