Quick Shots-49

YouTube Music will launch free background listening starting in Canada

YouTube Music is lifting one of its most annoying limitations — but only in Canada. Today, YouTube announced that beginning November 3rd, customers in Canada will be able to continue listening to their music in the background while doing other tasks on their phone or when the screen is off.

Background listening will support both the standard ad-supported, personalized radio mixes and any uploaded content you’ve added to your account.

This is the first time that YouTube Music has offered the feature without requiring that customers step up to a Premium subscription to get it. As for when listeners in other countries can expect to get the same convenience, for now, YouTube is only saying to “stay tuned for additional information and expansion plans.

Read More at The Verge

Microsoft Office 2021 release date, pricing, features and everything else you need to know

What is it? The latest version of Microsoft’s suite of office software
When is it available? October 5, 2021
How much does it cost? Office Home and Student 2021 – $149.99, Office Home and Business 2021 – $249.99 (international pricing tbc)
Who is the target audience? Office users who prefer one-time purchases over regular subscription fees

Read More at Techradar

Check out the first glimpse of ray tracing on Samsung’s Exynos chipset with RDNA 2

AMD announced that it’s working with Samsung to create an Exynos chip for mobile devices based on the RDNA 2 architecture at Computex 2021. It’s been around four months since that announcement, and we now have our first glimpse of ray tracing on a device powered by an Exynos GPU. Samsung shared a photo showing a side-by-side comparison of gameplay with and without ray tracing (via Ice Universe on Twitter).

The photo from Samsung only shows a still image of gameplay with ray tracing. As ray tracing is computationally intensive, a video would do a better job demonstrating ray tracing. A still image doesn’t indicate what framerate the game was running at or how smooth gameplay looked.

Read More at Windows Central

The Apple Watch Series 7 finally has official pre-order and release dates

Alongside the new iPhones and new iPads, Apple also announced the Apple Watch Series 7 at its September event. Unlike those other products, the company did not announce the pre-order or release dates for the new Watch 7 — until today. Apple has finally announced teh pre-order date for the Apple Watch Series 7, and it’ll be going live this Friday, with shipments a week later.

The Apple Watch Series 7 will be available for pre-order starting at at 5. a.m. PT/8. a.m. ET on Friday, October 8, and you’ll be able to shop for one in stores starting Friday, October 15, if you’re more of a tactile buyer. While the iPhone 13 series and iPad Mini 6 have already reached customers, issues with the supply chain delayed the Watch 7’s release slightly.

Read More at Digital Trends

OnePlus 9RT stops by Geekbench to flex its Snapdragon 888 chipset

The OnePlus 9 RT is reportedly arriving on October 15, and leaksters claimed it will have a Snapdragon 870 chipset. This rumor appears to be wrong, as an upcoming OnePlus smartphone, likely the 9 RT, appeared on Geekbench with a Snapdragon 888 chipset and 12 GB RAM.

We are confident this is indeed the 2021 flagship chipset, since it is codenamed “lahaina”, while the Snapdragon 870 runs by the name “kona”. Performance-wise, the numbers for a single core and multiple cores are also closer to the Snapdragon 888, which would make the OnePlus 9 RT just a slight update over the OnePlus 9R.

The company decided to sit back the 9T/9T Pro flagship for 2021, likely due to the chip shortage in the industry.

The 9 RT will get a 50MP camera with Sony IMX766 sensor, the same one used in the two OnePlus 9 flagships and the Oppo Find X3 series.

Read More at Gsmarena

Intel Alder Lake CPU leak hints at some wallet-worrying prices

As flagged by regular leaker @momomo_us on Twitter and Dellchannel21 (via Tom’s Hardware), the prices are in the ballpark of the $800 to $900 mark for the Core i9-12900K, while the Core i7-12700K is pegged at around $620. 

The midrange Core i5-12600K demands an asking price of around $310 to $350 (note that those are currency conversions from either Euros or pounds, but minus the VAT).

Read More at Techradar

Apple Ramps Up iPhone 13 Chip Orders, Scales Down Orders for Older iPhones

During Apple’s last earnings call, CEO Tim Cook warned that industry-wide shortages could be impacting ‌iPhone‌ production in the coming months, while increased demand for the latest iPhones could well be exacerbating supply issues. Analyst reports suggest ‌‌iPhone 13‌‌ orders have seen strong early demand, with minimal near-term component headwinds for the devices suggesting lengthy delivery estimates are a result of high demand rather than low supply.

According to today’s report, TSMC is still on track to move its 3nm process technology to volume production in the second half of 2022, with monthly output for the process set to reach 55,000 wafers. TSMC’s 3nm

process will reportedly be first adopted for the manufacture of ‌iPhone‌ chips. A previous report from Nikkei Asia claimed Apple will debut the next-generation 3nm chip technology in a 2022 iPad Pro.

