Scientists say the geology of Pluto is second only to Earth in its complexity.
NASA’s New Horizons probe reached Pluto in 2015, but it zoomed past the dwarf planet in a matter of minutes because of its tremendous velocity. Now, the agency is considering the possibility of sending another mission to Pluto, but this one would stay in orbit to study the surface. A NASA-commissioned study from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) lays out what it would take to establish a long-term presence in the space around Pluto.
New Horizons launched in 2006 when Pluto was still officially considered a planet. It set a record for the fastest spacecraft launch ever because it had a long, long trip ahead of it. After nine years, it flew past Pluto, sending back the first close-up images and data from the former ninth planet. To remain in orbit of Pluto, New Horizons would have needed substantial fuel reserves to bleed off its speed. Instead, NASA redirected New Horizons to study other Kuiper Belt objects. The probe reached an object called Ultima Thule (2014 MU69) earlier this year.
SwRI is the right outfit to come up with a followup to New Horizons — it led the New Horizons mission for NASA. The new NASA funding will allow SwRI to come up with a full mission plan and cost estimate for a future mission. NASA will use the study to inform its next Planetary Science Decadal Survey in 2020. That’s when NASA will decide where it will focus its planetary science efforts in the following 10 years.
The New Horizons probe scanned Pluto in 2015, but it wasn’t designed to remain in Orbiter of the dwarf planet.
We can make some guesses about what sort of mission SwRI will recommend thanks to a previous Pluto orbiter concept it has been developing for the last few years. The orbiter SwRI proposed a few years back would use ion engines like the Dawn spacecraft and a nuclear power source that could keep it operational in the outer solar system. It would rely on Pluto’s moon Charon for gravity assists to alter its orbit, similar to the way Cassini navigated around Saturn and its moons. A past concept called for a lander to set up shop on Charon, which could then observe Pluto from one angle for an extended period of time. It’s unknown if SwRI will recommend any surface instruments in its new study.
The brief New Horizons flyby of Pluto revealed an unexpectedly complex little world with clouds, vast plains of frozen nitrogen, and more. It’s no surprise NASA is thinking about going back.
Mere days after rumors began to percolate through the internet, Google has confirmed that it’s acquiring wearable maker Fitbit. According to Fitbit, the sale price values the company at $7.35 per share for a total of $2.1 billion. While Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh says this is an opportunity to invest even more in Wear OS, it could just as easily be a sign that Wear OS is doomed.
While it’s technically Alphabet that’s buying Fitbit, the wearable company will become part of Google. So, it’ll be a Nest-like situation. Osterloh will oversee Fitbit operations right from the start, whereas Nest initially operated under the Alphabet umbrella as an independent company.
One thing we can say for sure is that Google’s acquisition of Fitbit will finally lead to a Google smartwatch. Osterloh specifically calls out plans for a “Made by Google” wearable. However, it’s unclear how Google will reconcile its Wear OS platform with Fitbit’s. Current Fitbit devices come in various flavors ranging from basic fitness trackers to full-featured smartwatches. Even Fitbit’s top-of-the-line smartwatches like the Versa 2 have fewer features than Wear OS. However, they also work better. Wear OS is hamstrung by mediocre hardware and a lack of OEM partnerships — Fossil is the only company making Wear OS devices in appreciable numbers anymore.
Fossil is one of the few companies still making watches with Google’s Wear OS.
Fitbit fills an important gap in Google’s wearable efforts. While Wear OS offers tight integration with services like Google Fit, fitness tracking in Fit is rudimentary at best. On the other hand, Fitbit’s fitness tracking and exercise detection is class-leading. It will almost certainly integrate that technology with Google Fit. While Osterloh professed Google’s dedication to Wear OS, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Google heavily redesign the platform with technology it acquires from Fitbit. Whether it starts with an Android base or Fitbit OS as the base for future smartwatches is unknown at this point.
