 Coming up on DTNS, Intel's got new laptop chips. They pair very nicely with Nvidia's new chips and there's a dozen or so new laptops serving them together. Plus, should you trust Apple's color calibration tool for Apple TV? Well, thankfully, Robert Herron is here to give us the answer. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 11th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, host of AVXL, Robert Herron. Welcome back to the show. Hey, thank you, Tom. How are you guys doing? It's good to have you, man. We were just talking about mounting TVs and country ducks on good day internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung told Reuters it will not attend Mobile World Congress in person when the event take place in Barcelona. But Samsung will take part virtually. Mobile World Congress runs from June 28th through July 1st. Google Pay rolled out support for international money transfers in the US in partnership with WISE and Western Union. Transfers from the US are currently limited to Singapore and India, but Google plans to expand the featured of more than 200 countries by the end of 2021. Upload VR sources say Sony's next generation VR headset for the PlayStation 5 will offer 2,000 by 2040 per eye resolution, as well as adjustable lens separation, support for gaze tracking, and a haptic feedback motor. But if you want great specs in a headset that is actually shipping, HTC announced upgrades to its standalone VR headset. The Vive Focus 3 now has two 2448 by 2448 screens for an effective 5K resolution with 90 Hertz refresh rate and a 120 degree field of view. The batteries mounted on the back, it's now also replaceable, and the Vive Focus 3 is aimed at car makers, simulation training, medical companies, and other enterprise customers. It ships June 27th for $1,300, including tech support and business services. Yeah, if you sell it without a subsidy done by advertising, turns out it's a lot more expensive. Reuters sources say production at Foxconn's plant in Tamil Nadu, India has declined by more than 50% because workers are becoming absent due to COVID-19. The plant produces iPhones for sale in India. Tamil Nadu implemented a full lockdown Monday, even shutting down public transport, and the plant, which includes dormitories for workers on site, reportedly has a no entry policy, meaning employees may leave, but they may not enter the facility, at least until late May. TrendForce reduced its smartphone production growth forecast worldwide from 9.4% to 8.5% citing the impact of India's shutdowns. eBay announced Tuesday it will allow the sale of non-fungible tokens, also known as NFTs, on its platform. Sellers will need to meet certain standards to be approved to sell NFTs, but eBay hopes to broaden availability over the next coming few months. All right, we're dominated by hardware news today, Sarah. Start us off with some Intel stuff. Oh boy, are we ever. Intel announced a new batch of 10-nanometer Tiger Lake 11th Gen H processors meant for intensive uses, more intensive uses, rather than the chips that they announced at CES. Those chips are now called H35 by Intel. So Intel says the new batch will be up to 19% faster than the previous gen. The top of the line is the Core i9-1980HK, has eight cores reaching up to five gigahertz across two cores, 4.5 gigahertz across all cores and is fully unlocked for overclocking, also supporting 65 watts. Intel came in with some comparisons saying that the 1198HK, yes, the 1980HK is 26% faster than an AMD Ryzen 5900HK, if you're playing something like Grid 2019, 21% faster in Rainbow Six Siege. The five consumer and five commercial new H series processors feature 10 lanes of PCIe 4.0, DDR4 3200 memory, Wi-Fi 6E and Thunderbolt 4. All but the flagship support 35 watts and at least six cores. There are 32 graphics EU cores, which is fewer than the H35 models, but most users will pair these new H chips with a dedicated GPU. There's chip support for 4K, 60 frames per second video, and a dedicated V1 decoder. Commercial variant support Intel's V Pro platform, including hardware shield, total memory encryption and active management technology. Intel, however, did not make any specific battery life claims. Yeah, so I mean, these aren't meant to be particularly battery efficient, but it means that they didn't get any more battery efficient over the last generation if they didn't make any of those claims. And honestly, this is a sufficient announcement. If you want a new laptop that's got a better processor than the last generation and you want to do heavy duty uses like gaming, this is good for that. It's not anything that's going to turn heads and make people think, oh, Intel's back in the game, Intel's advancing things. This is just kind of good enough. By the way, I also called it 1980. It's 11, 980, which goes with the 11th chip. Just in case that was confusing anybody. Yeah, this is nice stuff. Go ahead, Roger. I mean, it's very