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Selasa, 09 April 2019

LG G8 ThinQ review: many gimmicks, not enough progress - The Verge

If you’re looking for a new phone in 2019 that has a bunch of features, the LG G8 ThinQ should be on your shortlist. Compared to something like the Google Pixel 3, a purposefully plain phone, the LG G8 is on the opposite side of the spectrum. It’s vibrant and chock-full of experimental software tweaks and fan-favorite hardware features. It’s refreshing to use a phone that’s capable of so much. LG places no walls around you; you can use as much or as little as it offers.

At its core, the G8 is a competent Android 9 Pie phone with the latest Snapdragon 855 processor and 6GB of RAM. It has a sharp 6.1-inch OLED display, a screen-rattling loudspeaker, and a headphone jack bolstered by a Quad DAC that sounds incredible with wired headphones. The G8 also offers wireless charging, supports microSD storage, and has an IP68 rating against water and dust ingress.

Most of what I just listed describes what you’ll also get in 2018’s LG G7 ThinQ, which you can find for roughly half the cost of the $840 G8. In fact, the G8’s design is mostly a rehash, with its 19.5:9 screen aspect ratio and wide notch to match, though the G8’s notch is a little different. Populated by a new Z Camera multisensor system, it can unlock the phone securely using your face or your hand’s vein structure. Z Camera also allows for the phone’s other big feature, Air Motion, which lets you use hand gestures to, say, raise the volume or pause a song in Spotify, without touching the G8.

6.5 Verge Score

Good Stuff

Comfortable to hold
Quad DAC yields great sound quality
Face Unlock is fast and easy
Improved battery capacity

Bad Stuff

Piezoelectric earpiece replacement isn’t loud enough
May not receive timely software updates
Hand ID and Air Motion are gimmicky and don’t always work

Digging deeper into the G8’s unique features, its notch houses an 8-megapixel selfie camera, a Time of Flight (ToF) sensor, and an infrared emitter. Once the object or person in the frame is covered in infrared light, the ToF sensor can detect its depth, which is critical for LG’s new features, Face Unlock and Hand ID. Face Unlock, as you might expect, gathers a 3D scan of your face angled in different ways, and it won’t unlock with a 2D image. I tried to fool it with a picture and a video recorded on a different phone, but I didn’t have any success. A good failure. Face Unlock is definitely fast and convenient enough that I rarely used the fingerprint sensor located on the phone’s back. However, I can’t say such positive things about Hand ID.

Hand ID unlocks your phone when it authenticates the unique vein layout in your palm above the Z Camera, and LG notes that this is a less secure method of protecting your phone. Hand ID is an interesting idea, but in practice, it’s slow to detect a match, often failing to read my hand accurately. Even when it’s successful, sometimes it asks for a secondary method of authentication. Hand ID is more of a roadblock than it is a viable way to gain access to the G8.

LG’s marketing loudly trumpets these new features, but when you pick up the phone, the device itself doesn’t make much of an effort to convince you to use them. That’s a shame because Face Unlock is one of my favorite features on the G8. But as for Hand ID and Air Motion, which we dig into below, they don’t rise above the status of party tricks that may delight but probably won’t convert onlookers (or even the person using the G8). The unique features are cool when they work. Even when they do, the Z Camera’s additions don’t enrich my experience to the extent that I’d pay a premium for them.

Some retailers are offering the G8 for $699 unlocked for use with any GSM or CDMA carrier, and if you’re able to find it for this price, you’ll get a lot of phone for your money. But my feelings about its highlight features aside, there’s the lingering issue of software updates. The most damning thing about every new LG phone that hits the market is that timely software updates are not forthcoming. Here’s a familiar refrain: LG has done too little to assure prospective buyers that this year’s flagship phone will be kept up to date.

In my colleague Chris Welch’s review of the G7 ThinQ in 2018, he said LG “promised to make a better, honest-to-goodness real effort at delivering future software updates at a timely pace.” That didn’t work out as planned. Android 9 Pie first launched in August 2018, though some G7 users are still waiting for the update. Things may change, eventually, but I don’t think that they’ll be any different for the G8. You’re buying an Android Pie phone that might be stuck on Pie for a long time after the release of its successor. Surprise me, LG.

