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Personal computers have not elicited many thrills of late. They’ve gotten cheaper, sure, and a little faster. But despite some wild promises the gap between the actual and the possible has remained expansive. This week, it narrowed significantly.
PCs that work on smartphone parts. Devices that run all day, but for real this time. A 32-core hellbeast processor. The first GPU shrunk down to a 7nm process. Always-connected 5G laptops. And while not a PC, the ASUS ROG put vapor cooling in gaming-focused smartphone. (Vapor cooling. In a smartphone.) This was the bounty of Computex, the Taiwan trade show that serves as the cradle of innovation for what goes inside your gear.
Not all of these innovations will wind up in consumer-facing devices, at least not for a while. Not all of them are strictly necessary for the majority of the computer-using masses. But if you’ve grown tired of waiting for the future to become the present, this week, the industry pressed the fast-forward button.
Let’s start with the near-term, and work outward from there. Qualcomm, for years the king of (non-iPhone) mobile processors, set up shop in Windows PCs last December, pushing the convergence Google has already pushed heavily in its Chromebook line. The premise: all the productivity of a laptop, with the battery life and connectivity of a smartphone.
That first effort used a Snapdragon 835 chip, the same you’ll find top-tier smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8. Its successor, the Snapdragon 850, is strictly for laptops. You still won’t want to edit video on a so-called Always Connected PC, and it’s not going to do you any favors playing PUBG. But it’s a new enough platform that the gains between each generation are potentially transformative, rather than iterative. The Snapdragon 850 promises a 30 percent systemwide performance jump over the 835, triple the AI performance, and up to 25 hours of continuous-use battery life.
Keep your grains of salt handy, especially over battery life claims, which are notoriously juiced industry-wide. But by optimizing for Windows 10 specifically, the 850 potentially gives PC makers the key to a viable everything machine, feather-light laptops that work anywhere, any time, for as long as you need it to. And they’re coming this year.
“It’s a big deal. The future of all notebooks is going to be like this,” says Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights & Strategy. “They’re always going to be connected, and you’re truly going to be able to use them the entire day, regardless of what you’re doing, without having to bring a power cord with you.”
If connectivity and efficiency don’t rev your engine, fear not: AMD has you covered. Its Threadripper CPU line may sound like it was named after a dainty Victorian serial killer, but its next-generation release includes a variant that packs in 32 cores and 64 threads. For the uninitiated: That is very, very many cores and threads. Contextually, Intel made a huge splash last May—with a chipset that had half as many.
“Particularly in workloads like video editing, doubling the amount of cores is almost linear. What would have taken you a half an hour to edit or recode a 4K or 8K video now takes 15 minutes,” says Moorhead. “Workstations, creative-type applications. Any type of rendering is where you’ll see the real-world benefits. Wherever you see the hourglass today.”
In fact, think of Threadripper 2 the way you might a tricked-out auto-show reveal, there more to demonstrate what’s possible than for you to actually buy. (To be clear, you can buy it, sometime in the next few months, for a yet-unspecified price.) But it’s got plenty of appeal, even on possibility alone.
“In the past, I’ve built my own PCs from various components. I would seek out the best processor, the best GPU I could get. A 32-core PC processor sounds like really cool stuff to me,” says Shane Rau, who leads semiconductor research at IDC. Rau cautions that his enthusiasm isn’t an endorsement, especially given that Threadripper 2’s actual performance remains to be seen.
Still, it’s progress! Real, near-term progress. And that’s before you even get to what’s coming a little further out on the horizon.
The most directly impactful development out of Computex this year may ultimately come from Intel. It had chip announcements both whimsical—the limited edition Core i7-8086K is Intel’s fastest yet, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the x86 chip architecture that redefined personal computing—and aggressive, teasing a CPU with 28 cores. But look, instead, at Intel’s purported display breakthrough, which claims to halve the amount of battery used by a laptop screen.
“Being able to tackle what is one of the big power consumption aspects on your average laptop or mobile device, the technology pieces that Intel’s put into doing some very dramatic power reduction in display is I think going to have the biggest near-term impact,” says Eric Hanselman, chief analyst at 451 Research.
Intel Low Power Display Technology is classic trade show sizzle, promise of performance without much detail to back it up. It comes in the form of a 1-watt display, manufactured in partnership with Sharp and Innolux, and Intel pegs the overall battery life gains at up to eight hours. That’s about as much information as you’ll get for now; an Intel spokesperson described it as more of a prototype than a ready product. But let that temper your expectations, not deplete them. Your screen is a battery-sucking vampire. How wonderful that someone’s even attempting to fashion such a sharp stake.
(Let it be noted here that Intel also showed off a dual-display, clamshell computer this week, in case you’re into that sort of thing. It gets demoted to a parenthetical because of how many manufacturers have tried and spectacularly failed to make that work over the last five or six years. But godspeed!)
And then there’s arguably the real star of the show, an AMD prototype of the first-ever GPU built on a 7nm process. Unlike some of the other blockbuster announcements out of Taipei this week, this one won’t make its way to your computer any time soon. It’ll find a home in data centers, helping AI and machine learning compute at blistering speeds, using a lot less energy to do so.