interesting that Intel is basically at this point just trying to keep pace with not just AMD, but in this case, Apple, because Apple really hit one out of the park with the M1. And Intel needs to make sure that they have enough consumer mind share. And so you need to pump out products regularly to get people's eyeballs. Oh, Intel has something new. Intel is the reliable brand that I've been using for so many years. They have something new. It's a way to kind of basically offset any potential chip jumpers. I mean, Intel is going to respond that the M1 isn't meant to do heavy-duty gaming and stuff like this platform. But I think your point's still well made, that this is just an advance. It's not a big advance. And we've seen ARM-based chips like the M1 making some big advances. We hear some scuttlebutt that Samsung is going to get together with AMD to do some chips later this year with AMD providing the graphics processing and Samsung doing the Exynos design. So this is Intel treading water. I mean, Robert, do you see it any different? I'm just looking at the specs alone. The HK parts clearly going to be aimed directly at gamers. Somebody who's going to be plugging that notebook in all the time, given the core count and the speeds they're hitting with that setup. I'm looking just one step back though, going to just the regular 11900H. That is effectively offering the same number of cores at almost like 60% of the actual thermal, at least as far as the wattage goes per the chip itself. That is the one where I think, man, if you're doing any kind of either single threaded or multi-threaded applications, it could be a decent work notebook that gives you terrific performance, especially if you're doing anything like content creation in addition to, of course, the HK being aimed, I think, squarely at gamers given that frequency they're hitting with the thermals and the ability to overclock. Yeah, a notebook, I'm not that concerned, but I'd like what they're doing and I depend on their mobile chips, that's quite a bit. And this one seems solid. NVIDIA confirmed the RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti. This is the one Samsung outed when it announced the Galaxy Book Odyssey. But now NVIDIA making it official, announcing some more details too. The 3050 has 2048 CUDA cores, the Ti 2560 CUDA cores, both come with four gigabytes of GDDR6 RAM and 128-bit memory interface. These are for 1080p gaming at a high level, but on a budget. They are Max-Q, so they can fit into thin laptops as well and not lose a lot of performance. Both models support RTX ray tracing. NVIDIA says you can play control in 1080p on medium graphics with ray tracing settings on, but also using DLSS. And given that condition, you can get 60 frames per second. So if that bears out in the benchmarks, that's not bad. NVIDIA only shared benchmarks for the Ti though. That's interesting. Essentially these cards are good at smoothing out gameplay if you don't need the highest resolution that is possible. NVIDIA thinks most people won't be able to see much different thanks to DLSS, that's probably true. That's great if the games you play support DLSS, not gonna help if you play games that don't and there's plenty that don't. If you want them for non-gaming uses, they have the NVIDIA hardware encoder on board and that works with NVIDIA's broadcast software that cleans up video and audio on calls. Broadcast just got an update too. It improves the sound in echo-y rooms, removes static from low quality webcams and filters out more background noise, including specifically the 17 year cicadas. If you're in one of the states. Oh thank goodness. With the 17 year cicadas, that probably is going to be a relief for you. Total graphic power can be set by the vendor anywhere between 35 watts and 80 watts. So just because it's got the 3050 or the 3050 Ti, you might want to look and see what the wattage is. You'll find them in laptops starting at $799. I absolutely love the broadcast software NVIDIA has put out that's compatible with their 20 series and 30 series graphics cards. In terms of audio cleanup for live recordings, it does a really nice job in terms of blocking any kind of background sounds, everything from key clicks to engine noises to whatever it might be near to. And it's, it's a damage process. However, it does require either the 20 series or the 30 series hardware. And it's hard to find that stuff outside of pre-built systems or notebooks. Yeah, yeah. I could make the same analysis of NVIDIA that I made of Intel, which is these are decent improvements, but maybe not head turning improvements. But the difference is these aren't meant to be. These are NVIDIA's lower end of the 30 series for laptops. They're meant to save you a little bit of money. They're meant to get you by on a budget. So they're not supposed to be impressive. And also NVIDIA is not in the same position as Intel. NVIDIA isn't lagging in the market. They're, they're