Outpaced by a few seconds is essentially parity. But compared to how badly previous generations of AMD CPUs did (losing by multiple minutes) it's a major step forward, especially when AMD is using only about 2/3 the power of the Intel part and will probably come in at a much lower price.
Agilent, not Aligent. Presumably a portmanteau of "agile enterprise". Not the best name the world has ever seen but not the worst either. The main problem I had with it is that it felt wrong for the original core of HP (instrumentation) to have to give up its original name, but I suppose they felt it was important for the big consumer product lines (computers and printers) to keep the brand.
Local laws can't prevent you from putting up an OTA antenna unless you are in a historic district. But if you live in an apartment or condo it's another matter. You can't be prevented from putting an antenna outside your own window but it may not be effective in that location, and the people who control the building are not required to give you access to a roof location where it might work. City dwellers often don't have a clear line of sight path to the broadcast stations in any case even from the roof, and reflections off other buildings create a multipath nightmare, so OTA reception may not work reliably.
Things should get better for urban populations if ATSC 3.0 is ever adopted. It is abandoning 8VSB modulation in favor of OFDM, which is much more resistant to multipath interference. We should have done that in 2000 when Sinclair Broadcasting petitioned the FCC for that change (the cost would have been small at the time because HDTV receivers were not yet widely available) but the FCC rejected it.
If you have a fancy new TV with HDR you may want to look elsewhere. The Fire TV doesn't do HDR. It's also limited to 30Hz at 4K, which doesn't currently matter for Netflix or Amazon Prime but does mean that you can't see a tiny amount of YouTube content in its full 60Hz UHD glory. A Roku Premiere+ or Roku Ultra would be better bets.
If you have a 2015 or earlier UHD TV or a new model without HDR, the Fire TV works very well.
What's the application for 32GB? Software development, and especially multimedia development. Modern development environments take up a lot of memory, and if you're doing multimedia you're likely to also be running image, audio, and/or video editing software at the same time. You might be running one or more virtual machines at test environments. And you may have multiple web browsers open for compatibility testing.
What's the application for a removable SSD? When you fill up the one that came with the computer you can replace it with a larger one, which is now affordable because of the way that the prices of computer components drop over time. (You can also avoid the inflated price that the manufacturer charges for extra storage at the time of purchase, which is undoubtedly one reason that Apple is doing away with removable drives.)
I mentioned the use of the ESC key in another post.
One more that you missed: a high end GPU. The fastest GPU you can get in the MBP is the Radeon Pro 460, which is comparable to the RX 460 desktop card. That pales by comparison with what NVidia offers; you can now get laptops with a GTX 1080. (It operates at a lower speed than its desktop counterpart because of power and thermal limitations, but it still blows Apple's Radeon out of the water.) Apple's GPU is inadequate for virtual reality and for high end games, which leaves out both users and developers of those things.
Yes, the ESC key is gone, except for the version of the 13" MBP with no Touch Bar. It's now a soft key on the Touch Bar instead. That's sub-optimal for many developers, because the user interface of two of the most popular editors for developers uses the ESC key heavily.
There are no plans for a Windows 11, just as there are no plans for an OS XI. (OS X was renamed macOS recently, which is a separate discussion.) Windows 10 will instead get regular updates; currently Microsoft is releasing about two per year.
I'm guessing that the average selling price of a Surface is around $1,000. (The lower end models are probably the ones that sell in volume and there are frequent sales.) At that price they would have sold over a million Surfaces in the quarter. Q2 is their busiest one because that's when they introduced the most recent upgrade, which means a rush of people buying the new shiny and also a rush of people taking advantage of closeout prices on the previous version.
Going forward, their average selling price will trend upward due to the introduction of the Surface Book and the Surface Studio, and the demise of the inexpensive Surface 3. But Microsoft is now talking about a new version of Windows for ARM with binary emulation for x86 code, with plans to put it on a wide variety of cellular-capable portable devices, and I expect to see a Surface 4 and possibly a Surface Mini as showcases for that; those products would bring the average price back down.
Irrational behavior on the part of the buyers. If they wanted a boat, the tax shouldn't have been a significant deterrent; at worst it might lead them to buy a boat that was 10% less expensive. But human behavior is frequently not rational, and this appears to be a prime example.
If wealthy Americans really are that tax averse, it means serious problems for any attempts to raise taxes on the rich. Or perhaps you just have to make them harder to avoid...
