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$350 each? $400 for the "Marine" model. Let me guess. That one is a solar powered laptop that is water resistant to 2000m, right? This looks like some sort of elaborate scam... something high quality and innovative for the same price as a Walmart laptop... Hm. And seriously, Intel GMA gfx? Ah well, guess that's one way to save power. Nice web page though. Love the parallax scrolling and the elephant. :P Anyways here's some doubt to chew on: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/163184-sol-the-350-solar-powered-rugged-ubuntu-laptop-that-wont-be-usable-in-the-sun

Intel is planning to put out a 48-core mobile CPU in less than a decade ( http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139267-intels-48-core-supercomputing-smartphone-cpu-is-less-than-a-decade-away ), with the main benefit being improved energy efficiency. That being said, it may be a smart short-term business move for Qualcom to not pursue 8 core chips in the meantime, and calling everyone else stupid is a convenient way to justify that to stockholders. Myself, I would love to have excessively powerful mobile devices that far exceed the needs of the average consumer. I currently lug around a gargantuan Lenovo w530 which, for the majority of its use, is docked and closed. If I could just dock a phone with workstation-grade hardware in it, that would be much more convenient for me.

Right and you think that figure was just pulled out of thin ever even though it turn out to be completely correct?

But here you go, have some more links to get upset over:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/150686-samsung-galaxy-s4-dimensions-weight-battery-size-and-hardware-specs-confirmed-ahead-of-launch

http://mobileandphone.com/samsung-galaxy-s4-vs-galaxy-note-2/

So what's your next excuse? That Samsung paid the whole internet to retrospectively doctor their old news articles and Google to update their indexes and caches?

You could just admit you were wrong instead you know? You'd look a whole lot less stupid than scraping about desperately for excuses to try and prop up your already crumbled argument.

Thor Energy started a trial earlier this month.

Turns out that Norway has one of the world's largest thorium deposits, which is part of the motivation. I guess having huge oil deposits, hydro-energy resources, and wind-energy resources wasn't enough...

The outcome changes, however, if instead of discs they use 500kg of DNA storage. The most data to be successfully stored in one gram of DNA so far as I could bother searching for is 5.5 petabits. So this comes out to 2,750,000,000 Tb (2.75 Zb) in 500kg of payload. At 518,400 seconds, that works out to roughly 5,304.78 Tb/s, two orders of magnitude higher than the fiber optic line.

The real trick would be preserving the 2.75Zb of DNA on a cross-country trip in a station wagon...

The XBox was the last successful entrance that they've made into a new arena.

Successful by what measure? Exposure for Microsoft, yes, and that's surely very valuable to the company. Successful as in it became popular, yes. But it is not a profitable product. In 2003, MS gaming division lost US$348 million per quarter. That's some price to pay for what amounts to nothing but MS marketing spend. What was gained? For a product to be "successful", it should float on its own, not perpetually buoyed up by tax-deductible division losses.

And now this:
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/158279-microsoft-is-losing-it-over-the-xbox-one-if-you-dont-have-the-internet-stick-with-the-xbox-360

All that money down the drain, and STILL they are alienating users from a new product. Same is happening with Windows 8. Someone somewhere is a bad product manager.

WIndows 8, horrible product. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/155199-windows-8-passes-100-million-license-sales-almost-matching-the-growth-of-windows-7 SQLServer, disruptive? I am pretty sure teradata and oracle own that market, none of my clients run SQL server for data warehousing, and BI would be either Cognos or SAP BI. SQL Server BI is pretty lame...

News at 11.

I don't think there's any chipmaker (CPU, GPU or otherwise) who hasn't been caught doing it. Not that that makes it right, of course.

For the quick readers, note that this is about Clover Trail, not to be confused with the recently announced Bay Trail. Though it does cast doubts on Intel's claims about the latter's performance...

Stone only lasts 1000 years. Do you want to be forgotten in 1000 years? Better use sapphire.

Stone only lasts 1000 years. Do you want to be forgotten in 1000 years? Better use sapphire.

Microsoft can sell all kinds of stuff after using this as a promotional tool.

It doesn't look like they'll be making money any time soon.