Relative to the 2018 LG G7, the G8 feels more weighty and substantial, but unless you’re picking apart a spec sheet, you might not notice any differences. The nicest upgrade is the fact that the rear cameras now sit under the same piece of glass covering the rear of the phone, generating no camera bump or disturbance at all. Compared to its Android contemporaries, the G8 is one of the smaller flagships on the market, and it should appeal to people who find the Plus models from other manufacturers to be too big to handle.

LG G8 ThinQ specs

Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor
6.1-inch QHD+ (3120 x 1440) OLED display
Dual 12-megapixel and 16-megapixel rear-facing cameras (one of which is super wide); single 8-megapixel front-facing camera
6GB of RAM with 128GB of expandable storage
3,500mAh battery with wireless charging
Rear fingerprint sensor, side-mounted power button, Face Unlock, Hand ID
Three color options: red (available only at T-Mobile), black, gray
A “Boombox speaker,” Hi-Fi quad-DAC, and DTS:X 3D Surround Sound
Shipping with Android 9 Pie

On the inside, the G8 features the Snapdragon 855 processor that’s Qualcomm’s current best chip for Android phones, and the phone’s 6GB of RAM makes for a smooth experience. Switching through apps, scrolling around mindlessly, and putting the G8’s camera features to the test didn’t cause any noticeable hiccups. The 3,500mAh battery is a sizeable increase over the G7’s 3,000mAh, and it’s more than you’ll find in the Samsung Galaxy S10 or S10E. I didn’t have to worry about the G8 running out of battery on a typical busy day of taking pictures outside and chatting with friends on Snapchat, but it needed a refill every evening.

LG opted to swap the bright IPS LCD used in the G7 for an OLED display, which gives it deeper blacks and better contrast. The company also got rid of the earpiece, instead utilizing a piezoelectric speaker behind the screen to create sound with vibrations from the phone’s frame. This works well in quiet settings, and when paired with its loudspeaker, it creates a somewhat convincing stereo effect. But if you take a call on a windy day or in a busy restaurant, it is far too weak to hear clearly.

LG also uses the Z Camera to add bokeh to selfie portraits, but that really isn’t much of an improvement. Even the Google Pixel 2’s single-lens computational bokeh worked more effectively than LG’s bespoke hardware. Speaking of the camera performance, I’ve always felt that LG’s optics are on the edge of something great, but they remain a step behind the competition. Easy shots with generous amounts of natural light are decent, but they usually come out fuzzy around the edges and have a cooler color temperature than I like. Good shots are possible even at night, though LG’s Night view doesn’t hold a candle to the Huawei P30 Pro’s low-light capabilities or the Pixel’s Night Sight. Like last year’s phone, the G8 is still slow to capture, which leads to lots of blurry photos. Additionally, it has a hard time getting skin tones right, portrait shots have inconsistent bokeh, and the auto-exposure can be all over the place.

LG was able to patch previous phones with AI features that were said to enhance low-light performance, so I’m interested to see if LG could improve the state of things here. But when it comes to LG and delivering software when a device needs it the most, I’m not hopeful.

Despite its limitations, I think that this is the closest that an LG camera has come to producing photos that I’m happy posting to social media without retouching. If auto mode isn’t getting the job done, you can get good results with the manual mode, which lets you seize control over the usual variables like shutter speed and ISO, and the ultra wide angle shots are always fun to snap.

The Z Camera can do another interesting trick called Air Motion. It’s a feature that lets you control a few tasks with hand gestures. What it actually lets you do differs slightly depending on the app you’re using, though the procedure to initiate it is the same: hold your hand near the phone’s front-facing sensors, and wait until you see a stripe of blue light beneath the notch. Then, a small window will show your hand as viewed through the infrared camera. While using Spotify, for instance, you can tweak the volume by making a knob-turning motion or pause a song by moving your hand left or right of center. The controls are similar for other multimedia apps that you download on the G8, like YouTube, Amazon Music, and the preinstalled music and video apps. For practically any other app, the default Air Motion gesture is a pinch to capture a screenshot. Then you can set a custom shortcut to open any app that you have downloaded by moving your hand left or right of center.

