Month: May 2018

Microsoft gave an early look at its next-generation Surface Hub 2 today. It will go on sale next year, with certain selected customers testing it this year.

Microsoft's Surface Hub, its conference room computer, was something of a surprise hit. The system has been in short supply since its launch about three years ago, especially in its 84-inch version: its combination of video conferencing and whiteboarding makes it a collaborative tool with few direct competitors.

The central feature of the new system is that it's a 50.5-inch 4K display with a rotating mount. Instead of the traditional 16:9 aspect ratio, the Surface Hub 2 has the same 3:2 ratio of Microsoft's other Surface systems. Need a larger screen? Up to four Surface Hub 2s can be tiled together in either portrait or landscape mode. The bezels are much narrower to enable this kind of tiling. Even with this much sleeker look, it still contains speakers, a far-field microphone array, and a camera.

How could you say Steve Jobs is not a gamer? Look at that Atari joystick he's holding!

When John Carmack talks publicly these days, he's usually focused on intricate technical matters, the blue-sky potential of virtual reality, or occasionally business-focused lawsuits. So when the Doom co-creator and Oculus CTO used a lengthy Facebook post to open up about his memories of Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs, it provided an interesting and rare look into two enigmatic tech luminaries.

Carmack leads off by recalling his fondness for Jobs' expensive NeXT workstations, mentioning a failed marketing deal to feature "Developed on NeXT" branding on the original Doom, well before it was a cultural phenomenon. That failed marketing deal put Jobs and Carmack in each others' orbit, a proximity which Carmack says he used to convince Jobs to adopt OpenGL 3D graphics standards on Macintosh, rather than using Apple's own proprietary API.

Despite the problems with Apple's OpenGL support (many of which the newer Vulkan standard seeks to fix), Carmack says getting Apple to adopt the open graphics standard ended up being key to getting mobile phone companies to adopt it years later, preventing a situation where "half a dozen SoC vendors [roll] their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age." He considers that knock-on effect "one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had."