Podcasts about Acer

In this week’s What the Hack!, Arthur Goldstuck speaks to Lester Kiewit about the revival of the Packard Bell brand announced at IFA in Berlin, where Gadget deputy editor Jason Bannier was on the ground. Arthur also looks at six of the most interesting gadgets showcased at the major consumer tech fair, with a focus on hardware and moving parts rather than the AI innovations that have dominated recent years. And after a major computer failure disrupted air travel in Britain, Arthur considers what the incident tells us about the technology behind aviation and similar challenges closer to home. Read more at https://gadget.co.za/ Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewit is a podcast of the CapeTalk breakfast show. This programme is your authentic Cape Town wake-up call. Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewit is informative, enlightening and accessible. The team’s ability to spot & share relevant and unusual stories make the programme inclusive and thought-provoking. Don’t miss the popular World View feature at 7:45am daily. Listen out for #LesterInYourLounge which is an outside broadcast – from the home of a listener in a different part of Cape Town - on the first Wednesday of every month. This show introduces you to interesting Capetonians as well as their favourite communities, habits, local personalities and neighbourhood news. Thank you for listening to a podcast from Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewit. Listen live on Primedia+ weekdays between 06:00 and 09:00 (SA Time) to Good Morning CapeTalk with Lester Kiewit broadcast on CapeTalk https://buff.ly/NnFM3Nk For more from the show go to https://buff.ly/xGkqLbT or find all the catch-up podcasts here https://buff.ly/f9Eeb7i Subscribe to the CapeTalk Daily and Weekly Newsletters https://buff.ly/sbvVZD5 Follow us on social media CapeTalk on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CapeTalk CapeTalk on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@capetalk CapeTalk on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ CapeTalk on X: https://x.com/CapeTalk CapeTalk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CapeTalkSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

GPT-6 Astra, les capacités des modèles IA et les nouveaux modèles d'Anthropic, Meta, Google et Alibaba. L'IFA de Berlin, puis Windows 11, le cloud gaming, Weather 3, les règles européennes et le DLSS 5.  Me soutenir sur Patreon Me retrouver sur YouTube On discute ensemble sur Discord Interactions auditeurs Gremi et les multipôles. Mika et la RAM, Flobosso et le prix des puces. Contre le vent de la horde. Ca parle et ça AGI Bingo : le meilleur modèle du monde de la semaine est ? Et ce mal qui nous fait du bien, c'est Astra. Quasar, la “quasi-star” “européenne” ; levée de fonds Mistral Weather 3 : la seule météo qui marche aussi dans le Finistère. Un bon titre, c'est pas sIFAcile On divise mieux quand c'est PAIR. Dernière petite balade au Spark pour NVIDIA. AMD a pas sa station de travail ? Non mais Halo quoi. Lenovo et le nouvel assistant Qira loin. C'est fin, c'est très fin ça se mange sans faim. Des téléphones avec des gros yeux. C'est tellement mignon. CameraJet ? Dyson peut se brosser… avec dentifrice spécial obligatoire Des aspirateurs à fleur de peau. Et avec des jupes. Actualités sans Currywurst Fais comme l'oiseau : jamais rien de l'empêche l'oiseau… D’aller plus haut ChatGPT, Reddit et Roblox dans la cour des grands, vont-t’ils se faire bolosser ? Microsoft au Zenith de son idiotie. Jeux vidéo IFAllait pas le rater : Acer présente sa console pour travailler. DLSS5 arrive même sur série 4000. Participants Une émission préparée par Guillaume Poggiaspalla Présenté par Guillaume Vendé

Qualcomm e Amazon fecham acordo por “chips de IA” para data centers. A Xbox vai começar a limitar o tempo de jogo na nuvem para 15 horas mensais. Aparelhos de TV pirata desviam conexões domésticas para crimes na internet. Ministério Público volta a cobrar medidas de proteção a menores no Discord. Rede chinesa invade sites '.gov.br' em fraude de apostas online. PlayStation apresenta nova política de assédio ao cliente após fim da mídia física! Da estratosfera: iPhone 17 Pro resiste a queda de 30 km de altitude e bate recorde e mais!

C'est un séisme discret mais historique dans l'écosystème Google : pour la première fois, la firme acte publiquement l'abandon d'une catégorie matérielle complète sous ChromeOS au profit d'Android. Alors que les projecteurs se braquent sur les rendez-vous de la rentrée, Mountain View amorce une bascule radicale : arrivée des futurs « Google Books », refonte complète de ses outils de création et accélération du rythme de Chrome, quitte à laisser son propre système sur la touche.Dans ce 189ᵉ épisode du CKB Show, Nicolas et Olivier décortiquent les coulisses de cette transition stratégique et analysent toutes les annonces de la semaine :Le grand virage ChromeOS vers Android : l'arrêt programmé du matériel Google Meet pour 2027 et la fin de l'ADN d'origine.Google Books en approche : fuite massive chez Acer avec le Spin 714 (Moonstone) sous Intel Core Ultra, et la flopée de machines partenaires en embuscade.Google Pics entre dans l'arène : le nouveau concurrent dopé à l'IA prêt à bousculer Canva dans Google Docs et Google Slides.Chrome passe la seconde : un cycle de mise à jour toutes les deux semaines dès la version 153… mais sans ChromeOS.Les nouveautés Android de rentrée : la fonction Motion Assist contre le mal des transports, la localisation des objets avec Gemini et les listes partagées dans Google Keep.Gemini NotebookLM monte en puissance : comment vos livres achetés sur Google Play Livres transforment l'IA en tuteur d'étude sur-mesure.Procès antitrust : la justice américaine rejette le démantèlement forcé de Google Ads.Retrouvez les notes complètes, les liens des sujets évoqués et l'accès au salon privé Discord sur mychromebook.fr. Pour soutenir notre média 100 % indépendant, rendez-vous sur patreon.com/mychromebook.

Welcome to episode 495 of the Mobile Tech Podcast with guests Nick Gray (Phandroid) and Adam Doud (SlashGear) -- brought to you by Mint Mobile. In this episode, we recap IFA 2026 and discuss Lenovo's IdeaPad Vibe and Yoga Pro 9n, ASUS' ProArt P14 and P16, plus new laptops from Acer and Dell. We also cover the Moto Watch Ultra, new phones from Xiaomi and TCL, and much more. Enjoy :)Episode Links- Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tnkgrl- Donate / buy me a coffee (PayPal): https://tnkgrl.com/tnkgrl/- Support the podcast with Mint Mobile: https://mintmobile.com/mobiletech- Nick Gray: https://www.threads.net/@nickmgray- Adam Doud: https://www.threads.net/@deadtechnology- IFA 2026 recap: https://www.techradar.com/tech/ifa-2026-best-in-show-awards-our-25-favorite-reveals-at-the-berlin-tech-expo-from-somersaulting-robots-to-modular-solar-batteries-for-renters- Lenovo IdeaPad Vibe: https://phandroid.com/2026/09/03/lenovos-new-699-99-laptops-finally-skip-the-boring-black-look/- Lenovo Yoga Pro 9n: https://www.engadget.com/2250161/lenovo-yoga-pro-9n-nvidia-rtx-spark-ifa-2026/- ASUS ProArt P14: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/macbook-pro-14-inch-vs-asus-proart-p14-nvidia-rtx-spark- ASUS ProArt P16 and GR1X: https://www.howtogeek.com/rtx-spark-hands-on-asus-dell-microsoft/- Acer Swift Blade 14: https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows-laptops/the-new-acer-swift-blade-14-is-the-worlds-lightest-laptop-to-be-launched-globally- Dell 14S: https://www.pcmag.com/news/dell-14s-unveiled-another-full-metal-macbook-neo-challenger-ifa-2026- Moto Watch Ultra: https://phandroid.com/2026/09/03/motorola-is-launching-its-first-ever-lte-smartwatch-for-349-99/- Xiaomi 18 Fold: https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_18_fold_gets_its_first_official_look_ahead_of_september_7_launch-news-74446.php- TCL P80 Ultra: https://www.androidpolice.com/tcl-p80-ultra-hands-on-why-no-one-copying/- Tecno Bezelless concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngPkbaZliaU- Ulefone/RugOne Xsnap 7 Pro: https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/rugone-xnap-7-pro-hands-on- Anker Soundcore Sleep earbuds 4 Pro: https://www.theverge.com/tech/988265/anker-sleep-earbuds-4-pro-price-date-specs- Ugreen MagFlow Pro Magnetic Power Bank: https://www.techlicious.com/blog/ugreen-bets-on-a-999-ai-hub-to-run-your-whole-smart-home/Affiliate Links (If you use these links to buy something, we might earn a commission)- Apple MacBook Neo: https://amzn.to/45Z2JRP- Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5X: https://amzn.to/3TcvXd7- ASUS Zenbook A14: https://amzn.to/3SU9mSu- Xiaomi 17T Pro: https://amzn.to/4iO3tRc- Ugreen MagFlow Pro: https://amzn.to/4yrG5Oc

In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down Hot Chips 2026, the engineering conference where IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Arm, and Fujitsu all showed how their next processors actually work. The headline disclosure is a mainframe core that runs Arm natively. Ray also covers Apple’s odd M6 Mac mini naming, London’s first autonomous Uber rides, Amazon’s purchase of the company behind DuckDB, GitHub’s HydraFusion, the best of IFA 2026, and new USDA research on farmed salmon. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show with a personal update. He apologizes for the late rollout and the missed Monday episode, having spent the week fighting a cold. He’s also heading to Michigan to spend time with family and visit his father’s gravesite. He hopes to record a couple of shows from his dad’s old studio while he is there, including a special episode planned for Tuesday. He also points listeners to a fresh site redesign that trades the old techie look for something cleaner and friendlier. The featured segment starts from a wrap-up post on Arm’s newsroom. However, Cochrane broadens it to cover the whole conference rather than a single article. Hot Chips has run every August since 1989, and this year’s event was the 38th, held August 23rd through the 25th at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium. What Hot Chips Actually Is Cochrane draws a line between Hot Chips and the big consumer trade shows. CES and Computex exist for product announcements and marketing. Meanwhile, Hot Chips is an IEEE engineering conference where chip architects present block diagrams and die photos for thirty minutes at a stretch. The audience matters as much as the content. Roughly five hundred people who design chips for a living fill the room, and they would spot a fudged number immediately. No written paper is required, just the talk and the slides. In-person tickets sold out this year, as did Stanford’s dorm housing. Cochrane says he plans to cover the conference annually going forward. IBM Built a Mainframe Core That Speaks Arm The disclosure that stopped Cochrane cold came from IBM. Its next processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE runs two completely different instruction sets natively, on every one of its eleven cores. Those are z/Architecture, IBM’s own mainframe language, and AArch64, which is 64-bit Arm. Crucially, this is not emulation. Nor is it Arm cores glued onto the die beside the mainframe cores. IBM built 2,792 Arm instructions directly into the hardware, which it says is more than double the mainframe instruction count. Each core carries two separate decoders while sharing the caches, branch predictor and register files downstream. It switches between the two in nanoseconds. IBM even added dedicated hardware to flip byte order, because Arm and the mainframe store numbers in opposite directions. The payoff is Arm SystemReady compliance, meaning off-the-shelf Arm Linux runs on a mainframe unmodified. Patrick Kennedy of ServeTheHome, who was in the room, wrote: “I am sitting here still in awe of what IBM is doing here; this is not Z plus Arm cores, this is Z and Arm in one core.” Cochrane flags one precision point that is easy to get backward. IBM did not license Arm’s core designs and drop them in. Instead, it took its own mainframe core and taught it AArch64 under an architecture license, which is considerably harder engineering. The specifications are striking. The chip uses a 2nm process, with eleven cores running above 5.7GHz sustained and no turbo mode at all. Each core gets 36MB of L2 cache, backed by a 3.5GB virtual L4 pool. Furthermore, the reliability target is eight nines, which works out to roughly three tenths of one second of unplanned downtime per year. IBM gave it no name and no ship date, though the press expects “Telum III” around 2028. Arm, Fujitsu and NVIDIA Show Their Hands Arm itself had plenty to discuss, starting with an unfortunate name. Its first chip in thirty-five years is called the AGI CPU, which is a product name rather than any claim about artificial general intelligence. For three and a half decades, Arm designed processor blueprints and licensed them out, collecting royalties without competing. That era is now over. The AGI CPU is Arm’s own silicon, co-designed with lead customer Meta, running up to 136 cores on TSMC’s 3nm process at 300 watts. Arm’s CEO says the company has more than $2 billion in customer demand across the next two fiscal years. Fujitsu brought the detail Cochrane called the coolest of the conference. Its MONAKA chip packs 144 Arm-based cores, but the trick is the cache. Rather than sitting alongside the cores and eating die area, the entire last-level cache lives on a separate 5nm die with the 2nm compute die stacked directly on top. It ships in 2027 in 350-watt and 500-watt versions. NVIDIA had more stage time than anyone, with six sessions. Its new Vera CPU carries 88 cores of NVIDIA’s own Olympus design, which marks a change: the previous Grace CPU used Arm’s off-the-shelf cores. Consequently, Arm’s win here is the instruction set, not the blueprint. The memory disclosure drew the most attention, with a fully loaded system reaching 1.5TB at 1.2TB/s while the whole memory subsystem draws just 30 to 40 watts. The Caveat on NVIDIA’s Benchmark Slides Cochrane pushes back on how NVIDIA presented its numbers. On the standard SPEC integer benchmark, Vera scored 925 against AMD’s 128-core EPYC score of 898, about three percent ahead. However, the slide NVIDIA showed normalizes that same result per physical core, which makes a three percent gap look enormous. NVIDIA defends the choice, arguing that per-core throughput matters when thousands of AI agents run at once. Cochrane grants that it is a fair argument to make. Even so, his verdict is blunt: it is a different number from the headline one, and presenting it that way is not the best look. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Apple’s Newest Chip Landed in Its Cheapest Mac Last week’s episode covered the Mac Studio half of Apple’s August announcement. Tonight Cochrane takes the other half, the new Mac mini, and finds the numbering genuinely strange. The $899 base Mac mini gets the M6, which is Apple’s first 2nm chip and the newest process the company has shipped. It brings twelve CPU cores, twelve GPU cores, and 170GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple also introduced a third CPU core class called super cores. So Apple’s most advanced chip sits in its cheapest desktop, while the M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra above it all carry a lower number. It gets stranger. The M6 mini has Thunderbolt 4 while the pricier M5 Pro mini has Thunderbolt 5, and the memory ceiling runs backward too. Apple explains none of it across three announcement pages. Reading between the lines, Cochrane figures the M6 is the entry point of a new generation that shipped ahead of its larger siblings. London’s Robotaxis Started Carrying Passengers Arm’s monthly roundup covers everything outside the data center, and Wayve stood out. Transport for London granted the British self-driving company private hire vehicle licenses on August 5th, the same category a minicab needs. Then on September 3rd the service launched with Uber, marking the first autonomous rides ever offered to UK passengers. A small fleet of Ford Mustang Mach-Es covers anywhere in London except the airports, with a TfL-licensed safety driver still aboard. Over 140,000 Londoners signed up. The compute runs on NVIDIA’s Arm-based automotive platform, which is why Arm claims the win. Cochrane notes the pattern: once you set a standard nobody can move off, these wins keep arriving. Two more items round it out, both about squeezing AI onto phones. Google’s Pixel 11 shipped in August with the Tensor G6, and Google claims on-device AI runs up to 3.5x faster using 3.5x less energy. Those are Google’s own unbenchmarked figures. Separately, Graphcore’s research team worked with Arm to run an 11-billion-parameter vision model on phone-class processors by squeezing each parameter to 2.7 bits, taking the model from roughly 22GB down to 3.7GB. Intel Is Pitching AI Infrastructure From a Long Way Back Intel’s newsroom post previews the AI Infra Summit, running September 15th through 17th in Santa Clara. CEO Lip-Bu Tan takes a fireside chat on Tuesday morning, with three Intel sessions across the show. Cochrane unpacks two terms first. Physical AI means AI that acts in the real world through sensors and motors rather than living on a screen, and Intel takes it seriously enough to have renamed its PC division the Client Computing and Physical AI Group in May. Disaggregated inference splits the two phases of running a model: reading your prompt is compute-hungry, while writing the answer back is memory-hungry. The context is where this gets interesting. Intel’s revenue rose 25 percent last quarter, its fastest growth since 2011. Nevertheless, in AI accelerators the company barely registers next to NVIDIA. Gaudi has effectively been abandoned, to the point that Intel stopped maintaining its open-source driver, and AMD passed Intel in data center revenue last quarter. Tellingly, when Intel demoed disaggregated inference at Computex, NVIDIA GPUs handled one phase and SambaNova chips the other while Intel supplied the coordinating CPU. Crescent Island, Intel’s actual inference chip, does not sample until later this year, and Intel declined to publish its memory bandwidth. Amazon Bought the Company Behind DuckDB On August 26th, Amazon signed a deal to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind DuckDB. Cochrane spends time explaining what DuckDB is, since listeners outside the data world may never have encountered it. The problem it solves is familiar. Querying a large pile of data files traditionally meant either running a database server or spinning up a data warehouse with a cluster, a bill, and a loading pipeline. Both are heavy machinery for a question you wanted answered in ten seconds. DuckDB instead ships as a library rather than a server. You add it to your program like any other package, point it at your files, and write ordinary SQL directly against them. The data never moves. The usual comparison is SQLite, which is embedded in nearly every phone and browser on earth. Where SQLite excels at looking up one record, DuckDB rebuilds that embedded idea for chewing through millions of rows. It now sees roughly 62 million monthly downloads on Python’s package index alone, up from about 25 million last October. AWS says it is buying the company, not the project. DuckDB stays free and open source under the MIT license, held by a Dutch nonprofit foundation, and the founders join AWS while continuing to run technical direction from Amsterdam. Andy Warfield, a VP and distinguished engineer at AWS, described DuckDB as “the glibc of structured data: a lean, unglamorous, ubiquitous dependency that a great deal of software links against and almost nobody has to think about.” Cochrane sits with what that ownership means. He reaches for an analogy: imagine Daniel Stenberg selling curl. He doubts it would ever happen, but the concept alone is startling given how much infrastructure depends on it. His read is that AWS is betting DuckDB becomes as foundational as curl and SQLite already are. GitHub Has One AI Model Grade Another One’s Homework GitHub shipped Project HydraFusion into Copilot as a research preview. Instead of routing your request to a single model, it picks one of three approaches per request. Sometimes one model simply answers. Alternatively, a cheaper model drafts, and a quality gate decides whether to escalate. The interesting one is Critique. One model writes the code, a separate model from a different family reviews it read-only, and the original gets one pass to revise. Despite the name, nothing is fused here. There is no voting and no merging, just one model at a time with a gate deciding whether to spend more. GitHub explained the reasoning in an earlier post: “a model reviewing its own work is still bounded by its own training biases: the same training data and techniques, the same blind spots.” Research supports it. A team at NeurIPS in 2024 showed that models recognize their own writing and score it higher than human graders do. GitHub’s earlier number had a Claude Sonnet and GPT critic pairing closing about three-quarters of the gap between Sonnet and the larger Opus model. This mirrors a workflow Cochrane uses constantly and has described on a previous episode. He runs a cross-check review with a second model from a different company, and it routinely surfaces issues the first model missed. He explains that different training data, different engineers, and different reinforcement approaches build different internal biases about what counts as correct. Looking ahead, he expects more of these “Frankenstein patterns” where models from different training families work together. The Best of IFA 2026, and What You Can Actually Buy IFA opened to the public in Berlin for its 102nd year, with about 1,900 brands. Cochrane splits The Verge’s roundup in two, since much of what generates headlines at these shows never ships. Starting with real products, iRobot’s flagship Roomba Max 875 Combo runs $1,199 and ships in about two weeks. Its SealForce feature drops a hidden skirt from the chassis when it detects carpet, sealing against the fibers so suction concentrates instead of leaking out the sides. That reaches 35,000 pascals, iRobot’s strongest yet. A step-down model at $899 carries the same trick, though Cochrane balks at both prices. Anker’s Soundcore Sleep 4 Pro earbuds arrive in November at $349.99. The charging case carries its own round touchscreen, so you pick soundscapes, set alarms, and read sleep stats without your phone. Optical sensors read heart rate and variability from the ear canal, which beats the wrist for accuracy, and the case masks a snoring partner. Cochrane remains unconvinced about sleeping with earbuds in. Philips also has smart rope lights, the Hue Liane 360, on sale now. They glow evenly around the tube rather than showing individual LEDs. They also run $400 for three meters, which works out to about $130 per meter of rope light. As for concepts nobody can buy, iRobot showed a robot vacuum that carries a smaller robot vacuum on its back in a garage and lowers it to deploy. Lenovo brought a 14-inch laptop whose screen rolls out to 17 inches at the press of a button, which reviewers call the first rollable that feels close to shippable. Tecno showed a phone with essentially no border around the screen, and Acer had a Windows gaming handheld that swivels its screen up over a keyboard. Two themes ran through the show. Humanoid robots were the loudest thing on the floor, and IFA’s own CEO framed the event as being about robots that work rather than robots that demo. Meanwhile, AI stopped being its own product category and became an ingredient, showing up in refrigerators, treadmills, dishwashers, and motorized TV mounts. Farmed Salmon Isn’t the Omega-3 Machine It Used to Be USDA scientists measured farmed salmon and found considerably less of the good fat than the government’s own database claims. EPA and DHA are two fatty acids you get almost entirely from fish. Your body can build them from the plant version, but only in tiny amounts, so the NIH’s position is that eating them is the only practical way to raise your levels. Those fatty acids are structural pieces of every cell, with DHA concentrating in the brain and retina. That is why the federal dietary guidelines, issued jointly by USDA and Health and Human Services, recommend at least eight ounces of fish a week and steer you toward salmon. That amount is calibrated to deliver about 250 milligrams a day. Published in Frontiers in Nutrition last month, the study found EPA and DHA in farmed Atlantic salmon came in 54.7 percent lower than USDA’s own reference values, last updated in 2018. A three-ounce serving fell from roughly 1,670 milligrams to about 756. Consequently, two servings a week now fall about 14 percent short of the target. Plant-derived fats meanwhile rose two to three times over. The likely cause is feed. Salmon are carnivores, and farms once fed them oily little fish. There was never going to be enough of those as the industry scaled, so crops filled the gap: soy, canola, sunflower and linseed. Importantly, the study does not claim to have proven this and calls the feed shift a plausible explanation. Independent corroboration lends it credibility. Researchers at Stirling measured a similar halving in Scottish salmon between 2006 and 2015, and Norway’s marine institute saw it across thousands of samples. There is a land dimension too. Roughly half the world’s soy grows in South America, where rainforest gets cleared for feed. Matthew Hayek, who studies the environmental cost of protein at NYU, told Inside Climate News that “soy is a major, important protein and oil ingredient in fish farming.” Adding up two decades of soy across all fish farming, he puts the extra forest clearing at around the area of Nicaragua or Bangladesh. That figure covers all fish farming rather than salmon alone, and Hayek notes it is hard to attribute soy use to any single species. Cochrane closes with two caveats. First, the study measured only eight fish, bought around Maryland, DC and Virginia over six weeks in 2023, and nearly all sourced from Chile. That is not a national survey, and the authors say plainly the sample was not large enough to change government advice. Rather, it flags that a federal database value needs rechecking, which is what the paper set out to do. Second, on whether you should care, farmed salmon still beats beef, chicken and eggs by a mile, since those carry essentially zero EPA and DHA. What it loses is its crown among fatty fish, dropping to mid-pack behind herring, sardines and mackerel and roughly level with trout. The broader health case is also softer than the 2000s suggested. A review of 86 trials covering 162,000 people found supplements barely moved heart attacks or deaths, so eating fish and swallowing fish oil are not the same claim. No producer has responded to the findings, and USDA, whose own scientists ran the study, declined an interview and did not answer emailed questions. Cochrane wraps up with housekeeping and a note that he will be back on Labor Day. The post The Mainframe Learned to Speak Arm #1875 appeared first on Geek News Central.

