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- Why the Snapdragon 765, not the 865, will make the biggest impact on 2020 Android phones - PCWorld
- The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4 - The Verge
- Got an Apple iPhone? Here are all the Best Apps YOU need to install right now - Express
Why the Snapdragon 765, not the 865, will make the biggest impact on 2020 Android phones - PCWorld Posted: 05 Dec 2019 06:57 AM PST Every year about this time, Qualcomm trots out its newest flagship processor and we all ooh and aah over the potential. Speed boosts! Battery efficiencies! Graphics boosts! I expected this year to bring more of the same, and for the most part, it does. The Snapdragon 865 is a predictable upgrade over the 855, bringing 25-percent faster performance, a 20-percent graphics boost, and "unbelievable battery life," according to Qualcomm. In fact, the company says its new chip represents "the culmination of Qualcomm's more than 30 years of wireless leadership and innovation." That may well be true, but this year Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon isn't the only star of the show. For the first time, the latest and greatest SoC is sharing the spotlight with a processor that's not destined for the most expensive premium Android phones. Alongside the 865, Qualcomm has also unveiled the Snapdragon 765. While it won't best the 865 in benchmarks, it could put some serious pressure on those thousand-dollar-plus flagships. Launched in 2018, the Snapdragon 7 Series is a relatively new line of processors, meant to bridge the gap between the low-end 600 and high-end 800 chips. They don't generally get a lot of fanfare (nor do the phones they power), but they're solid options for mid-range handsets. That changed with the unveiling of the folding $1,500 Mototola RAZR. That phone isn't due to land until January, but when it does, it'll be powered by the Snapdragon 710, which suggests how capable the chip is. Here are the 710's specs: Snapdragon 710
Now here comes the 765, which basically blows it out of the water: Snapdragon 765
On the surface, the 765 means mid-range phones will be getting a serious overall performance boost, bringing them ever closer to the high-priced premium handsets. And like the Snapdragon 730 and its 730G, the Snapdragon 765 has its gaming-focused 765G variant, which delivers a 20-percent graphics boost according to Qualcomm. But even the base 765 should deliver performance that's measurably better than the performance of any of the phones that used the 7 Series processors in 2019. So an inexpensive a phone like the Pixel 4a, the presumed follow-up to the Snapdragon 670-powered Pixel 3a, could be the phone of the year. The Pixel 3a already proved that you don't need a top-of-the-line processor to make an excellent phone, and let's face it, most of the speed benefits offered by the 865 will likely be negligible based on what people use their phones to do. The 765 won't just be good enough, it'll be great enough. 5G is keyBeyond straight performance, the main reason for the 765's superiority is its 5G support. Not only is it the first non-flagship Snapdragon processor to support 5G in any form, it's also Qualcomm's first one with an integrated 5G modem in the X52. Somewhat surprisingly, the 865 relies on the discrete X55 modem. Although the theoretical speeds are higher with the 865's RF system (7.5Gbps vs 3.7Gbps), both modems will deliver a similar 5G experience. Phones using the 765, however, will likely have better battery life. The 7 Series chips are already more power-efficient than the 8 Series ones, but 5G should take that to an order of magnitude. Battery life is the real differentiator. An integrated modem uses less power to run, and when it comes to power-hungry 5G, every little bit makes a difference. As it stands, the only 5G phones out there are very expensive and need to be very big to handle the heat and power consumption needs. That might not change much with the 865 and the X55 modem. But the 765 could be the chip that truly ushers in the era of 5G. For one, the phones that use it will be far less expensive than the Note 10+ 5G, and for another, they won't be compromised by a lesser discrete-modem system. With the fast and efficient 5G on the 765—not to mention an excellent ISP that supports multiple cameras and a massive boost in AI thanks to the Hexagon 696 chip—mid-range phones should attract way more attention next year, with the Pixel 4a and the Samsung A50 successor bringing some serious heat. Granted, those phones didn't use the 7 Series chips this year, but the promise of an integrated and future-proof 5G modem could change things. If those already-great phones have 5G on board, it could bring about a real sea change with how people approach their phones. The Snapdragon 765 could very well deliver next-generation networking to mid-range phones before many of the premium phones get it. By the second half of next year, there could be as many mid-range 5G phones in carrier stores as high-end ones. It could make buyers start to question why they even need a Snapdragon 865 premium phone in the first place. If phones costing $400-$500 can deliver 5G and better battery life, is it worth spending several hundred dollars more for slightly better performance and some extra bells and whistles? The Snapdragon 865 is a fantastic chip with loads of improvements and incredible speeds, but don't underestimate the 765. It could very well be the brains behind some of the best phones of 2020. Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. |
