Spotify may restrict major album releases to its paid subscribers

No word on which record companies would be a part of the deal.

And so it begins: The Financial Times reports that Spotify is looking to restrict major album releases from some of the major record labels as an incentive to lower its royalty fees.

The ploy is apparently in response to the company’s IPO ambitions—Spotify can’t make money off free listeners, and it needs to be making money to legitimize its place on the stock market. Spotify currently serves 50 million paying subscribers around the world — a 40 percent increase from the year prior.

Of course, Spotify isn’t the only music streaming service to offer this sort of exclusivity to its paying customers. Tidal, for instance, employs a “pay for access” business model, while Soundcloud keeps its bigger artist’s music libraries exclusive to subscribers. There’s no word on whether this deal has gone through yet, but when it does, there should be more information about which of our favorite artists will be affected.

Marine Corps guidelines now ban online sexual harassment

The US Marine Corps has already started to crack down on soldiers sharing nude photos of women soldiers through internet groups, but it now has a better way of tackling this behavior. The military branch has published updated guidelines that explicitly forbid various forms of online sexual harassment, including “indecent viewing, visual recording, or broadcasting.” Marines represent the Corps and their units “at all times,” and that includes when they post on social networks.

It’s far from certain that this will lead to more disciplinary action. Sexual harassment in the military certainly hasn’t been limited to Facebook groups, and curbing the activity may require a broader cultural shift where women infantry are no longer considered novelties. The Corps will also have to prove that it’s willing to enforce these guidelines when there are isolated incidents, not just publicly humiliating scandals.

However, the newer rule set will at least give prosecutors more ammo when pursuing a case. It might also serve as a deterrent if Marines get sufficient education on the policy. And it won’t be surprising if this language spreads to other military branches worried that they may run into similar trouble.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Marines

Amazon can judge your daily outfit choices

Amazon has a new perk exclusively for Prime members. The latest version of the e-commerce titan’s app comes with a feature called “Outfit Compare” under the “Programs and Features” section, where you’d usually find all its newest offerings. Since its purpose is to compare two different OOTDs, you’d have to upload photos of yourself wearing the outfits. Amazon says it hired real stylists with experience in retail and the fashion industry to judge your clothes based on their fit, how the colors complement you and what’s on trend. But as TechCrunch said, some part of the process could be automated, since you can get results in as little as a minute.

The company knows that the fact that you have to upload photos could deter you from using the feature, especially if you have privacy concerns. It says only Amazon staff will be able to see them, and when you delete the images from the in-app experience, it will also remove the copies associated with your account. Unfortunately, the only way to be sure nobody else can access your pictures through the app is to never use the feature.

If you don’t mind uploading personal photos, though, Amazon suggests taking pics with the same pose and background, though it will also accept full-body mirror selfies. You can simply upload them from your camera roll and wait for feedback. This isn’t the retail giant’s first fashion-oriented endeavor: it launched its own fashion brands last year and even a fashion and makeup TV show called Style Code Live.

[Image credit: TechCrunch]

Source: TechCrunch

Physicists declassified thousands of nuclear test films, and they’re on YouTube

Why it matters to you

Nuclear test footage has been classified for decades, but now, some of it has been digitized, reanalyzed, and published on YouTube.

Poring over declassified materials may not generally sound like a fun weekend plan, but when those materials are comprised of Cold War nuclear test films, you may want to clear your schedule. So whether you’re a History Channel geek or a sucker for action movies, you may just have a new plan for your Saturday evening.

Earlier this week, a team of physicists and film archivists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California published the results of a recent project — the digitization of thousands of films that document some of the 210 atmospheric nuclear tests carried out by the United States between 1945 and 1962.

As the team, led by Greg Spriggs, began to take the (nearly decomposing) films into the modern era, they realized that some of the nuclear yield data based on the images they saw was simply incorrect. And as such, Spriggs and his team began to not only preserve the footage, but also reanalyze its contents using 21st century techniques.

More: Watch this terrifying robotic LaserSnake destroy a nuclear power cell

While these tests are many decades old, they still hold valuable information for scientists, particularly because atmospheric nuclear tests (like those seen in these old films) have been banned since 1963.

“One of the payoffs of this project is that we’re now getting very consistent answers,” Spriggs told NPR. “We’ve also discovered new things about these detonations that have never been seen before. New correlations are now being used by the nuclear forensics community, for example.”