As for any personal health data you have stored in Fitbit, you still have full control over that. Per Fitbit’s usage policy, your personal data will never be used in Google ads after the merger. You can, of course, just delete your Fitbit data if you don’t trust Google with it.
The deal is expected to close in 2020 after the usual regulatory approvals. Neither firm expects much pushback. A Pixel watch probably isn’t in the cards for 2020, but it could happen in 2021.
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Apple talks up iPhone security, but Zerodium says it's falling behind.
Apple wants the 2020 iPhone to make a splash, and the company has reportedly pulled out all the stops to make it happen. We’ve heard reports to this effect for months now — even before the iPhone 11 launched, there were indications that the Cupertino company wanted a big follow-up for this year’s device. Next year we’ll supposedly see a full range of 5G-capable iPhones with SoC’s built on TSMC’s 5nm lithography node.
Apple is already a bit behind the Android world as far as 5G introductions are concerned, but that hasn’t been much of a factor in 2019. While you can buy a 5G device today, network support for them is so scattered, it makes little sense to do so. Outside the US, the situation is a little different — there’s more 5G service available, and the spectrum being used is different, providing better range and support. 5G will be ramping up in the US throughout 2020, but availability will often be limited to downtown in major cities.
If Nikkei is right, Apple will put a major push on 5G next year, with three new devices all equipped with the latest standard. “It will be the first time Apple introduces 5G iPhones … There will be three of them and the company has set an aggressive sales target,” one of the people familiar with the company’s thinking said. The company wants to ship 80 million 5G devices next year. There are estimates that manufacturers will sell ~206M 5G handsets next year, about 18 percent of the expected yearly total.
How many of those users will actually have access to a 5G network? Considerably fewer — but provided the device provides significant benefits on its own, that may not matter much. 5G’s impact on battery life is uncertain. Current reports suggest that the density of base station requirements will drive higher power requirements partly offset by lower power consumption per base station. In smartphones, 5G uses less power when delivering high data bandwidth but more power than LTE when serving smaller amounts of data. Firing up the entire 5G modem for a relatively low data stream is not power-efficient.
Supposedly the new iPhone will use Qualcomm’s new 5G modem, the X55. While Apple bought Intel’s 5G business earlier this year, there’s no chance of the company having new silicon ready to go this quickly. Intel’s inability to ship that silicon to meet Apple deadlines are the reason why Apple bought the business unit and paid Qualcomm billions of dollars for a modem license. The deal between the two companies put an end to Apple’s antitrust lawsuit against Qualcomm — a lawsuit Cupertino had precious little reason to settle under other circumstances.
Besides this, the new, expected A14 will be made on TSMC’s 5nm process node. If you’ve paid attention to EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography) development, you’re aware that 5nm is a major node transition for TSMC. While EUV is being deployed on 7nm, it’ll only be used for limited steps at that node — contacts and vias only. At 5nm, TSMC will introduce EUV in more steps. This has been believed to require the development of a pellicle — a protective layer that sits over the wafer and prevents debris from landing on it, damaging the manufacturing process.
Prototype EUV pellicle. Image by ASML.
There have been some positive developments on the pellicle front. According to lithography expert Dr. Christopher Mack, Intel has presented data at the industry SPIE conference showing that if your die size is small enough, manufacturing without a pellicle can still make sense. It depends on how clean you can keep the scanner and what your losses are from particle adders relative to the loss of scanner throughput caused by introducing a pellicle. He writes:
When there are many die on one reticle, living without a pellicle may make sense. In this scenario, wafer (print die) inspections are used to find reticle defects (“repeaters” on the wafer) after they occur. Despite efforts to keep the inside of the EUV scanner clean, 20 percent of the time reticles at Intel developed particle adders between inspections, killing yield for those die. On the other hand, the use of a pellicle, which today has a one-pass transmission of 83 percent, results in a 30 percent loss of scanner throughput. (Note that using a pellicle also requires the use of a membrane just above the wafer to block out-of-band radiation, and this membrane has about 90 percent transmission. Overall light intensity is reduced by 0.9*0.83*0.83.) Which is more expensive, the lost scanner throughput due to low pellicle transmittance, or the lost yield due to printing reticle defects? That will depend on the die size.
