Apple knows that iMessage’s blue bubbles are a big barrier to people switching to Android, which is why the service has never appeared on Google’s mobile operating system. That’s according to depositions and emails from Apple employees, including some high-ranking executives, revealed in a court filing from Epic Games as part of its legal dispute with the iPhone manufacturer.
Epic argues that Apple consciously tries to lock customers into its ecosystem of devices, and that iMessage is one of the key services helping it to do so. It cites comments made by Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddie Cue, senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi, and Apple Fellow Phil Schiller to support its argument.
“The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage … iMessage amounts to serious lock-in,” was how one unnamed former Apple employee put it in an email in 2016, prompting Schiller to respond that, “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why.”
“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing. Although workarounds to using iMessage on Android have emerged over the years, none have been particularly convenient or reliable.
According to Epic’s filing, citing Eddie Cue, Apple decided not to develop iMessage for Android as early as 2013, following the launch of the messaging service with iOS 5 in 2011. Cue admits that Apple “could have made a version on Android that worked with iOS” so that “users of both platforms would have been able to exchange messages with one another seamlessly.” Evidently, such a version was never developed.
Along with iMessage, Epic cites a series of other Apple services that it argues contribute to lock-in. Notably, these include its video chat service FaceTime, which Steve Jobs announced would be an open industry standard back at WWDC 2010. FaceTime subsequently released across iPhones, iPads, and Macs, but it’s not officially available for any non-Apple devices.
According to Moore’s Law Is Dead, Intel’s successor to the DG1, the DG2, could be arriving sometime later this year with significantly more firepower than Intel’s current DG1 graphics card. Of course it will be faster — that much is a given — but the latest rumors have it that the DG2 could perform similarly to an RTX 3070 from Nvidia. Could it end up as one of the best graphics cards? Never say never, but yeah, big scoops of salt are in order. Let’s get to the details.
Supposedly, this new Xe graphics card will be built using TSMC’s N6 6nm node, and will be manufactured purely on TSMC silicon. This isn’t surprising as Intel is planning to use TSMC silicon in some of its Meteor Lake CPUs in the future. But we do wonder if a DG2 successor based on Intel silicon could arrive later down the road.
According to MLID and previous leaks, Intel’s DG2 is specced out to have up to 512 execution units (EUs), each with the equivalent of eight shader cores. The latest rumor is that it will clock at up to 2.2GHz, a significant upgrade over current Xe LP, likely helped by the use of TSMC’s N6 process. It will also have a proper VRAM configuration with 16GB of GDDR6 over a 256-bit bus. (DG1 uses LPDDR4 for comparison.)
Earlier rumors suggested power use of 225W–250W, but now the estimated power consumption is around 275W. That puts the GPU somewhere between the RTX 3080 (320W) and RTX 3070 (250W), but with RTX 3070 levels of performance. But again, lots of grains of salt should be applied, as none of this information has been confirmed by Intel. TSMC N6 uses the same design rules as the N7 node, but with some EUV layers, which should reduce power requirements. Then again, we’re looking at a completely different chip architecture.
Regardless, Moore’s Law Is Dead quotes one of its ‘sources’ as saying the DG2 will perform like an RTX 3070 Ti. This is quite strange since the RTX 3070 Ti isn’t even an official SKU from Nvidia (at least not right now). Put more simply, this means the DG2 should be slightly faster than an RTX 3070. Maybe.
That’s not entirely out of the question, either. Assuming the 512 EUs and 2.2GHz figures end up being correct, that would yield a theoretical 18 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. That’s a bit less than the 3070, but the Ampere GPUs share resources between the FP32 and INT32 pipelines, meaning the actual throughput of an RTX 3070 tends to be lower than the pure TFLOPS figure would suggest. Alternatively, 18 TFLOPS lands half-way between AMD’s RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT, which again would match up quite reasonably with a hypothetical RTX 3070 Ti.