That means the gains won’t be as flashy or as visible as those from other corners. It’s still a big honking deal. “The jump from 12nm to 7nm is going to be significant,” says Hanselman. “7nm means that they ought to be able to save on significant power savings in terms of compute capacity. It’s a big potential step.”
It’s big, too, that AMD is the the company that took it. After years of lagging behind, it’s now throwing down some gauntlets of its own.
“We’re back to this familiar sense of competition,” says IDC’s Rau. “These companies are producing better and faster, more cost-competitive products that I think bode well for the PC.”
And perhaps more importantly, for those who buy them, whether they need an all-day, always connected device or a hair-singeing powerhouse. It’s too early to know what they next generation of PCs will look like, or how they’ll incorporate all these new toys. But at least on the inside, they’re already brimming with potential.
The convenience of e-commerce is great, but the environmental effects could be devastating. USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO – Walk down the street on garbage day in many towns, and evidence of our love affair with online shopping is plain to see. Recycling bins overflow with boxes from Amazon, eBay, Walmart and others.
All those folded and flattened corrugated cardboard boxes are a testament to Americans’ diligent recycling efforts — to a degree.
A USA TODAY analysis of several industry studies on cardboard use and recycling paint a different picture.Americans are sending more corrugated cardboard to the landfill than to recycling plants compared to past years.
Online sales have surged in the past five years, and cardboard use jumped 8% in the same period, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. Yet cardboard recycling has dropped.
Last year, 300,000 fewer tons of corrugated containers were recycled in the USA than in the year before, even as domestic consumption increased 3.5%, according to the AF&PA.
Without enough cardboard sent to recycling centers to be used to create new boxes, manufacturers may need more timber. Recycled content and timber each make up about half of what’s in a corrugated box.
“We need those boxes to come back. The alternative is trees,” said Bill Moore of Moore & Associates, a paper recycling industry consultant in Atlanta.
For all our efforts to flatten, pile and stuff boxes into recycling bins, consumers aren’t that good at recycling cardboard. For years, they didn’t have to be.
Many of the cardboard shipping boxes used to go to retail stores. Workers at your local Kmart, Sears or Target would load the flattened boxes into a machine that bound them into bales that the stores could resell for $74 or more a ton. Groceries and big-box stores recycled 90% to 100% of their cardboard, Moore estimated.
“Grocery and retail stores have been fantastic partners for us,” said Rachel Kenyon, vice president of the Fibre Box Association.
Consumers aren’t as efficient at it. About 40% of Americans either don’t have access to or don’t sign up for curbside recycling, said Betsy Dorn, director of RSE USA, a sustainable-packaging consulting firm in Orlando.
Of those who do, few actually recycle all their cardboard, mostly because it’s a hassle. The city of Charlotte asks residents to tear or cut cardboard into small pieces that fit loosely into recycling carts and tells people not to fold it.
Nationally, consumers send back 25% of their cardboard for reuse, Dorn estimated. “If you have to cut your cardboard up because it’s too big, who’s going to do that?” she said.
China — a big buyer of U.S. corrugated boxes — is becoming pickier about what it buys. It will no longer accept bales of cardboard that are contaminated, say a pizza box with a piece of pizza in it.
“China has stopped buying, and the recyclers in the United States can’t find enough buyers, so some of that goes to landfill. And that’s not eco-friendly at all,” said Hannah Zhao, a senior economist who follows global recovered-paper markets for RISI, a forestry and paper products consulting firm based in Bedford, Mass.
Garbage companies are just beginning to react.
In San Francisco, the waste management company Recology is giving customers new 64-gallon bins to replace the 32-gallon containers because of the increased volume of cardboard. Regular garbage cans shrank by half, to 16 gallons.
Last year, the company raised rates 14%, in part to deal with the rapid shift in what residents lug to the curb. Counties in Oregon and Michigan, along with El Paso, Largo, Fla., and Attleboro, Mass., have considered rate increases.
Even in the new, bigger bins, the cardboard doesn’t always fit, a common discouragement to household recycling.
Children’s book author Emma Bland Smith said she tries to keep mail and online orders at a minimum to keep down waste. Even so, she sometimes has to store paper for a week to wait for space in her recycling bin.
Her block has worked out an informal space-sharing arrangement. “We have an understanding with neighbors that you can use someone else’s bin if theirs is not full,” she said.
Cardboard box recycling took a turn for the worse during the holiday shopping season in 2016. Usually, waste paper collection centers are flooded with cardboard after Christmas. In January 2017, they didn’t get more. They got less.
That period was a turning point for retail America, when the explosion in online shopping spurred by Amazon’s free two-day shipping for Prime members and aggressive strategies by rivals such as Walmart and Target set off wave after wave of retail store closures. Shuttered J.C. Penneys, Sears and Kmarts meant those stores stopped recycling cardboard boxes, which were in the hands of households.
Online retailers are dealing with the problem. Ten years ago, Amazon introduced 100% recyclable packing, so products can ship in their original packaging and don’t need to be put in a second box for shipping. That reduced the number of boxes by 500 million over the decade.
Walmart increased its number of box sizes from 11 to 27, to use the least amount of cardboard to get something to the customer.
Those moves haven’t help improve recycling rates. The problem is expected to become more urgent. E-commerce will make up 25% of all retail sales by 2025, according to ABI Research, suggesting even more boxes could go from doorstep to trash.