The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4 - The Verge Posted: 05 Dec 2019 06:00 AM PST Sony's PlayStation 4 is designed to feel impenetrable. The machine — jet black, almost brutalist in shape — conceals its function to the untrained eye. Power on and disk eject buttons, as well as the actual disk drive, are almost invisible. It's as if Sony hopes to imbue the object with a sense of mystery and awe. The PlayStation 2 played with similar emotions at the turn of the millennium, sitting bolt upright like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the most recent PlayStation looks more like the headquarters of a galactic government. Its secrets, though, couldn't be more terrestrial, originating deep within Earth's crust and at the hands of workers across the globe. Far from being detached from the environment, the PlayStation 4 is an object hewn from its materials and inhabitants. As the climate crisis chastens and public awareness grows, environmental concerns have finally made their way to the video game industry. Sony recently signed up to the United Nations-backed initiative Playing for the Planet, while it's broader "Road to Zero" initiative aims to "achieve a zero environmental footprint by the year 2050," including goals to curb climate change, conserve resources, and promote biodiversity. But precisely how this squares with the company's ongoing aim to sell hardware with short-term lives (the PlayStation 5 releases next year, effectively making its predecessor obsolete) remains to be seen. In an effort to explore both the environmental and human impacts of Sony's current video game console, I decided to take one apart. Under its plastic hood, I discovered a machine that spans continents and deep time, touches thousands of lives (for better and worse), and leaves an indelible, measurable stain on Earth and its atmosphere. On October 29th, 2019, the University of Cambridge welcomed me into its engineering department's vast, utilitarian building, which is noticeably less sacral-looking than the institution's other more famous sites. I met with Claire Barlow, a specialist in sustainability, materials, and figuring out what happens to leviathan wind turbine blades at the end of their lives. She whisked me through the building's labyrinth-like corridors, past students in lectures and researchers with goggles, to a subterranean lab decorated with innumerable hazard signs. Exposed pipes crisscrossed the walls while strange machines whirred in the background. Just behind us, a giant industrial magnet powered up with warning signs dotted about its perimeter so we wouldn't scramble our phones. Before long, John Durrell, a specialist in superconductor engineering (who took apart more machines as a teenager than he can remember), arrived with a set of tools in his hands and a glint in his eye. We unpacked the machine first. An outer box that beamed with flashy images, marketing copy, and densely packed small print took a fiddly few moments to remove. This external layer of card is heavily processed, which means it has a high carbon and environmental footprint, but it's still recyclable, Barlow told me. Next came more cardboard — probably protective, less processed — before we got to the molded card holding the PS4 firmly in place. All of these materials should find another life as recycled cardboard, provided they're processed correctly. We moved on to the console itself, and Durrell popped its top lid off with ease. This piece of plastic — black, ever so slightly dappled, with a glossy PlayStation logo positioned prominently in its center — is made from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which is the same cheap, hard-wearing material from which Lego blocks are made. An origin is engraved into the plastic: the Casetek Computer factory in Suzhou, a city with over 10 million inhabitants, which is referred to as the "Venice of China." Because the ABS is labeled (along with most of the other materials within the console), it means it has a better-than-normal chance of being recycled, which falls in line with Sony's recycling policy. Another company initiative aims to reduce virgin plastic in its products by 10 percent in 2020. But in 2018, virgin plastic used per product was actually up 2.4 percent from its 2013 figure. Let's hypothesize that the 511 grams of ABS spread throughout the machine are actually virgin plastic. How might it have been produced? This is where things get trippy. Like almost every form of plastic on the planet, ABS is made from petrochemicals that are derived from petroleum, the fossil fuel we commonly refer to as crude oil. The substance materialized over millions of years as fossilized organisms like zooplankton and algae were covered by stagnant water and further layers of these dead animals and plants. Try to imagine not only how slow that process is (geologists call this "deep time") but also the near-instantaneous speed at which the oil was extracted from the earth. Now consider its carbon residue just sitting in the atmosphere, slowly helping make the planet hotter. As I stared at the plastic, these head-spinning thoughts flashed through my mind. Sony's ABS, which pumps approximately 1.