Sony just announced a car

Today at CES 2020, Sony unveiled a car. I’m surprised too. There are very few details about the Sony Vision-S sedan at this time. We’ll get more once we can see it on the show floor.

According to the press account, Sony partnered with industry leaders to build this prototype, including Bosch, Continental, Genetex, Nvidia, Magna, and Nvidia.

This car is a bit surprising but fits within Sony’s current strategy. Over the last generation, Sony started building and selling key technologies as a supplier. Sony camera sensors are found in many leading smartphones, including the latest iPhone Pro. But before it hits the iPhone, Sony has long produced its own smartphone with similar smartphone sensors.

Expect a similar play with the Vision-S sedan. This concept vehicle is clearly designed to help Sony sell components. Sony doesn’t want to get into auto manufacturing. I think. We’re asking Sony a bunch of questions and will relay the answers.

Not over it: California officials just sued billionaire Vinod Khosla in a now 12-year-long battle over access to a popular beach

One thing is certain: Vinod Khosla will be remembered in California, if not for his work, then for his now 12-year-old battle to keep private a stretch of beach in front of an 89-acre San Mateo hillside that the billionaire venture capitalist purchased in 2008.

It has exhausted colleagues and associates, who have privately complained over the unwanted attention it has drawn to Khosla’s investment firm, Khosla Ventures. It has infuriated beachgoers, whose access to the beach has been periodically obstructed. It has even landed a handful of surfers in jail. (You can watch a film about their 2012 arrest here.) Yet astonishingly, the battle over the sandy, crescent-shaped strip known as Martins Beach continues.

You could hardly be blamed for thinking it was a thing of the past. Last October, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Khosla’s appeal to overturn a ruling that the beach access path that cuts through is property must stay open. Exhausted onlookers surely heaved a sigh of relief at the decision, along with the Surfrider Foundation and other champions of ensuring Californians have access to the state’s beaches.

But Khosla — who has argued all along that his property rights are being violated —  found a sympathetic ear more recently in an appeals court in San Mateo County. As the L.A. Times explains, it ruled in favor of Khosla on a related case that centered on whether the former property owners of the land he owns had already granted public rights to use the beach — along with the road that leads to it and a parking lot where visitors have long been charged an entrance fee. The panel concluded there was insufficient evidence to show that they — a family that acquired the parcel in 1902 — had.

Now, the state is suing. Specifically, the California State Lands Commission and Coastal Commission is asking the court to consider new evidence from more than 225 people — including photographs, newspaper stories, and personal journal entries — that shows that while the land owners might not have explicitly granted public rights to use the beach, the beach and gated road to it have nevertheless been used by the public since “at least the 1920s.”

Indeed, it argues that a family that lived on the land and managed it for decades on behalf of its longtime owners, had operated a beach store and provided other beach amenities, including restrooms and even, at one point, a restaurant — all with the owners’ consent.

Collectively, these actions and experiences prove “implied dedication,” says the suit.

The filing adds that without court orders, Khosla will “continue to deny, impair and obstruct” the public’s right to use Martins Beach.

What happens now remains to be seen. But the Coastal Commission sees the case as far more than a story between the state and one very resolute property owner who remains unwilling to cut his losses, no matter its impact on the legacy he one day leaves behind.

Steve Padilla, who chairs the Coastal Commission, tells the L.A. Times that as far as the state is concerned, the case “goes to the heart of California’s public access mandate.

“We cannot allow this to be chipped away each time someone purchases beachfront property — it’s a dangerous precedent for the future of public access in California.”

PlayStation 5 announced for holidays 2020

Turns out Sony is still able to pack a surprise or two into its CES press conference. The company just kicked off its event by announcing that the PlayStation 5 will be arriving this holiday season.

Not a lot was revealed about the next-gen console, beyond a few basic features, including 3D audio (because Sony), haptic/adaptive triggers, ultra-high speed SSD, hardware based ray tracing and Blu-Ray (so, yeah, physical media).

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See you this holiday.

— Sony (@Sony) January 7, 2020

[^Not the new logo, nor a reflection of graphics quality.]

The announcement comes just under a month after the PS5’s chief competitor, the Xbox Series X. Microsoft is set to offer up that system at roughly the same timeframe, meaning that we’re powering head first into another explosive console war at the end of the year.

Given that we’re now less than a year away from the launch of both products, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about both. Look forward to an extremely crazy E3, Gamescom and other gaming conferences in the months to come.

Get a load of these Dell PC concepts that you can’t buy

Concept PCs are a lot like concept cars. The idea comes from a decent enough place, but mostly they exist to make you feel bad an inadequate about your current dumb device. It’s a metaphor for life, really.

