Features – Page 4

Review: Intel Lunar Lake CPUs combine good battery life and x86 compatibility

ASUS, core ultra, early reviews, Features, intel, intel lunar lake, intel meteor lake, ryzen ai, snapdragon x elite, Tech, zenbook / Rejus Almole / September 25, 2024

that lake came from the moon —

But it’s too bad that Intel had to turn to TSMC to make its chips competitive.

Andrew Cunningham – Sep 25, 2024 7: 03 pm UTC

An Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 7 258V inside.

Andrew Cunningham
These high-end Zenbooks usually offer pretty good keyboards and trackpads, and the ones here are comfortable and reliable.

Andrew Cunningham
An HDMI port, a pair of Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack.

Andrew Cunningham
A single USB-A port on the other side of the laptop. Dongles are fine, but we still appreciate when thin-and-light laptops can fit one of these in.

Andrew Cunningham

Two things can be true for Intel’s new Core Ultra 200-series processors, codenamed Lunar Lake: They can be both impressive and embarrassing.

Impressive because they perform reasonably well, despite some regressions and inconsistencies, and because they give Intel’s battery life a much-needed boost as the company competes with new Snapdragon X Elite processors from Qualcomm and Ryzen AI chips from AMD. It will also be Intel’s first chip to meet Microsoft’s performance requirements for the Copilot+ features in Windows 11.

Embarrassing because, to get here, Intel had to use another company’s manufacturing facilities to produce a competitive chip.

Intel claims that this is a temporary arrangement, just a bump in the road as the company prepares to scale up its upcoming 18A manufacturing process so it can bring its own chip production back in-house. And maybe that’s true! But years of manufacturing misfires (and early reports of troubles with 18A) have made me reflexively skeptical of any timelines the company gives for its manufacturing operations. And Intel has outsourced some of its manufacturing at the same time it is desperately trying to get other chip designers to manufacture their products in Intel’s factories.

This is a review of Intel’s newest mobile silicon by way of an Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Core Ultra 7 258V provided by Intel, not a chronicle of Intel’s manufacturing decline and ongoing financial woes. I will mostly focus on telling you whether the chip performs well and whether you should buy it. But it’s a rare situation, where whether it’s a solid chip is not a slam-dunk win for Intel, which might factor into our overall analysis.

About Lunar Lake

A high-level breakdown of Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which preserve some of Meteor Lake's changes while reverting others. — Enlarge / A high-level breakdown of Intel’s next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which preserve some of Meteor Lake’s changes while reverting others.

Intel

Let’s talk about the composition of Lunar Lake, in brief.

Like last year’s Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 100 chips, Lunar Lake is a collection of chiplets stitched together via Intel’s Foveros technology. In Meteor Lake, Intel used this to combine several silicon dies manufactured by different companies—Intel made the compute tile where the main CPU cores were housed, while TSMC made the tiles for graphics, I/O, and other functions.

In Lunar Lake, Intel is still using Foveros—basically, using a silicon “base tile” as an interposer that enables communication between the different chiplets—to put the chips together. But the CPU, GPU, and NPU have been reunited in a single compute tile, and I/O and other functions are all handled by the platform controller tile (sometimes called the Platform Controller Hub or PCH in previous Intel CPUs). There’s also a “filler tile” that exists only so that the end product is rectangular. Both the compute tile and the platform controller tile are made by TSMC this time around.

Intel is still splitting its CPU cores between power-efficient E-cores and high-performance P-cores, but core counts overall are down relative to both previous-generation Core Ultra chips and older 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips.

Some high-level details of Intel's new E- and P-core architectures. — Enlarge / Some high-level details of Intel’s new E- and P-core architectures.

Intel

Lunar Lake has four E-cores and four P-cores, a composition common for Apple’s M-series chips but not, so far, for Intel’s. The Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H, for example, included six P-cores and a total of 10 E-cores. A Core i7-1255U included two P-cores and eight E-cores. Intel has also removed Hyperthreading from the CPU architecture it’s using for its P-cores, claiming that the silicon space was better spent on improving single-core performance. You’d expect this to boost Lunar Lake’s single-core performance and hurt its multi-core performance relative to past generations, and to spoil our performance section a bit, that’s basically what happens, though not by as much as you might expect.

Intel is also shipping a new GPU architecture with Lunar Lake, codenamed Battlemage—it will also power the next wave of dedicated desktop Arc GPUs, when and if we get them (Intel hasn’t said anything on that front, but it’s canceling or passing off a lot of its side projects lately). It has said that the Arc 140V integrated GPU is an average of 31 percent faster than the old Meteor Lake Arc GPU in games, and 16 percent faster than AMD’s newest Radeon 890M, though performance will vary widely based on the game. The Arc 130V GPU has one less of Intel’s Xe cores (7, instead of 8) and lower clock speeds.

The last piece of the compute puzzle is the neural processing unit (NPU), which can process some AI and machine-learning workloads locally rather than sending them to the cloud. Windows and most apps still aren’t doing much with these, but Intel does rate the Lunar Lake NPUs at between 40 and 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS) depending on the chip you’re buying, meeting or exceeding Microsoft’s 40 TOPS requirement and generally around four times faster than the NPU in Meteor Lake (11.5 TOPS).

Enlarge / Intel is shifting to on-package RAM for Meteor Lake, something Apple also uses for its M-series chips.

Intel

And there’s one last big change: For these particular Core Ultra chips, Intel is integrating the RAM into the CPU package, rather than letting PC makers solder it to the motherboard separately or offer DIMM slots—again, something we see in Apple Silicon chips in the Mac. Lunar Lake chips ship with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and most of the variants can be had with either amount (in the chips Intel has announced so far, model numbers ending in 8 like our Core Ultra 7 258V have 32GB, and model numbers ending in 6 have 16GB). Packaging memory this way both saves motherboard space and, according to Intel, reduces power usage, because it shortens the physical distance that data needs to travel.

I am reasonably confident that we’ll see other Core Ultra 200-series variants with more CPU cores and external memory—I don’t see Intel giving up on high-performance, high-margin laptop processors, and those chips will need to compete with AMD’s high-end performance and offer additional RAM. But if those chips are coming, Intel hasn’t announced them yet.

