Why does Samsung have smaller buying power than Apple? Doesn't Samsung sell more phones than them? Or is it because while Samsung sells more phones in total, Apple still has the most successful single models?
So the reason Samsung typically has less influence is that when all you do is crush your suppliers margins to make your own, said suppliers don't tend to make much of an investment in making things better since they are incentivized to just make them cheaper.
[1] in fairness, they can't afford to: while Apple has an ongoing revenue stream from its devices, most other manufacturers don't. It's Google/Facebook/etc who monetize the devices post-sale while for the original device manufacturer it's merely a liability at that point. This is a factor in why Android has a rather dismal track record re: updates on older devices.
Apple can come to a vendor and say "these are our constraints on what we are willing to buy. Here's testing benchmarks. You are required to meet them. Failure to do so voids the purchase contract."
The vendor will then, of course, say "We'll have to charge you more if we're spinning up a test infrastructure we don't have."
And then Apple will negotiate a price point and pass the anti-savings onto the consumer.
They do this at multiple levels at multiple points in their hardware story. I met someone once who worked on the USB integration specs back in the first-couple-generation iBooks. Apple built a rig for physically testing the connectors (including multiple cycles of intentional mis-plug, i.e. flipping a USB-A connector over wrong-side-up and pushing hard against the socket). They told the vendors selling them USB sockets that the sockets had to survive the rig, or the sale was void. Vendors priced accordingly. But the resulting product is more robust than others on the market.
Apple sounds like it really is that rigorous with the quality of hardware and drivers/firmware they use.
Some of the stories of nitpicking that I’ve heard are truly awe inspiring. On the other hand, I’d hate to be the engineer on the vendor side trying to please apple. (Mostly because some crap PM or sales person made promises without consulting engineering on what’s possible with the available time and resources)
I'm not sure about this. There are people who pay >1000€ for their flagship phones and believe them to be premium products, but they are just as buggy as the cheap ones. Huge amount of CPU power and impressive camera specs, though.
The S21 Ultra seems like a very good purchase from reviews. QHD screen with dynamically adjusted 120Hz seems really like the best spec.
We've been together 4 years, its USB port is a little loose now. Too much charging everyday, but the screen is still pristine. The camera is fine so we can go out and take photos at the beach. I'm happy man. It does what it said it would do and did it. And still doing it.
Not just that, every apple device has wireless access, and Apple has thrice the operating income and more than twice the net income of Samsung Electronics.
But yes the "value" of individual devices is also part of the equation, in the sense that Samsung has a lot of cheap-ish devices with fairly short lifetimes, they're not going to fight for device quality. Apple has a very limited number of devices they support for a long time. And they're probably bringing in a lot of baggage from having been screwed over by the plans and fuckups of their suppliers in the past.
And even then, the more time passes the more they just go "fuck'em all" and move chip design in-house, not just the "main" chips (AX, MX, SX) but the ancillary as well: the WX and HX series integrate bluetooth on the SoC. There's no doubt they'll eventually go their own way on larger devices as well, the U1 is probably the first steps towards that.
I think my overall point is still valid because I have had Samsung phones for a while and have found their Bluetooth to be pretty good. This is not surprising as Samsung actually bought one of the biggest Bluetooth chip vendors (CSR) at one point, so they do have control over the full stack.
("what was advertised as" because there wasn't really a differentiation in the R&D bits, so there was a somewhat arbitrary split and hasty redacting of repos given to Samsung to avoid names of other customers in comments).
Samsung's phone division and electronic parts division aren't the same thing, so there was no guarantee that the phones would buy the Bluetooth/Wifi from their new acquisition, although I hear they did eventually.
With Samsung and android, it's a different story. There are many android vendors and the people producing the Bluetooth chips are selling to many of them (broadcom). Samsung has the ability to make their own chips, but to get everything working flawlessly they not only have to make their chips awesome but also improve the android driver stack to work with their new awesome chips. That stack has to also be compatible with the other bluetooth manufactures on the market making it a harder change to make.
In other words, with apple and a vendor, there are pretty much just the 2 parties involved which control everything. With Samsung and vendor it's not just them but also the likes of google and other bluetooth vendors that can get in the way of really fixing things.
If someone senior at Samsung said to their vendor "good Bluetooth or you lose the Samsung account", that would provoke some, um, intense conversations at the vendor between sales and engineering.
Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties. I know cases where they've had two suppliers. Displays and modems come to mind, although I've not Googled to verify.
The problem: There aren't that many suppliers left in the field, and Broadcom knows that their customers are pretty much locked in. The notable exception is once again Apple, they have proven that they can and will go and implement the technology on their own if their suppliers fail to meet their expectations.
Samsung could obviously do this too, but as you say, they lack the will - and motivation.
So why should Samsung invest more than the bare minimum when they can't get anything measurable in return?
Edit: Samsung has apparently already ripped out the Bluetooth stack and replaced it with their own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650447
Apple controls their whole stack. They've already written the Bluetooth stack for their OS. They only have to service their devices.
> Incidentally Apple sometimes has more than one vendor too, so it's not just two parties.
Not the point I was making. It's not an issue with multiple vendors, its and issue of who controls what. Those other vendors also have to conform to apples standards if they want to sell apple their products. What I'm talking about is the fact that a bluetooth device manufacture has to conform to google's android standards if they want to sell their chips to android manufactures, not to samsung standards. That's where the leverage goes away.
If samsung ever pulls the trigger and uses Tizen everywhere, then they'll be more in Apples position. Until that happens, they need to work with google to get stuff done.
If broadcom says it's going to be expensive to fix, either you pay or you don't. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with "controlling the whole stack".
As an aside, and it's totally irrelevant to the above, but there's nothing other than the amount of work involved preventing Samsung writing their own bluetooth stack. They write plenty of custom drivers and they created a folding device prior to OS support. If they wanted to they could; they just apparently don't think it's worth the cost.
Edit: according to a comment down thread they have done exactly that.
The same thing could be said for Qualcomm's failure to support it's SOCs for more than a couple of years. Device makers could force their hand.
That works, even works well, as long as device makers feel that supporting SOCs for a limited period helps them sell more phones.
Apple has changed the rules of the game by supporting its devices for longer -- and as phone upgrades become more infrequent due to plateauing technology, I think device makers will realize this.
Samsung has already committed to supporting recent Galaxy devices for at least 4 years -- at least with security updates[1]. I suspect this was also because they found that their extremely short-sighted prior policy re security updates encouraged corporate phone procurers to ditch Samsung and go with Apple.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-d...
However, if we're going to count years where you only got a security update, the iPhone 5s is currently on it's 8th supported year.