"Microsoft To Start Dumping Surface RT To Schools

It’s fair to say that Microsoft’s Surface didn’t get the reception the company was hoping for. The tablet debuted last October and tanked shortly thereafter, thanks to an overly ambitious price point, poor software selection, and the myriad issues surrounding Windows 8. "

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/159034-microsoft-unloading-surface-rt-units-at-199-offering-schools-major-discount

Those poor schoolkids - first they get Surface RTs dumped on them, now Bing? Microsoft should be prosecuted for child abuse!

Citation needed about that.

The Kinect is required because they want to encourage game devs to use the Kinect. If it were optional, developers may skip using some features since they may not be available. I don't see how it won't work if cam is obstructed.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/156515-kinect-for-xbox-one-an-always-on-works-in-the-dark-camera-and-microphone-what-could-possibly-go-wrong

It may continue to work if you obstruct the camera - but should you have to bother?

I starting to fell like a broken record here but seriously Slashdot, I would have thought that this Myth that x86 ISA somehow makes it impossible to build a low power part would be dead by now. ARM is a rather complex instruction set now that they have added SIMD and floating point support. If you look at the number of op-codes it has versus x86 they are roughly equal. Both ISAs have variable length instructions (all recent ARM designs support THUMB) so the decode logic complexity is actually pretty comparable. Also much of the decode logic is implemented in software via microcode on both ISAs.

There is nothing magical about ARM that makes it lower power. The real reason why x86 implementations are so much hotter is because designers of x86 processors have been targeting high compute performance for decades, whereas ARM has been targeting low power for decades. A quick look at Medfield benchmarks show that it is comparable in performance to ARM processors that were current when it was released. Medfield is ~4W active TDP... same as a Exynos 5 Dual ARM CPU. From what we have seen from Merrifield/Bay Trail/Haswell the next gen x86 parts are continuing along this trend.

I've been using Brief (add-on for Firefox) for about two months, and I'm quite satisfied. Getting used to the bookmark integration took some time, but it's not so bad. It can import feeds exported from Google Reader. More details here.

Funilly enough this is a similar solution to the AMD chip that will be in the xbox one (Chip on package edram).. When will AMD bring that tech to their PC part line?

In the second half of 2013.

I thought it was running Window 8 and/or Android on same system; nope.
Detachable screen is in fact an andoid tablet; when you plug it into the 'docking station' that's actually a full-spec Win PC sitting in the keyboard / chassis.
If your use cases including running both a tablet and an ultra-PC, could be temping I guess, but hardling a tech breakthrough.

Try these for more info:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/03/asus-announces-the-transformer-book-trio-likens-it-to-a-laptop/

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/157253-asus-unveils-dual-os-dual-cpu-jekyll-hyde-transformer-book-trio

I feel the need to investigate this issue further for the sake of the public interest. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/150743-mexican-terrorists-wage-war-on-nanotech-but-its-peta-we-should-be-worried-about Holy Cow!

Yeah, right, but the Avrocar wasn't all THAT secret, literally thousands of people knew about it.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950s-supersonic-flying-saucer-declassified

It was never all that tightly classified, because it never worked, was built in Canada, and it never got more than three feet off the ground or flew faster than 35mph.

Ultimately, though, the fact that we use fixed-wing aircraft today is a good indicator that flying saucers, while cool, just aren’t that functional. If flying saucers were somehow faster or more efficient or capable of lifting heavier loads, we would almost certainly see them in a commercial (to say nothing about combat) setting.

Its been 60 years since the 1950's, yet the government and washington can't keep a secret for a New York Minute.
Everything about our space launches is public knowledge. Everything about our nuclear arsenal is public knowledge.
The Chinese and Russians stole our plans right from under our noses and replicated everything from the B29 to the Space Shuttle.

Yet there are idiots like you that believe that Administration after Administration, in country after country has kept a secret for 60 years because the poor public couldn't handle the truth if it were found out there were Aliens visiting the earth, but would have no problem handling the truth that their own governments built Mutually Assured Destruction arsenals and had the world living in fear of nuclear war for 30 years.