more often leading the market. So I think this is a solid announcement. And this is going to bring some decent gaming laptops. It may not be the most powerful gaming laptops for some decent laptops that you could afford to buy. You know, when you're talking at $800, $900, that puts it in a lot more people's budget. Heck yeah. Considering the price of just standalone graphics cards, if you're trying to build a PC workstation style system, instead of a notebook. Yeah, but yeah, gaming on a notebook is still really hard. I mean, you still have all the hardware and software limitations in terms of really just the thermals and in terms of being able to crank things up. And going above 1080p resolution on a notebook is for extreme budgets, so to speak, if you can swing it. But this is a nice balance. I like what they've done. And I will add that, not just NVIDIA broadcast, but the, there's an entire suite of software, including OBS that takes advantage of the NVIDIA built-in encoder to literally offload up to 30 to 40% of encoding duties off of the CPU onto the GP, which is great. If you need a mobile, I need a laptop, I need to stream this event, or I need to stream my Twitch. These can actually be a pretty robust, but portable solution. All right, so we've got decent stuff. Yeah, and of course, if Intel's announcing new chips and NVIDIA is announcing new GPUs, then you know a number of companies will say, guess what, we have new laptops that go with these new chips and GPUs. So let's run through some highlights, Tom. Yeah, who's shorted to these? Dell has new versions of the XPS 15 and XPS 17. You can configure them all with the new 11th Gen H series, as well as both of the new NVIDIA cards, along with the RTX 3060. Otherwise looks and specs are pretty similar to previous XPS models. The XPS 15 starts at $1,199. The XPS 17 at $1,399. We don't have a shipping date for those. MSI also announced the Creator Z16, aimed at, as the name implies, creators. It offers a choice of two of the new H-Series Intel processors with the RTX 3060, starting at $2,599. The new MSI models are available on May 16th, right around the corner. The Creator M16 Creator i7 laptops also got new H-Series and NVIDIA options as to a number of MSIs gaming rigs. New entry-level models were also announced, the Katana starting at $99, and the Sword at $1,099. Could it be $99? Yeah, I can't be right. Too much of a bargain. Razer updated the Blade 15 gaming laptops with up to a Core i9-1900H and RTX 3080 GPU, along with a new 4K touchscreen. Also has a new coating that's supposed to be fingerprint-proof and a 1080p webcam, used to have a 720. There are two Thunderbolt 4 ports now, you're gonna hear that a lot. Thunderbolt 4 showing up on these laptops, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 4, 5.2, and the new advanced models support upgradable RAM and storage. Got an extra slot in there. The Blade 15 Advanced starts at $2,299, pre-order starting May 17th, shipping in June. The Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 and S17 with screen sizes that match the numbers, and of course 11th Gen H-Series and RTX 3070 or 3080 options. Both come with Quad HD with 165 Hertz refresh rates, although the S17 also comes in 4K 120 Hertz. The S17 now has the rising keyboard like the Zephyrus Duo, both coming in Q2 of this year, but no price. And finally, Lenovo updated the Legion line. You can get the 11th Gen H-Series, along with the new Nvidia RTX, or the more powerful Nvidia RTX 30 series GPUs. The 7i and 5i pro gaming laptops also features 1610 aspect ratios, which are a little taller for their 16-inch QHD screens. Both have two Thunderbolt 4 ports, both model ship in June. The 7i starts at $1,769, the 5i pro at $1,329, and then 15 and 17-inch variants of the 5i are supposed to launch in July, and the 15 starts at 969.99. All right, so bunch of laptops, they're all thin, they all got the new chips, they all have the new Intel chips. Some of them have some of the pre-existing Nvidia, some have the new 3050 or 3050 Ti. Any of these catch your eye, Robert? Anything jump out at you? The Dell XPS 15 and the 17 specifically will offer OLED options, which has been kind of rare on notebooks to speak, at least till today. And I believe these are using the Samsung OLED panels for notebooks, and that should offer some tremendous performance. Also, I'm kind of pleased to see other screen sizes rather than just plain 16 by nine. For video editing 16 by 10, it's just about perfect to have your toolbars and the window on the screen at the same time. That's just one usage case, but seeing OLED screens like that makes me very, very happy. And I'm more curious about the panel tech itself that Samsung is deploying. I am almost certain it's a Samsung panel going into something like the XPS 15 or the 17 right now. Yeah, it's interesting to me to, as I mentioned it, to see Thunderbolt 4 obviously with Intel chips inside, that makes it easy, is