In the short term, recycling industry experts said, manufacturers could change the production process, for example, by going to dedicated production lines that supply e-tailers only in the Amazon ready-to-ship mode. This reduces the double-boxing problem.
“It’s just a question of how long does it take to correct and for the markets to adjust to the new reality that e-commerce is here to stay,” said Kenneth Waghorne, a packaging analyst with RISI.
Bridget O’Neill of San Francisco said she tries to forgo the recycling bin entirely when possible, in part because Amazon uses paper packing tape to seal its boxes. That allows her to put that cardboard to the greenest of uses.
“I can flatten those boxes and put them in with my compost,” she said.
Amazon first started shipping video streaming devices four years ago. Since then, the company has updated its Fire TV products to match the larger trends of consumer gadgetry. The flat Fire TV boxes were shrunk down to HDMI sticks and dongles that weren’t much larger than a thumb drive; to this day, the cheap streaming sticks from Amazon and Roku are best-sellers for both companies. Then Amazon’s TV devices started working with voice control, a trend that Amazon itself is largely responsible for, considering the popularity of Alexa.
Whereas earlier Fire TV devices required you to summon Alexa through the remote, the Fire TV Cube has Alexa built in.
Now Amazon is launching what it thinks is the next obvious thing in home entertainment. The just-announced 4K Fire TV Cube is part Fire TV, part Amazon Echo, and part TV control center for the other boxes and gadgets you have crowded around your TV. Whereas earlier Fire TV devices required you to summon Alexa through the remote, the Fire TV Cube has Alexa built in. In fact, Amazon says the whole user experience of the Cube was designed with a “voice first” philosophy.
“The goal for the Fire TV Cube is to really enable voice experience in a way that makes sense and actually highlights the use of voice,” says Sandeep Gupta, vice president of product development for Amazon Fire TV. “It’s not about just making some stuff that’s voice enabled.” What Gupta didn’t say, because he didn’t need to, is that putting Alexa in every possible space in your home is part of Amazon’s larger strategy of getting you to use Amazon’s services, and getting you to buy even more stuff from Amazon.
Eight microphones on the top provide access to Alexa. There’s also a dedicated button for switching them off.
At $119, the new 4K Fire TV Cube is the most expensive Fire TV device to date. It’s also easily one of the nicest-looking TV products Amazon has ever made, compared with the flat-sandwich design of its Fire TV boxes and the uninspiring Fire TV Stick. This is for good reason—since it has Alexa built in, it’s meant to live out in the open, and not hide inside a home theater console. But even with the Fire TV Cube being sold at a reduced price ($90) for the first couple of days, it veers away from Amazon’s strictly utilitarian approach to making and selling inexpensive hardware.
The Amazon Fire TV Cube has eight far-field microphones built in, an array that was designed to accommodate the shape of the cube. It has the same beam-forming, noise-reducing, and echo-cancelling tech found in other Echo products. In his initial demo of the Cube at Amazon’s Silicon Valley labs last week, Gupta staged a scenario where he had just gotten home from work: “Alexa, I’m home,” he said to the Cube, and the Samsung TV, Sony soundbar, and Philips Hue smart lights in the room all turned on.
The Alexa features work pretty much as you’d expect; you can ask the Cube for the weather, or for jokes, or access any number of skills, Amazon’s term for voice-powered apps. It’s that connection to the TV or soundbar that’s new. The Cube connects to the TV via HDMI and supports both multi-directional IR and CEC, a feature that allows users to control multiple HDMI-connected devices with just one remote. (Sonos supports CEC in just-announced, Alexa-equipped Beam soundbar as well.) This all means that you can use Alexa to control a whole host of TV interactions, from toggling the power to searching for shows to controlling the volume. You can even use it to switch inputs between TV boxes and consoles, arguably one of the most useful parts of the setup.
Cube owners with set-top boxes for cable TV or over-the-air TV can connect Amazon’s box to those devices and access them using Alexa. These commands have to be super specific—”Alexa, switch to channel 31,” for example. You can’t just search for a program or movie by name and expect Amazon to surface the cable TV option for you. (Roku, one of Amazon’s biggest competitors in this space, now shows over-the-air TV search results in its “smart guide.”)
Still, voice commands provide a new way to switch between internet streaming video and old-school cable. And, like Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV products support single sign-on via certain apps, which means you can sign in to your cable TV provider’s app and be automatically signed in to any other supporting apps.
One HDMI port is on the back, along with a USB port. There’s also a plug for an IR extender if you want to hide the Cube in a cabinet.
The most interesting part about the new Fire TV Cube is almost certainly its interface. While the Cube runs on FireOS, Amazon’s Android-based operating system for tablets and TV streaming devices, it has the UX of the Echo Show. Gupta says Amazon used the Echo Show, its odd display-centric gadget, as drafting practice for the Fire TV Cube. “The reason why we’ve tried to leverage Echo Show is because voice interaction is different from TV remote interaction,” he says. “So, the results and the catalog are the same as any Fire TV, but it’s presented in a way that can be navigated through voice.”