I’m sure that Air Motion will appeal to some, but the only valid use case for the feature that I could dream up was if you need to turn up the volume or pause the music while you’re handling delicate pastry or painting a room. The feature isn’t fleshed out or anywhere near responsive enough to be a useful accessibility tool. In my experience, asking Google Assistant for help gets most jobs done faster, even though Assistant can’t take screenshots. To summon the voice assistant, you can push the dedicated side button on the G8, or just say, “Hey, Google.”

Outside of LG’s own sphere of design, other phones are going all in on new hardware features like hole-punch cameras and in-display fingerprint sensors. It’s not a big strike against the G8 that it doesn’t have these novelties, especially since we found the in-display fingerprint sensor in the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus to be slow compared to traditional fingerprint sensors. But by comparison, the G8’s design is basically a repeat of last year’s LG G7 ThinQ, and sitting still in the smartphone market makes it an even harder sell.

Of course, some mainstays from past LG phones are a good thing. Its best-in-class haptics motor, for example, is always welcome to the party. More phones are beginning to take haptic feedback seriously, providing more nuanced vibrations than bleary buzzes, and LG still leads the pack of Android phone makers. The haptics almost purr when you navigate the G8. Whether you’re running through basic tasks, like texting, or scrolling through your list of opened apps using Android 9 Pie’s pill-shaped home button, expressive haptics make bland tasks a little more fun.

WTF is a DAC?

The digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is an essential component in any modern audio system. It’s the circuitry that converts the 0s and 1s of your digitally stored music into an electric signal that can be played back via headphones and speakers. The reason why DACs matter is that the process of conversion is not straightforward. There are a bunch of errors and flaws to correct for, and a perfect translation is very difficult to achieve. The best DACs can scale in price up into the tens of thousands of dollars, but most of us will experience the cheapest varieties, which come integrated in our smartphones, laptops, and basically any digital device that produces sound. Wireless headphones each have their own built-in DAC, which means their sound quality isn’t dependent on the device that provides the music. The headphones do their own conversion.

Another feature I’m always happy to see is the headphone jack. And since it’s in an LG flagship phone, it’s not just any headphone jack. There’s a Quad DAC built in that dramatically improves the sound quality with wired headphones. It’s not activated by default, but when I switch on the Quad DAC, music occupies a more expansive soundstage, with each instrument and layer of the track coming through clearer. The additional DTS: X virtual surround sound effect adds a bit more attack to your tracks if you want a fuller, bass-heavy sound. To achieve similar results with other phones, you’ll have to get a portable DAC or stick to using it at home with a desk-bound DAC. Either option is an added expense and quite a bit more cumbersome than what LG provides.

The G8 continues LG’s dead sprint to innovate. Most times, it seems, just for the sake of saying that it tried. The byproduct is an improvement, in the most inconsequential of ways, over the G7 ThinQ. Ultimately, it’s an incremental upgrade that offers better battery life, a better screen, a faster processor, and more RAM. This year’s phone places emphasis on the new Z Camera that enables Hand ID and Air Motion, and while interesting, I don’t think that they’re selling points that you should care about. Without those features, this year’s phone doesn’t move the bar.

LG usually overhauls its G-series each year, but comparing it to Apple’s smartphone naming conventions, the G8 is more of an “S” upgrade to the G7 ThinQ. Many things about it are the same, but there are a few improvements that might interest you. Most S-year phones are worth checking out because, as Dieter Bohn said in his review of the Pixel 3, “It’s better to be on the S-cycle: you get a faster phone, better camera, and the fixes that come after a year with the original design.” But aside from improved specs, the things that changed in the G8 ThinQ are things that I think most users can carry on without.