(Image credit: Moore’s Law Is Dead)
There are plenty of other rumors and ‘leaks’ in the video as well. For example, at one point MLID discusses a potential DLSS alternative called, not-so-creatively, XeSS — and the Internet echo chamber has already begun to propogate that name around. Our take: Intel doesn’t need a DLSS alternative. Assuming AMD can get FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) to work well, it’s open source and GPU vendor agnostic, meaning it should work just fine with Intel and Nvidia GPUs as well as AMD’s offerings. We’d go so far as to say Intel should put it’s support behind FSR, just because an open standard that developers can support and that works on all GPUs is ultimately better than a proprietary standard. Plus, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Intel can do XeSS as a proprietary feature and then get widespread developer support for it.
Other rumors are more believable. The encoding performance of DG1 is already impressive, building off Intel’s existing QuickSync technology, and DG2 could up the ante signficantly. That’s less of a requirement for gaming use, but it would certainly enable live streaming of content without significantly impacting frame rates. Dedicated AV1 encoding would also prove useful.
The DG2 should hopefully be available to consumers by Q4 of 2021, but with the current shortages plaguing chip fabs, it’s anyone’s guess as to when these cards will actually launch. Prosumer and professional variants of the DG2 are rumored to ship in 2022.
We don’t know the pricing of this 512EU SKU, but there is a 128EU model planned down the road, with an estimated price of around $200. More importantly, we don’t know how the DG2 or its variants will actually perform. Theoretical TFLOPS doesn’t always match up to real-world performance, and architecture, cache, and above all drivers play a critical role for gaming performance. We’ve encountered issues testing Intel’s Xe LP equipped Tiger Lake CPUs with some recent games, for example, and Xe HPG would presumably build off the same driver set.
Again, this info is very much unconfirmed rumors, and things are bound to change by the time DG2 actually launches. But if this data is even close to true, Intel’s first proper dip into the dedicated GPU market (DG1 doesn’t really count) in over 10 years could make them decently competitive with Ampere’s mid-range and high-end offerings, and by that token they’d also compete with AMD’s RDNA2 GPUs.
You might still be reeling from the news that personal information from 533 million Facebook accounts has been made freely available online. But now there’s another huge batch of people’s data floating around the web — including data from LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network confirmed. And the potential scope of the leak is huge: an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles, according to CyberNews.
In a purported sample of two million of the profiles for sale, LinkedIn members’ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, and more were visible, CyberNews found. LinkedIn, however, says the data includes information from many places and wasn’t all scraped from the professional-focused social network.
“We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies,” reads LinkedIn’s statement.
The company also contends that “no private member account data from LinkedIn was included” — which perhaps means the scraped data only includes information you’d be able to see on someone’s public page. LinkedIn insists that this was “not a LinkedIn data breach,” which would be technically true if the data was scraped rather than collected by a hacker penetrating LinkedIn’s systems, but doesn’t do much for users whose data is now being sold on the internet.
LinkedIn has yet to tell us if it will notify users whose data was in the dataset. (Facebook, if you were wondering, doesn’t plan to inform users if they are one of the people whose data leaked.) If you want to check whether your email or phone number was part of the Facebook data leak, we have instructions here.
Italy’s privacy watchdog has started an investigation into LinkedIn, it confirmed to Bloomberg.
I love it when companies go public. I am never more excited than when I get to read a mandatory S-1 filing for the first time. Anything could be in there! Maybe the company has wildly more people using its products than I would have guessed. Maybe the company is surprisingly profitable. Maybe the company is WeWork!
Anyway, there is a new Robinhood regulatory oopsie in the news, and it’s made me even more eager to find out what’s lurking in that document. If I do not get the Robinhood S-1 soon, I will die. The company has confidentially filed to go public, but what fun is confidentiality? There might be some juicy shit in there!
Here’s the shape of the new thing: Robinhood allows customers to trade fractions of a share — something that makes it easier for ordinary investors to get into high-priced stocks. The problem, however, is that Robinhood didn’t report these trades to a public data feed, according to Reuters. This reporting is required by both the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Though Robinhood launched this service in December 2019, nothing was publicly reported until January 2021, Reuters says.
Other brokerages have been fined for this in the past because the missing information makes it harder to price stocks. It’s not the biggest violation — an expert Reuters spoke to suggested that Robinhood deserved “a parking ticket” for it — but it suggests something the other Robinhood screw-ups also hint at: start-up sloppiness.
