dethac

Virtualization support as well.

It's also OLED, though, so there's that.

I'd imagine that that's implicit: Nobody's buying a 40k display to show a desktop.

https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/dell-ultrasharp-27-4k-hdr-mo...

I mean there's that.

Presumably because the market is already saturated by everyone else.

IIRC Sony's is an OLED display. Different display technology. Very expensive. Entirely different. You can't do what an OLED can do with an LCD.

Isn't that thing OLED? I'm not surprised that it's 30k. It's effectively local dimming... for each pixel. Not at all comparable to Apple's HDR display.

Threadripper exists for PCIe + DDR4 (less than the reported 2TiB because of no RDIMM support, but theoretically could hit 2 TiB if people start producing 256GB UDIMMs.

But... 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0. 32 cores. 64 threads with SMT. 80MB of cache (think of all the locality!). 256GB of RAM support (if you're using more, you're probably doing scientific compute and you're probably better off on Linux anyway, I'd assume). ECC support. 1700 USD. Quad channel RAM.

Xeon W-3175X? 48 lanes of PCIe 3.0. 28 cores. Probably no more Hyperthreading after Zombieload. 512GB RAM support. ECC support. $3000 USD. Hexa channel RAM.

And better yet? Competent TR motherboards with all the RAM/GPU/whatever support you need go as low as 400 CAD.

Also, if you're less Mr. Moneybags, the 2920X exists. 12C/24T, same memory and IO capacity. 650USD.

But wait, there's more! TR 1900X is older, but: 8C/16T, 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes, quad channel RAM. Same kind of memory support: 256GB. 300USD.

A far shot from "ridiculously expensive" considering 300 USD (or even 650 USD) is less than some mainstream desktop CPUs. The 9900K is 490USD. The 9980XE is 2000USD.

Also, TR3 with PCIe 4.0 is on the horizon, and Zen 2 with PCIe 4.0 is here. 24 lanes of PCIe 4.0 has equivalent bandwidth to 48 lanes of PCIe 3.0: same as the Xeon W-3175X.

Big computers with lots of memory and IO capacity can be decently cost effective. You just can't ask Intel.

Probably saving golden 8 core dies for Epyc.

It'll come whenever the market needs it, but right now they're doing fine without it.

The 2400G existed. It's a lower end chip, but has the GPU you want.

Image processing is probably offloaded to some sort of custom silicon. If that is the case, then the generational performance uplift would be massive.

Consider this:

Decoding a big fat X265 file on your 2012 MBP would be atrocious because it doesn't have hardware X265 decode, but decoding it on your XS would probably be fine.

The attention to detail isn't always a good thing, though. Sometimes, they see the tree (wow, a thinner display cable) instead of the forest (this hinge has to flex thousands of times). Other times, they'll see a much thinner keyboard, but miss that debris could break the mechanism entirely. Even other times, they can forget to enable proper thermal controls or network drivers. Or, they can make sure your phone doesn't charge unless it wakes first. Bugger.

I mean, compared to $400 HPs or $200 Samsungs, there's definitely more attention to detail, but that isn't exactly a very fair comparison.

I'd argue that the whole consumer electronics industry is negligent, including Apple.

It's undeniable that they've made aggressive hardware decisions, but... Intel dwarves their second largest competitor (AMD) in revenue by an order of magnitude... and remember, AMD sells GPUs as well.

They are BY FAR the largest producer of CPUs for laptops, desktops, and servers. Note that on each of these platforms, arbitrary code execution is an issue.

Now for phones? Less so. Aggressively locked down software can help.

So, as a researcher, who are you going to research? AMD, who has negligible market share? Apple, who completely locks down their platform? Qualcomm? Well, that's an option, but Intel still makes them look small. Vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs affect the most people and the most money... You're naturally going to put more research into Intel.

It absolutely does have something to do with how large Intel is.

I think it's good to be cautiously optimistic. Microsoft has a massive revenue source in Azure, and losing 100 million on Github to make 1 billion in Azure is... a no brainer.

Can't set them as default though :(

So the Pixel 3a XL loses out on resolution (the Pixel 3a does not... go figure) vs the Pixel 3 counterpart.

The SD670 performs close to the SD835 in CPU, but noticeably worse in CPU. It should be noticeably worse in CPU than the 845 due to its 2+6 configuration rather than the 845's 4+4 configuration.

You get eMMC storage with F2FS (acceptable, but slower than UFS 2.0/2.1)

You get glass from some Japanese manufacturer instead of Corning.

Plastic body (yay!)

It's a number of compromises (not minor by any means), but the price is a pretty noticeable drop.

Invest in Kotlin. Kotlin is useful for Android NOW. Whenever Dart starts becoming more mainstream, you'll know and have enough time to react to it.

The keyboard changes honestly make no sense.

While I never used the context key (and indeed neither my 60% layout nor the original IBM Model M layout seem to have it anyway), I don't see the purpose of a Print Screen there either.

The Fn/Ctrl swap is... confusing. I'm guessing Lenovo tried to copy the MacBook format without thinking it through. Personally, I prefer Caps Lock as Control, though. I never use Caps Lock.

Home and End on laptops have almost always (it seems) been up on the function row. On a traditional layout, they're to the right, which obviously would not work on smaller form factors. Even with the 7-row keyboard, it was on the top.

Having tried other light laptops including the MacBook 13, the XPS 13, the HP Spectre 13, the Razer Blade Stealth, and the Dell Latitude 73 something or other (this was pretty good)... they just can't compete mechanically. No concavity on the keycaps is a big bummer. Some of them are obnoxiously loud. Some of them have piss-poor tactile feedback. Some of them are okay, but lack travel. Some of them bottom out too hard. Some of them bottom out too softly. It's a rough keyboard game out there. None of the layouts work for me on their own, so I always have to end up tweaking them slightly to my tastes. Caps Lock is useless to me, and I prefer Backspace being one key down. I've considered swapping Right Shift, but I'm not sure what to swap it to. Any ideas?