This includes a grid-like format, with clearly numbered content options presented. It prompts you to say things like, “Alexa, show more,” or “Alexa, select option four”—much cleaner than trying to burrow through thousands of video options with your voice. Once you pick up the Fire TV Cube remote and press a button, the interface immediately switches back to the “old” Fire TV format. The Fire TV Cube remote, by the way, also has Alexa built in, in case you’d like to turn the Cube’s microphones off but still want to use Alexa from time to time.
Amazon, not surprisingly, is pitching the Fire TV Cube as the perfect Frankengadget for your TV, something that not only gives you full Echo features but is supposed to drastically simplify your TV experience. But as with any hardware product from a company that has some services skin in the game, the Fire TV Cube is not a perfectly agnostic streaming platform.
Like every other FireOS device, the Fire TV Cube doesn’t play content purchased through iTunes. Apple TV, on the other hand, now streams Amazon Prime Video, so Apple has the distinct advantage there. More important is FireOS’s lack of a native YouTube app. Thanks to a spat that Google and Amazon can’t seem to resolve, your only option for watching YouTube videos on an Amazon device right now is to use a browser.
Also, don’t expect the Fire TV Cube to replace your soundbar. According to Amazon executives, the Cube’s audio output is comparable to what you get with an Echo Dot—so, not great. There’s also the question of whether the Cube will coexist nicely with other Echos in a small household; like if you have another Amazon product in your kitchen and that happens to be within spitting distance of your TV. Amazon says its Alexa devices are smart enough to discern which one you’re speaking to when two are nearby, but that isn’t always the case in the real world. For now, your best solution is probably to use different wake words.
First world problems aside (too many voice-controlled speakers!), Amazon’s new Fire TV Cube shows the company is serious about taking over your living room–or at the very least, becoming a very important part of it.
Coincidentally, the day that I brought home the electric Yuba Boda Boda bike was the day that the city of Portland decided to start a major construction project on the thoroughfare that goes by my house.
For a week, car commuters have been wandering around in a daze, finding their way through a maze of detours. “It’s like they’re a bunch of ants and their home has been destroyed,” our babysitter mused. I’ve bypassed all the confusion by e-biking to the construction site and walking my daughter and myself through the crosswalk.
Contrary to what my colleagues think (I love you guys!), I don’t believe that the bike revolution will happen when infrastructure improves. You see, I live in Portland, one of the most famously bike-friendly cities in the country. I’m (relatively) young, I don’t have a disability, and almost all of my destinations are less than a mile from my house, reachable through quiet residential roads.
Even armed with the best intentions, ideal circumstances, and gear, there are still some days when it’s just faster to pop my screaming toddler into a carseat than to get on my bike and do a SoulCycle-esque uphill sprint to her daycare. I don’t think people will take to biking en masse until it’s faster and easier to bike than it is to drive a car.
For the first time since I’ve become a mom, the electric Yuba Boda Boda has made that possible. It’s faster and easier to wheel the Boda Boda out of my garage, strap my toddler on the back, and e-bike, than it is to get in my car. The sound of my toddler shrieking, “This is so fun!” from the bike’s seat behind me is just a bonus.
Unlike the Yuba Supermarche, the electric Boda Boda is really easy to ride. It has a more compact aluminum frame with an extended rear rack, and comes in either a step-through or a step-over option. It has a 1.5-inch Chromoly fork, hydraulic disc brakes, and big, fat, 26-inch Cruz commuter tires. The tester model was in a wonderful bright teal color, and it was easy to adjust the seat and handlebars to fit my 5 foot, 2 inch height.
Yuba informed me that they don’t do home delivery, so I would have to pick up the bike myself at the retailer. I don’t own a vehicle big enough to fit the bike inside, and it wouldn’t fit on my roof rack. No matter, I said. I’d just ride it fifteen miles home.
The electric Boda Boda is kitted out with the e6000 Shimano Steps motor, which is an intelligent, weatherproof electric system with an integrated computer that assists you when you’re walking or riding the bike. It made the ride from the bike shop back to my house a total breeze.
The Steps system provides up to 50 newton meters of torque while pedaling. It automatically downshifts to a lower gear for an easier start, and even while stopping and starting on steep hills (curse you, stoplights!), I never felt like I had a hard time getting going.
Because the system provides power only when you need it, the motor has a colossal range of up to 93 miles, or around six hours, on one charge. That initial 15-mile bike ride on high assistance ate up only 24 percent of the battery life, even when I was hauling ass uphill at around 20 mph. If you ever want to surprise dedicated bike commuters, I suggest putting a Shimano Steps motor on the mom-liest bike of all time and waving as you pass them, hunched over in their racing crouches. I felt the way Paul Newman must have when he dropped a V8 engine in his tiny VW Bug.
The bike’s display is mounted between the handlebars, and you can turn your lights on and off, check your speed, range, gear, and battery life, and select between three levels of assistance (you can also turn off assistance entirely) from one convenient spot.
On a week of trucking my daughter and myself around our neighborhood (at much more moderate speeds), I only charged it once. It took a little over an hour to charge it after it had gone down to 40 percent.
E-assisted biking makes a huge difference, especially when you consider how heavy the whole apparatus is. The Boda Boda weighs 60 pounds without accessories, and can accommodate up to 220. I didn’t quite get there, but I came close. After you start piling on bags, bike seats, and kids, it is a lot of weight for a small woman to keep balanced. When it comes to hills, forget about it.
