Month: February 2019

Sometimes, you don’t want to carry a lot of laptop around with you. Maybe you’re highly mobile and rarely work in the same place for long. Or maybe you tend to work in cramped environments. Whatever the case, if you want a laptop that won’t take up a lot of space in your backpack or on you’re working surface, you have quite a few options.
We’ve taken a look at a couple of modern options, Apple’s diminutive MacBook with its 12-inch display and tiny chassis, and Dell’s XPS 13 that packs a 13.3-inch screen into a similar size. Which of them provides the smallest laptop with the fewest compromises?
DESIGN
Aesthetically, you can’t go wrong with either laptop. The MacBook conforms to Apple’s conservative yet elegant design in three color options, Gold, Space Gray, and Silver. Dell’s XPS 13 is also relatively conservatively designed, offering three of colors as well including a the business-like black and silver, Rose Gold, and a “Frost” that’s a lighter tone of silver than usual. That’s new for 2019. Thanks to a new webcam on the XPS 13 that’s now above the display and hence avoids uncomfortable up-the-nose angles, Dell can now boast some of the slimmest bezels around without making excuses. The MacBook’s wider bezels look downright old-school in comparison.
Both laptops also boast robust build quality, with the MacBook living up to the usual Apple standards thanks to a unibody aluminum chassis that feels like a solid chunk of metal. The XPS 13 has nothing to be ashamed of either, utilizing a range of materials including aluminum and carbon fiber to provide for a confidence-boosting build.
Although the XPS 13 is a bit thinner than the MacBook, it nevertheless boasts a keyboard with significantly more travel than the MacBook’s second-generation butterfly keyboard that’s incredibly shallow. Dell carried over its magnetic levitation technology from its XPS 15 2-in-1, and that means it’s just as snappy as the MacBook’s keyboard without feeling like you’re typing on a block of wood. The MacBook, on the other hand, benefits from the large Force Touch touchpad that’s one of our favorites, while the XPS 13’s Microsoft Precision touchpad is considerably smaller.
Finally, connectivity is similarly limited and focused on the future. Both laptops are limited to USB-C (including Thunderbolt 3 support), although the MacBook only has one port that’s also used to charge the laptop. If you want to connect a peripheral while charging, you’ll need an adapter. That’s really inconvenient sometimes. The XPS 13 has three USB-C ports, two with Thunderbolt 3, and so it’s far more adaptable. Photographers will love the addition of the microSD card slot as well.
The XPS 13 might be just slightly more substantial, but you get a bigger display, a better keyboard, and better connectivity. It wins this round.
PERFORMANCE
The XPS 13 uses 8th-generation Whiskey Lake quad-core CPUs, up to the Core i7-8565U, that provides a great balance of performance and efficiency. It’s fast enough for demanding productivity tasks, and it’s also efficient. The MacBook, on the other hand, uses 7th-generation Intel Y-series CPUs, meaning it’s more focused on being very quiet thanks to a fanless design and squeezing out as much battery life as possible. It was skipped for an update in 2018, meaning it’s a bit behind. Both use fast PCIe solid-state drives (SSDs) and so can access and save data quickly, but the XPS 13 is simply a much faster laptop.
Both laptops feature outstanding displays. The XPS 13 offers a variety of panels, including Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) displays with and without touch and a touch-enabled 4K UHD (3,920 x 1,080) screen. We tested the 4K display, and it’s bright with a wide color gamut, accurate colors, and high contrast. The MacBook’s 12-inch display sports Retina sharpness at 2,304 x 1,440 resolution, and it enjoys an even wider color gamut with high accuracy to go with similar brightness and contrast. Apple is good about making sure higher resolutions come standard, while you’ll have to pay quite a bit to jump up to the XPS 13’s 4K model.
PORTABILITY
Neither of these laptops will weigh you down or take up too much room in your backpack. Pick either, and you’ll enjoy awesome portability. The MacBook, though, is the smaller laptop thanks to its smaller display. However, it’s closer than you might imagine. It’s 11.04 inches by 7.74 inches by 0.52 inches at its thickest point, compared to the XPS 13 at 11.9 inches by 7.8 inches by 0.46 inches — impressive given the Dell’s larger display. The MacBook is considerably lighter, though, at 2.03 pounds compared to the XPS 13’s 2.7-pound starting weight.