In that spirit, here are a trio of concept PCs that Dell debuted this week at CES. Honestly, none are too farfetched. One looks an awful lot like an existing product, and the other two are pretty reminiscent of recently announced products from competitors. Any of the three could seemingly have been announced as actual retail devices, but life is an endless stream increasing disappointment culminating in your inevitable, inescapable demise.

First up is the Alienware-branded UFO. Remember a paragraph ago when I told you that one of the products looked like an existing one? Well, this is that. It’s Alienware’s take on the Nintendo Switch (or any gaming portable, to be honest). Though one assumes that, were it ever to actually come to market, it would feature much beefier specs. One assumes.

Like the Switch, the gaming portable features detachable controllers (sound familiar?) and kickstand, so you can, say, play it on an airplane tray table (wipe it down first, though. Those things are the germiest part of the plane). There’s a 10th gen Intel chip inside this hypothetical product, powering an eight-inch, 1900×1200 display.

Concept Duet, meanwhile, is the sort of idea a number of PC manufacturers have been flirting with for a while. It’s a standard laptop form factor, only with a 13.4 inch display on either side. The benefits of such a form factor are pretty clear, and like the Lenovo, there appears to be a slip-on keyboard, so you don’t have to type on a touchscreen. The Concept Ori is in-line with the actual ThinkPad X1 Fold announced earlier today by Lenovo. It’s a 13 inch screen that folds in for a significantly more portable form factor.

“I’m excited about our new approach this year at CES, and we hope you enjoy this glimpse into our labs,” CTO Glen Robson says in a blog post. “This is only a small fraction of the ideas, experiences, hardware and software our teams are constantly developing. Who knows, if response is positive, you may see more of our early work in the future.”

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Audi AI:ME concept demonstrates innovative safety through lights

The Audi AI:ME is a concept for future urban travel. The little car is autonomous, has a surprisingly spacious interior, and it’s equipped with a host of exterior lights designed to better communicate with the outside world.

There’s much more to this concept than the size. The most exciting part are the exterior lights. They’re everywhere.

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The idea is to surround the vehicle with multi-purpose lights. The front and rear fenders feature an array of lights along their shoulders. You see, this concept is a self-driving vehicle, and the lights demonstrate a possible solution to help autonomous communicate with humans.

Often, when driving, human drivers communicate through split-second glances and waves of the hand. That’s not possible when the computer is driving the vehicle. These arrays of lights could indicate greater detail about the vehicle’s intentions outside of standard blinkers. Their size and design would make them hard to miss even by someone staring at a smartphone.

The fender lights are situated in a way that makes them more visible to those looking down at them — think bikers and pedestrians. Meanwhile, the traditional blinkers are designed to be viewed head-on as if from another vehicle.

Sadly, Audi was unable to demonstrate this system in the demo. Does it work? I’m not sure, but it’s worth mentioning as a practical solution to a future problem.

The AI:ME has a spacious interior. There isn’t a small car on the market with this much space inside. The concept has an utterly hollow interior, but the production version, if it goes into production, would be equipped with airbags, sound deadening, and all sorts of bits missing from this one-off demo vehicle.

Once engaged in autonomous mode, the steering wheel retracts into the dash, and a large wood dash extends for use by the driver. The idea, Audi says, is to give the rider a place for their computer or book or whatever. After all, the vehicle is doing the driving, and they’re just there for the ride.

Or the driver could use the VR system. The Audi AI:ME is equipped with Holoride’s impressive in-vehicle VR system that matches the vehicle’s movements with custom-content on the headset. If the car turns right, the content on the VR headset veers right, too, matching the dynamics correctly.

Holoride launched last year at CES. I was impressed in 2019 with the initial demo, and it’s impressive here again. Holoride’s VR solution is designed mainly for passengers, and this demo shows a future where, perhaps, a driver puts his full trust in a computer and spends a few hours playing VR games while sitting in traffic.

There are no plans to produce the AI:ME. It’s a concept vehicle designed to showcase potential technology and design. The AI:ME is part of Audi’s four-piece concept family that also includes the luxurious Aicon, the sporty AI:RACE, and the rugged AI:Trail.

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Intel and Google plot out closer collaboration around Chromebooks and the future of computing

Intel, the chip-making giant, has been on the road of refocusing its strategy in recent months. While it has sold its mobile chip operation to Apple and is reportedly looking for a buyer for its connected home division, it’s also been going through the difficult task of rethinking how best to tackle the longtime bread and butter of its business, the PC.

Part of that latter strategy is getting a big boost this week at CES 2020. Here, Intel is today announcing a deeper partnership with Google to design chips and specifications for Chromebooks built on Project Athena. Project Athena is framework first announced last year that covers both design and technical specs, with the aim of building the high-performance laptops of tomorrow that can be used not just for work, but media streaming, gaming, enterprise applications and more, all on the go — powered by Intel, naturally.

