franki.hauptle :
I don't understand why the arm companies Qualcomm and even Samsung, who have been doing it for ages can't make a cpu that can compete with Apples. They go on about the 835's speed, but compared to the A11 it's like it's a couple of generations old.
Apple's chip design team is on par with or possibly exceeds that of Intel.
Other than the CPU, they really just copied and in some places improved on what android was offering already. (The first no bezel android is over a year old now)
Qualcomm and co need to get their act together on the SOC, but other than that I think the pen on the note 8 would push me to that. The next generation of flagships will be very interesting.
Apple is rarely the first to market with anything - they like to think that they fix what's broken in other products.
The original iPhone was their answer to what they though was broken in the smartphone market.
Curiously though, the no bezel smartphone was mentioned eons ago by Ming-Chi Kuo when he revealed how Apple's next phone would be a bezel less design which would be a window into Augmented Reality.
When Apple puts out a product, they're like a lumbering beast and it takes time to put together supply chains, engineering teams, and software teams to build the next iPhone to scale - and more agile players take things like that statement as their future design spec and rush to beat Apple to the punch.
So Apple always nowadays with all the leaks looks like they're copying things, even when they came up with the original concept.
As for facial recognition: yes, it existed before, but not in the reliable way Face ID implemented it. Samsung and most other companies would be horrified to be told what it would cost to implement that one feature by their engineering team, and that plan would be scuttled faster than plans for a militarized version of the Note 7 grenade phone
.