OpenAI announced its next big model, GPT-6 Astra, and also, by the way, that AGI is here now.Today on The Vergecast, we've got an all-star panel to break down the news of the week.First, senior AI reporter Hayden Field joins us to talk about our supposed AGI era and Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face. Then, our friend Joanna Stern pops in to talk about new Apple CEO John Ternus, old Apple CEO Tim Cook, and to, most importantly, speculate on the format of next week's Apple keynote.We wrap things up with a super-special lightning round from the IFA electronics show in Berlin. Senior reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and editor Dominic Preston each pick out the five most interesting gadgets they saw at the show.And two more things: Vergecast producer Travis Larchuk pops in to tell his tale of identity theft woe and warn you that he isn't the one DMing you on Twitter to ask you to be on The Vergecast. Plus, Brendan Carr is a dummy. Further reading: OpenAI's next big AI model has ‘entered the AGI era' Researchers fear safety disaster ahead of OpenAI's Astra release OpenAI delayed its new model's development after the Hugging Face hack Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion John Ternus sends first memo as Apple CEO teasing a ‘huge launch next week' Phil Schiller is leaving his biggest jobs at Apple Siri AI is already changing how I use my iPhone IFA 2026: the biggest tech and gadget announcements This might be the fanciest toothbrush launch ever. Anker's new MindBase is an AI-powered brain for your smart home This NAS company wants to run your local smart home I want to wrap myself in Hue's new Liane rope lights Homey just made the smart home controller I hoped Apple would The robot butler dream doesn't have legs Here's Xiaomi's wide 18 Fold I held the first truly bezel-free phone Acer's new concept hardware is a gaming handheld with a keyboard Lenovo's new MacBook Neo competitor comes in two sizes and seven colors Packard Bell is back, and more colorful than ever. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome00:46 Fake Travis warning03:01 OpenAI's Astra model05:45 Safeguards and delays08:55 Opaque recurrence fears13:08 What Astra does well18:08 Access tiers and rollout19:53 Nvidia buys Hugging Face23:04 Is this really AGI26:28 AGI vibes and Microsoft clause32:17 Apple event preview33:41 Ternus keynote politics39:43 Keynote Vibes Shift40:23 Tim Cook Era Review44:56 Services And Fees Machine47:15 Phil Schiller Steps Back49:52 Event Predictions Fold And AI55:43 Siri AI Real Use Cases58:32 Smart Home Display Rumors59:47 Bets And Keynote Structure01:05:19 Brendan Carr Is A Dummy01:09:23 IFA Lightning Round01:10:49 Philips Hue Smart Lighting01:11:03 Hue Rope Light Rave01:11:44 Sticker Shock Pricing01:13:03 Xiaomi Wide Foldable01:15:43 Dyson Camera Toothbrush01:20:31 Tecno Bezelless Concept01:22:42 Local AI Smart Home Hub01:27:09 MacBook Neo Clones01:29:35 Homey Dial Controller01:33:39 Acer DualPlay Handheld01:36:19 Dreame Humanoid Robot01:39:44 Packard Bell Revival01:42:17 Wrap Up And Credits Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Le robotaxi de Tesla ouvre une nouvelle ère automobile · Musk alerte sur la faim énergétique de l'IA · Les nouveautés de l'IFA 2026 · Dyson filme désormais vos dents · Apple change de patron · ChatGPT Reddit et Roblox passent sous le DSA · Pasqal accélère aux États Unis · Lake America apparait Google Maps · Une étude bouscule les idées reçues sur les écrans · Tamagotchi revient au doigt.Avec Bruno Guglielminetti (Mon Carnet)===============Cybercab : Elon Musk ouvre un nouveau chapitre de la voiture autonomeLe Cybercab de Tesla, sans volant ni pédales, symbolise le passage du robotaxi de la démonstration à la circulation réelle, avec une approche reposant sur les caméras et l'intelligence artificielle plutôt que sur le lidar. Quarante cinq véhicules ont été mis en circulation dans plusieurs villes du Texas. Un nouveau paradigme automobile.La France va tester la conduite autonome de TeslaPas de Cybercab en France, pour l'instant, mais le Gouvernement va autoriser la conduite autonome par FSD (Full Self-Driving) de Tesla. Le ministre des transport Philippe Tabarot l'a annoncé après s'être entretenu en visioconférence avec Elon Musk mercredi 2 septembre. De sosn côté Waymo se positionne en Europe. La bataille réglementaire ne fait que commencer.Elon Musk veut moins de règlementation et plus d'électricité pour l'IA Devant des responsables du G20, Elon Musk plaide pour davantage de centres de données tout en prévenant que leur développement se heurte déjà aux limites de la production électrique. Aux États-Unis, la course à l'IA attise les tensions locales autour de l'électricité et de l'eau, tandis qu'en Europe les acteurs du secteur dénoncent des procédures trop longues et des réglementations jugées susceptibles de ralentir l'innovation.IFA 2026 : ordinateurs abordables, maison connectée et Wi-Fi 8À IFA Berlin, Acer relance Packard Bell avec des ordinateurs accessibles, pendant que Samsung renforce également son offre de portables abordables. Xiaomi pousse son écosystème Human Car Home et sa gamme Mijia pour la maison connectée, tandis que les premières annonces autour du Wi-Fi 8 et les démonstrations de robots humanoïdes préfigurent les prochaines tendances technologiques.Dyson : une brosse à dents avec caméraDyson se lance dans l'hygiène bucco-dentaire avec la CameraJet, une brosse électrique à 479 euros associant caméra, analyse des espaces entre les dents et jet interdentaire. L'application permet même de regarder en direct l'intérieur de sa bouche, une débauche technologique impressionnante dont le prix et les comparaisons mises en avant par Dyson invitent néanmoins à garder un regard critique.John Ternus prend les commandes d'AppleDepuis le 1er septembre, John Ternus succède à Tim Cook à la tête d'Apple, quelques jours seulement avant une keynote très attendue. L'occasion de revenir sur le bilan spectaculaire de Cook, de l'Apple Watch au développement des puces maison en passant par l'échec relatif du Vision Pro, mais aussi sur la première prise de parole de Ternus sur X, qui rappelle le poids persistant du réseau dans la communication des dirigeants. À écouter aussi : Apple : Tim Cook passe la main à John Ternus.ChatGPT, Reddit et Roblox passent sous le DSAAvec plus de 45 millions d'utilisateurs européens, ChatGPT et OpenAI, Reddit et Roblox entrent dans une catégorie réglementaire européenne qui renforce leurs obligations face aux contenus illicites, aux risques pour les mineurs et à la désinformation. Dans le même temps, une enquête de Reporters sans frontières montre que plusieurs agents IA peuvent restituer des contenus issus de médias russes sanctionnés dans l'Union européenne, Meta AI étant le seul outil testé à avoir systématiquement refusé.Pasqal engrange les dollars L'entreprise française Pasqal, spécialiste des ordinateurs quantiques à atomes neutres, poursuit son expansion avec de nouveaux moyens financiers et une offensive sur le marché américain. Une étape majeure pour une entreprise issue de la recherche française, présentée comme l'un des rares acteurs hexagonaux capables de jouer dans la cour mondiale du quantique.Lake America : quand la politique redessine les cartes numériquesLe changement de nom américain d'une partie du lac Ontario en Lake America provoque des répercussions immédiates dans les services cartographiques. Google Maps puis Apple Maps adaptent leur affichage en fonction du pays de consultation, tandis que MapQuest profite de la polémique au Canada pour retrouver temporairement une visibilité inattendue.Écrans et adolescents : une étude finlandaise bouscule les idées reçuesL'étude PANIC a suivi 260 jeunes pendant huit ans et observe une association entre davantage de temps d'écran déclaré et de meilleures performances sur certaines mesures cognitives à l'adolescence. Les chercheurs ne démontrent toutefois aucun lien de cause à effet : la nature des activités numériques et l'équilibre avec le sommeil, l'activité physique et les autres dimensions de la vie quotidienne restent essentiels.Tamagotchi revient… sous forme de bagueTrente ans après le phénomène original, Bandai miniaturise encore son animal virtuel et transforme le Tamagotchi en bague. Même principe qu'autrefois : nourrir et surveiller une petite créature numérique qui réclame régulièrement de l'attention, avec cette fois la nostalgie comme puissant argument commercial.Les rendez-vous de la semaineDans Mon Carnet, Stéphane Ricoul – Mon Carnet abandonne cette saison le commentaire d'actualité pour proposer une série de fictions technologiques dans l'esprit de Black Mirror et des anciens radioromans. De son côté, Monde Numérique retrouve son rythme de rentrée avec L'Hebdo, notamment autour de l'éducation et de l'IA, de la cybersécurité avec Benoît Grunemwald – ESET, ainsi que d'une étonnante main robotique développée pendant plusieurs années par un inventeur indépendant.Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

While Microsoft pushes Copilot+ PCs, NVIDIA storms into the Windows ecosystem with AI-focused Spark machines and game-changing specs, igniting new rivalries with Apple and upending expectations for what local hardware can do. Plus, Atari revives 39 Activision classics for a price that will make retro fans blink, while the Sonos saga continues as it pivots to an open AI platform that might finally win back old loyalties. Finally, Paul's Markdown book will be released sometime in the next week. Windows The mystery of 26H2 is now less mysterious Last week: Week D came and went without a preview release, triggering speculation Microsoft issues Windows 11 version 26H2 to Release Preview, a first This means a September or October release to stable. Just guessing, but Preview Update in September, general Update in October is most likely Version numbers don't matter much anymore. There are no unique 26H2 features, just a few unique 26H2 presets - These include Point-in-time restore and Memory Integrity Protection being on by default Two 26H1 pre-release builds with little to speak of IFA 2026 is underway in Berlin Acer is first out of the gates with dozens of new PCs, including one based on the NVIDIA RTX Spark EU General Court confirms that Microsoft Edge is not a gatekeeper Visual Studio Code now has a full Markdown Editor experience Brave now offers free email aliases, and will have a premium option soon Firefox for iOS now has integrated ad blocking NVIDIA - $96.2 billion in revenues, up 106 percent YOY Dell - record $47 billion in revenues, but it's all from server/infrastructure HP - $15.7 billion in revenues, up 12.5 percent - $11.8 billion from PCs, vs. $15 billion for all Dell client products AI/dev Sony and Warner sue Anthropic for stealing their music Gemini Notebook gets first Expert Intelligence upgrade with integrated e-book support Sonos announces Sonos 27 OS with major AI functionality Microsoft moves WinUI development fully to GitHub ahead of open-sourcing it XBOX and gaming Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, more coming to Game Pass Every Activision title for the Atari 2600 is being reissued in cartridge form, but it's going to cost you Tips and picks Tip of the week: Markdown: A Field Guide for Writers App pick of the week: ImageGlass 10 RunAs Radio this week: Reimagining Intranets with Susan Hanley Brown liquor pick of the week: Macaloney's Cath-Nah-Aven Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit threatlocker.com/twit helixsleep.com/windows

While Microsoft pushes Copilot+ PCs, NVIDIA storms into the Windows ecosystem with AI-focused Spark machines and game-changing specs, igniting new rivalries with Apple and upending expectations for what local hardware can do. Plus, Atari revives 39 Activision classics for a price that will make retro fans blink, while the Sonos saga continues as it pivots to an open AI platform that might finally win back old loyalties. Finally, Paul's Markdown book will be released sometime in the next week. Windows The mystery of 26H2 is now less mysterious Last week: Week D came and went without a preview release, triggering speculation Microsoft issues Windows 11 version 26H2 to Release Preview, a first This means a September or October release to stable. Just guessing, but Preview Update in September, general Update in October is most likely Version numbers don't matter much anymore. There are no unique 26H2 features, just a few unique 26H2 presets - These include Point-in-time restore and Memory Integrity Protection being on by default Two 26H1 pre-release builds with little to speak of IFA 2026 is underway in Berlin Acer is first out of the gates with dozens of new PCs, including one based on the NVIDIA RTX Spark EU General Court confirms that Microsoft Edge is not a gatekeeper Visual Studio Code now has a full Markdown Editor experience Brave now offers free email aliases, and will have a premium option soon Firefox for iOS now has integrated ad blocking NVIDIA - $96.2 billion in revenues, up 106 percent YOY Dell - record $47 billion in revenues, but it's all from server/infrastructure HP - $15.7 billion in revenues, up 12.5 percent - $11.8 billion from PCs, vs. $15 billion for all Dell client products AI/dev Sony and Warner sue Anthropic for stealing their music Gemini Notebook gets first Expert Intelligence upgrade with integrated e-book support Sonos announces Sonos 27 OS with major AI functionality Microsoft moves WinUI development fully to GitHub ahead of open-sourcing it XBOX and gaming Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, more coming to Game Pass Every Activision title for the Atari 2600 is being reissued in cartridge form, but it's going to cost you Tips and picks Tip of the week: Markdown: A Field Guide for Writers App pick of the week: ImageGlass 10 RunAs Radio this week: Reimagining Intranets with Susan Hanley Brown liquor pick of the week: Macaloney's Cath-Nah-Aven Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit threatlocker.com/twit helixsleep.com/windows

Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy, CEO of Plugable The IT channel is no stranger to consumer brands attempting to make the leap into the B2B world, but few have navigated it as deliberately as Plugable. Originally known as a digital-native brand that built its reputation on Amazon, the connectivity and peripherals vendor is now turning its full attention to the channel. On this episode of In The Channel, Plugable chief executive officer Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy – a familiar face to Canadian partners from her time leading Westcon Canada – explains how the company is translating its consumer success into a reliable, low-friction offering for managed service providers. She notes that surviving the brutal review ecosystem on Amazon forced Plugable to build highly reliable, extensively tested products, which today translates into fewer helpdesk tickets for MSPs managing complex, mixed-vendor desktop environments. We also discuss the recent strategic investment from Acer Gadget. Smurthwaite-Murphy shares how this partnership gives Plugable the global supply chain muscle it needs to expand while remaining strictly vendor-neutral. Finally, we touch on a massive hardware innovation for the artificial intelligence era. Smurthwaite-Murphy shares details on Plugable’s upcoming Thunderbolt 5 AI enclosure, a modular hardware solution that promises to bring workstation-class, local AI processing power to standard laptops, giving MSPs a practical way to deploy AI hardware without relying entirely on emerging AI PCs. Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Today, we’re talking about the desktop edge and how a brand born on Amazon is making waves in the IT channel. My guest is Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy, the chief executive officer of Plugable. Many of you will recognize Lynn from her deep roots here in the Canadian channel, including her time leading Westcon Canada. She joined Plugable a few years ago to help them transition from a prosumer favourite to a serious B2B player. We discuss why their trial by fire in the consumer review space actually makes their docking stations and peripherals perfect for MSPs looking to reduce help desk tickets in mixed hardware environments. We also dig into their recent investment from Acer Gadget and get a really exciting scoop on a new Thunderbolt 5 AI enclosure that gives partners a modular way to deploy serious local AI processing power. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy. ROBERT DUTT: Tim, thanks for taking the time. It’s great to talk to you again. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, it’s great to talk to you again as well. It’s been many years, we were just establishing. ROBERT DUTT: It has been a while, probably more than either of us would like to admit, but such is. A lot of our listeners will obviously know you from your time leading Westcon Canada and then your work at StarTech.com after that. Can you kind of walk us through your journey from the distribution side of the house to where you are now at the helm of Plugable? LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, actually it’s been interesting because I started out at a service provider and then I spent many years at Westcon, and then I went to a vendor brand, which is where I’m at now as well. So you kind of get this 360-degree view of the channel and it’s been really interesting. I’ve been very fortunate. So about five years ago, I joined Plugable as the CEO and we’ve been undergoing a whole transformation. I mean, I can go into it if you want now, a little bit about why I joined the company, but I don’t want to jump on any questions you have. ROBERT DUTT: No, I appreciate that. And yeah, this would be a great time to do that. What did you see there? And I guess especially… yeah, let’s just start there. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah. So Plugable was known, and some of the channel partners do think of us as an Amazon seller. But what I loved about the… I mean, we were watching them closely because we were always competing with them when I was at StarTech.com. But what they really are is a data company, an e-commerce company, and they were founded on Amazon. So I saw this digital native that suddenly was showing up in the channel and the channel was asking for the Plugable products and I was like, what’s going on there? And I was very interested. And as I was talking to the founder, he really wanted to expand. We had this… what was happening was the Chinese factory brands were beginning to show up on Amazon and, I mean, they’re fine products, but the solutions are extremely broad compatibility for business. So suddenly I started noticing a lot of business in our point of sale and we invested in a whole channel team and we wanted to grow to this omnichannel wherever the business customers buy. And so I found it a very interesting business model. And I think that kind of leads to where we are today. It was sort of demand from the channel side of things. ROBERT DUTT: Interesting, because I was curious what kind of drove the strategic decision to go from the kind of direct-to-consumer and prosumer Amazon-centric brand to the sort of formalizing and B2B IT channel and making that kind of the bread and butter, it seems. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah. I mean, there were these factors that were happening. As I mentioned, there was disruption in the B2C side and then suddenly businesses are looking at the solution. And I think what interested me the most is the channel has a very broad portfolio that they’re responsible for with the customer. They can’t be master of every brand. And so they want, specifically in peripherals, they want something that they know will work and it’s easy to figure out what the compatibility is. So you had these two things coming together at the same time. And this company had to be built and survive and thrive with customers never talking to a customer yet selling something fairly complicated. So they had to do it all digitally. And that’s where I found… I think the channel was being asked for us initially because customers were doing online research, right? The B2B buyer’s journey is changing. And so they were asking for us and that’s kind of how it all began. ROBERT DUTT: How do you take that digital-only or digital-first kind of culture in terms of marketing, in terms of… well, there isn’t really so much enablement, but documentation support for customers… and turn that into channel enablement and all the stuff that one has to do when one’s working through the VAR or MSP channel? LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, great question. So there’s a team of us that came over that had spent our career in the channel. So we knew what the channel required from a channel program, channel support. And so we started with distribution and made sure that we were in the right distribution partners and that we had our inventory available and that we were listed properly. And then we were supporting the channel. They knew how to reach us. And so it’s been that journey, and marketing programs and events, doing all that. And now, as the whole modern desk is becoming disrupted again, and so much more is being expected of it, things are becoming more complicated. It was time for us to hire a field team. And that field team can help generate leads for the channel, but also can help support the customers. That’s where we are today. We’re on this multi-year journey of transforming to a B2B company, which now the majority of our business is through the channel, which now we are all-channel as well. I consider Amazon a channel. We don’t take any share of the world. ROBERT DUTT: Especially with that talent in place and that muscle motion in place now, how do you address some of the classic partner concerns that I’m sure have come up? Deal reg, margin protection, MDF, especially when Amazon is part of the channel, but it is also a visible competitor to a lot of the folks who are in the VAR/MSP space. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Oh, great question. And it’s interesting, the channel partners ask us that every time they see us. And we do a little test. We say, let’s go online right now and let’s look at Amazon and several partners’ listings. And I challenge you to find where there’s a different price, where the channel is at a disadvantage. And it’s because we came from an Amazon partner to a channel partner, we have really good control over our pricing. So that’s number one. And then we were able to build a channel pricing strategy and promotion that we knew, coming from the channel, we knew would work. And so we’ve got a multi-tier channel program. We’re able to do volume opportunities, jam programs, and deal reg, all of that. ROBERT DUTT: You sat in the distributor’s chair for a long time. And as you point out, you were on the partner side for a while before that. How does that background inform the way you operate a vendor today? What kind of distribution and partner lessons, as well as the overall insights that you mentioned bringing in with the team, does that kind of background in distribution apply to how Plugable goes to market today? LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: That’s a great question. Some of it might just be muscle memory, but I think I understand what makes both the service provider MSP and the distributor tick. And so I think we’re trying to make sure that we’re a really good partner to both of those constituents and try to deliver what they need and work with them in the way that they want. Even if you’re making price changes, for example, with the distributor, you know to do that at a timing that works with them. So we’re trying to be easy to work with. ROBERT DUTT: Price changes in a timely fashion in 2026 might be a little bit of a different discussion than it was a few years ago, but… LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Well, we went through the pandemic and that was kind of chaotic times. And we’re entering into a whole new chaotic time, really driven by AI. But anyway, you were asking about price changes. ROBERT DUTT: No, I was just making the observation that it’s certainly a different beast this year as a result of AI and RAMageddon and all that fun stuff that’s going on. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I was just… our founder and chief technology officer is over in Asia. He’s been over there for quite a while and it’s evolving. It’s an evolving story, but there are component level shortages that are beginning to rear, even more than I think people understood, and more than just the memory. So it’s where the pandemic we knew was going to end. We knew that it was a peak and valley and the demand and the constraint, but this is going to be sustained, at least for the foreseeable future. ROBERT DUTT: Grab your helmet, folks. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: That’s right. Fasten your seatbelt. ROBERT DUTT: A lot of folks in the solution provider community and MSPs are hyper-focused on SaaS, on cybersecurity, on cloud, on AI. Sometimes I think they think of peripherals as an afterthought, something that gets tacked on there. Why should they be paying more attention to this space? What are the opportunities or where are the margin dollars that they might not realize they’re leaving on the table in a deal if they’re not thinking about the kind of stuff that you guys are bringing to market? LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, that’s a great question because, I mean, let’s face it, peripherals are not that sexy until somebody really realizes they need them. So you’ve got a few things happening, right? The modern desk is being disrupted, as we mentioned, by AI, but also by the demand for productivity. People are using more applications than ever, so they need multi-screens. So just at the very core, you get a new laptop because you had to upgrade it for AI or just for Windows 11. Now you need new peripherals. But those are also… you’re adding more devices, more screen space. And that screen is probably running… one of them is probably running AI. And so the modern desk could be anywhere. It could be hybrid, in a hybrid environment in terms of work. And then every office you go into, I defy you to find one that is 100% one brand, one GPU, one set of devices that you have to connect to. So let’s just assume that 95% of the environments are hybrid in some way. That’s what third-party docking station companies like ours do best. We work in a mixed environment because we have to work and test deeply for compatibility. Where if you’re buying the bundle, the OEM plus the OEM dock, that’s great for that particular one use. But if you’re in a hybrid environment, you’re plugging in different devices, is it going to work? Are you going to lose productivity? Are you going to have a poor customer experience? So there’s a lot of demand and complexity that’s being added to the modern desk. And the IT department, they don’t have the capacity to deal with that. They don’t have the time or the capacity. And so we also take those calls from the channel, we take the calls from the end user. “Doesn’t work?” We take them locally. ROBERT DUTT: I think that points out an interesting side of things that I hadn’t really thought of. My first thought is kind of as an upsell opportunity for a partner who’s selling a solution, selling hardware, tag on the peripherals to build a total deal size and hopefully raise TCO as well. But it sounds like you’re saying there’s an opportunity to potentially, if done right, offload some of the inevitable help desk tickets that come with, “My monitor won’t turn on,” or, “Well, when I’m plugged into this thing, it feels like my data transfer is slower than it is, even though it’s the same kind of connector.” Well, no, it’s not. It’s actually USB. It’s all USB-C, but that one, you’re used to Thunderbolt 3 or 4, and this is something lower. So it sounds like there’s a cost reduction opportunity there too. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah. I mean, as a business leader, I also had to pay for help desks in my P&L. And so I can attest to the fact that I’ve got those people busy trying to do rollouts or IT upgrades, or I don’t want them working on these little minor things, but I also don’t want my staff not being able to get connected. And there are stats that say people lose five, seven minutes every time they try to connect to a meeting, especially if they’re running in. So yes, I’m talking the productivity and user experience and cost savings, but also you mentioned the channel margin. And we do offer a higher margin. That’s something that if the channel partner is not thinking about the margin opportunity by just adding peripherals. And then when you add third-party peripherals… ROBERT DUTT: Let’s talk about the current situation, the recent investment from Acer Gadget. Tell me a bit about how that partnership came about and what does it mean for you guys in terms of R&D and roadmap and where things go. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, that’s great. We were so excited. Both parties just really are so complimentary. They’re global. They’ve got a global footprint. They’ve got brand halo that we really were pleased to partner with. And then supply chain stability, opportunity to access even a broader supply chain. And for Acer Gadget and Acer, we represent an agnostic, highly compatible device that could work in their environments, as well as a B2B and an e-commerce company and innovation. Some of the innovation that we’re doing, they really appreciated, specifically around the Thunderbolt 5 AI enclosure and some of that innovation. So we consider it more of a strategic partnership than we do a finance partnership. Although there is benefit there as well, which helped fund the field team that we’re announcing that we’ve hired. That’s for an example. ROBERT DUTT: It sounds like you say Acer values the agnosticism, as you describe it. That sounds like Plugable remains and the strategy is to remain pretty strictly vendor-neutral when it comes to docking and connectivity. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Absolutely. They would like the brand to remain agnostic. ROBERT DUTT: You already mentioned the AI enclosure. You mentioned how AI is changing the desktop. How are you guys thinking about where AI is at now and where it’s going in the future in terms of what it means for what you do and where you see Plugable? LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Yeah, again, I think the modern desk is completely being disrupted and there’s so much more demand on it. AI PCs right now don’t have the power to run local models. What we’re seeing is in the cloud, there’s billions of dollars being spent on AI in the cloud and there’s going to be a lot of use case for that. But as we move to privacy, and privacy almost seems like it’s a little bit secondary right now. People are racing to leverage AI, but at some point there’s going to be big news. People will focus a little bit more on the privacy piece and what needs to stay local. You’ve got the capability of the hardware getting better and the GPUs being able to manage more, but also the models. The models are becoming more optimized. At some point, you’re going to have this come together where local is going to be a real option for people. It’s somewhere between now and 18, 24 months, it’s going to become more mainstream where there’s going to be repeatable or local workflows that need to be local. It could be because of token usage, it could be just because of privacy, but it’s going to be there. We wanted to get ahead of it. We’ve been on the bleeding edge of AI for our own company and we’ve got a really interesting roadmap, but the first launch was our Thunderbolt enclosure where we offered two solutions. One was the one for developers where you build your own local AI, and then we built an enterprise version where it’s intended to be plug-and-play AI. We’ve got a whole software stack and we wrote a chat harness. People in the channel can adopt this to drive a use case for AI and maybe give themselves an opportunity to have a seat at the table for the broader AI spend because use cases right now are where we’re not seeing successful proof of concepts. ROBERT DUTT: I guess from a peripheral point of view, it’s become an accepted and normal thing for docking to potentially include storage on board or directly connected. Why not have some processing as well and get into that AI boost? Then hopefully, I’m guessing the logic is I can have a less beefy machine hooked up to that and still get the better AI outcomes. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: That’s right. It works today with the Windows PC that you have where, if you were going with… first off, it’s 50 times more powerful than an AI PC. It depends what you’re trying to run. You can chat on an AI PC. You can’t run models. If you wanted to buy then a local solution like a DGX Spark, for example. Those are nice. They’re all built in one, but you have to use Linux. So you’ve got to add another operating system and it’s not modular. I know a lot of companies are trying to figure out when and how they get in and they don’t want to spend and then not be viable in the next couple of years. So ours is a modular solution. It works with the PC you have. It depends on the use case, what you’re trying to do. ROBERT DUTT: Given your roots, I have to ask about the distribution strategy in Canada. You said one of the first steps was to lock down what you want to do in distribution. Where are you at in Canada today and how are you approaching getting products into the hands of Canadian partners and getting in front of them and letting them know what you guys are up to? LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Being here in Canada, we have about a third of our company population is Canadian. We’re nicely straddling North America as a North American company. So right now we’re in Ingram and we’re in the works of launching another distributor and we’re expanding our channel here. As part of our expanding a new field team, we also expanded our channel team. ROBERT DUTT: What is the end… I imagine given what you said it’s probably a pretty broad array, but what does the ideal Plugable partner look like? What are some of the common threads for a successful partner for you? LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Well, it’s changing with the AI solution because with the AI solution, it’s got to be a partner probably within the Global 1000 that has an AI consulting development already because the beauty of that is it needs a channel partner to hook up all the data through MCP. They’ve got to integrate it and support it. But most of our partners are traditional partners. If you name one, we’re probably being sold by them. We initially started out where partners that had more of an e-commerce play, we were doing very well there, and then it’s just continued to expand. ROBERT DUTT: Last one for me. You’ve touched on this a little bit with the AI side of things, but what are the main priorities for Plugable over the next 12 to 18 months in terms of both building the market and the product roadmap? And I guess finally, your message to Canadian partners who might be hearing about Plugable for the first time? LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Ah, let’s unpack that. So what’s on the roadmap? Well, with this partnership with Acer Gadget and Acer, we will be expanding our product line. In the past we had to kind of choose an either-or and we spent a lot of time on innovation last year. Well, now we can do both. And so we’re going to be launching more new products this year than we have in a while. So we’re pretty excited about that. We want to continue to expand our footprint globally and we now have a path to do that faster. So basically they’re enabling us to accelerate our strategy. And then if I were a Canadian partner, what’s Plugable? I think what we’re told by the channel partners we work with is that A, we bring in more new business than most of our competitors because we’re being asked for by their customer. And B, we have the lowest return rate because it just works. And I really believe that that’s our digital native being born on Amazon. You live and die by your reviews. And if you don’t have this whole cycle process of taking the feedback, improving, improving, re-spinning and making sure that you’re listening to the customer’s user experience feedback and improving it, you’re not going to do well. So we bring that to a business-grade solution. So I think we’re low friction for a partner. ROBERT DUTT: Fascinating, especially fascinating as things continue to develop in terms of what you’re able to add to the PC as AI models get closer to the machine. Lynn, fascinating catching up and good luck with Plugable. LYNN SMURTHWAITE-MURPHY: Thank you so much. It’s been great to catch up. ROBERT DUTT: There you have it, Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy from Plugable. I’d like to thank Lynn for her time. And as always, thank you for listening. It’s fascinating to hear how a company weaponizes its Amazon background. Usually the consumer origin is something vendors tend to try to hide when they pivot to the channel, but Lynn makes a compelling case that surviving the consumer review gauntlet creates exactly the kind of bulletproof hardware that MSPs need. And that Thunderbolt 5 AI enclosure is definitely something to keep an eye on as we all try to figure out the hardware realities of this AI wave. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe to the channel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. Leaving a rating or review also helps us as well. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel. Bye.

Ahead of the 2026 ACEL National Conference – presented in partnership with ACER – Teacher editor Jo Earp is joined by Lisa Newland, CEO of ACEL, and Lisa Rodgers, CEO of ACER, to unpack the conference's theme of bold leadership. Lisa and Lisa tell us about their approach to leadership, what they've learned over the years, and more. Host: Jo Earp Guests: Lisa Newland and Lisa Rodgers

It's Teacher Editor Jo Earp dropping into your podcast feed to give you a heads up on a cracking new episode coming up tomorrow. It's all about leadership and I'm joined by 2 guests with a wealth of experience on the topic – Lisa Rodgers, CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Research, and Lisa Newland, CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders. We're speaking ahead of the ACEL National Conference, with the 2026 theme Bold Leadership: New Frontiers in Education. ACER is partnering with ACEL to deliver the conference this year. Join me for tomorrow's episode to hear Lisa and Lisa talk about their own approach to leadership, great examples they've seen over the years, and the importance of amplifying educator voice and elevating the profession.

Welcome to the Tech Latest podcast. Every Tuesday, our tech experts Katey Creel and Shotaro Tani deliver the hottest trends and news from the sector.In this episode, Katey speaks with Taipei correspondent Lauly Li about the AI-fueled memory chip shortage and how it is helping China's CXMT break into the global PC supply chain.== == == == == == == ==Check out this episode's ⁠⁠⁠⁠featured story below: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HP, Asus and Acer begin using CXMT chips amid memory shortage== == == == == == == ==And ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠register for our weekly #techAsia newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find more of our tech coverage here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.And for the Asian business, politics, economy and tech stories others miss, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠please subscribe to Nikkei Asia here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Thanks for listening!

If you like weddings, have at least a passing knowledge of Indian words, and enjoy puns, then you should find today's crossword theme quite satisfying (as was the case for both cohosts). The rest of the grid also held some delights: 58D, Battery for a mouse, AAA (ah, that kind of mouse); 55D, Where Anheuser-Busch is "BUD", NYSE (informal and instructive, very nice); and 14A, So-called "servebot" in tennis, essentially, ACER (just as long as the servebot isn't powered by AI

Welcome to MrMaple Podcasts, your go-to destination for all things horticulture. Our playlist is a collection of podcasts that showcase various plants and interview renowned horticulturists. We aim to educate and inspire our listeners about the beauty of plants and the knowledge needed to cultivate them. Our podcasts cover a wide range of topics, from Japanese Maples, Conifers, Ginkgos, and Azaleas to interviews with experts in the field. Tune in every Sunday at 8PM eastern for a new episode and join us on this journey to discover the wonders of horticulture.

ONEXPLAYER's Indigogo finally ends with over $3.5m raised, shipping times have also been released and ACER drop a huge pre-order gift for the Predator Atlas 8.

