Sonos was the first to make multi-room audio easy to set up, but swallowing the cost of its speakers wasn’t always as easy. Even in the age of internet-connected speakers from Google and Amazon, Sonos enjoys continued success thanks to its commitment to sound quality. However, the company has come under fire for the wasteful way it encourages customers to upgrade to new speakers — it bricks the old ones. Sonos’ defense of this practice is also laughably inept.
Even small Sonos speakers can cost several hundred dollars, which can make Sonos devotees hesitant to upgrade their expensive systems. So, Sonos implemented the Trade Up program that offers customers a 30 percent discount on select new speakers if they recycle the old ones. That sounds like a good deal at first, but Sonos really means it wants those old but perfectly functional speakers out of circulation.
Owners have to activate Recycle Mode on their old speakers to get the discount, which is really just a euphemism for self-destruct. After a 21-day countdown, the speaker stops working forever. E-waste recycler @atomicthumbs brought attention to this bizarre program on Twitter recently, pointing out that the speakers are completely functional on the hardware side. Sonos’ servers, however, will never again allow someone to activate them. Some customers have also accidentally tripped recycling mode only to find out there’s no way to stop the countdown. Sonos might as well just ask people to take a hammer to their old speakers and dump them in the trash.
This is the the most environmentally unfriendly abuse and waste of perfectly hardware I've seen in five years working at a recycler.
We could have sold these, and ensured they were reused, as we do with all the working electronics we're able. Now we have to scrap them.
Sonos has attempted to respond to this, saying that it wants Sonos users to have access to the newest features at a reasonable price. “For those that choose to trade-up to new products, we felt that the most responsible action was not to reintroduce them to new customers that may not have the context of them as 10+-year-old products, and that also may not be able to deliver the Sonos experience they expected,” Sonos says.
So, Sonos is claiming this is better for consumers because no one will end up with speakers that don’t have modern features. That’s an interesting angle, but it ultimately falls flat because it encourages wasteful disposal of working devices. Old Sonos speakers are often worth more than you’d get in discounts, too, and that’s more environmentally friendly. As many have pointed out, the best way to recycle an electronic device is to give it to someone else or refurbish it for resale. With Sonos speakers, the company’s policy means most of the materials like plastic will end up in a landfill.
(The editor would like to note his primary living room speakers are rebuilt original Advent Loudspeakers, at ~40 years old.)
A new set of rumors have leaked regarding the next-generation Xbox and PS5 and the GPUs both consoles will bring to market. We’ve known the broad specs of both platforms for a bit — both use AMD GPUs and CPUs, with the GPU based on AMD’s most recent RDNA architecture, while the CPU is derived from the same 7nm Ryzen CPU cores that launched earlier this summer. What we’ve lacked is specific details on the GPU cores themselves.
Eurogamer has gotten their hands on some leak data they feel is fairly legit, and the website’s track record with this kind of information is solid. There have been some rumored APU configurations that leaked earlier this year, but this new data implies the Sony PS5 will feature 36 GPU clusters clocked at up to 2GHz. Supposedly the silicon, codenamed Oberon, is designed to operate in three different modes (Gen 0, 1, and 2) with clocks of 800MHz, 911MHz, and 2GHz respectively. Supposedly memory bandwidth is 448GB/s in Gen 2 mode (though 512GB/s is an alternate possibility) and the GPU can reportedly also be variably configured in terms of ROP and core counts. Eurogamer states:
While a 2.0GHz GPU clock is used for what is described as the fully unlocked ‘native’ or ‘Gen2’ mode, the processor is also tested in what is referred to as Gen1 and Gen0 modes. The former is explicitly stated as running with 36 compute units, a 911MHz core clock, 218GB/s of memory bandwidth and 64 ROPs – the exact specifications of PlayStation 4 Pro. The latter Gen0 mode cuts the CU and ROP counts in half and runs at 800MHz, a match for the base PS4. The indications are that back-compat is an integral part of the silicon, which in turn raises some interesting questions about the makeup of the Navi GPU and the extent to which older GCN compatibility may be baked into the design.
The implication here is that the PS5 SoC contains multiple GPU clusters, just like the PS4 Pro did. Using multiple GPU clusters in the same SoC would give Sony the same ability to turn the clusters on or off depending on which mode the GPU was running in. Alternately, the GPU cluster could be physically unified but designed to allow for this kind of fine-grained power gating. Stamping out identical clusters would be simpler, designing a unified cluster with fine-grained gating is probably more complex but saves on die space.
