The US gets the worst phones

GadgetsCloseGadgetsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GadgetsReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReportTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechThe US gets the worst phones But Apple’s new CEO could fix that. But Apple’s new CEO could fix that.by Dominic PrestonCloseDominic PrestonNews EditorPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Dominic PrestonApr 25, 2026, 11:00 AM UTCLinkShareGiftImage: The VergeDominic PrestonCloseDominic PrestonPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Dominic Preston is a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.Apple and Samsung dominate the US phone market, and they’ve done so for years. Together with Google, they’ve shaped our sense of what a smartphone is and what it can do, pushing the boundaries of mobile photography, software, and processing power. But over the last few years, they’ve sat back, content to iterate rather than innovate — and in the interim, China’s tech giants have plowed ahead. Now a gulf is growing between the phones on sale in the US and those available in the rest of the world. US phone buyers are missing out.Some of the blame for that gap lies with Apple. Where it goes, the market follows, and in recent years it’s gone slowly. But with new CEO John Ternus — a longtime hardware guy — ready to take the helm from this September’s iPhone 18 launch onwards, one can dream that Tim Cook’s cautious approach to iPhone spec updates might be behind us. If Ternus decides to pick up the pace, the rest of the US market might just follow.US phones lag behind what’s on sale elsewhere in a whole host of ways, but the two big ones are cameras and batteries. The battery boost is a relatively recent phenomenon, the next step following years of Chinese phones offering faster and faster charging speeds (which still haven’t meaningfully reached the US). The bigger batteries are due to silicon-carbon cells, which use silicon to replace some of the graphite in a lithium battery’s anode. The resulting batteries are more energy-dense, allowing phones to fit much larger battery capacities into the same space. Regular-size phones have doubled in capacity over the last few years, while thin phones and foldables can now last longer than regular slab phones in the US — Honor’s Magic 8 Pro Air is almost as thin as Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge, but has a bigger battery than the S26 Ultra.The Oppo Find X9 Ultra has a 7,050mAh battery and a 10x telephoto camera, and isn’t launching in the US. Photo: Dominic Preston / The VergeSo far, the triptych of Apple, Samsung, and Google haven’t announced any phones using silicon-carbon cells, nor has any of them said they plan to — though a handful of Motorola and OnePlus models have been released in the US using the chemistry. By contrast, every major Chinese Android manufacturer has adopted it.Part of the slow US adoption may be down to long-term performance concerns. Silicon-carbon cells have the potential to lose total capacity more quickly over time, so a bigger battery on day one may not stay that way forever. Chinese phone…

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