Month: September 2023

Enlarge / Apple Senior Vice President of Services Eddy Cue. (credit: Justin Sullivan / Staff | Getty Images North America)

One of the most anticipated witnesses in the Department of Justice's antitrust trial over Google's search business was Apple executive Eddy Cue. But Cue, who testified this week for approximately four hours, publicly revealed very few details about the hotly debated deal between the two tech giants that set Google as the default search engine on Apple devices for the past two decades, The New York Times reported. He largely defended the deal as an obvious business choice for Apple.

“I didn’t think at the time, or today, that there was anybody out there who is anywhere near as good as Google at searching,” Cue told the court. “Certainly there wasn’t a valid alternative."

During Cue's approximately two hours of open court testimony, however, it was perhaps a passing remark from Cue that raised eyebrows the most.

Enlarge / It's what you signed up for. (credit: Intercept Games / Private Division)

When it comes to early access games, the only thing harder than code and quality assurance may be setting expectations.

Kerbal Space Program 2 was initially announced for 2020, then, after a whole bunch of development shifts, arrived in early access in February 2023—a bit too early, as suggested by player feedback. There were complaints about missing features and missing tutorials, but now there's an issue with having too much of something: Windows registry entries.

As detailed in a bug report, Kerbal Space Program 2 (KSP2) drops lots and lots of "PqsObjectState" entries into the Windows registry. The initial bug report offers a 322MB text file of them, to the point that the game started throwing "PlayerPrefsException" errors and refusing to load. The issue seems to be with how the game is using the Unity engine's PlayerPrefs game preference storing system.

Enlarge / The Quest 3 release date is unveiled at the Meta Connect conference.

Following a small tease in July, Meta has announced an October 10 release date for its Quest 3 headset. The follow-up to 2020's hot-selling Quest 2 and 2022's overpriced Quest Pro will start at $499 for a 128GB model or $649 for a 512GB model.

The lower-end model comes bundled with a copy of Asgard's Wrath 2 (available in winter 2023), while the higher-end model also includes a six-month subscription to the Meta Quest+ software subscription service.

The new headset upgrades the Snapdragon XR2 line powering previous Quest headsets to a "Gen 2" chipset, according to specs posted online. That means double the processing power and 30 percent more total resolution than Quest 2 (2064×2208 pixels per eye; 25 pixels per degree). The Quest 3 also sports 8GB of RAM, up from the 6GB of the Quest 2 but down from the 12GB on the Quest Pro.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Intel’s Meteor Lake processor architecture promises to be its most interesting in recent history, but we’ve known for a while now that Intel isn’t planning to launch a version for socketed desktop motherboards like the ones you’d find in a self-built PC or an off-the-shelf mini tower. For those systems, Intel plans to release a second consecutive refresh of the old Alder Lake architecture, the one that first came to desktops in 12th-generation Core CPUs in 2021.

In an interview with PCWorld (via Tom's Hardware), Intel Client Computing Group General Manager Michelle Johnston Holthaus said that Meteor Lake chips would be coming to desktops after all. But the company backpedaled a bit a couple of days later, clarifying that these Meteor Lake desktop chips would be of the soldered-to-the-motherboard variety, not intended as high-performance replacements for current desktop Core i7 and Core i9 chips.

This kind of bifurcation isn't totally unheard of, especially when Intel is in the process of shifting to a new manufacturing technology, as it is with Meteor Lake. Chips for high-performance desktops tend to be physically larger and also need to be able to scale up to higher clock speeds, two things that are harder to do when a manufacturing process is new. And Meteor Lake is nothing if not complex to manufacture, using new Intel Foveros packaging technology to combine four different silicon dies produced on three different manufacturing processes by two different companies.

Enlarge / The Pixel 7 Pro camera layout. Between the first two lenses, you can make out sensors for laser autofocus and a color sensor.

Canalys has some gruesome new numbers out for the North American smartphone market in Q2 2023, detailing what it's calling the "worst quarterly performance for over a decade." Q2 has plummeted 22 percent, year over year, and with these numbers, Canalys is predicting the smartphone market will be down 12 percent overall in 2023.

Apple is down 20 percent for Q2 and still in a dominant position with 54 percent market share. Samsung is down 27 percent, in second place overall with 24 percent market share in Q2 2023. Motorola is next with a 25 percent decline and only 8 percent market share. TCL, a TV company that feels like it only briefly dabbled in smartphones, is the single biggest loser, down 30 percent, with 5 percent market share.

(credit: Canalys)

Only a single company survived this quarter unscathed, and it's actually Google! The company might be at the bottom of the smartphone charts, but Pixel phone sales are up 59 percent, earning Google 4 percent of the market. It was the same story last year, when Google jumped from 1 to 2 percent. In a few quarters, the company might hit fourth place.

Enlarge / An artist's conceptual rendering of antihydrogen atoms falling out the bottom of the magnetic trap of the ALPHA-g apparatus. (credit: Keyi )

CERN physicists have shown that antimatter falls downward due to gravity, just like regular matter, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. It's not a particularly surprising result—it would have been huge news had antimatter been found to be repulsed by gravity and "fall" upward—but it does tell us a bit but more about antimatter and brings physicists one step closer to resolving one of the most elusive mysteries surrounding the earliest moments of our universe.

As the name implies, antimatter is the exact opposite of ordinary matter, as it is made of antiparticles instead of ordinary particles. These antiparticles are identical in mass to their regular counterparts. But just like looking in a mirror reverses left and right, the electrical charges of antiparticles are reversed. So an anti-electron would have a positive instead of a negative charge while an antiproton would have a negative instead of a positive charge. When antimatter meets matter, both particles are annihilated and their combined masses are converted into pure energy. (It's what fuels the fictional USS Enterprise, as any Star Trek fan can tell you.)

As far as we know, antimatter doesn’t exist naturally in the known universe, although we can now create small amounts at places like CERN's Antimatter Factory. But scientists believe that ten billionths of a second after the Big Bang, there was an abundance of antimatter. The nascent universe was incredibly hot and infinitely dense, so much so that energy and mass were virtually interchangeable. New particles and antiparticles were constantly being created and hurling themselves, kamikaze-like, at their nearest polar opposites, thereby annihilating both matter and antimatter back into energy in a great cosmic war of attrition.