Business Articles

A Western Digital earnings call has revealed the positive effect the Chia cryptocurrency farming trend has had on the company. Chia crypto farming requires proof of space, which is provided by large-capacity hard drives. Naturally, additional sales of WD HDDs that fulfill this requirement have added considerably to the corporation’s coffers.

It's a tradeoff between fan noise and performance, but the reduction in noise will likely far outweigh the performance deficit that entails for most office users.

The dazzling annual salary of the Tesla and SpaceX founder easily surpasses the compensation of the second-placed CEO who earns his money in the health sector. Meanwhile, another well-known leading executive in the tech industry has only made it to eighth place on this year's list of the highest paid CEOs in the USA.

There is a clear distinction in Lenovo's ThinkPad lineup as to which series is more premium: The ThinkPad T-series ranks ahead of the ThinkPad L-series. Nevertheless, there's one area where the ThinkPad L-series scores better, because the Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Gen 2 AMD can be upgraded more than all other current 14-inch ThinkPads.

The latest market research indicates that the brand Realme has passed an important milestone: 100 million units sold worldwide. Furthermore, it has broken the record for the time taken to sell this many devices. Realme is now in the top 10 smartphone OEMs worldwide.

After leapfrogging Apple to become the second-biggest smartphone brand in the world in Q2 '21, it appears Xiaomi temporarily sat at the top of the charts. A new report by Counterpoint reveals that the Chinese company was actually the best-selling smartphone company in the world in June.

Lenovo is releasing a second generation of the Lenovo ThinkPad T15p, which is mostly a straightforward CPU update. There are a few additional features though. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 is probably the most important aside from the better FHD screens.

Nvidia’s plans to acquire UK-based chip designer Arm in a deal worth US$40 billion looks like it could be unraveling. A security assessment undertaken by the UK government has raised national security concerns. This follows suggestions that other regulators, including the European Commission could also terminate the deal.

Striking fan-made concept renders of a BlackBerry Passport 2 smartphone have been shared online, and they include the always familiar physical QWERTY keyboard but also offer a couple of surprises. However, the design of the BlackBerry Passport 2 seems to be trapped in 2014 nostalgia rather than emulating 2021’s Android champions.

Fast-food behemoth McDonald's has developed a curious DualSense controller covered in a Big Mac and fries livery. Apparently, Sony was unimpressed by the custom PlayStation 5 controller, because it has prevented the controller from being released.

Apple has announced that it has reduced prices in the App Store within the European Union for all apps and in-app purchases, but not for automatically renewed subscriptions. Comparable price reductions also apply in South Africa and the UK.

LG has finally brought the UltraFine OLED Pro to market, the world's first 32-inch OLED monitor. The 32EP950 is cheaper than expected too, coming in at €750 less than LG originally stated it would launch for.

A physical job application filled out by Steve Jobs has been sold for a huge amount at a recent auction. The physical form was sold alongside an NFT (digital) version of Jobs’ job application, although the former sold for a much higher sum – in fact enough to buy six fully specced Apple Mac Pro computers and have change left over for half-a-dozen wheel kits.

Samsung sales are declining. The company has recorded mostly negative sales metrics this year, and a new report estimates that the Galaxy S21 series has sold rather poorly, showing a 20% drop versus the S20 lineup, and a massive 47% decline when compared to the Galaxy S10 series.

While Samsung recorded a 7 percent drop over last year's second quarter, Xiaomi managed to achieve a solid climb of over 67 percent in the European market. This allowed the Chinese OEM to come first with 12.7 million units shipped in Q2 2021, while Samsung only shipped 12 million handsets in the region.

Google's new custom-made chipset, Tensor, will power the Pixel 6 series. Not much was revealed about the manufacturing behind Tensor, but a new report indicates that it's built on Samsung's 5 nm node. The Snapdragon 888 also is, and has gained a reputation for overheating.

While Samsung retains its traditional place as the king of the hill, the company saw a significant decline in quarterly sales, with Xiaomi, on the other hand, recording a mind-boggling 98% rise in YoY shipments on its way to toppling Apple from just beneath Samsung—all thanks to strong Redmi Note 10 and Mi 11 sales.

OnePlus has released its shipment stats for the first half of 2021 (1H2021). The OEM claims that they have increased by 428% in the US, a greater amount of growth compared to all other brands in that market. This success is based on sales of the Nord N100 and N200 as well as the flagship 9 series.

Micron has put its latest kind of flash storage for mobile devices into production. It has the OEM's state-of-the-art 176-layer NAND technology, as well as the most up-to-date UFS 3.1 read and write speeds. The brand Honor has lost no time in announcing that its upcoming Magic3 flagship series will debut with this spec.

A new book by a well-known author unveils an absurd conversation between Tim Cook and Elon Musk that allegedly took place five years ago. In it, the eccentric founder of Tesla supposedly tried to snatch the CEO position of the world's most valuable company.

The incident supposedly did not have a noticeable negative effect on the production of the microchips for the upcoming generation of iPhones, but considering the tense situation on the semiconductor market, even small delays could eventually have major repercussions.

MediaTek is set to deliver the first 4 nm chipset on the market later this year. The company will use TSMC's new 4 nm node in a bid to deliver its first truly flagship SoC, keeping it a step ahead of Qualcomm and its upcoming Snapdragon 898.

Nvidia is hoping to finalize the ARM acquisition by March 2022, but, as of this moment, it still has not received any approval from regulators across the world. Additionally, Team Green needs to apply for a European Commission review, and this could delay things even further, eventually forcing Softbank to opt for an ARM initial public offering.

