Hasta La Gadget!

The new iPhones have excellent cameras, to be sure. But it’s always good to verify Apple’s breathless on-stage claims with first-hand reports. We have our own review of the phones and their photography systems, but teardowns provide the invaluable service of letting you see the biggest changes with your own eyes — augmented, of course, by a high-powered microscope.

We’ve already seen iFixit’s solid-as-always disassembly of the phone, but TechInsights gets a lot closer to the device’s components — including the improved camera of the iPhone XS and XS Max.

Although the optics of the new camera are as far as we can tell unchanged since the X, the sensor is a new one and is worth looking closely at.

Microphotography of the sensor die show that Apple’s claims are borne out and then some. The sensor size has increased from 32.8mm² to 40.6mm² — a huge difference despite the small units. Every tiny bit counts at this scale. (For comparison, the Galaxy S9 is 45mm², and the soon-to-be-replaced Pixel 2 is 25mm².)

The pixels themselves also, as advertised, grew from 1.22 microns (micrometers) across to 1.4 microns — which should help with image quality across the board. But there’s an interesting, subtler development that has continually but quietly changed ever since its introduction: the “focus pixels.”

That’s Apple’s brand name for phase detection autofocus (PDAF) points, found in plenty of other devices. The basic idea is that you mask off half a sub-pixel every once in a while (which I guess makes it a sub-sub-pixel), and by observing how light enters these half-covered detectors you can tell whether something is in focus or not.

Of course, you need a bunch of them to sense the image patterns with high fidelity, but you have to strike a balance: losing half a pixel may not sound like much, but if you do it a million times, that’s half a megapixel effectively down the drain. Wondering why that all the PDAF points are green? Many camera sensors use an “RGBG” sub-pixel pattern, meaning there are two green sub-pixels for each red and blue one — it’s complicated why. But there are twice as many green sub-pixels and therefore the green channel is more robust to losing a bit of information.

Apple introduced PDAF in the iPhone 6, but as you can see in TechInsights’ great diagram, the points are pretty scarce. There’s one for maybe every 64 sub-pixels, and not only that, they’re all masked off in the same orientation: either the left or right half gone.

The 6S and 7 Pluses saw the number double to one PDAF point per 32 sub-pixels. And in the 8 Plus, the number is improved to one per 20 — but there’s another addition: now the phase detection masks are on the tops and bottoms of the sub-pixels as well. As you can imagine, doing phase detection in multiple directions is a more sophisticated proposal, but it could also significantly improve the accuracy of the process. Autofocus systems all have their weaknesses, and this may have addressed one Apple regretted in earlier iterations.

Which brings us to the XS (and Max, of course), in which the PDAF points are now one per 16 sub-pixels, having increased the frequency of the vertical phase detection points so that they’re equal in number to the horizontal one. Clearly the experiment paid off and any consequent light loss has been mitigated or accounted for.

I’m curious how the sub-pixel patterns of Samsung, Huawei, and Google phones compare, and I’m looking into it. But I wanted to highlight this interesting little evolution. It’s an interesting example of the kind of changes that are hard to understand when explained in simple number form — we’ve doubled this, or there are a million more of that — but which make sense when you see them in physical form.

Image credit – Fixje iPhone

As we have seen for most smartphones, with every new generation, there will also be improvements made to battery life. In the case of Apple’s new iPhones, the iPhone Xs and Xs Max, Apple basically touted an extra 30 minutes of battery life that users could squeeze out of their phones.

Unfortunately in a test performed and published by Tom’s Guide (via AppleInsider), that doesn’t really appear to be the case. The test found that Apple’s new iPhones actually performed worse in battery life tests compared to its predecessor, the iPhone X. Based on their tests, the iPhone Xs Max managed 10 hours and 38 minutes of continuous browsing over 4G LTE.

The iPhone Xs managed 9 hours 41 minutes, while the iPhone X actually managed 10 hours and 49 minutes. Granted the difference between the iPhone Xs Max and iPhone X is pretty small, but to have a phone from 2017 beat out this year’s model which is supposed to offer an extra 30 minutes is pretty embarrassing.

The numbers on the iPhone Xs and Xs Max also pale in comparison compared to Android smartphones, like the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 which managed 11 hours and 26 minutes, while the Google Pixel 2 XL managed 12 hours and 9 minutes, while Huawei’s P20 Pro managed an impressive 14 hours and 13 minutes.

Test Finds That iPhone X Beats iPhone Xs, Xs Max In Battery Life , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The major gun manufacturer is the second to face pressure from investors in recent months.

We’ve watched many a nerd solve a Rubik’s Cube in like 4 seconds flat and we’ve also seen our share of robots that can solve it quickly as well. But until now, a Rubik’s Cube has never been able to solve itself. Hell, humans can’t even solve themselves, which is why there are so many buttholes out there. This robotic Rubik’s Cube is filled with electronics and motors making it a puzzle that solves itself. Does this mean it’s alive?

The self-solving cube needs no assistance – aside from a human messing it up before it starts. It was created by hardware hacker “Human Controller.” It can’t solve a puzzle that was pre-scrambled though – it just records the moves a human makes, then undoes them.

Despite the stuff crammed inside that creates the magic, it is the exact same dimensions as the cubes that you and I throw at the wall in frustration.

So how did he squeeze all of the electronics, motors, wiring, and batteries inside? Well, that called for a custom 3D-printed core, but and unique versions of the individual cube sections that can twist and rotate.

It’s pretty weird watching a Rubik’s Cube solve itself. This makes it much smarter than me. It may not be the fastest at solving the puzzle, but this thing IS the puzzle, so you can’t beat that really.

[via IEEE Spectrum via Gizmodo]

Of all the things you could possibly be doing on a Tuesday afternoon, watching a live stream of Will Smith bungee jumping out of a helicopter is probably not among the worst. Oh, and he’s doing the stunt over the Grand Canyon on his 50th birthday. No…