If you live in a major metropolitan area with great high-speed internet, you will be forgiven for forgetting Redbox exists. But the company that rents new releases from big red kiosks at grocery stores is still alive and kicking, and Variety is reporting it intends to go public after it was acquired by the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), Seaport Global Acquisition Corp. The new company is reportedly valued at $693 million.
Redbox has had success operating completely counter to Netflix, Disney Plus, HBO Max, and all the other behemoth streamers that rely on set-top boxes, new TVs, and solid internet to function. According to Redbox, around 70 percent of its customers would be classified as “late adopters.” They’re people who still use CRT TVs, dabble with DSL, and if they’re anything like the Redbox users I know, glare at cloud-based computing suspiciously.
However, despite focusing on what appears to be my mother and her best friend, the company has begun to branch out from kiosks. In February 2020, it launched an ad-supported streaming service and added videos on demand in December 2020.
Redbox told Variety it plans to use the cash from going public to pay down debt and expand its VOD services. With just 40,000 kiosks and 39 million subscribers, it will need to do some rapid expansion to keep up with its rivals. Disney Plus, which launched in 2019, has over 100 million subscribers. Netflix, which Redbox began as a rival to in 2002, has over 200 million.
Redbox is expected to go public in the third quarter this year with the ticker symbol “RDBX.”
Arduino may be the last of the official partners to release its RP2040 powered board, but it seems it may have left the best till last. Here we see the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, the first official Raspberry Pi Pico alternative with onboard WiFi.
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The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect is powered by the same RP2040 SoC, a dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133 MHz, 264KB of SRAM, and 16MB of flash memory as the Raspberry Pi Pico, but this is where the similarities end.
The biggest addition is onboard WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2, provided by a u-blox NINA-W102 chip, used on some models of Arduino for the past few years. This means that the 1.7 x 0.7 in (43.18 x 17.78 mm) board is ready for IoT projects with no additional extras. Other notable additions are a built-in mic that you can use for sound activation, audio control, and voice recognition and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) which can be used to measure angular forces, orientation and be used for simple gesture inputs.
The GPIO pin layout does not follow the Raspberry Pi Pico layout; rather, Arduino has quite rightly used the same pinout as previous Arduino Nano boards, such as the Arduino Nano 33 IoT. This means we have 14 digital pins, some of which have double duty for UART, SPI and I2C. There are also eight analog inputs, the most of any RP2040 board.
Software support comes via the usual options. The Arduino IDE, including version 2.0, is compatible with the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. Arduino’s IoT cloud platform is also supported, enabling GUI applications to be written for common data science and remote control projects. Support for MicroPython and CircuitPython will also be present, but tweaks may need to be made to use WiFi / Bluetooth and the onboard sensors.
How much will this board cost? The launch price is €22 (excluding taxes), which converts to around $27, making it currently the most expensive RP2040 board on the market.
Massively popular game creation tool Roblox is now a massively popular experience creation tool Roblox, possibly in response to the ongoing Epic v. Apple trial.
Roblox allows a variety of user-created projects on its platform, and until earlier this week, these were all grouped under a tab called “Games” on Roblox’s website. Roblox creators could create and manage “games” through an editor, and individual games had a user limit called “max players.”
That’s all changed now. The “Games” tab now reads “Discover” on the web, although it still points to an address of “roblox.com/games.” Developers can create and manage “experiences,” and experiences have “max people” allowed. The word “game” has been replaced by “experience” across nearly the entire Roblox website, and the iOS and Android apps now have a Discover tab instead of a Games tab — although both apps are currently classed as games in their respective stores. Roblox acknowledged a message from The Verge, but it didn’t offer an explanation for the latest change by press time.
Roblox has used the term “experience” in place of “game” before, and CEO David Baszucki called Roblox a “metaverse” rather than a gaming platform last year. But this change happened days after a legal fight over whether Roblox experiences are games — and by extension, whether Roblox itself should be allowed on the iOS App Store.
The Epic v. Apple antitrust trial has produced a weeks-long, frequently hilarious debate over the definition of a video game. Epic wants to prove that its shooter Fortnite is a “metaverse” rather than a game, pushing the trial’s scope to cover Apple’s entire App Store instead of just games. Apple wants to prove that Epic is an almost purely game-related company and that the App Store maintains consistent, user-friendly policies distinguishing “apps” from “games.” It also wants to defend a ban on “stores within a store” on iOS.
Roblox blurs the line between a large social game and a game engine or sales platform. Users don’t enter a single virtual world like Second Life; they launch individual experiences created by users. Developers can sell items within those experiences, and there are full-fledged game studios that build with Roblox instead of, say, the Unity or Unreal engines. But all of this activity happens within a single Roblox app, instead of as a series of separately packaged games.
Apple has apparently worried about this fuzziness. In a 2017 email, Apple marketing head Trystan Kosmynka said he was “surprised” that Roblox (which he referred to as “Roboblox”) had been approved for the App Store. The email chain indicates that App Store reviewers raised concerns in 2014, but Roblox was approved without ever resolving the issues. Epic brought the decision up again in court, hoping to cast doubt on Apple’s App Store review process.
Instead, Kosmynka justified the choice by saying that neither Roblox nor its user-built projects should be defined as games. “If you think of a game or app, games are incredibly dynamic, games have a beginning, an end, there’s challenges in place,” he testified. “I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft. These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of.” Kosmynka said Apple considered Roblox itself an app (rather than a game) because the company used that label in the App Store, although this doesn’t appear to be accurate.
Besides the crucial factors of “beginning,” “end,” and “challenges,” Kosmynka seemingly argued that these experiences weren’t games because Roblox contained their code in a safe, Apple-vetted Roblox sandbox — making them less objectionable than standalone installable games. But Apple doesn’t use that same logic for cloud gaming services, which stream video of games from remote servers. In fact, it requires these services to list each game as a separate app. That would probably be a nightmare for Roblox, where experiences range from full-fledged professional projects to tiny personal spaces.
Some Roblox users have left irritated messages on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms. But Roblox has promoted itself as a general-purpose metaverse in the past. It’s got virtually nothing to gain by deliberately stepping into Apple’s minefield of iOS gaming rules, particularly after such an extended courtroom debate about its status. On iOS, it turns out, the only winning move is to not play — or at least not tell anyone you’re playing.