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https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18301982/lg-g8-thinq-review-android-phone-snapdragon-855-6-gb-ram-z-camera-sensor

2019-04-09 16:00:00Z
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The AI Race Expands: Qualcomm Reveals “Cloud AI 100” Family of Datacenter AI Inference Accelerators for 2020 - AnandTech

The impact that advances in convolutional neural networking and other artificial intelligence technologies have made to the processor landscape in the last decade is unescapable. AI has become the buzzword, the catalyst, the thing that all processor makers want a piece of, and that all software vendors are eager to invest in to develop new features and new functionality. A market that outright didn’t exist at the start of this decade has over the last few years become a center of research and revenue, and already some processor vendors have built small empires out of it.

But this modern era of AI is still in its early days and the market has yet to find a ceiling; datacenters continue to buy AI accelerators in bulk, and deployment of the tech is increasingly ratcheting up in consumer processors as well. In a market that many believe is still up for grabs, processor markers across the globe are trying to figure out how they can become the dominant force in one of the greatest new processor markets in a generation. In short, the AI gold rush is in full swing, and right now everyone is lining up to sell the pickaxes.

In terms of the underlying technology and the manufacturers behind them, the AI gold rush has attracted interest from every corner of the technology world. This has ranged from GPU and CPU companies to FPGA firms, custom ASIC markers, and more. There is a need for inference at the edge, inference at the cloud, training in the cloud – AI processing at every level, served by a variety of processors. But among all of these facets of AI, the most lucrative market of all is the market at the top of this hierarchy: the datacenter. Expansive, expensive, and still growing by leaps and bounds, the datacenter market is the ultimate feast or famine setup, as operators are looking to buy nothing short of massive quantities of discrete processors. And now, one of the last juggernauts to sit on the sidelines of the datacenter AI market is finally making its move: Qualcomm

This morning at their first Qualcomm AI Day, the 800lb gorilla of the mobile world announced that they are getting into the AI accelerator market, and in an aggressive way. At their event, Qualcomm announced their first discrete dedicated AI processors, the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 family. Designed from the ground up for the AI market and backed by what Qualcomm is promising to be an extensive software stack, the company is throwing their hat into the ring for 2020, looking to establish themselves as a major vendor of AI inference accelerators for a hungry market.

But before we too far into things here, it’s probably best to start with some context for today’s announcement. What Qualcomm is announcing today is almost more of a teaser than a proper reveal – and certainly far from a technology disclosure. The Cloud AI 100 family of accelerators are products that Qualcomm is putting together for the 2020 timeframe, with samples going out later this year. In short, we’re probably still a good year out from commercial products shipping, so Qualcomm is playing things cool, announcing their efforts and their rationale behind them, but not the underlying technology. For now it’s about making their intentions known well in advance, especially to the big customers they are going to try to woo. But still, today’s announcement is an important one, as Qualcomm has made it clear that they are going in a different direction than the two juggernauts they’ll be competing with: NVIDIA and Intel.

The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Architecture: Dedicated Inference ASIC

So what exactly is Qualcomm doing? In a nutshell, the company is developing a family of AI inference accelerators for the datacenter market. Though not quite a top-to-bottom initiative, these accelerators will come in a variety of form factors and TDPs to fit datacenter operator needs. And within this market Qualcomm expects to win by virtue of offering the most efficient inference accelerators on the market, offering performance well above current GPU and FPGA frontrunners.

The actual architectural details on the Cloud AI 100 family are slim, however Qualcomm has given us just enough to work with. To start with, these new parts will be manufactured on a 7nm process – presumably TSMC’s performance-oriented 7nm HPC process. The company will offer a variety of cards, but it’s not clear at this time if they are actually designing more than one processor. And, we’re told, this is an entirely new design built from the ground up; so it’s not say a Snapdragon 855 with all of the AI bits scaled up.

In fact it’s this last point that’s probably the most important. While Qualcomm isn’t offering architectural details for the accelerator today, the company is making it very clear that this is an AI inference accelerator and nothing more. It’s not being called an AI training accelerator, it’s not being called a GPU, etc. It’s only being pitched for AI inference – efficiently executing pre-trained neural networks.