And there are more discoveries yet to be made. While 10,000 or so films are thought to have been made during the 17-year testing period, Spriggs and his team have only found about 6,500 of them. And of these, only a few have been reanalyzed, declassified, and posted to YouTube, where you can enjoy them at your leisure.

Spriggs hopes that he’ll be able to continue his project, and in some ways, use the footage as a warning against using such weaponry in years to come.

“It’s just unbelievable how much energy’s released,” he said. “We hope that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again. I think that if we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons [is] and how much devastation they can wreak, then maybe people will be reluctant to use them.”

The 5 best cases to keep your Galaxy A5 (2017) looking good

If you love the design of Samsung’s Galaxy phones but can’t stomach the price, then the budget-based A range might be the ideal solution for you. The Galaxy A5 is a decent mid-range phone with a lovely 5.2-inch Super AMOLED screen, good battery life, and plenty of power under the hood. It’s also water-resistant, though, you’re still going to need to protect the glass-and-aluminum body. Fortunately, each of the cases below should do the trick — assuming you have the 2017 A5.

More: Samsung Galaxy A7, A5, and A3 (2017) news

Spigen Liquid Air Case ($13)

This flexible TPU case is easy to fit and feels comfortable in the hand. There’s a texture on the back to add some grip, chunky button covers that are easy to find, and accurate cut-outs for your phone’s ports and camera. The case extends beyond the screen around the front, helping protect it if it should land face down. This isn’t a rugged case, but it should be able to handle the occasional bump and short drop.

Buy one now from:

Amazon

Rearth Ringke Fusion Case ($12)

You probably chose the A5 for its good looks, so why hide them? This Ringke case allows you to add a layer of protection without completely covering your phone’s stylish aesthetic. It combines a transparent back panel with a shock-absorbing TPU bumper. The corners are also reinforced for decent drop protection, and there’s a protective bezel around the screen, slim button covers, and accurate openings for all your phone’s functions. You can get a clear version, as well as a rose gold or smoke black model.

Buy one now from:

Amazon

Samsung Clear View Cover ($35)

We’re big fans of the official Clear View Cover from Samsung, but we wish it wasn’t so expensive. The transparent shell hugs your A5, and there’s a folio-style cover to protect the screen. When not in use, the cover works as mirror, but when a call or notification comes in, you can see it through the cover, so there’s no need to open it. In fact, you can even use the touchscreen through the cover. It’s a slim case and, as you’d expect, all buttons and features are accessible, thanks to a bevy of accurate cut-outs.

Buy one now from:

Amazon Mobile Fun

Olixar Leather-Style Wallet Case ($13)

This practical case sports looks like leather, though it’s actually plastic. There’s a basic shell inside to hold your A5 in place, as well as accurate openings for easy access to your phone’s controls, camera, and ports. The cover wraps around the front and back and opens like a book. Inside, there are two slots for stowing your credit cards and ID. It also acts as a stand when folded back, allowing you to prop up the A5 in landscape mode. This A5 case comes in either a black or brown configuration.

Buy one now from:

Mobile Fun

Nillkin Ultra Slim Case ($10)

Here’s a minimalist case for the A5 that should serve you well if you’re sick of smudges and looking for an enhanced grip. The svelte shell snaps onto the A5, but it just covers the back and part of the sides. There are also generous openings for your smartphone’s ports, buttons, and other functions. The back features a dimpled texture that makes it easier to grip your phone, but we wouldn’t expect it to provide much in the way of drop protection. This case comes in gold or black, and is best combined with a screen protector.

Buy one now from:

Amazon

Dell XPS 15 9560 review

Research Center:
Dell XPS 15 9560

The Dell XPS 15 is the larger version of the Dell XPS 13, one of our favorite laptops of the last two years. Set them side-by-side, and you can see that Dell didn’t want to mess with a good thing. The XPS 15 builds on the success of the XPS 13, by offering a slightly larger display in a very similar chassis, but can it surpass its smaller sibling?

Premium is an understatement

Shrouded in a thin plastic sleeve, the XPS 15 rests inside its soft black box, waiting. From the moment you lift the lid off of that box, it’s clear that this laptop is different. The chassis is clad in matte burnished aluminum, inset with a glossy black Dell logo. The seams are soft-touch plastic, and the interior is lined with carbon fiber.

