Thomas Ricker

When the resurgent Chinese giant unveiled its new Pura 70 flagship phones last week, all eyes were on the chipset. Would it close the gap with the state-of-the-art 3nm fabrication process Taiwan’s TSMC uses to make chips in the latest iPhones, for example?

TSMC says it’ll start production of 1.6-nm chips by 2026 in a move that should “greatly improve logic [chip] density and performance,” according to Nikkei. Meanwhile Intel is targeting 2-nm and 1.8-nm technologies by 2025, with Samsung targeting 1.4-nm in 2027.

If Epic’s Tim Sweeney is excited it can only mean bad news for Google or Apple. In this instance, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has ordered an evidentiary hearing for May 8th to explore whether Apple is “failing to abide by this Court’s injunction, which requires it to implement certain practice changes relative to in- and out-of-app purchases.”

The search giant says it will phase out third-party cookies in its dominant Chrome browser in 2023, no 2024, erm... actually 2025, reports the Wall Street Journal, citing “ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers.” That assumes the effort to better protect user privacy gets approval from the UK’s CMA and ICO which are monitoring implementation.

And Huawei just released its premium Pura 70 series a few days ago as followup to its wildly successful and sanction-skirting Mate 60.

Monthly active users were up 19 percent year-over-year to 615 million, while subscribers were up 14 percent to 239 million. Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek noted that the company just turned 18-years old, and “as an adult company we are now consistently profitable, which is great news.”