As for the Xbox Series X, Eurogamer is implying this console packs serious firepower. Here’s the rumored configuration:
Image by Eurogamer
If this rumor proves true — always something to keep in mind — the Xbox Series X will launch packing the equivalent of a high-end PC GPU. The largest GPU AMD has ever built are cards like the R9 Fury X and Vega 64, with 4096 cores. A 56-cluster Navi GPU would pack 1.4x more GPU cores than the 5700 XT, which already competes in the high-end PC GPU segment at the ~$400 price point. While AMD is expected to launch Navi 20 before the Xbox Series X debuts, we haven’t seen any indication that the company intends to dramatically expand the number of GPU cores it offers — Navi improved on GCN’s performance by making the individual cores more efficient as opposed to simply throwing more cores at the problem. It’s highly unlikely, in other words, that AMD would build a 56 CU for Microsoft and then ship a 128 CU design into the PC market.
If this rumor proves true, Microsoft is playing a far more aggressive game than it did last generation. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that AMD ships an 80 CU version of Navi 20, which comes out to 2x Navi 10. That would give the Xbox Series X 3,584 GPU cores compared to 5,120 for Navi 20, or about 70 percent as many.
In 2013, the Xbox One shipped with 768 GPU cores. The month before, AMD had shipped the R9 290X, with 2,816 cores. The PS4, at debut, had 1,152 cores. The Xbox had 27 percent as many GPU cores as the R9 290X, while the PS4 had 41 percent. While we can’t draw linear comparisons between console and PC performance strictly on the basis of GPU core count, the PC GPU was obviously far larger, with significantly more compute and graphics resources.
If — again, if — these rumors are true, the gaps are going to be a lot narrower this time around. The 1.7GHz clock speed on the Xbox Series X’s GPU is required to hit a supposed target of 12TFLOPS, but Eurogamer didn’t get that clock speed leak directly. The gap in GPU performance between the PS5 and XSX would be partially offset by faster clocks on the PS5, but only partially.
Frankly, the spec gap between the PS5 and XSX is large enough that you could argue the Xbox specs are less likely to be true. It’s also possible Microsoft decided to pull out all the stops after the disaster of the Xbox One. Doubling down on beating Sony in raw performance from Day 1 might represent Microsoft’s big idea for preventing a repeat of what happened last generation.
If the Xbox rumors are accurate there doesn’t seem to be a way for MS to sell the console at $400 without losing money — and I’ve got doubts about $500 as well, given that the system is expected to also use a high-speed NVMe-attached SSD and GDDR6. Hard drives might be slow, but they’re still cheaper than the equivalent amount of solid state storage. That doesn’t mean MS can’t pursue a loss-making strategy, but both MS and Sony opted not to do that with the initial Xbox One / PS4 after taking heavier-than-expected losses on X360 and PS3 (particularly in Sony’s case).
This kind of configuration would make a lot more sense if Microsoft is serious about a lower-end version of the console and intends to debut both. The PS5’s smaller GPU looks more like what we’d expect from a generational update. On the other hand, if this points to an upper-end Xbox Series X, it means that version of the console is going to pack high-end* PC-equivalent performance. With a 56-CU Navi, 8-core Ryzen 7nm CPU and 560GB/s of system memory bandwidth there’s no way it could perform like anything else.
Internet connected home security cameras have become a big business with companies like Google’s Nest and Amazon’s Ring dominating the high-end market. However, there are also numerous smaller players like the budget-minded Wyze. This company attracted attention for its $20 security camera and other super-cheap smart home products. However, Wyze now admits it suffered a serious security breach in December.
Wyze security cameras don’t have batteries, 4K resolution, or advanced AI like some devices on the market, but they’re cheap enough that you can keep an eye on your humble abode for a relative pittance. Whereas a 1080p Wyze camera costs $20, the basic indoor Nest Camera costs $200. However, Nest has Google’s account security, which is among the most robust you’ll find. Wyze recently made a grave error when it left a repository of user data wide open for several weeks.
The saga started last week when consulting firm Twelve Security reported that it discovered a copy of Wyze’s database accessible online. Wyze later confirmed the scale of the breach in an email to consumers. The data included camera names, Wi-Fi SSIDs, activation times, and access tokens for mobile apps and Alexa. Passwords and stored recordings were not part of the breach. Reports indicate about 2.4 million users were put at risk.