เคยสงสัยไหมครับว่า บริษัทห้องแถวในไต้หวันที่เริ่มต้นด้วยเงินทุนเพียงหยิบมือ ก้าวขึ้นมาเป็นผู้ผลิตคอมพิวเตอร์อันดับ 2 ของโลกได้อย่างไร? คำตอบคือกลยุทธ์ “ราคาถูก” แต่น่าเหลือเชื่อที่กลยุทธ์เดียวกันนี้ กลับกลายเป็นหอกแหลมที่เกือบทำให้ Acer ล้มละลาย เมื่อการมาถึงของ Apple และ iPad ได้เข้ามาทำลายล้างตลาดคอมพิวเตอร์ราคาประหยัดจนพังพินาศ มูลค่าบริษัทหายวับไปกว่า 7 พันล้านดอลลาร์ในชั่วพริบตา จากจุดตกต่ำที่สุด พวกเขาพลิกนรกกลับมารอดพ้นวิกฤต และผงาดขึ้นเป็นผู้นำตลาดเกมมิ่งตัวท็อปและเทคโนโลยี AI ได้อย่างไร? คลิปนี้เราจะพาไปเจาะลึกบทเรียนธุรกิจที่ทั้งเจ็บปวดและทรงพลังที่สุดของ Acer เลือกฟังกันได้เลยนะครับ อย่าลืมกด Follow ติดตาม PodCast ช่อง Geek Forever's Podcast ของผมกันด้วยนะครับ #Acer #ประวัติAcer #กรณีศึกษาธุรกิจ #บทเรียนธุรกิจ #ธุรกิจเทคโนโลยี #วิเคราะห์ธุรกิจ #วิกฤตAcer #กลยุทธ์ธุรกิจ #การตลาด #คอมพิวเตอร์Acer #ธุรกิจพีซี #AcerPredator #StanShih #ประวัติแบรนด์ #ความรู้ธุรกิจ #geekstory #geekforeverpodcast ========================= 

Você já se perguntou como um notebook é fabricado antes de chegar às lojas? No episódio de hoje do Podcast Canaltech, o repórter Diego Corumba leva os ouvintes para dentro da fábrica da Acer em Jundiaí, no interior de São Paulo, onde são montados todos os notebooks da marca vendidos no Brasil. Durante a visita, Diego conversou com Luiz Gustavo Milano Magoga, diretor de operações da Acer Brasil, que explicou como funciona a produção nacional, desde a fabricação das placas em Manaus até a montagem final, os testes de qualidade e o sistema de rastreabilidade que permite identificar a origem de cada componente utilizado nos equipamentos. O executivo também detalha os processos de controle de qualidade, o funcionamento do suporte técnico e explica por que um notebook lançado no exterior pode levar meses até chegar ao mercado brasileiro. Você também vai conferir: Agora dá para fazer Pix direto pelos óculos inteligentes, Galaxy S27 pode trazer uma mudança histórica para a Samsung e uma rival da BYD quer assumir a liderança dos carros elétricos no Brasil já em 2026. Este podcast foi roteirizado e apresentado por Fernanda Santos e contou com reportagens de Bruno Bertonzin, Nathan Vieira e Danielle Cassita. sob coordenação de Anaísa Catucci. A trilha sonora é de Guilherme Zomer, a edição de Yuri Sousa e a arte da capa é de Erick Teixeira. O Podcast Canaltech está concorrendo para entrar no Top 20 do Prêmio iBest 2026! Se você acompanha nossos episódios, curte as entrevistas e gosta do conteúdo que produzimos todos os dias, sua ajuda pode fazer toda a diferença. Vote no Podcast Canaltech aqui. É rápido, gratuito e você pode votar até 3 vezes por dia.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Intel's Arc G3 Extreme is finally here and from what we're seeing, it's actually the true next generation of handhelds. Performance is seemingly a huge step up over AMD's APU's like the Z2 Extreme and we're seriously excited. The MSI Claw 8 EX Ai+, Acer's Predator Atlas 8 and the OneXPlayer 3 are going to be the handhelds to get this year... if you have a deep wallet.

En direct du salon Computex 2026, Carl-Edwin Michel revient sur trois tendances marquantes de l'événement. D'abord, Qualcomm attaque le marché des ordinateurs abordables avec sa nouvelle puce Snapdragon C, destinée à des portables Windows à faible coût et à grande autonomie. Du côté du jeu vidéo, Intel dévoile sa nouvelle architecture graphique Arc G3, déjà intégrée dans plusieurs consoles portables de fabricants comme MSI et Acer. Enfin, ASUS célèbre les 20 ans de sa marque ROG avec une nouvelle version de la ROG Ally dotée d'un écran OLED, d'une autonomie accrue et de lunettes de réalité augmentée capables de projeter un écran virtuel géant. Un signe que l'innovation matérielle demeure très active malgré l'omniprésence de l'intelligence artificielle dans l'industrie.

This week on Next Portable Console, Brendon and Federico have spent more time with the Anbernic RG Rotate and along with John have more thoughts about it and the handheld news coming out of Computex. Also available on YouTube here. Links and Show Notes More RG Rotate Experiments Anbernic RG Rotate Apps We're Using Apple Music Musicolet Moon+ Reader Pro Amazon Kindle YouTube VLC Niagara Launcher Cocoon The Latest Portable Gaming News The Ally X Gets OLED and a Bigger Screen Asus just announced the OLED Xbox Ally X of my dreams​ Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 Bundle adds OLED display and AR glasses New Intel Chips for Handheld Gmaing Intel's first handheld gaming chip is the Arc G3, and this Acer is using it I held the next-gen handheld MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is an 8-inch handheld powered by Intel Arc G3 Extreme Subscribe to NPC XL NPC XL is a weekly members-only version of NPC with extra content, available exclusively through our new Patreon for $5/month. Each week on NPC XL, Federico, Brendon, and John record a special segment or deep dive about a particular topic that is released alongside the "regular" NPC episodes. You can subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/c/NextPortableConsole Leave Feedback for John, Federico, and Brendon NPC Feedback Form Credits Show Art: Brendon Bigley Music: Will LaPorte Follow Us Online On the Web MacStories.net Wavelengths.online Follow us on Mastodon NPC Federico John Brendon Follow us on Bluesky NPC MacStories Federico Viticci John Voorhees Brendon Bigley Affiliate Linking Policy

On this episode of the Ruff Talk VR podcast we kick things off with our thoughts on GRIM, the intense VR survival game from Spoonfed Interactive and Combat Waffle Studios. Then we jump into a packed week of VR, including Vertigo Games closing its Amsterdam studio, the Supernatural studio going independent, and I Am Cat topping the PS VR2 charts.We also talk about Arizona Sunshine going flat, Quest 3 headsets heading to the International Space Station, and the latest rumors around Steam Frame and Steam Machine potentially launching this summer. Plus, we cover updates on Trombone Champ: Unflattened, Maskmaker on Horizon+, CleanSheet Soccer 2 coming to PS VR2, Spatial discontinuing its creator program, PiEEG, a permanent price drop for UnLoop, and new smart glasses plans from Meta and Acer.Use code RUFFTALKVR at checkout to save on any game or hardware on the Meta Quest store and help support the show!Showcase application form: https://forms.gle/tnPhzKezn3WuJpCU9Big thank you to all of our Patreon supporters! Become a supporter of the show today at https://www.patreon.com/rufftalkvr0:00 - Episode start1:30 - GRIM12:45- Vertigo Games closes Amsterdam studio35:50- Trombone Champ: Unflattened & Maskmaker Horizon+ 45:35 - Supernatural studio goes independent50:45 - I Am Cat tops PS VR2 charts58:25 - Arizona Sunshine goes flat1:00:50 - Quest 3 heads go to the International Space Station1:06:20 - Steam Frame and Steam Machine coming this summer1:08:05 - Spatial discontinuing creator program1:10:40 - CleanSheet Soccer 2 PS VR21:12:20 - PiEEG1:16:00 - Meta plans 4 new smart glasses models1:18:15 - UnLoop permanent price drop1:19:45 - Acer AR and smart glassesDiscord: https://discord.gg/9JTdCccucSPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/rufftalkvrIf you enjoy the podcast be sure to rate us 5 stars and subscribe! Join our official subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/RuffTalkVR/Support the show

It's time for episode 482 of the Mobile Tech Podcast with guests Don McGuire (Qualcomm) and Domenico Lamberti (TechTechPotato) -- brought to you by Qualcomm. This episode comes in two parts. First, we discuss Qualcomm's Computex 2026 announcements, including Snapdragon C and Dragonfly. Second (15:24), we share our thoughts on Qualcomm's Snapdragon C, Intel's Wildcat Lake, and NVIDIA's RTX Spark. We also cover hot new computers like Acer's Aspire Go 15 and Swift Air 14, ASUS' Ascent QN10, Dell's XPS 13, and more... Fun!Episode Links- Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tnkgrl- Donate / buy me a coffee (PayPal): https://tnkgrl.com/tnkgrl/- Qualcomm: https://www.qualcomm.com/ (sponsor)- Qualcomm at Computex 2026: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/press-kits/computex-2026-press-kit- Don McGuire: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnymac/- Domenico Lamberti: https://www.threads.com/@mobile_dom- Qualcomm Snapdragon C: https://www.xda-developers.com/snapdragon-c-specs/- Intel Wildcat Lake: https://hothardware.com/news/intel-launches-core-series-3-wildcat-lake- NVIDIA RTX Spark: https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-announces-rtx-spark-at-computex-2026- Acer Aspire Go 15: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/we-went-hands-on-with-qualcomms-new-usd300-and-up-arm-laptop-platform-mystery-eight-core-cpu-in-active-cooled-snapdragon-c-laptop-surfaces-in-acer-aspire-go-15- Acer Swift Air 14: https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/acer-swift-air-14-2026-hands-on- ASUS Ascent QN10: https://www.xda-developers.com/snapdragon-x2-elite-is-finally-coming-to-a-mini-pc/- Dell XPS 13: https://www.xda-developers.com/dell-xps-13-2026-hands-on/Affiliate Links (If you use these links to buy something, we might earn a commission)- Apple MacBook Neo: https://amzn.to/3ORAMGM- Apple Mac mini: https://amzn.to/43SxwhV- ASUS Zenbook A14: https://amzn.to/49HF1eX- Acer Swift 14: https://amzn.to/4uUGVkV- Microsoft Surface Laptop: https://amzn.to/4vUmtB9

A Electrolux está completando 100 anos no Brasil e o futuro da marca passa por sustentabilidade, eficiência energética e inovação conectada ao dia a dia dos consumidores. Durante uma visita à fábrica da empresa em Curitiba, o repórter Bruno Bertonzin conversou com João Zeny, diretor de sustentabilidade do Electrolux Group na América Latina, e Alexandre Neves, gerente sênior de design da Electrolux na América Latina. No episódio, os executivos explicam como a empresa trabalha para criar produtos mais econômicos, quais iniciativas existem para descarte consciente de eletrodomésticos antigos e como o Brasil se tornou referência global em design dentro da companhia. A conversa também aborda o impacto das novas regras de eficiência energética no mercado brasileiro, o futuro dos produtos conectados e como a Electrolux pretende continuar relevante nos próximos 100 anos. Você também vai conferir: Acer entrou na disputa dos óculos inteligentes contra a Meta, Agora já dá pra pagar compras usando anéis e pulseiras inteligentes e Canon quer trazer de volta o sucesso das câmeras estilo Cyber-shot. Este podcast foi roteirizado e apresentado por Fernanda Santos e contou com reportagens de Nathan Vieira e Bruno Bertonzin. A trilha sonora é de Guilherme Zomer, a edição de Leandro Gomes e a arte da capa é de Erick Teixeira.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Microsoft's Coreutils for Windows https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Microsoft%27s%20Coreutils%20for%20Windows/33048 Cisco Unified Communications Manager Server-Side Request Forgery Vulnerability CVE-2026-20230 https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-cucm-ssrf-cXPnHcW Firmware Update for Acer Connect W6x Router https://community.acer.com/en/kb/articles/19672 OAuth marketplace apps keep access after publishers vanish https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/04/oauth-marketplace-apps-audit/ My Upcoming Classes https://www.sans.org/profiles/dr-johannes-ullrich

AI oversight arrives at the White House. A Cyber Force gains momentum. Critical infrastructure comes under cyberattack. Acer faces zero-day trouble. A stock exchange executive gets spied on for months. HTTP/2 Bomb threatens web servers. Quantum's classical side grows bigger. Britain's military chooses Starshield. Spain's infamous hacker gets sentenced. Our guest is Benjamin Morrell, Vice President, Security Strategy at Coro Cybersecurity, discussing the role of MSPs. Meta's productivity panopticon pauses for personal pitstops.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest On today's Industry Voices, we are joined by Benjamin Morrell, Vice President, Security Strategy at Coro Cybersecurity, discussing the role MSPs are playing in cybersecurity. If you enjoyed this conversation be sure to check out the full conversation here.  Selected Reading Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking Oversight of A.I. Models (The New York Times) New cyber force would cost up to $11 billion to start, commission says (The Record) CISA Warns of Cyberattacks Targeting U.S. Tank Gauge Systems (GB Hackers) Acer working to patch max severity zero-days in Wave 7 routers (Bleeping Computer) Espionage Campaign Targeted Stock Exchange Executive for Five Months (Security.com) 'HTTP/2 Bomb' Exploit Knocks Web Servers Offline in Seconds (SecurityWeek) The Classical Advances Needed to Make Quantum Computers Tick (IEEE) Alcasec, "Robin Hood of Spanish Hackers," Jailed for 31 Months Over Data Theft (Hackread) Exclusive: UK adopts SpaceX's Starshield for military operations, sources say (Reuters) Meta will reportedly let employees take 30-minute breaks from its tracking program (Engadget) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show.   Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Understanding how children learn and develop in the early years is key to supporting strong educational outcomes and lifelong wellbeing. Last month, the OECD released findings from the 2025 Early Learning and Child Well-being Study, or IELS, the first internationally comparable study designed to measure how children are learning and developing at age 5. The study looks across 3 key domains: foundational learning, executive function, and social and emotional skills. As we know, the early years from birth to age 5 are a critical period for building the foundations children need to communicate, regulate their emotions, concentrate, solve problems and engage with others. In today's episode, we're joined by Dr Dan Cloney, Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research and Lead Researcher for IELS here at ACER. We unpack some of the key findings from the study, explore what made the assessment design unique, and discuss why it's so important to ensure every child arrives at school with the strongest possible foundations. Host: Rebecca Vukovic Guest: Dr Dan Cloney

Gardening podcast - Acer Avenue.  Penny is back in the garden at number two, Acer Avenue, where the Acers are doing their floppy-leaf thing and everyone appears to be digging a hole.In this episode of My Garden Podcast, Penny plants a bargain scaly male fern under the trees, dreams up a Jurassic-style Dingley Dell and wrestles with slugs, compost, muddy knees and Joey's enthusiastic soil redistribution.There's also a low-histamine diet to navigate, the tragic temporary loss of red wine in the bath and some solid dating advice for Penny's hairdresser: if the red flags appear by date two, maybe don't wait for the plot twist.A funny, fern-filled episode about rescue plants, garden transformation and why you want red flowers, not red flags.https://gardenpodcast.co.uk/

Ce lundi 1er juin, François Sorel a reçu Cédric Ingrand, directeur général de Heavyweight Studio, Damien Douani, responsable de l'innovation de l'école Narrativ et fondateur de Topos, et Isabelle Bordry, fondatrice de Retency. Ils sont revenus sur le lancement des processeurs Nvidia pour ordinateurs Windows, ainsi que les nouvelles offres d'ordinateurs portables abordables proposées par Acer et Dell, dans l'émission Tech & Co, la quotidienne, sur BFM Business. Retrouvez l'émission du lundi au jeudi et réécoutez la en podcast.

È ancora aperta la partita sul futuro degli sconti sulle accise. A pochi giorni dalla scadenza del 6 giugno, nel governo si moltiplicano le valutazioni su costi e benefici di un nuovo eventuale intervento sui carburanti, senza che sia ancora maturata una decisione definitiva. Dalla primavera a oggi il taglio delle accise ha cambiato più volte intensità: si è partiti da uno sconto consistente, attorno ai 24 centesimi al litro, per arrivare a una progressiva riduzione. Nell'ultimo decreto il governo ha dimezzato lo sconto sul gasolio, portandolo a circa 12 centesimi al litro, mentre per la benzina il taglio è rimasto più contenuto, attorno ai 6 centesimi. Una modulazione dettata dall'esigenza di contenere l'impatto sui conti pubblici: il conto complessivo dell'operazione sfiora i 2 miliardi di euro, una cifra che rende difficile immaginare ulteriori proroghe senza coperture solide.OSPITE: Davide Tabarelli, presidente Nomisma EnergiaSoftBank investe 75 miliardi in Francia per costruire il più grande hub IA d EuropaSoftBank scommette sulla Francia per accelerare la corsa europea all'intelligenza artificiale (IA). Il gruppo giapponese guidato da Masayoshi Son ha annunciato, secondo quanto rivelato dal Financial Times, un impegno fino a 75 miliardi di euro per sviluppare una vasta rete di infrastrutture dedicate al calcolo avanzato, un progetto che, se completato, diventerebbe il più grande complesso di data center per l IA del continente. L investimento rappresenta il più importante impegno nel settore dell'intelligenza artificiale assunto da SoftBank al di fuori degli Stati Uniti e offre un importante successo politico al presidente francese Emmanuel Macron alla vigilia dell'edizione 2026 di Choose France , l evento con cui Parigi cerca ogni anno di attirare capitali e investimenti internazionali.La decisione - secondo il quotidiano britannico - è maturata rapidamente dopo una cena tra Macron e Son svoltasi a Tokyo all inizio di aprile. In quell'occasione il presidente francese avrebbe illustrato i punti di forza del Paese per ospitare infrastrutture ad alta intensità energetica, puntando in particolare sulla disponibilità di energia nucleare e su procedure autorizzative accelerate per gli impianti legati all'intelligenza artificiale. «SoftBank è orgogliosa di assumere questo importante impegno nei confronti della Francia», ha dichiarato Son. Secondo il fondatore e amministratore delegato del gruppo, le capacità industriali francesi, la disponibilità di competenze specializzate e l ambizione nazionale nel settore tecnologico rendono il Paese uno dei candidati più credibili a diventare un polo europeo dell'intelligenza artificiale. Uno dei principali poli sorgerà a Dunkerque, dove SoftBank collaborerà con Schneider Electric per creare un hub dedicato sia alle infrastrutture per l'intelligenza artificiale sia alla produzione di tecnologie robotiche. La posizione geografica del sito, affacciato sul Mare del Nord e vicino a importanti mercati come Londra, Bruxelles e Amsterdam, è considerata uno degli elementi strategici dell'iniziativa.OSPITE: Danilo Ceccarelli, collaboratore del Sole 24 ore da Parigi Easyjet vola in Borsa sulla manifestazione di interesse di CastlelakeEasyjet bolla come "altamente opportunistica la tempistica" con cui la società di investimento Castlelake sta valutando un'offerta per il vettore britannico e afferma di "non aver avuto alcuna discussione, né di aver ricevuto alcun approccio o proposta" dal potenziale acquirente. Venerdì scorso, a Borsa chiusa, Castlelake aveva reso noto di disporre di una quota del 2,1% nel vettore britannico e di valutare un'offerta a non meno di 403,23 pence ad azione. Sul listino di Londra Easyjet balza stamattina dell'11,6% a 444,1 pence. Il board di Easyjet, si legge nella risposta del vettore britannico, pubblicata poco prima dell'apertura di Borsa, "ha chiaro il proprio dovere di massimizzare il valore per gli azionisti e prenderà in considerazione qualsiasi proposta" ponendo attenzione "in particolare alla valutazione e alla fattibilità" dell'operazione. Con riguardo al primo punto il board rileva "il timing altamente opportunistico" di un'offerta nel momento in cui "il prezzo delle azioni è temporaneamente depresso a causa dell'attuale situazione in Medio Oriente e del suo impatto sulla fiducia dei clienti e sui prezzi del carburante". In tema di fattibilità il cda "rileva le considerevoli sfide normative, finanziarie e operative associate a una potenziale acquisizione di easyJet". Andrea Giuricin, Docente di Economia dei Trasporti all'Università Bicocca di Milano, autore di "Alitalia La privatizzazione infinita" Nvidia sfida Intel e Apple con un nuovo superchip per PcNvidia entra nel mercato dei chip per pc con il nuovo RTX Spark Superchip, che debutterà nei pc fissi e portatili delle principali marche dal prossimo autunno. L'annuncio, riferiscono i media internazionali, è stato fatto dal ceo di Nvidia, Jensen Huang, alla fiera Computex a Taipei. Il 'superchip' di Nvidia rappresenta una sfida diretta a gruppi come Intel, Qualcomm, Amd e Apple, aprendo una nuova linea di business per il colosso da 5,1 trilioni di dollari di capitalizzazione. "Il più efficiente chip per pc mai costruito", come lo ha definito Huang, sarà utilizzato da Dell, Asus, Hp, Lenovo, Microsoft, Acer e Msi.Il superchip di Nvidia, che lavorerà con il software Windows di Microsoft, è una combinazione di un microprocessore e di un chip grafico, realizzato con la collaborazione di MediaTek, e consentirà di eseguire applicazioni e modelli di intelligenza artificiale. La sua fabbricazione aumenta la competizione nel settore dei chip per pc e segnala come Nvidia, che occupa una posizione dominante nel settore dei semiconduttori per le infrastrutture di intelligenza artificiale, stia ampliando la sua offerta, sviluppando chip integrati che alimentano l'intero computer, con l'obiettivo di intercettare i flussi di spesa dei consumatori per sostituire pc datati, messi a dura prova dalle nuove applicazioni di intelligenza artificiale, con laptop più performanti.OSPITE: Alessandro Plateroti, Direttore editoriale Ucapital.com