To be clear, that’s real, actual carbon fiber, not just a textured sticker underneath some transparent plastic. You’ll find none of that nonsense here, as the Dell XPS 15 doesn’t compromise on build quality. Every corner, every facet of this laptop feels high quality and robust. From the materials to the layout, there’s not much to complain about. The XPS 15 isn’t just well-designed. It’s well-engineered.

Just enough connectivity

The XPS 15 features an adequate, if not overwhelming, number of ports with an appreciable amount of variety. There are two USB ports, one on either side, a USB Type-C port, an SD card slot, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and an HDMI port. It provides just enough connectivity, even when you’re using a lot of accessories — like an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

There is, however, a notable absence, because the XPS 15’s svelte chassis — the venerable Ethernet port is nowhere to be found. So instead, you’ll have to do with investing in an Ethernet to USB or USB Type-C adapter, if you need faster-than-Wi-Fi internet speeds.

Compared to the XPS 13, which features the same number of ports, but minus the HDMI port, it’s an appreciated step up. You get everything the 13 offers, plus a little extra, which is a good thing if you happen to use external monitors on a regular basis.

Alternatively, you could use the included Thunderbolt 3.1/USB Type-C port to handle video connections if you have a compatible monitor, or an adapter handy.

Room to stretch out

Laptop keyboards are seldom as comfortable as a full-sized desktop keyboard. Even if you’re not a fan of clickety-clackety mechanical keyboards, the extra space feels luxuriant after using a laptop keyboard for a while. The XPS 15 tries to mitigate that cramped feeling by offering a bit more lateral space than its 13-inch sibling, and its appreciated.

Typing on the XPS 15, even for long periods of time, never feels tiresome. The keys have decent travel for a laptop, offering just enough depth without feeling mushy.

The XPS 15 isn’t just well-designed, it’s well-engineered.

The keyboard features a white LED backlight as standard equipment. The light leaks substantially from under the keys, and it’s not very attractive. It provides utility in the dark — when you need to search for your Function keys — but that’s about it. The light leakage tends to spoil the otherwise high-quality vibe the XPS 15 conveys.

The trackpad is nice and matte, with just enough texture to differentiate it from the soft-touch material along the interior of the laptop. It clicks nicely, and responds well to basic taps and multi-touch gestures.

Compared to the trackpads on similar laptops up and down the Dell lineup, the XPS 15 delivers an unparalleled level of accuracy and control. The Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming, for instance, opts for a cheaper trackpad and the quality gap is stark. On the business-class Dell Latitude, the trackpad feels nice, but it’s not as pleasant to use as the XPS 15 — multi-touch gestures just aren’t as quick and responsive.

The closest comparison is the MacBook Pro 13. Apple has long been the king of trackpad quality, but the Dell XPS 15 comes very close. Its trackpad is smooth, accurate, and it detects multi-touch gestures instantly. Plus, the XPS 15 still has a mechanical click, which might be a bonus for users put off by the MacBook’s simulated click using Apple’s “taptic engine.”

A crisp and nearly perfect display

Our review model of the XPS 15 features a 4K touch screen display, and at first it seemed like overkill for a laptop — particularly a laptop that isn’t primarily for gaming. But once you feast your eyes on its inky blacks and vivid, lively colors, it’s very hard to go back to a run-of-the-mill 1080p display. It certainly helps that the XPS 15 features not only tack-sharp picture quality, but outstanding color accuracy and fidelity.

The XPS 15’s display is an embarrassment of riches, so let’s start with the basics: resolution. The 4K display panel Dell chose for this model is nothing short of superb. That lavish screen real estate lends itself well to a 15-inch display, as you have enough room for two full-sized windows side-by-side, and the immense resolution ensures that text is silky-smooth and inky.

Moving on to the numbers, the XPS 15 doesn’t just look great, it objectively superior to most laptop displays.

Starting with the sRGB spectrum, you can see that a good display will usually land in the 90-99 percent range. With the AdobeRGB spectrum, good displays can land anywhere from 76-80 percent, meaning they’re still incapable of rendering about 20 percent of the colors in that spectrum. The XPS 15 though, hits 99 percent, meaning it’s capable of reproducing nearly every color in the AdobeRGB spectrum without fail.

