Which Laptop Should I Buy?
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| Which Laptop Should I Buy? | |
| Number | 3714 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 7, 2020 |
| Episode Length | 33:15 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang |
| Guests | Patrick Norton, Len Peralta |
Looking to upgrade to a new laptop this year? Before you do, listen to what Patrick Norton has to say about your options on today’s show.
Guest
Quick Hits
- Google announced that Chrome 82 will warn users before starting "mixed content downloads" or non-HTTPS downloads started on secure pages. Chrome 82 will warn about executable files, and Chrome 83 will block them. Archive file types, PDFs, Word docs, and image files will follow, with all mixed content downloads blocked in Chrome 86 on the desktop. Mobile versions of Chrome will have these policies delayed by one version.
- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declined to rehear the October ruling that upheld the US FCC's 2017 repeal of net neutrality rules. Petitions filed in December by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, internet trade group INCOMPAS, and 15 US states asked for the case to be reheard.
- Motorola's new Razr phone has a hinge system that Razr says, "includes moveable support plates that rigidly support the display when the phone is open but collapse out of the way when the phone is closed." CNET used SquareTrade's Foldbot, a robot designed to open and close folding smartphones repeatedly until they die, and found Moto's phone only lasted for about a quarter of the 100,000+ fold time the Galaxy Fold lasted.
- Motorola announced the Moto G Power and Moto G Stylus. Both phones feature a 6.4-inch 19:9 Full HD LCD screen, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 655 chipset and 4GB of RAM, with a 5000mAh battery on the G Power, and 4000mAh battery in the Stylus. The G Power comes with three rear cameras, a 16MP main shooter, 8MP ultrawide, and a 2MP macro. The G Stylus-- comes with a stylus and also a 48MP main camera, 16MP ultrawide, limited to let you shoot horizontal video while holding the phone in portrait, and a 2MP macro. The Moto G Power starts at $250, the Stylus at $300, with both shipping in the spring.
Top Stories
- Instagram confirmed it built an internal prototype of an Instagram Partner Program that lets creators earn income by running ads on videos. No revenue split was announced, but Facebook Watch currently offers a 55% revenue split for video "Ad Breaks." Previously, Bloomberg reported that IGTV offered to offset production costs on some celebrity accounts, but offered no direct monetization.
- The US Department of Homeland Security confirms it bought access to a commercial database that maps locations of millions of smartphones in America, something multiple advertising companies purchase as well. The Wall Street Journal's sources say the DHS uses the information for border enforcement and to combat illegal immigration. The database is compiled from apps where the user has granted permission to track location, including games, weather and e-commerce apps. The data is then sold to advertisers anonymized for determining things like foot traffic and population density. The data could be combined with other data to deduce a user's identity. The Wall Street Journal sources say the DHS used the data to discover a tunnel used by drug smugglers coming in and out of San Luis, Arizona. Arrests were made of people using that tunnel, but the location data was not used as evidence. In 2018, the US Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that accessing historical records with cellphone location data without a warrant violated the fourth amendment. However, government lawyers reportedly approved this new program because the information was available through commercial ad exchanges, and as a commercial buyer, the ruling did not apply.
- Android Police notes that many people are having "frustrations" with the auto punctuation feature added in late January to Google Voice Typing. Before the update, you had to say punctuation out loud like "period" or "comma." The new feature is supposed to relieve you of that burden and insert punctuation automatically. But it apparently doesn't work consistently. For instance, periods often show up in the middle of a sentence if you pause too long. Google's Recorder app does the same thing when it makes transcriptions, but apparently has a different or better algorithm. Sadly, there's no way to turn off automatic punctuation short of uninstalling all updates to the Google app.
- On December 20, Jalopnik reports that someone named Alec bought a used 2017 Tesla Model S from a dealer called United Traders. United Traders got it used at auction directly from Tesla on November 15. At that auction, the car was sold with the Enhanced Autopilot and FSD package. That package is sold as a one-time payment by the original owner. It's not a subscription. An audit of the car on November 18, determined that the customer had not purchased the software package and therefore it would be flagged for removal in the next software update. United Traders says that after Alec had agreed to purchase the car but before he took it home, a message popped up saying Autopilot had been upgraded and consequently, it stopped working. Alec and United Traders figured it was a glitch and would get fixed in a following update. However, Tesla customer support told Alec the feature was not in his purchase history, and he would need to pay for it to get it back. A source from United Traders told Jalopnik that the same thing happened with the "Ludicrous Speed" package which was removed 60 days after it resold a Model XP90D with the same response from Tesla that the owner of the used car never paid for the feature.
- Uber reported it lost $0.64 per share in Q4 on revenue of $4.07 billion. Analysts had expected revenue of $4.06 billion and a loss of $0.68 per share. On the earnings call, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company has moved its profitability target up from 2021 to Q4 2020. Gross bookings for rides increased 18% on the year to $13.51 billion, while its Eats division saw gross bookings increased 71% to $4.37 billion. Uber thinks it can achieve the profitability because it is lowering spending to promote growth. For example, Rides grew 20% year over year in Q4 but but earnings hit $742 million up from $195 million a year ago.
Discussion
Patrick's latest advice on picking a laptop
- Before we talk about anything else: might wanna buy RAM & SSDs now, rather than later in the year!
- DRAM prices down nearly 40% since the peak in 2018... (Patrick loves) this Camel Camel Camel chart.
- Samsung says DRAM market will start to recover, says Samsung, "citing increased demand from data centres and 5G smartphones."
- CES announcement: AMD Ryzen 4000 mobile APUs 7nm, 8-core, 15w and 45w, first quarter. 7nm, 20% drop in SOC power, "2X performance per Watt" compared to 12nm Zen 2 parts. 7nm process makes for huge gains in graphics and CPU performance. 15W and 45W parts w/ up to Ryzen 9 4900H With 8 Cores, 16 Threads.
- AMD laptops now account for "16.2% market share. That’s up no less than 4% year-on-year, a huge leap, and 1.5% compared to the previous quarter. The figure represents AMD’s strongest performance since 2013 (Q2)."
- Hint: The AMD part is faster than the 10th gen Core i5 part they run it against. Especially in multi-threaded performance.
- AMD Ryzen 4000 'Renoir' APU's 7nm Vega GPU Destroys Intel Ice Lake's Gen 11 GPU In Various Graphics Benchmarks.
- Oh... and Ice Lake isn't super impressive on CPU performance compared to Comet Lake.
- The big question for (Patrick) is battery life...
Mailbag
- Regarding our conversation Thursday about EVP of Gaming at Microsoft Phil Spencer saying he sees Google and Amazon as more of a competitor than Nintendo and Sony, Dustin suggested clarifying a point about cloud gaming. It's not just things like Stadia.
Dustin writes:
In addition to servers that can be used for cloud gaming and snapping up developers to make games for them, developers need servers to run their games on.... if your game needs more than just connecting players together, you need servers for them to play on. Apex Legends has servers hosted in EA's own datacenters but also has servers on Google's Compute Engine. Amazon has a service called GameLift designed to get developers to run games on AWS. So a really popular game is going to need a bunch of servers to back it up and Microsoft is going to have to compete with Google and Amazon for those customers.
- Regarding our conversation Thursday about EVP of Gaming at Microsoft Phil Spencer saying he sees Google and Amazon as more of a competitor than Nintendo and Sony, Dustin suggested clarifying a point about cloud gaming. It's not just things like Stadia.
YouTube
Links
| Preceded by: "People Don't Talk About Nuro Enough" |
Which Laptop Should I Buy? |
Followed by: "The Butterfly Keyboard Effect on Writing" |