[powerpresss] My co-host Ken Suzan and I are welcoming you to episode 175 of our podcast IP Fridays! Today's interview guest is Bruce Dearling, patent attorney and partner at Hepworth Browne in the UK, and we talk about how non-technical features must be considered when assessing inventive step of patents at least according to recent decisions of the UK supreme court and the Unified Patent Court. Profile of Bruce Dearling UK Supreme Court Emotional Perception AI Limited UPC Abbot vs Sinocare But before we jump into this interesting interview, I have news for you: On May 20, 2026, the Swiss Federal Council adopted the fully revised Patent Ordinance, which will enter into force on January 1, 2027, together with the revised Patent Act. In the future, the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property will prepare a mandatory search report for each application; applicants can choose between a partially examined version and a full examination that assesses novelty and inventive step. The full examination costs an additional 300 Swiss francs, and renewal fees will increase by a total of eight percent over the 20-year term. On May 19, 2026, Asus entered into a licensing agreement with the Wi-Fi multimode patent pool managed by Sisvel, thereby ending all ongoing infringement proceedings. Sisvel bundles standard-essential patents in the pool from, among others, Atlantia, ETRI, and Mitsubishi Electric. On May 18, 2026, the UPC Local Chamber in Düsseldorf rejected Align Technology's application for a preliminary injunction against its Chinese competitor Angelalign. Angelalign may continue to sell its clear aligners within the UPC jurisdiction. Our partners Dirk Schulz, Ulrich Storz, and Wanze Zhang, together with Arnold Ruess, successfully represented Angelalign. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced midweek that, since October of last year, it has invalidated or is seeking to invalidate approximately 10,500 trademark applications and registrations in eleven administrative orders. Reasons include forged attorney signatures and the fabrication of non-existent filing requirements. This stems from ongoing abuse of the U.S. trademark system, primarily by non-U.S. applicants, which can lead to conflicts with validly registered trademarks for legitimate businesses. On May 12, 2026, the British Court of Appeal overturned a lower court decision that would have required Nokia to grant interim licenses for video coding patents. The court found that Nokia's license offer to the Taiwanese manufacturers Acer and Asus had already been made on RAND terms. In May, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a brief in the ongoing Corteva v. Inari litigation, expressing antitrust concerns regarding certain patent practices in the field of plant breeding. This marks the first time the agency has actively intervened in a biopharmaceutical patent dispute with implications for seed innovations. Episode 175 of the IP Fridays podcast was a conversation I will not forget quickly. My guest Bruce Dearling, partner at Hepworth Brown in the UK and a patent attorney for 36 years, took a case through every level of the British court system up to the Supreme Court and, in doing so, fundamentally changed patent law for AI inventions in the UK. The case is called Emotional Perception, and its effects reach well beyond British borders. Below I summarize the key points from our conversation. The full episode is available at IP Fridays. A. What Is the Emotional Perception Case About? The underlying invention concerns artificial neural networks. Specifically, it relates to a method of closing what is called the semantic gap at the output of a neural network. That sounds abstract, but the idea is straightforward: a neural network always produces an output that does not fully correspond to what a human would actually expect or feel. Closing that gap brings the system closer to human perception and human expectations. Bruce Dearling drafted this application himself and filed it at the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). The Office rejected it as excluded subject matter, characterizing it as essentially a computer program as such. The legal basis for that rejection was the Aerotel decision from 2006. The case then went to the High Court, which found in favor of the applicant. The Court of Appeal reversed that decision. Then the UK Supreme Court stepped in and changed everything. B. The Aerotel Test and Its Flaws Since 2006, the Aerotel test had been the standard British method for assessing whether an invention falls within the excluded categories under patent law. It was a four-step approach: construe the claim, identify the actual contribution the invention makes to human knowledge, ask whether that contribution falls solely within excluded subject matter, and finally check whether the contribution is technical in nature. The problem Dearling described in our conversation is that Aerotel reverses the logical order of the analysis. You start with the contribution and only then ask about the exclusions under Article 52 EPC. The UK Supreme Court described Aerotel in its judgment as “unsound law” and overturned it. The EPO’s Technical Boards of Appeal had previously called Aerotel “disingenuous,” which at the time led to a public dispute between the British courts and the Boards. With the Emotional Perception ruling, that conflict has now been resolved in favor of harmonization with the EPO. C. What the UK Supreme Court Decided The Supreme Court made two central findings. First, the exclusion of computer programs “as such” is overcome as soon as a claim includes any piece of hardware. It does not matter whether that is a processor, a memory module, or any other component. The threshold is deliberately low. Dearling described this as the “any hardware” approach, which aligns fully with the EPO’s position following G1/19. Second, and in Dearling’s assessment the more important finding: when assessing inventive step, the invention must be considered as a whole. The Court introduced what it called an “intermediate step,” an analytical stage in which the interactions between all features of a claim are examined before the question of inventive step is addressed. Non-technical features cannot simply be struck out if they contribute to the overall technical effect of the invention. D. Inventive Step: The Intermediate Step This is the heart of the judgment. In EPO practice, Dearling said, it happens regularly that examiners strike through features they consider non-technical and thereby fail to assess the invention’s inventive step correctly. A recent Technical Board of Appeal decision, T 1249/22, already criticized this approach: a claim directed at a technical solution to a problem can be patentable even if the underlying problem is non-technical in nature. Dearling recalled a remark made by a Board of Appeal member at a hearing he attended years ago: “We understand that examining divisions can operate with a degree of mental laziness and that it’s too easy to throw too many things out of the basket when considering the issues of inventive step.” That quote stayed with him because it names a structural problem that the intermediate step now addresses directly. The British method for assessing inventive step is the Pozzoli test, which differs from the EPO’s problem-solution approach. The Supreme Court explicitly retained Pozzoli because the problem-solution approach, in its view, is structurally infected with hindsight reasoning: you already know the invention, you work backwards to formulate an objective technical problem, and then you ask whether it would have been obvious for the skilled person to arrive at precisely that solution. Dearling sees this as a source of unfairness toward genuine inventions. E. Alignment with the Unified Patent Court In April 2025, the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court issued a decision in Abbott v. Sinocare (APP_000000901/2025, judgment of 17 April 2025). Dearling pointed out that this decision uses language and reasoning strikingly similar to the UK Supreme Court’s Emotional Perception ruling of February 2025. That is significant because the UPC is bound neither by UK courts nor by the EPO. The overlap suggests voluntary convergence. Dearling reported a conversation with a person close to the EPO, whom he did not name, who used the word “permissive” to describe the UK Supreme Court’s approach and indicated that the EPO might move toward it. Whether and how quickly that happens remains to be seen. What is clear is that the UPC, as the new European patent court, is setting its own standards, and the question of how to handle non-technical features in inventive step assessment is now being asked at multiple levels simultaneously. F. Implications for the EPO and Practice The EPO is not directly bound by the ruling. It is an administrative body, not a court. Dearling is nonetheless optimistic that change is coming. On one hand, external pressure is building: when the UK Supreme Court and the UPC articulate similar principles, convergence becomes hard to resist. On the other hand, Article 27.1 TRIPS requires all contracting states to make patents available in all fields of technology. Examiners routinely striking non-technical features from AI claims and rejecting them on that basis sits uncomfortably with that obligation. For the underlying application in the Emotional Perception case, the ruling has a pointed consequence. The Supreme Court did not grant the patent itself; it referred the matter back to the UKIPO for reconsideration under the intermediate step. The Office’s subsequent response was, in Dearling’s words, unconvincing. He suspects the Office is attempting to reintroduce the Aerotel test through the back door. As a last resort, he has not excluded a judicial review, a procedure that does not simply challenge the substantive decision but holds the Comptroller General of Patents to account for whether the Office is deliberately circumventing the Supreme Court’s direction on the intermediate step. That is, as Dearling put it, “a nuclear option,” but one he would not rule out if the evidence in the file already suggests the Office is in contempt of court. There is also an international dimension. Singapore’s Intellectual Property Office launched a public consultation shortly after the ruling, asking whether Singapore should adopt the Emotional Perception approach into national law. That is British soft power operating in real time within the Commonwealth. G. Three Takeaways for Patent Practitioners At the end of our conversation I asked Bruce Dearling to distill the most important practical points. His first takeaway: make sure the claim contains hardware. This applies not only to UK and European applications but is simply good drafting hygiene. Without hardware in the claim, the application remains exposed. The second takeaway concerns the description. Anyone filing an AI invention needs to explain clearly which function is achieved by which piece of hardware, circuit, or software. Not as boilerplate, but as a complete technical account that describes the real-world effects. Dearling’s experience is that practitioners who write the claim first and fill in the description afterward run into trouble. The third takeaway emerged from the conversation itself: how the EPO assesses inventive step for AI inventions is not a settled question. It is worth following the development of UPC case law and any shifts in EPO practice closely. Anyone advising on AI patent applications today needs to know these arguments. H. Conclusion The UK Supreme Court’s Emotional Perception ruling is not a British footnote. It has declared the Aerotel test dead, introduced the intermediate step that brings non-technical features back into the inventive step analysis, and set off a convergence movement that is already visible at the UPC and still pending at the EPO. For everyone working in AI patent practice, whether in prosecution, examination, or counseling, this ruling is required reading. Rolf Claessen: Our interview guest on IP Fridays podcast is Bruce Dearling. He has been in the IP field and a patent attorney for 36 years and is partner at Hepworth Brown in the UK. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. Bruce Dearling: My pleasure, Rolf. Thank you for inviting me. Rolf Claessen: All right. We just met at the INTA annual meeting in London. And you talked about the UK Supreme Court case where you were involved. And the core questions were whether non-technical features would be considered when assessing inventive step of patents. Can you briefly summarize this case? Bruce Dearling: It’s a bit more than that. It started — I actually wrote the case. And I prosecuted it through the patent office. The patent office rejected the case for being excluded subject matter. So pretty much the excluded subject matter provisions in the UK are nearly identical. They’re as near as practical to the language of the EPC, so those of the European Patent Office — Article 52.2. But again, they apply as such. The actual technology relates to artificial neural networks. And the invention related to a very clever way of what is termed closing the semantic gap at the output of the neural network. So that means that in a neural network, there is always a discrepancy between the output of the neural network in terms of what it’s telling you you should be thinking essentially, and what reality is. So if you can close the semantic gap, then you align the neural network or the artificial intelligence system to better reflect human knowledge or human reactions and human expectations. So that’s really what the invention is about. There’s no point in going into too much detail with it — that’s the way it is. It’s very clever. So the UKIPO rejected this because they said it was essentially a computer program excluded from patentability as such. And they used a decision which is called Aerotel, which has been around since 2006. And that decision has caused considerable consternation and tension between the EPO Technical Boards of Appeal and the UK courts. Aerotel was described as being essentially disingenuous by the EPO Technical Board of Appeal. And the UK courts pushed back and said, you don’t know what you’re talking about. So that’s where it fell apart. So that’s where they rejected it for essentially being a computer program as such, possibly with a bit of business methods thrown in as well. But let’s leave that for the time being. So the case then went to the High Court and at the High Court, we won. The judge said, actually, it’s not a computer program. Neural networks aren’t computers. They’re not programs themselves. There’s more to them than that. And the invention as claimed is not excluded from patentability as such. The UKIPO obviously weren’t very happy about that because they liked their Aerotel case and so they appealed it. And they appealed it on several grounds, including a new one, which was that it was a mathematical method. The Court of Appeal decided that the UKIPO was right and that we were wrong, so we lost the case. So we then went to the Supreme Court. Well, actually, they denied us an ability to go to the Supreme Court. The court said no appeal. We went — actually, no, I think there is a bigger issue here — because we realized, or I realized at that point, that the work that we were doing was much broader than this. It requires real consideration of what an invention is at a fundamental level. So not only exclusions, but how inventive step is applied. And these issues were built into the case from the very beginning. And they sort of — I wouldn’t say crept up on the court as we went through — but they became more and more prominent to the extent that ultimately, when we made an application to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court went, yeah, we’ve got some issues here. We want to hear the full arguments on why this is not excluded from patentability, why Aerotel is potentially bad and how we more or less try to align ourselves with the European Patent Office. So that’s essentially what happened. And the Supreme Court hearing was last July. It took them the thick end of eight months to come out with a decision, which was issued in early February, at which point the entire legal landscape in the UK changed because they said we were right. The Patent Office doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Aerotel is bad. It’s unsound. That’s what they described it as — unsound law. It needs to be removed and we’re going to harmonize with the European Patent Office. So before I — I’m just going on a bit of a rant here, standing on my soapbox telling you what you already know. But the Aerotel test essentially was — it was a four-step test, past tense. So you firstly had to construe the claim. That’s pretty straightforward. Then you actually had to identify the actual contribution. This is what they said — identify the contribution. Really in this aspect, you’re asking what, as a matter of substance rather than form, the inventor has added to human knowledge. So that’s what they said the contribution was. And then they said, the next step in Aerotel was to ask, well, does that contribution fall solely within the excluded subject matter field or realm? And then they said, well, if you get through that question, then you check the actual contribution or the alleged contribution to see whether it’s technical in nature. So that’s the Aerotel test as it was. And what the Supreme Court in their unanimous final decision said was that Aerotel at best jumbles up the order. It reverses the logical order of the analysis by starting with the contributions and then addressing the Article 52 exclusions. And then finally it goes back to what the technical nature of the invention is about. So they really went, no, we don’t like any of this stuff. It’s bad, it’s stupid, it puts the cart before the horse. So, in the intervening period between finding the case and actually seeing it progress all the way to the Supreme Court, we obviously had the G1/19 decision from the EPO Enlarged Board. And they basically said that they are going to validate any hardware as the approach. And that’s essentially what the UK also went with. The UK Supreme Court said we’re going to say that the threshold of patentability — or the exclusion to patentability — is simply overcome by the inclusion in a claim of any piece of hardware, whether it’s a processor or a piece of memory or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Any hardware makes the invention a technical invention. So it’s a really low threshold to consider. And they then went, well, actually, if we now align and harmonize with the European Patent Office sensibly, then we need to look at how we assess inventive step, which is the other thing that we raised with the Supreme Court. In fact, we probably raised it at other times and in all the other instances as well, but it came to a head at the Supreme Court. So the Supreme Court then also went a bit further and said, well, actually, whilst we do like the global approach to assessing inventive step for all fields of technology — whether it’s chemistry or biotech or electronics or software or AI — we use a test called Pozzoli. So that isn’t problem-solution. We don’t like problem-solution. We think it’s not codified in the European Patent Office. It’s just a mechanism that the EPO has come up with to try to objectively assess inventive step. We don’t particularly think that’s appropriate. We like our approach called Pozzoli. That’s it. So we’re going to say with Pozzoli, however, in order to actually understand — particularly in the context of mixed inventions having technical and non-technical features — it’s necessary for the examiner to undertake the so-called intermediate step, where you have to look at the interactions between features within a claim. The invention is defined by the claim. That’s what the act says. That’s what everyone understands. It’s the invention defined by the claim. So you look at the claim features and then you have to understand the interactions that take place. And even if they are between technical and non-technical features, if they bring about an overall technical effect when you consider the invention as a whole, then your claim should be good and you can assess it for classical inventive step. So that’s really where we’re at. There’s a lot to unpack there already. It’s probably a podcast in its own right, but that’s the positive history of where we’re at. And I can keep going if you wish me to for a second and talk about why I think this is — we’ll just contrast it quickly with the problem-solution approach at the EPO and COMVIK. So for inventions in the computer-implemented field, they use COMVIK and the problem-solution approach. The Supreme Court said, as I said, they don’t like problem-solution. I think the problem-solution issue is that it is also inherently pre-baked with hindsight because you have to look at the invention and then step back and exclude those features which are common. And then you formulate a problem based on the function that the claim achieves. And then you’re asking whether or not it would be obvious for a skilled person to arrive at the claimed invention, having been given that hindsight-developed problem. So COMVIK is not great by any means. And we know from a practical perspective that examiners are only too willing to look at a claim and simply line through features which they believe are non-technical, whereas they don’t actually look at the interaction of those features in the context of the claim as a whole. There is also a decision — very recent one actually, about a year ago — T 1249/22, where the Technical Board of Appeal told the examiners and the examining division, you cannot do this. It’s okay to have a claim directed towards an invention in a non-technical field, as long as the invention is directed to a technical solution of that problem. I think it’s paragraphs 11 and 12 or 10 of that decision that are worth looking at. But they’re saying that in all fields of technology, it doesn’t matter as long as the technical solution is about technology — therefore, you should be able to obtain a patent as long as there is a realistic and appropriate technical effect. Be careful actually, Bruce — I don’t mean technical contribution, I mean technical effect. There’s a reason for that distinction. Rolf Claessen: The non-technical features are nevertheless used to assess inventive step in the UK now after this decision, right? Bruce Dearling: Yes, that is the intermediate step. The decision says you must look at the invention as a whole. It’s the important thing. There are a couple of issues that arise out of this. The first one is that you have to provide context for the invention. The Supreme Court never provided any specific guidance about how we deal with the intermediate step or what the exact test is, which is in some respects fine. It seems to be fairly clear that you just have to engage your gray matter — your neurons — to work out what is going on in the real world. And once you work out what’s going on in the real world, what the benefits are, then you look at whether or not the actual implementation of the invention fundamentally has a technical flavor to it, which is not just coding, not just simple coding, but it does something smarter. There’s a real technical impetus. There’s a technical effect. Now that actually brings me onto something I’ve postulated or said. I think the intermediate step will follow something like what I’ve termed the holistic character test, which essentially is: work out what’s going on in the real world. Then once you’ve worked out what’s actually being achieved, what the benefits are, what the invention’s concerned with, then you ask the question, how am I achieving it technically? And how is there a technical effect? How does the technical effect arise? That brings out a couple of issues. The first one is that it’s actually about the word “contribution” because it depends on how the word is used. So if you look at head note one in COMVIK, it uses the word “contribute” — how the non-technical feature contributes to the invention. So that’s an additive inclusive concept. The UK IPO historically, and arguably at the moment today whilst they’re trying to retrain their 400 examiners — which this has caused them to have to do — their idea of contribution is this backward-looking concept. So technical contribution and technical effect, I think — although we mix them up and interchange them — are distinct. Technical contribution: you’re looking backwards. Technical effect is what you look at when you look forward into what’s going on. So this is subtle — it’s really subtle, but it’s important. And once you realize that you are actually looking for the technical effects, then you’re on much safer ground. It’s much more objective in terms of the assessment. This might be somewhat contentious, because it’s the way I’m looking at this, but I’ve been working on this a long, long time and thinking about it for probably decades, worryingly so. So technical contribution and technical effects are probably not the same, where they are interchangeably used to mean the same thing within existing decisions. Rolf Claessen: And in the beginning you said, now that Aerotel is dead basically, it’s more harmonized with the EPO’s approach. But what I take from the discussion now is that maybe — especially in view of the problem-solution approach — it’s not fully harmonized with the EPO’s approach at the moment, right? Or did the UK Supreme Court get something wrong, or was that a desired outcome from your point of view that this is not so completely harmonized with the EPO? Bruce Dearling: Well, the EPO — the any-hardware solution is fully harmonized, no doubt. So it’s now a question of inventive step under Article 56 or Section 3 of the Act. The EPC nowhere mandates the use of problem-solution. And we know that there are many different ways of actually assessing inventive step, including the concrete elaboration test from last year and problem-of-invention approaches. So there are numerous ways of assessing inventive step. So the UK says, “Pozzoli — we like Pozzoli.” Interestingly, I had a discussion with someone I probably can’t mention. They’re saying that the UK approach may actually be more permissive now. It might even influence how the EPO operates. So they may move away from COMVIK towards more of a Pozzoli approach, which basically says this: You identify the notion of the skilled person — step one. You identify the common general knowledge of that skilled person — step one B. You identify the inventive concept of the claim in question, where you construe it if you can’t work out what it is. You then identify what the differences are. And then you ask the question, is it obvious to the skilled person, given knowledge of the common general knowledge? This is entirely not artificial because, as I said beforehand, when you look at problem-solution, you are formulating a problem by backtracking from what the claimed invention is to a situation where you say, well, these are the common features and I’m going to project a problem to try and solve. Now that is already tainted with hindsight reasoning. It’s not safe, it’s not thoroughly objective. There is an inherent problem with this which sees good inventions cast by the wayside. Although it’s a preferred mechanism, it’s not fully baked. There are situations where examiners are inherently lazy, or they just simply use something like the requirements specification argument, which is just factual. It just demonstrates that they can’t be bothered to actually argue it properly or think about what the invention is. Sorry to any examiners listening to this, but this is just my personal view, that sometimes there are problems. I’m reminded of a quote from an EPI hearing I was at a long time ago, where the Legal Board of Appeal member said: “We understand that examining divisions can operate with a degree of mental laziness and that it’s too easy to throw too many things out of the basket when considering the issues of inventive step.” Now that one has stayed with me because you think — did someone just say that? And the answer is yes, they did. But it just goes to show that there is some tension between the TBA and the examining divisions, and they don’t always get it right. Rolf Claessen: So there might be a small difference now between the UKIPO’s future approach of assessing inventive step and the EPO? Bruce Dearling: Yeah, it might do. But the other interesting thing here — and thank you for pointing this out, I hadn’t entirely caught up with it, I’ve been traveling beforehand and I missed some of the UPC case law. So the UPC case law — in, was it — yeah, we talked about that. Rolf Claessen: Yeah. There was a decision in April, Abbott versus Sinocare. Bruce Dearling: Yeah, 901 of 2025. So a Court of Appeal decision from the UPC. It was APP_000000901, I believe, 2025. Decision 17th of April, hearing 27th of March. The UPC is not bound by — it’s a court. The European Patent Office is not a court, it’s an agency that administers and looks after the administrative rule of law. So the fact that this decision came out from the UK Supreme Court in February, and you see almost identical language used in the UPC decision, suggests that there is some alignment here, or some convergence in thought. Now, whilst the UPC decision also references G1/19 and uses problem-solution, there is enough — you’ve got to bear in mind that high-level courts do look at each other’s decisions. And this is really a question of influence and the desire to converge. So the fact that they’ve done this at this time is quite interesting. Again, I can’t quote someone directly from the EPO, although I would love to. They were saying — at a very high level — and they used the words “converge UPC practice towards UK Supreme Court practice on interpretation of the law.” So this may actually be happening in real time. Again, it would be wrong to actually refer to anyone by name, but it’s an observation that when I looked at the case, I can see why this is going ahead. And I can see why the judiciaries — they want to maintain independent judicial controls. They won’t reference the UK Supreme Court decision, not least because we’re not in the UPC. But if you look at the arguments in sections 106 and 107 of the UK Supreme Court’s Emotional Perception decision and head note one, you go — wow, this is very close. Rolf Claessen: Very close and nearly identical wording. Yeah. And the UPC also now uses non-technical features for assessing inventive step. Is that a problem for the EPO that has historically been aggressive in throwing out non-technical features for inventive step analysis? Bruce Dearling: Well, I think they really need to get to the situation — I don’t know — this holistic character test that I’m sort of proposing, where you really have to think about what the invention is achieving, and then look at how it’s technically being achieved. And then if you look at that again in the context of that other decision I mentioned — T 1249/22 — it says something like, in the case of an invention that amounts to a technical implementation of a non-technical method, provided the non-technical method does not contribute to the technical character of the invention. The board validated the approach of identifying the non-technical method and then goes through and says it’s patentable. There are decisions like this which suggest that examining divisions have to give it a bit more thought, because the Technical Board will realize that to satisfy the WTO requirements — which pretty much everyone is bound by — Article 27.1 TRIPS, which requires that you protect all fields of technology. And that means whether it’s data processing or business methods, because business methods can be patentable so long as they are implemented on a technical basis. That essentially seems to be what T 1249/22 is saying, although it doesn’t explicitly say “allowing business methods.” The exclusion is only “as such.” So does this decision, in combination with the Supreme Court case and the movement of the UPC, say: well, actually, let’s look at this properly? It requires objective assessments, not just superficial “let’s strike through that feature because I don’t like it, it looks non-technical.” Rolf Claessen: So are you hopeful that the EPO is adjusting and will reshape their case law in view of the UPC decision and the UK Supreme Court decision? Bruce Dearling: It’s a bit unfortunate that the corresponding UK case at the EPO was dropped by the applicants, because it was heading towards an examination hearing at the examining division. It would have gone to the TBA, and I’m sure it would then have gone from the TBA to the Enlarged Board. I’m pretty sure that’s the case. There is another case from the same client which will probably argue the same thing because the specs are almost identical. It’s just lagged in time. So is it going to change? I hope so, because I think the EPO have got it wrong — more often than not in this field. Well, maybe not more often than not — they get it wrong more times than they should do. Would I like to see it changed? Yes, I would, because I want the examiners to actually think about the technology as opposed to just — oh, it’s not — I don’t want to engage the gray matter. That serves no one. That doesn’t serve technology. That doesn’t serve industry. These patent rights are there for a reason. They are property rights. I’m referring to the award of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Economics — they are a core driver for society’s development. So the 2025 Nobel Prize was for something called creative destruction — the replacement of old technology with new — and it’s based on the patent paradigm. So all this stuff is coming to a head now. It’s just a question of how quickly the EPO actually catch up, and maybe they have something to catch up on. It’s just understanding that the examiners have to start to think. As I said, we’ve got the issues at the UKIPO where they’re going to have to retrain 400 examiners. Rolf Claessen: Yeah, right. Bruce Dearling: The Emotional Perception case wasn’t granted by the Supreme Court. They referred it back to the patent office for consideration under the intermediate step. So the patent office produced a response that I would describe as — I’d say arguably — not well reasoned, which I’ve filed the response to, which basically says you don’t really know what you’re talking about. What really worries me a bit is that I think they’re trying to introduce the Aerotel case through the back door. It’s backsliding. It’s a mechanism for trying to apply it in a different way or a different context, which would be wrong. I think they believe that the applicant will appeal this if they get a bad decision — they will appeal it back to the courts again via the High Court, Court of Appeal, Supreme Court route. I say maybe not. I say maybe the client will file what they call a judicial review, which is a nuclear option. That’s when you actually hold the Comptroller General of Patents to account and get full discovery of whether or not there’s internal documentation showing that they are deliberately circumventing the direction of the Supreme Court on the intermediate step. This is basically holding them to account and saying: if you’re not applying the intermediate step appropriately, you are in contempt of the law. So judicial review is a really serious thing to do, but it’s certainly something I would not exclude from consideration. We’ll see what happens. It’s not saying we’re just going to go through the courts and make them decide on this. We’re going to say you’re wrong. And there’s already enough evidence in the files to suggest that they are probably in contempt of court and they’re not applying the intermediate step appropriately. They may not know any better at the moment — they need to be guided — but the consequences for them are potentially severe. Rolf Claessen: I have another question for you. You were the instructing attorney — do you think the decision was perfect? What argument that you made was the most underappreciated by the court? And where do you think the judgment got it wrong, or was it all perfect? Bruce Dearling: No, it got 90% or 95% correct. The intermediate step is right. That’s the most important thing in the decision — it’s the intermediate step. The any-hardware thing — that’s logical, that makes some sense — but if people say “if the any-hardware rule is the important bit,” no it isn’t. It’s the intermediate step. That’s the important thing. Where do they go wrong? I think they went wrong because — and you’ve got to bear in mind that unlike German courts, I’ve got to be careful about how I express this — generally, as I understand it, and correct me if I’m wrong, but the judiciary in Germany on patent cases are generally more technically able. They’re normally technically qualified. I look at the Supreme Court justices and the Court of Appeal justices — we had one who was a humanities undergrad, one was a chemist. Good luck with trying to argue complex artificial neural network technologies, which are difficult even for me to understand. And I’ve been working in the field. They’re hard to understand. They require real understanding, real appreciation. They could say, well, actually we don’t need to look at the technology — but frankly, if you’re looking at the statutes and exclusions to patentability and asking what a computer program is, then you need to understand what these technical terms really are. And if you can’t, then the judgment is potentially flawed. Their finding that the neural network is a computer program is, I think, technically obtuse. You know that the Singaporean government — the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore — released about six weeks ago a consultation note to the Singaporean profession and population, asking: is the Emotional Perception case right, and do we need to adopt it into Singaporean national law? So this is direct soft power from the UK Supreme Court changing Commonwealth legislation and statutes. We’ll see what happens. But from what I’ve seen of a draft response from the attorneys, they’re saying essentially: we agree any hardware is right, the intermediate step is right. The assessment of the neural network as a computer program is wrong, or it just doesn’t make any sense. And I’ve made the same comments before in SIPA, in the relevant round in March. There’s a disconnect. I mean, it’s like they equate a computer program with being able to be run on an analog computer. Now, an analog computer has no central processing unit. An analog computer just has resistors and transistors and capacitors. So if they’re saying that an analog computer can run a program — that’s essentially what they’re saying in part of the judgment. Where is the program in an analog computer? And if they’re saying it’s in the values of the resistors and the capacitors, then that has implications for any circuit we’ve got — it’s potentially a computer program — which is just madness, because it doesn’t sit well with the legislation and decisions we’ve looked at over the last 50 years. This is a real problem. It may be a storm in a teacup because you can overcome the objections by having any hardware, but it’s an argument they shouldn’t have been making. It seems to be abstract legal argumentation which has little credibility in my personal view, although it’s now law. It may be that someone can take that, have an argument with the Supreme Court, get them to fix this. The other thing is the EPO looks at a neural network as a mathematical method, and the UK now says it’s a computer program. Neither is right. The EPO is wrong as well. If you look at the actual decision which they regularly quote — the Vicom case — if you actually read the claim and look at the case, you see that it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. A neural network has applied mathematics in it. It can be based on a computer program because it’s required to set up the learning objectives and the loss function. Mathematical processes — it tweaks the weighting factors of neurons over the course of the training epochs. But at the end of the day, if the function performed by the neural network is new and it’s directed towards a technical implementation which is technically relevant, then it shouldn’t fail for being a mathematical method. And I think the EPO guidelines actually say that. Even recommendations — the UK court said that a recommendation is not technical. Well, actually it is, because it’s data processing, and you’ve got to work out how does the data processing work to provide an improved recommendation? Again, it goes back to the T 1249/22 decision. There’s a whole raft of these things which are left not entirely resolved. There’s enough here to keep someone busy for a few more years. Rolf Claessen: Right. So I have a question for you now that we’ve talked about the decision of the UK Supreme Court and the UPC — the Unified Patent Court — with very, very similar wording. What do you say are the three most important takeaways for patent practitioners in the US, in Europe, in the UK, before the EPO? Are there any things that you really want patent practitioners to take away from our discussion here? Bruce Dearling: Yeah, okay. So first: make sure the claim has some structure in it. You need to have any hardware. That’s number one — in terms of claim drafting. In terms of the description, you really have to understand what the invention is about. And you’ve got to make sure that you explain what function is achieved by what piece of hardware, kit or software. And if you do that — don’t nickel-and-dime this by writing the claim first — I would suggest that you run into problems. You need to understand what the invention is about. And you need to make sure that the description is complete and full to describe the functionality and the effects that are achieved in the real world. And if you can do that, then you’re on a much sounder basis — much, much stronger. There’s a much stronger foundation for this. So that’s two things. Is there a third one? That’s me being a bit cheeky, but I suppose I know what’s going on. Rolf Claessen: Yeah, but maybe the third takeaway is that maybe the EPO will rethink the way — at least how AI inventions are assessed for inventive step. Bruce Dearling: Well, as I said to you before, it could be that that’s the case. I don’t want to repeat myself again. The word “permissive” was used in a conversation I had with respect to the UK Supreme Court approach. COMVIK fundamentally still breaks with me and has done for years, because the way it’s set up and the way it’s applied distorts fundamentally what the invention is about. And until such time as that distortion is removed, there is a problem of objectivity versus subjectivity. And I think that’s really what the EPO has to grapple with. It’s not an easy thing to deal with, but maybe there are things going on. Bruce Dearling: It’s not an easy thing to deal with. I don’t know who’s going to argue it. It would have been useful for me to still have the original case up and running at the EPO because these arguments would have been fleshed out. I’m pretty sure they would have been referred to the Enlarged Board. We would have got it resolved. So it’s whether or not I can now work this into the existing case to try and get the examining division to — well, they will refuse, I suspect. And then it’ll go to the TBA. And then the TBA will have to look at this, hopefully with the referrals to the Enlarged Board. And then that fixes the problem on a national and international basis. Rolf Claessen: Yeah. Let’s see. [Laughs] Bruce Dearling: No, we don’t know. I mean, you might have a different view. What do you think? Do you think COMVIK is fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong? Rolf Claessen: Well, I’m not so much into AI inventions. I’m a chemist and I usually deal with chemistry inventions. But from the discussion that we had, I think that the EPO might rethink their position. I don’t know. Let’s see. Let’s hope so. Bruce Dearling: Well, they liked it. They liked problem-solution. It’s been with us for 25 years. It suggests that it’s a compromise. It’s not mandated by the European Patent Convention — that’s the point. It’s something they think works. And these things only work until such time as someone comes along and says, actually, you’re wrong, and this is the reason. Rolf Claessen: Let’s see if they choose a different route at least for AI inventions. So Bruce, thank you very much for your insight and for talking about the case that you were involved in with the UK Supreme Court. Where could people reach you if they have more questions about this field — basically patents, AI protection in the UK and Europe — and if they want to ask you more questions about this case? Bruce Dearling: Sure. Through the Hepworth Brown website or my LinkedIn profile, I suppose. The Hepworth Brown website has an email link. I’m trying to post things on it as well to try and provide a bit more context. But if people have fundamental questions on this stuff, then I’m happy to try and answer them. I suppose that I can be considered to be quite knowledgeable in the area. Rolf Claessen: Right. Certainly more than I am. [Laughing] Bruce Dearling: So I was fortunate. As a consequence of the work I’m doing, I was appointed last year to the WIPO Standing Committee on Patents and Privacy. That was discussed for the issues of where WIPO goes and what the direction of the problems are that we have in high-tech areas. So there seems to be some degree of understanding that I might know what I’m talking about. I think I probably do. Rolf Claessen: Thank you, Bruce. Thank you very much for being on IP Fridays. Bruce Dearling: My pleasure. Thank you very much, Rolf.