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere for every PlayStation 4 manufactured, might have originated from China as part of the country's expanding petrochemicals industry. But huge reserves can also be found in Venezuela, Canada, and a host of Middle Eastern countries. Once the oil has actually been mined, a complex process involving transport, refinery, and the plastic manufacturing takes place. "It's energy-intensive," Barlow soberly told me in the lab, "from top to bottom." Deeper inside the PlayStation 4, we came across a lot of steel, approximately 736 grams. Around 70 to 90 percent of steel gets recycled internationally, during which old parts are melted down, refined, and turned into new steel. This is what Barlow describes as "genuine recycling." But because steel demand continues to rise, which means creating the metal alloy from ore, the proportion of recycled material in new steel sits at around 35 percent. In China, where the PlayStation 4 is made, it's even less, clocking in at 20 percent. Still, from Sony's point of view, the metal is cheap and structurally stable. The economic efficiency with which the PlayStation 4 has been designed and subsequently manufactured is one of the machine's most striking elements. We peered into the complex cogs of the Blu-ray drive, which is mostly made from a plastic called polyoxymethylene (POM) and is cheaper than hardier nylon plastic. The heatsink is made from aluminum, most likely because it's a more cost-effective material than copper. The plastic ABS casing would have been created using injection molding, a process that results in very little waste material. Again, it's cheaper for Sony and a little bit better for the environment, albeit relatively so. Low-cost thinking extends to the limited use of more expensive metals. Occasional pieces of gold materialize on the main circuit board where various components are held in place by a tin-based solder. When it comes to the open pit and hard rock mining, the extraction methods responsible for some of the world's gold (as well as the copper and neodymium found in the machine), there's the actual blowing up of the earth. But enormous quantities of water are also required for mineral processing, dust suppression, slurry pipelines (to transport minerals in remote areas), and, last but by no means least, employees' needs. Another extraction process called cyanide leaching sprays the toxic chemical over mined ore to dissolve the gold, thereby making it easier to extract. This comes with its own ecological and health risks if the cyanide leaks into the local area. Each method is grim for the environment where metals are often scattered diffusely throughout the rock. Gold and tin are classified as "conflict minerals" by US legislation, a term that refers to resources originating from Congo and its neighboring countries. This region has faced ongoing violence for the past 30 years, funded in part, and amid many other complex factors, by its colossal mineral wealth, which is estimated at $24 trillion. Since 2010, publicly listed US companies have been required to check their supply chains for such minerals, their origins, and any risks associated with their extraction. We can't be sure whether any of the tin or gold in the PlayStation 4 originated from this African region because Sony doesn't publish its supply chain — unlike, say, Apple — but there's cause for concern. Earlier this year, Gamesindustry.biz combed Sony's corporate documents to reveal 53 smelters or refiners (the companies that process metals, sometimes at the site of extraction) failing to meet the standards set by the Responsible Minerals Assurance Process, including sourcing practices. It's feasible that some of these 53 smelters or refiners exist within what's called a "covered country" (e.g., Congo and its adjoining countries), which means their mines could be, too. Working conditions at such mines are often pitiful, sometimes involving violence and child labor, and all for mercilessly little pay. It's quite possible that the tin-based solder in your PlayStation 4, which is the glue holding its vital computerized parts together, originated from such deep exploitation. After a while, Durrell wrestled the AMD microchip, an integrated CPU and GPU, away from the circuit board using a heat gun and pair of pliers. This is the component that breathes Frankenstein-like life into the machine's inanimate assembly of earthly materials. He held it up, and we all squinted at the flattened forest green square with plastic hairs fraying at its edges. "You miniaturize the product, and you maximize your carbon footprint," Barlow said. "Even though it's very little material, the processing energy is absolutely huge, and the end of life is almost impossible. It's basically single-use." Under the microscope, I could see just how intricate the chip is, geometric lines multiplying in every direction like a Japanese cityscape. For a split-second, I was overwhelmed by its vastness, experiencing what some people might describe as "technological sublime." It feels like vertigo. Away from the microscope and firmly back in the real world, I scheduled a call with California-based microchip expert Sarah Boyd. The first point to bear in mind — because there are over 100 million PlayStation 4s out there, and AMD also produces chips like this for Microsoft's own Xbox One console — is the scale at which these tiny objects are being produced. Such immense numbers become even more mind-boggling when you consider not only the intricacy of the actual manufacturing process but the conditions under which these microchips are made. Boyd told me it takes approximately 400 process steps to create chips like this in sparkling clean rooms inhabited by humans wearing iconic bunny suits and futuristic-looking robots. Why do microchips demand such pristine manufacturing conditions? It's essentially so that no unwanted particles find their way into the microscopic components. Boyd described Inception-like layers of rooms in cavernous facilities, each more filtered than the last, until you reach a final chemically scrubbed clean room. Ultra-pure water, air, argon, and nitrogen are all ferried around arrays of tubes and pipes, which, at times, resemble the complexity of an actual organism. A clean room's floor is often actually a grate, under