The value of the donation is probably about equal to the value of their typical employee gifts. But they get a tax writeoff on it. So it is a cost saving measure.
The bigger question is what the effect on employee morale is. When you have a tradition of giving people something every year and then stop, people feel hurt. (Taking away a perk has about twice as large a negative effect as the positive effect you got by giving the perk in the first place; there have been studies on the subject. People really don't like having things taken from them.) Giving employees Google products also turns them into users of your products, which means they are more knowledgeable about them and more likely to promote them to friends, so they're giving up that.
Microsoft itself won't be selling the majority of these devices, though I expect we will see a Surface 4 and possibly finally see a Surface Mini. I think the non-removable part is mostly about making it possible to make the devices thinner and less expensive to manufacture by eliminating the SIM slot, with getting to market the plans being a side benefit. It's also possible that Microsoft's real goal here is to use their muscle to get lower prices for cellular data, which would improve sales of their devices and other devices that license Windows.
Offering cellular plans through the Windows Store will be a non-starter unless Microsoft offers the carriers a drastically reduced rate for those sales; the 30% that they get for app sales is a non-starter. It's also going to go nowhere in most of the world unless Microsoft is prepared to partner with a LOT of providers. The Asian markets, in particular, will just stick with standard SIM slots unless that happens.
If companies repatriate those foreign earnings they'll get hit with the full 35% rate on that money. They won't have losses or other tax credits to offset them.
If we lower the corporate tax rate we will have to raise taxes on individuals. That would not be a politically popular move. It's probably the right thing to do anyway because of the problems caused by our misalignment with the tax structure of other developed nations.
Seriously? People who could afford a $100,000 boat were put off by a 10% tax? Perhaps it should have been a 10% tax on the amount over $100,000 so the threshold effect wouldn't be so strong...
A lot of the businesses that bear his name are licencing deals. Not much risk for Trump there. The ones he is directly involved in operating have a pretty bad record, especially the casinos and Trump University.
People pick on Apple mostly because it has a boatload of cash... much more than anybody else does. Other companies tend to invest their money in buyouts or business expansion. Apple already dominates its market niche (computing and mobile devices as luxury items), hasn't found a lot of suitable companies to buy out (compared to its assets), and doesn't choose to expand into other markets.
The piracy argument is a red herring. Good enough copies of movies quickly appear online already. It's true that it would enable somewhat better pirate copies. No amount of streaming software DRM will help because HDCP 2.2 crackers are already available, so the pirates can re-encode from the bits that are sent to your television.
In pure revenue terms the studios have nothing to lose. They don't get any money from those expensive snacks at the movie theater. (Conversely, the theater makes almost nothing from admissions for the first couple of weeks; nearly all the money goes to the studio, and the theater's entire profit comes from those snacks.) And the proposed pricing for home viewing is high enough that they'll do fine there; they'll lose money when people hold big home viewing parties, but they will gain when individuals or couples watch.
The fly in the ointment is channel conflict. (That's the principle that says that it's often a good idea to avoid competing directly with companies that resell your product. But some companies do it successfully; for example, the Apple Store manages to coexist with Apple resellers.) If the studios aggressively promote a home viewing option they will alienate the theater owners, which might retaliate by refusing to show the films in question or at least giving them less favorable placement and less promotion.
If this does happen, theaters are likely to become even more dominated by teens and young adults than they already are. They're the audience that most wants to get out of the house.
Not to mention that MPEG-2 is baked into the ATSC broadcast television standard. OTA reception will continue to use it until when and if ATSC 3.0 is adopted. The ATSC 3.0 standard is still being finalized but it will certainly include more advanced video encoding. The proposed standards include standard H.265 and scalable H.265 (HEVC). The latter is linked to the fact that ATSC 3.0 also provides for sending relatively low bit rate data in a robust form that can handle weak reception, while also sending higher bit rate data that is less robust. In scalable HEVC a lower resolution version of the picture is sent in the low rate stream, while additional data for higher resolutions is sent in the high rate stream. The result is that a mobile viewer or a viewer in a weak signal area might only get 1080p reception while somebody in a strong signal area will get UHD, or for secondary subchannels get SD instead of HD.