We don’t know yet if TSMC will have a pellicle solution ready for Apple’s 5nm process specifically, or if they’ll try for non-pellicle manufacturing. The point is that there are potential solutions in play whether a pellicle is ready or not.
According to TSMC, the 5nm node offers relatively small improvements on power efficiency and performance. Gains on 5nm are expected to be up to 20 percent reduced power, up to 15 percent higher performance, and up to 45 percent area reduction. That’s a side effect of how Moore’s Law scaling has broken down — we can still pack transistors in more tightly, but doing more with them is going to be difficult. On the other hand, it’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s SoCs emphasize shrink over performance or power.
Other features supposedly include a new 3D depth-sensing rear camera with the ability to detect objects in the environment for use in AR apps and games. It isn’t clear what sort of impact 5G will have on battery life, but watch for how it shapes up before new iPhones go on sale. If multiple devices are all using the X55 modem, we should be able to judge performance fairly well before it ships.
Version 4 of Ford Sync infotainment brings support for screens as big as 15.5 inches, wireless connections for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, and over-the-air updates for a wide range of software/firmware updates to the car, not just infotainment updates. There will be an always-on, Alexa-like agent (wake word: Ford). It comes next year in Fords and Lincolns that are all-new or major-refresh vehicles. More in-car connections can be wireless, reducing the times a USB cable gets in the way of a center-stack control you’re trying to reach.
Bigger screens will have more windows available. The biggest screen will have a physical volume knob sticking out the bottom. All this moves Ford infotainment ahead in some respects, while in others Ford and other companies are keeping pace with each other. Ford says it’s “faster, easier and simpler than ever to use.” Ford is sticking with the QNX operating system for Sync, but it has taken development work in-house.
Ford Sync 4 15.5-inch portrait display with temperature slider, phone, and music screens. The bigger the display — 8, 10 or 15.5 inches — the more information and tiles the driver and passenger see. (Main photo shows 10-inch display.)
The Bigger the Screen, the More It Does
The basic screen is 8 inches diagonal, which is nothing special, merely better than a 7-incher. The step-up screen is 12 inches and appears to be 16:9 aspect ratio with the ability to do a 70-30 split and show two windows for what Ford calls multi-tasking. True: You can see navigation on the left, your phone or the audio stream on the right, and you can access either one, so it’s “multitasking,” but that’s pretty common.
The largest screen is 15.5 inches, portrait mount (three images, above). It for sure will go into Ford’s F-Series pickups to match and raise the 12-incher in Ram pickups. The top of the screen shows whatever you’re doing now, while the bottom has HVAC controls and a physical volume knob. The middle is three panes, or Adaptive Dash Cards, there are six running left to right; you see three, and swipe left-right to see the rest. An infotainment card would let you pause or jump tracks even if it’s not showing elsewhere. AI, or machine learning, or something automatic, decides which three to display for you. Ford says:
Available machine learning capability also means Sync 4 can automatically learn your preferences and make helpful suggestions at the right time based on previous usage. Sync 4 will make destination suggestions based on your previous navigation behavior and can even prompt you to make phone calls to people that you frequently speak to.
We hope to see working concepts by early 2019 to get a feel for how much Ford’s predictive intelligence is in sync with what you want to do.
Sync 4 Fords can do over-the-air updates. To soothe tech-anxious drivers, the update isn’t installed until the owner says to do it.
Voice Recognition, Fewer Cords
Sync 4 gets a new level of conversational voice recognition to control the center stack hardware and make infotainment selections. Some basic voice recognition is running inside the car in case you lose or don’t have connectivity. Also, it takes too long to process “Next track” or “Navigate home” in the cloud even if you have a connection working (every car, not just Ford).