Not only that, it’s capable of reproducing those colors very accurately. The Dell XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Pro 15, both of which have fantastic displays, land on either side of the XPS 15 when it comes to color accuracy. The XPS 13 has an average color error of 2.65, which is a little too high, meaning colors will look a bit off — they’ll be noticeably different on the XPS 13’s display than they would be in real life.

On the other hand, the MacBook Pro 15 manages an average color error of .61, meaning its colors are nearly perfect — good enough for professional-grade color-sensitive work like photo and video editing. The XPS 15 comes in right between them with an average color error of 1.23, meaning its colors are very close to perfect.

But the sound? Flat and lifeless

Fire up Spotify or your favorite streaming app on a laptop, and you should expect your music to sound good. The same goes for games, movies, YouTube videos, and anything else you might watch on your laptop. Laptop speakers have a bad reputation for producing flat, lifeless audio, and the XPS 15 does nothing to buck that trend

The speakers on the XPS 15 aren’t the worst you’re ever likely to use on a laptop, but they crush otherwise dynamic sound by a significant degree. Everything sounds hollow, though the speakers do at least steer away from a muddy, unclear quality.

The XPS 15’s built-in speakers are fine for system alerts and the occasional YouTube video, but for anything else you’ll probably want to invest in a pair of decent headphones.

Quick and capable

Another distinct advantage the XPS 15 has over competitors is its 7th-generation Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, clocked at 2.8GHz. It’s an upgrade over last year’s 6th-generation model, and it performs a bit better in everyday use but it’s not a massive leap forward.

You can see those performance gains in the comparison to the Asus ROG Strix, which features the 6th-generation version of the XPS 15’s processor, the Intel Core i7-7600HQ. The Strix scores 4,137 on single core performance, and 12,314 on multi-core performance, while the XPS 15 scores 4,594, and 13,814 respectively.

These scores are instructive for a couple reasons. First, you can see that the 7th-generation Intel processors are relatively quick on their feet. Secondly, the performance you gain moving from 6th-generation chips to 7th-generation chips isn’t a large as it has been in the past, so investing in a 7th-generation chip might not be necessary depending on your current needs.

Overall, the XPS 15’s quad-core processor is fast and capable, edging out 6th-generation i7 chips, and blowing past 6th-generation i5 chips with ease.

A sprightly hard drive

Our review unit arrived with a 512GB solid state drive connected over PCI Express. That is what we’d expect to see in a high-end laptop, and it performed admirably.

In our testing the drive beat out competitors in both read and write speeds. Among roughly similar laptops, only two we’ve tested beat the XPS 15. One is the Apple MacBook Pro, which is quite a bit more expensive, and can’t run the same benchmark (as it uses MacOS). The other is Dell’s Precision 5520, which is essentially a workstation version of the XPS 15 – and also a lot more expensive.

Even gaming is pretty alright

Just looking at the XPS 15, you’d never guess that it was a capable laptop for gaming. Black plastic, carbon fiber, aluminum, and a single-colored keyboard backlight? Without any red accents or fierce brand-names like Strix, Predator, or Razer, the humble XPS flies under the radar — and that’s a good thing. By including a solid mid-range GPU in the otherwise business-class XPS 15, Dell has created something of a hybrid, an accidental gaming laptop that eschews every “gamer laptop” design trend.

The GeForce GTX 1050 purring away under the XPS 15’s hood provides enough headroom to comfortably accommodate recent games at medium-high settings if you scale your resolution down to 1080p. Games still look great on this display, but the XPS 15 just can’t reliably handle 4K gaming.

In 3DMark, the XPS 15 outperforms its nearest competitors and performs nearly as well as entry-level gaming laptops like the Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming and Asus ROG Strix GL553VD.

In individual games, the XPS 15 fared well, but you should expect to tweak your settings to get the most out of the GTX 1050. It’s not the fastest graphics card on the market and it shows.

In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the XPS 15 managed an average of 25 frames per second at high detail settings and 1080p resolution, while the Inspiron managed 24, and the Strix managed 28. They’re all within the same margin, but for comparison, the Acer Predator 15, a laptop featuring the GTX 1060 graphics card, hit 58 FPS on high detail settings in 1080p.