This is an important distinction because, while the devil is in the details, Qualcomm’s announcement very strongly points to the underlying architecture being an AI inference ASIC – ala something like Google’s TPU family – rather than being a more flexible processor. Qualcomm is of course far from the first vendor to build an ASIC specifically for AI processing, but while other AI ASICs have either been focused at the low-end of the market or reserved for internal use (Google’s TPUs again being the prime example), Qualcomm is talking about an AI accelerator to be sold to customers for datacenter use. And, relative to the competition, what they are talking about is much more ASIC-like than the GPU-like designs everyone is expecting in 2020 out of front-runner NVIDIA and aggressive newcomer Intel.

That Qualcomm’s Cloud AI 100 processor design is so narrowly focused on AI inference is critical to its performance potential. In the processor design spectrum, architects balance flexibility with efficiency; the closer to a fixed-function ASIC a chip is, the more efficient it can be. Just as how GPUs offered a massive leap in AI performance over CPUs, Qualcomm wants to do the same thing over GPUs.

The catch, of course, is that a more fixed-function AI ASIC is giving up flexibility. Whether that’s the ability to handle new frameworks, new processing flows, or entirely new neural networking models remains to be seen. But Qualcomm will be making some significant tradeoffs here, and the big question is going to be whether these are the right tradeoffs, and whether the market as a whole is ready for a datacenter-scale AI ASIC.

Meanwhile, the other technical issue that Qualcomm will have to tackle with the Cloud AI 100 series is the fact that this is their first dedicated AI processor. Admittedly, everyone has to start somewhere, and in Qualcomm’s case they are looking to translate their expertise in AI at the edge with SoCs into AI at the datacenter. The company’s flagship Snapdragon SoCs have become a force to be reckoned with, and Qualcomm thinks that their experience in efficient designs and signal processing in general will give the company a significant leg up here.

It doesn’t hurt either that with the company’s sheer size, they have the ability to ramp up production very quickly. And while this doesn’t help them against the likes of NVIDIA and Intel – both of which can scale up at TSMC and their internal fabs respectively – it gives Qualcomm a definite advantage over the myriad of smaller Silicon Valley startups that are also pursuing AI ASICs.

Why Chase the Datacenter Inferencing Market?

Technical considerations aside, the other important factor in today’s announcement is why Qualcomm is going after the AI inference accelerator market. And the answer, in short, is money.

Projections for the eventual size of the AI inferencing market vary widely, but Qualcomm buys in to the idea that datacenter inference accelerators alone could be a $17 billion market by 2025. And if this proves to be true, then it would represent a sizable market that Qualcomm would otherwise be missing out on. One that would rival the entirely of their current chipmaking business.

It’s also worth noting here that this is explicitly the inference market, and not the overall datacenter inference + training market. This is an important distinction because while training is important as well, the computational requirements for training are very difference from inferencing. While accurate inferencing can be performed with relatively low-precision datatypes like INT8 (and sometimes lower), currently most training requires FP16 or more. Which requires a very different type of chip, especially when we’re talking about ASICs instead of something a bit more general purpose like a GPU.

This also leans into scale: while training a neural network can take a lot of resources, it only needs to be done once. Then it can be replicated out many times over to farms of inference accelerators. So as important as training is, potential customers will simply need many more inference accelerators than they will training-capable processors.

Meanwhile, though not explicitly said by the company, it’s clear that Qualcomm is looking to take down market leader NVIDIA, who has built a small empire out of AI processors even in these early days. Currently, NVIDIA’s Tesla T4, P4, and P40 accelerators make up the backbone of datacenter AI inference processors, with datacenter revenues as a whole proving to be quite profitable for NVIDIA. So even if the total datacenter market doesn’t grow quite as projected, it would still be quite lucrative.

Qualcomm also has to keep in mind the threat from Intel, who has very publicly telegraphed their own plans for the AI market. The company has several different AI initiatives, ranging from low-power Movidius accelerators to their latest Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable CPUs. However for the specific market Qualcomm is chasing, the biggest threat is probably Intel’s forthcoming Xe GPUs, which are coming out of the company’s recently rebuilt GPU division. Like Qualcomm, Intel is gunning for NVIDIA here, so there is a race for the AI inference market that none of the titans wish to lose.