Most cable systems distribute the same bits that they receive for OTA channels. The only change is that they demultiplex the subchannels (putting them on separate cable channels) and repackage the picture and sound bits for compatibility with DOCSIS. So they will also be likely to continue to use MPEG-2 for a while at least for those channels. The alternative would be to reencode the OTA channels, but they would have to buy expensive encoders to do that without loss of quality for the viewers. The satellite people don't seem to care; look at the awful quality they offer for local broadcast channels. To be fair, they're up against the rock vs hard place problem of having to carry local channels for a bunch of markets on a single satellite.
Vizio is a US-based company; they design the products here though a lot of the manufacturing is done in China. They are well known in the US (though not as well known as Sony and the like) and have a strong reputation for high performance at a less-high price. TVs are their main product, but they have also made some tablets and laptops. Vizio also sell products in China and other Asian markets, including a line of mobile phones that they don't sell in the US. So far as I know they have no presence in Europe.
Vizio was bought this year by a Chinese company, LeEco, which has its own brand of TVs that are also known for value. They plan to continue to run Vizio as a separate subsidiary, but I wouldn't be surprised if some common design shows up in the two lines of TVs.
Large tablet then. Some people still care about those. It would make a nice display for the Surface Pro 5, which is expected to be released next spring.
The main obstacle to making such a thing isn't Amazon. It's that there isn't a big enough market for large e-ink displays to create a mass market for them. As a result, the displays are very expensive, and the result is that such an e-reader is too expensive to be popular.
Another problem is the lack of color. Many current textbooks use a lot of it.
Finally, there is the competition from tablets. If a large e-reader costs as much as a Microsoft Surface, most people will buy the Surface instead because it does more. People can justify an additional $100 device like a Kindle Paperwhite, but fewer can justify an additional $500 or $1000 device.
My guess is that a large e-reader would have to sell for $250 or less to have a chance of widespread success. Currently it is impossible to hit that price point because the display costs too much. And until a large e-reader or some other product creates significant demand for large e-ink screens, the display will always cost too much.
Alexa DOES connect to your home tech ecosystem. There are Alexa skills for controlling a lot of home automation products. Currently, it is the most capable of the voice assistant products in that regard, though Google intends to catch up.
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Outpaced by a few seconds is essentially parity. But compared to how badly previous generations of AMD CPUs did (losing by multiple minutes) it's a major step forward, especially when AMD is using only about 2/3 the power of the Intel part and will probably come in at a much lower price.
Agilent, not Aligent. Presumably a portmanteau of "agile enterprise". Not the best name the world has ever seen but not the worst either. The main problem I had with it is that it felt wrong for the original core of HP (instrumentation) to have to give up its original name, but I suppose they felt it was important for the big consumer product lines (computers and printers) to keep the brand.
They had a good run though. Longer than any Intel motherboards do these days.
Local laws can't prevent you from putting up an OTA antenna unless you are in a historic district. But if you live in an apartment or condo it's another matter. You can't be prevented from putting an antenna outside your own window but it may not be effective in that location, and the people who control the building are not required to give you access to a roof location where it might work. City dwellers often don't have a clear line of sight path to the broadcast stations in any case even from the roof, and reflections off other buildings create a multipath nightmare, so OTA reception may not work reliably.
Things should get better for urban populations if ATSC 3.0 is ever adopted. It is abandoning 8VSB modulation in favor of OFDM, which is much more resistant to multipath interference. We should have done that in 2000 when Sinclair Broadcasting petitioned the FCC for that change (the cost would have been small at the time because HDTV receivers were not yet widely available) but the FCC rejected it.
If you have a fancy new TV with HDR you may want to look elsewhere. The Fire TV doesn't do HDR. It's also limited to 30Hz at 4K, which doesn't currently matter for Netflix or Amazon Prime but does mean that you can't see a tiny amount of YouTube content in its full 60Hz UHD glory. A Roku Premiere+ or Roku Ultra would be better bets.
If you have a 2015 or earlier UHD TV or a new model without HDR, the Fire TV works very well.
What's the application for 32GB? Software development, and especially multimedia development. Modern development environments take up a lot of memory, and if you're doing multimedia you're likely to also be running image, audio, and/or video editing software at the same time. You might be running one or more virtual machines at test environments. And you may have multiple web browsers open for compatibility testing.
What's the application for a removable SSD? When you fill up the one that came with the computer you can replace it with a larger one, which is now affordable because of the way that the prices of computer components drop over time. (You can also avoid the inflated price that the manufacturer charges for extra storage at the time of purchase, which is undoubtedly one reason that Apple is doing away with removable drives.)