All this is possible “now that every new Ford vehicle comes with optional FordPass Connect with a 4G LTE WiFi Hotspot, [and] cloud connectivity comes standard to Sync 4.” Meaning, apparently, that every Ford model offers FordPass Connect on at least some trim lines, whether standard or optional. FordPass is an app customers can load on their phones to help control Ford Motor cars, and FordPass Connect is an embedded cellular telematics modem. Ford, like most automakers, partners with AT&T as the service provider.
Onboard telematics means the ability to use the power of the cloud to process complex voice requests with the industry-standard lag of a couple seconds before the cloud gets back to you with an answer. But you can ask richer questions — just like talking to Google Assistant or Apple Siri — such as “Find the best Asian fusion restaurant near here” or find a location by its name, even if you get it a little bit wrong, or it’s not in the online POI listing.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can be simultaneously connected in the car. Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, Waze, and Ford’s own Sync AppLink can be used wirelessly, no need to plug in a cord, and Ford says there will be wireless (Qi) charging. It will be interesting to see how many Qi spots there’ll be on higher-end cars. Two in front and at least one in back would be nice.
The owner’s manual will be available onscreen but probably not while the car is moving, even if it’s a passenger who wants to look something up. If your car has satellite radio, you can get SiriusXM with 360L, providing streaming music either through the car and its onboard modem, or your phone. Ford also promises “curated” channels based on your listening habits.
Of importance especially to technology haters is how Ford handles updates. Much of the car, not just the infotainment system, can use over the air (OTA) updates downloaded late at night to get newer software or navigation maps. Most updates take just a minute or two. The old app remains installed until the owner decides he or she wants the update installed, then presses a button to make it happen. So the owner has a sense of being in control. And Ford says that for owners who just can’t get enough of dealership visits (actually, they didn’t put it quite that way), the owner has the option of letting the dealer do the install.
Ford Sync 3 in 2018.
Does Ford Have a Class-Leading Product?
15.5-inch portrait display with texting (no hands) at top.
Ford was early with a phone-car infotainment system starting with the first Sync in late 2007. Also called MyFord Touch, two versions carried Ford through late 2014. There were some novel parts, especially work truck apps for people whose office is their truck. The early products were decent but suffered problems of slow booting, slow operation, small fonts, and sudden crashes that turned the screen blue, the same Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) hue as on Microsoft Windows. Ford ditched Windows Automotive/Windows Embedded for Blackberry QNX and things got a lot better in 2015. That was Sync 3; Sync 4 is a significant enhancement to Sync 3.
Sync 4 should make Windows more competitive against a wide range of mainstream vehicles. Ford declined to comment on plans for Lincoln but we’re confident Sync 4 will find its way there. The company is on a roll with a string of SUV hits — the Corsair, Nautilus, and Aviator (from small to large) — and has become the attractive nameplate for buyers who value luxury and refined cockpits over Nürburgring-ready handling you’ll never use.
We’ll wait to see new-vehicle prototypes early to mid-2020 to learn which cars get what size screens. If Ford is smart, it will have 12-inch displays on midsize vehicles, not just the big cars, because a) it’s what buyers want and b) the Ford Escape circa 2010 with a 4-inch screen still leaves a bad taste, so think of Sync 4 as reparations. We’re also interested to see how much redundancy there is between touchscreen controls and physical buttons. Many users prefer a fan or temperature control that is always visible on the dash, large, and easy to manipulate. If you’ve ever had to hunt for the seat heater button that is only on the LCD, two levels down, you know why users love dials.
We trust Ford will offer entry and mid-grade trims without a navigation system ($500) since Google Maps and Waze are more than good enough. Ford could also continue to offer its own on-phone navi app that runs off the phone. Buyers are happy enough with what’s on the phone. If an automaker wants to offer premium services that require the automaker’s own navigation, then maybe it has to include onboard navigation free or for $99 if it plans to charge for services overload atop navigation.