Review: Intel Lunar Lake CPUs combine good battery life and x86 compatibility Read More »

In the room where it happened: When NASA nearly gave Boeing all the crew funding

Boeing, commercial crew, Features, reentry, Space, spacex / Rejus Almole / September 24, 2024

The story behind the story —

“In all my years of working with Boeing I never saw them sign up for additional work for free.”

Eric Berger – Sep 24, 2024 5: 58 pm UTC

Enlarge / But for a fateful meeting in the summer of 2014, Crew Dragon probably never would have happened.

SpaceX

This is an excerpt from Chapter 11 of the book REENTRY: SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age by our own Eric Berger. The book will be published on September 24, 2024. This excerpt describes a fateful meeting 10 years ago at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, where the space agency’s leaders met to decide which companies should be awarded billions of dollars to launch astronauts into orbit.

In the early 2010s, NASA’s Commercial Crew competition boiled down to three players: Boeing, SpaceX, and a Colorado-based company building a spaceplane, Sierra Nevada Corporation. Each had its own advantages. Boeing was the blue blood, with decades of spaceflight experience. SpaceX had already built a capsule, Dragon. And some NASA insiders nostalgically loved Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser space plane, which mimicked the shuttle’s winged design.

This competition neared a climax in 2014 as NASA prepared to winnow the field to one company, or at most two, to move from the design phase into actual development. In May of that year Musk revealed his Crew Dragon spacecraft to the world with a characteristically showy event at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne. As lights flashed and a smoke machine vented, Musk quite literally raised a curtain on a black-and-white capsule. He was most proud to reveal how Dragon would land. Never before had a spacecraft come back from orbit under anything but parachutes or gliding on wings. Not so with the new Dragon. It had powerful thrusters, called SuperDracos, that would allow it to land under its own power.

“You’ll be able to land anywhere on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter,” Musk bragged. “Which is something that a modern spaceship should be able to do.”

A few weeks later I had an interview with John Elbon, a long-time engineer at Boeing who managed the company’s commercial program. As we talked, he tut-tutted SpaceX’s performance to date, noting its handful of Falcon 9 launches a year and inability to fly at a higher cadence. As for Musk’s little Dragon event, Elbon was dismissive.

“We go for substance,” Elbon told me. “Not pizzazz.”

Elbon’s confidence was justified. That spring the companies were finalizing bids to develop a spacecraft and fly six operational missions to the space station. These contracts were worth billions of dollars. Each company told NASA how much it needed for the job, and if selected, would receive a fixed price award for that amount. Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada wanted as much money as they could get, of course. But each had an incentive to keep their bids low, as NASA had a finite budget for the program. Boeing had a solution, telling NASA it needed the entire Commercial Crew budget to succeed. Because a lot of decision-makers believed that only Boeing could safely fly astronauts, the company’s gambit very nearly worked.

Scoring the bids

The three competitors submitted initial bids to NASA in late January 2014, and after about six months of evaluations and discussions with the “source evaluation board,” submitted their final bids in July. During this initial round of judging, subject-matter experts scored the proposals and gathered to make their ratings. Sierra Nevada was eliminated because their overall scores were lower, and the proposed cost not low enough to justify remaining in the competition. This left Boeing and SpaceX, with likely only one winner.

“We really did not have the budget for two companies at the time,” said Phil McAlister, the NASA official at the agency’s headquarters in Washington overseeing the Commercial Crew program. “No one thought we were going to award two. I would always say, ‘One or more,’ and people would roll their eyes at me.”

Boeing's John Elbon, center, is seen in Orbiter Processing Facility-3 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2012. — Boeing’s John Elbon, center, is seen in Orbiter Processing Facility-3 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2012.

NASA

The members of the evaluation board scored the companies based on three factors. Price was the most important consideration, given NASA’s limited budget. This was followed by “mission suitability,” and finally, “past performance.” These latter two factors, combined, were about equally weighted to price. SpaceX dominated Boeing on price.

Boeing asked for $4.2 billion, 60 percent more than SpaceX’s bid of $2.6 billion. The second category, mission suitability, assessed whether a company could meet NASA’s requirements and actually safely fly crew to and from the station. For this category, Boeing received an “excellent” rating, above SpaceX’s “very good.” The third factor, past performance, evaluated a company’s recent work. Boeing received a rating of “very high,” whereas SpaceX received a rating of “high.”

While this makes it appear as though the bids were relatively even, McAlister said the score differences in mission suitability and past performance were, in fact, modest. It was a bit like grades in school. SpaceX scored something like an 88, and got a B; whereas Boeing got a 91 and scored an A. Because of the significant difference in price, McAlister said, the source evaluation board assumed SpaceX would win the competition. He was thrilled, because he figured this meant that NASA would have to pick two companies, SpaceX based on price, and Boeing due to its slightly higher technical score. He wanted competition to spur both of the companies on.

In the room where it happened: When NASA nearly gave Boeing all the crew funding Read More »

Reviewing iOS 18 for power users: Control Center, iCloud, and more

Apple, control center, Features, files, ios 18, Tech / Rejus Almole / September 20, 2024

iOS 18 —

Never mind emojis—here’s some stuff that makes iOS more efficient.

Samuel Axon – Sep 20, 2024 7: 53 pm UTC

Control Center in iOS 18 in its customization view — Enlarge / Control Center has a whole new customization interface.

Samuel Axon

iOS 18 launched this week, and while its flagship feature (Apple Intelligence) is still forthcoming, the new OS included two significant new buckets of customization: the home screen and Control Center.

We talked about home screen a few days ago, so for our next step in our series on iOS 18, it’s now time to turn our attention to the new ways you can adjust the Control Center to your liking. While we’re at it, we’ll assess a few other features meant to make iOS more powerful and more efficient for power users.

This is by no means the most significant update for power users Apple has released of the iPhone operating system—there’s nothing like Shortcuts, for example, or the introduction of the Files app a few years ago. But with the increasingly expensive iPhone Pro models, Apple still seems to be trying to make the case that you’ll be able to do more with your phone than you used to.