Robinhood is where the “move fast and break things” tech ethos runs straight into the “I will kill and eat you, but in a highly regulated way” Wall Street ethos. The most obvious example is the service outages. Remember in January, when Robinhood pissed off the entire internet by limiting trades on GameStop? The company hadn’t planned for an event of the GameStop scale and coming up short for clearinghouse requirements. There were also three huge outages in March 2020, which Robinhood has said were due to “stress on our infrastructure”; then, as with GameStop, it simply hadn’t planned for an outlier event. Some real fail whale stuff!
But the other interesting bit is the regulated part of Wall Street. Robinhood has run into trouble there, too. For instance, the company was fined $65 million by the SEC for deceiving its customers about “payment for order flow” (PFOF), a practice that lets market makers bundle trades. (It is controversial because, theoretically, it could let banks illegally front-run trades; in practice, it doesn’t seem like this would be a very good idea because the price on PFOF trades is better than what’s available on the market.) Also, there’s the $1.25 million settlement on claims that Robinhood didn’t work hard enough to get the best price for its users. This is to say nothing of 2,000 hacked accounts.
The new regulatory thing is small potatoes by these standards, but nonetheless illustrative. It’s easier to get away with being sloppy if you’re, like, a social network and there’s no specific government or industry watchdog that’s tasked with keeping you in line. Sure, you might get bad press and a congressional scolding, but that’s about the end of it. This is part of what makes fintech so interesting: if you’re focused on making a pretty app and to hell with the rest of it, you are in trouble.
The S-1 is the moment of truth. Right now, it’s hard to tell where Robinhood stands. The flush of press earlier this year led to a bunch of new users. Payment for order flow means Robinhood gets paid on every trade, whether the market is going up or down. On the other hand, this company has a habit of falling afoul of regulators. (There is still an outstanding complaint from Massachusetts.)
Anyway, if you have that S-1 filing, do me a favor and send it my way. I need it. My family is starving, and we need gossip to survive.
Verizon said Thursday it is working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to recall 2.5 million hotspot devices after an investigation found the devices’ lithium-ion batteries could overheat and pose fire and burn hazards.
The Ellipsis Jetpack mobile hotspot models MHS900L, MHS900LS, and MHS900LPP were imported by Franklin Wireless Corp. and sold between April 2017 and March of this year, according to the CPSC. The model numbers are all for the same device but vary depending on how the customer purchased the device — through a consumer prepaid or postpaid plan.
“The safety of our customers is our highest priority,” Verizon said in a statement. “We are taking the situation very seriously, and we are working diligently to determine the cause of the issues with the supplier and to provide replacement devices for all of our customers, free of charge.”
The CPSC bulletin indicated Verizon had received 15 reports of the devices overheating; six of the reports involved fire damage to bedding or flooring. Two incidents included minor burn injuries, the CPSC said.
Recalled Ellipsis hotspot.Image: CPSC
A Verizon spokesperson said in an email to The Verge that about 1.3 million of the hotspot devices are currently in use by customers. The recall is focused on the entire device, not just the batteries, and customers should not try to remove the batteries themselves.
Demand for hotspots increased over the past year during the coronavirus pandemic, with schools and libraries seeking the devices for students who didn’t have internet access at home so they could complete their schoolwork remotely.
Verizon has sent a software update to the affected hotspots that are powered on that should help reduce the risk of the devices overheating, as it prevents the hotspot from charging up while it’s on. The company also recommends turning off the hotspots while they’re not in use and keeping them on flat surfaces without anything covering them. It’s also not a good idea to expose the hotspot devices to extreme temperatures for long periods, Verizon said.
To request a replacement hotspot or get more information, customers can go to ellipsisjetpackrecall.expertinquiry.com or call 855-205-2627.
Amazon is adding a new streaming option to its Luna cloud gaming platform that will cap resolution at 720p to help improve stability for players on slower internet connections.
Right now, Luna streams only at 1080p, with 4K coming at some point in the future. Yet even at 1080p, internet connections that struggle to keep up with the high bandwidth demands of cloud gaming might result in latency, lag, and audio issues for the player when using a service like Luna. Now, Amazon says those using Luna in its early access beta — the platform has yet to release to the public — can toggle on the 720p streaming mode in the settings panel to help with performance.