This week we discuss memory crisis profiteering, a new piracy clampdown, confusing roaming charges and an expensive accident with a MacBook Pro. The Hot Hardware of the Week is Acer's PD1520U ultra-short-throw projector.

In this podcast special, Dominique Beech sits down with Dr Dan Edwards, Acting Head of ACER's Student Learning and Progress Division, to talk about the future of assessment. He shares his insights on how assessment can support students at key transition points across K-12, the impact of AI, and more.

News and Updates: AI Compute Tax Debate: Economists and policymakers are debating taxing AI processing power to offset job displacement and fund social services, though critics argue it's too blunt a tool. AI Dividend Proposal: NY congressional candidate Alex Bores unveiled an "AI Dividend" plan funding direct payments to Americans through a token tax on AI consumption and equity stakes in frontier AI firms. Screenless Fitness Trackers Surge: Screenless wearables like Oura Ring and Whoop are booming, with U.S. fitness tracker purchases up 88% and smart ring sales up 195% between 2024 and 2025. Canvas Hacker Payout: Instructure, maker of the Canvas education platform, reached an undisclosed "agreement" with the ShinyHunters hacking gang after a breach exposed data from 275 million users across 9,000 institutions. FCC Router Ban vs. Supply Chain: AT&T warned the FCC that a global DRAM and NAND flash shortage, driven by AI deployments, is complicating compliance with its ban on foreign-made Wi-Fi routers. Google Unveils Googlebook: Google announced a new laptop line called Googlebooks running a fused Android/ChromeOS platform, featuring Gemini AI integration and a "Magic Pointer," with hardware partners including Acer, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.

