My old $200 Motorola G9 Power phone lasted almost 4 years with only very minor scratches. Obviously in that period I have dropped it a few times getting out of the car, where the phone sometimes work itself out of my pant pocket while I drive, and then it slips out when I get out of the car. But no problem on my previous phones, despite the Moto had cheap Panda glass front.
Then I bought my $800 glass back Xiaomi 13T Pro in January, and I loved the phone for the camera and good specs. But alas after only 4 months, and single drop of just 30 cm while sitting on the porch, the glass back immediately cracked! The back now looks like an ugly mess, and the high water resistance is very likely gone too.
For sure the last time I buy a phone with a glass back!!!
I wonder why glass back is so popular, and I curse the media for reviewing the Samsung Galaxy S2 as "feeling a bit cheap", because the back was synthetic, and drop tests showed it was 10 times as durable as the iPhone with its glass back.
Samsung did it right in the beginning, glass backs are a curse.
PS: I don't use condoms for my phones, if they need that for daily use, it's an obvious design flaw!!!
The glass back is supposedly there to give a premium feel to the phone. But because it's fragile, people have to use a cover, but with the cover, the premium feel of a glass back is gone anyways?
How is glass back not a design flaw?
EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION:
I am not clumsy, that's why I believe the phone should be able to last without cover. This was the first time the phone slid out of my packet, and I've NEVER dropped it out of my hands. One 30 cm slip and it's broken. Where for instance my Moto had maybe 4-6 in all over the years, and remained unscathed, apart from some tiny scratches.
The sliding out of pocket does occur maybe a couple of times per year, but it's a low drop, and the phone should absolutely be able to handle that tiny drop, as it's an item for everyday use.
I've also never had problems with scratches on my screen on any phone, which is the reason people use screen protectors I guess, which I don't either, because they are ugly, for instance they create a tiny ring around the camera, and they feel awful IMO, my phone came with it, and it took exactly 10 seconds for me to decide to remove it, because I could feel the edge of the screen protector when using the phone.
But please stop with the dropping my phone regularly comments! Just because I dropped my Moto a few times (slid out of pocket) over almost 4 years! Always from low height, which it should be able to handle a few times.
Absolutely, but for some reason Intel has a history of failing in new areas. Their attempt with Itanium for high end was really bad, their attempt at RISC which mostly ended up in SCSI controllers was a failure too. Their failure with Atom not being competitive against Arm. Their attempts at compute for data-center has failed for decades against Nvidia, it's not something that just happened recently. And they tried in the 90's with a GPU that was embarrassingly bad and failed too.
They actually failed against AMD Athlon too, but back then, they controlled the market, and managed to keep AMD mostly out of the market.
When the Intel 80386 came out it was actually slower than the 80286!, When Pentium came out, it was slower than i486. When Pentium 4 came out, it was not nearly as efficient as Pentium 3. Intel has a long history of sub par products. Typically every second design by Intel had much worse IPC, so much so that it was barely compensated by the higher clocks of better production process. So in principle every second Intel generation was a bit like the AMD Bulldozer, but where for AMD 1 mistake almost crashed the company, Intel managed to keep profiting even from sub par products.
So it's not really a recent problem, Intel has a long history of intermittently not being a very strong competitor or very good at designing new products and innovating. And now they've lost the throne even on X86! Because AMD beat the crap out of them, with chiplets, despite the per core speed of the original Ryzen was a bit lower than what Intel had.
What kept Intel afloat and hugely profitable when their designs were inferior, was that they were always ahead on the production process, that was until around 2016. Where Intel lost the lead, because their 10nm process never really worked and had multiple years of delays.
Still Intel back then always managed to come back like they did with Core2, and the brand and the X86 monopoly was enough to keep Intel very profitable, even through major strategic failures like Itanium.