Let's Talk Tech
Get your tech week started off right!
Samsung potentially in hot water for price fixing and antitrust RAM pricing, while also posting RECORD profits on RAM. Will Apple EVER pay their taxes? Belgium declares lootboxes ILLEGAL! GPU prices might drop. T-Mobile and Sprint merger moving forward!
Download this week’s podcast – SGGQA 038 (RSS subscription links below)
It’s happening!
The same day the FAA announced it no longer was bothered by devices being used in airplane mode during all stages of flight, we have two companies vying for our mobile electronics affections.
Delta and Jet Blue rushed out to let us know they’ll be allowing us to use all of our mobile glowing rectangles from the moment our butt is in a seat to the moment we’re throwing elbows to get off the flight. We can be sure the rest of the airlines are looking to make the same play soon. Most of my credit card points are tied up with United, so they better make the jump PDQ…
Bloomberg has a great write up detailing all the business concerns, and I’d just like to take this moment to remind all of my readers that just because this rule has opened up, it doesn’t mean you get to be a douche bag about your tech. Listen to the flight attendants, follow instructions from the pilots, fly safe.
Be a good tech citizen.
I wrote a longer maudlin article about agenda “journalism” and bias. I had no idea I’d be rewarded so soon with another perfect example of why we journalists need to take a more nuanced approach to reviewing, and at least try to overcome our natural personal bias.
Windows 8 has been incredibly divisive in the tech community. Most of the commentary surrounding MS’s new OS has been pretty negative, and there have been a number of criticisms regarding changes to the UI. See, when you change something as well established as Windows, a UI which hasn’t been significantly altered since Windows 95, people are going to freak out. For as much as we like to think we want “new” and “bleeding edge” we don’t weather actual change all that well. Windows 8 was a shock for me, but after a couple days on a touchscreen laptop, I came to not only really like the UI, but also appreciate the improvements to file management and hardware resource management.
That’s the kicker however. I had to take a couple days to get used to it. I didn’t write up reviews and thoughts during that time. I wanted to understand it before I shared my experiences with readers, even though I was hopelessly behind the tsunami of early angry reviews.
Windows 8 is far from “bad”, it’s actually quite good. If Microsoft is guilty of anything here, it’s not making a bad product, but doing a miserable job of communicating with consumers what the changes were going to be.
And now, in time for the Surface 2 launch, we’re seeing people “come to appreciate” the changes to the UI. Now Windows 8 is “elegant”. Those adorable scamps, they just had to “get used to it”, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s not really as bad as their initial reviews would have led MILLIONS of tech enthusiasts and blog readers to believe. It’s almost like you get more honest and accurate information when you don’t put an un-boxing and first impressions video up as your proper review of a product. Interesting.
Sorry to pick on you Jon, but welcome to the club. Glad you finally figured out how to use a product that most of us haven’t had any serious or significant issues with. I hope you enjoy the Surface Pro 2 even more. Maybe spend more than a day with it before you “review” it?
Hit the jump for Mr. Rettinger’s ACTUAL review of the Microsoft Surface and Windows 8.
I couldn’t help it. Sorry folks. I just couldn’t walk away from a bad chickenpox joke.
Anywho, this is actually cool new tech. Seagate has been working its SMR process to increases data density on hard drive platters. SMR stands for Shingled Magnetic Recording, and it works pretty much like how it sounds. By shrinking the space between tracks, and then staggering them like roof top shingles, you can increase the amount of storage on a surface.
Starting in 2014, Seagate will move from 1TB per platter to 1.25TB per platter, and shipping four platter drives means we’ll see 5TB storage next year. Pretty exciting stuff as I seem to increase the amount of digital content I create logarithmically each year…
Full PR after the jump.
Continue reading “Seagate to ship 5TB drives next year thanks to a case of the Shingles”