Making It to the Finish Line

Qualcomm’s ambitions aside, for the next 12 months or so, the company’s focus is going to be on lining up its first customers. And to do this, the company has to show that it’s serious about what it’s doing with the Cloud AI 100 family, that it can deliver on the hardware, and that it can match the ease of use of rivals’ software ecosystems. None of this will be easy, which is why Qualcomm has needed to start now, so far ahead of when commercial shipments begin.

While Qualcomm has had various dreams of servers and the datacenter market for many years now, perhaps the most polite way to describe those efforts are “overambitious.” Case in point would be Qualcomm’s Centriq family of ARM-based server CPUs, which the company launched with great fanfare back in 2017, only for the entire project to collapse within a year. The merits of Centriq aside, Qualcomm is still a company that is largely locked to mobile processors and modems on the chipmaking side. So to get datacenter operators to invest in the Cloud AI family, Qualcomm not only needs a great plan for the first generation, but a plan for the next couple of generations beyond that.

The upshot here is that in the young, growing market for inference accelerators, datacenter operators are more willing to experiment with new processors than they are, say, CPUs. So there’s no reason to believe that the Cloud AI 100 series can’t be at least moderately successful right off the bat. But it will be up to Qualcomm to convince the otherwise still-cautious datacenter operators that Qualcomm’s wares are worth investing so many resources into.

Parallel to this is the software side of the equation. A big part of NVIDIA’s success thus far has been in their AI software ecosystem – itself is an expansion of their decade-old CUDA ecosystem – which has vexed GPU rival AMD for a while now. The good news for Qualcomm is that the most popular frameworks, runtimes, and tools have already been established; TensorFlow, Caffe2, and ONNX are the big targets, and Qualcomm knows it. Which is why Qualcomm is promising an extensive software stack right off the bat, because nothing less than that will do. But Qualcomm does have to get up to speed very quickly here, as how well their software stack actually works can make or break the whole project. Qualcomm needs to deliver good hardware and good software to succeed here.

But for the moment at least, Qualcomm's announcement today is a teaser – a proclamation of what’s to come. The company has developed a very ambitious plan to break into the growing AI inference accelerator market, and to deliver a processor significantly unlike anything else on the open market. And while getting from here to there is going to be a challenge, as one of the titans of the processor world Qualcomm is among the most capable out there, both in funding and engineering resources. So it’s as much a question of how badly Qualcomm wants the inference accelerator market as it is their ability to develop processors for it; and how well they can avoid the kind of missteps that have sunk their previous server processor plans.

Above all else, however, Qualcomm won’t simply take the inference accelerator market: they’re going to have to fight for it. This is NVIDIA’s market to lose and Intel has eyes on it as well, never mind all the smaller players from GPU vendors, FPGA vendors, and other ASIC players. Any and all of which can quickly rise and fall in what’s still a young market for an emerging technology. So while it’s still almost a year off, 2020 is quickly shaping up to be the first big battle for the AI accelerator market.

Gallery: Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Press Deck

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https://www.anandtech.com/show/14187/qualcomm-reveals-cloud-ai-100-family-of-datacenter-ai-inference-accelerators-for-2020

2019-04-09 16:50:22Z
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Slack integrates Office 365 tools into its platform - Engadget

A lot of companies (Engadget included) rely on Slack to get things done, and in recent times the "MSN Messenger for the workplace" has integrated a whole bunch of apps into its platform, including Dropbox, Zoom and G Suite, to make workflow smoother. Now it's adding Office 365 tools to the mix.

From today, you'll be able to access Office 365 files, email and calendar right within the Slack browser, so you needn't go bouncing between tabs as you check off your to-do list. The Outlook Calendar app for Slack will message you as soon as you're invited to an event, where you can respond with a click, and be informed of any scheduling conflicts. If the event involves a call, you can jump right into it from the Slack notification, and the app will automatically set your Slack status to "in a meeting" based on your Outlook calendar.