That’s why I normally hook a big, awkward bike trailer on my own bike, rather than put my kid in a bike seat. It’s a pain to wrestle my trailer out of my house and to strap my kids in it, but it does significantly lessen the possibility that I will keel over and crush everyone I love.
But, it’s much easier to maneuver a bike around obstacles when you don’t have a trailer fouling up your every move. My toddler far and away prefers riding in the open air, at a height where she can talk to me and enjoy the scenery. Instead of struggling to get her in the car, she now can’t wait to climb on. With electric assistance, I’m no longer afraid that I’ll let the bike topple over while she’s riding.
The electric Boda Boda is not light, or cheap. I wouldn’t be able to haul it up a flight of stairs if I lived in a walk-up, and the base model costs $3,400. A Kryptonite U-lock and cable seems sufficient protection for my ancient Surly, but I was terrified of letting the Boda Boda out of my sight. That might be a consideration if many of your bike trips are to public places like the farmer’s market or the corner store. You can also detach the battery from the motor and take it with you.
The base model comes with a double stand, chain guard, wheel skirt, fenders, and front and back LED lights, along with a two-year warranty on the frame and a one-year warranty on the motor. Thanks to Portland’s Clever Cycles, my step-through tester model was tricked out with a bike bell, padded seat, roll bars around the rear rack, and the Yepp Maxi child’s bicycle seat, which would have added about $500 to the cost.
Like I said, it costs a lot of money. But when you consider how much cars cost, and how much time and money it takes to maintain them, four grand starts to seem like a drop in the bucket.
According to a 2009 survey by the National Household Travel Survey, car trips of under a mile in the United States add up to ten billion miles per year. There have been more times than I’d like to admit when I’ve jumped in the car and driven a half-mile and back to get more milk. I’m constantly crunched for time and energy, and sometimes driving is just easier, until it’s not.
The electric Boda Boda turns driving into a relative hassle. While it might not be financially or physically possible for every family, it’s made a huge difference in how many times I use my car—just in a week! If it does turn out to be possible to buy our way out of climate change, then getting an e-bike might be a great start.
The Sonos Beam is a new $399 soundbar, but to Sonos, it’s a heck of a lot more than just a speaker that sits under your television. It’s a fabric-wrapped representation of how Sonos sees the future—one in which all the voice assistants from Apple and Google and Amazon can live next to one another. In this future, hip, urban millennial parents will use Beam not just for Netflixing and HBOing, but queuing up the soundtracks to their hip, urban lives and for controlling their hip, urban smart home. And they’ll do it all with spoken commands instead of an app or a remote.
Development on the Beam has been going on for more than two years (during which time the speaker was referred to internally as El Rey, Spanish for The King). And it’s being released at a critical time for Sonos: It’s been reported that the 16-year-old audio company will soon file to go public. Sonos has also just laid off almost 100 employees, or around 6 percent of its workforce. Patrick Spence, the company’s relatively new CEO, inherited a perception of the company—one rooted in reality—that it was slow to react to the Amazon Echo and slow to release new products in general. Sonos products are pricey, and the company has been feeling pressure from the low end of the smart speaker market.
The microphones on top are for talking to your preferred voice assistant.
But that’s not the end of the speaker market Sonos wants to play in, even if this new Beam costs significantly less than Sonos’ two previous soundbars and also works with Alexa. Spence sees things like the Amazon Echo Dot as “stepping stones” to higher-quality speakers. Sonos believes firmly that audio quality is its killer feature and that if you experience the sound of a Sonos speaker, you’ll be more inclined to buy into a whole multiroom Sonos system. Employees at the company talk about sound as though it’s as essential as air or as vital as basic nutrients, and they emphasize simplicity as a feature in a way that rivals only Apple.
“We think of sound as a material that you can actually interact with,” says Tad Toulis, Sonos’ VP of design, who called in on a videoconferencing system while I was visiting the company’s offices in Santa Barbara, California, last week. “We have this life force running through the system called sound, and that can be either music or television or podcasts and so forth.”
The challenge for Sonos now is to convince potential new customers that a soundbar like the Beam—a soundbar for TV, for music, for chatting with an AI—is the speaker they need as the sound centerpiece in their living rooms. And they need to convince these buyers to pick a $399 Beam instead of an inexpensive Echo, an Apple HomePod, or a Google Home.
There’s no mistaking the Beam for anything other than a soundbar, but it’s much smaller than Sonos’ last two television-adjacent speakers, 2013’s Playbar and last year’s Playbase. The Sonos Beam measures 26 inches across, around 30 percent shorter than the Playbar. It’s also 60 percent smaller by volume and weighs just 6 pounds. If the Playbase and Playbar were speakers you probably only moved when you were dusting, the Beam is something you could transport to your friend’s party and it wouldn’t be a total nuisance to do so.
Aki Laine, industrial design manager for Sonos Beam, took me through a product demo in a room at Sonos’ office that shared the same aesthetic as one of Breather’s rent-a-spaces: not quite a living room, but striving for it. I sat on a comfortable couch; a surf print hung on the wall. Perched in front of a Sony television was a brand-new white Sonos Beam on an entertainment console. (The Beam also comes in black.)
