Monday, December 31
Daily News Stuff 31 December 2018
Tech News
- Apple is doomed. (ZDNet)
The current Mac lineup is a snoozefest, the iPad is in decline, and the hilariously overpriced iPhone XS Max is barely making half its projected sales. (Tech Crunch)
And the iWatch is a joke. Which leaves, what? Smart speakers? Apple missed that market. Overpriced uncomfortable earphones that you immediately lose?
Apple makes enormous amounts of money, enough to fund a dozen entirely new products every year. The question is whether they have the vision to actually do that.
I don't think so.
Amazon does. Microsoft does, though not to quite the same degree. Google has the vision, but the company is run by idiot children so they always fail.
Apple has the money and competent leadership, but vision died with Steve Jobs.
Analysts are trying to talk up the stock, framing Apple as the new Coca Cola. (Fudzilla)
But Coca Cola don't charge A$2869 per bottle and deliver it bent.
- Nvidia is facing a lawsuit over mishandling its inventory in the face of the cryptocurrency bubble. (Tom's Hardware)
About 18 months ago I was looking to build a new PC, and I wanted to go all AMD. I could not get an AMD graphics card anywhere. By the time I decided to get Nvidia instead, they were gone too. Then Dell announced the Inspiron 27 - and launched it with a 15% day one discount - and I just went with that instead.
AMD cards were impossible to find for a long time. And the reason AMD didn't just increase production is that they knew that the moment the crypto bubble burst, as all bubbles eventually do, they would be left with a ton of unsold inventory and the used market would be flooded with cheap cards.
Not a good combination. So they held tight and waited it out.
Nvidia doesn't seem to have been as successful in managing those events.
- Tariffs are bad for high-end embedded CPUs. (Serve the Home)
Specifically because these CPUs are soldered-in, rather than socketed, so the tariff ends up hitting the entire product. The CPU might represent 80% or more of the total cost, but since it has to be soldered to the board, the tariff hits the whole thing.
- If you can't beat them, hire them? Intel hired Ryan Shrout, Editor in Chief of PC Perspective back in October to become their Chief Performance Strategist, and they've now also poached Allyn Malventano and Ken Addison.
This is a good move for Intel, but a loss for tech journalism. PC Perspective is still a going concern, though, with Sebastian Peak moving up to Editor in Chief.
Until Intel hires him too...
Social Media News
- Meanwhile things are tough in the professional shitposting biz. (Tech Crunch)
Mic, Vice, and BuzzFeed have all suffered cutbacks. Vox is struggling, Gizmodo has had staff cuts, and so has Upworthy. Defy is gone entirely, and The Outline has no staff writers left.
I don't like to hear of companies failing and people losing their jobs. Most people are trying their best to deliver what they think their customers want. But Mic, Vice (except sometimes their Motherboard section), BuzzFeed, and Vox are objectively awful and their loss is humanity's gain. I hope their former staff find productive and fulfilling jobs elsewhere as the companies crash and burn.
- Charles Lane, who was editor of The New Republic at the time of the Stephen Glass scandal, just figured out that journalists lie. (Washington Post)
Video of the Day
If you're thinking of picking up a new laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory for the holidays, don't click buy before you watch this roundup from Other Linus.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:26 PM
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1
Apple is New Coke? An expensive boondoggle that the company had to eventually back down on? Nah.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 31 2018 02:58 PM (Iwkd4)
2
Heh.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 31 2018 03:09 PM (PiXy!)
3
"I hope their former staff find productive and fulfilling jobs elsewhere as the companies crash and burn."
For many of them, that shouldn't happen until they spend some time learning to be good at saying "would you like fries with that?", at least if there were any karma in the world.
For many of them, that shouldn't happen until they spend some time learning to be good at saying "would you like fries with that?", at least if there were any karma in the world.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 31 2018 03:32 PM (Iwkd4)
4
Apropos of nothing, a year and a half after the game came out, there are NO faqs on gamefaqs.com for Metroid: Samus Returns. Absolutely nothing but 3 world maps. It's crazy. The only thing I could find is a godawful-formatted walkthrough on IGN.
Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 31 2018 03:44 PM (Iwkd4)
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