A few years ago, every phone manufacturer was racing to offer the highest megapixel count in its cameras. Now, it’s increasingly about how many cameras you can cram into a phone. It’s common to have two on the back now, but LG is reportedly going a bit crazy with the upcoming V40. This phone will apparently have . This news comes from “sources familiar with the company’s plans,” who explain the phone will sport a pair of cameras on the front and three on the back. The V-series phones have long been LG’s chance to try out new features like the secondary ticker display and wide-angle cameras.
Intel’s decision to fire CEO Brian Krzanich for his decision to engage in a consensual violation of company policy has sparked a raft of think pieces on the topic, including those revisiting Intel’s current market position and its relative strength against companies like Qualcomm and AMD. One argument making the rounds is that Intel’s continued insistence on primarily manufacturing its own chips is causing problems for the company. But is it true? First, let me say this: I don’t think it’s crazy to see a link between Intel’s recent announcement that it would delay 10nm into 2019 — possibly even the back half of 2019 — and Krzanich’s dismissal.
The racing games have always obsessively focused on accurate car models and performance characteristics. Naturally, fans of the Forza franchise have waited with bated breath for the list of licensed cars in each incarnation. Forza Horizon 4 isn’t set to come out for four more months, but the developers accidentally pushed it out to some fans over the weekend. Of course, downloaders have from the game files. This leak might have gone unnoticed, except that it was only the biggest Forza fans in the world who got the early download: those who pre-ordered the Ultimate Edition of Forza Horizon 4 from the Windows Store.
AMD has launched a new teaser trailer video for Threadripper 2 that feels like something you’d get if you ran Duke Nukem and Doom through a PR generator for a CPU launch. Whether that’s good or not depends on your tolerance for this sort of thing, but the company is right about one thing — the fact that we’re sitting here talking about 32 cores on a desktop platform — or any platform — is more than a little nuts. Let’s assume, for the sake of our discussion, that AMD’s 32-core Threadripper 2 will target a price point between $2,000 and $2,500, as seems likely given the Threadripper 1950X’s pricing.
Google has never used the walled-garden approach to app distribution that Apple uses. If you want to make an app and hand out APKs on your own website, that’s totally fine by Google. There’s a story floating around the web today that Google has just gotten around to adding some sort of heavy-handed DRM to all Android apps, but this is based mainly on speculation and incorrect assumptions. At the heart of this story is a very developer-oriented piece of news. Google has in apps that verifies authenticity. Some have chosen to describe this as DRM that would prevent you from installing unknown APKs (known as sideloading), but that’s unproven and frankly rather silly.
As cars get smarter, they inevitably need better connectivity. Tesla’s electric vehicles have LTE radios to pull down OTA (over-the-air) updates, traffic data, and even stream music. However, the free LTE ride is . Starting July 1, will no longer include unlimited premium LTE services with new cars. Tesla packs its cars with fancy entertainment and mapping features, which are tied into the large 17-inch touch-screen display in the center console. The interface is powered by an Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC and runs a version of Linux. It seems a shame to limit its connectivity, but this move fits with Tesla’s trend toward trimming down the free extras.
After the rise of the MacBook Air, similar Windows-based laptops have seen widespread success, and it’s easy to understand why. With a slim form factor and a focus on flexibility, these highly portable laptops are excellent fits for most consumers. Now, you can pick up the sleek Dell XPS 13 with a new eighth generation Core i7 CPU at a very reasonable asking price. • (List price: $1,399.99 – Coupon code: 100OFF) On the inside, this laptop features an eighth generation quad-core 1.8GHz Intel Core i7-8550U CPU that’s capable of boosting up to 4GHz. In addition, it has Intel UHD Graphics 620, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, Bluetooth 4.1, and 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi support.
When Apple last redesigned the MacBook Pro keyboard, it attempted to shave roughly one quadrillionth of a millimeter off the keyboard design by shifting to a new type of switch with minimal key travel. Predictably — because literally nothing can be made thinner forever — this relentless pursuit of thinness . The new keyboards fail far more often than the old ones did, in part because something as simple as a large grain of dust is capable of preventing the new keyboards from actuating properly. One might be tempted to ask how Apple missed such a problem during it’s testing process, but the answer is obvious: Dust is legally banned from Apple and Apple HQ by order of Tim Cook, thereby preventing the company’s engineers from anticipating that the world is full of particles, some of which would inevitably find their way into the keyboard.
There are reports that Nvidia might have a GPU inventory problem on its hands. If true, it would explain why Jen-Hsun that new GeForce cards wouldn’t arrive for a “long time,” when other sources we’ve spoken to have implied a much quicker release time frame within the next few months. As always, stories about rumors, inventory levels, and unannounced products should be taken with lots and lots of salt. Say, a GeForce GTX 2080 worth? This rumor started with and has been discussed in . The general claim is that Nvidia overshot its mark on cryptocurrency mining sales to the point that it was forced to take back 300,000 GPUs it had already shipped to OEMs.