Next up, email. The big sell here is the ability to pull emails out of siloed inboxes and into Slack channels where you can collaborate with teammates. Forward the message directly to a Slack channel or to a contact via direct message, and start discussing the issue at hand straight away -- no more long and confusing email chains.

Finally, Slack has brought about some updates to the OneDrive app. Now, instead of spinning up a new email chain just to share a OneDrive file, you can click the + icon that's next to where you write messages. Then select OneDrive and choose the file you'd like to share. When the file is added to a channel or direct message, members can discuss it in a thread, with the full context, and its content is automatically indexed and searchable.

Additionally -- and while this isn't an app, per se -- Slack has also added the ability to scroll through full PowerPoint presentations, Excel worksheets and Word files without having to download the whole document. This means you can review a deck from your phone before a presentation, or scan through a document while simultaneously chatting in channels -- a small tweak that could have a big impact on productivity. Slack says it's hoping to eventually bring similar functionality to OneDrive files, too.

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/09/slack-integrates-office-365-tools-into-its-platform/

2019-04-09 15:00:03Z
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Apple could release a 31.6-inch 6K external display this year - TechCrunch

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has released a new report about future Apple products — 9to5mac obtained the report. The company could be working on a new 31.6-inch external display with a 6K resolution that could work particularly well with the Mac Pro. New iPad and MacBook Pro models with better displays are also in the works.

Apple used to sell external displays but stopped selling the latest model in 2016. The 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display had an aluminum case and an LED-backlit LCD display. It had four times fewer pixels than the 27-inch 5K iMac with a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels. And it never made the switch to Thunderbolt 3.

When Apple told TechCrunch that it was working on a Mac Pro, the company confirmed there would be a new external display. “We want them to know we are going to work on a display for a modular system,” Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller told Matthew Panzarino.

According to Ming-Chi Kuo’s report, the new display will come earlier rather than later. Apple plans to launch the device during the second or third quarter of this year. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an announcement on June 3 at WWDC.

As for new iPad and MacBook Pro models, Ming-Chi Kuo has learned that Apple will use mini-LED technology to improve color gamut, contrast ratios, etc. This new technology should also improve battery performance compared to traditional LED displays.

Those new devices with mini-LED displays will arrive on the market at the end of 2020 or at some point during the first half of 2021. It’s unclear if Apple plans to update the MacBook Pro before then.

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https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/apple-could-release-a-31-6-inch-6k-external-display-this-year/

2019-04-09 14:09:54Z
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How to Beta Test Microsoft’s New Chromium-Based Edge Browser - Lifehacker

Microsoft has launched public testing for the newest version of its Edge web browser, which it built on top of Google’s “Chromium” open-source framework. Not only does this mean that Edge should (supposedly) work better with sites designed to modern web standards, but it also means that you’ll be able to run Chrome extensions in Edge—making the browser much more bearable than previous incarnations.

According to Microsoft, the new Edge will look pretty similar for existing users, though there are a few fun additions (support for synchronizing data across Edge instances, as well as the aforementioned extensions). Also, expect to encounter some bugs and other technical issues, as the new iteration of Edge is only available through two of Microsoft’s three beta build branches: “Dev,” which receives weekly updates, and “Canary,” which receives daily updates.

If you’re willing to ride the beta wave and give the new versions of Edge a try, you can download them through the Microsoft Edge Insider site. Click the button next to your desired build and download it. At the moment, the Chromium-Edge beta is only available on Windows 10 for now, though versions for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 are “coming soon,” as is a version for macOS. You can sign up at Microsoft Edge Insider to get a reminder when your preferred version of the beta goes live.

If either build sounds too glitchy for your tastes, Microsoft says that more stable branches—including a “beta” version that receives updates every six weeks and an even less temperamental “Stable” branch—will be coming soon.