60 years, and not one honest man has surfaced with the goods in hand?

Current ARM processors may indeed have a role to play in supercomputing, but the advantages this article implies don't exist.

Go look at performance figures for the Cortex-A15. It's *much* faster than the Cortex-A9. It also draws far more power. There's a reason why ARM's own product literature identifies the Cortex-A15 as a smartphone chip at the high end, but suggests strategies like big.LITTLE for lowering total power consumption. Next year, ARM's Cortex-A57 will start to appear. That'll be a 64-bit chip, it'll be faster than the Cortex-A15, it'll incorporate some further power efficiency improvements, and it'll use more power at peak load.

That doesn't mean ARM chips are bad -- it means that when it comes to semiconductors and the laws of physics, there are no magic bullets and no such thing as a free lunch.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/155941-supercomputing-director-bets-2000-that-we-wont-have-exascale-computing-by-2020

I'm the author of that story, but I'm discussing a presentation given by one of the US's top supercomputing people. Pay particular attention to this graph:

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/CostPerFlop.png

What it shows is the cost, in energy, of moving data. Keeping data local is essential to keeping power consumption down in a supercomputing environment. That means that smaller, less-efficient cores are a bad fit for environments in which data has to be synchronized across tens of thousands of cores and hundreds of nodes. Now, can you build ARM cores that have higher single-threaded efficiency? Absolutely, yes. But they use more power.

ARM is going to go into datacenters and supercomputers, but it has no magic powers that guarantee it better outcomes.

Current ARM processors may indeed have a role to play in supercomputing, but the advantages this article implies don't exist.

Go look at performance figures for the Cortex-A15. It's *much* faster than the Cortex-A9. It also draws far more power. There's a reason why ARM's own product literature identifies the Cortex-A15 as a smartphone chip at the high end, but suggests strategies like big.LITTLE for lowering total power consumption. Next year, ARM's Cortex-A57 will start to appear. That'll be a 64-bit chip, it'll be faster than the Cortex-A15, it'll incorporate some further power efficiency improvements, and it'll use more power at peak load.

That doesn't mean ARM chips are bad -- it means that when it comes to semiconductors and the laws of physics, there are no magic bullets and no such thing as a free lunch.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/155941-supercomputing-director-bets-2000-that-we-wont-have-exascale-computing-by-2020

I'm the author of that story, but I'm discussing a presentation given by one of the US's top supercomputing people. Pay particular attention to this graph:

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/CostPerFlop.png

What it shows is the cost, in energy, of moving data. Keeping data local is essential to keeping power consumption down in a supercomputing environment. That means that smaller, less-efficient cores are a bad fit for environments in which data has to be synchronized across tens of thousands of cores and hundreds of nodes. Now, can you build ARM cores that have higher single-threaded efficiency? Absolutely, yes. But they use more power.

ARM is going to go into datacenters and supercomputers, but it has no magic powers that guarantee it better outcomes.

But can it play Crysis?

Yes, rhetorical question, I know.

But taking it seriously... The new Xbox GPU is said to be similar to the Radeon 7790. And according to Anandtech, that card can indeed handle Crysis in full HD at more modest settings at playable frame rates (though not a full 60 fps).

That said... who cares? Crysis is basically a benchmark masquerading as a game. It's amazing how much publicity Crytek got by hiring programmers who don't know how to optimize.

Another technology always 20 years from now.

www.extremetech.com/extreme/110031-a-bionic-prosthetic-eye-that-speaks-the-language-of-your-brain

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVhggGSjXVg

How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop

OMG, it was faked! This is an outrage!

... but, from the ExtremeTech article:

When is an image fake, and when is it merely enhanced?

The bigger discussion, of course, is whether Gaza Burial is actually fake — or just enhanced to bring out important details. This is a question that has plagued photography since its inception. Should a photo, especially a press photo, be purely objective? Most people think the answer is an obvious “yes,” but it’s not quite that simple. What if a photo is perfect, except that it’s taken at an odd angle — can you digitally rotate it? What about cropping? What if there’s dust on the lens/sensor/film — can you digitally remove it?