Battery life also matters, though, and they’re roughly equal when comparing the XPS 13 with its high-end 4K display. That is, both laptops are going to struggle to last a full working day. If you step down to the Full HD option on the XPS 13, though, the dynamic likely changes with the Dell being a much longer-lasting option.
With equal displays, portability is roughly the same. But Dell gives you the option of a much longer-lasting laptop in the 1080p model.
THE XPS 13 IS A FASTER AND LONGER-LASTING LAPTOP
The MacBook starts at $1,300 for a Core m3 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, and tops out at $1,600 for a Core i5, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. That’s very expensive for the specs.
The Dell XPS 13 is a much more economical option, starting at $900 with a Core i5, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD, and then pricing goes up from there. It’s $2,010, for example, with a much more powerful configuration of a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 4K display.
You can spend more on the XPS 13, but you’re getting far more power, and you can also save some money and enjoy a longer-lasting laptop. Either choice appeals more to us than the MacBook’s relative compromises in battery life and performance.

The upcoming OnePlus 7 will likely rock the latest processor and upgraded cameras. One thing it won’t have, though, is wireless charging.
OnePlus phones are known for packing many of the latest features found in premium smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S10 — and at a much lower price. But one feature that continues to elude OnePlus is the ability for users to place a phone down on a wireless charging pad for a quick boost. CEO Pete Lau still doesn’t think it’s worth adding to his products.
“OnePlus charging is one of the best,” Lau said through an interpreter in an interview on Monday at MWC 2019. “Wireless charging is far inferior.”
Even so, wireless charging has grown in popularity ever since Apple introduced it in the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus in 2017. Samsung stepped it up by adding the ability to wirelessly charge its Galaxy Buds with its Galaxy S10.
OnePlus is at MWC to show off a prototype of its 5G smartphone, which will come to two carriers in Europe in the second quarter. Lau declined to comment on the OnePlus 7, as well as the rumors that it may shed the notch and add a pop-out camera. He was carrying a prototype of the phone with him, but declined to show it to us.
His comments on wireless charging indicate that one of the key features still on consumer wish lists for an ideal OnePlus phone remains missing.
Lau expressed his skepticism about wireless charging as a consumer benefit, noting that it takes a long time to charge a device with a wireless pad. With the physical quick charge plug, OnePlus says, you can get your battery 50 percent charged in 20 minutes and fully charged in less than an hour.
OnePlus is working on accelerating the delivery of wireless power, but still hasn’t figured out how to do it without too much heat. Lau said he doesn’t have a date for when that may show up in his company’s devices.
Qualcomm said it’s bringing its quick-charge technology to wireless charging,which may improve the experience. Lau declined to comment about using it.

Usually, I reflexively delete press releases. This one was no different, but as the message vanished, the subject line registered—“IonQ… quantum computing.” It took a second, but I realized that the name might mean something I had never expected: a commercial, ion-based, quantum computer. A quick visit to the trash confirmed my suspicion.
After some negotiation, I was in receipt of a super-secret paper demonstrating the capabilities of IonQ’s new computer.
Engineering ions is not simple
Making an ion-based quantum computer seems like a bad idea. Think about the engineering required to commercialize the computer. You need to have qubits (quantum bits) that are interconnected so that they can perform logic operations, and those qubits need to preserve their quantum-ness.
Pretty much all commercial quantum computing efforts focus on using superconducting rings of current as the qubit. These circuits can take advantage of all the engineering tools available for printed circuit board technology. The control circuits and readouts are all electronic—they send in and receive microwave signals via lines on a printed circuit board. The qubits are interconnected by lines that couple them together. In other words, the engineering is comparatively easy.
In research labs all around the world, however, there are small-scale quantum computers based on strings of ions (an ion is an atom with an electron removed). The ions float in a near-perfect vacuum, trapped by electric fields. Each ion needs to be addressed by two laser beams. The interconnection between qubits occurs via the natural motion of the qubits: they all vibrate together.
Ion qubits and their logic operations outperform their superconducting brethren by a huge margin. But engineering this type of computer at a commercial scale has been an entirely new challenge.
There’s water in your computer
A paper released by researchers uses the IonQ computer to calculate the ground state energy of a water molecule. The calculation itself is something almost any modern computer can do. What makes the calculation stand out is the number of operations required to complete the operation. In choosing water, the researchers have shown ion-based quantum computing at its best.
