Nubia Technology is a one-time subsidiary of ZTE that’s made headlines in the last few years for its line of gaming phones. The company just announced the Red Magic 3. The device has a lot of impressive specs, including a Snapdragon 855 SoC, 12GB of RAM, a 5000mAh battery, 6.65-inch AMOLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate, and multiple integrated speakers. All of this sounds reasonably great. Also? It’s got a . I can’t help feeling like we’ve arrived, somehow. Once upon a time, not all CPUs even required heatsinks. It wasn’t unusual to buy a fanless 486 or even a Pentium, depending on which model you owned (early Pentiums ran quite hot by the standards of the day).
Razer, the peripheral manufacturer and designer of high-end laptops, mobile devices, and the occasional high-concept PC, has announced that it’s entering the high-fashion world of… kitchen appliances. Back in 2013, a fan jokingly asked Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan to create a Razer toaster. Tan replied that they’d already made one. This was picked up by Mark Withers, another Razer lover, who started harassing the CEO by beginning for a toaster morning, noon, and night. Withers even created a Facebook page for his campaign. Eventually, Tan agreed to make a Razer toaster if the Facebook page could hit a million likes.
Virtual reality hasn’t taken off as many had hoped, but Facebook is still forging ahead with its Oculus lineup. The Oculus Rift S (above right) and Oculus Quest (above left) are now available for pre-order, and they’ll ship next month. Fans of VR will have their choice of a PC-based headset or a standalone VR device that works without a PC. In both cases, . The Rift S is the successor to the classic Oculus VR headsets. It plugs into your computer via a DisplayPort and USB 3.0 — it’s basically a fancy monitor that you strap to your face.
The Earth-Moon system is one of the unique features of the solar system. Earth is the only rocky planet with such a large moon, and the only planet besides Pluto to have a moon so fundamentally similar to itself in composition. The Pluto-Charon system is considerably different otherwise from the Earth-Moon system, however, leaving our planet in a category all its own. The problem is, we’ve never had a completely satisfactory model for how the Moon came into existence in the first place. The Giant Impact Hypothesis has dominated for decades. The theory is that not long after the Earth was formed, a protoplanet roughly the size of Mars slammed into it.
AMD announced its Q1 2019 results yesterday, and the results, while not great, actually highlight how much the company’s position has improved since it launched Ryzen back in 2017. Sales for the quarter were $1.23B, down 10 percent from Q4 2018 (roughly in-line with seasonality) and 23 percent from Q1 2018. AMD reported higher operating expenses of $543M compared to $477M a year ago, both directly related to the 7nm ramp. An increase in inventory ahead of the Ryzen launch occurred for the same reason. AMD’s gross margin was the star of the show, rising 3 points quarter-on-quarter and five points year-on-year.
Google makes a lot of bets on products and services that end up falling apart a few years down the line. Google hasn’t been afraid to pull the plug on these projects, even after years of development. Google abandoned products like Reader, Google+, and Tango over the years, but some are starting to wonder if its Pixel smartphone initiative is destined for the same fate. In the company’s recent earnings call, CFO Ruth Porat for Google’s disappointing hardware numbers. announced the first Pixel phones in 2016, following that up with refreshed Pixels in 2017 and 2018. Google doesn’t break out earnings per division (Google is just one part of the Alphabet umbrella), but Porat confirmed during the call that Pixel sales in Q1 2019 have dropped compared with last year.
The 2019 Cadillac XT4 compact SUV is a good car in a field of — you guessed it — very good vehicles. The styling is different yet still distinctively Cadillac, it’s roomy for its size, and there’s a new turbo-four engine that delivers plenty of power as long as it’s not pushed too hard. The Cadillac CUE infotainment interface is finally easy to use. There are plenty of safety features, but most of the active safety features are scattered among a half-dozen options packages that jack up the price by seven grand and force you to take 20-inch rims with sacrifices to your state’s potholes.
It used to be a foregone conclusion that smartphone makers would see substantial year-over-year sales increases. After all, everyone wanted smartphones. Today, everyone still wants smartphones, but they already have at least one. The market has plateaued, and companies like Samsung and Apple are seeing phone sales level off and even trend downward. One notable exception is , which is still growing and has again passed Apple to be the second largest smartphone vendor in the world, . For most of the last decade, smartphone sales have ticked upward at double-digit rates every year. The increase began leveling off — even Apple recently warned that it expected iPhone sales to drop.
Last week, we the leak of an Intel roadmap for both its mobile and commercial client parts. The headline event was the general lack of 10nm silicon for desktop, which didn’t appear to pop up in non-mobile systems through the end of 2021. The same group at Tweakers.net that the previous releases have leaked this one as well. Now, ordinarily we don’t hit the same rumor or set of rumors with two separate stories, but in this case, they’ve leaked the roadmap we were most interested in — the desktop client roadmap. As always, the same caveats and grains of salt apply.