(The specs include things like requiring ‘fast wake’ using fingerprints or push-buttons or lift lids; using Intel Core i5 or i7 processors; “Ice Lake” processor designs; better battery life and charging; WiFi 6; touch displays; 2-in-1 designs; narrow bezels and more.)

Earlier today, the first two Chromebooks built on those Athena specifications — from Samsung and Asus — were announced by the respective companies, and Intel says that there will be more to come. And on stage, Google joined Intel during its keynote to also cement the two companies’ commitment to the mission.

“We’re going a step further and deepening our partnership with Google to bring Athena to Chromebooks,” Gregory Bryant, the EVP and GM of Intel’s client computing group, said in an interview with TechCrunch ahead of today. “We’ve collaborated very closely with Google [so that device makers] can take advantage of these specs.”

For Intel, having a Chromebook roster using Athena is important because these have been very popular, and it brings its processors into machines used by people who are buying Chromebooks to get access to Google services around security and more, and its apps ecosystem.

But stepping up the specifications for Chromebooks is as important for Google as it is for Intel in terms of the bottom line and growing business.

“This is a significant change for Google,” said John Solomon, Google’s VP of ChromeOS, in an interview ahead of today. “Chromebooks were successful in the education sector initially, but in the next 18 months to two years, our plan is to go broader, expanding to consumer and enterprise users. Those users have greater expectations and a broader idea of how to use these devices. That puts the onus on us to deliver more performance.”

The renewed effort comes at an interesting time. The laptop market is in a generally tight spot these days. Overall, the personal computing market is in a state of decline, and forecast to continue that way for the next several years.

But there is a slightly brighter picture for the kinds of machines that are coming out of collaborations like the one between Intel, Google, and their hardware partners: IDC forecasts that 2-in-1 devices — by which it means convertible PCs and detachable tablets — and ultra-slim notebook PCs “are expected to grow 5% collectively over the same period,” versus a compound annual growth rate of -2.4% between 2019 and 2023. So there is growth, but not a huge amount.

Up against that is the strength of the smartphone market. Granted, it, too, is facing some issues as multiple markets reach smartphone saturation and consumers are slower to upgrade.

All that is to say that there are challenges. And that is why Intel, whose fortunes are so closely linked to those of personal computing devices since it makes the processors for them, has to make a big push around projects like Athena.

Up to this month, all of the laptops built to Athena specs have been Windows PCs — 25 to date — but Intel had always said from the start Chromebooks would be part of the mix, to help bring the total number of Athena-based devices up to 75 by the end of this year (adding 50 in 2020).

Chromebooks are a good area for Intel to be focusing on, as they seem to be outpacing growth for the wider market, despite some notable drawbacks about how Chrome OS has been conceived as a “light” operating system with few native tools and integrations in favor of apps. IDC said that in Q4 of 2019, growth was 19% year-on-year,  and from what I understand the holiday period saw an even stronger rise. In the US, Chromebooks had a market share of around 27% last November, according to NPD/Gfk.

What’s interesting is the collaborative approach that Intel — and Google — are taking to grow. The Apple-style model is to build vertical integration into its hardware business to ensure a disciplined and unified approach to form and function: the specifications of the hardware are there specifically to handle the kinds of services that Apple itself envisions to work on its devices, and in turn, it hands down very specific requirements to third parties to work on those devices when they are not services and apps native to Apple itself.

While Google is not in the business of building laptops or processors (yet?), and Intel is also far from building more than just processors, what the two have created here is an attempt at bringing a kind of disciplined specification that mimics what you might get in a vertically integrated business.

“It’s all about building the best products and delivering the best experience,” Bryant said.

“We can’t do what we do without Intel’s help and this close engineering collaboration over the last 18 months,” Solomon added. “This is the beginning of more to come in this space, with innovation that hasn’t previously been seen.”

Indeed, going forward, interestingly Bryant and Solomon wouldn’t rule out that Athena and their collaboration might extend beyond laptops.

“Our job is to make the PC great. If we give consumers value and a reason to buy a PC we can keep the PC alive,” said Bryant, but he added that Intel is continuing to evolve the specification, too.

“From a form factor you’ll see an expansion of devices that have dual displays or have diff kinds of technology and form factors,” he said. “Our intention is to expand and do variations on what we have shown today.”

Comcast makes xFi Advanced Security, its $5.99/month network security service, free for all 18M customers who lease its new xFi Gateway router/modem device (Nathan Ingraham/Engadget)

Nathan Ingraham / Engadget:
Comcast makes xFi Advanced Security, its $5.99/month network security service, free for all 18M customers who lease its new xFi Gateway router/modem device  —  At CES last year, Comcast announced a feature for its Xfinity internet customers called Advanced Security.