Daily Tech News 15 September 2021

• Apple announced a new range of cameras with phones attached to them. (The Verge)
  
  They're supposed to be pretty good cameras too.
  
  
  
• Apple also announced a new small tablet which gets a few things right but has some bizarre marketing. (The Verge)
  
  The iPad Mini 6 has an 8.3" 3:2 screen with a resoluion of 2266x1448. That's pretty good, and the narrower ratio is better for reading than the old 4:3 screen. At a little under 300 grams it's the a similar size to the old Nexus 7 except about 20mm wider.
  
  The weird part? Apple trumpets a "new all-screen design".
  
  It has huge bezels.
  
  "An all-new enclosure features a new edge-to-edge screen, along with narrow borders and elegant rounded corners."
  
  It has huge bezels.
  
  What do they even think they're saying here? They have a claim about the new edge-to-edge screen surrounded by photos of huge bezels.
  
  I don't get it.
  
  
  

• Rare earth metal prices are soaring. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Along with less rare metals like lithium - up 150% since last year, aluminium, and copper.
  
  China mines half of rare earth elements and processes 85% of production, because it produces pollution like nothing else.
  
  I mentioned earlier that the Salton Sea by itself contains enough lithium to supply two thirds of the world's demand. There's no shortage. It's just that extracting these materials makes a hell of a mess.
  
  
  
• Kioxia - which I insist is pronounced kosher - formerly Toshiba's flash storage division is making SLC SSDs again (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The disadvantage is that these drives cost three times as much to make as typical TLC models. The advantage is that they're up to 10 times as fast in terms of read latency, so you can sell them for five times as much.
  
  That still leaves them slower than Intel's Optane, which uses an entirely different technology, but Optane costs about five times as much again.
  
  

• Russia has issued fines against Facebook and Twitter for failing to delete illegal content. (Reuters)
  
  In all, eight fines were issued by a district court totalling 35 million roubles ($4.26).
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:11 AM

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