On this week's episode of The MacRumors Show, we discuss Google's latest wave of announcements for Android and Gemini, the newly announced Fitbit Air, and Apple Watch Series 12 rumors.The centerpiece of Google's announcements this week was Gemini Intelligence, Google's new umbrella platform for AI across phones, watches, cars, and laptops. Its headline capability is cross-app automation: users can photograph an event flyer and ask Gemini to find tickets on Expedia, or pull up a grocery list and have it build a cart in a shopping app. A companion feature called Create My Widget lets users describe a home screen widget in natural language and have Gemini generate it, drawing from Gmail and Calendar to build a personalized dashboard.Google also unveiled the Googlebook, a new laptop category designed from the ground up around Gemini with partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo arriving this fall. Gemini in Chrome for Android gained an agentic browsing layer rolling out end of June, and Android Auto received AI-generated contextual replies and DoorDash voice ordering. A Meta partnership brings Ultra HDR, native stabilization, and night mode to Instagram on Android flagship devices.In January, Apple and Google announced a partnership under which Gemini would power the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, including a more personalized Siri expected this year. Apple's equivalent cross-app ‌Siri‌ actions were announced at WWDC 2024 but have not yet shipped; Gemini Intelligence is rolling out this summer using the same underlying technology.Google also unveiled the Fitbit Air this week, a screenless fitness tracker priced at $99 that ships on May 26. The device weighs just 12 grams with the band and tracks heart rate, AFib, HRV, SpO2, and sleep stages in a pill-shaped pebble with no display, no buttons, and no notifications. Battery life lasts for seven days, with a five-minute fast charge delivering a full day of use. A Stephen Curry Special Edition is priced at $129, with core tracking free and Google Health Premium adding an AI Coach for $9.99 per month after a three-month trial.The launch accompanies a broader rebrand. The Fitbit app becomes Google Health on May 19, with Google Fit folded in, Apple Health data supported on iOS, and APIs for Garmin, Whoop, and Oura. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported earlier this year that Apple has scaled back a comparable Health+ coaching service, with the feature now unlikely to launch. The Apple Watch SE starts at $249 and requires daily charging, and the Fitbit Air's $99 price with no mandatory subscription addresses a segment Apple does not cover.We also discuss the Apple Watch Series 12, which is shaping up to be an incremental upgrade. Bloomberg's Mark Gurmansaid in March that he does not expect any major design changes, and a significant redesign is now not expected until 2028.The leaker known as Instant Digital said this week that Touch ID, which appeared in leaked Apple code last year, has been deprioritized in favor of battery life improvements. DigiTimes previously reported an eight-sensor array on the back of at least one 2026 model, though blood pressure monitoring is said to be further out. A new chip is expected, with leaked code indicating a meaningful upgrade from the S10 used across the last three series, and watchOS 27 will be previewed at WWDC on June 8. Start your business with Shopify and get everything you need to sell online and in person. Start today at https://www.shopify.com/mac

Most product decisions get made by analogy. Someone says, "This is how we've always done it," or "This is what the market expects," or "This is what the competition is doing." The room nods. The decision gets made. And buried somewhere in the middle of all of it is an assumption nobody checked. First-principles thinking is the discipline of identifying assumptions before the market finds them for you. By the end of this episode, you'll have the tools to strip any problem down to what's actually true and build answers that hold, even when the boardroom is watching, and the clock is running. What Is First Principles Thinking? First principles thinking is the practice of breaking a problem down to its fundamental truths, then building your solution up from what actually holds. Not from industry convention. Not from what worked last time. From what's actually true about the problem in front of you. The alternative is reasoning by analogy: doing what worked before, doing what competitors do, doing what the category expects. Analogy is faster and usually right. It fails badly when the thing that used to be true stops being true and nobody notices. Why Assumptions Go Unchecked In 2005, HP's CEO, Mark Hurd, stopped me in the hallway at Building 20 in Palo Alto and drilled me on HP's R&D funding. The metric he focused on was R&D as a percentage of revenue. He wanted HP's ratio to look more like Acer's. I pushed back. I argued we should be comparing ourselves to Apple, not Acer. Mark didn't hesitate. "We are not Apple, and we never will be." What stopped me in that moment wasn't the disagreement. It was the certainty. Nobody in the room questioned whether R&D as a percentage of revenue actually measured what we thought it measured. That metric had been in use for decades. Every competitor used it. Every analyst tracked it. It felt like bedrock. It wasn't. It was an inherited constraint that had calcified into a rule. R&D as a percentage of revenue tells you about accounting categories. It tells you nothing about what that spending produces, whether the right problems are being attacked, or whether innovation output is growing or shrinking. The assumption underneath the metric had never been tested. Nobody had ever asked whether comparing R&D ratios across companies with entirely different business models actually tells you anything meaningful. The cost of that unchecked assumption didn't show up in the next quarter. It showed up over the following decade. HP's innovation pipeline quietly drained, and the Fast Company "Most Innovative" recognition we'd earned three years running disappeared with it. One inherited metric, accepted as fact by an entire room of experienced people, making a generational decision. That's what derivative thinking actually costs. Not a bad quarter. A decade. The people in that room weren't careless. They were experienced. Experience is exactly what makes inherited assumptions feel like facts. The metric felt like a fact. It was a choice nobody remembered making. That's exactly what a first principles question would have caught. Nobody asked it. The Three Core Skills The three skills run in sequence, and each one depends on the one before it. The first, Strip the Assumptions, finds the inherited assumptions baked into how the problem was framed. From there, Test What Remains and Build Up takes what survived and builds your solution from what's actually true. Finally, When to Use First Principles tells you when the process is worth running in the first place. Skip ahead, and the later skills don't hold. Run them in order, and they compound.  Strip the Assumptions Before you can reason from first principles, you have to know what you're actually working with. Most problems arrive already carrying assumptions in how they're framed. Your first job is to find them. Steps to strip assumptions: Write the problem exactly as it was given to you. Don't improve the framing yet. Use their words. Underline every word that implies a constraint. "Must," "can't," "always," "never," "the only way to." Each one is a candidate. Ask, for each constraint: is this physically true, or is it inherited? A physical truth holds regardless of what you decide. An inherited constraint is someone's prior decision that calcified into a rule. Set the inherited constraints aside and restate what remains. This is the real problem. It's usually smaller and easier to solve than what you started with. Treat what survives as your design constraints. These are your real boundaries. Take this list into your brainstorming, and test every idea against what's on it, not against the assumptions you crossed out. This step takes 20 minutes when you do it honestly. Most teams skip it entirely, then spend months optimizing a solution to the wrong problem. Test What Remains and Build Up Not every constraint is an assumption. Some things are actually true: physics, unit economics, human behavior at scale. The goal isn't to pretend those constraints don't exist. It's to be precise about which reality you're dealing with. Steps to test what remains and build up: Take each surviving constraint and push on it. Ask: Is this true because it's physically impossible to change, or because changing it would be expensive, unfamiliar, or uncomfortable? Expensive and unfamiliar are not the same as impossible. Separate the hard limits from the soft ones. Hard limits are what's actually true: things that hold regardless of how the problem is reframed. Soft limits are negotiable. Label them clearly. Most teams never make this distinction and treat every constraint as if it were granite. State your hard limits in plain language.  Write it down. One sentence per hard limit. These are the actual boundaries your solution has to honor. Reason forward from what remains. Don't start from where the industry is and work backward to justify it. Now ask: what solution do the hard limits support?  That last step is where unexpected solutions come from. When you reason backward from convention, you arrive at a modified version of the existing answer. The shape is familiar because you started with it. When you reason forward from hard limits, you land somewhere the category didn't expect, because you weren't anchored to the shape of the existing answer. Solutions built this way often feel strange at first. People will question them. That discomfort is usually a signal you've found something real rather than something inherited. That's what reasoning from what's actually true produces, rather than reasoning from what everyone assumed. When to Use First Principles Before running the process, ask these four questions. One yes is enough. Has the environment this decision was built for changed significantly? Does every solution on the table feel like a variation of the same thing? Is the current approach inherited rather than chosen? Would a bad assumption here cost you more than an afternoon to find and fix? If all four are no, past experience is the right tool. Use it.  The 20-minute assumption-strip is cheap. The cost of skipping it isn't. The Assumption Reversal Exercise For this exercise, you will need a partner. Have them watch this video first. They need to know what an inherited assumption looks like before they can spot yours. Once you're both ready, grab the free First Principles Thinking Checklist at innovation.tools or find the link in the description. It gives you both a shared reference point before you start.  Here is how it works: Each person brings one real problem. Something current, with actual stakes. Not a thought experiment. The problem should be one you've been turning over in your mind without arriving at a satisfying answer. Work on your partner's problem, not your own. You are trying to find the assumptions baked into how they've framed it. They are doing the same for yours. The reason this works is that you can see their inherited constraints more clearly than they can. You're not inside their problem the way they are. Each person lists every assumption they can find in the other's problem. Write them down. Don't argue yet. Don't evaluate. Just surface as many as possible. Quantity matters here. The obvious assumptions are easy. Push past them. Take each assumption and reverse it. If the assumption is "this requires a significant budget," the reversal is "what becomes possible if it requires no budget?" If the assumption is "the customer won't accept a different format," the reversal is "what would we build if they would?" Don't ask whether the reversal is realistic. Ask what it opens up. Discuss what the reversals revealed. Not every reversed assumption leads somewhere useful. But one of them usually exposes a constraint that was never as fixed as it felt. That's the one worth following. The point of the reversal is simple. Some assumptions hold when you push on them, and some don't. You can't tell which is which until you try. The Long Game Every time you run this process and find something that didn't hold, you get faster at spotting them. The judgment about when to use it gets sharper. That's what improvement looks like in practice: not a dramatic flash of insight, but a practiced ability to find the assumption in the room before it finds you. The assumption that costs you most isn't the one you haven't thought of yet. It's the one you stopped questioning years ago.  Find your partner. Run the Assumption Reversal this week. That's where this starts becoming a skill. Subscribe for the next episode. It builds on this.

A alta dos preços de notebooks não é um fenômeno isolado. Ela está ligada à corrida global por componentes de inteligência artificial, e é justamente nesse cenário que a Acer precisa lançar produtos novos no Brasil. No episódio deste sábado (25) do Podcast Canaltech, o editor de Hardware do Canaltech, Sérgio Oliveira, conversa com Germano Couy, presidente da Acer para as Américas, durante a IEM Rio 2026. Na conversa, ele detalha o que a empresa está preparando para o segundo semestre: os primeiros notebooks com processadores Intel Wildcat Lake — linha de entrada com capacidade de IA — e novos modelos da linha Nitro, voltados para o mercado intermediário. Couy também explica como a marca está tentando equilibrar inovação e acessibilidade em um momento em que o consumidor brasileiro pensa cada vez mais na parcela do que no produto. Você também vai conferir: YouTube Premium mais caro; HBO Max começa a barrar compartilhamento de senhas; Apple vai ignorar crise da RAM e lançar iPhone com mais memória. Este podcast foi roteirizado e apresentado por Marcelo Fischer e contou com reportagens de Viviane França, Jaqueline Sousa e Vinícius Moschen, sob coordenação de Anaísa Catucci. A trilha sonora é de Guilherme Zomer, a edição de Lívia Strazza e a arte da capa é de Erick Teixeira.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the streets of Paris to the heart of Europe's energy regulation, this episode explores how geopolitics, market design and infrastructure are reshaping France's - and  the continent's - energy future.As tensions in the Gulf ripple through global gas prices and Europe's energy markets,  France finds itself in a uniquely resilient position, buoyed by nuclear power, growing renewables and strong export capacity. But beneath that stability lie complex questions about pricing, interconnectors, and the long-term balance between supply, demand and affordability.So how can Europe maintain energy security, keep prices competitive, and still accelerate the transition to a low-carbon future?In this episode, Richard sits down with Emmanuelle Wargon, President of France's Energy Regulator (CRE) and Chair of the Board of Regulators at ACER. She shares insights into France's evolving power mix, why electricity prices there have largely decoupled from gas, and how Europe is navigating the pressures of global gas supply shocks.Richard and Emmanuelle also explore the growing debate around marginal pricing, the urgent need for grid investment and interconnectors, and the delicate challenge of scaling renewables without undermining market stability. From LNG dependency to nuclear resurgence and the politics of cross-border energy flows, this conversation offers clarity over the trade-offs shaping Europe's energy system.#EnergyTransition #FranceEnergy #EmmanuelleWargon #EuropeanEnergy #PowerMarkets #GasPrices #NuclearEnergy #Renewables #EnergySecurity #Interconnectors #ElectricityMarkets #GridInfrastructure #LNG #DecarbonisationHost: Richard Sverrisson, Editor-in-Chief, Montel NewsGuest: Emmanuelle Wargon, President of CRE and Chair of ACER's Board of Regulators Editor: Alexandra CarlonProducer: Alexandra Carlon & Caroline Pailliez

35 yıla yakın kariyerlerinde DJ'likten prodüktörlüğe, radyoculuktan müzik direktörlüğüne uzanan yolculuğu anlatan DJ Funky C ve Burçin Acer; radyo kültürünün neden hala güçlü olduğunu, podcast'in yayıncılığı nasıl dönüştürdüğünü ve DJ'liğin dışarıdan göründüğünden çok daha fazlası olduğunu samimi ve eğlenceli bir dille paylaşıyor.

Anthropic lança Claude Opus 4.7 com melhorias criativas e preparativos para o Mythos. Novo celular da Motorola tem pré-registro no Brasil, dá cupom de R$ 2 mil e bônus na troca. Técnica para roubar US$ 10 mil de um iPhone bloqueado é revelada por YouTuber. Oi vende divisão de telefonia fixa por R$ 60 milhões. Anthropic quer desenvolver chips próprios. Nvidia se torna a 1ª empresa com valor de mercado de US$ 4 trilhões. Meta vai passar Google e será líder global. Amazon compra Globalstar, empresa que oferece comunicação via satélite para iPhones. Empresa de Musk é processada e mais!