which a "sub-fab" lies where some of these tubes lead to equipment that sucks in lots of nasty chemicals and transforms them into less nasty chemicals. Such intensive air filtration and purifying procedures require almost cataclysmic amounts of electricity, which comes with its own carbon cost. There is a darker, more direct way in which microchip manufacturing impacts humans and the climate, Boyd explained. Perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases, are key to the manufacturing process. Inside the clean room equipment, high-energy plasma is used to break these perfluorocarbon gases apart, which subsequently releases highly corrosive fluorine. One example is nitrogen trifluoride, a greenhouse gas that is 16,100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat. Needless to say, this spells bad news if the chemical does leak into Earth's atmosphere. Worse yet is the effect such gases can have on the immediate surroundings if, for any reason, disposal systems within the manufacturing facility don't function correctly. Boyd described one incident in Asia where highly toxic fluorines escaped into the factory parking lot, and layers of employees' windscreens started to literally disappear. "You can't even imagine what's happening to the people exposed to it directly in the air outside," she said. A different kind of terror lurks in the Chinese factories that actually assemble these machines. On the back of the PlayStation 4 we deconstructed in Cambridge, it simply read: "Made in China." But other machines carry different text. At home, my console states: "Made in China MTK." When I asked a friend to look at his PS4, he sent a grainy photo showing the text "Made in China FOX." MTK and FOX refer to two giant contract manufacturers, Maintek and Foxconn. Remember the top lid that Durrell popped off so easily? That was made by Casetek, which, alongside Maintek, is part of Pegatron, a giant corporation that creates consumer electronics, including the iPhone. You can find Maintek's factory at the same address as Casetek in Suzhou, China. No. 233, Jinfeng Road is a monumental site employing up to 80,000 workers in peak season. In 2014, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour, a non-government organization based in Hong Kong, detailed abhorrent conditions there, including punishing work spells that can last for 10 weeks at a time, illegal charges for health checks, little protective equipment, and excessive performance-related fines. Conditions are just as bad for workers at Foxconn, which, over the past decade, has found itself at the heart of a string of scandals. In 2010, 15 people committed suicide at the so-called "Foxconn City" in Shenzhen, while poor conditions and unpaid student labor have all made headlines. In September 2019, China Labor Watch, another non-governmental organization, reported ongoing worker rights violations at Foxconn. On a phone call, I asked Child Labor Watch program officer Elaine Lu how she would characterize these working conditions. "They're pretty terrible and dire," she said. "If you think about it, just for a worker to be on a production line doing the same thing is very monotonous work, with at least a hundred overtime hours a month. And then most of them live in dorms so their life is very centered around work and the facility itself. Not having the proper protections, not living in great conditions, this really affects the workers as well." A few days later, Barlow emailed me the results of her and Durrell's findings. The equivalent of 89 kilograms of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere with the production and transportation of every PlayStation 4. I asked her if that was broadly in line with what she was expecting. "Yes," she said simply. Certainly, the figure compares with other consumer electronic devices of its size and complexity, like a laptop. What if we multiply that number by 100 million, the number of consoles Sony has sold to date, would that be fair? "Yep," she said again. Now we arrive at a more imposing number, one that feels like it captures the machine's multitudes: the extraction and production of its raw materials, the global transportation of components, and the gigantic factories it's assembled within. Since the PlayStation 4's release in 2013, approximately 8.9 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide have been generated and subsequently released into the atmosphere. That's more than all of Jamaica's emissions in 2017. All for one little video game console. What the figure doesn't include is the energy consumed during the console's use, so I purchased a plug-in energy monitor to test my own PlayStation 4. Over the course of an hour, Hideo Kojima's new hiking simulator Death Stranding ate up 75 watts of electricity. If we estimate that average usage equates to roughly one hour each day, then a single player might generate 13.7 kilograms worth of carbon emissions throughout the year. If the player has owned their PlayStation 4 for the whole six years of its life to date, that's 82.2 kilograms of carbon emissions, which is not far off the carbon footprint of the machine itself. Of course, if your electricity supplier is using a renewable energy source, then this point is null and void. But for the majority of us, our electricity will come from natural gas. (Only 17 percent of US electricity was renewably sourced in 2018.) The PlayStation 4's 8.9 billion kilogram carbon footprint leaves out other environmental impacts like pollutants that don't end up in our carbon-soaked atmosphere. Take the controller's lithium-ion battery, the same kind of chargeable technology powering electric cars. Lithium is produced by drilling