Way to judge hundreds of millions of people at once. Rather than talking about people we don't know, let's talk about the phone.
You cannot evaluate the two devices by only using basic specs like that. The situation is complex. They are running completely different operating systems. The APIs the apps are written in use different design patterns and memory management. They don't have identical needs regarding memory, CPU, and GPU. Look at anandtech.com's cpu benchmarks. The iPhone's CPU does that with only 2 cores against the 4 and 8 core competition! I guess that spec doesn't mean much. The same thing happens in other areas.
The 1440p screen is amazing for sure. But once pixels are smaller than I can see, I can only see the downside, which is reduced graphics performance from drawing so many pixels. The Note needs it because it's also expected to drive that Gear VR headset, where you are looking at the Note screen through two magnifying lenses. You really need the resolution there. But the iPhone is not targeted with that in mind.
More megapixels is a bragging right that is no longer a clear win. It comes with compromises such as reduced low light sensitivity. Review after review reinforces the amazing job the iPhone's camera does with 8MP because of the effort that went into its image processor and emphasis on larger physical sensor pixels made possible by the lower megapixel number. You can't say more megapixels is better when there is a cost to winning that one spec. Samsung is definitely good at the spec race for sure.
Removable battery--sure, it's handy, but non-removeable is a design choice that has its merits. You can fit a bigger fixed battery because you don't need the internal structure of a removable cover. Or you can make the phone thinner and lighter while keeping the battery size similar. The choice is not black and white. It's a balance.
SD card support--Yes there is a certain appeal to having support for this. But I would guess the vast majority of people either just use the built in memory of their phone if it has a decent amount or they put a card in once and never change it out. As a product designer, it makes sense to want to unify that storage and give people enough out of the box so they never have to worry about it. This is what the iPhone and many Android phones do. Another issue is security. A lot of changes came down the pipe regarding SD card access and KitKat. Apps are segregated just like the iPhone is because it was too easy for malicious apps to move or make changes to files belonging to other apps.
Implementing SD cards on the iPhone brings another issue. The iPhone's file system is encrypted at the hardware level. It is physically impossible (according to the architecture) to write unencrypted data to the flash storage of the iPhone because the encryption happens on the data path between the cpu and the storage. It's one of the reasons it's super hard (and recently made impossible) to get at your phone's data without your passcode, to the point that Eric Holder is complaining. Google is doing the same thing, although I suspect not in hardware. Even pulling the flash chip out of your iphone and putting it in a computer to read won't help. This is what we are starting with. Now suppose you want to add SD card support. In order for data to be written to the card unencrypted, you now have this entire category of files that is not safe from viewing or tampering at all. You can mount the card on a computer and read what you want and write what you want. You can use this opening to hack the phone by putting malicious files on the card. Reading the corrupt files can then easily be the vector for breaking into the phone. I imagine securing it to be a hard problem to solve. Why do this when you can just put more memory in such that the SD card no longer matters for most people. And they did--128GB is a lot.
This is all just engineering speculation, and my point is that it's not a case of SD cards automatically being superior. It's a design decision that has upsides and downsides. Not having an SD card and just including plenty of memory is also an excellent way to go. In the same way, judging phones by basic specs is really simplistic and not indicative of the user experience, which is what counts.
You cannot evaluate the two devices by only using basic specs like that. The situation is complex. They are running completely different operating systems. The APIs the apps are written in use different design patterns and memory management. They don't have identical needs regarding memory, CPU, and GPU. Look at anandtech.com's cpu benchmarks. The iPhone's CPU does that with only 2 cores against the 4 and 8 core competition! I guess that spec doesn't mean much. The same thing happens in other areas.
The 1440p screen is amazing for sure. But once pixels are smaller than I can see, I can only see the downside, which is reduced graphics performance from drawing so many pixels. The Note needs it because it's also expected to drive that Gear VR headset, where you are looking at the Note screen through two magnifying lenses. You really need the resolution there. But the iPhone is not targeted with that in mind.
More megapixels is a bragging right that is no longer a clear win. It comes with compromises such as reduced low light sensitivity. Review after review reinforces the amazing job the iPhone's camera does with 8MP because of the effort that went into its image processor and emphasis on larger physical sensor pixels made possible by the lower megapixel number. You can't say more megapixels is better when there is a cost to winning that one spec. Samsung is definitely good at the spec race for sure.
Removable battery--sure, it's handy, but non-removeable is a design choice that has its merits. You can fit a bigger fixed battery because you don't need the internal structure of a removable cover. Or you can make the phone thinner and lighter while keeping the battery size similar. The choice is not black and white. It's a balance.
SD card support--Yes there is a certain appeal to having support for this. But I would guess the vast majority of people either just use the built in memory of their phone if it has a decent amount or they put a card in once and never change it out. As a product designer, it makes sense to want to unify that storage and give people enough out of the box so they never have to worry about it. This is what the iPhone and many Android phones do. Another issue is security. A lot of changes came down the pipe regarding SD card access and KitKat. Apps are segregated just like the iPhone is because it was too easy for malicious apps to move or make changes to files belonging to other apps.
Implementing SD cards on the iPhone brings another issue. The iPhone's file system is encrypted at the hardware level. It is physically impossible (according to the architecture) to write unencrypted data to the flash storage of the iPhone because the encryption happens on the data path between the cpu and the storage. It's one of the reasons it's super hard (and recently made impossible) to get at your phone's data without your passcode, to the point that Eric Holder is complaining. Google is doing the same thing, although I suspect not in hardware. Even pulling the flash chip out of your iphone and putting it in a computer to read won't help. This is what we are starting with. Now suppose you want to add SD card support. In order for data to be written to the card unencrypted, you now have this entire category of files that is not safe from viewing or tampering at all. You can mount the card on a computer and read what you want and write what you want. You can use this opening to hack the phone by putting malicious files on the card. Reading the corrupt files can then easily be the vector for breaking into the phone. I imagine securing it to be a hard problem to solve. Why do this when you can just put more memory in such that the SD card no longer matters for most people. And they did--128GB is a lot.
This is all just engineering speculation, and my point is that it's not a case of SD cards automatically being superior. It's a design decision that has upsides and downsides. Not having an SD card and just including plenty of memory is also an excellent way to go. In the same way, judging phones by basic specs is really simplistic and not indicative of the user experience, which is what counts.
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