Category: Article

Remember how Samsung said it would narrow down its plans to relaunch the Galaxy Fold sometime in mid-May? Well, it’s been a month — and now those rumors of an extended delay appear to be coming true. A spokesperson has reiterated to CNET that a new release date is still due sometime in “the coming weeks,” suggesting that you might not get a new release date until July or later. Given that the phone was originally supposed to be in customer’s hands in late April, would-be buyers might just face a delay of three months or more.

Not that Samsung necessarily wants to rush. The original version was inherently fragile, with a screen layer that was all too tempting to peel off and gaps that made it easy for debris to damage the foldable display. If Samsung is going to sell the Fold, it has to reassure buyers that their $1,980 wonder phone isn’t going to break because of a wayward crumb, and that means ensuring a high level of fault tolerance. Those extra weeks could prove worthwhile if they prevent additional headaches.

The continuing Fold delays aren’t likely to hit Samsung’s bottom line. Unlike the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, the Fold isn’t a high-volume device. However, there is a matter of prestige here. Samsung wants to prove that it can make foldable display technology a practical reality, and it can’t do that until there’s finally a device in someone’s pocket.

Apple introduced two pricy and powerful pieces of pro-targeted hardware at its developer conference last month: the modular desktop tower Mac Pro, and the creative-focused Pro Display XDR. Although Apple said the devices would come this fall when discussing them during its keynote stage last week, the industry giant didn’t get any more specific than that. But an apparent mistake in the Apple Store may have narrowed down the date.

Earlier today, MacRumors and 9to5Mac discovered that, when you clicked on the option to “Notify Me” of availability for the products, they were presented with text that said “coming in September.” This was while other parts of the website all said “coming in the fall.” Since the news broke, Apple quietly changed the copy in the “notify me” panel to also say “coming in the fall.”

September would make sense as a narrower launch window. Apple often holds an event focused on the iPhone and Apple Watch around that time each year, so the company could announce final public availability of the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR there.

For background, the Mac Pro is a desktop tower that borrows elements of the classic “cheese grater” design from Mac towers of yore—though the design also has a heat-management function. It offers a sort of half-measure for those who wanted a PC-style upgradeable desktop: you can replace many key components, but you’ll likely have to buy many of them from Apple or its partners directly. The Mac Pro offers up to 1.5TB of up to 2933MHz and up to a 28-core Intel Xeon CPU.

GPU options range from the fast-but-comparatively-modest AMD Radeon Pro 580X to the beefy, workstation-class AMD Radeon Pro Vega II—or even two of the latter. There are up to eight PCIe expansion slots. This monster starts at a whopping $5,999, ensuring it will live on pro video-editing bays and on 3D animators’ desks but not many other places.

Also niche is the Pro Display XDR, which addresses a market that has a lot of computer monitors focused on response time but not image quality. Priced at $4,999 and up (with a $999 stand), the Pro Display XDR is intended for use by a narrow set of professionals, such as those who do post-production color grading and HDR on film and TV content. Despite consumer demands, Apple did not launch a consumer display at the event last week.

When you’re talking flagship smartphones, devices like the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S series typically garner most, if not all, of the attention. Over the past few years, though, Google has made impressive strides with its Pixel line. Especially with the launch of Night Sight mode a few months back, the PIxel 3 quickly catapulted itself into the upper echelon of the smartphone market.

For as compelling as the Pixel 3 is, Google is seemingly prepared to take things to the next level with the launch of its next-gen Pixel. And with the release date now less than 6 months away, we’ve started to see a steady stream of Pixel 4 leaks emerge over the past few weeks.

Hardware aside, the design of the Pixel 4 is particularly intriguing given a bevy of rumors that we may see a brand new form factor. The latest renders to hit the web (via Pricebaba) depict a nearly edgeless display, as evidenced below.

What’s particularly interesting here is the camera bump on the rear side of the device, a design that is quite similar to many of the iPhone 11 leaks we’ve seen so far.

“According to OnLeaks,” the report notes, “we can expect at least two cameras inside the square bump, if not three. Google’s Pixel phones are known for their camera prowess, and this will be the first time Google is using multiple camera lenses at the rear.”