Intel intimately involved with Thunderbolt. So it is nice to see that becoming a standard out there so we can see more Thunderbolt 4 accessories and move the ecosystem forward. But yeah, good solid mid-level gaming laptops available for you now from multiple vendors, love it. If you want to expand your Spanish tech skills, Dan Campos is here to help. Hello, friends of DTNS. It is time for the word of the day, brought to you by Noticias de Tecnología Express. I bet you have heard the term machine learning when talking about the branch of computer sciences that develops techniques for machines to learn by themselves. Originally, it was translated as aprendizaje de máquinas, but that expression could be unclear since it could mean that a machine was learning something or a human was learning something about a machine. That is why we use aprendizaje automático as a proper expression when referring to machine learning. You can learn this and more words by listening to Noticias de Tecnología Express available every Friday. During Apple's spring-loaded event, the company revealed the Apple TV color calibration tool. The idea is you hold the iPhone true-depth camera up to your TV's screen and that will adjust the color settings on your Apple TV without having to dive in into your television's complicated settings. So Robert Herron, who deals with actual calibration tools, we're curious because I've done it. Is this worth doing? Does it make sense? Does it make any difference? I think for most people, it is something you can skip or really not pay much attention to. In the end, you'll always be better off simply going through your TV's picture presets and selecting the one that looks best to your eye for a given room environment. Typically your dark room viewing environments are the ones that benefit from the most calibrated picture presets. Things that are labeled typically something like movie or cinema or something along those lines where you'll notice the color temperature's a little warmer, the picture's usually a little darker and it's really made for you to have your eyes naturally dark adjust to really perceive that detail. I take note from what Chris Heinenin, who is a solid reviewer of audio and video gear, posted on his Twitter feed last week where he went through that tool, compared it to the results you'd get with manual calibration and in the end, it was not enough. It was, you were far better off. His final take was just stick with those picture presets and when it came to tools like the TV calibration tool that's built into the Apple TV, it wasn't necessarily effective with all picture presets. You really have to then still be very selective. Like if you try to calibrate the vivid mode on your TV, it's really not gonna change very much because so much of that is already locked down. The concept of being able to use a smartphone to calibrate a TV is something that's been around for a while. This is Apple's latest version of their tool. TCL and their IQ software for mobile apps has also offered that feature as well. They generally work pretty good, but like I said, stick with those legit presets that are built in, calibrated by the factory for a variety of room conditions. And just doing that can get you a good ways there in terms of having the ideal picture quality for whatever your room setup might be. Either it's something very bright or a very well-liked controlled room where your eyes can really take advantage of accurate picture quality. I tried it out when the new TV OS update came along. I'm not great at seeing the difference of these kinds of things to be honest, but I didn't notice any difference. So, you know, my poor eye experience bears this out, but do I need to worry now that I did it? Cause I didn't affect the TV settings, but if like I changed my TV settings, the Apple TV is still calibrated to this thing that I did before. Is that gonna mess things up to do it? If you, that is a good point. If you move the Apple TV to a different TV, you would want to reset that function. So it's not interfering with the quote unquote perfect video signal coming out of a device like that. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is that products like Apple TV, as well as Roku Ultras and I'm sure a few other devices, they default to converting everything to an HDR format and that will trigger the HDR function in your TV. And that's not always the best case. I find it far better to simply stick with whatever that native format of the original video source is. If it was SDR to begin with, don't convert it to Dolby Vision or HDR, leave it in SDR and have that pass right through. Also with TVs like OLEDs, wide drive even menus in HDR if you don't really need it. And it puts additional wear on the panel as well. But double check the pass through or the default setup on these devices to make sure they're simply not converting everything into a wide color palette. And in particular