Month: August 2022

Enlarge / A photo taken onsite at Apple Park in Cupertino, California—an office complex Apple built with onsite work culture in mind.

Apple has asked its employees to spend more time in the office as pandemic restrictions continue to loosen, but it has again been met with organized resistance and an internal petition advocating for more time working from home, according to a report from the Financial Times.

A week ago, Apple once again announced a deadline for when its corporate employees should return to the office at least three days a week. This time, the date is September 5. Beginning that day, the company will require its employees to work onsite on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as one additional weekday that will be decided on a team-by-team basis.

This was not the first time Apple made such an announcement—though the previous attempt mandated Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays instead of offering one team-dependent flex day—but the company's leadership has repeatedly had to postpone the shift in light of new developments in the pandemic since first announcing a three-day plan in June 2021.

Enlarge / Matt Smith stars as the scheming and ruthless Prince Daemon Targaryen, heir presumptive to the Iron Throne. (credit: HBO Max)

Making a prequel to a beloved series is never easy, especially when it's a prequel to one of the most influential blockbuster series of the last decade—one that whiffed its finale so badly that it alienated some of its most devoted fans. HBO's House of the Dragon rose to the challenge, debuting last night with a solid, promising pilot episode. Granted, it suffers a bit in comparison with Game of Thrones (especially the earlier seasons). But this was an eminently watchable and entertaining pilot that might even win back some of those alienated fans if the rest of the season lives up to that promise.

(Some spoilers below.)

As I've written previously, House of the Dragon is set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and chronicles the beginning of the end of House Targaryen's reign. Those events culminated in a civil war and the extinction of the dragons—at least until Daenerys Targaryen came along two centuries later. The primary source material is Fire and Blood, a fictional history of the Targaryen kings written by George R.R. Martin. The book begins with Aegon I's conquest of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, thanks to the family's advanced weaponry in the form of dragons. This is followed by a period of relative peace before the inevitable succession crisis. The final two sections of Fire and Blood deal with the fallout of that crisis and serve as the primary source material for House of the Dragon.

Enlarge / A Core i7-12700. A leaked list of Intel's 13th-generation Core desktop CPUs claims that most of them will be getting more E-cores than their 12th-generation counterparts. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Our understanding of Intel's 13th-generation Core CPUs, codenamed "Raptor Lake," continues to take shape ahead of their planned launch this fall. Motherboards for current-gen Alder Lake chips have been adding preliminary support for them, and now a supposed list of the desktop CPU lineup (as reported by Tom's Hardware) suggests that Intel will be leaning on its CPUs' small efficiency cores (E-cores) for much of their performance gains.

Based on Intel's disclosures, we know that Raptor Lake CPUs will use the same CPU and GPU architectures and Intel 7 manufacturing process as Alder Lake. Its large performance cores (P-cores) will be based on an architecture called "Raptor Cove," though technical documents don't distinguish between it and Alder Lake's "Golden Cove" cores. And the E-cores will be based on the same Atom-derived Gracemont architecture that Alder Lake uses. The big cores handle the heavy lifting and provide the best performance for games and other apps that benefit from good single-core performance, while the E-cores pitch in for lower-priority and background tasks plus workloads like CPU-based video encoding and rendering jobs that can engage all of your processor's cores at once. It's tough to make exact performance comparisons, but AnandTech's benchmarks of E-cores in isolation suggest that they are about as fast as a midrange 6th-gen Skylake CPU core most of the time.

Intel has also confirmed that some Raptor Lake chips will include up to 24 physical cores, spread out across eight P-cores and 16 E-cores. Alder Lake CPUs max out at eight E-cores, for a total of 16 physical cores.

Enlarge / Try enough browsers and accounts and eventually you'll be able to see this new podcasts page. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

YouTube's podcast push started with a new "Podcasts" page. The website youtube.com/podcasts will 404 for some people, but for others, they'll see a landing page highlighting podcast content. The page was first spotted over the weekend by 9to5Google but has apparently been slowly rolling out since last month.

The podcast page doesn't do much right now. It shows "Popular Episodes" and "Popular Podcast Playlists" for random shows, and that's about it. Clicking through still only gives you the normal YouTube interface. It's a meager first step, but this is all part of the plan, which involves a major push into podcasts from Google's media brand.

Google already has a podcasting product called "Google Podcasts," which very slowly grew out of the search division in 2016. It only started to become a viable service around 2020, though, when the iOS app finally launched. Before that, there was Google Play Music Podcasts from 2015 to 2020. Before that, there was the Google Reader-powered "Google Listen," which lasted from 2009 to 2012. YouTube Podcasts will be Google's fourth podcasting platform.

Enlarge / People weren't that interested in new smartphones in Q2 2022—unless they were the kind that cost more than $900. (credit: Getty Images)

Smartphone makers are reporting big downturns in smartphone buying, and analysts think it's because people are holding onto their phones longer. But the market is still high for expensive phones—people still like buying those.

Nearly every smartphone maker besides Samsung and Apple reported lower smartphone shipments in the second quarter (April–June) of 2022. Global smartphone shipments decreased 9 percent last quarter compared to 2021, according to International Data Corp. Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo saw marked downturns. Xiaomi reported a 26 percent drop in smartphone shipments during the second quarter, with a similar drop in revenue.

Higher-end phones are increasing in market share and becoming even more important to manufacturer profits. (credit: Counterpoint Research)

In a Wall Street Journal report, analysts and company executives pointed to inflation, people leaving their homes more after a long pandemic, and a far softer Chinese market. Chip and component makers had recently reported similar kinds of demand dwindling, just as they were aiming to invest in more production facilities.

Enlarge / Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci gestures as he waits for the beginning of a hearing before the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies of Senate Appropriations Committee at Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, May 17, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Alex Wong)

Anthony Fauci—President Biden's chief medical adviser and longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—will retire from his government positions this December.

The 81-year-old infectious disease expert has worked at the National Institutes of Health since 1968, holding the position of director of the NIAID for nearly four decades, since 1984. In that time, he has advised seven presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan. He played a crucial role in the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, notably as a key architect behind PEPFAR, the global AIDS response program begun by President George W. Bush that is estimated to have saved 21 million lives and prevented millions of HIV infections.

Fauci had noted for some time that he soon planned to step down from his positions, citing his long tenure at the NIH, his age, and his interest in other pursuits. "Obviously, you can't go on forever," Fauci told CNN in July. "I do want to do other things in my career, even though I'm at a rather advanced age."