The A15 Bionic chip in the ‌iPhone 13‌ uses a 5nm+ process, which TSMC refers to as N5P, a “performance-enhanced version” of its 5nm process that delivers additional power efficiency and performance improvements. The A16 chip in 2022 iPhones is expected to be manufactured based on TSMC’s future 4nm process.

Read More at Macrumors

Report: iPhone 13 Pro costs more to produce than the iPhone 12 Pro

A teardown analysis by TechInsights shows that the iPhone 13 Pro has a higher build cost when compared to the iPhone 12 Pro. The report says that the semiconductor shortage affected the iPhone 13 production as the A15 Bionic cost more to produce, as well as the NAND memory, the display subsystem price, and an increase in the main enclosure cost.

TechInsights also compared the iPhone 13 Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro with the Samsung Galaxy S21+, which was less expensive than Apple’s iPhones to build.

We have completed the QTT cost analysis and estimate the sub-6 GHz iPhone 13 Pro A2636 has a higher build cost when compared to last year’s iPhone 12 Pro A2341 mmWave model. The increased total cost is due to the higher estimated costs for the A15 processor, NAND memory, the display subsystem price, and an increase in the main enclosure cost, which impacted the total Non-electronic cost. We also compared the new iPhone 13 Pro with the competitive sub-6 GHz Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G mobile phone (normalizing the NAND size to 256 GB).

As you can see in the image below, the iPhone 13 Pro’s estimated cost was around $570, while the iPhone 12 Pro was $548.50, followed by the Samsung Galaxy S21+ for an estimated cost of $508. It’s important to note that all models have 256GB of storage.

Read More at 9to5Mac

The global tech shortage that stole Christmas

If you were hoping to snag some deals on coveted tech such as a PS5 or a new MacBook for Christmas in this year’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, then it might be time for a harsh reality check. 

Silicon, an element present in almost every major tech product these days, is in short supply due to high demand and manufacturing issues caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. This has resulted in the cost of production increased by an alarming 300%, as reported by Bloomberg. Low silicon = low product stock for everything that uses it, which means this year’s sales could largely be a disappointment.

Read More at Techradar

How ‘losing friend to misinformation’ drove Facebook whistleblower

Frances Haugen, the whistleblower behind a series of damaging revelations about Facebook, is adamant that she wants to help the social media company and not foment hatred of it.

The 37-year-old leaked tens of thousands of internal company documents after becoming frustrated that Facebook was not publicly acknowledging the harm its platforms could cause.

“If people just hate Facebook more because of what I’ve done, then I’ve failed. I believe in truth and reconciliation – we need to admit reality. The first step of that is documentation,” she told the Wall Street Journal, which revealed the documents in its Facebook Files series.

In her final message on Facebook’s internal system, posted when she left in May, she wrote: “I don’t hate Facebook. I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

Haugen, born and raised in Iowa by a doctor father and a mother who gave up an academic career to become an episcopalian priest, said it was a lost friendship that changed her view of social media.

Haugen was a successful tech professional with a CV that included stints at Pinterest and Google but a decade ago she was diagnosed with celiac disease, an autoimmune condition, and in 2014 entered an intensive care unit with a blood clot in her thigh. A family friend was hired to help her with daily tasks such as shopping but their relationship deteriorated as he became obsessed with online forums touting conspiracy theories about dark forces manipulating politics.

“It was a really important friendship, and then I lost him,” she told the WSJ. The former friend has since abandoned his conspiratorial beliefs, which had dragged him into a world of the occult and white nationalism. But it changed Haugen’s career.

“It’s one thing to study misinformation, it’s another to lose someone to it,” she said. “A lot of people who work on these products only see the positive side of things.”

So when a Facebook recruiter approached Haugen in 2018, she said she wanted a job that related to democracy and the spread of false information. That led to a role in 2019 as a product manager in Facebook’s civic integrity team, which looks at election interference around the world.

The group was disbanded after the 2020 US presidential poll and Haugen contacted the WSJ soon after, her dismay deepening after the 6 January riot in Washington. Facebook has said it “invested heavily” in people and technology to make its platform safe, but Haugen believed the company was not doing enough to combat misinformation.

“Facebook acted like it was powerless to staff these teams,” she said.

Reacting to Haugen’s comment, Facebook said: “Hosting hateful or harmful content is bad for our community, bad for advertisers, and ultimately, bad for our business.” On Tuesday, Haugen will appear in front of US lawmakers to reiterate her argument that Facebook did not do enough to stop the hate and harm.

Read More at The Guardian