with content that doesn't need to be converted that way. Or it may look funky if it does. I know there's a lot of folks in our audience who do like to do the calibration. You were mentioning something about a new OLED calibration or some new info about OLED calibration. Yeah, a company I work with called Portrait Displays as a software tool called CalMAN that I use on a variety of different display types for calibrating. And one of the features of the new 2021 software was that they have analyzed enough OLED panels at this point from different manufacturers to realize that when you're putting up these test patterns, especially HDR test patterns, the heat that generated by the panel itself can actually alter the perceived color that you see and as well as what it measures. So it's really critical to figure out what like your average TV temperature is with regular content and ensure you're not dramatically overshooting that when you're doing calibration sessions where typically you're using a much smaller window, say like a 10% window for color and white detail and driving that as hard as possible, perhaps just right in the middle of the screen, that heat, you need to not only manage it, but also be aware of it so that when you're done with the calibration, it looks as good as possible and it's best representing the content in that TV how it will typically be used. The nice thing about the latest version of CalMAN I'm finding is that it offers a new tool for helping manage that heat in addition to just making sure you're not overtaxing the panel during extended calibration sessions where you're pushing the TV as hard as it can go and you just wanna make sure that to get the best result, you can't be cooking those OLEDs. You really have to take it easy on them a little bit and just be aware of that and it could be something as simple as watching some regular content and then taking a thermal reading of the TV just to see what its average temperature is and then during the session ensure you're not exceeding that dramatically. Nice, good, good, good info. Before we wrap up, I know there's a lot of those TVs we heard about at CES this year coming out now and in particular, the high sense seem to be giving you the best bang for your buck, no? It's what I put on par with something like a TCL series in terms of what they're doing year after year in terms of not only making the technology better but keeping the price affordable. They have two new series that they were putting out for 2021 that I just wanna quickly mention. They have a UHG which will be the mid to upper tier television. Last year's eight series was about, they claimed a thousand nits which is pretty bright for an HDTV or HDRTV at this point. And when you actually measured that eight series from last year, it ended up measuring about 1300 nits. So they were giving you some extra punch beyond what it said on the box. And then with the UHG for 2021, they're bumping that at least what it says on the box up to 1500 nits. So I'm expecting it should even exceed that which combined that with things like quantum.color for superb HDR playback in addition to just having that full array local dimming with 1500 nits of brightness that will not only just make the picture punch more but it'll help in rooms that might be more challenging for things like a sunny day or just trying to impress the neighbors, so to speak. The other TV they are also announcing in their super flagship series is the U9 DG. The D in the DG is actually a dual cell technology where they're technically placing a 1080P panel behind the 4K panel using that in conjunction with the local dimming system, the backlighting system to create basically two million zones of local dimming. Every pixel on that 1080P screen is acting as a light valve for the 4K screen you eventually see. That could be impressive. We've seen demos of this going back a couple of years now at CES, every year it looks fantastic. I mean, when the TV goes black, even in a pitch black room be it letterbar boxes or just a dark scene, it is impressively contrasted with no light leakage or bleed or any kind of oddity that you typically would expect from a LCD television. Pricing is a little crazy on this one though. They're talking about $3,500 for only a 75 inch screen size at this point. If they're charging that much for that TV it has to go toe to toe with some of the very best out there right now including 77 inch OLEDs at that price point. So I can't wait to actually see that in person. And if it's anywhere as good as it was on the CES show floor a few years ago it's gonna look fantastic. It's just MSRP pricing compared to what the street pricing is gonna be. That's the end of what I'm waiting to see. Gotcha. Good stuff. There you go. High sense folks, be on the lookout. You might be getting some deals. Well, Amazon's assistant, you know her, you perhaps love her, might be synthetic speech but she does, at least her