De um lado, a chegada (aqui no Brasil) de um mini workstation com potência de nível data center para rodar IA localmente; do outro, o lançamento do NemoClaw, uma nova solução open source focada em agentes de IA mais seguros, de maneira local e prontos para uso corporativo.Aperte o play e ouça agora, o Data Hackers News dessa semana !Para saber tudo sobre o que está acontecendo na área de dados, se inscreva na Newsletter semanal: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.datahackers.news/Conheça nossos comentaristas do Data Hackers News: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Monique Femme⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Lider Executiva do Data Hackers, e Leon Sólon Especialista em Inteligência Artificial Aplicada. ⁠Matérias/assuntos comentados:Blog Data Hackers: Chega ao Brasil NVIDIA Grace Blackwell: o computador projetado para uso avançado de Inteligência Artificial Assista ao vídeo: Workstation IA Acer Veriton GN100 NVIDIA GB10 - Testado em primeira mão pelo Data HackersDemais canais do Data Hackers:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Site⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tik Tok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You Tube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Every public company in the technology industry measures innovation spending the same way. R&D as a percentage of revenue. Why? Because Wall Street tracks it. Boards benchmark it. CEOs get fired over it. And it tells you almost nothing about whether the spending is working. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard knew that. From the very beginning, they measured something different. Something the rest of the industry has been ignoring for seventy years. And the proof was sitting in a paper that Chuck House pulled out and sent to me after a conversation at a Computer History Museum board meeting. By the end of this episode, you'll know what that metric is, why it works, and why the one everyone else uses makes it nearly impossible to tell whether your innovation investment is building the future or just burning cash. Here's how I found it. The Question That Wouldn't Let Go In the last episode, I talked about the argument with Mark Hurd. The question was over whether HP should cut R&D as a percentage of revenue to match Acer. I knew Mark was fundamentally wrong. But I couldn't prove it. The only metric on the table was R&D as a percentage of revenue. That was what Wall Street expected. It's what shareholders expected. It's what the board expected. But I couldn't argue against it, because I didn't have the data. I needed a better metric. So I decided to go back to the beginning. HP's complete financial records dating back to the 1940s. Division by division. R&D project by R&D project. The actual operating data. I got access to all of it. The HP archive team gave me direct access to Bill and Dave's original notebooks. Now, data alone wasn't enough. It was mountains and mountains of data, and you're trying to extract the signal. What is the trigger in that data? The conversation that cracked it open happened outside HP.     The Man with the Medal of Defiance I was at a Computer History Museum board meeting, standing next to Chuck House, and I shared with him the struggle I was having. A little context on Chuck. He spent twenty-nine years at HP. He was the Corporate Engineering Director and he helped launch dozens of products. He's also the recipient, from David Packard himself, of the Medal of Defiance. The Medal of Defiance was given to him because David had told him at one point to kill a product line. Chuck went around that decision, put the product into the catalog, shipped it, and it turned into a phenomenal success. When David gave Chuck the medal, the citation was something along the lines of: "for going above and beyond the stupidity of management and doing what was right." Chuck and Raymond Price co-authored a book called The HP Phenomenon, published by Stanford Press. It's the deep dive into the history of the innovation culture inside HP, all of the metrics used back in the Bill and Dave days that put in place the structure that allowed HP to be successful. By the time I'm at HP, Chuck had long since moved on. He was running Media X at Stanford, the university's research program on innovation, media, and technology. But we both served on the Computer History Museum board. At that board meeting, I shared the argument I'd had with Mark and the search for a better metric. I had a strong feeling there was something around gross margin. That R&D investment impacted gross margin. But a feeling isn't an argument. I needed data. I needed to correlate R&D spend to margin, and that's extraordinarily hard to do when you've got all these different product lines and divisions. Chuck got this little smile on his face and said, "I need to send you something." The Paper and the Whiteboard What he sent me was a paper. A journal paper he and a few of his colleagues had written decades before. And it laid out the connection between research investment and margin performance. The correlation I suspected but couldn't prove was right there on the page. I read it that night. The next morning I emailed Chuck, and I was just really excited. What they'd written decades ago matched what I was finding in the data. That email exchange turned into an invitation. I asked Chuck to come to HP Labs. We met in a conference room in Building 3, the main building for HP Labs at the time. And I'll tell you, I look back on this and it makes me smile a little, because this conference room was just down the hall from Bill and Dave's offices. HP preserved those offices exactly as Bill and Dave left them. You can walk in there today, see their desks, see their offices, just as they were on their last day. There's something about being that close to where it all started that makes the history feel less like history and more like unfinished business. Chuck walked up to the whiteboard and drew two things. On the left side: R&D as a percentage of revenue. The metric every company reports. The metric Mark used to argue HP was overspending. Chuck's point was simple. That metric tells you how much you're spending. That's it. Nothing about whether your products are any good. Nothing about whether customers value what you built. It's an input metric pretending to be an output metric. Two ways to improve the ratio: spend less on research, or sell more of what you've already got. Neither of those is innovation. You can manipulate R&D as a percentage of revenue by cutting your R&D spend, or you can cut prices to drive top-line revenue. But neither has any connection to measuring whether your innovation is actually working. On the right side, he drew gross margin. The distance between the cost to make something and what the customer pays for it. Chuck said: that gap is a direct measure of differentiation. Solve a problem nobody else can solve, and customers will pay for that difference. Margin expands. Build a product that looks like everyone else's, and customers have no reason to pay more. They'll shop you. Margin compresses. Then he drew the line connecting both sides. Research investment flows in. If the research produces differentiated products, gross margin expands. That expanded margin funds the next round of research. A virtuous cycle. But only if you're watching margin. The moment you manage to the spending ratio instead, the cycle breaks. The boardroom conversation stops being about whether research is producing differentiation. It becomes about whether the spending number looks right compared to some peer. That's what happened with Mark. HP's PC group margins were compressing toward commodity levels. The response, driven by that revenue-ratio metric, was to cut research spending to match the compression. Exactly backwards. Compressing margins are the alarm bell. Fix the research pipeline. Fix your innovation. Not just more innovation, but good innovation. Don't defund it. Bill and Dave's First Product, and What It Actually Proved Standing at that whiteboard, I could see it running through HP's entire history. The HP 200A audio oscillator. 1939. HP's first commercial product. Competitors were selling oscillators for over $200. Bill and Dave were selling theirs for $89.40. Now that's not because they undercut the market. What Bill figured out as part of his master's degree project at Stanford was that by using a light bulb inside the circuit as a self-regulating component, you could smooth the output in a way competitors couldn't match. Technically superior instrument. Radically cheaper to build. Walt Disney bought eight of them for Fantasia. The founders tracked the gap. Cost versus what customers pay. Not total revenue. That gap is gross margin. And that gap funded everything that came after. A lower-priced product, a higher-quality product, and the margin it generated is what drove HP's ability to continue to reinvest. David Packard codified it. He described what he called the six-to-one ratio. Products at HP were considered genuinely successful only when the profit from a product over time was six times the cost of developing it. If it was lower than that, it wasn't generating enough. And this is also how Bill and Dave decided which product lines to kill off. The ratio determined where research dollars were earning their return and where they weren't. The products that crushed that ratio weren't the ones with the biggest R&D budgets or the most engineers. They were the ones earning the highest return on the research dollar, because customers paid a premium for what the research produced. And here's what this enabled: self-financing. No debt. No banks. No Wall Street ninety-day pressure. That was back before HP was even public. It was the freedom to invest in research on a ten-year horizon, and that's only possible with healthy margins. At HP's margins, spending landed at about eight to ten percent of revenue. Why Eight to Ten Percent Is Not a Contradiction Now you might hear "eight to ten percent of revenue" and think I'm contradicting myself. I just spent ten minutes telling you that R&D as a percentage of revenue is a useless metric. Here's the difference. Bill and Dave didn't start with the percentage and work backwards. They started with margin. They funded the research that kept margins healthy, and the spending that produced happened to land at eight to ten percent. The percentage was a byproduct, not a target. The moment you flip that and make the percentage the goal, you've lost the plot. That's the distinction the entire industry missed. Chuck drew all of this in about twenty minutes on a whiteboard. Decades of institutional knowledge, distilled into one diagram. And the thing that hit me hardest wasn't the analysis. It was the realization that HP had already figured this out. The knowledge was in a paper that had been sitting around for decades. The company had just forgotten. What was old had become what was new. HP didn't need a breakthrough. It just needed to remember. Confirming the Pattern: Art Fong and John Young After the session with Chuck, I reached out to two other people who'd been there in the early days. Art Fong. I've talked about Art many times on this show, and there's an interview with him in the archive. He was the sixth R&D engineer Bill Hewlett ever hired. At one point in the 1960s, twenty-seven percent of HP's total revenue came from Art Fong's innovations and projects. And John Young. John was the first CEO after the founders stepped back, after Bill and Dave retired. He took HP from $1.3 billion in revenue to $16 billion. I had the same discussion with both of them about R&D as a percentage of revenue, about margin. And they both confirmed it. They shared their own stories about margin priority, the six-to-one ratio, and their direct conversations with Bill and Dave. That series of conversations with Chuck, Art, and John, capturing all of that history, really drove me to refine the thinking on the R&D-to-margin connection. So what did I do next? I back-cast against the entire HP history. Division by division. Is it predictive? Can you use a metric to actually predict? That's what turned an insight into something defensible in a boardroom. But here's the thing. This isn't just an HP problem. Most companies never had the margin insight. They started with R&D as a percentage of revenue because that's what Wall Street asks for, and they've never questioned it. Margin would have caught it. Margin starts telling you the truth years before the revenue line does. By the time you see revenue take a dip, the damage is done. That is the result of decisions made three, five, ten years prior. Margin compression is the early warning. Differentiation is fading. Research is not producing what it needs to produce. Half the Answer, and a New Problem Walking out of HP Labs that day, I thought I'd found the answer. Track margin, not spending. Watch the output, not the input. It took me another year to realize I'd only found half of it. When I started tracing where HP's R&D dollars were actually going, division by division, I found a problem hiding inside two letters. R and D. We say it like it's one thing. It's how we report it in financial filings. It's how Wall Street looks at it. It's how the press views it. But it's not one thing. Research and development are two completely different activities, with completely different time horizons, different risk profiles, and different impacts on the business. The moment you combine them into a single line item, you can move money from one to the other, and nobody outside the building can tell. That's what we're going to get into in the next episode. The split nobody sees.     Here's a question for you. If you've found a way to connect R&D spending to actual business outcomes in your company, how do you do it? What metric are you using with your leadership to make the difference? Drop it in the comments. I read every one of them, and the best answers end up shaping future episodes. If this episode changed how you think about innovation investment, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And share this with someone in your company who's fighting this fight right now. They'll thank you for it. Two ways to keep going between episodes. Studio Notes comes out every Monday. That's where I take apart a real company's innovation decisions using public data. This week I dig into PayPal's innovation health. You want to check that out. Studio Sessions, what you're watching right now, drops every Wednesday. This is where the decisions happened. The real rooms, the real calls, what went right and what went wrong. Show notes and the full analysis are at philmckinney.com. The idea was never the hard part. It never is. The call is.  

Twenty years. Nearly one thousand episodes on this show. And starting today, we're going to try something a little different this season. Season 21 is about the decisions that actually determine whether innovation lives or dies inside any organization. The real calls. Not the fluff stuff we read in academic textbooks. I want to actually put you in the rooms where these decisions are happening. What went right. What went wrong. My objective is to expose you to the patterns in innovation decisions so that you can recognize them. Recognize them in yourself, in the people you need to influence, long before you step into any landmines. So let's get into it. The Encounter on the Top Floor of Building 25 Making generational decisions on innovation investment can be a make-or-break moment. What I refer to as a CLM, a Career Limiting Move. In my case, it started with a chance conversation with Mark Hurd, HP's CEO. Let me take you back to 2005. HP headquarters is on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, referred to internally as Building 25. The top floor is where all of the executive offices are. That's where Mark's office was. I was up there doing some meetings and got snagged by Mark. Now, Mark had a reputation. He was a big numbers guy. He believed in what he called extreme benchmarking. You tore into your competitors' numbers. You knew your own numbers in and out.1 Others had warned me about this. He had a famous quote that everybody shared:  "Stare at the numbers long enough, and they will eventually confess." Mark believed you could not lead a critical role at HP if you did not know your numbers cold, inside and out. Didn't matter whether it was sales, CTO, a function, or a division. It didn't matter. And Mark tested everyone on the leadership team. Not just the leadership team. He would randomly stop employees and ask them for their numbers based on what group they worked in. It was non-stop. It was constant. To where support staff was literally constantly preparing briefing books for managers, VPs, leaders, just in case they got nabbed by Mark. In my case, I happened to be walking past his office. Mark waved me in. I sat down, and he immediately started drilling me on the CTO numbers. The number he focused on was R&D as a percentage of revenue. The Broken Benchmark: R&D as a Percentage of Revenue Now, if you've been a regular listener of this show, you know my opinion of that metric. R&D as a percentage of revenue is a meaningless number.2 It is absolutely meaningless. But every public company CEO at an innovation-dependent company, all the tech companies, AI companies, even automotive, they live by this number. It's a number that Wall Street looks at. You have to report it as part of your quarterlies, and from there it's simple math.3 When Mark grilled me, he was focused specifically on the PC group at HP. HP's number at the time for the PC group was about one and a half percent. R&D as a percentage of the PC group's revenue. Acer, which was a key competitor, was at 0.8%. Less than one percent. Roughly half of HP's number.4 Apple was at four percent.5 Mark's question, and he was really pounding on this, was: How do we get our ratios in line with Acer? Basically, he was saying: how do we cut costs so that our R&D expense as a percentage of revenue equals Acer at 0.8%? This is exactly the problem with choosing the wrong metric. Now I'm going to quote somebody who I think was probably one of the most insightful leaders in the business world. Charlie Munger. If you've ever watched any of his talks, he had a really strong opinion on certain metrics. Specifically EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Charlie referred to EBITDA as BS earnings. It was a metric Wall Street swore by, and Munger said it hid more than it revealed. His exact words: "Every time you see the word EBITDA, just substitute the word 'bullshit' earnings."6 R&D as a percentage of revenue is the same problem in a different disguise. It's the metric that makes every company look like it's investing when all it's doing is spending. Mark was using a broken instrument to make a generational decision. If you make decisions based on R&D as a percentage of revenue, and then you do comparisons like "let's make our numbers look like Acer," what you are actually deciding to do is cut your R&D. That is generational. You will destroy a company's innovation capability over the next ten to twenty years before you can even have a hope of rebuilding it.7 "We Are Not Apple and We Never Will Be" I looked at him and said: Why aren't we raising our R&D spend to match Apple? Mark didn't hesitate. He said: "We are not Apple and we never will be." I took offense at that. I was offended that he wouldn't even contemplate it. And I pushed back. I pushed back hard. I argued we could be Apple in areas where we had genuine advantage. Here's one example. Go back to September 2004, about a year before my meeting with Mark. Carly Fiorina was still CEO. Carly had just handed Steve Jobs access to the retail shelf space HP spent thirty years building.8 At that time, HP controlled about nine, nine and a half percent of all retail shelf space for consumer electronics, the largest single entity holding in that category. Where did all that come from? It traces back to the calculator days in the 1970s. Those relationships, those stocking slots, that footprint: HP had spent three decades building that access. Apple was launching the iPod.9 It had no retail distribution in consumer electronics. None. And rather than HP taking advantage of that for itself, it actually opened the door and allowed Apple to come in. That is how the iPod got its traction. It bought Apple the time to build out its own retail strategy, which is ultimately what allowed Apple to be where it is today. That wasn't an accident of history. That was HP giving away a structural competitive asset. When I tried to push back on Mark, saying we could be better with the right investment, it didn't land. Mark viewed the PC business as a commodity. And if it's a commodity, you manage expenses. You don't invest in capabilities. Monthly Arguments and the Search for Better Metrics There was no decision made that day. But something shifted in me. That was the first of many monthly arguments I had with Mark. And they were non-stop. What it drove me to do was start looking for better metrics. We had something most companies don't have: HP's complete financial history going all the way back to the 1940s. I had access to the numbers, division by division, for one of the founding companies of Silicon Valley.10 We were getting traction. I was actually getting Mark to align. I was getting the HP board to align. And then what happens? Mark gets removed as CEO and Leo comes in. Then Meg kicked Leo out and she took over. Then the split of HP into two companies. Acer today? Still roughly 0.9% of revenue in R&D.11 Twenty years later, almost exactly where Mark wanted HP to get to. What I Would Do Differently: Right Argument, Wrong Language If I'm being honest about what I would do differently, I had the right argument. I had the wrong language. The job wasn't to prove Mark wrong. Nobody changes their mind when they're being told they're wrong. I needed to stop speaking CTO and start speaking CEO. Meet him where he was. Make the case in the language of margin, risk, competitive position, the language he already trusted. But that language didn't exist when it came to R&D and innovation. That's the reason I spent the rest of my career building something better. And that is what this season is about. What Comes Next: The Metrics That Tell the Truth That conversation with Mark sent me looking. If R&D as a percentage of revenue was the wrong metric, and I believe to my core that it was, and is, then what's the right one? We went back through HP's own numbers. We back-cast all the way to the 1940s, looking at the numbers by division, by the overall organization. And then something unexpected happened. The archive team at HP gave me access to something nobody had looked at in decades: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's original notebooks. What I found in there pointed me somewhere nobody had thought to look. In the next episode, we're going to talk about the metrics that actually tell the truth when it comes to R&D and innovation.     If this episode gave you some insights, shifted something, share it with somebody who you think needs to hear it. Particularly if you're trying to fight senior leaders around R&D investment. And in the comments below, tell me: what's that one benchmark that you are required to hit, and yet you've never questioned? Is it the right benchmark? Have you really looked at it? I genuinely would like to know. Show notes and this week's Studio Notes are over at philmckinney.com. Subscribe there. That's where the deeper analysis lives. Every Monday that we post, subscribe. You don't want to miss the next one. I'll see you in the next episode.  

Not sure how this got missed last week!  Making up for time, now you get TWO episodes packed into 1 week!Intel might go back to a unified arch, Acer threatens people to buy now or else, and that Discord thing continues.  Oh, and that Nvidia money train just keeps on rolling, plus more 12VHPWR woes.  Do take a listen / look at the Moza R5 virtual driving gear bundle though, very nice.Timestamps:0:00 Intro00:56 Patreon02:18 Food with Josh04:13 News begins - Intel unified core architecture rumor10:24 AMD Zen 6 might not arrive until 202715:37 Acer sees sales jump after warning of price hikes17:15 NVIDIA to improve Linux gaming performance18:26 NVIDIA financials with Josh23:10 Apple to build Mac mini in USA26:31 Some alternatives to rising NVMe costs?33:41 DDR5 prices possibly beginning a downward trend35:11 WireView Pro II to help keep your 5090 from melting41:00 Command line automation comes to AIDA6443:22 Discord45:31 (In)Security Corner55:26 Gaming Quick Hits1:03:00 Josh reviews the MOZA R5 Bundle1:10:41 Picks of the Week1:19:51 Outro ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Kloiber, Manfred www.deutschlandfunk.de, Computer und Kommunikation

How Taiwan rose to global prominence in high tech manufacturing, from computer maker to the world's leading chip manufacturer. How did Taiwan, a former Japanese colony and the last fortress of the defeated Chinese Nationalists, ascend to such heights in high-tech manufacturing? In Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan's Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2024), Honghong Tinn tells the critical history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan, including engineers, technologists, technocrats, computer users, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, helped transform the country with their hands-on engagement with computers. Rather than engaging in wholesale imitation of US sources, she explains, these technologists tinkered with imported computing technology and experimented with manufacturing their own versions, resulting in their own brand of successful innovation. Defying the stereotype of “the West innovates, and the East imitates,” Tinn tells the story of Taiwanese technologists' efforts over the past six decades. Beginning in the 1960s, they grappled with the “black-boxed” computers that were newly available through international technical-aid programs. Shortly after, multinational corporations that outsourced transistor and integrated circuit assembly overseas began employing Taiwanese engineers and factory workers. Island tinkerers developed strategies to adapt, modify, assemble, and work with computers in an inventive manner. It was through this creative and ingenious tinkering with computers that they were able to gain a better understanding of the technology, opening the door to future manufacturing endeavors that now include Acer, Foxconn, Asus, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Honghong Tinn is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Li-Ping's NBN episodes on Taiwan Studies are supported by the Chun and Jane Chiu Family Foundation Taiwan Studies Program at Oregon State University. Relevant Links: Open Access for Island Tinkerers here Island Tinkerers' Book Talk with Honghong Tinn here Chinese language translation of Island Tinkerers 科技造浪者: 一部奇蹟般的台灣科技產業史，揭開全球都想知道的人脈網絡 here Fly up with Love (1978) here “Labour and (De)Industrialisation in East Asia” in Gateway To Global China Podcast here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

How Taiwan rose to global prominence in high tech manufacturing, from computer maker to the world's leading chip manufacturer. How did Taiwan, a former Japanese colony and the last fortress of the defeated Chinese Nationalists, ascend to such heights in high-tech manufacturing? In Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan's Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2024), Honghong Tinn tells the critical history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan, including engineers, technologists, technocrats, computer users, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, helped transform the country with their hands-on engagement with computers. Rather than engaging in wholesale imitation of US sources, she explains, these technologists tinkered with imported computing technology and experimented with manufacturing their own versions, resulting in their own brand of successful innovation. Defying the stereotype of “the West innovates, and the East imitates,” Tinn tells the story of Taiwanese technologists' efforts over the past six decades. Beginning in the 1960s, they grappled with the “black-boxed” computers that were newly available through international technical-aid programs. Shortly after, multinational corporations that outsourced transistor and integrated circuit assembly overseas began employing Taiwanese engineers and factory workers. Island tinkerers developed strategies to adapt, modify, assemble, and work with computers in an inventive manner. It was through this creative and ingenious tinkering with computers that they were able to gain a better understanding of the technology, opening the door to future manufacturing endeavors that now include Acer, Foxconn, Asus, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Honghong Tinn is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Li-Ping's NBN episodes on Taiwan Studies are supported by the Chun and Jane Chiu Family Foundation Taiwan Studies Program at Oregon State University. Relevant Links: Open Access for Island Tinkerers here Island Tinkerers' Book Talk with Honghong Tinn here Chinese language translation of Island Tinkerers 科技造浪者: 一部奇蹟般的台灣科技產業史，揭開全球都想知道的人脈網絡 here Fly up with Love (1978) here “Labour and (De)Industrialisation in East Asia” in Gateway To Global China Podcast here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

The RAM-apocolypse continues of course, with hints of it hitting general manufacturers, and delay of gaming systems and even spinning harddrives.  At least Micron is making some PCIe 6 drives you cannot have.  Also, since we are sometimes audio geeks as well as PC, we talk about some bananas.  Seriously.  You'll just have to listen to get the scoop on bad Chrome extensions, bad Copilot, and bad password managers.  Until then, enjoy Unread Tournament 2004!Timestamps:0:00 Intro01:15 Patreon03:22 Food with Josh05:20 Acer and ASUS caught up HEVC patent dispute07:15 Intel's new annual GPU cadence09:00 Micron is making PCI-E 6.0 SSDs that you can't have11:10 WD CEO says storage is already sold out for 202614:07 Warning - many consumer electronics companies will fail this year22:25 Sony may push PS6 launch as far as 202922:55 US reportedly removes two Chinese memory companies from banned list25:54 RTX 5090 LIGHTNING is 5090 USD (list price, anyhow)29:35 Audio dragged through the mud - and a banana34:34 (In)Security Corner45:07 Gaming Quick Hits50:35 Jeremy reviews 25 USD speakers from Cyber Acoustics56:53 Picks of the Week1:08:51 Outro ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Timestamps: 0:00 wooow. who's your stylist? 0:09 Apple Glasses, AI pendant, camera Airpods 1:18 Steam Deck OLED shortage 3:01 Discord Persona concerns 5:27 QUICK BITS INTRO 5:43 Disney cease-and-desist over Seedance 2.0 6:32 OpenAI hires OpenClaw creator 7:19 Acer, Asus laptop sales halted in Germany 8:05 T-Mobile Live Translation 8:48 China Spring Festival Gala robots NEWS SOURCES: https://lmg.gg/UhZvj Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices