Microsoft’s Surface Laptops are bad for its partners, but good for you

Microsoft’s release of the first Surface Pro in 2013 raised more than a few eyebrows.

The company had never entered the hardware space before and PC builders, already in the middle of a downturn, didn’t need competition.

At the time, most manufacturers responded to Surface dismissively. Lenovo’s CEO, Yang Yuanqing, told PC World “…I don’t believe they can provide the best hardware in the world. Lenovo can.” Todd Bradley, then head of HP’s PC division, was harsher still, and told Citeworld “I’d hardly call the Surface competition…it tends to be slow and a little kludgey as you use it.”

It was easy to be skeptical at the time, and I was no exception. I didn’t like the early Surface devices, and felt Microsoft didn’t deliver a product that was useful to most people. That remained true even while my opinion of newer Surface devices improved with each generation. Surface was a luxury brand, targeted at the most hardcore.

Now, with the introduction of the Surface laptop, that’s changed.

More than a blueprint

Predictably, Microsoft has never claimed it seeks competition with the manufacturers that build Windows PCs. Even if it were true, such an admission wouldn’t win the company much favor. Instead, the company carefully managed its message, reassuring the world that its hardware partners wouldn’t be shut out, and that the Surface team wouldn’t get access to special or early builds of Windows. Surface was portrayed as a blueprint for what Microsoft thought tomorrow’s PC should look like.

That was an easy line to believe when Microsoft only built the Surface and Surface Pro. Even the Book and Studio did little to disrupt. Except for the now discontinued Surface, which had its own troubles, all company’s devices were too expensive for most people to consider, and their design is at the leading edge of PC technology. They weren’t the kind of PC an average home user wants.

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop changes the equation. Starting at $1,000, and featuring a 13.5-inch touchscreen, it’s the very model of a high-end laptop. It competes directly against the Dell XPS 13, the HP Spectre 13 x360, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and other flagships. It’s still more expensive than the laptops most people buy, but it’s no more unobtainable than the laptops just mentioned.

In a way, it does remain a blueprint. The Surface Laptop makes several interesting design choices that represent where tomorrow’s devices could head. It has a fabric interior, a solid-state drive embedded on the motherboard, and pairs respectable key travel with a robust battery. Yet it’s not priced or positioned as a concept. It’s a device that absolutely anyone seeking a luxury PC could buy and use everyday without complaint.

The competition is real

The Surface Laptop makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. It helps bring the Surface experience to a wider variety of users, at a price point that’s more obtainable (yes, I know the entry-level Surface Pro 4 is $749 – but it’s out of date, and makes a lot of sacrifices to get there). A laptop gives Microsoft a platform to show off the many Windows 10 features that aren’t related to touch, and puts the company’s hardware in front of a new audience.

Surface was a luxury brand, targeted at the most hardcore. Now, that’s changed.

I doubt this move is made with any malice towards Microsoft’s partners. Nadella and Panay aren’t secretly plotting to take down PC builders. It’s just business – and business is ruthless. Whatever Microsoft’s intent, a successful Surface Laptop will absolutely be a threat to the bottom line of the company’s hardware partners. In fact, it’ll go toe-to-toe with the high-profit luxury devices Dell, Lenovo, and HP depend on to make money.

What’s bad news for Microsoft’s hardware partners is likely good news for Windows’ fans. The company wants to show its vision of Windows 10, and has a unified hardware and software plan for that vision. Ideally, it will result in a class of Windows device that’s more attractive, faster, and easier to use than any that have come before. Surface devices, from the Studio to the Laptop, are equipped to make the most of everything Windows 10 offers.

That’s not to say the plan will go, well, as planned — but the intent is clear. PC builders better watch their back. Microsoft wants to create an awesome experience for it users. If that means controlling both hardware and software, as Apple always has, so be it.

These USB-C to Micro-USB adapters are great for your legacy devices

Transitioning between standards can be tough, but you can make it easier on yourself.