It’s 2.7 inches tall, which from my vantage point on the couch meant that the soundbar creeped just above the Sony logo on the TV. Laine says the designers carefully considered the sizes and dimensions of all of the top-selling TV sets on the market to ensure the product would fit well into most setups. In this case, it doesn’t align perfectly with the bottom of the TV, but the Beam is still remarkably unobtrusive. Plenty of people mount their TVs on a wall anyway, and Beam can be stuck to a wall too.
Another sign of Sonos’ design obsessiveness can be found in the fabric that wraps around the speaker’s body. It starts out as a circular tube of knitted polyester, like a sock. Then it’s cut to an exact length, stretched over the grille, and bonded to the inside edges of the speaker. Look at a Beam and you won’t see a single seam.
Sonos also custom-designed the Beam’s drivers, which are shaped like ovals. “The most cost-effective way to do transducers is to make them round,” Laine said. “But because we didn’t want to block any of the TV, we’re limited by height. So in order to move more air and get more sound out of the product, we designed elliptical transducers.”
There’s also a newly designed microphone array in the Sonos Beam. The $199 Sonos One speaker also has a microphone array and works with Alexa, but the two speakers have distinctly different shapes, which means the microphones used for voice recognition and noise cancellation required a different approach.
At the start of the demo, Laine summoned Amazon’s Alexa through the Sonos Beam and asked it to turn on the television. These TV-control capabilities from the Sonos Beam are new, since Sonos replaced the optical audio cable that was in the Playbar and Playbase with support for HDMI ARC, a newish home theater standard that allows components to work together more smoothly, send each other commands, and more easily shuttle digital surround-sound signals between connected components. That also means that Beam supports CEC, one of the features of the HDMI standard that lets you use just one remote control for all of the devices in your home theater—even if it’s your voice, like in the demo I got.
The main upside of switching to HDMI ARC and CEC, according to Sonos, is that it facilitates support for more standards and codecs and that it makes things simpler overall. For example, the Beam can now automatically recognize whatever remote you’re using. Not all TV sets support HDMI ARC, so Sonos will throw an HDMI-to-optical adapter into the box so you can still send digital sound to the Beam. Like many new standards these days, simplicity comes with dongles attached.
To get a sense of how the soundbar performs, Laine cycled through a few music tracks from Jordan Rakei, Radiohead, and Beck before eventually landing on a short clip from the film Arrival. It’s hard to make an in-depth judgment after just a few minutes of listening, but to the average ear, I think the Sonos Beam will sound fantastic. Audiophiles may pick up on the diminutive speaker’s subtle lack of bass, despite it having four full-range woofers and three passive radiators. But it sounds great despite the small size. The clip from Arrival, which included loud, ominous tones and whispery dialog, benefited the most from the soundbar—specifically from its center tweeter, which was designed to amplify dialog.
Later that same day, I briefly visited Sonos’ anechoic chamber, a giant concrete box of a room with a mesh suspension floor and foamy soundproofing wedges lining the walls. The Beam speaker sat in the center of the room, on a surface carved to be the exact same size as the bottom of the speaker. A thin metal arm covered in microphones arced above the Beam. It looked like the speaker was about to be interrogated. In fact, this chamber is where all of Sonos’ products are interrogated. Because of the lack of any audible reverberation or resonance, every word spoken inside an anechoic chamber sounds serious, almost profound. Someone made a joke about turning the lights off, and I’m glad they didn’t. One form of sensory deprivation was enough.
Motorola is in no mood to rock the boat. Motos are moving off shelves at a respectable pace in North America where phone buyers (especially those buying unlocked phones), are starting to recognize the company’s affordable, but very usable Android phones. The sixth Moto G was shown off earlier this spring, and now its time for the main attraction: the Moto Z3 Play.
The Z3 Play has a few new notable features, but it’s mostly the exact kind of upgrade you’d expect from last year’s Z2 Play. For you spec hounds, it has a Snapdragon 636 processor that Motorola says is about 30 percent faster than the Z2’s 626, an extra gigabyte of RAM (giving it a grand total of 4 GB), and the new Android Oreo (8.1). Battery life should remain around a day and file storage is still 32GB, though you can still upgrade it with a MicroSD card.
Spotting the design in phones is sometimes like examining a Where’s Waldo book, but there are some visible differences between the Z2 and Z3 Play. Motorola has added more microphones, two of which you’ll notice on the bottom of the phone’s face. They’ll let you talk to Google Assistant and Alexa from far away, and help cancel noise out when you’re talking on the phone. The rear of the phone is also covered in Gorilla Glass, though aluminum still adorns the edges.
It also did away with its front-facing fingerprint sensor in favor of new positioning on the right side. I haven’t held the phone yet, but this side positioning worked decently well on older Sony Xperia phones that used it.
The reason that fingerprint sensor had to move is simple: Motorola wanted more screen space, but didn’t want to make its phone bigger. The display now stretches 6 full inches diagonal, with slightly more pixels than before (2,160 x 1,080). Competing phones pack more pixels these days, but the HD AMOLED screen on last year’s Z2 looked plenty beautiful and clear. It’s a good bet that the Z3 Play will, too.
To appease fans of its handy fingerprint sensor gestures on previous Z phones, Moto has crafted an on-screen gesture slider on the bottom of the screen that will let pro users save some real estate. There’s also an odd feature that lets you animate parts of your photos and save them as .gif files for maximum meme-ability. In the demo we saw, the feature wasn’t enthralling, but we’re hoping it will work better in the real world. Regardless, the 12-megapixel rear camera does have some minor upgrades from last year and the selfie cam has gotten a boost from 5 to 8 megapixels. Google Lens also replaces some of Moto’s similar image-recognition features in the camera app.
There’s still no headphone jack on the Z3, though Motorola will include an adapter in the box. It’s also not waterproof, just splashproof, but Moto reps assured me it should be able to handle an accidental toilet drop, if that’s your chief worry.
Motorola isn’t giving up on its Moto Mods. The useful modular magnetic snap-on accessories that previous Z phones have built their names around are still supported and may be pushed harder than ever with new bundles. You can browse the Moto Mods here, but to give you an idea, there are Mods that add a zoom camera, a projector, let you talk to Alexa, or even print pictures. Most helpful of all are the extra battery packs, which can boost your battery capacity when you slap them on.
The Moto Z3 Play will start with a $500 price tag and come with a Moto Power Pack Mod included. It’ll be available unlocked, ready to work on any of the four major U.S. wireless carriers when it ships later in the summer.
Most of the best Memorial Day tech sales have slowly trickled to an end, but with summer in full swing and new products coming out all the time, there are a surprising number of killer deals this week, including a rare sale on some excellent Google gadgets. With the help of our friends at TechBargains, below are some of our favorite deals going on this week.
Google discounts some of its products now and then, but this week four of them have had their prices slashed. The Google Pixelbook is the most powerful Chromebook you can buy, by a longshot, and ChromeOS has improved considerably since we reviewed it late last year.
Google Pixelbook Chromebook for $749 (Was $999) – Intel Core i5 CPU, 12.3-inch 2400×1600 touchscreen, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD
2 Pack Google Home Mini for $58 (Was $100) – WIRED Best Smart Speakers Award Winner, Scroll down to “Buy Together and Save” to get the bonus discount
Google Daydream View Mobile VR for $49 (Was $99) – WIRED Recommends
Google Wi-Fi Mesh Router 3 Pack for $259 (Was $300)
With the Google Home Mini on sale, rival Amazon has put its competing Echo Dots on discount, along with the Echo Show, which is an Echo with a screen, perfect for your kitchen.
2 Pack Amazon Echo Dot Speakers for $60 (Was $80) – WIRED Recommends, add 2 Dots to your cart for the extra discount
Amazon Echo Show with 7-Inch Touchscreen for $150 (Was $230) – WIRED Pick for Best Smart Speakers and Best Alexa Speaker
Be sure to check out some of the other killer audio deals this week, including the BackBeat Pro 2, Sony noise cancelling headphones, and UE Megaboom. We’ve also included a TV and laptop that we like.
Plantronics BackBeat Pro 2 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones for $130 (Was $200) – WIRED’s Best Wireless Headphones Pick, Also, check out the other Plantronics sales going on
UE Megaboom Bluetooth Speaker for $120 (Was $250) – Wired Recommends, the larger sibling of our Favorite Bluetooth Speaker
Sony WH1000XM2 Noise Cancelling Wireless Headphones for $300 (Was $348) – The noise cancelling in these is on par with Bose QuietComfort and Plantronics BackBeat, or about as good as it gets
SteelSeries Arctis 7 Wireless Gaming Headset for $100 (Was $130) – Best Gaming Headset for Switch Owners
50-Inch Vizio E Series LED 4K TV for $300 (Was $448) – WIRED Recommends, though the 50-inch panel does have fewer local dimming zones than 55- and 60-inch models
15.6-Inch Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Laptop for $480 (Was $760) – Use the coupon code “EXTRA270NOW” at checkout for the discount. Has an Intel Core i5 (7th Gen) CPU, 8GB RAM, Windows 10 Pro, 256GB SSD
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Steve Jobs changed the world with the iPhone, the glossy slab of aluminum and glass that redefined the category of “phone” the day it went on sale in 2007. But it wasn’t until a year later, when Jobs introduced the App Store, that Apple would make its most lasting contribution.
The App Store invented a new world, where chauffeurs, dates, and deliverymen could be summoned with a few taps; but also where our attention could be shattered, our democracy shaken, and our anxiety spiked. Ten years later, as we increasingly grapple with technology’s dominance over our minds, it’s hard not to imagine Steve Jobs as a young Dr. Frankenstein; the App Store, his monstrous creation.
“iPhone and iPad are some of the most powerful tools ever created,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, while speaking at Apple’s annual developer conference this week. But our apps “beg us to use our phone when we really should be occupying ourselves with something else. They send us flurries of notifications trying to draw us in for fear of missing out. We may not even recognize how distracted we’ve become.”
Now, Apple—like much of Silicon Valley—wants to cure the disease it’s caused. The next version of iOS will be armed with a “comprehensive set of built-in features” to limit distractions and recalibrate priorities on the iPhone. There’s a more expansive Do Not Disturb mode, which flips on during bedtime and hides notifications from the homescreen until you’re fully awake and ready to face them. Do Not Disturb can also be switched on during certain times of day, switching off when you leave a particular location or when an event ends on your calendar. A new feature for “tuning” notifications lets you adjust how you receive the pop-ups from certain apps, and for the first time, Apple will support grouped notifications to make them easier to parse and manage.