I mentioned the use of the ESC key in another post.
One more that you missed: a high end GPU. The fastest GPU you can get in the MBP is the Radeon Pro 460, which is comparable to the RX 460 desktop card. That pales by comparison with what NVidia offers; you can now get laptops with a GTX 1080. (It operates at a lower speed than its desktop counterpart because of power and thermal limitations, but it still blows Apple's Radeon out of the water.) Apple's GPU is inadequate for virtual reality and for high end games, which leaves out both users and developers of those things.
Yes, the ESC key is gone, except for the version of the 13" MBP with no Touch Bar. It's now a soft key on the Touch Bar instead. That's sub-optimal for many developers, because the user interface of two of the most popular editors for developers uses the ESC key heavily.
There are no plans for a Windows 11, just as there are no plans for an OS XI. (OS X was renamed macOS recently, which is a separate discussion.) Windows 10 will instead get regular updates; currently Microsoft is releasing about two per year.
I'm guessing that the average selling price of a Surface is around $1,000. (The lower end models are probably the ones that sell in volume and there are frequent sales.) At that price they would have sold over a million Surfaces in the quarter. Q2 is their busiest one because that's when they introduced the most recent upgrade, which means a rush of people buying the new shiny and also a rush of people taking advantage of closeout prices on the previous version.
Going forward, their average selling price will trend upward due to the introduction of the Surface Book and the Surface Studio, and the demise of the inexpensive Surface 3. But Microsoft is now talking about a new version of Windows for ARM with binary emulation for x86 code, with plans to put it on a wide variety of cellular-capable portable devices, and I expect to see a Surface 4 and possibly a Surface Mini as showcases for that; those products would bring the average price back down.
Irrational behavior on the part of the buyers. If they wanted a boat, the tax shouldn't have been a significant deterrent; at worst it might lead them to buy a boat that was 10% less expensive. But human behavior is frequently not rational, and this appears to be a prime example.
If wealthy Americans really are that tax averse, it means serious problems for any attempts to raise taxes on the rich. Or perhaps you just have to make them harder to avoid...
The value of the donation is probably about equal to the value of their typical employee gifts. But they get a tax writeoff on it. So it is a cost saving measure.
The bigger question is what the effect on employee morale is. When you have a tradition of giving people something every year and then stop, people feel hurt. (Taking away a perk has about twice as large a negative effect as the positive effect you got by giving the perk in the first place; there have been studies on the subject. People really don't like having things taken from them.) Giving employees Google products also turns them into users of your products, which means they are more knowledgeable about them and more likely to promote them to friends, so they're giving up that.
Microsoft itself won't be selling the majority of these devices, though I expect we will see a Surface 4 and possibly finally see a Surface Mini. I think the non-removable part is mostly about making it possible to make the devices thinner and less expensive to manufacture by eliminating the SIM slot, with getting to market the plans being a side benefit. It's also possible that Microsoft's real goal here is to use their muscle to get lower prices for cellular data, which would improve sales of their devices and other devices that license Windows.
Offering cellular plans through the Windows Store will be a non-starter unless Microsoft offers the carriers a drastically reduced rate for those sales; the 30% that they get for app sales is a non-starter. It's also going to go nowhere in most of the world unless Microsoft is prepared to partner with a LOT of providers. The Asian markets, in particular, will just stick with standard SIM slots unless that happens.
If companies repatriate those foreign earnings they'll get hit with the full 35% rate on that money. They won't have losses or other tax credits to offset them.
If we lower the corporate tax rate we will have to raise taxes on individuals. That would not be a politically popular move. It's probably the right thing to do anyway because of the problems caused by our misalignment with the tax structure of other developed nations.
Seriously? People who could afford a $100,000 boat were put off by a 10% tax? Perhaps it should have been a 10% tax on the amount over $100,000 so the threshold effect wouldn't be so strong...
A lot of the businesses that bear his name are licencing deals. Not much risk for Trump there. The ones he is directly involved in operating have a pretty bad record, especially the casinos and Trump University.
People pick on Apple mostly because it has a boatload of cash... much more than anybody else does. Other companies tend to invest their money in buyouts or business expansion. Apple already dominates its market niche (computing and mobile devices as luxury items), hasn't found a lot of suitable companies to buy out (compared to its assets), and doesn't choose to expand into other markets.