As far as other Pixel 4 specs are concerned, Slashleaks notes that Google’s next-gen smartphone will not include front-firing speakers or a physical fingerprint scanner. There are also rumblings that the Pixel 4 will boast 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, at a minimum.

It’s worth noting that some of the other Pixel 4 leaks we’ve seen feature an entirely different design, which is to say that this rumor, like others, should be taken with a requisite grain of salt. As a point of interest, some of the previous Pixel 4 renders — which are ostensibly based on accurate supply chain rumors — look like this:

We have been teased with AMD’s next generation processor products for over a year. The new chiplet design has been heralded as a significant breakthrough in driving performance and scalability, especially as it becomes increasingly difficult to create large silicon with high frequencies on smaller and smaller process nodes. AMD is expected to deploy its chiplet paradigm across its processor line, through Ryzen and EPYC, with those chiplets each having eight next-generation Zen 2 cores. Today AMD went into more detail about the Zen 2 core, providing justification for the +15% clock-for-clock performance increase over the previous generation that the company presented at Computex last week.
AMD’s Zen 2 Product Portfolio
The current products that AMD has announced that have Zen 2 cores include the Ryzen 3rd Generation consumer CPUs, known as the Ryzen 3000 family, and AMD’s next generation enterprise EPYC processor, known as Rome. As of today, AMD has announced explicit details of six consumer Ryzen 3000 processors, including core counts, frequencies, memory support, and power. Details about the server processor, aside from some peak values, are expected in due course over the next few months.
The Zen 2 design paradigm, compared to the first generation of Zen, has changed significantly. The new platform and core implementation is designed around small 8-core chiplets built on TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process, and measure around 74-80 square millimeters. On these chiplets are two groups of four-cores arranged in a ‘core complex’, or CCX, which contains those four cores and a set of L3 cache – the L3 cache is doubled for Zen 2 over Zen 1.
Each full CPU, regardless of how many chiplets it has, is paired with a central IO die through Infinity Fabric links. The IO die acts as the central hub for all off-chip communications, as it houses all the PCIe lanes for the processor, as well as memory channels, and Infinity Fabric links to other chiplets or other CPUs. The IO die for the EPYC Rome processors is built on TSMC’s 14nm process, however the consumer processor IO dies (which are smaller and contain fewer features) are built on the Global Foundries 12nm process.
The consumer processors, known as ‘Matisse’ or Ryzen 3rd Gen or Ryzen 3000-series, will be offered with up to two chiplets for sixteen cores. AMD is launching six versions of Matisse on July 7th, from six cores to sixteen cores. The six and eight-core processors have one chiplet, while above this the parts will have two chiplets, but in all cases the IO die is the same. This means that every Zen 2 based Ryzen 3000 processor will have access to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes and dual channel memory. Based on the announcements today, the prices will range from $199 for the Ryzen 5 3600, up to $700+ for the sixteen core (we’re waiting on final confirmation of this price).
The EPYC Rome processors, built on these Zen 2 chiplets, will have up to eight of them, enabling a platform that can support up to 64 cores. As with the consumer processors, no chiplet can communicate directly with each other – each chiplet will only connect directly to the central IO die. That IO die houses links for eight memory channels, and up to 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0 connectivity.
AMD’s Roadmap
Before diving into the new product line, it is worth recapping where we currently sit in AMD’s planned roadmap.
In previous roadmaps, showcasing AMD’s movement from Zen to Zen 2 and Zen 3, the company has explained that this multi-year structure will showcase Zen in 2017, Zen 2 in 2019, and Zen 3 by 2021. The cadence isn’t exactly a year, as it has depended on AMD’s design and manufacturing abilities, as well as agreements with its partners in the foundries and the current market forces.
AMD has stated that its plan for Zen 2 was to always launch on 7nm, which ended up being TSMC’s 7nm (Global Foundries wasn’t going to be ready in time for 7nm, and ultimately pulled the plug). The next generation Zen 3 is expected to align with an updated 7nm process, and at this point AMD has not made any comment about a potential ‘Zen 2+’ design in the works, although at this point we do not expect to see one.
Beyond Zen 3, AMD has already stated that Zen 4 and Zen 5 are currently in various levels of their respective design stages, although the company has not committed to particular time frames or process node technologies. AMD has stated in the past that the paradigms of these platforms and processor designs are being set 3-5 years in advance, and the company states it has to make big bets every generation to ensure it can remain competitive.
For a small insight into Zen 4, in an interview with Forrest Norrod, SVP of AMD’s Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom group, at Computex, he exclusively revealed to AnandTech the code name of AMD’s Zen 4 EPYC processor: Genoa.
Forrest explained that the Zen 5 code name follows a similar pattern, but would not comment on the time frame for the Zen 4 product. Given that the Zen 3 design is expected mid-2020, that would put a Zen 4 product for late 2021/early 2022, if AMD follows its cadence. How this will play into AMD’s consumer roadmap plans is unclear at this point, and will depend on how AMD approaches its chiplet paradigm and any future adjustments to its packaging technology in order to enable further performance improvements.