An industry blog asserts that display panels capable of ultra-high 480Hz refresh rates are now in the works. They will allegedly come courtesy of AU Optronics (or AUO) and LG Display, and may go into production at these companies by 2022. Therefore, monitors that can blow the fastest 1080p models of today out of the water might be on the way.

The start-up OnwardMobility announced that it had secured the classic BlackBerry mobile device brand back in 2020, then unveiled plans to make such a phone with 5G. However, the company has gone very quiet on the subject since then. Now, however, it is back with an invitation to join a community that will apparently help the device's development with feedback and exclusive previews.

The number of fraudulent reviews on the websites of the world's biggest online retailer is rapidly increasing, a fact which Amazon has now underlined with a mind-boggling statistic. Because deleting the fake reviews is not enough, Amazon is putting its focus on the manipulators that create a majority of these deceitful reviews.

The United States' Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced a crackdown on practices that make it harder for citizens or even organizations to fix electronics themselves or seek alternatives to first-party services. The Commission asserts that these new measures will benefit businesses and consumers alike.

Tired of having manufacturers decide for you what ports you want or don't want? The Framework Laptop lets you choose exactly what you want and how many you want at up to four individual ports.

The idea of a new top-end 1TB SKU in the next-gen iPhone series has been raised and then shot down again in leaks emanating from market analysts trying to assess the new devices' specs and success ahead of their launch. However, the latest such tip asserts that this new option will indeed be announced by Apple during its upcoming product event.

Pokémon Go continues to pull in the bucks. After hitting US$5 billion in lifetime revenue earlier this year, this past weekend's Pokémon Go Fest 2021 pulled in over $21 million over just two days. The event also saw a flurry of activity from budding mobile Pokémon Masters.

The Flip CX5400 is powered by Intel's i7-1160G7 low-voltage processor that allows for a totally silent design. It also integrates 16 GB of LPDDR4x RAM, a 512 GB NVMe SSD, and 2x Thunderbolt 4 connectors plus it features a high-quality 14-inch touchscreen with 1080p resolution and 100% sRGB color gamut. It will be available soon at just above $1,000.

After the South Korean corporation quit the smartphone business due to lackluster sales numbers, LG is now collaborating with one of its biggest competitors to compensate for some of the loss that the mobile division has caused.

Qualcomm has announced that it will devote further investment and effort to its wearables business. This involves Ecosystem Accelerator Program, a new initiative to bring manufacturers, service providers, developers and vendors in order to improve innovation, collaboration and commercialization in the sector. Its provider claims that over 60 leading companies in the market have already signed up for it.

Lenovo equips the new ThinkPad E14 G3 with AMD's powerful Ryzen 5000 CPUs and brighter IPS panels. The excellent keyboard did not change and the AMD model also manages long battery runtimes thanks to improved efficiency as well as a larger battery.

Google has launched a free battery repair programme for the Pixel 4 XL. The programme affords the Pixel 4 XL an additional year of coverage, albeit only in a handful of countries.

Engineers from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have reported a new world record for data-transmission speed over fiber-optic cables. They claim a rate of 319 terabits per second (Tb/s), as opposed to the former highest rate of 178 Tb/s. Most crucially, this achievement has been made over an appreciable length of cable and a potentially feasible tweak of conventional technology.

Microsoft won't make a handheld XBox so Valve have done it themselves. The Steam Deck has the potential to fire up a fledging category of handheld PCs for gamers and not just enthusiasts.

TSMC had projected that its sales would grow by about 20% year-on-year (YoY) in 2021, despite the ongoing chip-supply crisis. With its latest revenue and profit reports, the company still believes it will comfortably hit that target by the end of the year. It also now forecasts that the crisis will start to abate in 2022.

MSI's latest line of 15- and 17-inch professional-grade PCs have up to 4K displays, 11th-gen core i9 processors and RTX A5000 graphics. Some variants even have the largest-capacity batteries available to laptops. They now also have sales listings that start at US$1,500.

An incredible annual growth rate has given Xiaomi the ability to leapfrog over Apple and take up second place in the table of the world’s largest smartphone vendors for the second quarter of 2021. Samsung still remains at the top but could soon relinquish its position if Xiaomi continues its market assault with affordable smartphones.

GlobalFounderies was created as an AMD spin off back in 2008, but now it is not controlled by Team Red anymore. Nevertheless, AMD is still an important customer, and the two companies already signed a $1.6 billion multiyear deal for chip component supplies earlier this year, so the Intel deal might not be easily attainable.

Mobvoi's latest product is a dedicated voice recorder pitched at a professional market. The OEM asserts that it is enhanced with "dual-mic" noise-cancelling for clarity in voice-capture during meetings. It is also equipped with a neural network for automatic transcript summary generation based on intelligently-chosen keywords.

The hybrid OS running on the Azure cloud infrastructure will only be available for enterprise clients through a monthly paid subscription. At launch, users will be able to create Windows 10 instances, with the possibility to add Windows 11 instances once the new OS is officially released. The increased storage and processing power scalability should help enterprises drastically reduce computer hardware-related costs.

The IBM ThinkPad 701C with its foldable TrackWrite keyboard, also known as the ThinkPad Butterfly, is one of the most iconic models of the series. The impressive design was only featured in a single model, however. A new patent may be a sign that ThinkPad manufacturer Lenovo is considering to bring back the concept.