Tech

It’s a sad day for anyone who was planning to while away the holidays with a shiny new Steam Deck. Valve has announced that its upcoming handheld gaming machine won’t launch on time. Instead of reaching gamers in time for the holidays, the launch has been pushed back to February 2022. You can thank the messy global supply chain for the delay. The Steam Deck looks a bit like a Nintendo Switch, but it’s a beefier piece of hardware that can play PC games that run on the Linux-based Steam OS. Valve opened pre-orders a few months back, saying that the first wave of orders would ship in December.

The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 both launched roughly a year ago. Both have enjoyed success; reports from late October, if accurate, claimed eight million sales for Microsoft’s Series S|X family and 13.4 million for both flavors of the Sony PlayStation 5. The fact that the newest consoles from Microsoft and Sony have sold well is not unusual in and of itself. The fact that they have sold as well as they have despite a near-complete lack of what we would nominally call launch titles, however, is a little more interesting. There are no truly “next-generation” exclusives (as the term is typically defined) available for the Xbox Series S|X yet, and only two for the PlayStation 5: Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and Returnal.

(Photo: Kilian Seiler/Unsplash)In vague terms, Apple has stated it plans to finally allow customers to repair their iPhone displays through third parties—without losing the ability to use FaceID. As originally by iFixIt, new iPhone displays contain a tiny controller chip, which acts as an integrated circuit responsible for translating screen taps into signals the phone can understand. This is a change, as prior to the iPhone X, this chip was stored in the logic board within the body of the device. As it stands today, a serial lock requires that the display chip remain connected to the rest of the phone in order to retain use of FaceID, which is Apple’s facial recognition feature.

Until recently, I’ve thought of a USB hub as a pretty simple piece of gear. Sure, some are powered and some aren’t, and of course there are USB 3.0 versions, with some USB 2.0 versions still floating around, but for the most part they’ve traditionally been pretty boring. That has all changed now with the introduction of USB-C hubs that can handle high-resolution monitors along with high-speed peripherals and even power distribution to your gadgets. Introducing the DockCase USB-C Smart Hub Until recently, finding out whether a hub was compatible with your gear has been a simple but not very scientific process of plugging it and seeing what happened.

Ingenuity’s mission on Mars has been a resounding success, but it is not without its emergent challenges; reports have returned from the space copter’s latest exploits, and things are getting tough out there. This fall, we experienced solar conjunction with Mars, where the two planets line up on exactly opposite sides of the sun. It’s a cool astronomical event, but it also forces a communications blackout that takes weeks to clear up, because the Sun’s radio emissions can corrupt signals we try to send between here and there. Ingenuity has also been dealing with declining atmospheric pressure for some weeks, as the Martian seasons roll ahead.

(Photo: John Moran Auctioneers)If you thought Apple’s new laptops were expensive, they can’t hold a candle to the latest Apple computer that is up for sale. John Moran Auctioneers in Southern California is taking bids on a , designed by Steve Wozniak and built by Steve Jobs himself. The ultra-rare PC is expected to sell for between $400k to $600k, if not more, as the current pre-bidding is already at $225k. The auction begins in earnest today, November 9th. According to the auction listing, included in the package is an Apple-1 “NTI” motherboard with original blue Sprague 39D capacitors, original power regulators, rare original “Circle D” ceramic .01 capacitors, and an Apple Cassette Adapter (ACI) in an original ByteShop Apple-1 koa wood case with Datanetics Keyboard Rev D.

If your rinky dink NVME M.2 PCIe SSD isn’t cutting the mustard with its laughable 7GB/s transfer rates and middling capacity, OWC has a solution that is sure to clear up any storage and capacity bottlenecks you might be dealing with. Its new “solution” holds up to eight M.2 SSDs, and when connected to a next-gen platform with PCIe Gen 4 abilities, can rip through any workload with a staggering 26GB/s throughput. If you’re still on a platform with PCIe Gen 3, it’s capable of a still-decent 12GB/s, which is still faster than any single SSD you can buy today.

(Photo: Microsoft)The long-rumored from Microsoft has finally arrived, and it’s called the , running on a stripped-down version of Windows 11, also dubbed SE. The $250 laptop is aggressively priced and aimed directly at students, as well as at schools using Google’s popular Chromebooks. The laptop has rather modest specs, which is not a surprise given its price tag. At the heart of the all-plastic beast lies a Celeron processor, either in dual-core or quad-core trim, along with 4 or 8GB of DDR4 memory. Storage is handled by an embedded eMMC card, which is available in either 64GB or 128GB capacities.

(Photo: Joshua Hoehne/Unsplash)Another week, another fresh embarrassment for Facebook. In what appears at first to be good news, new whistleblower documents reveal that Facebook had a team responsible for reporting on and solving unhealthy social media use. The team, which was focused solely on user well-being, investigated the ways in which people used Facebook, and was tasked with finding ways to improve upon the platform. But “had” is the keyword, here. According to internal documents by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook shut down the team in 2019. Worse, the team appears to have been on the cusp of making major suggestions that could have benefited users—at the cost of time spent on the platform, which is crucial to Facebook’s ability to earn revenue.