Let’s start with Control Center, then dive into iCloud, Files, external drives, and hidden and locked apps.

A revamped Control Center

Control Center might not be the flashiest corner of iOS, but when Apple adds more functionality and flexibility to a panel that by default can be accessed with a single gesture from anywhere in the operating system—including inside third-party apps—that has the potential to be a big move for how usable and efficient the iPhone can be.

That seems to be the intention with a notable control center revamp in iOS 18. Visually, it mostly looks similar to what we had in iOS 17, but it’s now paginated and customizable, with a much wider variety of available controls. That includes the option for third-party apps to offer controls for the first time. Additionally, Apple lets you add Shortcuts to Control Center, which has the potential to be immensely powerful for those who want to get that deep into things.

When you invoke it (still by swiping down from the upper-right corner of the screen on modern iPhones and iPads), it will mostly look similar to before, but you’ll notice a few additional elements on screen, including:

A “+” sign in the top-left corner: This launches a customization menu for reordering and resizing the controls
A power icon in the top-right corner: Holding this brings up iOS’s swipe-to-power-off screen.
Three icons along the right side of the screen: A heart, a music symbol, and a wireless connectivity symbol

Control center is now paginated

The three icons on the right represent the three pages Control Center now starts with, and they’re just the beginning. You can add more pages if you wish.

Swiping up and down on any empty part of Control Center moves between the pages. The first page (the one represented by a heart) houses all the controls that were in the older version of Control Center. You can customize what’s here as much as you want.

The first page resembles the old Control Center, but with more customization.

Samuel Axon
By default, the second page houses a large “Now Playing” music and audio widget with AirPlay controls.

Samuel Axon
The third has a tall widget with a bunch of connectivity toggles.

Samuel Axon
Adding a new page gives you a grid to add custom control selections to.

Samuel Axon

The second page by default includes a large “currently playing” music and audio widget alongside AirPlay controls, and the third is a one-stop shop for toggling connectivity features like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, AirDrop, airplane mode, and whichever VPN you’re using.

This new paginated approach might seem like it introduces an extra step to get to some controls, but it’s necessary because there are so many more controls you can add now—far more than will fit on a single page.

Customizing pages and controls

If you prefer the way things were, you can remove a page completely by removing all the controls housed in it. You can add more pages if you want, or you can tweak the existing pages to be anything you want them to be.

Whereas you previously had to go into the Settings app to change what controls are included, you can now do this directly from Control Center in one of two ways: you can either tap the aforementioned plus icon, or you can long-press on any empty space in Control Center to enter customization mode.

In this view, you’re presented with a grid of circular spots where controls can go. Each control that’s already there has a “-“ button in its corner that you can tap to remove it. To move a control, you just long press on it for a split second and drag it to whichever spot in the grid you want it to live in.

This is the Control Center customization view, which is vastly superior to the home screen’s wiggle mode.

Samuel Axon
Choosing to add a new control brings up this long, searchable, scrollable list of controls from both Apple and third-party apps you have installed.

Samuel Axon
There aren’t a ton of third-party controls yet, but here are a few examples.

Samuel Axon
You can resize controls, but most of them just seem to take up more space and include some text—not very helpful, if you ask me.

Samuel Axon

There’s also a marker on the bottom-right corner of each control that you can touch and drag to increase the size of the control. The substantial majority of these controls don’t offer anything of value when you make them bigger, though, which is both strange and a missed opportunity.

To add a new control, you tap the words “Add a control” at the bottom of the screen, which are only visible in this customization mode. This brings up a vertically scrollable list of all the controls available, with a search field at the top. The controls appear in the list just as they would in Control Center, which is great for previewing your choice.

Reviewing iOS 18 for power users: Control Center, iCloud, and more Read More »

Life imitates xkcd comic as Florida gang beats crypto password from retiree

crime, crypto, Features, robbery, Security / Rejus Almole / September 19, 2024

intruders —

Group staged home invasions to steal cryptocurrency.

Nate Anderson – Sep 19, 2024 7: 57 pm UTC

Enlarge / Sometimes this is all you need.

Aurich Lawson | Getty Image

Remy Ra St. Felix spent April 11, 2023, on a quiet street in a rented BMW X5, staking out the 76-year-old couple that he planned to rob the next day.

He had recently made the 11-hour drive up I-95 from southern Florida, where he lived, to Durham, North Carolina. It was a long way, but as with so many jobs, occasional travel was the cost of doing business. That was true especially when your business was robbing people of their cryptocurrency by breaking into their homes and threatening to cut off their balls and rape their wives.

St. Felix, a young man of just 25, had tried this line of work closer to home at first, but it hadn’t gone well. A September 2022 home invasion in Homestead, Florida, was supposed to bring St. Felix and his crew piles of crypto. All they had to do was stick a gun to some poor schlub’s head and force him to log in to his online exchange and then transfer the money to accounts controlled by the thieves. A simple plan—which worked fine until it turned out that the victim’s crypto accounts had far less money in them than planned.

Rather than waste the opportunity, St. Felix improvised. Court records showed that he tied the victim’s hands, shoved him into a vehicle, and drove away. Inside the car, the kidnappers filmed themselves beating the victim, who was visibly bleeding from the mouth and face. A gun was placed to the victim’s neck, and he was forced to record a plea for friends and family to send cryptocurrency to secure the man’s release. Five such videos were recorded in the car. The abducted man was eventually found by police 120 miles from his home.

A messy operation.

So St. Felix and his crew began to look out of state for new jobs. They robbed someone in Little Elm, Texas, of $150,000 and two Rolex watches, but their attention was eventually drawn to a tidy home on Wells Street in far-off Durham. The homeowner there was believed to be a significant crypto investor. (The crew had hacked into his email account to confirm this.)

After his day of surveillance on April 11, St. Felix and his partner, Elmer Castro, drove to a local Walmart and purchased their work uniforms: sunglasses, a clipboard, reflective vests, and khaki pants. Back at their hotel, St. Felix snapped a photo of himself in this getup, which looked close enough to a construction worker for his purposes.