holes into salt flats — usually found in massive crater-like lakes — and pumping brine to the surface. The important bit, lithium carbonate, is subsequently extracted through a chemical process. In recent years, pollution from the extraction process has led to the death of animals and crops, severely impacting local communities in countries like Argentina and China. The lithium that makes our controllers wireless is just another material that scars not only the landscape but the lives of those who call it home. However forcefully Sony makes the case, the PlayStation 4 is not special. As Durrell said, the console is an "elegant piece of equipment," but it's also "much of a muchness" with other consumer electronics. When I asked Barlow how she might characterize the carbon footprint of consumer electronics, she offered just one word: "big." Consider all of the other devices in the world, each with broadly similar carbon footprints using the same compressed carbon and shards of minerals formed over many millions of years. Workers might have been paid a pittance to extract, manufacture, and assemble those machines, too, with comparable industrial processes similarly impacting local environments. The numbers quickly rack up to an almost dizzying degree. What was also remarkable about deconstructing the console was how quickly it transformed from a single object into an assembly of diffuse materials, each with their own histories, protagonists, and processes. As I think back to the cadaverous heap of metal, plastic, and electronics on the lab table in Cambridge University, it occurs to me that the PlayStation 4 has the most dazzling and problematic parts of global capitalism purring in unison. It is an exquisite, leanly designed machine pulsing with the exploitation of Earth and its people. I think lots of us know this, at least on some level, but our collective thirst for these carbon-hungry technologies remains unquenchable. Whether the planet can sustain such consumption is one question, but the ongoing human cost is another one entirely. For now, that's the reality we must confront each time we boot up the jet black machine and plug ourselves back into the matrix. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
Got an Apple iPhone? Here are all the Best Apps YOU need to install right now - Express Posted: 04 Dec 2019 10:01 PM PST Apple has held an event to crown its favourite iPhone, iPad and Mac games of the last year. If you've been swiping around your home screen looking for something fresh to cheer-up your gadget, this could be the perfect time to download a new application to make you more productive, or an award-winning game to help pass the time on your commute. Apple has decided to highlight a number of different apps, from stylish games – like Sayonara Wild Hearts on iPhone – to practical workhorses – like Affinity Publisher on Mac. Although there isn't anything controversial here, the judges' picks should throw the spotlight on smaller developers who might not crack the Top Ten on the App Store, but that millions of iPhone, iPad and Mac owners might find useful or entertaining to use every single day. The App Store is a serious phenomenon. The digital store, which is used to download all applications and games on iPhone and iPad hardware, has earned developers $120 billion worldwide. Although Mac users can download software from other sources, there is still a curated App Store where the applications are vetted by Apple's famously strict rules. Apple Watch owners recently gained the ability to search their own dedicated App Store and download and install apps from their wrist following the launch of watchOS 6. Arch-rival Google recently announced its own picks of the Best Apps of the year. Although there is a lot of crossover between the App Store and the Google Play Store (the equivalent for Android smartphones and tablets), both have a number of popular exclusives. Apple has also published a definitive list of the most popular apps downloaded from its App Store over the last 12 months, too. This allows some of the most widely-downloaded software – like Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, and more – that wasn't fortunate enough to get a spot on the podium during Apple's awards can still get some recognition. And speaking of awards, Apple has just hosted its first ever Apple Music awards. The show was designed to celebrate the best musical talent that has been streamed on the music service, which directly competes with Spotify and is available on all Apple hardware as well as Android smartphones and tablets. Here is the full list of the winners of the Best Apps Of The Year, as chosen by Apple: iPhone App of the Year: Spectre Camera Top Free iPhone AppsYouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream Top Paid iPhone AppsFacetune Top Free iPad AppsYouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream Top Paid iPad AppsProcreate Top Free iPhone GamesMario Kart Tour Top Paid iPhone GamesMinecraft Speaking about the awards, Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller said: "Developers around the world inspire us all with innovative apps that have the power to influence culture and change our lives, and this year that is as true as ever. "The 2019 App Store Best Apps and Games winners reflect our global desire for connection, creativity and fun. "We are excited to announce such a diverse group of 2019 App Store winners, showing that great design and creativity comes from developers large and small, and from every corner of the world. We congratulate all the winners and thank them for making 2019 the best year yet for the App Store." |
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