He who is JF Mezei said on Sun, 24 Dec 2017 16:52:37 -0500:

any idiot can see a $130 device is not equivalent to a $600 device.

I disagree.

Price is not an indication of quality. Price is an indication of demand.
Nothing else.

If you have a hurricane, the price for a piece of lumber can triple.
The quality didn't triple - only the demand did.

You can have a pharmaceutical company make Viagra for $100 a pill and then
when the patent turns off, the same guy can sell the blue pill for $100 and
the white pill for $50 where the only difference is demand.

You can buy car parts on your own or you can let the body shop buy them for
you and the price will be ten times for the same part when the body shop
buys it.

Price is never an indication of quality.
Price is only an indication of demand - which is highly influenced by ...
guess what ... c'mon ... guess.....

MARKETING.

I have a friend who bought an Asus Zen phone. On paper, it
had all the "superior" specs.

Hardware specs aren't everything I agree.
What matters is price to performance.

I would expect and hope that the iPhone 7 Plus is at least five times
faster in all meaningful benchmarks than the LG Stylo 3 Plus is, as the
Stylo has a *lot* of nice things that the iPhone will never have (e.g.,
removable battery, 2TB storage,

But it trurns out the camera, in real life, takes lousy shots, not good
in dark etc. The 5000mAh battery is great but doesn't give 2.8 times
the autonomy you'd get on an iPhone with 1800mAh.

I'll look on DXoMark for the camera comparison because they seem "similar"
but not the same.

For example, I think the f stop rating for the iPhone 7 Plus is better than
the f stop rating for the LG Stylo 3 Plus - which would make the cameras
perform differently when in low-light conditions.

I will defer to the camera tests to see which has the better camera where I
would hope that the iPhone has a far better camera because we all know
(from extensive DxoMark tests over time) that the iPhone cameras generally
are in the bottom of the top ten of the best Android cameras.
https://www.dxomark.com/introducing-the-new-dxomark-mobile-test-protocol/

A lot of playesr in the phone market play the specs game. Apple's specs
are traditionally unimpressive, but in real life, yields better quality
photos, more battery autonomy, faster CPU etc.

That's just dead wrong on the camera. You're too influenced by MARKETING.
Apple camera results are fine - but they're historically in the bottom of
the top ten or dozen of the best Android cameras at the same time.

We have many threads on this topic ... here's just one:
Finally, Apple makes a smartphone camera that isn't the worst
of the top ten best!
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/misc.phone.mobile.iphone/s-_cGzvapwY/58sodzJ8BQAJ

So just looking at the specs isn't enough, and a lot of the real life
measurements are not scientific, they are subjective (such as image
quality for photos taken).

I think that anyone who thinks iPhone cameras are the best is unduly
influenced by MARKETING where the specs aren't the problem. They are just
wrong (since the people who test camera output know how to test them).

Apple camera output is good - and it's in the top ten - but almost always
over time - it's been in the BOTTOM of the top ten at any given moment -
although for a moment or two - they were the number one camera - and then
slipped back - only weeks later to fourth or fifth place before dropping
back to where they typically are, in tenth place.

Still - the cameras are good - they're just not the best and never were.

But I do agree with you that the specifications don't tell everything but
that camera ranking is based on output - not on specs.

Back to the comparison of the $130 LG Stylo 3 Plus to the iPhone 7 Plus, I
would HOPE to dear God that the iPhone (at its price) has (far) better
meaningful benchmark numbers. It must - but I haven't found the direct
1-to-1 comparison benchmarks yet.