Google Cloud and Seagate offered a peek at their efforts to use machine learning, a type of AI, to predict when data center hard disk drives (HDDs), which are responsible for storing many terabytes of data, might start to fail so they can plan around those disruptions to their systems.
Right now there’s no getting around the fact that HDDs fail. They’re less reliable than SSDs —assuming those drives aren’t being pushed to the limit while they mine Chia—but they also offer higher capacities at lower prices. That’s an important factor for companies like Google Cloud that need to be able to handle massive amounts of data, either in support of their own projects or on behalf of their customers.
”At Google Cloud, we know first-hand how critical it is to manage HDDs in operations and preemptively identify potential failures,” the company said in a recent blog post detailing those efforts. “We are responsible for running some of the largest data centers in the world—any misses in identifying these failures at the right time can potentially cause serious outages across our many products and services.”
The problem was that manually identifying a failing drive, which Google Cloud defined as an HDD “that fails or has experienced three or more problems in 30 days,” is a time-consuming process that requires physical access to the device. Google Cloud and Seagate wanted to use machine learning to reduce the amount of time engineers would have to spend testing drives to determine their risk of failure.
Google Cloud said that it has “millions of disks deployed in operation that generate terabytes (TBs) of raw telemetry data,” including “billions of rows of hourly SMART(Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data and host metadata, such as repair logs, Online Vendor Diagnostics (OVD) or Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) logs, and manufacturing data about each disk drive.”
That means the company has a staggering number of HDDs that all generate “hundreds of parameters and factors that must be tracked and monitored.” This being Google Cloud, however, the sheer amount of available information was also beneficial. Between Google Cloud, Seagate and Accenture, that data could be put to use in a machine learning model capable of predicting a drive‘s chances of failing.
The companies tested two models: One based on AutoML Tables and one that was custom-developed for this project. The former won out with “a precision of 98% with a recall of 35% compared to precision of 70-80% and recall of 20-25% from [the] custom ML model,” (which also means the experiment served the dual purpose of demonstrating the benefits of using AutoML instead of a custom solution).
Google Cloud said that it plans “to expand the system to support all Seagate drives—and we can’t wait to see how this will benefit our OEMs and our customers!“ More information about the project is available via the company’s blog post.
The NASA spacecraft that snatched a sample of rocks from the distant Bennu asteroid last year fired up a suite of thrusters on Monday and committed to its two-year journey back home. The maneuver kicks the minivan-sized spacecraft, dubbed Osiris-REx, onto a winding cosmic path around the Sun and toward Earth’s orbit. When it returns to Earth in 2023, it’ll toss a capsule packed with asteroid samples through the atmosphere somewhere over Utah.
The spacecraft’s Asteroid Departure Maneuver (ADM) was no sweat for the Osiris-REx team, but it marked a significant step towards the return of the first pristine cache of asteroid samples in NASA’s history. Spacecraft engineers inside a Lockheed Martin center in Littleton, Colorado confirmed the seven-minute thruster firing began at 4PM ET Monday and celebrated success shortly after.
“All stations, the ADM burn has completed. We had a nominal ADM burn, and we’re bringing our samples home!” declared Navigation Team Chief Pete Antreasian, prompting applause inside the control room.
Osiris-REx launched from Florida in 2016 to journey over 100 million miles to Bennu, an acorn-shaped asteroid named after a mythological Egyptian deity that symbolized the world’s creation. Scientists hope Bennu, an ancient remnant from the earliest days of the solar system, will hold clues to the origins of life on Earth.
Last year, Osiris-REx entered Bennu’s orbit, becoming the first US spacecraft to circle an asteroid. It gradually approached the space rock’s surface and extended an 11-foot robotic arm with a showerhead-shaped collection device on the end. In a dramatic event that lasted only a few seconds, the sampling head touched down on Bennu’s surface and emitted a blast of pressurized gas strong enough to kick up rocks and asteroid debris to catch them in the sampling head’s container. Bennu’s surface was surprisingly soft, and the touch-and-go maneuver splashed up more rocks than scientists expected. The asteroid scoop was so hearty — collecting about two ounces — that rocks jammed the sampling container door open.
Osiris-REx’s sampling arm plucks a sample from the Bennu asteroid on October 20th, 2020.NASA
But engineers managed to close up the rock suitcase and stow it safely inside the spacecraft’s capsule. Osiris-REx stayed in Bennu’s neighborhood for a few more months to bask in the cloud of asteroid dust it punched up, and to study the crater it left on the asteroid’s surface. Now, it’s finally on its way home.
“It’s a new chapter in the mission,” says Osiris-REx project scientist Jason Dworkin, who maintains the scientific integrity of the sampling mission, serving as the operational glue between the spacecraft engineering team and the teams of scientists eagerly awaiting the asteroid samples. “I’ve been waiting a long time to get this sample to the laboratory,” he tells The Verge. “I started in 2004. My daughter was in diapers, and now she’s graduating from high school.”
The first thruster burn on Monday was precisely timed to put Osiris-REx in Earth’s path two and a half years from now, a little over 6,000 miles from the surface. The spacecraft will orbit the Sun twice along the way, using its thrusters to intricately nudge itself closer and closer to Earth and tallying 1.4 billion miles total in its return expedition. “This is really the finality — we’re done at Bennu, we aren’t going back,” says Sandy Freund, Lockheed Martin’s Osiris-REx Mission Operations Program Manager. “There’s a little bit of sadness, in that we’ve gotten to know this asteroid, we’ve learned so much. But then there’s that excitement of what we’re going to learn when these samples are here on Earth.”
The spacecraft will eject its dishwasher-sized asteroid sample capsule and send it careening through Earth’s atmosphere for a landing at the Utah Test and Training Range on September 24th, 2023. Osiris-REx will stay in space. If it manages to save enough fuel during its years-long return from Bennu, NASA might assign it a new mission to another asteroid sometime in the future, the agency said in a blog post on Monday.
As soon as it touches down in Utah, NASA teams will carefully transport the capsule and its precious cargo to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the agency’s Moon rocks currently live.
Only 25 percent of the Bennu material will be used for immediate inspection by scientists around the world. The other 75 percent will be stored for future scientists, some of whom haven’t been born. The researchers hope later generations can explore the samples using technologies that haven’t yet been invented — an apt way to anticipate innovation and prolong the scientific value of rare cosmic rocks.