Perhaps most importantly, though, cameras simply don’t capture the same gamut of color or dynamic range as human eyes — a photo never looks the same as the original image perceived by your brain. Is it okay for a photographer to modify a picture so that it looks exactly how he remembers the scene?

So, it wasn't faked, but rather cleaned up? All those people were in those positions at that time? The event was real?

The article uses the word "fake" to discredit the photographer, while at the same time admitting that that determination is really a subjective one having to do with how much enhancement is acceptable, and that the subject of the photo - which photojournalism is really about - is completely real.

He's joking or trolling, but he is correct about ISS dropping XP on their laptops...

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155392-international-space-station-switches-from-windows-to-linux-for-improved-reliability

Chromebooks have been topping the Amazon sales charts. Clearly TFA's numbers are bullshit because you don't top Amazon by selling less than 5,000 units.

X is dying. Slashdot confirms it. One of the oldest trolls that still works.

Submitter here. The 5000 figure is from the first 6 months of sales from June/July 2011.The Amazon sales charts numbers are from January of this year. Also, not many folks buy laptops from Amazon, so topping the sales there is nothing big.

OTOH, total sales so through Q1 of 2013 are purportedly in the 500K range. Certainly not a Windows killer yet, nor even an OS X competitor, but 100X more than 5K.

Chromebooks have been topping the Amazon sales charts. Clearly TFA's numbers are bullshit because you don't top Amazon by selling less than 5,000 units.

X is dying. Slashdot confirms it. One of the oldest trolls that still works.

Submitter here. The 5000 figure is from the first 6 months of sales from June/July 2011.The Amazon sales charts numbers are from January of this year. Also, not many folks buy laptops from Amazon, so topping the sales there is nothing big.

Chromebooks have been topping the Amazon sales charts. Clearly TFA's numbers are bullshit because you don't top Amazon by selling less than 5,000 units.

X is dying. Slashdot confirms it. One of the oldest trolls that still works.

Google did exactly that.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/144804-google-attempts-to-stymie-android-fragmentation-by-locking-down-the-android-sdk

Now keep in mind that this is for the SDK and not AOSP itself. Amazon is going to have a difficult time taking android in a separate direction if they can't modify the SDK.

Here is it, thanks to Barns & Nobles:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/105113-microsofts-android-bullying-revealed-by-barnes-noble

More details
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2011111122291296

TLDR:
1) Background image loading
2) Operating system provided tabs.
3) Handles when selecting text.
4) Annotation of electronic documents. (annotating them without changing the original document)
5) Web browser loading status icons.
6) Simulating mouse inputs using non-mouse devices. (basically everything with a touchscreen infridges)

The "ugly and harsh light" is described in the industry as Color Temperature. I'm not sure if it is a requirement to include but most bulbs come with a Color Rendering Index (CRI) rating. It's a scale from 0-100 (100 being a reference incandescent bulb) to rate the Color Temperature of a bulb. LED's are harder to quantify using this method however so a new method is in development called Color Quality Scale (CQS). Who knew a simple light bulb could be so complex? I found a really good read at Jason Morrison's web site with cool pictures and everything!

But to answer your question...it depends on the LED bulb. Since LED's come in several colors but white isn't one of them LED bulbs make white using a couple of different methods. So there are some LED's that have the same harsh temperature and others that are very close to the warm glow of an incandescent. Philips just announced a new process that will bring near incandescent quality with better efficiency (200 Lumens Per Watt (LPW)) than existing LED technology but it is still a few years from production.

actually it comes from this article:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/150207-chinese-physicists-measure-speed-of-einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-at-least-10000-times-faster-than-light

Magic? I don't believe in real magic.

Stage magic, or clever marketing, that's the kind of magic they've used. Magic which uses smoke and mirrors to obfuscate the real underlying situation.

Like I've said already, many of those WP7 developers did have to modify their code. Microsoft created all kinds of incentives for it. And the ones who didn't bother just suffered a new influx of negative reviews from users with WP8 phones and therefore less visibility in the app store.

Reference for the " many of those WP7 developers did have to modify their code" line? The final WP8 SDK wasn't even published when WP8, yet the WP8 store had 100K+ apps.