Wyze says the database was accidentally copied to an insecure location by an employee. The company doesn’t believe anyone’s login data is compromised, but the availability of login tokens could have allowed a determined third-party to hijack accounts. As a precaution, Wyze logged everyone out and reset tokens.
Unsecured Wyze databases, via Twelve Security.
Twelve Security says the database was accessible between December 4th and the 26th, but that’s not the only issue. The company also claims Wyze is routing traffic through Alibaba’s servers in China, which will no doubt set off alarm bells for some US consumers. Wyze, however, denies this claim. Twelve Security also says Wyze’s US servers were never as secure as its Chinese servers, suggesting user data might have been accessible in some form all the way back in January 2019. Wyze has yet to respond to that, but it continues to investigate.
While devices like Wyze cameras can be appealing, it’s important to remember they aren’t bulletproof. This is far from the first time a camera maker has had a data breach, and it won’t be the last. It’s probably a good idea to make sure these devices aren’t pointed at anything you wouldn’t want revealed.
The international medical community was aghast last year when a Chinese scientists announced the first ever genetically engineered babies. He Jiankui and his team used the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool to make two twin girls immune to HIV infection but did so without authorization from medical authorities. Now, Chinese state media reports that He Jiankui has been sentenced to three years in prison following a secret trial.
He Jiankui dropped off the radar shortly after the announcement. Many speculated that he had been arrested by the Chinese government, and now we know what became of him. He Jiankui has been convicted of “illegal medical practice” and sentenced to three years in prison along with 3 million yuan ($429,000) fine. He’s also banned from working in reproductive medicine for life. Two co-authors of the paper have also been sentenced in the case. Zhang Renli will spend two years in prison, and Qin Jinzhou has been sentenced to 18 months.
The CRISPR/Cas9 system has been heralded as a groundbreaking tool for editing DNA. The system comes from bacterial cells, allowing scientists to make precise cuts in DNA. Cas9 is a restriction enzyme — a protein that can cut DNA. Scientists can guide Cas9 to the right part of a genome using CRISPR DNA sequences. Researchers have used CRISPR in the lab to neuter disease-carrying mosquitoes, halt HIV replication inside cells, and engineer bacteria that can eat plastic. Editing the human genome with the intention of producing living, breathing people is regarded as irresponsible by most of the medical community when there is still so much we don’t know about the possible side effects.
That didn’t stop He Jiankui, who published his paper last year along with 10 co-authors. The team introduced mutations into the CCR5 gene, which codes for a protein (also called CCR5) on the surface of white blood cells. This protein is important in immune system signaling, but it’s also the route by which HIV infects cells. There are millions of people with CCR5 mutations that make them immune to HIV, and He Jiankui introduced that mitation into embryos. The twin girls born in 2018 are allegedly healthy and have no other genetic abnormalities.
The announcement of the sentence is also the first time Chinese authorities have confirmed the existence of a third gene-edited baby. He Jiankui claimed shortly after the initial announcement that another woman was due to deliver another designer baby in the coming months. So, there are now three genetically engineered people growing up in China, and the consequences of that are still unclear.
Honda CEO Takahiro Hachigo says there’s no future for EVs. Or maybe he didn’t. Comments Hachigo made recently indicate he doesn’t see “a dramatic increase in demand for battery vehicles.” Much of the confusion comes from analysis / commentary from other media outlets reacting to a recent interview with Automotive News Europe. Hachigo appears, at worst, to be honest in noting that demand sucks currently for fully electric vehicles. That honest appraisal disheartens EV-enthusiast journalists who dislike an executive who isn’t a full-on cheerleader for battery electric vehicles.
Tesla has shown there’s a market for pure EVs, not just hybrids, not just plug-in hybrids (PHEVs). Similarly, two decades ago, Toyota showed there’s a market for hybrids that went a mile or two on battery power, the rest of the time on gasoline (but still managed impressive mpg increases). Their dominant products sucked the oxygen out of the market for a decade or more.
What Honda CEO Hachiago Really Said
Here’s the key points from an interview of Hachigo with Automotive News Europe editors Jamie Butters and Hans Greimel, through a translator:
Q (ANE): Honda wants two-thirds of its global sales to come from electrified vehicles by 2030. What is your road to electrification when demand for hybrids and EVs is still undeveloped?
A (Hachiago ): I believe hybrid vehicles will play a critical role. The objective is not electrification, per se, but improving fuel efficiency. And we believe hybrid vehicles are the way to abide by different environmental regulations.