“That means every decision I make has the weight of history on it,” Dworkin says. “So I want to make sure that I arm all future scientists with the best tools I can, so they can use the samples as best as possible. That’s one of the things that a project scientist does — they help enable more science to be done than they can personally do.”
“I look forward to in 50 years, or longer, maybe your readers, or your readers’ children or grandchildren, may be inspired to ask new questions with new techniques on these old samples,” he says. “It would be thrilling.”
Voice control isn’t the sole preserve of wireless smart speakers, you know. Barking “Alexa, open Just Eat” at your Echo Dot (or other Alexa speaker), or “Hey Google, what’s in my calendar for today” to your Google Assistant speaker just for the joy of hearing that your schedule is clear, is now commonplace. But using spoken word to command the main music system in your home – your serious, great-sounding hi-fi setup – may not seem so natural. It may be a jump many audio enthusiasts are reluctant to take, even. But give this a moment’s thought, music lover, because verbal control over your hi-fi might be just what your household needs.
Here, we explain the various ways in which you can have voice control as part of a hi-fi system, whether you are keen to use Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant or Apple’s Siri platforms, and whether you want to bring your a traditional ‘dumb’ system into 2021 or are looking to invest in a new set-up with virtual voice assistance at its core…
(Image credit: Amazon)
Add voice control by connecting a smart speaker
One of the easiest routes to giving your vintage hi-fi system a voice is by connecting an external smart speaker to it.
Add Alexa The Amazon Echo Dot smart speaker comes with its own built-in driver under its little spherical fabric jackets, but you can beef up its audio by making it play through the speakers in your sound system instead. (Amazon launched a speaker-less Echo Input device a few years ago for this very purpose, but it’s now been discontinued.) This may be handy, but note that audio quality will be limited here.
The Echo Dot offers wired and wireless connectivity, and will work with just about any integrated amp, receiver, soundbar or pair of active speakers with a 3.5mm aux input or Bluetooth connection. With either connection, all of the audio – including Alexa’s verbal answers – will play through the connected speakers in your system.
The diminutive, cheap and cheerful Amazon Echo Dot has a 3.5mm output, which means you can wire it to any receiver, integrated amp or powered speaker with a 3.5mm input. Alternatively, it features built-in Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) Bluetooth, meaning you can connect it wirelessly to any Bluetooth-enabled receiver, speaker or soundbar.
Best Alexa speakers 2021
Add Google Assistant Want Google Assistant to run the show instead? Similarly, you can pair a Google Nest Mini* (Google’s version of the Echo Dot) over Bluetooth for voice commands and music to play through your Bluetooth-toting system. However, it does not have a 3.5mm output.
*Older Google smart speakers, such as the Home Mini, can also do this.
Best Google Assistant speakers 2021
How about hi-fi with Alexa or Google Assistant integrated?
As we’ve explained, almost any receiver, integrated amp or powered speaker with a 3.5mm input or Bluetooth connection will essentially ‘work’ with Alexa (or Google Assistant, for that matter), if you’ve already got an Alexa- (or Google-) powered device to physically or wirelessly connect it to.
Products with Alexa and*/or Google Assistant baked in, however, do not require you to already own and connect a third-party smart device. These products – ‘smart’ themselves – have integrated microphones to pick up your commands, and run Amazon’s voice software internally, rather than simply being able to work with the technology. These are, for now, more or less limited to wireless ‘smart’ speakers, though.
*Some wireless speakers are platform agnostic and support both Alexa and Google Assistant, such as the Sonos One.
How about the Amazon Echo Link/Amp or Sonos Amp?
(Image credit: Sonos)
If it’s an Amazon Echo device, that means Alexa must be built in, right? Wrong. The Echo Link and Echo Link Amp – Amazon’s music streamer and music streaming amplifier respectively – don’t have integrated microphones so still need a third-party Alexa device, such as an Echo Dot, connected to be obey commands and be part of voice-controlled music groups throughout your home.
Similarly, the Sonos Amp – which you may well think would be voice controllable – doesn’t have an in-built microphone for voice control. It will, however, respond to voice commands issued to connected Alexa-, Google- and Siri-powered devices, including, naturally, the Sonos One.
Sonos: everything you need to know
Multi-room hi-fi platforms with Alexa support
If you’ve yet to buy a hi-fi system and want to get one that puts voice assistant friendliness at its core, there are now several hi-fi and home cinema components that have Alexa-friendly multi-room platforms built in. These include those based on Yamaha’s MusicCast, HEOS by Denon, and BluOS, all of which offer an enhanced Alexa experience when a third-party Alexa device (like an Amazon Echo) is connected to them through specific Alexa ‘skills’.
MusicCast MusicCast is a wireless multi-room audio system built into several Yamaha AV receivers, soundbars and wireless speakers. It allows these devices to be connected together through your home wi-fi network and controlled by an app on your smartphone or tablet. By adding Alexa through a third-party Alexa speaker, you can kick back on the sofa and simply ask for music on your MusicCast AV receiver.
In case you didn’t know, Alexa provides capabilities (called ‘Alexa Skills’) that enable us to create a more personalised experience according to the kit we own, which can be downloaded from the Alexa Skills store, or simply by saying “Alexa, enable [skill name].” Since said skills are cloud-based, they don’t take up space on your device, so there’s no limit to the amount you can enable. There are two Alexa skills that work with MusicCast: the MusicCast Smart Home skill and the MusicCast skill.
The MusicCast Smart Home skill brings standard Alexa commands such as power on/off, volume control and play/pause/skip to the party. To turn on the AV receiver in your living room, you just say, “Alexa, turn on the Living Room.”
The MusicCast skill goes beyond the basics, giving you control of unique MusicCast functions, like linking/unlinking rooms and direct access to playlists and favourites. In order to access the MusicCast skills, you need to add “ask MusicCast to” after the “Alexa” wake word (or whatever your wake word is): for example, “Alexa, ask MusicCast to link the Living Room to the Kitchen.”
(Image credit: Future)
BluOS
An operating system developed by NAD Electronics and its sister brand Bluesound, BluOS sits at the core of connected products from those two brands, plus Dali and Monitor Audio.
To add Alexa voice control to your BluOS multi-room system, simply download the BluOS Voice Control skill in the Alexa app and link your BluOS-enabled products. You can then tell Alexa to play songs or playlists from subscribed services like Amazon Music, Tidal and Deezer, adjust volume levels or pause what’s playing with a single voice command.
