Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps are top-rated for their powerful capabilities, but their high price, subscription-only model, and complex user interfaces leave a lot of users cold. For those who want to leverage Adobe’s technology in a more-approachable way, the company continues to pack features into its Elements Suite. The 2020 versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, available this week, continue to add new capabilities, mostly thanks to Adobe’s brand of AI that it calls its Sensei technology. We had some time to test each; here are our initial impressions. Frankly, Elements 2020 looks a lot like Elements 2019 and 2018.
When Microsoft first dove into the portable computer market with the Surface Pro, the company claimed it was all in the service of showing OEMs what they could create within the Windows ecosphere. But with each new generation of Surface products, it’s increasingly clear Microsoft simply wants a piece of the Windows hardware business for itself and is happy to go toe-to-toe with its own customers to get it. The Surface Laptop 3 is another step in that direction. All indications are that it’s a competent ultra-light laptop designed to compete with other premium offerings. For the first time, the Surface Laptop offers both a 13.5-inch and a 15-inch version, as Microsoft is clearly hoping to take a chunk out of Apple’s market share among content creators who need the larger display size.
NASA’s InSight lander , after which the team spent months carefully surveying its surroundings and deploying a suite of instruments that will peer inside the red planet. One of those instruments is a seismometer, which has recorded the rumbles of another planet for the first time. It’s also able to pick up the faint, otherworldly sounds of Mars. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has , recorded on Mars earlier this year. Unlike Curiosity and the upcoming Mars 2020 mission, InSight is non-mobile. NASA had to choose a target area where InSight could set up shop, but the lander handled the rocket-powered landing autonomously.
Today, Amazon is offering discounts up ranging up to 30 percent off on Acer computers and displays. Of note is an excellent deal on one of Acer’s Chromebooks and one of the company’s 2K 32-inch displays. Acer’s Chromebook 15 stands out as it features a more premium design than most Chromebooks on the market. It has a fully aluminum cover and a 1080p touch-screen display. Today you can get this system marked down from $329.99 to $239.99 from Amazon. This affordable 2K display features an IPS panel with a resolution of 2,560×1,440. The panel also features 10-bit color depth, which allows it to display over a billion individual colors and makes the display well suited for editing images and videos.
Tesla set the bar high with free charging for many years. Now comes Volta Charging, a company that aims to build a network of high-speed chargers for all EVs that are free for the first 30 minutes. They’d be in upscale locations that meet Volta’s standards and supported by advertising, including on signage near the DC fast chargers. The typical motorist would pick up 175 miles of driving from the half-hour charge. The user then decides to complete the charge on their own nickel, or disconnect and drive for a couple more days. Volta already has a series of Level 2 (240-volt) charging stations in and around a dozen major metro areas.
Google needs our data to run its business, but it’s not going to get it unless people trust the company has good intentions. Naturally, Google has always tried to give us some control over what happens to our personal info, and it’s expanding that control today. are coming to YouTube, Maps, passwords, and Google Assistant in honor of Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Google Maps is one of Google’s most popular products, and the things you search for and interact with inform Google’s algorithm. What if you don’t want your Maps activity to become part of your digital profile? There’s a new Incognito Mode in Maps that keeps your activity private.
Intel has an upcoming refresh for its High End DeskTop (HEDT) product family, based on its Cascade Lake X series of processors. Cascade Lake-X is the latest iteration of the company’s 14nm product line, with technologies like Intel DLBoost for accelerating AI workloads and some additional new features we’ll touch on below. Up until now, one of the weaknesses of the Intel HEDT product family has been the vastly superior pricing available on AMD’s Threadripper. We weren’t supposed to be able to share details of this with you until October 7, but Intel has opted to release certain information earlier than it originally expected to do so.
The Samsung R&D Center in Austin, Texas (SARC) was founded in 2010 to develop CPUs and system IP, including interconnects and memory controllers. Development for Samsung’s custom CPU core is reportedly handled here, which would make sense — Samsung’s CPU dev team has at least a few ex-AMD employees on it, and Austin has been a major hub for AMD for decades. According to rumors, however, SARC has just been hit by major layoffs. The scope of these layoffs is currently unclear. Some have said that a single project was canceled, while others have implied a larger number of employee firings.
As a consequence of Huawei’s dispute with the US government, the company announced its latest flagship phone without Google apps. The Mate 30 Pro still runs Android, but it was unclear how easy it would be to manually install apps like Gmail and Google Maps. An app called LZPlay appeared online several days ago that made the process easy — too easy, as it turns out. LZPlay and its website have vanished after developers about how the app worked its Google-installing magic. For Google’s apps and services to run correctly on a phone, they need to be installed in the system partition, which is protected on all new phones.
