Month: September 2021

Enlarge / Microsoft is streaming a Surface-focused hardware event on September 22. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows 11 is coming out on October 5, but it's not the only thing Microsoft has in store this fall. The company will be livestreaming an event at 11 am Eastern on September 22, where it promises to "talk about devices and Windows 11." Microsoft wasn't specific about what kinds of devices it plans to reveal, but the looping video on the event site is of a Surface tablet, so it's not hard to guess. (Before you get too excited, it looks like a Surface Pro X, not a preview of some unannounced product.)

Without more specifics on the kinds of hardware Microsoft intends to focus on, all we can do is speculate. Current rumors suggest that the Surface Duo 2 Android phone or the aging Surface Book 3 are likely candidates, but there are newer processors available that would be suitable for everything from the Surface Pro to the Surface Studio, so refreshes for pretty much everything could be on the table (the Intel version of the Surface Pro is way overdue for a hardware redesign, but we'd at least like to see the 11th-generation Intel Core CPUs from the Surface Pro 7+ come to a Surface Pro device that regular people can easily buy).

The event will be remote and livestreamed from Microsoft's website, as it was for its Windows 11 event a couple of months ago. This has become the norm for tech product announcements in the pandemic era, including Apple's and Google's, but the Windows 11 livestream was a lot less reliable than Apple's or Google's typically are; hopefully Microsoft has smoothed out its technical wrinkles in the intervening months.

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  The Pixel 6. Notice how the bottom one has a bigger area above the camera block? That's the "Pro" model. [credit: Google ]

Nikkei Asia has been sniffing around the Google supply chain and came away with a fun pair of Google rumors. The first is that Google is so optimistic about Pixel 6 sales that it's increasing the production capacity by 50 percent. The second is that the Pixel 6's "Google Tensor" SoC is headed for Chromebooks around 2023.

First, Pixel 6 optimism: Nikkei reports that Google "has high hopes for the Pixel 6 range and has asked suppliers to prepare 50% more production capacity for the handsets compared with the pre-pandemic level in 2019." Google shipped 7 million phones in 2019 according to research firm IDC, so Google is hoping for 14 million in sales. For a gut check, Apple ships over 200 million iPhones a year, and Samsung ships anywhere from 260-300 million phones.

Google has a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the Pixel 6. It marks the company's return to the flagship smartphone market after bowing out in 2020 with the mid-range Pixel 5. It will be the first phone to ship with the hyped-up "Google Tensor" SoC, Google's first self-branded main smartphone SoC. With its own SoC, there's nothing to stop Google from dramatically increasing the lifespan of Pixel phones above the current three-year mark, which we're really hoping the company does. Google's image-stacking camera algorithms have long made it a leader in the smartphone camera quality wars, but it has also rested on its laurels when it comes to the hardware, choosing to ship essentially the same camera sensor in the Pixel 2, 3, 3a, 4, 4a, 5, and 5a. The Pixel 6 will mark the first big camera upgrade in years, and expectations are high for what Google can do with modern camera hardware. The phone will also be the first to ship with Android 12, which puts a beautiful color-changing UI front and center. It will look great in all the commercials.

Enlarge / Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos at the 32nd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on April 12, 2016. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Amazon's attempt to block proposals for the next-generation Starlink system is a "delay tactic" and a continuation of Amazon's strategy of "hinder[ing] competitors to compensate for Amazon's failure to make progress of its own," SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission yesterday.

"Amazon's track record amply demonstrates that as it falls behind competitors, it is more than willing to use regulatory and legal processes to create obstacles designed to delay those competitors from leaving Amazon even further behind," SpaceX told the FCC in its filing. Approving Amazon's request would hurt consumers by denying them "access to faster-moving competition," SpaceX said.

Amazon last week urged the FCC to reject an update to SpaceX's Starlink plan because it "proposes two different configurations for the nearly 30,000 satellites of its Gen2 System, each of which arranges these satellites along very different orbital parameters." Amazon contends that the SpaceX request violates a rule requiring applications to be complete and have no internal inconsistencies.

Enlarge / In 2023, Motional will begin operating Hyundai Ioniq 5 robotaxis. (credit: Motional)

In 2023, you'll be able to take Lyft rides in autonomous Hyundai Ioniq 5s with self-driving systems provided by Motional—as long as you live in the right city. This week, we got our first look at the sensor-bedazzled battery-electric vehicles, which add lidar, radar, and cameras to one of the best-looking new vehicles we've seen in some time.

Motional was created in 2020 by Hyundai Motor Group and automotive supplier Aptiv, which had been testing its level 4 autonomous vehicles in Las Vegas for years. When I rode in an autonomous Aptiv vehicle during CES in 2018, it was with a safety driver behind the wheel. But in February of this year, Motional began fully driverless testing in Las Vegas. The company said it completed over 100,000 passenger rides without incident between beginning operations and removing the safety drivers.

Motional has worked with Hyundai to integrate the sensor suite and other hardware into the Ioniq 5, and Motional President and CEO Karl Iagnemma told TechCrunch that the robotaxis will roll off the line in South Korea, just like normal Ioniq 5s. "This is not a scenario where we’ll take a base vehicle, move it to a different line, take the components off, and then reintegrate or retrofit it," he said. The cars will still have steering wheels, and passengers will not be allowed to ride in that seat.

Enlarge / This isn't Western Digital's first 20TB drive—but it is the first shipping drive to achieve that density without the use of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. (credit: Western Digital)

At Western Digital's HDD Reimagine Event yesterday, the company introduced its newest hard drive architecture—a hybrid spinning rust/NAND flash design it calls OptiNAND. But as WD President of Technology and Strategy Dr. Siva Sivaram told Ars in an interview, OptiNAND bears almost no resemblance to the much-maligned hybrid SSHD drives first introduced in 2011 and 2012.

Instead of promising SSD-like speeds via caching of customer data, OptiNAND offers increased areal density by removing firmware-accessible metadata from the disk itself and storing it on NAND instead.

20TB per disk without SMR

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  Like last year's 20TB SMR drives, the OptiNAND drives employ EAMR in the form of an additional current to the main pole of the write head. [credit: Western Digital ]

The most tangible milestone achieved by Western Digital's newly announced architecture is a nine-platter, 20TB drive that does not require Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) techniques. The new disk uses a subset of Western Digital's EAMR technology, which has been rebranded ePMR—presumably to emphasize that it's not SMR, which has severe performance and usability implications for many common workloads.

Enlarge / The US Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

Two top vaccine regulators have resigned from the Food and Drug Administration, revealing anger, frustration, and turmoil at the federal agency as it faces intensifying pressure to authorize COVID-19 vaccine booster shots and doses for children under the age of 12.

The two regulators leaving are Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review (OVRR), and OVRR Deputy Director Phil Krause. Gruber has been with the FDA for more than 30 years, and Krause has been at the agency for more than a decade.

Their resignations, first reported by pharmaceutical trade publication BioCentury, were apparently sparked by frustration that the Biden administration had overstepped the FDA in announcing plans to offer COVID-19 booster shots beginning on September 20. The pair also clashed with higher-up Peter Marks, who reportedly went along with the administration's plans. Marks is the director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which includes the OVRR.