Let’s put this in perspective. To model a water molecule, the researchers use a standard approach, where it’s assumed that the electrons in a water molecule take on a bit of the character of electrons that are in oxygen and a bit of the character of electrons that are in hydrogen. The trick to the calculation is to determine the balance of the admixtures and their energies.
The calculation that does this is a repeated approximation, where additional correction terms make the result (hopefully) more accurate as the calculation proceeds. This allows you to, in a sense, choose your accuracy based on when you stop doing math. As you might expect, each correction term requires more computational resources—for a quantum computer with only a few qubits, that’s a challenge.
But if you have nice, stable, long-lived qubits that all talk to each other with a high degree of reliability, then you have a bit of wiggle room. That’s one of the key points of this paper: the ion computer allows you to play some clever tricks that reduce the total number of qubits needed in exchange for increasing the number of operations required. That only works if you have time to perform all the operations, and time is something that quantum systems don’t always provide in abundance.
Zooming in
According to the press release, IonQ’s computer has either 160 or 79 qubits (depending on whether the computer is storing or operating on quantum information). Looking at the circuit diagram (the program, essentially), I estimate that the calculation required some 30 qubits. That in itself is quite a jump from the typical ion quantum computer, which has about ten ions.
That, however, is the least of it. The calculation requires many sequential gate operations, and unlike digital logic operations, quantum logic operations are not exact. The error in each operation accumulates over many operations, which will leave a calculation in tatters. Ion computers, however, have very high precision in their operations. The researchers reported that they were able to perform 50 consecutive operations while still retaining the qubit in the correct state about three quarters of the time.
The interconnectedness of the ion computer also played an important role in the calculation. The researchers were able to directly entangle arbitrary pairs of qubits during the calculation. In other quantum computers, geometry does not allow all the qubits to be interconnected. As a result, any computation requires information to be swapped back and forth between qubits. Since the information fades away after a certain number of operations, each additional step to move information around reduces the amount of useful computation that can be done.
The end result is an answer that is very close to the results obtained from standard calculations performed on classical computers. And it’s surely not the end. Hopefully, IonQ release more details about the computer soon—you can be sure we’ll cover it when they do. Even in the absence of more technical details, I’m pretty sure we will see a steady stream of results from users.

How annoying are Windows 10’s automatic updates? In a new study, a group of UK researchers report that users of Home edition experience unexpected restarts and inconsistent installation times, caused by inappropriate defaults and inadequate notice of pending updates.
The single biggest complaint about Windows 10 is its approach to security and feature updates. Monthly cumulative updates and twice-yearly feature updates are downloaded and installed automatically, which can result in unexpected reboots that disrupt productivity and risk the loss of unsaved work. That pain point is particularly acute for anyone running Windows 10 Home edition, which lacks any controls for delaying and deferring those updates.
Since the initial release of Windows 10 nearly four years ago, Microsoft has been tweaking its approach to automatic updates, adding Active Hours settings to ensure that mandatory restarts are less likely to be intrusive. Recent feature updates have also made notifications of pending updates more obvious.
Are those changes enough to ease the pain? A new study from a group of UK-based researchers suggests Microsoft has more work to do.
The study, titled “In Control with No Control: Perceptions and Reality of Windows 10 Home Edition Update Features,” was presented this week at the Workshop on Usable Security (USEC) 2019 in San Diego, California. Researchers Jason Morris, Ingolf Becker, and Simon Parkin of University College London, built a detailed model of Microsoft’s update process as of Windows 10 version 1803 and then surveyed a group of 93 Windows 10 Home users.
The overall conclusions were a mixed bag. In general, the survey respondents think that the Windows 10 update approach is an improvement over that found in previous Windows versions. Among participants who had experience with earlier Windows versions 53 percent reported they felt updating Windows 10 is easier, versus only 8 percent who found the process more difficult.
Similarly, a majority of respondents agreed that the Windows 10 update process causes fewer interruptions than in previous versions (43 percent agreed, 21 percent disagreed).
Where Microsoft has fallen down, the researchers argue, is in building an update system that is “dependent on a complex range of user and system properties.” That system, illustrated by the flowchart shown here, is simply too complicated for the average home user to understand.