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https://lifehacker.com/how-to-beta-test-microsoft-s-new-chromium-based-edge-br-1833889177

2019-04-09 13:00:00Z
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Apple reportedly to adopt mini LED backlighting - Digitimes

Apple reportedly to adopt mini LED backlighting

Siu Han, Taipei; Adam Hwang, DIGITIMES

Tuesday 9 April 2019

Apple will adopt mini LED backlighting for a 31.6-inch iMac to be launched in the second or third quarter of 2019, a 10- to 12-inch iPad to be unveiled in fourth-quarter 2020 or first-quarter 2021, and a 15- to 17-inch MacBook to be introduced in first-half 2021, according to a analyst Kuo Ming-chi at TF International Securities.

Apple is motivated by mini LED backlighting's support for wide color gamut, high contrast ratio, high dynamic range and local dimming, Kuo was widely cited by the local press as disclosing.

The backlight unit (BLU) to be used in the 31.6-inch iMac will be made of about 500 LED chips of 600 microns in size, with Japan-based Nichia to supply the LEDs, Kuo said.

Strictly speaking, this is a quasi-mini LED BLU because the chip size is much larger than those of standard mini LEDs, according to industry sources. However, the use of such a BLU will give opportunities for the supply chain to improve mini LED production in cost and yield rate, the sources noted.

But more than 10,000 mini LEDs will be needed for the iPad BLU, with the LEDs to be produced by Epistar, the LCD panels by LG Display and BLUs by Radiant Opto-Electronics, the sources said, adding the three companies will also be in the supply chain for the mini LED-backlit MacBook.

Epistar has broken into the Apple supply chain through TE Opto, a joint venture it established with Japan-based Toyoda Gosei to obtain licensed use of Toyoda's patents concerning mini LED technology, the sources indicated.

Epistar decline to comment on the report.

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https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190409PD202.html

2019-04-09 07:01:14Z
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The Morning After: The ISS is filthy - Engadget

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.

It's time to get up to speed on an intriguing 5G rumor and an expensive way for you to watch movies at home while they're still in theaters. Also, we've got some grimy news about the ISS and a fold-up bike that you might want to check out.

It's nice to want things.Huawei is 'open' to selling its 5G modems, but only to Apple

A source with knowledge of the situation has confirmed to Engadget that Huawei is now "open" to selling its 5G Balong 5000 chipsets, but only to one company: Apple. That would be a major change for the Chinese company, but the surprising change of heart only really matters because Apple appears to be in a tough spot with its sole modem supplier, Intel. Recent reports have suggested issues with the chipmaker could keep Apple from launching a 5G iPhone next year.

Yes, there's a dark mode.Microsoft releases first test builds of its Chromium-based Edge browser

Microsoft has released the first test versions of its new-look, Chromium-powered Edge browser on Windows 10. Edge also supports Chrome extensions and those from Microsoft's own extensions store.

With a little practice, Nick Summers transformed it in under 15 seconds.Gocycle's GX is a head-turning e-bike that folds in a flash

Gocycle has redesigned the folding mechanism and claims the GX can be broken down in under 10 seconds. Unlike the company's previous models, you don't have to take the wheels off. You merely flip the switch and fold the frame in half so both wheels are facing each other. Drop the handlebars down, and boom -- you can roll it along like a suitcase.

If you have to ask "how much" then you can't afford it.Bang and Olufsen's gorgeous OLED TV has 'wing' speakers that fold out

Samsung and Huawei's folding smartphones can't have all the fun. Bang and Olufsen's Beovision Harmony is its latest high-end TV design that uses a 77-inch LG OLED TV (nice choice, right there), wrapped in a very stylish frame and audio package that feels somewhere between a pop-up book mechanism and a butterfly wing.

Shout out to Staphylococcus aureus and Enterobacter.The ISS is crawling with nasty bacteria

"The ISS is a hermetically sealed closed system, subjected to microgravity, radiation, elevated carbon dioxide and the recirculation of air through HEPA filters, and is considered an 'extreme environment,'" said Dr Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That's the kind of place where bacteria thrive, and surprise, a new study found the ISS is home to pathogens just like the ones crawling around your local gym.

But wait, there's more...

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/09/the-morning-after/

2019-04-09 10:30:26Z
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