The next morning at 7: 30 am, St. Felix and Castro rolled up to the Wells Street home once more. Instead of surveilling it from down the block, they knocked on the door. The husband answered. The men told him some story involving necessary pipe inspections. They wandered around the home for a few minutes, then knocked on the front door again.

But this time, when the wife answered, St. Felix and Castro were wearing ski masks and sunglasses—and they had handguns. They pushed their way inside. The woman screamed, and her husband came in from the kitchen to see them all fighting. The intruders punched the husband in the face and zip-tied the hands and feet of both homeowners.

Castro dragged the wife by her legs down the hallway and into the bathroom. He stood guard over her, wielding his distinctive pink revolver.

In the meantime, St. Felix had marched the husband at gunpoint into a loft office at the back of the home. There, the threats came quickly—St. Felix would cut off the man’s toes, he said, or his genitals. He would shoot him. He would rape his wife. The only way out was to cooperate, and that meant helping St. Felix log in to the man’s Coinbase account.

St. Felix, holding a black handgun and wearing a Bass Pro Shop baseball cap, waited for the shocked husband’s agreement. When he got it, he cut the man’s zip-ties and set him in front of the home office iMac.

The husband logged in to the computer, and St. Felix took over and downloaded the remote-control software AnyDesk. He then opened up a Telegram audio call to the real brains of the operation.

The actual robbery was about to begin.

Life imitates xkcd comic as Florida gang beats crypto password from retiree Read More »

macOS 15 Sequoia: The Ars Technica review

AI, Apple, apple intelligence, Apple silicon, Features, iMac, Mac Pro, Mac Studio, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, macOS, macOS 15, macos sequoia, Reviews, Tech / Kris Guyer / September 16, 2024

The macOS 15 Sequoia update will inevitably be known as “the AI one” in retrospect, introducing, as it does, the first wave of “Apple Intelligence” features.

That’s funny because none of that stuff is actually ready for the 15.0 release that’s coming out today. A lot of it is coming “later this fall” in the 15.1 update, which Apple has been testing entirely separately from the 15.0 betas for weeks now. Some of it won’t be ready until after that—rumors say image generation won’t be ready until the end of the year—but in any case, none of it is ready for public consumption yet.

But the AI-free 15.0 release does give us a chance to evaluate all of the non-AI additions to macOS this year. Apple Intelligence is sucking up a lot of the media oxygen, but in most other ways, this is a typical 2020s-era macOS release, with one or two headliners, several quality-of-life tweaks, and some sparsely documented under-the-hood stuff that will subtly change how you experience the operating system.

The AI-free version of the operating system is also the one that all users of the remaining Intel Macs will be using, since all of the Apple Intelligence features require Apple Silicon. Most of the Intel Macs that ran last year’s Sonoma release will run Sequoia this year—the first time this has happened since 2019—but the difference between the same macOS version running on different CPUs will be wider than it has been. It’s a clear indicator that the Intel Mac era is drawing to a close, even if support hasn’t totally ended just yet.

macOS 15 Sequoia: The Ars Technica review Read More »

Meet the winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes

Features, Ig Nobel Prizes, Science / Rejus Almole / September 12, 2024

Science that makes you laugh then think —

The award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures.

Jennifer Ouellette – Sep 12, 2024 10: 00 pm UTC

Enlarge / The Ig Nobel Prizes honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.”

Aurich Lawson / Getty Images

Curiosity is the driving force behind all science, which may explain why so many scientists sometimes find themselves going in some decidedly eccentric research directions. Did you hear about the WWII plan to train pigeons as missile guidance systems? How about experiments on the swimming ability of a dead rainbow trout or that time biologists tried to startle cows by popping paper bags by their heads? These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2024 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit.

Viewers can tune in for the usual 24/7 lectures, as well as the premiere of a “non-opera” featuring various songs about water, in keeping with the evening’s theme. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel prizes.

Peace

Citation: B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.

This entertaining 1960 paper by American psychologist B.F. Skinner is kind of a personal memoir relating “the history of a crackpot idea, born on the wrong side of the tracks intellectually speaking but eventually vindicated in a sort of middle class respectability.” Project Pigeon was a World War II research program at the Naval Research Laboratory with the objective of training pigeons to serve as missile guidance systems. At the time, in the early 1940s, the machinery required to guide Pelican missiles was so bulky that there wasn’t much room left for actual explosives—hence the name, since it resembled a pelican “whose beak can hold more than its belly can.”

Skinner reasoned that pigeons could be a cheaper, more compact solution since the birds are especially good at responding to patterns. (He dismissed the ethical questions as a “peacetime luxury,” given the high global stakes of WWII.) His lab devised a novel harnessing system for the birds, positioned them vertically above a translucent plastic plate (screen), and trained them to “peck” at a projected image of a target somewhere along the New Jersey coast on the screen—a camera obscura effect. “The guiding signal was picked up from the point of contact of screen and beak,” Skinner wrote. Eventually, they created a version that used three pigeons to make the system more robust—just in case a pigeon got distracted at a key moment or something.

Enlarge / Nose cone of NIST glide bomb showing the three-pigeon guidance system.

American Psychological Association/B.F. Skinner Foundation

There was understandably a great deal of skepticism about the viability of using pigeons for missile guidance; at one point, Skinner lamented, his team “realized that a pigeon was more easily controlled than a physical scientist serving on a committee.” But Skinner’s team persisted, and in 1944, they finally got the chance to demonstrate Project Pigeon for a committee of top scientists and show that the birds’ behavior could be controlled. The sample pigeon behaved perfectly. “But the spectacle of a living pigeon carrying out its assignment, no matter how beautifully, simply reminded the committee of how utterly fantastic our proposal was.” Apparently, there was much “restrained merriment.”

Even though this novel homing device was resistant to jamming, could react to a wide variety of target practice, needed no scarce materials, and was so simple to make that production could start in 30 days, the committee nixed the project. (By this point, as we now know, military focus had shifted to the Manhattan Project.) Skinner was left with “a loftful of curiously useless equipment and a few dozen pigeons with a strange interest in a feature of the New Jersey coast.” But vindication came in the early 1950s when the project was briefly revived as Project ORCON at the Naval Research Laboratory, which refined the general idea and led to the development of a Pick-off Display Converter for radar operators. Skinner himself never lost faith in this particular “crackpot idea.”

