This Week In Tech – Nov 1, 2020

Firstly, I intended to write an article last week because I did not have time. Last week the US Department of Justice sued Google for anti-trust. Experts and journalists think that the suit was rushed and that it did not do a good job of establishing the problems that it focuses on search instead of advertising. They talk about business deals like Google paying Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine on their given platforms. I agree, Big Tech should be dealt with, but I don’t think that anti-trust/monopoly law is how to deal with it. I plan to think about it a little more and maybe write an article about my thoughts when I have some more time.

Now to this week, This week the UK banned cell carriers selling locked phones, AMD announced details about their next-generation GPUs, the big tech companies announced their earnings and, there is a lot of space news. Also, like usual more in the Other News Section.

The UK bans sales of carrier-locked phones

On Tuesday, the UK’s telecom regulator announced that they will ban carriers from selling locked phones. These regulations will come into effect in June of 2022. Here in Canada, carriers have had to sell cellphones unlocked since December 2017.

AMD Event

On Wednesday, AMD held an event to announce details about the next-generation GPUs. The new GPUs will be 30% more power efficient and will also support Microsoft Direct Storage API. But the biggest announcement was, AMD GPUs will now support Ray Tracing in hardware. For specs, more details and, links to more coverage, you can read my article on the event.

Tech Earnings

Apple

Despite the tough iPhone quarter, revenue was a record for the company’s fourth fiscal quarter, at $64.7B. iPhone revenue was $26.8B, down 20% year over year. Mac revenue was $9B, up 29%. iPad revenue was $6.8B, up 46%. Services revenue was $14.5B, up 16%. And Wearables revenue was $7.9B, up 20.8%.

Jason Snell – Six Colors

Also on the earnings call Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Apple’s subscription bundle Apple One would be coming out Friday so it’s out now.

Google

Alphabet had Q3 2020 earnings of $46.2 billion in revenue with an increase of 14% from $40.5 billion in Q3 2019. YouTube and Cloud led growth with $5.04 billion and $3.44 billion respectively. Quoting 9to5Google, “The closely-watched Other Bets continues to lose money. It reported $178 million revenue primarily generated by Verily and Fiber from $148 million last quarter. However, it lost $1.10 billion compared to $941 million in Q3 2019.”

Space News

Water on the Moon

In a teleconference on Monday, NASA announced that they discovered water on the sunlit side of the Moon. This is significant because NASA’s thought that there’s water on the moon for a while but hadn’t detected in non-polar locations.

“We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon. Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”

Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate

OSIRIS-REx successfully stows sample

This story actually starts last Wednesday when OSIRIS-REx tagged an asteroid to collect a sample. Later that week it was announced that they successfully collected the sample. After doing a couple of experiments they determined that they had collected quite a larger than planned sample. They started having some trouble stowing the samples but on couple of days ago (Thursday) they announced that they’d successfully stowed the sample.

Other News

In other news, NASA set the date for the Crew-1 launch to Nov 14, the cost of your Netflix subscription will increase next year and T-Mobile is launching their TVision TV Streaming service. Also, Netflix announces that they are working on an Assassins Creed TV show and Ford will unveil an electric delivery van on November 12th.

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