If Ford goes to Sync 4 only as it ships new models — roughly every six to seven years — and mid-life refreshes every three to four, Sync 4 would be on all cars sold by 2023 or 2024. Sooner is always better. Ford has made a lot of smart bets: moving to SUVs (even if millennials say they want sedans), making Lincoln luxury not sports/luxury, committing to to electrification, and even targeted bits of utility such as Pro Trailer Backup Assist (turn a knob the direction you the whole vehicle to go and it does, without jackknifing). Sync 4 could be another differentiator for Ford.
Sony has unquestionably won the latest round in the console wars. As of this week, the PS4 has officially sold 102.8 million units. That’s significantly more than the PS3 (87.4M units), and there’s still a full year to go in the PS4’s life cycle. The PS4 has now sold more units than the original PlayStation and is the second-highest selling console of all time — far behind the PS2, at ~155M units.
What’s striking about this situation is how unexpected it was back in 2012. Coming off the Xbox 360, Microsoft was flying high. Where the original Xbox had been a rounding error compared with the PS2’s sales figures, the Xbox 360 had nearly tied things up with Sony. Both consoles had weathered their own respective disasters. Sony took enormous losses early in the PS3’s life cycle when the hardware was selling for much less than it cost to produce. Microsoft had the early unreliability and problems of the Red Ring of Death. Both platforms had expanded to copy the Wii’s push into motion controls. Microsoft had Kinect, while Sony had the PlayStation Move — or, as I liked to call it, the PS Wii.
Today, the Xbox One has a fraction of the PS4’s sales — an estimated 43.6M systems, according to VGChartz. We don’t know the actual number, because Microsoft won’t disclose it, but all reports and estimates suggest that the Xbox console ecosystem is less than half the size of Sony’s. So what happened?
There are several reasons why Sony took and kept an early lead. The most obvious reason is price — at debut, the Xbox One was a $500 system, compared with $400 for the PS4. That extra $100 paid for Kinect 2, an updated version of Microsoft’s Project Natal (aka Kinect, the first-generation peripheral for Xbox One). Price is the first place to look for an explanation for the PS4’s early and sustained sales momentum because Microsoft was asking gamers to pay 1.25x more for its comparable console.
Performance was another factor. The Sony PS4 wasn’t just less expensive — it was faster. There were several high-profile early launches that ran better on PS4, while games running better on Xbox One was a fairly rare event. The gaps weren’t always that large, but if you know that games are going to run 5-8 percent better on a less expensive platform, why wouldn’t you choose that system?
But in my own opinion, what hurt the Xbox One the most wasn’t its price or its performance. Higher prices aren’t intrinsically bad if a platform can justify the cost. The performance gap was noticeable in some cases, but it could have been ameliorated by a unique, interesting experience. Microsoft, to its credit, absolutely wanted to shoot for the moon. Microsoft catastrophically misunderstood its own market.
A Difference in Vision
On May 21, 2013, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, a console with advanced multimedia integration, and the ability to juggle multiple video streams at once. Microsoft wanted to talk about its plans for multimedia content, including a Halo TV series with Steven Spielberg, cloud integration features, and Skype integration. Microsoft wanted to talk about how you’d use Kinect for video conferencing or to check which actor was in a movie without pausing playback.
Gamers, however, wanted to talk about how the console’s always-online connectivity would work. Gamers wanted to discuss how Kinect was always listening for your voice, and about patents Microsoft had taken out allowing Kinect to monitor how many people were watching a movie, so you could be charged more if someone walked into the room halfway through. As 2013 turned, the situation worsened. Microsoft’s vision for family game sharing — a genuinely requested feature — came with enormous strings attached. Consoles had to be always-online or able to connect every 24 hours at the very least in order to retain library access.
Microsoft wanted to talk about its plans for a multimedia empire and its vision of the Xbox One as the central multimedia device of the future. Gamers wanted to talk about games. Microsoft wanted to talk about how we’d use Kinect as the central interface for all our digital products. Gamers didn’t want to pay $100 over the price of the PS4 for a product Microsoft could use to spy on them. Why so many people have decided they’re fine paying Amazon and Google to sell them the equivalent is beyond me, but in 2013, people were pissed about Kinect 2. E3 2013 did little to help.