“One of the most requested features is the ability to play at lower resolutions to match unique internet connection speeds and bandwidth demands,” the company said in a statement to The Verge. “Starting today, we’re enabling a new 720p option, allowing for decreased bandwidth and data usage by streaming at a lower resolution.” Amazon also suggests the lower-resolution setting for Luna will help those who have home internet data caps, like the ones Comcast has said it will start imposing on its customers this July.
Luna released last fall in early access with a unique channel model that borrows concepts from cable and streaming television. Instead of paying a fee to use the service like Nvidia GeForce Now or buying your games outright like on Google Stadia, Luna itself is free to use but access to streamed games is gated behind “channels” with individual monthly subscriptions. The only two available right now are Amazon’s Luna Plus channel ($5.99 per month) and a dedicated Ubisoft one ($14.99).
Deathloop has been delayed again, with Arkane’s timed PS5 console exclusive moving from its previous May 21st release date to a fall release on September 14th. The news marks the second big delay for Deathloop, which was originally supposed to be out in the 2020 holiday season alongside the then-newly released PS5.
As with the earlier delay, Arkane’s Lyon studio is once again citing COVID-19-related delays, with an increased difficulty in development as it works to ensure “the health and safety of everyone at Arkane.”
Deathloop is the latest title from Arkane’s Lyon studio, best known for the Dishonored franchise and the rebooted Prey from 2017. Players assume the role of Colt, an assassin stuck in a time loop who must fight his way out by assassinating his eight targets using a variety of weapons and mystical powers — all while being hunted by a rival assassin, Julianna (who can be controlled by other players over the internet).
As a next-gen exclusive title, Deathloop is only set to be released on the PlayStation 5 (for a one-year exclusivity period) and PC — despite the fact that publisher Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft. Xbox studio head Phil Spencer told Bloomberg back in September that it’ll still be holding to that timed exclusivity for both Deathloop and GhostWire: Tokyo. Thatmeans, with the current delay, Xbox owners will be waiting even longer before they’re able to head to Blackreef.
Intel’s Bleep announcement starts at the 27:24 mark in its GDC 2021 presentation.
Last month during its virtual GDC presentation Intel announced Bleep, a new AI-powered tool that it hopes will cut down on the amount of toxicity gamers have to experience in voice chat. According to Intel, the app “uses AI to detect and redact audio based on user preferences.” The filter works on incoming audio, acting as an additional user-controlled layer of moderation on top of what a platform or service already offers.
It’s a noble effort, but there’s something bleakly funny about Bleep’s interface, which lists in minute detail all of the different categories of abuse that people might encounter online, paired with sliders to control the quantity of mistreatment users want to hear. Categories range anywhere from “Aggression” to “LGBTQ+ Hate,” “Misogyny,” “Racism and Xenophobia,” and “White nationalism.” There’s even a toggle for the N-word. Bleep’s page notes that it’s yet to enter public beta, so all of this is subject to change.
With the majority of these categories, Bleep appears to give users a choice: would you like none, some, most, or all of this offensive language to be filtered out? Like choosing from a buffet of toxic internet slurry, Intel’s interface gives players the option of sprinkling in a light serving of aggression or name-calling into their online gaming.
Bleep has been in the works for a couple of years now — PCMag notes that Intel talked about this initiative way back at GDC 2019 — and it’s working with AI moderation specialists Spirit AI on the software. But moderating online spaces using artificial intelligence is no easy feat as platforms like Facebook and YouTube have shown. Although automated systems can identify straightforwardly offensive words, they often fail to consider the context and nuance of certain insults and threats. Online toxicity comes in many, constantly evolving forms that can be difficult for even the most advanced AI moderation systems to spot.
“While we recognize that solutions like Bleep don’t erase the problem, we believe it’s a step in the right direction, giving gamers a tool to control their experience,” Intel’s Roger Chandler said during its GDC demonstration. Intel says it hopes to release Bleep later this year, and adds that the technology relies on its hardware accelerated AI speech detection, suggesting that the software may rely on Intel hardware to run.
Facebook is responding to the recent news that data from 533 million accounts leaked online for free, but perhaps not in the way users might have hoped: the company doesn’t plan to notify the users whose data was exposed online, a Facebook spokesperson told Reuters.
