Technology

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending …

  From time to time, Intel will make mention of the fact that it sells CPUs directly to specific large companies — think Google or Amazon. Unlike AMD, which breaks this segment out into its own semicustom business, Intel typically doesn’t talk about the specific parts that it builds for …

  Today, AMD is launching their Ryzen Threadripper 3990X — a 64-core CPU with a base clock of 2.9GHz, a boost clock of 4.3GHz, and a 256MB L3 cache. Originally, our plan was to present a deep-dive review on the CPU, briefly discuss the overclocking project, and follow up with …

  The 2020 tax season is here, and that means everyone is getting ready for the arduous task of filing their income tax returns. This is often a difficult task, and it hasn’t got any easier with recent tax reforms. If you feel nervous about filing your taxes, however, taking …

  Both AMD and Intel reported strong quarterly results at the end of 2019, with Intel setting multiple revenue records, and AMD hitting market share targets it hasn’t reached in years. It’s an excellent example of how the computing market isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game, and Dean McCarron, President of …

  Microsoft is reorganizing several of its business units with the new year, with some significant changes slated for the Windows unit. The company is combining its Surface business with the Windows Experience team, creating a new unit: Device + Windows. Device + Windows will be headed by Panos Panay, …

  Intel’s Cascade Lake family of Xeon parts hasn’t been in-market all that long, but there are rumors the company is queuing up a refresh cycle to introduce new parts at higher core counts and tweaked frequencies. The move is being read as a response to AMD’s 7nm Epyc CPUs. …

  Whatever your thoughts about how quickly autonomous vehicle technology will move forward, there is little doubt that it will need to rely on better and less expensive sensor technology than we have available today. Current test vehicles often have sensor suites costing over $100,000, and still can’t deal with …

  Amazon-owned Ring has come under fire in recent years for its lax approach to privacy and cooperation with police departments around the US. As 2020 dawns, the company has promised to re-emphasize its commitment to privacy, and it appears to be following through. The newest version of the Ring …

  BlackBerry has struggled to find a place in the modern smartphone era, and it turned to TCL to do the heavy lifting a few years ago. TCL has manufactured devices like the KEYone and KEY2 under the BlackBerry brand, but there won’t be any more BlackBerry phones from TCL. …