Meet the winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes Read More »

Ars Technica system guide: Falling prices are more exciting than new parts

AMD, Ars System Guide, Features, intel, NVIDIA, Tech / Paul Patrick / September 7, 2024

AMD's Ryzen 7700X makes enough sense to feature in our higher-end gaming build. — Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 7700X makes enough sense to feature in our higher-end gaming build.

Andrew Cunningham

It’s been a while since our last system guide, and a few new products—most notably AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series CPUs—have been released since then. But there haven’t been many notable graphics card launches, and new ones are still rumored to be a few months off as both Nvidia and AMD prioritize their money-printing AI accelerators.

But that doesn’t make it a bad time to buy a PC, especially if you’re looking for some cost-efficient builds. Prices of CPUs and GPUs have both fallen a fair bit since we did our last build guide a year or so ago, which means all of our builds are either cheaper than they were before or we can squeeze out a little more performance than before at similar prices.

We have six builds across four broad tiers—a budget office desktop, a budget 1080p gaming PC, a mainstream 1440p-to-4K gaming PC, and a price-conscious workstation build with a powerful CPU and lots of room for future expandability.

You won’t find a high-end “god box” this time around, though; for a money-is-no-object high-end build, it’s probably worth waiting for Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake desktop processors, AMD’s expected Ryzen 9000X3D series, and whatever Nvidia’s next-generation GPU launch is. All three of those things are expected either later this year or early next.

We have a couple of different iterations of the more expensive builds, and we also suggest multiple alternate components that can make more sense for certain types of builds based on your needs. The fun of PC building is how flexible and customizable it is—whether you want to buy what we recommend and put it together or want to treat these configurations as starting points, hopefully, they give you some idea of what your money can get you right now.

Notes on component selection

Part of the fun of building a PC is making it look the way you want. We’ve selected cases that will physically fit the motherboards and other parts we’re recommending and which we think will be good stylistic fits for each system. But there are many cases out there, and our picks aren’t the only options available.

As for power supplies, we’re looking for 80 Plus certified power supplies from established brands with positive user reviews on retail sites (or positive professional reviews, though these can be somewhat hard to come by for any given PSU these days). If you have a preferred brand, by all means, go with what works for you. The same goes for RAM—we’ll recommend capacities and speeds, and we’ll link to kits from brands that have worked well for us in the past, but that doesn’t mean they’re better than the many other RAM kits with equivalent specs.

For SSDs, we mostly stick to drives from known brands like Samsung, Crucial, or Western Digital, though going with a lesser-known brand can save you a bit of money. All of our builds also include built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you don’t need to worry about running Ethernet wires and can easily connect to Bluetooth gamepads, keyboards, mice, headsets, and other accessories.

We also haven’t priced in peripherals, like webcams, monitors, keyboards, or mice, as we’re assuming most people will re-use what they already have or buy those components separately. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even make your own DIY keyboard! If you need more guidance, Kimber Streams’ Wirecutter keyboard guides are exhaustive and educational.

Finally, we won’t be including the cost of a Windows license in our cost estimates. You can pay a lot of different prices for Windows—$139 for an official retail license from Microsoft, $120 for an “OEM” license for system builders, or anywhere between $15 and $40 for a product key from shady gray market product key resale sites. Windows 10 keys will also work to activate Windows 11, though Microsoft stopped letting old Windows 7 and Windows 8 keys activate new Windows 10 and 11 installs relatively recently. You could even install Linux, given recent advancements to game compatibility layers!

Ars Technica system guide: Falling prices are more exciting than new parts Read More »

Asus ROG Ally X review: Better performance and feel in a pricey package

ASUS, asus rog ally x, Features, gaming, gaming handheld, Reviews, ROG Ally, rog ally x, steam deck, Tech, Windows / Kris Guyer / August 31, 2024

Faster, grippier, pricier, and just as Windows-ed —

A great hardware refresh, but it stands out for its not-quite-handheld cost.

Kevin Purdy – Updated Aug 30, 2024 11: 30 am UTC

It's hard to fit the perfomance-minded but pricey ROG Ally X into a simple product category. It's also tricky to fit it into a photo, at the right angle, while it's in your hands. — Enlarge / It’s hard to fit the perfomance-minded but pricey ROG Ally X into a simple product category. It’s also tricky to fit it into a photo, at the right angle, while it’s in your hands.

Kevin Purdy

The first ROG Ally from Asus, a $700 Windows-based handheld gaming PC, performed better than the Steam Deck, but it did so through notable compromises on battery life. The hardware also had a first-gen feel and software jank from both Asus’ own wraparound gaming app and Windows itself. The Ally asked an awkward question: “Do you want to pay nearly 50 percent more than you’d pay for a Steam Deck for a slightly faster but far more awkward handheld?”

The ROG Ally X makes that question more interesting and less obvious to answer. Yes, it’s still a handheld that’s trying to hide Windows annoyances, and it’s still missing trackpads, without which some PC games just feel bad. And (review spoiler) it still eats a charge faster than the Steam Deck OLED on less demanding games.

But the improvements Asus made to this X sequel are notable, and its new performance stats make it more viable for those who want to play more demanding games on a rather crisp screen. At $800, or $100 more than the original ROG Ally with no extras thrown in, you have to really, really want the best possible handheld gaming experience while still tolerating Windows’ awkward fit.