BluVoice is the voice-control interface (or trigger word) that acts as the intermediary between BluOS and a compatible voice assistant, so BluOS owners can ask their Echo device: “Alexa, ask BluVoice to play new songs on Tidal”.
DTS Play-Fi Similarly, to use Alexa with DTS Play-Fi hi-fi products, you’ll need to ask a connected Alexa-supporting speaker to play music, which it can then do across the rest of your compatible Play-Fi products.
HEOS When it comes to the HEOS platform, we’d point you towards the What Hi-Fi? 2020 Award-winning Denon AVC-X3700H (above). It’s an 8K-ready home cinema amplifier, but those intending to use it for music playback can also take advantage of the AVC-X3700H’s hi-res audio decoding of files up to 24bit/192kHz and double-speed DSD. Most importantly – in regards to voice control, at least – there’s a HEOS Home Entertainment skill to enable in the Alexa app, which means you can control all of your HEOS-enabled devices by conversing with Alexa through.
HEOS-based Denon and Marantz kit that supports AirPlay 2 can also benefit from Siri voice control when controlled by an iOS (iOS 11.4 and later) device, too. Which leads us to…
Can I voice control my system using Siri?
In a word, yes – as long as something in your system supports AirPlay 2.
While Apple’s Siri voice assistant is integrated into the Apple HomePod or HomePod Mini smart speakers, other speakers (such as the Sonos One) and streaming systems (such as the Bluesound Powernode 2i and KEF LSX) rely on AirPlay 2’s connection to your iOS device to speak to Siri. You simply have to Open the Apple Home App on your iPhone or iPad and select ‘Add Accessory’ to add, group and then voice control your device over Siri.
However, Siri’s usefulness is more limited than Alexa’s and Google Assistant’s, only allowing you to directly ask to play music that’s either on Apple Music or stored locally on your iOS device. You can ask to play from Spotify too, but you’ll need to say “on Spotify” after your request.
MORE:
See our pick of the best smart speakers 2021
Or the best multi-room systems 2021
Starting from scratch? Read up on the best hi-fi systems 2021
If broadband access was a problem before 2020, the pandemic turned it into a crisis. As everyday businesses moved online, city council meetings or court proceedings became near-inaccessible to anyone whose connection couldn’t support a Zoom call. Some school districts started providing Wi-Fi hotspots to students without a reliable home connection. In other districts, kids set up in McDonald’s parking lots just to get a reliable enough signal to do their homework. After years of slowly widening, the broadband gap became impossible to ignore.
So as we kick off our Infrastructure Week series, we wanted to show the scope of the problem ourselves. This map shows where the broadband problem is worst — the areas where the difficulty of reliably connecting to the internet has gotten bad enough to become a drag on everyday life. Specifically, the colored-in areas show US counties where less than 15 percent of households are using the internet at broadband speed, defined as 25Mbps download speed. (That’s already a pretty low threshold for calling something “high-speed internet,” but since it’s the Federal Communications Commission’s standard, we’ll stick with it.)
Maps like this are important because, for much of the past decade, the scale of the problem has been maddeningly difficult to pin down. Most large-scale assessments of American broadband access rely on FCC data, a notoriously inaccurate survey drawn from ISPs’ own descriptions of the areas they serve. Even as the commission tries to close the broadband gap, its maps have been misleading policymakers about how wide the gap really is.
Instead of the FCC’s data, we drew on an anonymized dataset collected by Microsoft through its cloud services network, published in increments by the company over the past 18 months. If the FCC monitors the connections that providers say they’re offering, this measures what they’re actually getting. You can roll over specific counties to see the exact percentage of households connected at broadband speed, and the data is publicly available on GitHub if you want to check our work or drill down further.
The disparity between FCC reports and the Microsoft data can be shocking. In Lincoln County, Washington, an area west of Spokane with a population just a hair over 10,000, the FCC lists 100 percent broadband availability. But according to Microsoft’s data, only 5 percent of households are actually connecting at broadband speeds.
Other areas stand out for the sheer scale of the problem. Nine counties in Nevada fall under the 10 percent threshold, covering more than 100,000 people and the bulk of the area of the state. Most of Alaska is a similar dead zone — understandably, given how rugged the state’s interior is — but similar gaps pop up in southwest New Mexico or central Texas.
Because it’s measuring usage, this data doesn’t distinguish between people who can’t buy a fast connection and people who simply can’t afford one, and in other places, you can see the connectivity problem as one more consequence of accumulated neglect. In Arizona, Apache County stands out as a long thin stripe in the northeast corner of the state, showing just 5 percent broadband usage. More than 70,000 people live there, most of them members of the Navajo, Apache, or Zuni tribes. According to the census, more than 23,000 of them are living in poverty, by far the highest poverty rate in the state. Across the border, San Juan County, New Mexico, shows 29 percent broadband usage, so the problem isn’t that the county is too remote or that the terrain is too difficult to manage. Apache County is simply poor, and the slow progress of the broadband buildout seems like a promise it will stay that way.
With the right eyes, you can even see the broadband gap as a dividing line for the US at large. Counties on the wrong side of the line are poorer and more remote, losing population even as the country grows. This is why there’s no broadband, of course: from a business perspective, building out fiber in Apache County is a losing bet. But the lack of fiber also stifles economic activity and makes young people more likely to leave, creating a cycle of disinvestment and decay that has swallowed large portions of our country.
In theory, this is a problem the federal government is getting ready to fix. President Biden has proposed $100 billion in broadband funding as part of the American Jobs Plan, more than twice what the FCC estimated would be necessary to bring broadband to 98 percent of households. But it will be a long walk from appropriating that money to actually laying fiber in places like Apache County. That road starts with taking a long look at the shaded parts of this map and thinking about what it will take to truly get them online.
Today, Nvidia has begun announcing its GeForce Now library additions for May. Over the course of this month, 61 games will be added to the cloud gaming service, with 17 of those games arriving today.
Nvidia’s continued partnership with Remedy Entertainment sees Alan Wake and Alan Wake’s American Nightmare joining the library alongside Control for the first time. The most recent Splinter Cell game, Blacklist, is also joining the library today.