The GTX 1050 is a capable graphics card, but it’s not quite up to the task when it comes to high-detail settings on very demanding games. You can increase your performance to tolerable levels by turning down shadows, or anti-aliasing though.

Despite its slim profile, the internal fans do a very good job of keeping the XPS 15 cool even while running demanding games for long periods of time. It’s surprising that the XPS 15 is an okay gaming laptop, since it’s not actually designed to be one.

Light, and long-lived

By filing the bezels to the bare minimums, the XPS 15 manages to maintain a very small profile despite its large overall screen size. In fact it’s smaller, though not thinner, than a MacBook Pro 15. Weighing in at just four pounds, you’ll barely even notice carrying this thing around.

Putting it in a small bag designed for 13-inch laptops, the XPS 15 still leaves you with enough room to throw in a water bottle, charger, and even another — small — laptop. It’s a refreshing change.

Battery life is good, but it might not get you through a full workday, and that’s due to the 4K display. Powering all those pixels takes a toll, and we were hard pressed to get more than five hours out of the XPS 15 in everyday mixed use. That said, most of that daily use was performed in a bright office, with the brightness turned way, way up.

On a more sensible power plan, with brightness calibrated to around 100 lux — which is a little under 50 percent brightness — battery life improved significantly. Using browser macro loop, which essentially loads up the same webpage over and over, the XPS 15 managed up to six hours of life.

Dell XPS 15 9560 Compared To

Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (2017)

Asus Zenbook 3 UX390UA

Lenovo ThinkPad X260

Dell Precision 15 3510

Lenovo Ideapad 710S

HP Spectre

Dell Latitude 12

LG Gram 15 Z960

Samsung Notebook 9 Pro…

Asus Zenbook UX501VW-DS71T

Samsung ATIV Book 9 (2014)

Dell XPS 15 (2012)

Toshiba Satellite P755

HP Pavilion g6

Lenovo IdeaPad U550

Looking at its nearest competitors, you can see that the XPS 15 provides solid, if not stellar, battery life in most use cases. The video loop provided the best results, with the XPS 15 looping the same video for seven and a half hours before running out of juice. Still, it’s a bit short of what we managed to get out of the Lenovo Yoga 910, and the HP Spectre x360 15-inch, both of which managed upwards of 10 hours before falling flat.

Uninvited guests

Dell is usually good about keeping bloatware to a minimum, at least on its premium laptops. You’ll likely find a few Dell-branded utilities and registration tools on brand-new laptops, but not much else.

The XPS 15’s only uninvited guest is a trial version of McAfee Antivirus, which nags incessantly, but it’s easily removed with a simple uninstall.

Warranty information

The Dell XPS 15 is protected by a one-year limited hardware warranty, covering manufacturer defects and shipping costs — but the warranty specifies that you’ll need to provide your own box if anything goes wrong.

Our Take

The XPS 15 is a phenomenal laptop. It does have a few flaws, as the speakers aren’t great, and the battery life could be better, but overall the XPS 15 stands head-and-shoulders above the competition in nearly every way. It’s easily one of the best 15-inch Windows laptops you can buy.

Is there a better alternative?

Yes and no. There are better alternatives if you don’t really need a discrete graphics card and 4K display, two factors which contribute substantially to the XPS 15’s price tag. In which case you might be better off saving yourself some cash and investing in one of the lower-end 1080p models, or even the XPS 13.

The DT Accessory Pack

SteelSeries Arctis 5 gaming headset

$94

CableCreation USB 3.1 Ethernet port adapter

$20

Razer Orochi Bluetooth mouse

$69

There are other laptops which outperform the XPS 15 in more specialized use-cases. For instance, the Dell Precision 5520 is a much better choice for AutoCAD or other high-intensity software suites on account of its Intel Xeon processor and Nvidia Quadro GPU. But it will run you about $3,700.

Alternatively, the Acer Predator 15 G9-593 would be a better choice for gaming, since it comes standard with an Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU, which runs circles around the XPS 15’s GTX 1050. It costs about the same as the XPS 15.

Unfortunately, though, specialized gaming or business notebooks have their own unique drawbacks. Gaming performance can kill portability in more ways than one, and the high-end components in professional laptops drive up the price considerably. With the XPS 15 you don’t have to worry about that, as it’s well-balanced without much compromise.

