> 1700 euros

Right, thats the top specced 1TB version isnt it?

Amazon Germany has the basic 256g version for 1200€

No one sane buys it for the list price. During launch there are always various discounts. I got S25U for 800 (without sending my old phone, just some coupons) with a 5eur/month contract last year at launch. If it really lasts 7 years it's not even that expensive.

What gaming laptop?

Samsung has never respected the user. I remember having having a Galaxy S5 and every update it would reinstall all the bloatware like facebook and paypal. Everyone who cares about a platform that respects them and their time moved to iPhone long ago. Apple's AI features can be turned off with one global toggle, as well as more granular ones.

I'm much less concerned about a rando looking over my shoulder than I am the wealth of information the software hands out to its owners. It's like the difference between being seen in public by other pedestrians versus being captured by thousands of fixed surveillance cameras. Look all you want, so long as you're not wired into a database. Different threat models, I guess.

Or displaying your card out in the open, flashing it in front of everyone in the restaurant, grocery store, etc. With remote workers scanning through video feeds of people in public, it won't be long before they figure out the Meta glasses and similar cameras are high enough resolution to capture sensitive information, even if the actual user is 100% innocent and not doing anything wrong.

There was a gas station cashier that was using a memory palace trick to memorize card numbers and details, then stealing money later on. The bar was one of a little effort - not many people can do the memory palace thing, so it wasn't a threat vector. Now, everything is being recorded all the time, and you basically have to trust that everyone in the long list of people who have access to the video won't use it maliciously. We absolutely don't live in the type of society where that type of trust is warranted - there's gonna be lots of crime from unexpected places.

Throw in capturing logins, secure pins, touchscreen swipe sequences, etc, it won't even matter if you have all the best security features in the world.

Maybe implanted cryptographic key devices are the way to go, and you have to go into a perfectly secure SCIF with a faraday shielded closet in order to enter in your personal key, which can be used to provide tokens for other logins, verify actions, etc.

The world is so ridiculously insecure.

The people who are genuinely concerned about shoulder surfing probably slapped on a privacy filter anyway. They're no different from a screen protector. What the S26 Ultra can do is cool and super useful for the few people who need it, but I'd bet that all the rest will just show it off as a cool party trick and nothing more.

I've seen this with laptops that came with integrated electronically controlled privacy filter. They were nice but eventually the added cost, complexity, and lowered image quality didn't make them a popular choice even for enterprise users. I think only HP still offers them from the big brands, Dell and Lenovo don't do it anymore.

significantly and dramatically are two different things. I was sceptic when buying it but have no problem using the display with privacy screen on, and dont see that much difference in brightness, even in direct sunlight, fwiw.

Bonus with it on you can stretch your battery life, only half the pixels actually active saves quite some battery, who knew!

I just don't believe these geekbench numbers represent real world performance numbers. Like... Firefox compile times or late game civ 6 turn times or such things

Similar functionality also available for Pixel https://lifehacker.com/tech/android-16-desktop-mode-pixel

Still not great, I'm using it on my S23 and I would compare it to a 2010-era Linux WM.

It's good enough to use on the go I'd say but not beyond that.

Remove your Samsung account.

It is needed for a bunch of things including all bixby stuff (which is admittedly starting to get useful) but those constant ToS updates can drive a man mad.

If any Samsung employees are reading this: whoever is pushing those ToS changes is probably a on Apples payroll ;)

Two problems can be concerning at the same time!

Its not a filter or layer, its the pixels themselves. Half are normal wide viewing angle pixels, the other half are pixels with a much more narrow viewing angle. When activated they just ... switch off the normal ones.

See for example:

https://gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s26_ultra-review-2939p3....

Or from the official Samsung presentation:

https://youtube.com/shorts/qnUVGPkeCCc

Basically half of the pixels have a narrow view angle, the others don't, when you activate the privacy mode, only the narrow pixels remain, so you can see the screen only looking straight.

I got this explanation for the mkbh video: https://youtu.be/nfHRMqqO578?t=141&si=iEhVrdCuLN0fkasd which illustrates it very well (2m24 if timestamp doesn't work)