Somehow, it is June. That boggles my mind a bit. A quiet holiday weekend in the US was saved by big PC news on Tuesday, and a new Ransomware attack that could have significant implications in North America.
Read MoreTech News Roundup for May 27, 2021
This has actually been a very full week of news, to the point that I can’t even fit in that Amazon is buying MGM and how that’ll matter in the the long term but not right away. Oops, I guess I just did.
Here are a few of the other stories I’ve found even more interesting than that in the last couple days.
Read MoreTech News Roundup for January 18, 2020
Here are a few of the stories I found interesting over the weekend. There wasn’t a ton of weekend news, as the post CES lull began, so this is heavy on space news.
Read MoreTech News Roundup for January 13, 2020
With the bulk of the CES product announcements done, a single update today with one CES related item, as well as some other important news bits that have occurred over the last several days.
Read MoreTech News Roundup for September 23, 2020
Here are a few of the tech stories I found interesting… on Tuesday. This is being written early Wednesday morning, so anything of note that happens during the day on Wednesday will be missing.
Tesla Battery Day Event Promises Cheaper Batteries, Vehicles… Eventually
Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed plans for the company’s future direction in battery technology on Tuesday. Tesla has an ambitious plan to halve the cost of the battery cells that go into its vehicles, which constitutes a large portion of the cost of these vehicles. While the cost of the batteries in Teslas have already fallen 87% since the introduction of the original Roadster years ago, driving the costs even lower will help bring the costs down even further. Right now, batteries in Tesla Model 3 and Model Y cost about $156USD per KWh of energy. Tesla’s goal has always been to get that below $100 USD per KWh.
Tesla hopes to achieve this by creating new “tabless” batteries that have 5x the energy density of the current batteries in Tesla vehicles. Thse 4680 batteries, as Tesla calls them, should enable 6x the power and 16% greater range compared to the batteries currently used in the Model 3 and Model Y. It achieves this using the aforementioned “tables” design, which removes the bulky piece that connects the battery cell to the device it is powering with a much smaller connection that is more integrated into the whole product. Tesla plans to produce these 4680 batteries in house, which would be a first for the company. Tesla currently buys all of the batteries for its vehicles in North America from Panasonic, with Elon Musk stating that Panasonic’s production capacity has limited production of the Model 3 and Model Y. Moving to in house batteries will allow Tesla to better control its product stack.
Musk also promised that this new battery will power a new Tesla vehicle that will cost $25,000 USD. No other details were given about this new vehicle, but that price point is important. The current lowest price for a Tesla vehicle is a $35,000 USD Standard Range Model 3. That standard range model gets to that price by sacrificing about 25% of the range of the other Model 3 cars. Getting to $25,000 will make electric vehicles more affordable for more people, which should help adoption greatly.
Don’t expect the new batteries and new car any time soon, however. Elon Musk stated that it will likely be 2023 before we see these batteries being manufactured in quantity, which also means we won’t see the new, cheaper vehicle until at least then. Until then, Tesla will continue buying batteries from Panasonic, and Musk says it will actually increase the number it buys from the company. We will likely see incremental cost reductions in Tesla vehicles in the medium term, as Tesla improve the efficiency of its production process. Tesla did lower the price of the Model 3 and Model Y by about $3000 earlier this year, and the company has not been shy about reducing prices or increasing capabilities of its vehicles whenever it is able.
Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 750G Processor
As consumers and device OEM’s push back against the huge cost of the high end Snapdragon 865 chipset, Qualcomm is trying to alleviate that by releasing more processors in the lower cost 700 series. The 750G is the latest such product. The 750G will be faster than the 730 and 732G, but not quite as fast as the 765G.
The 765G chipset is very capable, and is more than enough for most users. The 750 appears to be a replacement for the 730 and 732G, which are capable today, but the 750G should hopefully add a little extra oomph which will add to their longevity.
Plus, it will help keep the price down, which everyone will appreciate.
Fitbit Sense Reviews Hit
The Fitibit Sense is Fitbit’s new high end fitness centric smartwatch, and reviews hit on Tuesday. Based on a few of them, the product seems very disappointing out the door. The hardware is praised, but the software is said to be riddled with bugs and half baked. The blood oxygen monitoring feature works with only one specific watch face, which is nonsense.
Before I was gifted the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 I had the Fitbit Versa, which was the first version of this line of watches. I found the fitness features to be very robust, but the actual smartwatch features quite basic. It was enough for me, but I did wish it had just a little bit more. The sense is aiming to improve on that, with more smartwatch type features and capabilities like GPS, voice control, and more advanced sensors. It even *improves* the battery life, going from 4 days on the Versa 2 to as many as 6 days on the Versa 3 and Sense. The design is very similar to a 40mm Apple Watch (unfortunately lacking a larger option) that looks quite good if you are ok with a square-ish watch instead of a round watch. However, Fitbit seems to have stumbled out of the gate with the Sense, which is disappointing. If you are entrenched in the Fitbit ecosystem, the Sense (or Versa 3) are the devices to get, but the software bugs will likely keep it from being a serious competitor to the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watches, at least for now.
https://www.theverge.com/21450123/fitbit-sense-review
Jabra Announces Elite 85t Headphones
In the tech world, while the focus on true wireless headphones usually falls on the headphones made by Apple, Samsung, and Google, the most popular and well known alternative to AirPods and Galaxy Buds has been the Jabra Elite series. The 65t and 75t were well regarded headphones, and now the followup 85t have launched. The 85t is an improvement on the 75t in every way, and should be a solid set of headphones for those looking. It features active noise cancellation, longer battery life, bigger speaker drivers, a wireless charging case, a vent to improve the fit in a user’s ear, and more microphones to improve call quality.