How long will it last?

Longer than it needs to. Seriously, this chassis is rock-solid, and it will very likely outlast its internal components. In three or four years when your CPU is showing its age, a well-tended XPS 15 will likely be just as good-looking as it was the day you bought it. This is the closest any PC manufacturer has come to Apple’s lofty build standards.

Should you buy it?

Yes. This is a solid, reliable, and attractive laptop with a reasonable price, and few drawbacks. It can handle pretty much anything you throw at it, and look good doing it.

Superyacht mothership concept breeds modular daughter apartments

Why it matters to you

With modular daughter vessels, your next superyacht isn’t limited to one big boat.

Modern construction materials and techniques have enabled the existence of superyacht designer Pastrovich Studios‘ village concept. Why not build a superyacht with multiple deployable modules that can serve as private apartments and special purpose spaces?

Genoese Stefano Pastrovich, the head of Monaco-based Pastrovich Studios, has a clear vision of the final X R-Evolution project, according to Haute Living.

“Lay anchor in the Virgin Islands and deploy your apartments anywhere you desire,” suggested Pastrovich. “Be waited on hand and foot by the crew living aboard the mother-ship or go it alone in your own isolated beach fronted property.”

More: The biggest, baddest, most extravagant superyachts ever conceived

The “daughter vessels” can take other forms than apartments. “Imagine that instead of apartments,” says Pastrovich, “Each daughter vessel is a different luxury object; a swimming pool, a garden, even an artificial beach complete with its own palm trees.”

The X R-Evolution concept uses honeycomb construction for maximum strength with the minimum material. The hull is carbon fiber and the floating decks are composed of titanium. A self-stabilizing hexapod with six hydraulic cylinders keeps the upper deck level in rough seas, while gyroscopes minimize roll for the rest of the superyacht.

The concept example is a 77-meter (253 feet) superyacht. Hydraulic lifts would stack modular units on the aft deck while in transit. Once the destination is reached, the units are placed in the water in desired locations. Tenders and pleasure craft are stored midships during long passages but are tethered alongside for use by passengers and crew.

Owners who wish to build various attached or standalone decks, pathways, and boat slip configurations can use portable modular trapezoid sections for that purpose. The simplest application would be a walkway to a beach, but possibilities abound, limited only by the number of sections you want to haul around with you.

Patrovich has been working on the various modular components in the X R-Evolution concept for more than a decade. The big idea is providing superyacht owners with flexibility after their (generally) huge yachts are finished. They’ll always have choices to arrange and rearrange spaces and modules. Plus, once the superyacht reaches its final destination for a given journey, the owners and some lucky guests can choose to remain on the main vessel with the crew or gain more privacy with a modular apartment.

In 2017, what do benchmark numbers even mean??

Numbers can mean a lot of things, but not all the things.

Recently we had a look at some benchmark numbers for the Galaxy S8. Or at least we assume they are for the Galaxy S8 since it’s not really here just yet. As expected, just by existing these numbers got plenty of people talking about them.

Some conversation about benchmarks is just idle chatter. “Oh, cool! The Snapdragon calculates the “stuff” in a benchmark application about as well as the Exynos” was the majority of the conversation. People talking about them because it’s something to talk about while we wait for the Galaxy S8. Tomorrow, another factoid about the Galaxy S8 will conveniently “leak” and we’ll talk about the new thing instead.

But some folks get serious about benchmark numbers and consider them an important part of a buying decision. I pulled a dumbass stunt and tweeted some raw numbers for the Galaxy S8 processors compared to the A10 in an iPhone 7 Plus with zero context. I do stupid stuff like that every now and then because I forget how seriously some folks take all this stuff. As a punishment to myself, I’m going to spend a Saturday afternoon talking about benchmarks and iPhones.

For everyone obsessing over which CPU is better for the Galaxy S8. pic.twitter.com/28TTXdIDhW

— Jerry Hildenbrand (@gbhil) March 17, 2017

Benchmarks on mobile phones aren’t really benchmarking any hardware, at least not the way we think they are. They don’t have access to the hardware itself because they are using the operating system’s application layer. They have a laundry list of things they have the phone do through the APIs exposed by the operating system, then they calculate how well it did them. There is an intermediary layer through the “brains” behind the operating system that controls the hardware directly. So a benchmark app is benchmarking the hardware through some software. You might have heard iOS people talking about Metal or Android people talking about an NDK. This is the software used to build benchmark apps so they can best use the hardware.