Sony suggested it’s exploring PlayStation 5 cross-gen play with PlayStation 4 thanks to backward compatibility in its next-generation console. During a Sony Investor Relations Day 2019 Q&A session, PlayStation heads indicated PS5 could include cross-gen play with PS4 players through the PS5’s backward compatibility features, suggesting people playing PS4 games on their PS5 would still be able to play online with others who are using a PS4, or potentially even play cross-gen titles across these systems.

Deputy president of Sony Interactive Entertainment John Kodera said through a translator, “Having compatibility is a positive thing. Not only can a game be played on the next-generation console, cross-generation – the community can enjoy the games together… bridging that compatibility has a very important role to play.”

Prior to this quote, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Jim Ryan commented on PS5’s backward compatibility, saying “Backwards compatibility in a networked era is something that’s incredibly powerful. The gaming community is somewhat tribal in its nature, backwards compatibility gives us the opportunity to migrate that community from PlayStation 4 to next-gen, using the ability to play the PS4 games that they have on their next-generation console [with] groups of 10, 20, 50 gamers. We see this, given the size of the community that we’ve been able to accumulate over all these years on PS4, as a really critical success factor for us – we think it’s really important.”

Prior to this Q&A, a video of Sony’s next-gen console performance was demonstrated, showing its loading times in comparison to the PS4’s. This video spurred a lot of fan questions about the PS5, including price, its utilization of an SSD, and more.

Steam has mainly been a gaming marketplace for PC games over the years, but Valve appears to be doubling down on the platform’s social aspects with its newly launched Steam Chat messaging app for Android and iOS.

While Steam Mobile has let users manage their accounts and send messages from their smartphones for years, Steam Chat splits the platform’s messaging service off into its own dedicated app. Steam Mobile isn’t going away, though; both apps will exist simultaneously, with Steam Chat dedicated to communication and Steam Mobile covering other parts of the service—such as purchasing games, initiating remote downloads, and Steam Guard account security.

Here’s the full list of Steam Chat’s features at launch, according to Valve’s official blog post announcing the app:

Friends List: See who’s in-game or online at a glance. Never miss an opportunity to play.

Rich Chat: Your chats get even better with higher fidelity links, videos, tweets, GIFs, Giphy, Steam emoticons, and more.

Invite Links: Add new friends on Steam with a link. Generate an invite link you can text or email.

Customizable Notifications: Mobile notifications mean you’ll never miss a message or game invite. You can customize your notifications per friend, group chat, and chat channel.

Group Chats: Get everyone on the same page. Groups make it easier to do things like stay in touch with your communities and organize game night with your best friends.

Some of Steam’s desktop features for chatting aren’t present on Steam Chat at launch, like voice chat, but Valve confirmed in its blog post these will be added soon.

Steam Chat seems to be aimed primarily at existing Steam users—and PC gamers more broadly—but the app’s features are reminiscent of many other messaging services on smartphones. Not surprisingly, Steam Chat includes similar capabilities as the mobile app for one of Steam’s upstart competitors, Discord. By splitting Steam’s messaging features into its own app, Valve appears to be looking to widen the service’s appeal. After all, you can create a Discord server for any topic right now; why not a Steam group?

After downloading and installing the app, you’ll need to sign in with your Steam account (or create a new one) and verify the device via a confirmation code sent to your email. Once you’re signed in, you’ll be able to message your Steam friends while not at your PC, and without needing the core Steam app installed.