What’s new in the Ally X

Specs at a glance: Asus ROG Ally X
Display	7-inch IPS panel: 1920×1080, 120 Hz, 7 ms, 500 nits, 100% sRGB, FreeSync, Gorilla Glass Victus
OS	Windows 11 (Home)
CPU	AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme (Zen 4, 8 core, 24M cache, 5.10 Ghz, 9-30 W (as reviewed)
RAM	24GB LPDDR5X 6400 MHz
GPU	AMD Radeon RDNA3, 2.7 GHz, 8.6 Teraflops
Storage	M.2 NVME 2280 Gen4x4, 1TB (as reviewed)
Networking	Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2
Battery	80 Wh (65W max charge)
Ports	USB-C (3.2 Gen2, DPI 1.4, PD 3.0), USB-C (DP, PD 3.0), 3.5 mm audio, Micro SD
Size	11×4.3×0.97 in. (280×111×25 mm)
Weight	1.49 lbs (678 g)
Price as reviewed	$800

The ROG Ally X is essentially the ROG Ally with a bigger battery packed into a shell that is impressively not much bigger or heavier, more storage and RAM, and two USB-C ports instead of one USB-C and one weird mobile port that nobody could use. Asus reshaped the device and changed the face-button feel, and it all feels noticeably better, especially now that gaming sessions can last longer. The company also moved the microSD card slot so that your cards don’t melt, which is nice.

There’s a bit more to each of those changes that we’ll get into, but that’s the short version. Small spec bumps wouldn’t have changed much about the ROG Ally experience, but the changes Asus made for the X version do move the needle. Having more RAM available has a sizable impact on the frame performance of demanding games, and you can see that in our benchmarks.

We kept the LCD Steam Deck in our benchmarks because its chip has roughly the same performance as its OLED upgrade. But it’s really the Ally-to-Ally-X comparisons that are interesting; the Steam Deck has been fading back from AAA viability. If you want the Ally X to run modern, GPU-intensive games as fast as is feasible for a battery-powered device, it can now do that a lot better—for longer—and feel a bit better while you do.

The Rog Ally X has better answered the question “why not just buy a gaming laptop?” than its predecessor. At $800 and up, you might still ask how much portability is worth to you. But the Ally X is not as much of a niche (Windows-based handheld) inside a niche (moderately higher-end handhelds).

I normally would not use this kind of handout image with descriptive text embedded, but Asus is right: the ROG Ally X is indeed way more comfortable (just maybe not all-caps).

Asus

How it feels using the Rog Ally X

My testing of the Rog Ally X consisted of benchmarks, battery testing, and playing some games on the couch. Specifically: Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and Tactical Breach Wizards on the devices lowest-power setting (“Silent”), Deathloop on its medium-power setting (“Performance”), and Shadow of the Erdtree on its all-out “Turbo” mode.

All four of those games worked mostly fine, but DRG: Survivor pushed the boundaries of Silent mode a bit when its levels got crowded with enemies and projectiles. Most games could automatically figure out a decent settings scheme for the Ally X. If a game offers AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling, you should at least try it; it’s usually a big boon to a game running on this handheld.

Overall, the ROG Ally X was a device I didn’t notice when I was using it, which is the best recommendation I can make. Perhaps I noticed that the 1080p screen was brighter, closer to the glass, and sharper than the LCD (original) Steam Deck. At handheld distance, the difference between 800p and 1080p isn’t huge to me, but the difference between LCD and OLED is more so. (Of course, an OLED version of the Steam Deck was released late last year.)

Asus ROG Ally X review: Better performance and feel in a pricey package Read More »

NASA’s Starliner decision was the right one, but it’s a crushing blow for Boeing

Boeing, commercial crew, Commercial space, Features, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / Mike M. / August 25, 2024

Falling short —

It’s unlikely Boeing can fly all six of its Starliner missions before retirement of the ISS in 2030.

Stephen Clark – Aug 25, 2024 2: 16 am UTC

Enlarge / A Starliner spacecraft mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket before an unpiloted test flight in 2022.

Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency’s most experienced contractors, won the lion’s share of government money available to end the agency’s sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.

At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.

A decade later the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft’s first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule June 5, will instead return to Earth inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn’t confident enough in Boeing’s spacecraft after it suffered multiple thrusters failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS.

So where does this leave Boeing with its multibillion contract? Can the company fulfill the breadth of its commercial crew contract with NASA before the space station’s scheduled retirement in 2030? It now seems that there is little chance of Boeing flying six more Starliner missions without a life extension for the ISS. Tellingly, perhaps, NASA has only placed firm orders with Boeing for three Starliner flights once the agency certifies the spacecraft for operational use.

Boeing’s bottom line

Although Boeing did not make an official statement Saturday on its long-term plans for Starliner, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters he received assurances from Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, that the company remains committed to the commercial crew program. And it will take a significant commitment from Boeing to see it through. Under the terms of its fixed price contract with NASA, the company is on the hook to pay for any expenses to fix the thruster and helium leak problems and get Starliner flying again.

Boeing has already reported $1.6 billion in charges on its financial statements to pay for delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program. That figure will grow as the company will likely need to redesign some elements in the spacecraft’s propulsion system to remedy the problems encountered on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. NASA has committed $5.1 billion to Boeing for the Starliner program, and the agency has already paid out most of that funding.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. — Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

The next step for Starliner remains unclear, and we’ll assess that in more detail later in the story. Had the Starliner test flight ended as expected, with its crew inside, NASA targeted no earlier than August 2025 for Boeing to launch the first of its six operational crew rotation missions to the space station. In light of Saturday’s decision, there’s a high probability Starliner won’t fly with astronauts again until at least 2026.

Starliner safely delivered astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station on June 6, a day after their launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. But five of the craft’s 28 reaction control system thrusters overheated and failed as it approached the outpost. After the failures on the way to the space station, NASA’s engineers were concerned Starliner might suffer similar problems, or worse, when the control jets fired to guide Starliner on the trip back to Earth.

On Saturday, senior NASA leaders decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The two astronauts, who originally planned for an eight-day stay at the station, will now spend eight months on the orbiting research lab until they come back to Earth with SpaceX.

If it’s not a trust problem, is it a judgement issue?

Boeing managers had previously declared Starliner was safe enough to bring Wilmore and Williams home. Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, regularly appeared to downplay the seriousness of the thruster issues during press conferences throughout Starliner’s nearly three-month mission.

So why did NASA and Boeing engineers reach different conclusions? “I think we’re looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, and the agency’s most senior civil servant. “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s our technical expertise and our experience that we have to balance. We balance risk across everything, not just Starliner.”