Jabra also announced that it will update the 75t to include active noise cancelling, but that it will be software based, as the 75t lacks the dedicated hardware.
https://www.androidauthority.com/jabra-elite-85t-elite-75t-anc-upgrade-1159792/
Tech News Roundup for July 6, 2020
Here are just a few of the things I found interesting over the weekend.
Read MoreTech News Roundup for June 17, 2020
Today’s update includes a couple larger groups of stories that are connected, as well as a few other interesting stories to me.
Read MoreTech News Roundup for June 10, 2020
After a light weekend there has been a lot of very interesting things the last few days, so much so that the Android 11 beta didn’t even make the cut today. Here are a few things that caught my interest in the first part of this week.
The Right Approach to Using Fitness Trackers
I wrote about Fitness tracking, and what I consider the right approach to using them after an article was published recently about how they can be inaccurate in many situations.
Telus Launches 1.5 Gigabit internet plan for some reason
Telus has announced a new internet plan for customers in western Canada called PureFibre 1.5 Gigabit Internet. As that would suggest, the speed on that plan is 1.5 Gigabit download. Interestingly, the upload speed is “only” 940 megabit, which makes this only PureFibre plan Telus offers that does not have symmetrical upload and download speeds.
This is almost certainly a response to Shaw’s recent announcement of a 1 gigabit internet plan from a few weeks ago, and a way for Telus to maintain their ability to claim the fastest home internet plans. I’m all for better internet, but a plan like this is very excessive and unnecessary for most people. Equipment that can actually take advantage of a speed over 1 gigabit is very expensive. Telus didn’t immediately make clear whether or not the advanced Wifi modem they offer even supports that kind of speed, though I would assme it does. However, based on other devices on the market, the modem can get 1.5 gigabit from the internet, but can’t actually send more than 1 gigabit to any individual device. We really are at a point where the technology isn’t capable of supporting the speeds.
I can’t really recommend anyone actually spend the $165/month Telus is charging for this plan. It is too much, and nothing can take advantage of it. It only exists for Telus to say they are faster than Shaw.
Bell will trial using AI to block spam calls
We all hate spam calls, so this is good news. Bell has received approval from the CRTC to conduct a 90 day trial for a system that will use artificial intelligence to monitor telecommunications traffic to “flag anomalies” in an attempt to stamp out spam calls. This is just a trial to see how well this method works, but every little bit helps.
Twitch flooded by copyright claims for old clips
Video streaming service Twitch has received a massive number of copyright takedown notices on older clips on the service. Twitch mostly serves as a livestreaming platform where videos are not stored long term, but users watching the stream can create “clips” of videos, usually 30 second snippets to capture something interesting/good/funny that happened in the video. Those clips do live on in channels. Over the past weekend, the service was flooded with a very large number of takedown notices from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) which is the governing body of the music industry in the US. The RIAA is the association that successfully sued services like Napster out of existence in the early 2000’s when music piracy was at its height. The organization has apparently now turned to Twitch.
There is a much longer conversation about copyright here, and most of this is around US law, which is another thing entirely, but this has become a big issue for Twitch creators overnight. These clips are not created by the Twitch streamer themselves, but rather people watching the video. This has the potential to get very messy very fast.
Reliable sources say Apple will announce a processor shift to ARM at WWDC
There will be a lot more to say about this once there are official details at WWDC in less than 2 weeks, but this is still a big story. Apple is apparently planning to announce the beginning of the transition to Apple designed ARM processors for its Mac computers, with the first products being released in 2021. Currently Mac computers all run Intel processors, like virtually every personal computer in the world. It still isn’t clear what this transition will look like, and whether or not every Mac will eventually run on an ARM processor or whether or not this will be for certain types of devices. I’ll have more to say on this once the details all hit.
The company that makes batteries for Tesla in China has spoiled details on the “Million Mile Battery”
Electric vehicles are the future, and one of the key components on making them cheaper and more sustainable than traditional gas vehicles is battery technology. Boiled down to the simplest terms, the batteries in electic vehicles are just advanced versions of batteries found in devices like phones and laptops, just obviously much larger. That means they are also subject to the battery wear we see on phones and laptops. This means that over time, the total capacity of the battery will decrease, which will reduce range in an electric vehicle. Tesla doesn’t specifically state the longevity of their batteries, but the Telsa Warranty in Canada states that the battery should hold 70% of its capacity after 8 years or 192,000km, whichever comes first. Tesla has invested billions of dollars into researching improvements in battery technology to improve the situation, and the “million mile battery” is something we’ve been hearing about for years. Tesla had been rumoured to hold a Battery Day event this spring to detail advances in the million mile battery, but that was apparently pushed back because of COVID-19. However the company that makes Telsa batteries for the Chinese market has released a lot of details on this million mile battery, stating that this battery could be warrantied for sixteen years or 1.24 million miles (almost exactly 2 million kilometers). This has the potential to mean the battery could last the entire lifetime of the vehicle, instead of potentially needing to be replaced.