If you wind up giving the new app a shot, Valve is interested in getting user feedback through the Steam Chat app’s official Steam community page. So far, feedback from Steam users appears… well, “mixed” would be putting it nicely. Here are a few snippets from the comments of Steam’s announcement:

Manatee-Nyan! ♥ Lamppost: “Please merge this with the regular Steam app, there’s no reason to have 2 separate apps. It’s annoying an inconvenient.”

Mairo 🐻🎧: “Could you please then at least update Steam guard to use some goddamn regular 2FA system so I can just use something like authy, delete all steam apps from my phone. The proper steam app has been broken for years with zero updates and nobody even uses chat anymore, because every time I get chat message I have to find who messaged me first as app doesn’t tell me.”

Voldiemert: “Discord wins with group chat, especially on mobile. I have no idea why time was put into this. I’d much prefer to see the Steam App updated. It’s a pain in the♥♥♥♥♥browsing the store, buying a game, and trying to install the game remotely.”

m4x7us: “FINALLY”

Hallo ich bin Grünspan: “How about some END TO END ENCRYPTION ALREADY instead of letting Steam read and analyze all our texts? Also how hard can it be to add some sort of chat history function that saves the entirety of all your chats to a text file or whatever?”

It’ll kick off its annual developer conference with a presentation by CEO Tim Cook and other execs at 10 a.m. PT.

Apple on Wednesday sent invitations to members of the media for its annual keynote address at its Worldwide Developers Conference. The WWDC 2019 presentation will take place at 10 a.m. PT on Monday, June 3 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California.

The confab is in its 30th year, and this will mark the third year for Apple to hold its developer conference in San Jose. The city — the third biggest in California and 10th largest in the US — is about 50 miles south of San Francisco and only about 10 miles from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.`

WWDC is known as the event at which Apple details the newest software that will hit its devices later in the year. The company may be best known for its hardware, but the seamless integration of its hardware with its software is what sets Apple apart from rivals. Apple’s ability to control every aspect of its products — something that began when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the company in 1976 — has been key in making it the most powerful company in tech.

The event comes as software and services are taking on even greater importance for Apple. The company still sells millions of iPhones every quarter, but sales aren’t soaring like they used to. People are holding onto their devices for longer, which makes it important to give them services that get them paying monthly. Apple has made augmented reality, mobile payments, streaming music and other areas key focuses over the past couple of years.

Smart home assistants need smarter timers. Today, you can use Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri to set timers. You can use all three smart assistants to control your smart home gadgets. But frustratingly, you cannot use the two features together: setting your lights to arbitrarily turn off in 30 minutes is impossible with today’s most sophisticated, cutting-edge smart home technology.

Now, you could use a pre-programmed routine, but that’s not the same thing. You can set your lights to go on when a motion detector goes off, have your motorized shades close at sunset, or have your air conditioner turn on at exactly 12:53PM on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But with all three smart home platforms, you need to set up those routines in advance — they’re not the sort of thing you can just attach to a timer.

More importantly, they’re not the sort of thing you can actually do with voice commands — you have to go into a companion app and configure them, which means knowing beforehand exactly what you want to turn on and off and when you want it to happen. And if you have to go into an app to use a voice assistant properly, something in that process isn’t working right.

As far as I can tell, there’s no technical reason that all of these systems don’t allow this, and yet, you just can’t do it. And yes, natural language processing is incredibly complicated, but I don’t think that’s the issue: the smart assistants themselves explicitly say that the software doesn’t allow it. Siri, for example, gives a response letting you know that it can’t schedule commands. That means that someone at Apple was aware that a user might want to do this, and then specifically coded in a response to say that you can’t. The issue doesn’t seem to be one of comprehension.

Furthermore, you can set a timer like this for part of one function: all three companies offer a sleep timer specifically for listening to music, ostensibly for when you’re falling asleep. But the net result is that you can ask Alexa or Siri to play music or audio playback to a timer, and shut it off when that timer ends. It’s great! I wish I could do it with my lights, my TV, my fan, my air conditioner, and every other gadget plugged into my smart home setup, too.