If you buy a phone because you like to run benchmarks, you should probably buy an iPhone.

Apple’s intermediary layer is better. Let’s throw that out there right where we all can see it. Apple builds its own processor and its own software so that they work really well together. Google has to build software that can be adapted to work with anything. It’s done an amazing job and the software that powers an Android phone is a beautiful thing that’s incredibly complicated. Something like a benchmarking app using Apple’s interface to the hardware automatically has an advantage over Android, no matter who built it, because the interface itself is more streamlined and “faster” with iOS.

You’re benchmarking the phone as a whole, not just the processor. When it comes to crunching numbers on each CPU core the iPhone 7 Plus does it a lot better.

Let’s look at those cores in Apple’s A10 processor. That thing is undeniably the best consumer ARM chip ever designed when it comes to raw performance per core. That’s because it was designed to do just that. We’ve talked about ARM architecture before, and the A10 is a great example of how you can scale ARM to do just about anything you want. So are the Qualcomm 835 and the Exynos 8895, they just were designed with different criteria in mind.

We compare them because they all are inside a phone, but Apple is thirsty to build one ARM processor that can power an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook. Qualcomm and Samsung build processors to sell to other companies for small mobile devices. They aren’t spending money and time to squeeze more from a processor that no other company wants to buy for their phone because it’s too expensive.

When you take a tool designed to only do certain things in a certain order and see how “fast” they can be done, the A10 will always win. It should always win, and we should want it to always win. A CPU designed for a 13-inch MacBook needs to perform single core calculations faster than an Exynos 8895. The A10 isn’t that CPU, but it is a step in that direction. And Apple is a tech company that we should want to do really cool things to drive tech forward just like we want Samsung or Google or Microsoft to do.

Qualcomm or Samsung could build an ARM processor that is as powerful as the A10, but they have no reason to do it.

My little snip of a benchmark scoreboard that had no context was intended to show that these numbers have little bearing on how great something like a phone is to use. The user experience has little to do with the hardware because the hardware has been good enough for a while now. The innards of a Galaxy S5 or Nexus 7 or Note 4 are more than enough to do the things we expect a phone to do as long as the software is up to snuff. You don’t have to take my word on that, just stumble over to XDA where people who don’t want or can’t afford to buy something newer have built custom software for each.

I’m convinced even mobile VR would be fine if companies cared enough to support Vulkan correctly on their older processors. We’ll never know because the companies involved exist to make new things and sell them to us.

What we really see from these benchmarks

What we can take away from these benchmark scores is that the way a CPU core calculates things and works with GPU cores isn’t broken. Numbers can be crunched a little faster with newer hardware. The way the CPU cores crunch numbers hasn’t been the bottleneck for a long time, so these small differences and increases won’t be noticed when you’re not running a benchmark application. Newer hardware might be better than last years, and one processor might be better than another, but not in any way that benefits you while you are using it.

The Galaxy S8 will have a new operating system that should provide a better experience than last year’s Galaxy S7 did. Many of us here will consider it a better experience than Apple offers with the iPhone 7, while many will feel the opposite. None of this is because of a benchmark score.

Tesla kills its relatively affordable 60kWh Model S options

After April 16th, 2017, people will no longer be able to buy the most affordable Tesla cars available today. The automaker has decided to stop offering the Model S 60 and 60D options to “simplify the ordering process,” according to a newsletter it sent to subscribers. Tesla launched the cars last year as a way to reintroduce the cheaper 60kWh battery option. The company first offered 60kWh battery from 2012 to 2015, before the Model S 70D took its place.

While the cars technically have shorter battery life and range than the standard option, they’re actually equipped with 75kWh battery packs. They’re merely software-locked to 60kWh, and customers can pay an additional fee to unlock the remaining 15kWh. Tesla says most people ended up paying for the software unlock, so it sees no reason to continue selling the 60kWh versions of the vehicle. While the $67,000-plus cars are going away, the company will have an even cheaper offering in the future. Tesla’s upcoming Model 3 cars will set you back $35,000 when they start shipping in 2018.

Via: Electrek

Source: Tesla