Month: January 2020

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  The updated XPS 13 laptop with a 16:10 aspect ratio screen. [credit: Valentina Palladino ]

It's time to usher in the new year with a slew of consumer electronics slated for formal introduction at next week's CES 2020, but Dell is already dishing out product news. Today, the company announced the newest version of its popular XPS 13 laptop, an update to last year's model that is currently our favorite Windows ultrabook. Dell didn't change much about the XPS 13, though it did adjust the display aspect ratio to 16:10 and included an infrared camera for Windows Hello.

That first change makes a big difference in the overall look of the XPS 13 9300. Previously, the wide chin at the bottom of the 16:9 display panel took up a lot of space and made the screen area feel smaller than it actually was. Now, Dell has expanded the display and shrunk all of its bezels to fit the new 16:10 panel, and it's a welcome improvement.

I got a few minutes with the new XPS 13, and the experience of using the device—particularly a model with a 4K display—feels much better. When the old and new XPS 13 are placed side by side, it's hard to imagine using the squished panel on the old XPS 13, as the new 16:10 panel looks like it was always meant to sit in its place.

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken familiarize themselves with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. (credit: NASA)

In the early years of SpaceX at its first factory in El Segundo, the company had a mock-up of a spacecraft that it intended to one day take humans into space. The company's engineers called the capsule Magic Dragon, an allusion to the folk song "Puff, the Magic Dragon." The dope name didn't stick—but the aspiration to launch humans into space has remained among SpaceX's big goals since its founding in 2002.

Now, that day may finally be at hand. The launch of Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on a Crew Dragon spacecraft later this year, perhaps as early as this spring, represents the top-level achievement SpaceX will reach for in 2020, but it is far from the only potential accomplishment on the table. Here's a look at some of the company's major goals for this year.

Crewed flight

The biggest priority for NASA in 2020 is to regain the capacity to get its astronauts to the International Space Station on US vehicles. Since 2011 and the retirement of the space shuttle, now nearly a full decade ago, NASA has relied on Russia and its Soyuz spacecraft for such transport.

Enlarge / If your company makes the Ars Deathwatch, there are always other options. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

Wow, that 2019, though. While we had hopes of a glowing new year as it began, it turns out the glow we saw instead was just the Cherenkov radiation from nuclear-powered Russian doomsday torpedoes. Or perhaps it was the twinkling of the million–dumpster-fire march that 2019 turned into—with some of those dumpster fires lit by the companies we honor here in our 2020 edition of Ars Deathwatch.

Now, it's time to look forward in anger—well, we're not really angry, just disappointed, so we'll say "ennui"—at another new year, as has become our custom. We have taken the pulse of our editors and readers and divined the ashes from all those lovely dumpster fires in an effort to prognosticate the companies, services, and products in the tech world that will lead 2020's inevitable march into ignominy. And we're not even going to mention the election cycle, I promise.

First, let's get our usual disclaimer out of the way: if you're a first-time Deathwatch player, this is not a prediction of the actual demise of companies or technologies. We know that it takes a lot to actually erase a company or a technology from the face of the Earth these days—after all, many of our previous Deathlisters have emerged from Chapter 11 multiple times before going into Chapter 7. Even the worst ideas and businesses often linger on through inertia or get absorbed by some other company and metastasize in new and horrific ways.