It was just this time last year that the revolution of moving to USB-C was getting into full swing, and what a difference a year makes. Now just about every new phone you can buy (well, except a pretty notable one) has a USB-C port, and most new laptops have USB-C ports for charging and data.

But of course we don’t all refresh every device we own every year — there are still plenty of phones, tablets, and most importantly accessories we all own with Micro-USB ports. All the while, every new device we get comes with a USB-C cable in the box.

Instead of buying new Micro-USB cables to carry around for those old devices like my Bose QC35 headphones or Anker PowerCore battery, I picked up a pair of awesome USB-C to Micro-USB adapters. Nope, these aren’t the super-popular adapters that go in the other direction — these little bits of plastic and metal let you use your new USB-C cables with old Micro-USB devices!

See at Amazon

Micro-USB is still going to be around for a while — make the transition simpler.

The adapters that I’ve been using are from TechMatte, and are just $8 for a pair. Yes it feels a little dumb to be buying new things to help me continue using old technology, but try as I might to have everything in my life be USB-C it just isn’t possible right now. By spending a few bucks on these adapters, I can keep using my old Micro-USB devices without having to keep a whole Micro-USB cable around. The adapters also work for data transfers to a computer, which isn’t something I necessarily expected to work.

Now I’ve wrapped up and stored my Micro-USB cables, swapping everything out to USB-C to use a majority of the time while I have these adapters around for the edge cases when I have to power up something old. It isn’t ideal, but it’s far better than the alternative — and it only cost me $8.

Take the Developer Economics Q3 ’17 survey and find out who you would be in a sci-fi developer universe!

The most global developer survey, providing the dev community with knowledge, insights and fun!

We are excited to announce that the Developer Economics Q3 2017 survey, run by our friends at VisionMobile, has just been launched! This is the 13th developer survey, focusing on tools, training and career development. Every year more than 40,000 developers around the world participate in this survey, so this is a chance to be part of something big and make your own contribution to the developer community.

The survey features questions on topics like development resources and where to find them, tutorials and courses, distribution channels, developer tools and SDKs, as well as languages, platforms, app categories, new technologies, and revenue models. What’s great about this survey is that it is 100% relevant since it has been made by developers. Plus you will get to learn about new tools – and it only takes 15 minutes!

The Developer Economics survey is always designed to offer an extra fun factor. So this time, while taking it, your answers will be gradually forming a profile – showing you what kind of character you’d be in a sci-fi developer universe. When you finish, you’ll get to read your full profile. What’s your character going to be? A cyborg trooper, a technomancer, a smuggler?

Participants can win one of the many prizes available including a Google Pixel, a Dell Venue 8 tablet, and more!

Last but not least, VisionMobile will show you how your responses compare to other developers’ in your country, so you’ll get a sense of how you compare to other devs. You’ll also be the first to receive the Developer Economics Q3 2017 report (due August 2017) based on key survey findings.

Take the Developer Economics survey!

Honor 6X is getting an interface makeover with its Nougat update

The latest software rollout includes all the features of Android 7.0 Nougat, as well as the revamped EMUI 5.0.

Just because you didn’t pay a ton for your smartphone doesn’t mean it shouldn’t run the latest software. Honor has announced its now pushing out the update to Android Nougat and EMUI 5.0 to the Honor 6X this month.

EMUI 5.0 for the Honor 6X was in the process of being beta tested for the last two months. You can expect to see the update hit your phone between now and late-May.

Here’s some of what you can expect from the update, per an email from Honor:

Simpler user interface: a brand new user interface design with a blue and white color scheme inspired by the Aegean Sea; a simplified interface system with an easy three-step-operation for over 90% of the time

Stronger functionality: smoother system run enables quicker browsing from massive pictures to web pages and search queries

A more secure system: strengthened security over user privacy, mobile payment and communication, and APP usage

The Honor 6X’s EMUI 5.0 also offers a remodeled task manager, the ability to use two user account profiles within an application, and an app drawer, which EMUI 4 users have been clamoring about for quite some time. The device will also have many of the same features of the latest version of Android, including multi-window support, direct reply for notifications, and under-the-hood battery saving features.

