Google loses Sonos patent case, starts stripping functionality from speakers

Rather than pay royalty fees to Sonos, Google is sending downgrades to customers.

Promotional image of smart speaker.

Enlarge / The new Nest Audio. (credit: Google)

Following a preliminary ruling in August, the US International Trade Commission has issued a final decision saying that Google infringed five Sonos smart speaker patents. It would be possible for this ruling to result in some products like the Nest Audio, Chromecast, and Pixel line being banned in the US, but Google has prepared ITC-approved software downgrades, which remove the infringing features from users' products.

Sonos essentially invented the connected speaker category for streaming music, but the advent of voice assistants has led to Big Tech stomping all over Sonos' territory. Sonos says that while it was pitching Google for support of Google Play Music, Google got a behind-the-scenes look at Sonos' operations in 2013. Sonos says Google used that access to "blatantly and knowingly" copy Sonos' features for the Google Home speaker, which launched in 2016. Sonos sued Google in early 2020.

Eddie Lazarus, the chief legal officer at Sonos, told The New York Times, “We appreciate that the ITC has definitively validated the five Sonos patents at issue in this case and ruled unequivocally that Google infringes all five. That is an across-the-board win that is surpassingly rare in patent cases.”

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Intel NUC 12 Extreme “Dragon Canyon” has a socketed desktop CPU, discrete graphics support

Intel’s NUC Extreme line of computers tend to be compact, high-performance systems with the latest Intel mobile chips and support for discrete graphics. But this year’s NUC 12 Extreme is something a little different – it will have an LGA1700 socket with support for 12th-gen Intel Alder Lake desktop processors. Code-named Dragon Canyon, the new Intel […]

The post Intel NUC 12 Extreme “Dragon Canyon” has a socketed desktop CPU, discrete graphics support appeared first on Liliputing.

Intel’s NUC Extreme line of computers tend to be compact, high-performance systems with the latest Intel mobile chips and support for discrete graphics. But this year’s NUC 12 Extreme is something a little different – it will have an LGA1700 socket with support for 12th-gen Intel Alder Lake desktop processors.

Code-named Dragon Canyon, the new Intel NUC 12 Extreme should be available in the first quarter of 2022.

Like many companies, Intel scaled back plans to attend this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in person, so instead of showing off the Dragon Canyon NUC in person, the company shared some details at the end of a CES 2022 Demo video.

Among other things, we can see that the system will feature:

  • Support for 65W Intel Core i7 or Core i9 socketed processors
  • Vapor Chamber & fan cooling
  • 3 x PXIe Gen 4 slots for M.2 2280 SSDs
  • 2 x DDR4-3200 SODIMM slots for up to 64GB of RAM
  • Thunderbolt 4
  • 10 Gbe Ethernet
  • USB 32 Gen 2
  • HDMI
  • Front panel with customizable LED lighting

There’s also a a slot in the baseboard for an optional discrete graphics card. According to a report from last fall from Inpact Hardware, it’s expected to be a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot.

We first learned that Intel was likely planning to use a socketed CPU for this year’s NUC Extreme via a leaked photo posted earlier this month, but now Intel has confirmed that the leak was accurate.

Since the CPU is socketed, users will likely be able to upgrade or replace the processor, but the marketing materials suggest that Intel expects most users to opt for a Core i7-12700 or Core i9-12900 processor. Both are 65-watt processors, with the former featuring 12 CPU cores, 20 threads, and top speeds up to 4.9 GHz, while the latter is a 16-core, 24-thread processor capable of hitting frequencies as high as 5.1 GHz.

The post Intel NUC 12 Extreme “Dragon Canyon” has a socketed desktop CPU, discrete graphics support appeared first on Liliputing.