Here is the full list of titles joining GeForce Now this week:
Alan Wake (Steam)
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare (Steam)
Assetto Corsa (Steam)
Beat Cop (Steam)
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger (Steam)
Chronicon (Steam)
Death Rally (Steam)
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (Steam)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV (Epic Games Store)
MotoGP21 (Steam)
Observer System Redux (Epic Games Store)
Pacify (Steam)
Pine (Free on Epic Games Store until May 13)
Project: Gorgon (Steam)
THE SHORE (Steam)
Steep (Steam)
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist (Steam)
All of these games will be live and ready to stream on GeForce Now as of today.
KitGuru Says: What do you all think of the latest additions to GeForce Now? Do many of you use the service for gaming away from your usual rig?
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Unit shipments of hard drives in the first quarter of 2021 were down both sequentially and year-over-year as consumer devices continued their migration to SSDs. Still, HDD capacity sold during the quarter set a new record of 288 exabytes as hyperscalers and enterprises upgraded their storage capabilities. Seagate remained the world’s largest maker of hard drives in terms of units and exabytes (EB) shipped.
Nearly 60% of New PCs Use SSDs
The industry shipped as many as 83.981 million PCs in Q1 2021, according to IDC. Meanwhile, only about 34.97 million hard drives for consumer PCs were sold last quarter (based on data from Trendfocus), so nearly 60% of personal computers shipped in Q1 used SSDs. This is not particularly surprising as many modern notebooks cannot house a hard drive. In contrast, enthusiast and workstation-grade desktops use SSDs because HDDs are rather slow for modern workloads by today’s standards.
The industry shipped 14.79 million hard drives for desktops (down 23% quarter-over-quarter) and 20.18 million drives for laptops (down 31.4% QoQ) in Q1, according to Trendfocus. The average capacity of an HDD for a client PC in the first quarter was 1.82TB (2.13TB for desktops, 1.58TB for notebooks), so most computers used rather inexpensive hard drives.
64 Million HDDs Sold in Q1
Hard disk drive shipments in the first quarter of 2021 totaled 64.17 million units, according to Trendfocus (via StorageNewsletter). Coughlin Associates (via Forbes) estimates that the hard drive TAM (total addressable market) in Q1 2021 was 64.1 million units, down from 67.8 million in Q1 2020. Meanwhile, Nidec believes that the industry sold 63 million units in the first quarter, up from 59 million units in the same quarter a year ago.
(Image credit: Future)
Seagate retained its position as the world’s leading maker of HDDs, with about 27.54 million HDDs sold in the first quarter and 42.9% of the market. Western Digital shipped 23.09 million drives and commanded 36% of the market. Toshiba was the distant No. 3 with 13.54 million HDDs supplied and 21.1% of the market.
Seagate also led in average HDD capacity (5.07TB per drive) and exabytes shipments (139.5EB) in Q1 2021. In contrast, the average capacity of a Western Digital hard drive in Q1 was 4.72TB, and the company shipped 109.04EB of hard drive storage devices.
Since the remaining three HDD makers don’t disclose their detailed unit shipments, the numbers published by analysts are basically educated guesses. Meanwhile, the first quarter of 2021 did not bring many surprises as far as sales of hard disk drives are concerned, so the sales numbers and market shares should be quite accurate.
288 EB ~ 303 EB Shipped in Q1
The general trend for the hard drive market was set several years ago: HDD unit sales are declining while exabyte shipments are growing. Nothing changed in Q1 2021. Trendfocus believes that the total capacity of HDDs shipped by the industry was 288.28EB. By contrast, Coughlin Associates estimates that HDDs sold in Q1 2021 can store 303.34EB of data, up from 278.03 in Q1 2020.
The lion’s share of exabyte shipments belongs to 3.5-inch hard disk drives for servers, enterprise, nearline, and surveillance applications. About 16.05 million of such drives were sold in the first quarter, but with an average capacity of 12TB, they can store 192.78EB, thus commanding 66% of exabytes shipments in Q1 2021.
Console HDDs Are Dropping, DAS Remains Strong
Consumer electronics HDDs are a rather large category of storage devices for applications like game consoles, direct-attached storage (DAS), digital video recorders (DVRs), and similar things. Shipments of CE HDDs in Q1 2021 totaled 9.95 million units, according to both Trendfocus and Coughlin Associates. Meanwhile, the industry shipped 14.4 million CE hard drives in Q1 2020, based on data from CA.
Since the latest game consoles from Microsoft and Sony no longer use HDDs, it is not surprising that shipments of hard drives for consumer electronics dropped significantly — by 31% — year-over-year.
In fact, manufacturers shipped only 2.53 million 2.5-inch CE HDDs with an average capacity of 0.72 TB per unit in Q1 2021. The vast majority of 2.5-inch CE HDDs have been used for game consoles and branded external drives for years. So, as production of previous-generation gaming systems from Microsoft and Sony is winding down, shipments of 2.5-inchers will decline further.
By contrast, sales of 3.5-inch CE HDDs remain strong. Trendfocus says about 7.42 million of these drives shipped during the quarter. An average capacity of a 3.5-inch CE hard drive was about 3.47TB, which indicates that most of them were used for various demanding applications, such as DAS. Branded DAS with high-capacity HDDs inside seems to be a pretty successful business for HDD makers as many people buy direct-attached storage for their PCs that come with SSDs (which do not always feature enough capacity for things like media).
Enterprise HDDs Booming
Enterprise HDDs have been the one bright spot in recent years. The enterprise-grade HDD category includes various drives for a wide variety of applications, including servers (both cloud and on-premise), enterprise NAS, nearline, and surveillance. In total, 19.25 million such HDDs were shipped in Q1 2021, according to Trendfocus.
Surprisingly, despite general trends, shipments of 2.5-inch enterprise-grade HDDs (which includes legacy 10,000/15,000 RPM drives) totaled 3.2 million units, up both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. The average capacity of these HDDs was 1.37TB, so some legacy datacenters probably upgraded their capacities or just replaced old drives during the quarter.
Sales of 3.5-inch enterprise-grade HDDs exceeded 16 million units and increased sequentially and annually in the first quarter. Enterprise-class 3.5-inchers shipped by the industry in Q1 could store 192.78EB of data, and their average capacity now slightly exceeds 12TB.
Meanwhile, sales of nearline HDDs for exascalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure are booming. Seagate says that hard drives with 16TB and higher capacities (i.e., 16TB, 18TB, and 20TB) contributed nearly 50% of its capacity shipments during the quarter (139.5EB), which equals nearly 70EB.
