Comment on what's stops one from scavenging the best parts of old phones and putting them into a new one?
linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s prohibitively difficult. Like not just hard, but complete redesigns for even fairly small adaptations.
Hardware: The parts just don’t replace each other one for one, and it’s not just where the wires are. Each SOC or component requires a cadre of resistors capacitors, voltages, signal lines that don’t line up well between different products. The boards that these components mount on are many layers thick with wiring hidden in multiple layers. You can’t even just bodge and reroute everything all the time. In many cases the packages wouldn’t even fit in the intended target spot and phones have precious little space to spare. Then for a lot of chips you’ve got thermal considerations.
The 10x camera for an s23 wouldn’t have a chance at fitting in a pixel, the focal lengths are different It literally wouldn’t even fit in the case.
Drivers/software: especially relation to cameras, a lot of third party software can’t even run the full compliment of Samsung cameras. Commands to switch back and forth between lenses aren’t universal. In a lot of cases you can screw around with different camera software and get it to work and make modifications for the cameras to signal when they need changes. But then when you take a s24 which is 64-bit only you can no longer run any of the 32-bit camera software that used to do things like sphere camera. And then even if you did manage to swap sensors out all of the lens correction would be wrong. You’d end up with Chroma and correction issues. The cameras aren’t just giving you what’s off the sensor anymore. A long time ago we used to get big upgrades in picture quality going from one sensor to a new more sensitive sensor, We now do the opposite and use really big sensors that take multiple samples per pixel and we drive those pictures with complicated software or even AI to generate better looking imagery. When all the software and hardwares tuned together to give you a better image and you swap the hardware out it’s a bad thing.
These devices are all very custom they’re very purpose-built around each one of the features and the subcomponents don’t even match up neatly in between different models in the same line. I’m fairly certain you couldn’t even fit an s23u 10x camera into an s24u.
TL;DR it’s essentially as close to impossible as you could make it in just about every way you can imagine.