Best of CES 2021 award winners and we're waiting for the Galaxy S21

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It's Thursday, January 14, 2021.

Congratulations to all of our winners from the Best of CES 2021, including our Best of the Best winner, AMD's Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs. Is it weird for a chipset to best high-end TVs, robots and futuristic transport announcements? You might think so, but AMD's claims, which suggest large performance-per-watt improvements over last year's 4000 series, were impressive.

AMD still has a long way to go if it wants to snatch the Windows laptop market away from Intel, but it's making all the right moves. Intel, as CES continued, also announced a new CEO, VMWare's Pat Gelsinger. What will it do next?

We're already moving on from CES, however, as Samsung's big Unpacked event kicks off today at 10 AM ET/ 7 AM PT. Expect to see the new Galaxy S21 family and possibly some upgraded Galaxy buds. Hope you're ready for the first flagship smartphones of 2021.

— Mat Smith

Jack Dorsey breaks his silence after Trump ban

He said the company made the right choice even if it sets a 'dangerous' precedent.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made his first public statement since the social network permanently banned Donald Trump. Dorsey said he believed Twitter made the correct decision, but that "a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation." Twitter has spent much of the last two years wrestling with how to make its platform "healthier."

Dorsey echoed Twitter's previous statements on the reason for the ban, writing that "offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all."
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Ubisoft is making an open-world Star Wars game

It's the first Star Wars game in years that EA didn't make.

Just as the Lucasfilm Games brand is resurrected, it's time to put it to work on a Star Wars game — with some assistance. Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment, the team behind The Division 2, is developing an open-world Star Wars game. It marks the end of EA's exclusive rights to make Star Wars titles, which has been a bumpy ride.

Hopefully Ubisoft will go easy on the repetitive fetch quests. It's still early days for the game, but expect to hear more in 2021.
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CES has blessed us with a three-webcam laptop

The Avita Admiror II also has a 'ring light' around the screen.

One of the final devices we spotted at this year's CES was the Avita Admiror II, a Chinese laptop aimed squarely at the conference call reality of work in 2021. It has three webcams, each with a different level of zoom and an intriguing ring-light bezel around the screen to offer "consistent, gently diffused lighting."

Alas, that's all we got in terms of specs; there's no word on the CPU, GPU, screen resolution or even webcam resolution. (Not to mention a price or release date.) You might not have heard of Nexstgo until now, but you would most likely have come across VAIO. The former has been a licensee of VAIO in Asia since mid-June 2018, after Sony sold the brand.
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CD Projekt Red co-founder apologizes for the sorry state of 'Cyberpunk 2077'

The first of two major patches for the game will arrive within the next 10 days.

Patch #1, as the studio has taken to calling it, is the first of two updates that will address the game's problems on last-gen consoles, and it's slated to arrive within the next couple of weeks. Patch #2, which it's saying is a larger and more significant update, will follow in February.

As to how we got here with Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński tried to offer an explanation and apology. According to him, the game's issues, particularly on console, result mainly from the technology — designed for PCs — used to stream the game world as you play, and they weren't apparent as developers tested its various iterations.

Beyond the fixes, DLC should start to arrive after that; however, native next-gen updates for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are projected for the second half of this year.
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Feds push Tesla to recall 158,000 Tegra 3-equipped vehicles

Affected EVs have a memory chip that wears out prematurely.

Years ago, Tesla touted that an NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip powered the large touchscreens in its electric vehicles. However, as configured in certain cars, the infotainment setup has a known issue that causes the 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory device to wear out after it has been overwritten too many times, and when that happens the touchscreen goes blank.

Tesla tried to address this issue with a warranty adjustment program, but NHTSA is pushing for the company to institute a recall to deal with every vehicle using the hardware. In a letter it sent to the company, the federal agency said Tesla's own information confirmed all units will eventually fail.
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