Summary
The HDD market in Q1 2021 brought no surprises and was consistent with trends set in the last five years or so.
Mainstream client PCs are on track to replace HDDs with SSDs, but at the same time, people are buying more DAS, NAS, and cloud storage. To that end, shipments of client HDDs are declining, whereas sales of hard drives for other applications are growing.
Enterprise-grade 3.5-inch HDDs are thriving. Now that data is generated not only by users but by computers themselves (in various forms), demand for storage will only grow and 288EB ~ 303EB of HDD storage shipped in Q1 2021 will increase rather rapidly in the coming quarters.
Another emerging driver for HDD demand is of course Chia cryptocurrency. At press time (on May 8), storage space allocated to the Chia network was nearing 3 exabytes, increasing three times from about 1 exabyte at the end of April. From the general market point of view, that is slightly over 1% of exabytes shipped in Q1, but it is already hard to acquire a high-capacity HDD at retail. What is going to happen next and whether Chia is set to become a factor that will cause a global shortage of hard drives is something that remains to be seen, but signs are not good for general users.
Today, there’s only one official way to play Google’s Stadia game streaming service on your 4K TV — the last-gen Chromecast Ultra, connected to the company’s proprietary Stadia Controller over Wi-Fi. That’s because Google hasn’t yet brought Stadia to the new-and-improved $50 Chromecast, and its predecessor didn’t support Bluetooth, meaning the only way to pair a controller was to loop through Google’s servers in the cloud.
But Google now has a workaround,9to5Google reports. There’s a new “bridge mode” hidden in the latest version of the Stadia app on Android that should let you send controller signals from your phone — letting you play Stadia with your phone’s touchscreen, or even connect another gamepad to your phone. You’ll be able to use your phone to change your TV’s volume, too, according to text snippets buried in the APK.
9to5Google spotted this graphic in the APK to promote bridge mode.Image: Google
The original Stadia Controller has been something of a thorn in the company’s side ever since Stadia launched on November 19th, 2019, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Google decides to move on. It took many months for buyers to be able to use Google’s wireless controller wirelessly with anything except the Chromecast Ultra — desktop web browsers and Android phones weren’t supported at first, meaning you had to physically plug in a USB-C cable. USB-C audio took a while too, and Bluetooth audio via the controller still has yet to materialize.
Thankfully, third-party controller support was quite robust on those other platforms, letting you easily sync a PlayStation or Xbox gamepad to play, and it’s unlikely you’ll even need this new Bridge Mode to play Stadia on the 2020 Chromecast whenever it arrives; the new Chromecast does support Bluetooth game controllers. Judging by a few Steam Link and GeForce Now sessions with my 8BitDo gamepad, Bluetooth gamepad support may work just fine.
Right now, it’s just a little unclear how much Google cares about Stadia; after it axed all its in-house game studios in February, I argued that the writing was on the wall; since then, Stadia has lost its head of product and at least six additional staffers, and been the subject of two reports about its internal struggles. Apparently, Google had to pay tens of millions of dollars to publishers like Ubisoft, per game, just to get games ported to Stadia.
As the first week of the Epic v. Apple trial comes to a close, Apple is picking a fight over one of Epic’s witnesses. The fight centers on testimony from Lori Wright, Microsoft’s vice president of Xbox business development, who testified about the distinction between “general purpose” and “special purpose” devices on Wednesday in favor of Epic’s claim. Wright’s testimony set off a day of confusion over whether Microsoft actually makes money selling Xbox hardware. Apple is now asking the judge for an “adverse credibility finding,” basically a determination that Wright’s testimony can’t be trusted because of irregularities in document production.
In a new filing, Apple argued that some of the documents referred to in Wright’s testimony weren’t produced in advance, and the entire testimony should fall under a cloud. Apple’s lawyers zeroed in on Wright’s claim that Xbox hardware was sold at cost in order to subsidize game sales.
“Ms. Wright testified about the supposed unprofitability of Microsoft’s console business without providing the P&L statement from her files that could have substantiated (or disproven) her testimony,” Apple’s filing argues.
Apple has actually made this case before, arguing back in April that Wright’s testimony should be stricken from the record because of irregular document production in the weeks leading up to the trial. Now, they’re arguing that Wright stepped outside of the preset parameters of her testimony, and her entire testimony should be deemed not credible.
And at the center of it all is Microsoft’s profit-and-loss analysis for the Xbox hardware, which no one on the Apple side has seen. It’s worth remembering here that Apple and Microsoft have been locked in heated competition for decades now, and while Apple doesn’t have a product competing specifically against the Xbox, the broader companies are tied up in a delicate balance of fierce competition and business cooperation. As a result, Microsoft really does not want to give Apple sensitive financial data about the Xbox — and Apple sees the P&L statement as a way to punch back at Microsoft for getting involved in the App Store fight in the first place.
From the beginning of the Epic v. Apple trial, documents have been an issue — and it’s likely to continue being a problem as long as the proceedings go on. Both sides agreed in advance to upload exhibits to a public Box folder (it’s here, if you want to follow along), but the actual use of that folder has been extremely chaotic. On the first day of the proceedings, more than 100 different filings were uploaded to the general exhibits folder, only to have a handful clawed back as sealed — including some of the Sony docs we published here. Nearly every day, documents have been added to the Box and then pulled back, to the point where we’ve had to mirror the whole thing just to make sure we don’t miss anything.
Some of this is normal. A big part of the legal fight is over which documents can be used in the trial and which parts of those documents can be blacked out to conceal trade secrets or other information the companies would rather not get out. The companies’ lawyers have been going back and forth on these tiny details for months; it’s just what lawyers do.
But it’s fair to say this case has been unusually chaotic — either because of the remote nature of the trial or the sheer volume of different companies involved. A lot of information has come out of the discovery in this case, and not all of it was supposed to. Now, Microsoft is caught between giving up information that could help in court and giving up business secrets to a longtime rival. Microsoft wants Epic to win this case, and it’s willing to talk about Xbox profitability if it helps to make that happen. But giving up that information in open court might be a bridge too far.
Microsoft has been trying to build a lighter version of Windows for more than 10 years without success. The latest effort, Windows 10X, has reportedly now been shelved, in favor of improving Windows 10 instead.
Petri reports that Windows 10X will no longer ship this year, and the OS will likely never arrive in its current form. Microsoft had originally been planning to deliver Windows 10X, a more lightweight and simplified version of Windows, alongside new dual-screen devices like the Surface Neo. That was before the pandemic hit, and Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows 10X for single-screen laptops instead.
The Surface Neo was supposed to ship with Windows 10X.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The switch was designed to position Windows 10X as more of a Chrome OS competitor. Windows 10X included a simplified interface, an updated Start menu without Live Tiles, multitasking improvements, and a special app container for performance and security. Microsoft’s overall goal with 10X was to create a stripped-back, streamlined, and modern cloud-powered version of Windows.
Microsoft has always seen Chromebooks as a big threat in businesses and schools, but over the past year there has been a big increase in demand for regular Windows laptops. Despite a global chip shortage, the PC market hasn’t slowed down during the pandemic. Microsoft has directly benefited with increased Windows revenue. Windows OEM revenue grew by 10 percent in the recent quarter, reflecting strong consumer PC demand. Windows non-pro OEM revenue also grew by 44 percent.
There are now 1.3 billion active Windows 10 devices, according to Microsoft. That’s a huge amount of existing devices, and it appears Microsoft is now focused on improving the core of Windows instead of delivering a new variant. Microsoft has been gradually working on improving the user interface of Windows 10, with new system icons, File Explorer improvements, and even the end of Windows 95-era icons.
The Windows 10X Start menu.
All of these visual changes are part of a broader effort codenamed Sun Valley. Microsoft has not yet officially detailed this work, but a job listing earlier this year teased a “sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows.” We’re expecting a lot of visual changes to arrive in the Windows 10 21H2 update that should appear in October.
Elsewhere, Microsoft is also focusing on improving Windows for those who rely on it daily. The software maker is finally fixing the rearranging apps issue on multiple monitors, adding the Xbox Auto HDR feature and even improving Bluetooth audio support.
It’s clear Microsoft is getting back to the basics, after more than a decade of trying to simplify Windows. Windows RT first debuted in 2012, and then Windows 10 S arrived in 2017. Both failed to simplify Windows, but Windows 10X had some interesting changes that will undoubtedly make their way to Windows 10.
Ubisoft announced that it’s developing a free-to-play game set in The Division’s universe, called The Division Heartland. The company also announced that a Division mobile game is in the works.
The announcement is light on details, so it’s not clear yet whether the game will be a battle royale style like Call of Duty: Warzone or Fortnite, but Ubisoft has said it’ll be coming to PC, consoles, and cloud gaming platforms at some point in 2021 or 2022. There are also basically no details about the mobile game, but Ubisoft said in a news release that more will be revealed at a later date.
It’s understandable why Ubisoft would want to launch its own version of the free-to-play and mobile shooter games: Fortnite makes billions of dollars for Epic, and CoD: Mobile alone reportedly made $10 billion in 2020. That’s not even mentioning the 100 million players for Warzone, another lucrative title.
Whether Ubisoft’s offerings in The Division universe will be as popular as its competitors remains to be seen, but Ubisoft is certainly trying to keep the game’s world culturally relevant: it’s still developing content for The Division 2, and is currently working on a movie version with Netflix starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
A Microsoft executive has admitted that the company doesn’t earn any profit on sales of Xbox consoles alone. The admission came as part of the Epic v. Apple trial yesterday, confirming what we’ve known for years: Microsoft sells Xbox consoles at a loss. Asked how much margin Microsoft makes on Xbox consoles, the company’s head of Xbox business development, Lori Wright, said, “We don’t; we sell the consoles at a loss.”
An Epic Games lawyer asked a follow-up question: “Does Microsoft ever earn a profit on the sale of an Xbox console?” Wright replied, “No.” That doesn’t mean Xbox doesn’t make money, though. Microsoft was keen to point this out in a statement to The Verge just hours after Wright’s testimony yesterday.
“The gaming business is a profitable and high-growth business for Microsoft,” says a Microsoft spokesperson. “The console gaming business is traditionally a hardware subsidy model. Game companies sell consoles at a loss to attract new customers. Profits are generated in game sales and online service subscriptions.“
The Xbox Series S.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
I asked Microsoft whether it never truly makes any margins on hardware alone, but the company didn’t respond in time for publication. Typically, Microsoft and Sony subsidize hardware at the beginning of a console’s lifecycle, but those early component costs tend to decrease over time. Those lower costs also translate to lower retail prices for consoles over time, though.
A teardown analysis of the Xbox One S, for example, revealed an estimated bill of materials of $324, which is $75 less than the $399 launch price for the 2TB version of the console, back in 2016. Microsoft also launched a disc-less version of the Xbox One S two years ago, which was presumably also sold at a loss.
Sony and Microsoft have similar business models for PlayStation and Xbox consoles, but Nintendo is the exception. In court documents, Microsoft estimates that hardware is generating a loss for Sony, but a profit for Nintendo. That’s backed up by Nintendo’s impressive 84.59 million Switch sales this year, up to March 31st.
Why all these costs are being discussed right now is a big part of the ongoing Epic v. Apple trial. Epic isn’t happy about Apple’s 30 percent revenue cut on in-app purchases for Fortnite, but Apple is arguing that Epic should also take issue with Microsoft or Sony’s identical 30 percent cut. It has resulted in hours of testimony about whether the iPhone is more like a PC or an Xbox, and a debate around open platforms versus locked-down ones. Microsoft clearly sees a difference between Xbox and PC, and has only cut the amount it takes on the Windows side to 12 percent, while the Xbox remains at 30 percent.
Microsoft obviously wants to maintain its business model for Xbox, and has attempted to push the industry toward digital games for years. Microsoft has very much sided with Epic Games in the case against Apple, and Epic has admitted it has never even questioned Microsoft’s digital sales cut. But how long this harmony will exist between the pair will very much depend on the future of digital game sales and cloud gaming. Microsoft is increasingly focused on its Xbox Game Pass subscription, which spans across devices that aren’t even Xbox consoles.
Game Pass also includes xCloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming technology. Fortnite isn’t part of xCloud, because Epic Games won’t allow it. That highlights the emerging battles that are starting to take place in the game industry over shares of revenue. It looks like Microsoft has been preparing for some of them, but Epic v. Apple feels like the beginning of a greater war over the digital future of game stores.