Q: What about full-electric vehicles?
A: Are there really customers who truly want them? I’m not so sure because there are lots of issues regarding infrastructure and hardware. I do not believe there will be a dramatic increase in demand for battery vehicles, and I believe this situation is true globally. There are different regulations in different countries, and we have to abide by them. So it’s a must to continue R&D. But I don’t believe it will become mainstream anytime soon.
What we hear from Honda’s head guy is what you’d expect to hear from pragmatic automaker: a straightforward appraisal of where the market is today. He did not, unlike other CEOs, complain that governments need to underwrite a big charging infrastructure first.
What we hear from some of our fellow editors tracking EVs is disbelief that Honda hasn’t gotten with the program. From Elektrek (“Honda CEO says ‘There Will Be No Dramatic Increase EV demand’”):
Honda EV Plus: first modern EV, 1997-99, 80-100 miles range, 300 built.
The automotive industry is operating on two completely separate alternative planes of existence. Readers of this site are familiar with the overwhelming evidence of EVs approaching an inflection point, and the last gasps of internal combustion. Let’s call that reality. And then there’s Honda’s Takahiro Hachigo, joined by executives from Toyota (and others). In their alternative universe, the inevitability of a pure-electric future is not proven. Nobody wants them.
… Nearly four decades ago, Honda introduced the first engine technology to meet US Clean Air Act standards without the need for a catalytic converter. In 1999, the Honda Insight was the first hybrid. But that’s ancient history. Today, the company remains fixated on 20-year-old technology rather than innovating for the new electric age. … At the same time, Hachigo’s latest statements are entirely out of step with the times. The imperative of global climate change is too urgent for minimal compliance and CES eye candy.
And from Jalopnik (“Ghostly Specter Of Honda’s CEO Still Not Convinced Electric Cars Are A Thing”):
Here comes Honda CEO Takahiro Hachigo, rising from the dead to walk among us in the year 2019—a year in which Tesla has sold more than 255,000 cars [worldwide]—to inform us he is still not sure about this whole electric car thing, revealing himself to be not a man but a ghost of a bygone era.
Honda is also designing a modular electric car platform which they hope to have ready by 2025. Does that count as “anytime soon?” By automaker timelines, probably not, which means there’s plenty of time for more CEOs to die and rise from the dead before Honda completes its EV platform for a future it doesn’t think will happen.
One company dominated hybrid sales 20 years ago: Toyota. Now Tesla is doing the same with EVs. Four-fifths of EVs sold in the US are Teslas. After that, only Chevy, Nissan and BMW sell more than 5,000 EVs year. (Source: Statista)
The EV Market Is Good (For Tesla)
Automakers have lots of rules to follow: crash protection, safety equipment, emissions. Also they have to make money for shareholders. And stay in business. Right now, Tesla dominates battery-electric vehicle sales, controlling 80 percent (182,000) of the 228,000 pure EVs sold in 2018 in the US, which is 1.0 percent of all US sales. What’s left is table scraps. Chevy has 8 percent of the EV market (0.1 perecent of all vehicles sold), Nissan 6 percent of EVs (0.1 percent of all sales). For everybody else, it rounds to 0.0 percent unless you go to two decimal places.
Honda sold 948 Clarity BEVs in 2018. That is a small number: one of every 1,500 Hondas sold, one of every 18,000 cars sold (all brands) in 2018. Clarify is actually three vehicles: a fuel-cell car that converts hydrogen to electricity, a BEV (the sub-1,000 sales), and a plug-in hybrid. Together they accounted for 20,000 Clarity sales, but virtually all of them were PHEVs. Honda marketed the Clarity BEV as a comfortable family car (think Accord with batteries instead of gasoline). But with an EPA combined-driving range of 89 miles, it was a challenging car to sell. Honda will move into 2020 with the fuel cell and PHEV but not the Clarity EV.
Critics scoff at PHEVs as uninteresting for the long term, and they’re probably right. For. The. Long. Term. But in the US with its greater driving distances than Europe, they make sense. You can drive to and from work on electricity alone if you remember to recharge when you get home. And then on weekends you go where you want, mostly on gasoline. Meanwhile, battery technology is improving at about 20 percent a year, so four to five years from now, a 100-mile Clarity BEV could be a 200-mile Clarity. (And, okay, a 250-mile Tesla could be a 500-mile Tesla.) So Honda could lay low until 2025, rejoin the fray then, and not miss a lot of EV sales in the US. In Europe, the company may face regulatory pressure to act sooner.
