Daily Tech News 18 January 2023

• Apple has announced new MacBooks based on the M2, M2 Pro, and M2 Max chips, up to 20% faster than the identical models with the M1. (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple advertises them as 2.5 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook, which while not untrue on some benchmarks, neglects to mention the fact that so were Intel's laptop chips from last year.
  
  Prices start at $expensive for the basic 14" model and go up to $really_fucking_expensive for a fully-equipped 16" model.
  
  
  
• There's also a new M2 Mac Mini that starts at $not_too_expensive for a configuration that would have been more or less adequate in 2013. (9to5Mac)
  
  Fortunately, you can easily upgrade... Nothing. You can upgrade nothing.

• Toy giant Hasbro, which owns card game company Wizards of the Coast, which owns TSR, which owns Dungeons and Dragons, which originated more than 50 years ago as a medieval wargaming rule system named Chainmail, has taken the game and its decades of history and uncounted millions of loyal fans and flushed it straight down the toilet. (Ars Technica)
  
  Hasbro hired a new CEO for WotC with the bright idea of turning a game anyone can pick up and play into a locked-in recurring revenue stream, with the utterly predictable result that all those millions of people picked up and left.
  
  The provisions in the new license for third-party content ranged from paying a 25% royalty, to WotC being able to revoke your license at any time for any reason, to granting them an irrevocable right to take your work and publish it themselves and keep the money.
  
  Result being that everyone - normal humans and the lunatics at Ars Technica and everyone in between - hates Wizards of the Coast now.
  
  
  
• Micron has announced 24GB and 48GB DDR5 modules - for Intel and AMD desktops. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  SK Hynix is working on 64GB modules but hasn't indicated when those are likely to ship, so for now 192GB is the new limit.
  
  
  
• TSMC is slowly ramping up 3nm production to avoid the issues that Samsung ran into. (AnandTech)
  
  Don't expect anything other than high-end mobile chips to be made on this new process before next year. AMD and Nvidia are using a mix of 7nm, 6nm, 5nm, and 4nm, but 4nm is 5nm and 6nm is 7nm, while 3nm is a whole new ball game.
  
  Intel has its own fabs and its own - very aggressive - plans for new process nodes, but we've seen what happened with Intel's process plans before.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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