The Active Hours feature draws the most criticism in this respect, with the authors arguing that its default settings are inappropriate for 97 percent of their test subjects.
To minimize disruption, they note, “users need to understand the ‘active hours’ concept and … the configuration of active hours should ideally align with their usage patterns.”
Neither of those conditions are true, they found. First, only 28 percent of respondents were even aware of the Active Hours feature. Second, the default window of 8AM to 5PM might be appropriate for businesses, but it’s wildly out of sync for home users, based on the self-reported behavior of this group. Of the 93 survey participants, only three reported hours of use within those limits, with the overwhelming majority typically using their PC on weekday evenings.
And even among the 26 participants who were aware of the feature, 10 had not changed it from the default settings even though it clashed with their daily schedule.
Not surprisingly, that resulted in about half of the survey respondents reporting that they had experienced unexpected restarts.
The other noteworthy finding from the research is that users don’t understand how often updates are delivered, nor do they appreciate the difference between monthly quality updates and semi-annual feature updates. That can lead to anxiety when an unexpected feature update takes well over an hour compared to the 12 minutes or less that a monthly cumulative update takes.
The survey respondents, who were generally well educated and experienced PC users, reported by an overwhelming 95 percent margin that they trust Microsoft as much as or more than other software makers at the task of delivering updates.
The researchers offered a few recommendations based on their findings.
The most important is that Windows “obtain explicit permission for restarts consistently.” They note that doing so might require adjustments in the Active Hours default settings for Windows 10 Home as well as better progress displays.
Second, they criticized Windows 10 for offering insufficient notice of restarts. Unlike, say, a Chromebook, Windows 10 Home Edition does not provide a persistent warning that the system has a restart pending.
That’s especially a problem when the user chooses the option to restart at a specific time. In that configuration the system shows a warning and then restarts within a few minutes. “If a user is absorbed by other tasks,” the researchers argue, “the computer could, in the mind of the user, appear to restart unexpectedly despite them having been responsible for the chosen time. We think that one’s computer should not reboot while in active use.”
Finally, they suggest that Microsoft do a better job of warning about the significantly longer times required for feature updates. “[W]e think a notification that describes an update as one ‘that could take a little longer than other updates’ is failing to set accurate expectations to support users in planning around the availability impact of these updates.”
That latter recommendation skips right past the real question, of course: Why is it necessary to deliver feature updates twice a year? Given that these updates are time-consuming to install and offer significant potential for disruption, why not offer Home edition users at least some control over when updates are installed.

Mobile World Congress is mostly about phones and other mobile tech, but Lenovo also used the show to introduce a handful of new products outside that narrow-but-vast category. The most interesting of them is a portable monitor that lets you bring the dual-monitor user experience with you and your laptop when you travel.
Labeled the ThinkVision M14, it’s a 14-inch monitor with an IPS panel. The resolution is 1920×1080 pixels, which is plenty for 14 inches. It’s built with modern laptop trends in mind, so it connects to your computer with USB-C. In fact, it has two USB-C ports, and both can be used for passthrough, provided you connect the monitor to an AC adapter. You can power the monitor from your laptop, but that doesn’t seem like enough for passthrough, and Lenovo hasn’t specified just how much power it needs from said laptop.
The ThinkVision M14 weighs 1.3 pounds and is 4.6mm thick. The only adjustment available is in the foot, which you can see in action in one of the render images above. The monitor will be available starting in May of this year for $249.
We’re always happy to see options like this. Creatives (like video editors in particular) will appreciate the additional screen even when they’re on the go. That said, Lenovo hasn’t said anything about colorspaces and the like, so tread carefully if those are important to you—at least until more information is available.
Lenovo laptops
Lenovo also used MWC to announce updates to its ThinkPad laptop line with several new models—the T490s, T490, T590, X390, and X390 Yoga—and its mid-range IdeaPad line with the new C340, S340 and S540 models. It also introduced the 14w and 14e laptops for firstline workers in the enterprise; the former of those two runs Windows 10 Pro, the latter is a Chromebook. Most of the models introduced are just spec bumps over last year.
The ThinkPads offer Dolby Vision HDR, low-power display options, and faster, Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, along with eighth-generation Intel Core CPUs and an overhauled BIOS experience. The IdeaPads are pretty standard mid-range laptops with a range of configuration options. You can read more about the myriad laptop launches on Lenovo’s website.