The piracy argument is a red herring. Good enough copies of movies quickly appear online already. It's true that it would enable somewhat better pirate copies. No amount of streaming software DRM will help because HDCP 2.2 crackers are already available, so the pirates can re-encode from the bits that are sent to your television.
In pure revenue terms the studios have nothing to lose. They don't get any money from those expensive snacks at the movie theater. (Conversely, the theater makes almost nothing from admissions for the first couple of weeks; nearly all the money goes to the studio, and the theater's entire profit comes from those snacks.) And the proposed pricing for home viewing is high enough that they'll do fine there; they'll lose money when people hold big home viewing parties, but they will gain when individuals or couples watch.
The fly in the ointment is channel conflict. (That's the principle that says that it's often a good idea to avoid competing directly with companies that resell your product. But some companies do it successfully; for example, the Apple Store manages to coexist with Apple resellers.) If the studios aggressively promote a home viewing option they will alienate the theater owners, which might retaliate by refusing to show the films in question or at least giving them less favorable placement and less promotion.
If this does happen, theaters are likely to become even more dominated by teens and young adults than they already are. They're the audience that most wants to get out of the house.
The current ATSC 3.0 proposal includes H.265. But it's not finalized, so it is possible that AV1 will replace it or be included as an alternative.
I'm not surprised that the commercials don't compress as efficiently as the programs. They tend to use more rapid cuts and point of view changes.
Not to mention that MPEG-2 is baked into the ATSC broadcast television standard. OTA reception will continue to use it until when and if ATSC 3.0 is adopted. The ATSC 3.0 standard is still being finalized but it will certainly include more advanced video encoding. The proposed standards include standard H.265 and scalable H.265 (HEVC). The latter is linked to the fact that ATSC 3.0 also provides for sending relatively low bit rate data in a robust form that can handle weak reception, while also sending higher bit rate data that is less robust. In scalable HEVC a lower resolution version of the picture is sent in the low rate stream, while additional data for higher resolutions is sent in the high rate stream. The result is that a mobile viewer or a viewer in a weak signal area might only get 1080p reception while somebody in a strong signal area will get UHD, or for secondary subchannels get SD instead of HD.
Most cable systems distribute the same bits that they receive for OTA channels. The only change is that they demultiplex the subchannels (putting them on separate cable channels) and repackage the picture and sound bits for compatibility with DOCSIS. So they will also be likely to continue to use MPEG-2 for a while at least for those channels. The alternative would be to reencode the OTA channels, but they would have to buy expensive encoders to do that without loss of quality for the viewers. The satellite people don't seem to care; look at the awful quality they offer for local broadcast channels. To be fair, they're up against the rock vs hard place problem of having to carry local channels for a bunch of markets on a single satellite.
A lot of newer phones have enough CPU power to do H.265 decoding in software. But it would kill battery life so it's not going to happen.
Vizio is a US-based company; they design the products here though a lot of the manufacturing is done in China. They are well known in the US (though not as well known as Sony and the like) and have a strong reputation for high performance at a less-high price. TVs are their main product, but they have also made some tablets and laptops. Vizio also sell products in China and other Asian markets, including a line of mobile phones that they don't sell in the US. So far as I know they have no presence in Europe.
Vizio was bought this year by a Chinese company, LeEco, which has its own brand of TVs that are also known for value. They plan to continue to run Vizio as a separate subsidiary, but I wouldn't be surprised if some common design shows up in the two lines of TVs.
Large tablet then. Some people still care about those. It would make a nice display for the Surface Pro 5, which is expected to be released next spring.
The main obstacle to making such a thing isn't Amazon. It's that there isn't a big enough market for large e-ink displays to create a mass market for them. As a result, the displays are very expensive, and the result is that such an e-reader is too expensive to be popular.
Another problem is the lack of color. Many current textbooks use a lot of it.
Finally, there is the competition from tablets. If a large e-reader costs as much as a Microsoft Surface, most people will buy the Surface instead because it does more. People can justify an additional $100 device like a Kindle Paperwhite, but fewer can justify an additional $500 or $1000 device.
My guess is that a large e-reader would have to sell for $250 or less to have a chance of widespread success. Currently it is impossible to hit that price point because the display costs too much. And until a large e-reader or some other product creates significant demand for large e-ink screens, the display will always cost too much.
Alexa DOES connect to your home tech ecosystem. There are Alexa skills for controlling a lot of home automation products. Currently, it is the most capable of the voice assistant products in that regard, though Google intends to catch up.