The people at the top of NASA’s decision-making tree have either flown in space before, or had front-row seats to the calamitous decision NASA made in 2003 to not seek more data on the condition of space shuttle Columbia’s left wing after the impact of a block of foam from the shuttle’s fuel tank during launch. This led to the deaths of seven astronauts, and the destruction of Columbia during reentry over East Texas. A similar normalization of technical problems, and a culture of stifling dissent, led to the loss of space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

“We lost two space shuttles as a result there not being a culture in which information could come forward,” Nelson said Saturday. “We have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection, you come forward. Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest, and even at its most routine. And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine. So the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety.”

Now, it seems that culture may truly have changed. With SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft available to give Wilmore and Williams a ride home, this ended up being a relatively straightforward decision. Ken Bowersox, head of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, said the managers polled for their opinion all supported bringing the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without anyone onboard.

However, NASA and Boeing need to answer for how the Starliner program got to this point. The space agency approved the launch of the Starliner CFT mission in June despite knowing the spacecraft had a helium leak in its propulsion system. Those leaks multiplied once Starliner arrived in orbit, and are a serious issue on their own that will require corrective actions before the next flight. Ultimately, the thruster problems superseded the seriousness of the helium leaks, and this is where NASA and Boeing are likely to face the most difficult questions moving forward.

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station.

Boeing’s previous Starliner mission, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), successfully launched in 2022 and docked with the space station, later coming back to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico. The test flight achieved all of its major objectives, setting the stage for the Crew Flight Test mission this year. But the spacecraft suffered thruster problems on that flight, too.

Several of the reaction control system thrusters stopped working as Starliner approached the space station on the OFT-2 mission, and another one failed on the return leg of the mission. Engineers thought they fixed the problem by introducing what was essentially a software fix to adjust timing and tolerance settings on sensors in the propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne.

That didn’t work. The problem lay elsewhere, as engineers discovered during testing this summer, when Starliner was already in orbit. Thruster firings at White Stands, New Mexico, revealed a small Teflon seal in a valve can bulge when overheated, restricting the flow of oxidizer propellant to the thruster. NASA officials concluded there is a chance, however small, that the thrusters could overheat again as Starliner departs the station and flies back to Earth—or perhaps get worse.

“We are clearly operating this thruster at a higher temperature, at times, than it was designed for,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “I think that was a factor, that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully, we’re operating the thruster outside of where it should be operated at.”

NASA’s Starliner decision was the right one, but it’s a crushing blow for Boeing Read More »

Cards on the table: Are Butch and Suni coming home on Starliner or Crew Dragon?

boing, crew dragon, Features, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / Mike M. / August 24, 2024

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits.

After months of consideration, NASA said Thursday that it will finally decide the fate of two astronauts on board the International Space Station, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, by this weekend. As soon as Saturday, the two crew members will learn whether they’ll return on a Starliner spacecraft in early September or a Crew Dragon vehicle next February.

On the eve of this fateful decision, the most consequential human spaceflight safety determination NASA has had to make in more than two decades, Ars has put together a summary of what we know, what we believe to be true, and what remains yet unknown.

Why has NASA taken so long?

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the International Space Station 11 weeks ago. Their mission was supposed to last eight days, but there was some expectation that they might stay a little longer. However, no one envisioned the crew remaining this long. That changed when, during Starliner’s flight to the space station, five of the 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed. After some touch-and-go operations, the astronauts and flight controllers at Johnson Space Center coaxed the spacecraft to a safe docking at the station.

This failure in space led to months of testing, both on board the vehicle in space and with similar thrusters on the ground in New Mexico. This has been followed by extensive data reviews and modeling by engineers to try to understand the root cause of the thruster problems. On Friday, lower-level managers will meet in a Program Control Board to discuss their findings and make recommendations to senior managers. Those officials, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson presiding, will make a final decision at a Flight Readiness Review on Saturday in Houston.

What are the two options?

NASA managers will decide whether to send the astronauts home on Starliner, possibly as early as September 2, or to fly back to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle scheduled to be launched on September 24. To make room for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, this so-called “Crew-9” mission would launch with two astronauts instead of a full complement of four. Wilmore and Williams would then join this mission for their six-month increment on board the space station—their eight-day stay becoming eight months.

How are Butch and Suni feeling about this?

We don’t know, as they have not spoken to the media since it became apparent they could be in space for a long time. However, based on various sources, both of the crew members are taking it more or less in stride. They understand this is a test flight, and their training included the possibility of staying in space for an extended period of time if there were problems with Starliner.

That’s not to say it’s convenient. Both Wilmore and Williams have families back on Earth who expected them home by now, and the station was not set up for an extended stay. Wilmore, for example, has been having to sleep in a science laboratory rather than a designated sleeping area, so he has to pack up his personal things every morning.

What does seem clear is that Wilmore and Williams will accept NASA’s decision this weekend. In other words, they’re not going to stage a revolt in space. They trust NASA officials to make the right safety decision, whatever it ends up being. (So, for that matter, does Ars.)

Why is this a difficult decision?

First and foremost, NASA is concerned with getting its astronauts home safely. However, there are myriad other secondary decision factors, and bringing Butch and Suni home on Dragon instead of Starliner raises a host of new issues. Significantly among these is that it would be devastating for Boeing. Their public optics, should long-time rival SpaceX have to step in and “rescue” the crew from an “unsafe” Boeing vehicle, would be terrible. Moreover, the company has already lost $1.6 billion on the Starliner program, and there is the possibility that Boeing will shut it down. NASA does not want to lose a second provider of crew transport services to the space station.

Cards on the table: Are Butch and Suni coming home on Starliner or Crew Dragon? Read More »

Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game

2K Games, 4X, civilization, Civilization VII, Features, firaxis, gaming, strategy / Rejus Almole / August 20, 2024

One More Turn —

Classic turn-based gameplay meets a radical rethink of the overall structure.

Samuel Axon – Aug 20, 2024 9: 00 pm UTC

A Mayan city in Civilization VII — Enlarge / Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It’s still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before.

2K Games

2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.

Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.