In the dataset, there’s apparently a lot of information that you might not want floating around the internet — including birthdays, locations, full names, and phone numbers — so it’s disappointing to hear that Facebook doesn’t plan to notify users that might be affected. The company cited two reasons to Reuters as to why it’s not telling users proactively: it says it’s not confident it would know which users would need to be notified, and that users wouldn’t be able to do anything about the data being online.
On Tuesday Facebook wrote on its blog that it “believes” the data was scraped via its contact importer sometime before September 2019, a method that’s in violation of the company’s policies. But as BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Mac points out, this doesn’t quite mesh with the fact that the company hasn’t spoken out or filed lawsuits against controversial surveillance company Clearview AI for scraping photos from Instagram and Facebook.
Over the last year, I have asked Facebook more than a dozen times if it will take legal action against Clearview AI for scraping what is likely millions of photos from Instagram and Facebook. No lawsuits have been filed and FB has said nothing on record.https://t.co/htkKCD5bT0
— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) April 7, 2021
Facebook says it has “made changes to the contact importer” to stop the scraping.
If you’re concerned about whether or not your data was included in the data dump, and don’t want to wait to see if Facebook will change its mind about notifying users, you can take a look at our guide on how to see if you were affected. And for more about the data set and Facebook‘s lack of transparency around it, you should read Wired’s piece about the company’s inconsistent messaging.
Facebook has not responded to a request for comment.
Rapper Lil Nas X has just released a free rhythm game that has you twerking to his new song “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” Yes, the main mechanic is twerking.
It’s a free browser game, and you can play it right now at this link. If you want to get an idea of how the game works, check out this video he tweeted. Or just use your imagination. It’s exactly what you think.
I tried it briefly before writing this post, and I have to admit that I had a hard time lining up my twerks with the on-screen arrows. (What a sentence. Also hi Dad, who gets email notifications whenever I publish a Verge story.) But the game says I somehow got 43 of the 50 arrows, and a rating of two and a half stars out of three. I’ll take it!
The new game is Lil Nas X’s latest internet-savvy stunt to help promote the new song. He also collaborated with internet collective MSCHF to release the “Satan Shoes,” which were custom Nikes that supposedly have a drop of blood in them. Nike sued MSCHF over the shoes, seeking a temporary restraining order, but MSCHF said it has no intention of shipping the 666th pair.
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
I’m not old enough to have ever encountered an original IBM Model M in an office. But in my second year of university, after hearing about how amazing these old keyboards were to type on, I sought out an old model on eBay. For the next two years, every essay I wrote was hammered out on a vintage keyboard from 1985. I never took it to libraries or lectures (I’m not a monster), but my second-year roommate must have been pretty happy to see the back of me that summer.
As of this writing, you can still find plenty of decades-old IBM Model M keyboards for sale online, or you could buy a $104 New Model M from Unicomp, a company with its roots in the Lexington-based keyboard factory that produced many of the original Model Ms. The New Model M is big, bulky, and it’s got the same buckling spring switch mechanism that made its predecessor such a treat to type on. It’s not hard to imagine this board soaking up cigarette smoke and coffee on the desk of a 1980s office worker.
When people ask me what it is I like about mechanical keyboards, I usually respond by saying something about how timeless their designs are. IBM keyboards produced in the 1980s still feel great to type on today, and there’s a good chance many mechanical keyboards made nowadays will outlast the computers they’re plugged into. But feeling great to type on isn’t the only thing a modern keyboard needs to do, and that’s where the New Model M falls short.
The New Model M is available in a variety of different configurations. Although its case only comes in black, its keys are available in either gray or, like we have here, white and gray. It’s available with an old-fashioned PS2 connector or more modern USB. (The cable, unfortunately, isn’t detachable like many modern mechanical keyboards.) It’s available with layouts suitable for a variety of countries, including US, UK, Denmark, Finland / Sweden, France, Germany, Norway, and Spain. If you go for a US layout, there’s the option of getting the keyboard with a slightly longer space bar, and Unicomp will also ship the keyboard with a Mac layout. Some of these options come with customization fees. Unsurprisingly, there’s no option for wireless connectivity, just like there wouldn’t have been in the mid-1980s.
Even for a full-size keyboard, the New Model M is large. There’s a border of at least 2cm (0.78in) of plastic around the four sides of the keyboard, and even between the sections of keys themselves, there’s more empty space than you’ll find with most modern keyboards. It’s a tad narrower and shorter than my ’80s Model M, though not by much. It’s also a lot lighter and doesn’t feel quite as sturdy as my original model. It’s not flimsy; it’s just not built like a tank in the same way the old keyboards were.
There are obvious practical downsides to a keyboard this big, and space-constrained typists should look elsewhere (or perhaps at Unicomp’s more recent Mini M if you’re prepared to give up the Numpad and could use a detachable USB cable). But if you need a full-size keyboard and you’re even slightly space-constrained, then the New Model M isn’t a great choice.
The overall design of the New Model M I could take or leave. It has a kind of retro charm to it, but the Unicomp logo emblazoned on the top right is dated in an ugly way rather than a charming way, and the blue LEDs that light up when you’ve got caps lock or num lock turned on are an eyesore.
Overall, although build quality isn’t quite as good as an original Model M, Unicomp’s keyboard feels solidly built by modern standards. Its keycap legends are printed on using dye-sublimation, so they’re not going to wear away anytime soon, and they’ve got a slightly rough matte texture that feels nice under the fingers. They’re fairly tall and gradually increase in height from front to the back of the keyboard, with squared-off edges and a slight curvature from left to right. (I’d say they’re closer to OEM than Cherry profile keycaps overall.) There’s a pair of raised bars on the J and F keys to help touch typists find their home row, but they’re subtle and take a little getting used to.
Its keycaps are made of PBT plastic and have a slightly rough texture to them.
The quality and style of the keyboard’s PBT keycaps are important because alternatives aren’t nearly as easy to come by as they are for keyboards for Cherry-style switches. Unicomp does sell replacements via its online store, but if you’re someone who’s interested in buying any of the wildly designed keycaps available across the internet, then be aware that vanishingly few of them are compatible with the New Model M. I also found the keycaps weren’t as easy to remove and replace as the keycaps on Cherry MX-style switches.
It all means the New Model M isn’t the best keyboard for tinkerers. There are no Cherry MX-style switches for you to desolder and swap out, and you won’t be tempted by a seemingly never-ending supply of new keycaps to buy online. That won’t matter for the vast majority of typists, but it’s worth bearing in mind if you’re curious about the weird and wonderful world of custom keyboards.
If you’re buying a New Model M, you’re buying it for the typing experience it offers out of the box. Thankfully, that experience is one of the best around. The keyboard’s heavy keys take a little bit of getting used to (I find that typing with my wrists held in the air rather than resting on my desk helps a lot), and pretty soon, the tactile clack of each keypress guides you into a reassuring rhythm. The fact that each key is that little bit harder to press than most other keyboards meant that I mistyped less frequently, making it easy for me to get into a good flow and just enjoy the process. At its best, the New Model M sounds like a glorious cacophony of key-clacking, and it feels every bit as good as it sounds.
People like to give advice about what kind of switches you should buy a keyboard with based on what you’re going to use it for. If you’re a typist, Cherry MX Blues are said to be a good choice, while gamers might be better off with Cherry MX Reds. MX Browns are considered a mix of the two. For the most part, I think advice like this can be a little prescriptive. I know people who game on Blues and type on Reds.
The board is available with white and gray or just white keycaps.
But when it comes to buckling springs, I really do think these are switches for typing and typing alone. That pressure you have to use to press each key is fine when you’re typing, but it can get tiring if you’re holding down a key while playing a game.
Another downside to consider is their volume: buckling springs are loud. They’re so loud that it’s not just an issue if you’re planning on using the keyboard in a shared dorm or office, but their loudness also caused problems for me on Zoom calls. I had to mute myself while on a recent call to avoid disturbing everyone else with my clacking, and I had to turn up my speakers’ volume on other occasions to be able to hear a press conference while I typed up notes. Another time, I managed to completely ruin a recording of an interview because all you could hear was the sound of me clacking away while an interviewee spoke.
If all you do on your computer is type, then the New Model M does that brilliantly. But when you need to use your computer for other things, like playing games or making calls, the keyboard’s lack of versatility becomes obvious.
I loved using my IBM Model M, and there’s no way I’m going to part ways with it anytime soon. But soon after I was done with school, I switched to a more modern keyboard with much quieter Cherry MX Brown switches. Ultimately, I needed my computer’s main control peripheral to be good at things that weren’t just typing.
Like its predecessors, when you’re using the New Model M for what it’s designed for, typing, there are few other keyboards around that do it quite as well. People have been clacking away on buckling spring keyboards for decades for good reason. But Unicomp’s keyboard is just as uncompromising as any Model M from the ’80s. It’s too loud for any modern office or video calls, and its stiff switches aren’t great for gaming.
Still, if you’re after the best typing experience around at whatever cost, then the Unicomp New Model M is one of your best options. You just need to understand exactly what “whatever cost” is.
Cambridge Audio has just unleashed two beautiful beasts into the just-add-speakers streaming system market. The Evo 75 and Evo 150 are the first of their kind from the British brand, and oh boy don’t they look lovely?
Hopefully they sound just as lovely too – not least as they’re positioned in the firing line of the multi-Award-winning Naim Uniti Atom and five-star Arcam SA30.
Cambridge is hoping to continue its good run of form with this new product venture, which is naturally based on the company’s established StreamMagic streaming platform for playback over – deep breath – DLNA, AirPlay 2, Bluetooth, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Qobuz, aptX HD Bluetooth and internet radio. The new Evo systems are also Roon Ready.
(Image credit: Cambridge Audio)
The Evo 75 and Evo 150 are powered by Hypex NCore Class D amplifiers (chosen by Cambridge for their, “clear advantages in clarity, resolution and musicality”) and rated at 75 and 150 watts per channel respectively.
The other discrepancy between the two models lies in physical connectivity: both have RCA, optical and coaxial inputs as well as HDMI ARC and 3.5mm headphone sockets, but the Evo 150 expands on that further with an MM phono stage, asynchronous USB and balanced XLR inputs, plus two sets of speaker terminals for running two pairs of speakers. The Evos are determined not to be out-featured.
That walnut wooden panel you see up top is a nod to Cambridge’s first-ever product, the 1968-released P40 amplifier, although owners can choose to dress the black anodised aluminium cabinet with black side panels made from Richlite (an innovative new material made primarily from recycled paper) instead. The side panels can also be switched out according to each customer’s taste.
Completing the look is a dual-concentric rotary dial and 6.8in LCD panel that hark back to the company’s flagship Edge products.
(Image credit: Cambridge Audio)
The Cambridge Audio Evo 75 and Evo 150 will be available from this month, priced £1799 ($2250) and £2249 ($3000) respectively.
A specifically designed Evo CD transport (£799, $950) and a pair of Evo S speakers (£649, $750) will join the Evo range later in the year, with further details on those promised nearer the time.
Whether or not the new Cambridge Evo systems have sonic appeal remains to be heard, but one thing’s for sure: they have plenty of visual appeal.
MORE:
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See our pick of the best hi-fi systems 2021: micro, hi-fi, vinyl
Nvidia is launching its latency-reducing tech, Reflex, for anyone who has a Nvidia graphics card and plays the PC version of Overwatch. The company tested the feature in Overwatch’s PTR servers in March, but now Reflex is live and theoretically available for competitive play. Nvidia claims Reflex reduces the time between pulling the trigger in Overwatch and the game rendering the shot on screen by as much as 50 percent, and now you can easily test that.
Latency can be caused by a variety of things (internet speed can be a big factor in competitive play) but Reflex is focused on reducing latency caused by computer hardware. The longer the delay between a click and the game reacting, the better chance whatever the player was responding to is already out of frame. In this case, Nvidia’s tech isn’t new, and Overwatch is just the latest esports title to be fully added to the small collection of 15 games that support Reflex so far.
I can’t say how well the feature might actually work without trying it, but if Nvidia’s video demonstration is to be believed, it might only be noticeable to a professional player who can feel the microsecond difference in latency. Nvidia does suggest that in some cases, that small difference could drastically change the result. According to Nvidia’s demo, enabling Reflex could be the difference between a critical hit and missing entirely.