default voice sound pretty human, right? So one might wonder if Amazon recorded and analyzed and then algorithmically reproduced an actual person's voice. In his upcoming book, Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone claims that she is based on voiceover artist Nina Roll. Stone says, characteristically secretive, Amazon has never revealed the name of the voice artist behind Alexa. I learned her identity after canvassing the professional voiceover community, Colorado based voice actress and singer Nina Roll. Her professional website contains links to old radio ads for products such as moth apple juice and the Volkswagen Passat and the warm timber of Alexa's voice is unmistakable. Stone says that Roll told him when he contacted her she was not allowed to speak with him and then he asked Amazon if he could speak with her and Amazon declined. So take that how you will. Okay, so the Verge put a couple of videos of her work embedded in their story on this. One is for a mall in Colorado and the other is for an app. So I'll play a little of each and you tell me if you think she's the voice behind the Amazon voice assistant. Come to Cherry Creek North this winter. Denver's premier outdoor retail destination. Technology was supposed to make things simpler. Your interests connect you to other people and the internet was supposed to make- That's the second one, the mall one maybe, but technology. It's, I mean it's, well and it's funny because I'm like that human sounds like you know who rather than what's probably the other way around. Robert, you look skeptical. Well, you could, I think it probably is. Especially given what Sarah mentioned in terms of the non-denial or it's like I can't talk about this. That to me is probably more proof than anything. The voices certainly sound similar and you could see with some post-production how it would be easy to roll Miss Roll's voice into the most beloved of AI assistants out there. Although that could maybe be part of like a voice over actors mystique too. I may have been the basis for Amazon's assistant. You might be familiar with it. Exactly. You can't talk about it though. Technology is supposed to make things simpler. Your interests- That's totally right, that's totally right. All right. The money is to build back. Oh, let's do it. On GDI yesterday, if you missed it, we like to talk about the days of yesteryear every so often and we were talking about fax machines and when's the last time we all faxed something. Doesn't happen that often. Kome wrote in, had a fun flashback to those pre-cell phone 1990s. Kome said, to make a call from inside the office to overseas, this was an office that Kome was working in at the time, you would first dial nine for an external line and then 011 for international calls. Kome says, who in the world decided on that by the way? There was somebody in Kome's building who would program the speed dial on the fax machine with a number starting with 9-9-1-1 instead of 9-0-1-1. That was my mistake. So then people would send a fax or they thought they were and then they'd walk away and the machine would call 9-1-1. The police and fire department had to locate the caller which was someone in Kome's office. They showed up at least once or twice to make sure nobody was actually in distress. They find the company for every erroneous 9-1-1 call and it took administrators a while to figure out who was programming the fax machine with that wrong number although Kome does not call anyone out specifically. Yeah, you won't get fined the first time you're called 9-1-1 but if you're constantly doing it because it's misprogrammed in your fax machine, yeah, they're gonna start charging you for those wrong call outs. That is a story of its time. Kome, thank you for sharing it with us. It really is. God, I remember those nine. Do you know? Yeah, nine to nine. And like not every office had them but sometimes you just, yeah. Yeah, good times. Well, if you have fond memories of the 90s or questions or comments on anything we talk about on this here show, please do share them with us. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also shout out to patrons at our master and our grand master levels. Today they include Ken Hayes, Brad and Andrew Bradley. Also, we would be remiss without a Taco Tuesday special thanks to Tony Glass. Tony, I don't even know if you like tacos but hey, it's Taco Tuesday. You are one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Also thanks to Robert Herron for bringing the knowledge today. Robert, what else is going on with you? Well, it's that season again where it seems like everyone's buying new TVs for whatever reason, probably because of the 2021 launches coming out right now and calibrations keeping me busy as can be. Well, good stuff. We are live Monday through Friday on this show for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back to it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.