Sleep timers aren’t new technology, either. Home appliances like TVs and air conditioners have had them for decades, which leads to some weird setups. For example, at home, I have an AC unit hooked up to a smart plug. The Wi-Fi-connected plug can turn the AC on or off from anywhere in the world, but it’s not smart enough to understand the idea of “run for two hours and then turn off.” The IR remote that came with the unit does it just fine, though, assuming I can find it.

None of this is the end of the world: I can remember most of the time to turn off my lights, or deal with the occasional annoyance of waking up to realize that the AC is still running and that my room is an ice box. But it’s yet another example of how for all their intelligence, smart assistants still can often fall short in the small ways when it comes to actually fitting into our lives.

Apple this week began stocking a new 4K 23.7-inch LG UltraFine Display, which replaces the original 21.5-inch 4K LG UltraFine Display that was pulled from retail stores and the online Apple Store earlier this year.

We picked up one of the new 23.7-inch UltraFine Displays and thought we’d check it out to see if it’s worth the $700 price point.

The new 4K display looks quite similar to the prior-generation 4K and 5K UltraFine displays with a black plastic body with relatively thick bezels and a black aluminum stand. Like prior models, it can be VESA mounted if you prefer.

It’s larger than the original 4K UltraFine display as it measures in at 23.7 inches instead of 21.5 inches, but it features a 3840 x 2160 resolution rather than a 4096 x 2304 resolution like the first model. That’s still considered Ultra HD, though, and qualifies as 4K.

Though this display has a 4K resolution, it’s not meant to be used at the full 3840 x 1260 resolution given its 23.7-inch display size because everything on the display would be super small. Instead, it’s meant to provide retina clarity when downscaled to a more reasonable resolution like 1920 x 1080 or 2560 x 1440, which is what we have it set to.

Along with the larger display size, the new UltraFine Display features two Thunderbolt 3 ports instead of a single Thunderbolt 3 port, which means you can daisy chain two of these monitors together. We didn’t have a second on hand, but used daisy chaining with a different 4K LG display, which worked well.

You can also connect other Thunderbolt 3-enabled accessories directly to the display if preferred, and there are also three additional USB-C ports. Both a Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C cable are included. There’s no webcam, but there are built-in stereo speakers available, much like the prior version of the LG UltraFine displays available from Apple.

The display is crisp and vivid, rivaling the Retina display on Apple’s Macs, and we liked the high gloss finish despite the fact that it tends to add more glare. With 500 nits brightness, it’s fairly bright, and because it has P3 wide color support, all the colors are rich and true to life.

All in all, we came away with a positive impression of this display. Since you can daisy chain two of them together, it might be nice to have two of them if you can given the smaller size and the $700 price point, which is half of the price of the 5K UltraFine display.

With the 4K LG UltraFine Display having been replaced, Apple may also have a replacement for the 5K UltraFine monitor on the horizon. The 5K monitor is sold out on Apple’s site right now, though the listing for it hasn’t been removed entirely.

Apple is also planning to get back into displays with rumors suggesting a 31.6-inch 6K display is in the works and set to be released alongside a new Mac Pro that’s coming this year. Unfortunately, Apple’s 6K display is rumored to be super pricey, so it may be out of range for a lot of Mac users who will instead need to rely on other options like the UltraFine displays from LG.

A week after Sonos added long-promised Google Assistant integration to a pair of speakers, Bose is following suit. The company’s bringing the popular smart home AI to a trio of existing models, the Home Speaker 500 and Soundbar 500 and 700. The forthcoming, pint-sized Home Speaker 300 will be hitting the market with the feature built-in.

Like Sonos, you’ll get your standard array of Assistant queries, including music playback, Chromecast TV control and the ability to control connected home features like smart lighting. All of that will be accessible through the built-in speaker array. Like Sonos, the aforementioned speakers are also compatible with Alexa.

It’s clearly in the best interest of these third-party manufacturers not to have to play sides. For Google and Amazon, it means bringing their respective smart home ecosystems to a pair of well-regarded brands. Also like Sonos, setup happens in the company’s music app, which means, unfortunately, that you won’t have the full suite of setup options you get with Google’s own Home speakers.

The upgrade is available starting today. Additional features, including news and podcasts, are coming this summer. Ditto for the Home Speaker 300, which is arriving this summer.