Wow, it has been ages since I posted something on my blog – so many things occurring at work as well as home such as getting myself better organised to cook meals at home, taking public transport rather than my scooter because the weather is absolutely atrocious or just plain cold (most nights getting down to 2-3 degrees celsius) along with buying my groceries online once a fortnight which funny enough, even if you include the cost of delivery works out cheaper (since I am not tempted to purchase things I don’t need – I go to the website, create a list, buy it and that’s that).

Lots of rumours are starting regarding Pixel 6 and the rumoured of a return of the XL model along side the smaller non-XL version. The other question is whether they’re going to start offering it in more countries – it is rather befuddling that a great product is deliberately undermined by, what appears to be, a management team at Google who haven’t seemed to grasp that there is a world outside of the United States (not to mention realising there is a country outside the borders of California).

There is the, pretty much all but officially confirmed, next version of Samsung Galaxy S series will include an AMD GPU with the early benchmarks demonstrating that the CPU on the SoC keep up with Qualcomm quite nicely and trounce the Andreno GPU in benchmarks. I wouldn’t be surprised if, with the sunsetting of CDMA2000 networks in the US and else where (the markets they use the Qualcomm SoC) that Samsung eventually standardise on shipping their Exynos based phones everywhere.

The other big win has been the consolidation of Wear OS an Tizen and quite frankly it had to happen. The idea of having multiple OS vendors in the wearable space is pretty much a nonstarter and even at this stage Apple struggles to get software vendors to write applications so getting developers to write for two other wearable OSs is pretty much out of the question. It makes little sense creating fragmentation so hopefully the Wear based devices from Samsung with the One UI 4.0 to give it a unique Samsung look and feel while being able to leverage the Wear ecosystem and integration into the Google cloud services.

There are rumours regarding the net refresh of Apple’s ARM chip being the M1X which will result in a refresh of the 13.3″ notebook into a 14″ one (13.3inch chassis but having the screen take up more space so that it is almost bezel-less) – I wouldn’t get to excited since it’ll be a incremental improvement over the M1. For me, I am waiting for the next refresh which will upgrade the processor to ARMv9 which will include SVE2 – the bigger winners I believe will be the 27inch iMac and Mac Pro users who want the extra grunt that SVE2 will bring for those work flows that were dependent on taking advantage of SSE/AVX technologies present on Intel based processors.

At this stage I am pretty agnostic regarding what my next computer will be – but my focus on this year is getting all the other parts of my life in order, lets hope that I have better success this year than I did last year.