Recently, I had the opportunity to play Civilization VII, the next entry, which is due to launch in February 2025. The build I played was an early alpha build, but the bones of the game it will become were there, and it’s interesting to see which third Firaxis kept the same and which third it has reimagined.

It turns out that the core of the game that its developers won’t much want to change is the turn-to-turn experience. But in the case of Civilization VII, all bets are off when it comes to the overall arc of a long journey, from sticks and stones to space travel.

Rethinking the structure of a Civilization game

Most of the time, playing Civilization VII feels a lot like playing Civilization VI—but there’s one big change that spans the whole game that seems to be this sequel’s tentpole feature.

That’s the new Ages system. The long game is now broken into three segments: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Each Age has some unique systems and gameplay, though most systems span all three.

Within each age, you’re given a handful of “Legacy Paths” to choose from. These map closely to the franchise’s long-standing victory conditions: Science, Economic, Cultural, and Military. The idea is that you pick the Legacy Path you want to pursue, and each Legacy Path has different success conditions that change across each of the three Ages.

These conditions are big and broad, and Firaxis thankfully hasn’t gotten too jazzy with them. For example, I played in the Age of Antiquity and pursued the Cultural path, so my goal was to build a certain number of Wonders before the end of the Age.

In some ways, this is similar to the boom-and-bust cycle of Dark and Golden Ages in Civilization VI, but I found it much more natural in VII. In VI, I often found myself making arbitrary-seeming choices I didn’t think made sense for my long-term strategy just to game the system and get the Age transition I wanted. In this new game, the Legacy Path objectives are likely to always be completely in line with the overall victory strategy you’re pursuing.

One of the advantages of this new structure is support for shorter games that aren’t just hyper-compressed versions of a larger game. Previously, the only way to play a game of Civilization that wasn’t a dozen or more hours long was to pick one of the faster game speeds, but that fundamentally changed how the game felt to play.

This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt's Hatshepsut, at the helm. — Enlarge / This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt’s Hatshepsut, at the helm.

2K Games

Now, Civilization VII gives you the ability to play a match that’s just one Age, if you choose to.

The new Ages system is integrated with another big change: your choice of leader and civilization are no longer tied together when you start a new game, and they’re not set in stone, either.

Now you pick both a civilization and a leader separately at the start—and you can do some weird, ahistorical combinations, like Greece’s Alexander as the leader of China. Each leader and civilization offers specific bonuses, so this gives more customization of your playstyle at the start.

It doesn’t end there, though. At the end of each Age, you can essentially change civilizations (though as far as I could tell, you stick with the leader). Firaxis says it took inspiration for this feature from history—like the fact that London was a Roman city before it became an English one in the Medieval era.

Which civilization you can transition to is dictated by what you did within the Legacy Path system, among other things.

The amount of time I had to play the game was just enough to almost finish the Antiquity Age, so I didn’t get to see this in action, but it sounds like an interesting new system.

Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game Read More »

Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.

ads, Amazon, Features, fire tv, lg, Roku, samsung, Tech, TVs / Paul Patrick / August 19, 2024

The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset.

Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.

How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?

The value of software

Success in the TV industry used to mean selling as many TV sets as possible. But with smart TVs becoming mainstream and hardware margins falling, OEMs have sought new ways to make money. TV OS providers can access a more frequent revenue source at higher margins, which has led to a viewing experience loaded with ads. They can be served from the moment you pick up your remote, which may feature streaming service ads in the form of physical buttons.

Some TV brands already prioritize data collection and the ability to sell ads, and most are trying to boost their appeal to advertisers. Smart TV OSes have become the cash cow of the TV business, with providers generating revenue by licensing the software and through revenue sharing of in-app purchases and subscriptions.

A huge part of TV OS revenue comes from selling ads, including on the OS’s home screen and screensaver and through free, ad-supported streaming television channels. GroupM, the world’s largest media investment company, reported that smart TV ad revenue grew 20 percent from 2023 to 2024 and will grow another 20 percent to reach $46 billion next year. In September 2023, Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at analyst Omdia, reported that “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”

Automatic content recognition (ACR) tech is at the heart of the smart TV ads business. Most TV brands say users can opt out of ACR, but we’ve already seen Vizio take advantage of the feature without user permission. ACR is also sometimes turned on by default, and the off switch is often buried in a settings menu. Including ACR on a TV at all says a lot about a TV maker’s priorities. Most users have almost nothing to gain from ACR and face privacy concerns by sharing information—sometimes in real time—about what they do with their TVs.

At this point, consumers have come to expect ads and tracking on budget TVs from names like Vizio or Roku. But the biggest companies in TV are working on turning their sets into data-prolific billboards, too.

When TVs watch you back, so do corporations

In recent years, we’ve seen companies like LG and Samsung increase their TVs’ ad capabilities as advertisers become more eager to access tracking data from TVs.

LG, for example, started sharing data gathered from its TVs with Nielsen, giving the data and market measurement firm “the largest ACR data footprint in the industry,” according to an October announcement. The deal gives Nielsen streaming and linear TV data from LG TVs and provides firms buying ads on LG TVs with “‘Always On’ streaming measurement and big data from LG Ad Solutions” via Nielsen’s ONE Ads dashboard.

LG, which recently unveiled a goal of evolving its hardware business into an ad-pushing “media and entertainment platform company,” expects there to be 300 million webOS TVs in homes by 2026. That represents a huge data-collection and recurring-revenue opportunity. In September, LG said it would invest 1 trillion KRW (about $737.7 million) through 2028 into its “webOS business,” or the business behind its smart TV OS. The company said updates will include improving webOS’s UI, AI-based recommendations, and search capabilities.

Similarly, Samsung recently updated its ACR tech to track exposure to ads viewed on its TVs via streaming services instead of just from linear TV. Samsung is also trying to make its ACR data more valuable for ad targeting, including through a deal signed in December with analytics firm Experian.

Representatives for LG and Samsung declined to comment to Ars Technica about how much of their respective company’s business is ad sales. But the deals they’ve made with data-collection firms signal big interest in turning their products into lucrative smart TVs. In this case, “smart” isn’t about Internet connectivity but rather how well the TV understands its viewer.

Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse. Read More »