There’s also a dashboard for usage insights, called Screen Time, which sends a weekly breakdown of how you spend your time on the iPhone. A built-in App Timer can set limits on certain apps, reminding you to move on after 30 minutes or an hour. Those features also update Parental Controls, which first came to the iPhone in 2008, by letting parents to monitor their kids’ activity and set limits on how they’re spending their time. Throughout many of these features, Siri is there to help, like a secretary that holds your calls during important meetings and knows exactly how you take your coffee.
The new features earned Apple generous applause on Monday, a sign that the WWDC crowd appreciated the company taking responsibility for the iPhone’s absorbent qualities. But just moments later, Apple executives demonstrated Memoji, a new personalized emoji feature that involves staring at the screen and animating a digital character with your facial features. Another demo featured Julz Arney, who works on Apple’s fitness technologies, biking while breathlessly scrolling through productivity apps on her Apple Watch, changing dinner reservations, texting friends, browsing the web, checking notifications about her infant baby, and struggling to close the fitness rings on the watch’s face.
The cognitive dissonance was striking. Apple says it wants you to have a healthier relationship with your phone, and it’ll even give you the tools to do it. But for every feature it showed to wrangle notifications or curb app use, it added more to keep you staring at your screen. The Screen Time dashboard and Do Not Disturb mode might make it easier to ignore certain apps, or shame you into spending less time thumbing through Instagram. But the rest of the keynote showed that Apple isn’t ready for you to put your iPhone down just yet.
The rise of “digital wellness” has been coursing through Silicon Valley for years, but it reached its fever pitch earlier this year when Tristan Harris, the father of the “time well spent” movement, formed the Center for Humane Technology. The group evangelizes a more human approach to personal tech, calling for better tools from the big tech companies, regulation from government, and a greater awareness of how much of our lives we waste staring at screens. Facebook name-checked “time well spent”—Harris’s famous credo—when it rejiggered its News Feed algorithm in January. Google riffed on the idea last month, when it introduced new Android features to promote “JOMO,” or the joy of missing out. It was Apple’s turn to go next.
In many ways, Apple was already primed to join the “digital wellness” movement. The company stands for minimalism; a distraction-free interface fits well with the Apple ethos. It makes most of its money from hardware, not software—meaning as long as long as you buy the iPhone, it shouldn’t matter how much time you spend staring into the black hole of its screen. Apple even introduced the Apple Watch with this idea in mind: it was pitched as a device to free you from the tyranny of the phone.
“We’re in a very unique position because we have never been about maximizing the number of times you pick it up, the number of hours that you use it,” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said today in an interview with NPR. (Apple declined to give an on-the-record interview for this story.) “The user is our focus. And so our question is always, what is in their best interest?”
And yet, Apple’s native apps seem to be creeping in the opposite direction. Memoji was just one of the new immersive features demoed Monday. The native Photo app in iOS will get more social, popping up suggestions to share photos with friends; iMessage and FaceTime will get a suite of camera effects that look more like Snapchat. The problems with smartphone obsession have nothing to do with hardware, and everything to do with apps—ones like Instagram, and Facebook, and Snapchat. Apple seems to want you to spend more time interacting with your iPhone, with native experiences that look more like those apps. It’s hard to claim that any of these updates constitute “time well spent.”
In Apple’s view, users should make their own choices about how they use their phones. If you want to stare at your Apple Watch throughout your workout, or spend the next hour animating the poop emoji with your face, so be it. Apple’s “digital wellness” features are less paternalistic than Google’s, designed to empower you to make the choices you think are healthy without much interference. The limits on the App Timer can be easily extended; Do Not Disturb switched off with a tap. Screen Time simply shows you how you’re spending time on your iPhone, so that “you can make decisions about how much time you want to spend with your device each day,” as Federighi explained it on stage at WWDC.
“The fact Apple thinks three product changes alone can solve a complex social problem speaks to how simplistically they are treating the issue,” says Andrew Dunn, the CEO of Siempo, an Android app that replaces the standard homescreen with a simpler interface to minimize distraction. He and other developers have created their own solutions to smartphone obsession, ranging from apps that lock you out of your phone during certain times of day to ones that block all notifications. Dunn says that if Apple really wanted to give iPhone users a better “digital wellness” experience, the company should’ve turned to the community of developers who had already been building these tools for years. But yesterday, there was no mention of easing the current restrictions and allowing developers to build on the new screen time features.
“This is certainly a start in providing options to stem tech addiction and obsession, but nothing on your phone is going to change that behavior until you change the psychology behind it,” says Larry Rosen, the co-author of The Distracted Mind and a research psychologist who studies the impact of technology. Giving users the tools to monitor their own behavior is great, but showing people how much time they’re wasting on Facebook doesn’t make Facebook any less addictive. Hiding someone’s notifications can’t cure FOMO, and adding interactive Memojis doesn’t encourage people to spend any less time staring at their iPhones.
Apple’s new features represent a useful acknowledgement of the problems with technology. The screen time tools go a long way to giving users more control, and many iPhone users will be thrilled to finally find the features they’ve been wanting for years. But new features can only be as successful as the apps they regulate—and in Apple’s case, just like Frankenstein’s monster, it might already be too late.