Galaxy S23 takes it all and Apple reacts, 2023 starts with a bang | HD rewind 49

Here we are with a new one hd rewind, the appointment in which we tell you the most significant news and curiosities of the week in a different key. Although it is a summary, the resulting article is often not short. So here is an index to comfortably juggle the various topics.

No need to go around it. It was Samsung week, it will be next week and the one after that. The reason, if you follow the news and you have an Android smartphone in your pocket, doesn’t even need to be explained: on February 1st at Galaxy Unpacked there will be the Galaxy S23 are official (and also the unpublished Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, it seems), which has been talked about a lot for months and has been talked about a lot during the week. You know, the closer the presentation of any product is, especially if it is high-end, the more the rumors become insistent and usually even precise. Whereby within walking distance of the day and time x it is normal for the Galaxy S23s, with the Ultra variant on the shields, to hold the court.

The week started with the render on the three top of the range, so numerous and defined that if someone does not know that they are not yet official by seeing them might think they are pictures of Samsung and no one would blame him. Still at the beginning of the week, the first rumor arrived, not very pleasant for those intending to buy one, about a probable upward adjustment to the prices, then confirmed a couple of days later by the second, much more detailed and credible on the price list which will be applied in Italy, since it concerned the French market. Briefly, from our reconstruction: 128 GB variant only on S23 while Plus and Ultra starting from 256 GB, starting prices of 90 euros for the first, 170 euros for the second and third even if with double the space compared to last year.

THE price increasesin the light of the current moment, they were very predictablehowever, I would have expected a smaller leap for the 128 GB S23: yours will be the price used by marketing when there is something to showcase “S23 range starting from xxx euros”, I hope for the pockets of enthusiasts – of smartphones in general, since the market will then align accordingly – that the indiscretion is inaccurate. All in all glass half full instead for those who would take the Plus or the Ultraclearly not on day one: having an access variant with double the archiving will bring benefits in the medium term, when retailers start discounting attack versions of the Galaxy S23 which for the Plus and Ultra would no longer be 128 GB but 256 GB.

Apple has tried to turn some spotlight on Samsung towards itself. First Tuesday, presenting almost without warning i new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips designed in Cupertino, and then on Wednesday, effectively announcing iOS 16.3, watchOS 9.3 and the new HomePod. The rest is a direct consequence. The 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros and Mac mini have been updated with M2 Pro and Max, which includes both the M2 chip to replace the M1 and the M2 Pro (which has already been shown on Geekbench) as a replacement than the previous Intel Core i5/i7. The Mac mini range is therefore entirely in the hands of the Apple chips, but Macs haven’t fully emancipated themselves: Intel’s fort is Mac Pro with its Xeon W, the update with Apple Silicon is not in question, but it is not yet clear when it will happen.

About operating systemsone curiosity: five months after availability Android 13 would be in little more than 5.2% of smartphones with the robot, according to the findings of mixpanel.com iOS 16 is in more than 70 out of 100 iPhones. True that this kind of comparisons they are difficult to “weigh” for a thousand reasons therefore they have (very) relative valuebut part of that difference is the price of the Android fragmentation. As he continues to work on the AR/VR viewer – the first components would leave in February, at the latest in March, to the factories that will assemble it, and a more “cheap” version would already be in the works – Apple this week he collected two grits. One for the truth is the old friction with Spotify, which has asked the EU, together with Deezer and others, for measures “quick and incisive” against anti-competitive behavior, the other is a (heavy) fine from Russia for abuse of the App Store’s dominant position.

Stadia Wednesday officially closed its doors, but Google abandons the project with a sweet treat: those who have a Stadia controller won’t have to throw it away, with Bluetooth mode it can be used with third-party devices and services. In the meantime, in the Mountain View headquarters, the“anti-ChatGPT” alarm, you fear you have found a serious very serious competitor in a business, that of research and information on the web, which holds up the empire built over the years. According to NYT you are doing your best to reply to ChatGPT quickly, CEO Sundar Pichai would even called back founders Larry Page and Sergey Brinaway from Google since 2019, for some emergency meetings. It’s the least that can be done: the OpenAI bot is already extraordinary in beta, the feeling is that Google has no choice but to run for cover as soon as possible.

The formidable competition of ChatGPT also comes at a time when the workforce at Google decreases, after the dismissal of 12,000 employees. Times are tough, not just for the search giant. Who follows hd rewind he has known for a while that I prefer to minimize negative news about work, this being a appointment-relax of the weekend and not a potential source of distress.

But the crisis is biting, many are being fired and ignoring the problem does not help to improve things, so I’m going quickly: moreover, there are individual articles to go deeper. Microsoft will also fire several employees in 2023, around 10,000, while according to the Financial Times and Reuters Vodafone is also preparing to cut costs. On the opposite side there are those like Tesla (last week) decided to go against the tide giving a clear cut to the prices of the coveted Model 3 and Model Y (also in Italy)instead of the workforce. No cuts at the moment for TIM, but no gifts either. The operator has decided – like others of course – to make up for the customers: therefore the remodeling starts in March and above alladjustment of contracts to inflation also for fixed lines, with prices that will only be able to change in the event of inflation and at the most remain unchanged in the unlikely event of deflation.

Resolved one week later the conundrum of Twitter’s third-party clients which suddenly stopped working, and neither did all of them. After a revisable admission of guilt of the Twitter Dev account, yesterday the one that forbids the use of the APIs for alternative clients to the official one appeared among the rules. The intentional blackout, explained late by a rule introduced in the silence: the “time machine” was necessary to track it down, yet another fall in style of the new course signed by Musk towards clients who yes, it is true, do not bring profits, but who have brought a lot of traffic to Twitter. No acknowledgment or possibility of mediation.

I close with yet another case of contagion in the market cryptocurrencies triggered by FTX crash: yesterday Genesis also collapsedopening a chasm that from the first estimates seems to be more than 3 billion euros. Will there be others? We cannot exclude it, but if we want to find something positive in the tsunami that has been hammering cryptocurrencies at regular intervals for several months, it is that Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to have bought the maturity necessary to not give up (again) in the face of adversity.

Yesterday morning, up until the writing of the article, there were no anomalous movements in the graph of the value of the two “pulses” of the sector, and as the hours went by, the picture even improved: in the evening they touched the highs of the week achieved just before the bankruptcy of Genesis, a sign that, if there are no other thuds, the trend was and should remain up.

Thanks to Filippo Vendrame’s “wrist” for the selection.