Facebook’s revamped Marketplace goes after Craigslist again

Last year Facebook relaunched its online classifieds, Marketplace, as a way to take on Craigslist. Now the social network is giving the system a makeover, TechCrunch noticed. There are dedicated sections for categories of for-sale items including tools, baby-and-kids items and even mobile phones. Oh, and there’s one each for garage sales and housing — two of Craiglist’s most popular categories.

From the looks of it, Marketplace’s biggest tweaks make it easier to post photos of your own salable items and sift through what’s available to buy near you. Apparently, diving into individual categories now takes one tap instead of two, for example. There’s a big emphasis on photos, unsurprisingly, something that Craigslist still doesn’t have. If you have the Facebook app, you should be able to see the new changes.

Sadly, Marketplace lacks things that Craigslist has too. Like an archaic simple design in addition to Missed Connections or Personals sections — you know, for those moments when you’re bored at work and need a laugh. Same goes for when you really want to reconnect with someone whose “beautiful crystal eyes fixated on the invisible vibrations” at an LCD Soundsystem concert.

Source: TechCrunch

WSJ: Facebook rejects female-authored code more often than male

Facebook has been accused of issues with bias before, but that was about suppressing conservative political views. Today’s allegations run into sexism territory. But rather than being something surface-level seen explicitly by its users, the Wall Street Journal reports that back-end code written by female engineers is rejected more often than work by males by 35 percent.

Female engineers also apparently have to wait 3.9 percent longer for submitted code to be approved and their work saw 8.2 percent more comments and questions from superiors. An engineer at The Social Network compiled five years of approval logs showing the data, which was then presented to CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an employee-only town hall meeting. Zuckerberg reportedly responded that gender bias was “an issue.”

A spokeswoman said the reason for the gendered code rejection is because there “aren’t enough” women at senior engineering levels, not just at Facebook, but across tech as a whole — directing the blame away from her employer. Meaning, if there were more women in those roles, the amount of rejected code would organically be lower. She added that the study was derived from an “incomplete and inaccurate” data set. That’s one way to spin this story.

“In an internal post published a month later, Jay Parikh, Facebook’s head of infrastructure, attributed any gap in rejection rates to an engineer’s rank, not gender,” WSJ writes. Parikh’s internal post from October used data of its own that appears to be unavailable to general staff members and resulted in different findings. While WSJ’s source relied on the length of time an engineer worked at Facebook, Parikh’s utilized an engineer’s rank. That lead to Parikh writing that when his data set was taken into consideration there wasn’t a “statistically significant” difference in code rejection.

As a way to make staffers feel better about the situation, Parikh supposedly tasked employees to take a training course on how to stop biases before they start. Facebook has come under fire for diversity issues before, and this instance reinforces that the problem might still persist. There’s the chance that both of the analysis are flawed in their own ways, sure, but given how rampant sexism is in technology there’s probably truth to the claims.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information and will update this post should it arrive.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Theranos’ financial troubles are starting to pile up

Theranos has been having an awful time of it lately, mostly of its own making, with several lawsuits in place, including ones from Walgreens and hedge-fund Partner Fund Management (PFM). The company that promised investors a revolutionary blood-testing technique and custom analysis machinery has just settled the latter suit for an undisclosed sum. The original lawsuit sought recovery of a $96.1 million investment plus damages. A particularly large settlement could have a significant impact on the beleaguered company, of course, which told investors that it only had $200 million in cash as of the end of last year. The Wall Street Journal reports that Theranos has already spent $5 million on other recent settlements.

The lawsuit brought by PFM alleged that Theranos had defrauded the company into making its large investment. Documents filed as part of the suit alleged that the medical company directly misled investors and even its own directors about its testing practices while secretly using off-the-shelf lab equipment which it passed off as its own revolutionary machinery. The Walgreens suit, filed for a reported $140 million, could be yet another costly settlement in the future, though the details are sealed behind a non-disclosure agreement between Theranos and its former retail partner.

