When you write about tech stuff, the first question you need to ask yourself when a new product comes out is whether it’s really new. It means understanding how innovative it is, if it can simplify people’s lives, if it was really needed. With the pandemic and the resulting chip crisis, the consumer electronics industry (but not only) has entered the freezer. As anyone who has been looking for new consoles for months, wants to buy a new car or even just a graphics card knows well, what will happen – indeed it is already happening – is that at least in some countries and for some brands, deliveries will slow down, some products they will be postponed and there will be, as experts say, less product availability. Months were lost in the research and development labs as well as in the production of content.
Paradoxically, we touched the most innovative innovations in 2021. Presented in 2020, its first Apple Silicon chip has begun to find interesting incarnations with the redesign of the new Macs. These Socs, based on Arm architecture, are less energy-intensive and with better performance. they have made computers more and more like smartphones.
After the running-in of the first generation M1, the new processors are landing on Apple products. The choice to leave Intel and go out on their own is an ancient temptation in Cupertino. But not only. Just this year Google, after having ditched Qualcomm, began to produce processors for its smartphones on its own, confirming the mantra of the Steve Jobs era according to which those who control software like the lord of the rings can shape performance and new services in the image. of the hardware it runs on.
The Google Tensor – this is the name – contains two novelties: the mobile Tensor Processing Units (TPu) which is the neural chip for artificial intelligence operations and the new Titan M2 chip for security. These components, according to experts, can generate AI-related services that we have never known before on the mobile platform. And already in the new smartphones the first applications are beginning to be touched. But the “passage” of state has crossed the entire ecosystem. Qualcomm, number one of the chips on smartphones, has announced that it wants to create SoC based on ARM architecture for Windows PCs, with logics very similar to those of Apple. The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team that Qualcomm bought earlier this year in a massive $ 1.4 billion acquisition. Their first product is slated to launch in 2023.
Time counts in innovation. Indeed, they are everything. The success of a product is strictly connected to the freedom to generate working prototypes and the commercial ability to know how to put them on the market, limiting losses as much as possible. A recent school case is represented by foldable mobile phones. The first “foldable” smartphone appears in 2018. Nobody remembers it, because a semi-unknown small Californian company called Royole made it. Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X arrive just a year later. The first models stood out for stellar prices, design and communication errors, so much so that in mid-2019 they seemed like a failed experiment. Today they are back, indeed they are returning. Oppo recently announced its Find N foldable. Creative workarounds have also been fielded by Motorola (Motorola Razr 5G) and Microsoft (Surface Duo 2). To date, however, Galaxy Z Fold 3 is the best “folding” in circulation.