I was virtually certain Microsoft would have to change its stance once I saw company representatives claim serving US troops without access to online services would have to be content with an Xbox 360 if they wanted to game while on deployment. Either that or buy a PS4. Indeed, this proved to be the final straw.
This went over exactly as well as you think it did.
Microsoft reversed course on the always-online idea, even if they nuked family sharing in the process. Eventually, they reversed course on the Kinect mandatory integration as well. When they built the Xbox One X, they even flipped the performance differential. Today, the Xbox One X is the most powerful console you can buy. It’s faster than the PS4 Pro. That hasn’t appeared to help Microsoft’s console sales one iota.
Sony’s stance during the same period that Microsoft was tearing itself apart was simple: “It plays games and costs $400.”
While we do not know how many Xbox One X or PS4 Pro units specifically sold versus the regular flavors of the console, we do know that Microsoft pulled out all the stops on the Xbox One X design and didn’t appear to see a commensurate sales bump. Fixing the price and positioning issues and overtopping Sony on performance didn’t fix the problem. The Xbox One has performed respectfully, but Sony has outsold it decisively — and it looks like launch positioning, rather than price or performance as such, were the primary reasons why. Keep the messaging simple and don’t enrage fans by talking about an always-on spybox when what they want is a game console.
Last thought: If you add up sales of the Xbox One and PS4, the total comes to 146.4M units, compared with a total of 173.2M units between the Xbox 360 and PS3 last generation. While that gap will continue to shrink until the new consoles launch in 2020, Microsoft and Sony would need to move 26.8M consoles between them in the last year of a cycle. The number of console gamers seems to have gone down in absolute terms between generations. Counting the Switch doesn’t help things — if we count the Switch, we have to count the Wii, and the Wii has shifted far more units.
A new style of battery could let electric cars charge quickly. Credit: Yang Wang Group
Battery technology has finally reached the point that you can drive an electric vehicle without constant range anxiety, but you still have to plan ahead for charging. Even Teslas, which charge faster than other EVs, need almost an hour to fill up completely at a SuperCharger. Researchers from Penn State University say it may be possible to design electric vehicle batteries that charge in as little as 10 minutes. The key, apparently, is to turn up the heat.
The standard set by the researchers for a sufficiently fast battery is 200 miles of range per 10 minutes of charging. That’s actually possible without any fancy new technology… as long as you don’t mind the battery deteriorating after a handful of charge cycles. The challenge is to create a high-capacity battery that can charge quickly and maintain its functionality for 2,500 cycles or more.
When batteries charge too quickly, they develop “battery plaque,” also known as solid-electrolyte-interphase (SEI) growth. This lithium metal plating on the electrodes reduces the battery’s capacity. The system described in the new study uses asymmetric charging — the battery is heated during charging and then cools when storing the charge. The goal is to heat the cells just past the point where lithium plating can form.
The team added thin nickel foil to a battery’s internal structure, allowing it to absorb the heat from rapid charging and transfer the heat into the battery itself. Interestingly, this approach also means the battery needs less cooling after recharging because there’s less time for the heat to build up. That also reduces wear from excessive heat on other components in the battery. It would require new charging stations that can output 400 kilowatts of power in just a few minutes, though.
The test batteries were charged with the internal temperature calibrated to 40, 49, and 60 degrees Celsius. A control battery was maintained at 20 degrees Celsius. The 60-degree electrode lasted through 2,500 cycles of super-fast charging without accumulating the plaque that would hamper cooler cells. With internal heating, the battery would also work equally well no matter the climate, according to coauthor Xiao-Guang Yang.
Yang says the next step is to see if they can push the charging speed time to just five minutes. That would put it in the same ballpark as refilling a gasoline car.