And I did have to quote it for you, you're the one who linked to it originally, claiming that it somehow supported *your* point when it very clearly doubted that your point was even possible at all.

I linked to that article because it detailed the process of how Microsoft automatically recompiled WP7 apps to WP8.
If my point wasn't possible, how come there were 100K apps at launch automatically without even the final SDK coming out?

And I'm the one who pointed out to you that all the 5 articles you linked to were from before the WP8 launch (including the article quoted above), thereby nullifying them as evidence for your point, and now you're the one who has the gall to point out the same thing to me? Even quoting the dates and highlighting the "before" in bold as if you were the one suddenly trying to educating me on the matter when I didn't even make half the claim you made? Seriously?!

The point is that you have completely failed to provide any references after the migration showing that there were anything more than a handful of problems. If there a lot of problems, the media would've gone nuts in the WP8 review about how WP7 apps didn't run on WP8.

That all the articles doubting the migration were before it happened is telling. Of course the media is silent when there are no issues. There is nothing to write about! A few apps did have issues, but it's definitely not many as you say.

http://www.techspot.com/news/50645-microsoft-unveils-wp8-windows-store-reaches-120000-apps.html

Without even the final WP8 SDK for developers to make any changes. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/137621-two-weeks-away-still-no-sdk-windows-phone-8-teeters-on-the-edge-of-failure

Please explain from where 120K apps appeared for WP8 on Oct 29th 2013 without the WP8 SDK being released if there so many "breaking changes" preventing them from running?

So the onus is on you to show that there were lots of problems with the migration, and you failed to come up with even one reference.

New PS2 games were made for about 5-6 years after the PS3 came out.

Six years after the PS3s release, there is still an occasional game being released for the PS2, such as the Final Fantasy XI expansion Seekers of Adoulin, which will release March 27 of next year.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/144342-13-years-after-the-playstation-2-changed-the-industry-sony-finally-halts-production

If you like to play benchmarks I can show you that GS3's CPU overall performance is considerably better: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/136291-iphone-5-benchmarks-slower-than-the-galaxy-s3-faster-than-the-nexus-7

A full, true, Raspberry pi setup that could replace a computer (including a case + power supply + sd card, etc) will run you around $85. There's not $85 of scrap value in an old P4 unfortunately.

ExtremeTech did an article on this:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/148482-the-true-cost-of-a-raspberry-pi-is-more-than-you-think

There's been many valid points made here about the long term costs of power consumption versus the short term upfront costs of new hardware investment. Unfortunately the issue with most non-profits is they don't have the upfront capital to invest in say 50 Raspberry Pi systems, but they can easily spread out the power consumption over the long term of 50 P4's (as inefficient as they are - agreed!) through operating expenses.

There are already a number of Android forks in China, including one by the Chinese search giant Baidu, who has also replaced Google as the default search engine in most of the Android phones there.

cf. "Android is failing by succeeding in China"

The Google "control" of Android doesn't seem to be doing much to deter Chinese companies.

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

There are only so many hours in the day. If we put those hours into finding new ways to kill other people and win conflicts, we will not be putting those hours into finding new ways to heal people and resolve conflicts. Langdon Winner talks about this topic in his writings when he explores the notion of whether artifacts have politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner

Albert Einstein wrote, after the first use of atomic weapons, that everything had changed but our way of thinking. You make some good points about us long having cruise missiles, but on "forces of good", here is something written decades ago by then retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler:
http://www.warisaracket.com/
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. ..."

Just because it was "hot" before, with cruise missiles and nukes and poison gases, does not mean we will be better off when our society reaches a boiling point -- with robotic soldiers and military AIs and speedier plagues and so on. Eventually quantitative changes (like lowering prices per unit) become qualitative changes. Every year our planet is in conflict is a year of risk of that conflict escalating into global disaster. So, the question is, do our individual actions add to that risk or take away from it?

I'm impressed with what some UAVs can do in terms of construction vs. destruction, so obviously there is a lot of different possibilities in that field.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/107217-real-life-constructicon-quadcopter-robots-being-developed

So then you only use magnetic tape for storage?

