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Tech Archive

Archives for January 2024

Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
PS5 and/or Xbox sales may have just peaked.

Sony shipped 10 million PS5s in just five months last year, and Xbox hardware sales were up 3 percent last quarter. But AMD, whose gaming business provides their chips, is forecasting a “significant double-digit percentage” decline in gaming revenue now that we’re in “the fifth year of what has been a very strong gaming cycle.”

We won’t hear from Sony again till Valentine’s Day, but Microsoft just confirmed: next quarter, Xbox hardware revenue will decline year-over-year.

Microsoft has internally suggested the next gen of consoles might arrive in 2028.

YouTube TV listened to sports fans, and it’s fixing multiview’s biggest problemYouTube TV listened to sports fans, and it’s fixing multiview’s biggest problem
Nathan Edwards
Nathan Edwards
Dear sir: am in receipt of your love letter, addressed to “keyboards” and weighing nine pounds.

I just got my copy of Shift Happens, an absurdly overengineered, utterly lovely, two-volumes-and-change book by Marcin Wichary on the history of the keyboard. It’s astonishing.

A small number of extras will be available soon.

The Verge’s Jon Porter spoke to Wichary last February just as the book’s Kickstarter launched. Check it out.

Shift Happens celebrates 150 years of typewriters, keyboards, and the people who use them

Jon Porter
Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
AMD says its MI300 AI accelerator is “now tracking to be the fastest revenue ramp of any product in our history”.

While that doesn’t quite tell us how well AMD’s competing with Nvidia in the AI gold rush, AMD CEO Lisa Su says she’s not sitting back: “The demand for compute is so high that we are seeing an acceleration of the roadmap generations here.”

She confirmed Zen 5 CPUs are still on track for this year, with server chips in second half. Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and “other large PC OEMs” will begin putting Ryzen 8000 notebooks on sale in February.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Jack Dorsey’s Block is also cutting jobs.

The company, which owns financial services like Cash App and Square, is laying off close to 1,000 employees, according to a report from Business Insider. Here’s what Dorsey told employees in a memo seen by BI:

Why is so much happening in one single day?... We decided it would be better to do at once rather than arbitrarily space them out, which didn’t seem fair to the individuals or to the company When we know we need to take an action, we want to take it immediately, rather than let things linger on forever.

Jack Dorsey's Block lays off 'large number' of staffers, adding to wave of tech-industry cuts

[Insider]

Spec Ops: The Line permanently removed from Steam and other digital storesSpec Ops: The Line permanently removed from Steam and other digital stores
Elon Musk won’t get his $55 billion pay package after allElon Musk won’t get his $55 billion pay package after all
Nathan Edwards
Nathan Edwards
For five hours on Sunday, a third of Texas was powered by the sun.

Solar power feeding into the Texas energy grid set two records on January 28th. Production hit 15,222 MW at around 10am, and at 3:10pm, solar power met 36.1 percent of electricity demand, a new peak. Solar met around a third of overall demand every hour from 11am to 4pm.

This doesn’t even count rooftop solar. The sun, y’all!

Texas just broke a record for how much power it got from the sun

[Texas Public Radio]

Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
The PC slump is over.

Last week’s Intel earnings suggested the tide had turned, and AMD’s Q4 and FY23 agree: PC sales are getting back to where they should be.

It was a crummy year for Ryzen CPUs, losing $46M on 25 percent lower revenue, but things changed last quarter: AMD chips sold 62 percent better YoY for $55M in operating profit. Radeon GPU sales were up too.

Meanwhile, Microsoft saw “PC market unit volumes were at roughly pre-pandemic levels.”

While gaming was down 17 percent year over year, AMD says that’s down to semi-custom (read: game consoles); it actually sold more Radeon GPUs.
While gaming was down 17 percent year over year, AMD says that’s down to semi-custom (read: game consoles); it actually sold more Radeon GPUs.
Image: AMD
Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid
Alphabet posted $307.4 billion in revenue for the 2023. It also spent $2.1 billion on layoffs.

Alphabet generated 13 percent more revenue year over year in 2023, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report (PDF) released on Tuesday. You can follow along with execs on the call embedded below, that’s just starting.

The company also said that over the entire year, it spent $2.1 billion on employee-related severance for the layoffs it announced in January 2023. That doesn’t account for the thousand people it let go earlier this month.

If you have an Arlo camera or video doorbell, it’s about to get more expensiveIf you have an Arlo camera or video doorbell, it’s about to get more expensive
Microsoft’s gaming revenues overtake Windows thanks to Activision BlizzardMicrosoft’s gaming revenues overtake Windows thanks to Activision Blizzard
Alex Heath
Alex Heath
“Lightweight and fine, like the fabric from a silk blouse.”

That’s how John Gruber describes the Apple polishing cloth that comes packaged with the Vision Pro.

I agree with his characterization of Apple’s other cloth you can buy separately being “quite suede-like” in texture. But I am waiting for further confirmation of this Very Important Cloth news from others who have used it. Perhaps Nilay can weigh in via the comments!

The Vision Pro

[Daring Fireball]

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
How long can one person wear an Apple Vision Pro?

Our review of Apple’s Vision Pro included an...interesting avatar call with Wall Street Journal tech reporter (and Verge alum) Joanna Stern, whose review you can watch and/or read right here.

Was it necessary for her to try to wear Apple’s spatial computing headset for 24 hours, even on the ski slope? Yes. Yes, it was.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Satya Nadella on AI, the New York Times, and elections.

Moving off the topic of Taylor Swift for a moment (and any possible link to Microsoft’s AI tools), NBC released another segment of Lester Holt’s interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella before it airs tonight at 6:30PM ET.

In the segment below, he talks mostly about the upcoming election, and NBC Nightly News also released a quote from his comment on the lawsuit filed by the New York Times:

Nadella:

I think, you know, the courts will opine on it and I’m sure we’ll come out. And in fact, if you look at, you know, what Japan is doing, and other countries are also doing, which is how to think about copyright in an enlightened way, so that this new technology can be developed, in fact new competitors can be introduced, while at the same time protecting copyright.

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