Safari just doesn’t support key features — and Safari’s the only option
Something keeps coming up at the Epic v. Apple trial as a potential alternative for getting Fortnite on the iPhone: web apps. It’s an intriguing idea, as web apps are able to do surprisingly complex things: just look at a Chromebook or even game streaming services on the iPhone. But potential is far from reality, because the ability for web apps to look, feel, and perform as well as native apps on iOS is severely limited.
These web apps aren’t the preferred way for consumers or developers to use or create apps on the iPhone, either. But Apple has forced companies like Microsoft and Nvidia to use web apps, instead of native ones available in the App Store.
Though the term itself hasn’t really come up explicitly, what’s being discussed are Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs. If you’re unfamiliar, think of them as slightly more advanced web apps that you can “install” directly from your web browser on to your home screen. Google has been pushing the idea (though support for PWAs on its own platforms is a little mixed), and some companies like Microsoft and Twitter have wholeheartedly embraced PWAs.
Not Apple, though. There are a variety of reasons for that — ranging from genuine concern about giving web pages too much access to device hardware to the simple fact that even Apple can’t do everything. There’s also the suspicion that Apple is deliberately dragging its feet on support for features that make PWAs better as a way to drive developers to its App Store instead.
Fortnite running on an iPhone before its removal.Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
But the App Store has restrictions that aren’t tenable for some developers. That’s the whole crux of this trial for Epic, after all. On the stand, a Microsoft executive detailed the company’s struggles to get its xCloud game streaming service onto iOS. Lori Wright, VP of Xbox business development at Microsoft, revealed the company spent around four months talking to Apple to try and get xCloud launched as a native app. Apple seemed, initially open to the idea of letting Microsoft use the same model as Netflix or Audible. But Apple changed its mind and forced Microsoft, Nvidia, and others to list cloud games as separate apps.
Submitting Xbox games one-by-one was simply a nonstarter for Microsoft, so it resorted to making a web app. In addition to the technical hurdles a web app involves, it also introduces a discoverability issue. Users simply aren’t used to installing apps from the web on their iPhones. Apple has effectively trained everybody that if they want an app, they go to the App Store.
Wright essentially admitted that the only reason Microsoft is releasing Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) as a web app is because Apple’s terms on the App Store are too onerous. “People don’t play games through the browser on iPhone,” said Wright, but “it was our only outcome in order to reach mobile users on iOS.”
Even the judge in the case seemed confused by Apple’s rule, which says that services that stream movies can offer them all in a single app but services that stream games have to separate each game for individual listing and review. “I can use Netflix with a native app and I can see lots of different movies or TV shows or whatever. Is it that you didn’t want to use a subscription model?” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers asked at one point.
Apple has forced Microsoft and others to head to the web for gaming streaming.Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge
But back to those technical hurdles: they’re tall, numerous, and can be blamed both on the nature of web apps and Apple’s own decisions. Safari on the iPhone only recently became capable of supporting a service like Xbox Cloud Gaming via specific controller support. Until then, that sort of thing was on the list of features Apple was reticent to include in Safari. There are legitimate reasons to block things like Bluetooth access from web apps, including fingerprinting for tracking, but it was getting harder to justify and Apple needed some kind of escape valve as pressure mounted to support cloud gaming services.
Google software engineer Alex Russell recently published a very comprehensive list of all the features that Safari on iOS doesn’t support yet — and it’s a long list. For PWAs to truly be a viable alternative to App Store apps, there are at least a few of these features that need to be enabled. The inability to send push notifications via a web app, for example, is particularly galling as it’s already possible on Safari on macOS. An app that can’t send notifications is simply not competitive with an app that can.
Grant is touching on some more of the benefits to native versus web apps; push notifications and ARKit both come up. The former is another example of Apple letting native apps reduce friction points — Epic needs to convince the judge these smaller features are meaningful.
— Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy) May 5, 2021
As Russell notes, his “interests and biases are plain” as a Google engineer. But it doesn’t change the fact that there are many things that a PWA cannot do on the iPhone that a developer like Epic would need to support Fortnite as a web app.
“Native [iPhone] apps would have access to a far wider range of APIs than web apps,” explained Andrew Grant, engineering fellow at Epic Games, during the trial. “Access to things like push notifications, to Siri, to health data, and augmented reality features” are also limited to native apps, said Grant. Web apps also have to be far smaller than native apps, and are capped at about 50MB in size.
Plus, from a simple performance perspective, web apps have more overhead than native apps — and lack access to Apple APIs that can speed up games like Fortnite.
In fact, this was a sticking point for a lot of the questioning of an Nvidia employee. Nvidia, like Microsoft, has been trying to get its GeForce Now cloud gaming service into the App Store, but has faced the same restrictions that Microsoft is struggling with. Nvidia director of product management Aashish Patel spent a lot of time answering questions around latency in a browser and the benefits of using native apps.
“There are less controls over the streaming, so you could argue in some ways it’s worse,” than a native app, said Patel. Developers are also locked into using the video codecs provided in Safari on iOS, whereas they could use alternatives that might be better at handling latency inside a native iOS app.
All iOS browsers run the same WebKit engine underneath.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
All of this is compounded by yet another Apple policy: no third party browser engines. You can install apps like Chrome, Firefox, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and others on the iPhone — but fundamentally they’re all just skins on top of Apple’s Webkit engine. That means that Apple’s decisions on what web features to support on Safari are final. If Apple were to find a way to be comfortable letting competing web browsers run their own browser engines, a lot of this tension would dissipate.
As it relates to Epic v. Apple, a lot of this PWA discussion isn’t germane to the fundamental arguments in the case. Fortnite as a PWA would necessarily be a streaming app instead of a native game and that introduces an entirely different set of compromises. Which is why it’s so fascinating to see Apple’s lawyers float web apps as a potential solution — because web apps on the iPhone are famously more limited than they are on other platforms, including even Apple’s macOS.
The human-readable versus machine-readable code bit is back now — Grant is talking about how web apps don’t go through the same kind of compilation process that increases processing efficiency, yet another reason they’re not as good as native apps.
— Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy) May 5, 2021
Even if every single browser feature was available on mobile Safari or even if Apple allowed alternative browser engines on the iPhone, a web app will never match the performance of a native app. At the end of the day, though, all the discussion of web apps in the Epic v. Apple case highlight the limitations of Apple’s App Store policies, not PWAs.
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