Of course not. He uses laser etched sapphire.

Not necessarily true.
iPhone5 has better memory, while the S3 has a much faster processor.


http://www.extremetech.com/computing/136291-iphone-5-benchmarks-slower-than-the-galaxy-s3-faster-than-the-nexus-7

This comes uncomfortably closely after the latest announcement of the drone authorisation map.

He refers to this story, though we've only heard that MS plans to release Office on Linux, not that you can already pre-order it.

OMG, you're absolutely correct! We don't have any experience at all in keeping mirrors in very precise, stationary configurations in space!

As for handling molten steel in a micro-g environment, the best I can say for your level of comprehension is Magnets, How Do They Work?

As for the printing process, we've pretty much solved that problem here on earth, and micro-g just makes it even easier.

There are large challenges, no doubt, to making it all work and getting into production, but the key is that there are no un-developed technologies necessary. Everything we need we already know how to do.

Hopefully this is going to be a bit easier over time as everyones moves to LTE (does this mean that CDMA finally bites the dust?) and phones become standardized like the rest of the civilized world.

Don't bet on it.
There is already segmentation in what bands get used in different countries and of course The US carriers are deploying FDD LTE while the rest of the world leans more to TDD LTE. ClearWire being a notable exception. AT&T likes being able to charge you global roaming fees so they go out of their way to make sure you can't just hop on a European competitors network when you are in town. Here are a few good articles on just the iPhone 5 models.

This article claims a storage device made from sapphire & platinum that will last 10 million years, although I do not see where they come up with that estimate.

Are there any benefits in terms of speed or reliability?

Games run faster/smoother in Linux. DirectX may be easier to code for, but OpenGL is superior if implemented correctly.

aliens came down, anal probed you and made you forget.

(Un)fortunately this time the anal probing is just part of the regular Microsoft customer experience.

Microsoft is re-engineering these supernodes to make it easier for law enforcement to monitor calls by allowing the supernodes to not only make the introduction but to actually route the voice data of the calls as well. In this way, the actual voice data would pass through the monitored servers and the call is no longer secure. It is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack, and it is made all the easier because Microsoft -– who owns Skype and knows the keys used for the service’s encryption -– is helping.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/132935-microsoft-tweaking-skype-to-facilitate-wiretapping

I think this article linked through TFA reviewing the WOA appstore sums it up nicely "But for now, x86 compatibility isn't just a check box: It's a doorway back to a land of sanity.". Kinda sad they are actually charging more than iPad for Surface when its quite obvious just from reading the reviews their appstore is completely broken and worthless.

BTW it may be a little petty of me, but since i called it months ago that the WOA and Win 8 appstore would be a trainwreck, since they couldn't make GFWL functional after years and a competitor that would be easy enough to copy they sure as hell wouldn't be able to pull off an appstore for a different arch so I'd like to say "I told you so" to those that doubted me and do the dance of smug superiority.

TSMC is at the forefront of producing chips, yes. The word that's not there is successfully. It's not entirely their fault, except that it is.

Examples: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/04/19/qualcomm-28nm-capacity/1
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/130937-tsmc-still-struggling-with-28nm-qualcomm-and-nvidia-threaten-to-jump-ship

Somewhat hilariously if you Google IPS image retention, you will find a ton of articles about the MacBook Pro Retina display problems.

Including this one, that explains the problem is basically limited to MacBook Pros with LG displays, instead of the Samsung displays some use. The Samsung display also has better contrast and proper color calibration that the LG panels lack.

I can't help but find the whole thing hilarious.

I had been planning to purchase an iPad 4 for a while, but I guess I had better do it soon. I don't really want to be a beta tester for Apple/TSMC. There have been serious problems with TSMC's 28nm process and I don't trust them to get it right. And during the past year or so, Apple has shown a disturbing trend of prioritizing screwing over their competitors (Samsung and Google) above providing a good customer experience, as demonstrated by the Apple Maps fiasco and the myriad of problems with LG displays on the Retina MacBook Pro. I'm very concerned that corners will be cut in the rush to TSMC fabrication.