The Honda E is part of a new architecture coming within five years.
Honda’s Roadmap for Electrification
Honda e, due in 2021 in Europe – Honda’s first minicar since 2001.
Honda will bring to bring to market an electric city car in 2020 called the Honda E, in the spring of 2020. At 157 inches, it’s smallish for the US market. Over the summer Honda told investors and media it’s developing a dedicated EV platform for midsize and large sedans and SUVs. The first vehicles will come to market in 2025. It’s this timeframe that has some media critics upset with Honda.
Right now in the US Honda has these alternative vehicles:
Honda Accord Hybrid, 48 mpg city / 46 mpg highway, this from what measures as a full-size car.
Honda Clarity PHEV, BEV, hydrogen fuel cell through 2019.
Honda CR-V Hybrid, due early 2020, targeting Toyota RAV4.
Honda appears to be intercepting the glidepath toward higher-efficiency, zero-tailpipe-pollution vehicles. Europe especially is pushing automakers toward cleaner, higher-efficiency vehicles. Honda will begin selling the retro-look Honda e next year in Europe, with a goal of at least 10,000 units a year, possibly more. The Honda e, a minicar, will allow Honda to meet EU CO2 targets in 2020 and 2021 without paying fines.
While we live on the same planet and breathe the same air (more or less), Europe feels the shock more when Russian or the Middle East countries restrict access to petroleum – the US can always “drill, baby, drill” (per Sarah Palin – and Europe is also more concerned about clean air. The US’ concern about fuel consumption and clean air depends a lot on who’s in the White House come 2021. Currently the US supports aggressive petroleum-source development and extraction.
Immersion cooling manufacturer CoolBitts thinks there might be a market for immersion cooling systems at the ultra-high-end of the market. The company has announced a kit including chassis, coolant, fans, PCIe tray, power meter, pump, radiator, and rear IO panel. Total price? Just $2450 — though the five gallons of EC-120 coolant that you get does typically retail for about $500.
There are two types of immersion cooling system — two-phase evaporation where a liquid evaporates into a gas before condensing into a liquid, and single-phase systems that rely on a pump and radiator. The use of a pump and radiator makes immersion cooling conceptually similar to both closed-loop and open-loop water cooling, with the obvious difference that with immersion cooling, the entire PC is dropped directly into the fluid.
Obviously, this requires a non-conductive fluid. Mineral oil has been used before, but supposedly EC-120 is easier to work with and a bit less hard on motors. The ICEbox can handle up to 750W of cooling and the rear I/O port of the system is kept out of the liquid to ensure connectivity. The system supports both mATX and ATX motherboards and is capable of keeping both a CPU and GPU at a temperature of about 30C according to Anandtech.
Could systems like this power high-end computers of the future? They definitely can, but it’s not clear if they will. One of the major advantages of immersion cooling compared to forced air in the data center is that you waste far less energy. A ratio of 1.5W of power expended per 1W of computation is typical for data centers, advanced cooling systems have been measured as low as 1.08.
Will Immersion Cooling Ever Go Mainstream?
The advantage of coolant systems like this is that they’re as silent as it’s practically possible for any piece of equipment to be. It’s possible for advanced hardware to debut at the server level before waterfalling into consumer systems, but companies would need to get much more serious about immersion cooling in data centers before we’d see any waterfall IP usage over on the PC side of things.
There’s always been an enthusiast cooler market in PCs. It looks approximately like this: High-end air, closed-loop liquid cooler (these two overlap), followed by open-loop water coolers, chillers (water coolers that reduce the water temperature below ambient air temperature), phase change units, dry ice, and liquid nitrogen. It’s not actually clear how immersion coolers perform compared to other options — if I had to guess, I’d rank them between open-loop water coolers and below chillers. The high cost, in this case, is related to the fact that none of the highest-end options for CPU cooling are all that practical, and they get increasingly impractical the higher up you go.
Immersion cooling like this makes sense for dense deployment data centers, but I’m not sure what the enthusiast angle would be. They don’t seem likely to allow for dramatic performance improvements (overclocking, generally speaking, isn’t having a great moment). If this type of cooling is going to ever go mainstream, kits like this will play a part in making it happen, but so far the enthusiast PC community has relied on improving air coolers (or CLLCs) rather than moving to a radically new type of cooling.
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