I own a T450s. Definitely no bloatware that persists through a reinstall (that was for a particular case with Lenovo's consumer lineup... completely unexcusable, but never touched ThinkPads), which I would recommend for any laptop regardless of the OS, especially if you're buying used. Doesn't matter if it runs MacOS (unless, of course, you implicitly trust Apple's supply chain to be 100% robust), Linux (which I don't think anyone except System76 or Dell actually sell out of the box), BSD (which I don't think anyone sells out of the box), or Windows (which has competent driver detection and management now, making most "system update tools" useless). Wipe it and restart.

These criticisms exist because Samsung does not offer first-party solutions to things such as malware detection, location sharing, storage management, caller ID, VPN, music streaming, and news aggregation. It's unclear how exactly these services are being used (Samsung should be more clear on this front) and what parts of it are integrated (Samsung should be more clear here as well).

But, well, put it this way. If Google or Apple had offered first-party solutions to each of those services, would they be criticized for offering bloatware as well? No, probably not. So, is the issue here that the services aren't first-party (Spotify) or that they aren't from traditionally trustworthy sources (McAfee)? If it's the former, why does it matter? If it's the latter, then Samsung should be more clear about the extent of the influence of the other company, which they are not, but that shouldn't necessarily exclude them from collaborating.

Now, there are some key issues that should be criticized. Hard. A persistent notification? It's unforgivable. Facebook? The amount of tracking they can do makes them a threat to the device. It's basically spyware. It can be disabled, sure, but it shouldn't be enabled in the first place (except to enable Gear VR, I guess).

But really, can you trust any major tech company, considering programs like PRISM exist and are in operation? What differentiates Google from Apple when the device is still able to transmit whatever it wants to whoever it wants however it wants? Apple or Google may or may not be tracking some piece of data, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't being collected and tracked by someone. That the companies themselves don't happen to store the data that happens to be the very thing they make their money protecting and using? It's definitely better in that your data isn't being used for the company's profit, but is it really any better for privacy from, say, the government?

The thing with keyboards is that... well, for one, scissor switches are perfectly acceptable (the ones in the 2015 MBP and older, and pretty much all laptops today). Further, the thickness of the scissor mechanism can be made to be REALLY small. See: Acer Swift 7 (9.95mm thick, total), the XPS 13 (11.6mm thick, total) the X1 Carbon 6 (15.95mm thick, total), and pretty much any other Ultrabook. This is compared to the MacBook Pro, which is 14.9mm thick. Note that the X1 Carbon has TDP-up configured to 25W vs 28W on the MacBook Pro and the XPS 13 has TDP-up configured to 26W. Point being, thermal constraints did not force a keyboard redesign to fit the new form factor.

This feels like something Google would do: Take something that's perfectly functional, change it entirely, remove features, make it less functional, have it be buggy as hell, then release it while deprecating the old one. Now, sell it as an innovative new feature.

In short: the keyboard redesign does not appear to have any real reason behind it, and it's essentially change for the sake of change.

Thing is, for a majority of people, life in China is perfectly normal (other than maybe air quality and population density, but the Chinese government has tried hard to combat those issues).

Most people are able to live normal lives where the government doesn't really have a massive influence. Even if it does, it's usually in terms of infrastructure development (transportation, housing, etc.), which can be done much more rapidly than in, say, the US (look at high-speed rail deployment in China over the past decade or so).

Plus, what's the alternative? China would be trading their fast-paced economic expansion and massive infrastructure investments (necessary to keep pace with the expanding number of people in China) for more... freedom?

And I think that's really the key here. The Chinese government is NOT incompetent and they're able to more than adequately provide for their citizens' needs. So, who would WANT a revolution?

China has more than a billion people. It might be the sentiment ONE Chinese person may have, or even a group, but one Weibo user does not represent a significant fraction of Chinese citizens.

And no, I'm not even sure many people know that Leica collaborates with Huawei.

Galaxy Buds might be worthwhile if you're willing to open it up. Supposedly it's not too hard.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds+Teardown...

Geekbench is, IIRC, a pretty non-representative benchmark. Nowhere is this more clear than looking at Samsung Exynos Geekbench results vs. their real-world performance. It's okay for comparing iterations on an architecture (e.g. A11 vs A12, SD845 vs SD855), but it falls apart a bit otherwise.

Huawei's phone lineup relies on offering an option for every price segment. Basically, it boils down to how much a user is willing to spend.

Apple's phone lineup relies on targeting a particular market segment. If you can't afford it, save until you can.

Apple has, with the iPhone, ignored region-locked devices.

By doing so, they're effectively sacrificing a massive portion of the Asian market. Oh well.

So... because China violates the rights of Chinese citizens, the US deserves to violate the rights of Chinese citizens?

It goes both ways. I'm sure we'd all prefer if everyone would just stop violating human rights, but that isn't happening. It's not fair to ignore the US's human rights violations just because of China's, and it's not fair to ignore China's human rights violations just because of the US's. Both governments are hypocritical.

Back in 2014 they issued a recall for batteries... They expanded it in 2015. IIRC it's still valid today if your battery is the original one. IIRC there wasn't any issue, but there was a risk in the design that could pose a safety hazard.

They also recalled some devices for a battery enclosure problem again in 2018. Same deal: no issues, but there was a manufacturing defect that could have resulted in an issue. It was a loose screw.

You're looking at it wrong. It isn't a dent, it's an aesthetic mark to help differentiate your device and deter thieves. OMG you just don't get it do you? You must use a personal computer.