Hasta La Gadget!

The Huawei MateBook 16s is the latest evolution of Huawei’s largest premium productivity laptop line. It is based on Intel’s latest 12^th generation H-Series mobile processor architecture (up to 14 cores, 60W TDP)  but doesn’t feature a discrete GPU, probably to maximize battery longevity.

Underneath the surface, Huawei claims to have dramatically improved the cooling performance with new materials and a dual-fan system that’s supposed to be relatively quiet. This is interesting because the 60W TDP Intel processor can deliver serious performance and heat.

The industrial design is similar to the previous MateBook 16 model but slightly modernized. The chassis is made from CNC aluminum and is undoubtedly very rigid. It looks neat and minimalist, with a gigantic glass trackpad and prominent top-firing speakers. Our experience with Huawei’s laptop speaker design has been outstanding, so we’re hoping for a repeat.

The full-size keyboard has large keys with a deep 1.5mm key travel. That’s significantly more than the 1.3mm of the previous generation. Below the keyboard, there’s a sizeable 84Wh battery. It will be interesting to see the battery life, but I suspect it might be a bit lower than last year’s AMD edition.

The MateBook 16s has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, thanks to the Intel platform. It’s terrific news for anyone wanting to create a one-connector desktop extension or connect ultrafast I/O devices.

The 16-inch display finally gets multitouch and conserves the excellent color accuracy making it a good Light Creative laptop (photoshop, web development). The display is factory-calibrated, so practical color accuracy is as high as the LCD panel would allow.

Additionally, a new 1080p AI camera is located at the top of the screen representing a significant improvement over the 720p camera of the MateBook 16. We’re in a Zoom world, after all.

The bezels are extremely thin, making the laptop beautiful to look at and very compact for a 16-inch laptop. The 3:2 aspect ratio allows for additional vertical content space, another productivity booster many people love.

Finally, Huawei’s laptop connect and interacts in more advanced ways with other Huawei products, such as its smartphones. It’s possible to drag and drop content from the two devices or use a Huawei tablet as a digitizer tablet. If you already have Huawei devices, staying within that ecosystem is a strong incentive.

The maximum amount of RAM is 16GB, which might be a bit tight for some Creative activities like video editing, and the same is true of the 1TB SSD max storage. That said, it should be more than enough for lighter applications, and this computer seems perfect for executives, people who read a lot of documents, or developers.

Huawei MateBook 16s: The Best Huawei Laptop Yet

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Starting today, small phone carriers must implement a special caller ID authentication tool that will help identify robocallers, the Federal Communication Commission announced. Known as STIR/SHAKEN, major carriers such as AT&T and Verizon — due to an FCC rule adopted in 2020 — have had the same tool in place since last year. The agency initially gave small carriers a more generous deadline of June 2023 to adopt STIR/SHAKEN, but opted to fast-track adoption because it discovered “a subset of these small voice service providers were originating an increasing quantity of illegal robocalls.”

But as a new report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) notes, merely flagging suspected robocalls is not enough to tackle the robocall industry. “The problem is that applying the STIR/SHAKEN methodology requires only that originating providers apply a certification indicating how confident they are that the caller ID displayed in the calls is correct,” the report states. Presumably, this means calls can still be routed through gateway carriers from abroad where the FCC’s rules don’t apply. But as EPIC also mentions, implementing STIR/SHAKEN may help identify spam callers, but there aren’t any real metrics in place by which to measure how effective carriers are at stopping the calls. “The FCC’s pending regulatory efforts would continue to require only that providers have procedures in place to mitigate illegal robocalls,” the report points out, “with no meaningful and enforceable requirement that these procedures actually be effective.”

Air travel remains one of the largest contributors to global warming in the transportation sector, producing 915 million tonnes of CO2 worldwide in 2019, per ATAG. In an effort to usher in a more sustainable era of flight, NASA announced Thursday that it is seeking partners “to develop technologies needed to shape a new generation of lower-emission, single-aisle airliners that passengers could see in airports in the 2030s.” 

NASA is looking to fund the design, building, testing and flying of large-scale demonstrators as part of its new Announcement for Partnership Proposals program. Specifically, the agency seeks to “reduce carbon emissions from aviation and ensure US competitiveness in a high-demand area of aircraft design — single-aisle commercial airliners.”

“In the coming years, global air mobility will continue to grow at a steady pace, and single aisle aircraft will continue to carry the majority of that passenger traffic,” Bob Pearce, NASA associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, said in Thursday’s media release. “Working with industry, NASA intends to seize this opportunity to meet our aggressive environmental goals while fostering continued global leadership of the U.S. aviation industry.”

This effort comes as part of the White House’s US Aviation Climate Action Plan, which itself aims to make make aviation emissions carbon-neutral by 2050. To help reach that deadline, NASA is planning to have these demonstrators ready by the end of the decade so that the lessons learned can be applied to the next generation of single-aisle aircraft coming in the 2030s. NASA plans to select at least one industry partner early next year, granting them funding and access to NASA facilities at Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. 

When I went hands-on with Roland’s SP-404 MKII back in October I said it was “becoming” my favorite sampler. Fast forward a few months and it is firmly entrenched in that spot. Of course, no piece of gear is perfect, and there’s always room for improvement. So Roland is pushing out a 2.0 firmware update that only further cement’s the 404’s place at the top of my list.

Perhaps the biggest addition is a new TR-style (as in TR-808) step sequencer. While the SP series has always appealed more to those that want the loose feel of live instrumentation, being able to punch in a basic four-on-the-floor kick that’s right on the money is always nice. That’s especially true if your sense of rhythm is only so-so, but it also makes the 404 more useful for genres that are all about being right on the beat like house and techno. And in some ways, it’s actually more versatile than your average TR-style sequencer since patterns can be up to 64 bars (or 1,024 steps) in length. 

In addition to being able to program beats by manually punching in individual steps, you can also now record to patterns in chromatic mode: load up a sample of a single note and just play a melody into a pattern. Previously this had to be done via resampling, i.e. creating an entirely new sample of the melody you played.

Terrence O’Brien / Engadget

But wait, there’s more! Now chromatic sample playback has three different modes — plain old monophonic, legato (great for sliding bass lines) and polyphonic — so you can turn a single piano note into a chord. And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it gets better still. Roland has vastly improved the time stretching algorithm. Frankly, it was borderline useless before. Now, in addition to the default “vinyl” mode of pitch shifting (just playing things back faster or slower), there are two Variphrase modes (these change pitch without changing playback length): Backing, for things with distinct attacks like drums and guitar; and Ensemble for sustained sounds like strings and synth pads. Backing is still a little rough sounding, though it handles drums decently enough. But Ensemble is lightyears beyond what the 404 previously had, and is key to making that new polyphonic sample playback mode useable.

Now if this was all Roland added, it would be a pretty big deal. But the company also included four new bus effects: SX Reverb, SX Delay, Cloud Delay and Backspin. Plus there’s now a Harmonizer on the input FX menu and a second version of reverse playback borrowed form the SP-303 for those that really want to lean into the lo-fi heritage of the range. And, on top of all of that, the Skip Back feature can, at any time, recall audio from up to 40 seconds in the past where its prior iteration had a 25 second maximum.

In short, Roland took what was already a pretty great piece of music gear and made it even more alluring. Now if only they weren’t completely out of stock everywhere. 

The sweeping inquiry of the police unit that inspired TV’s “Law & Order: SVU” comes following years of complaints about the way they treat crime victims.