Partner Fund Management has a separate suit filed to block a Theranos deal with late-stage investors that would reward them with stock if they promised not to sue the company. Now that the first PFM suit is settled, the deal can go through. Theranos says in a statement that 99 percent of its shareholders are committed to the agreement ahead of a planned May 15th closing date.

Via: Wall Street Journal

Source: Theranos

Microsoft’s lie-flat Surface Arc mouse is a new take on an old formula

Microsoft didn’t just limit its latest hardware introductions to the Surface Laptop — there’s a new (if familiar) mouse as well. The Surface Arc Mouse is an evolution of the well-established Arc Touch Mouse that takes advantage of several years of progress. Most notably, it’s what you don’t see that matters. The new Bluetooth peripheral still has that eye-catching, travel-friendly design that snaps flat for stowing in your bag, but there are no distinct left and right buttons, or even a scroll strip. Instead, a monolithic touch-sensitive button handles all those functions.

You can pre-order the mouse for $80 in blue, burgundy and gray colors that complement the Surface Laptop. Early purchases should ship by June 15th, so you can expect to get it alongside Microsoft’s latest PC if you’re buying both at once. Is that fairly expensive for a mouse without any special tricks up its sleeve? You bet. However, Microsoft clearly wants you to see this more as a good match for its hardware than something that goes toe-to-toe with the latest mice for gamers and power users.

Check out all the news from the MicrosoftEDU event here.

Photos by Edgar Alvarez.

Source: Microsoft

You can fix the HTC Vive’s sub-par headstrap on June 6th

Despite hitting the market before the Oculus Rift with motion control, room-scale virtual reality support and more connectivity options, the HTC Vive has always trailed behind Facebook’s VR headset in one incredibly important regard: comfort. The Vive’s basic headstrap works fine, but compared to the more robust mounts on the Rift and PlayStation VR headsets, it’s objectively inferior. It’s a good thing, then, that the company’s new Deluxe Audio Strap is almost ready for consumers — HTC says Vive owners will be able to nab the more ergonomic head-mount accessory on June 6th.

Think of the Deluxe Audio Strap as a mix between the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR headset’s mounting equipment. It has a more ergonomic cradle for the user’s head and an easy-adjustment sizing dial to fit different sized heads. True to its name, it also includes integrated headphones. The $100 add-on is a nice quality-of-life enhancement for individual users, but Vive seems to be targeting business users — including the strap with all Vive Business Edition headsets. That makes sense — the new strap is a lot easier to adjust for multiple users in a VR arcade.

Source: Vive

NYPD faces lawsuit for withholding info on facial recognition

A think tank is suing the NYPD over its failure to reveal details about its secret facial recognition program. Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology (CPT) alleges that the department hasn’t complied with New York state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) by forking over information on the system, which the department started using to investigate crimes in 2011. When groups submitted FOIL requests for training manuals and documentation, the NYPD insisted they didn’t have any, so CPT is taking the department to court.

The NYPD did share one document, a Chief of Detectives memo that instructs officers on protocol to submit a request for a facial recognition search. It’s confirmation the program exists, but not how it’s used, how it was built and what privacy protections are in place for the database of citizens’ faces. Which is unsettling considering that the unit built around the facial identification program had conducted over 8,500 facial recognition investigations leading to 2,000 arrests from 2011 until last year, a former NYPD official told the NY Daily News. The department didn’t deny that purchase invoices for the program exist, but claimed they couldn’t be requested by FOIL, which is another claim CPT is debating in its lawsuit.

New York City isn’t the only place in the state investing in more face-screening tech. The NY DMV’s facial recognition system was responsible for over 100 arrests since refining it in January 2016, and Governor Cuomo announced last October that he wanted to expand it to critical locations by covering bridges, tunnels and airports in cameras and sensors. Ideally, this will help eyeball terrorists, but even facial recognition databases used by our top agencies are far from foolproof: The FBI’s system returns false positives 15 percent of the time, more frequently with women and minorities.

Source: Vocativ