Your mileage may vary, but if you have a Nvidia graphics card — Reflex works on cards as old as the GTX 900-series — and a G-Sync monitor, you should be able to give the low latency feature a try. Enabling Reflex requires the newest version of Nvidia’s drivers and an updated copy of whatever game you want to use it in. In Overwatch’s case, if you have an updated game, a supported graphics card, and the new driver, you can enable Reflex in Video Settings. The company has also partnered to create specific monitors that include a Reflex Latency Analyzer feature.
Leaving a missed call on someone’s phone usually signals that you should call them back — but at one point in India, it was communication in its own right. A new feature by Atul Bhattarai in Rest of World examines the Indian culture that grew up around missed calls — and the startups that took advantage of it.
In basic terms, a “missed call” means dialing a person but hanging up before they can answer. Hanging up without talking let users send a basic message (“I called”) without getting charged for minutes or SMS messages — like paging someone without a pager. Bhattarai focuses on ZipDial, a company that turned missed calls into a robust advertising business and a way to experience some of the features of online life without paying for data.
As Bhattarai writes, using missed calls to communicate came about because of the high cost of cellphone data and limited access to high-speed internet. Calling long enough to connect to someone else’s phone and then hanging up or not picking up on the other end avoided being charged for the call. These missed calls could mean a variety of things, like letting a friend know you’re on your way or a loved one know that you miss them. “The fact that the missed call demanded only basic numeric literacy made them accessible to the third of India’s population that was illiterate,” Bhattarai explains.
ZipDial combined the missed call trend and preexisting SMS services into a kind of a one-stop shop for cellphone owners who wanted basic internet functionality. ZipDial would partner with a brand and set up a hotline that people could call for services like sports scores or celebrity tweets. All it took was “signing up” with a missed call.
Bhattarai also highlights a proto-Spotify algorithmic playlist service called Kan Khajura, which delivered new music in 15-minute calls. “Kan Khajura’s central appeal was that it could be accessed anywhere and anytime, unlike the radio and TV,” Bhattarai writes.
Those businesses became unsustainable as mobile data became cheaper, and ZipDial ceased operations in 2016. But Bhattarai argues the services helped bridge the offline-online gap in a period before internet service providers and physical infrastructure caught up.
You can read the full feature on ZipDial’s missed call empire on Rest of World.
Sony has officially launched Bravia CORE, its 4K lossless video streaming service. The bad news? It’s currently exclusive to those with a Bravia XR TV and a very fast internet connection.
As we reported in January, Bravia CORE uses Pure Stream technology to serve up the latest box office films at bitrates of between 30 Mbps – 80 Mbps, along with immersive DTS sound. In other words, similar or higher quality than that of most 4K Blu-ray discs.
Now, Sony has revealed that the Bravia CORE app will come pre-loaded on all new Bravia XR models including the A90J, Z9J, A80J, X95J and X90J. Lucky owners will get access to over 300 4K lossless titles such as Venom, Ghostbusters, Blade Runner 2049 and Jumanji: The Next Level.
Just how much ‘access’ depends on how much you splurge. Buy a range-topping A90J or Z9J and you’ll get free access to the service for 24 months and 10 credits to spend on lossless CORE titles that are otherwise available on pay-per-view basis. Buy any other Bravia XR model and you’ll get five credits and 12 months free access.
You’ll need a nippy broadband connection, too. While Netflix recommends a 25 Mbps connection for streaming 4K movies, Sony says Bravia CORE “requires a minimum internet speed of 43 Mbps.” In fact, streaming the highest quality lossless movies requires a minimum internet speed of – drumroll, please – 115Mbps. Holy smokes.
The service also claims “the largest IMAX Enhanced movie collection” – over 50 films remastered by IMAX and Sony Pictures to boost the image and sound on Bravia XR TVs. The selection appears to be pretty decent, and includes the likes of Baby Driver, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Little Women. Sony has also revealed that CORE will provide users access to a “separate library of movies to stream any time and as many times as they like, in up to 4K HDR quality.”
At this point, you might be wondering what happens when the free 24/12 month subscription expires? Will Bravia CORE continue to be free? That’s yet to be confirmed but according to Sony, “you may watch the movies you have redeemed via Bravia CORE until February 23, 2026”.
MORE:
Take a look at the best streaming services for TV and movies 2020
Our guide to the best TVs you can buy
Here are the best Apple TV+ shows and movies to watch right now
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