There’s a semiconductor shortage that’s affecting the supply of chips for a wide range of products including laptop and desktop computers, game consoles, and automobiles, just to name a few product categories. Like so many things that have happened in the past year, you can largely blame this on COVID-19, which has led to changes in the way people work and attend school and have led to increased demand for electronic devices.
It’s not clear if there are any good short term solutions that will ramp up supply to meet that demand, but the Biden administration officials say the president will likely sign an executive order soon to start a review it plans to identify supply chain issues in an effort to ease the shortage. And that’s expected to be just the first of several steps in an effort to develop a long term plan.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- Biden Team Pledges Aggressive Steps to Address Chip Shortage [The Hill]
Increased demand for electronics and shifting work/school patterns have caused a chip shortage affecting PCs, game consoles, and cars. The Biden administration plans to address the shortage and develop a long term strategy to prevent recurrences. - PlayStation Portable emulator ‘PPSSPP’ now supports rewinding on mobile [xda-developers]
PPSSPP PlayStation Portable emulator version 1.11 was released this week and it brings several new features to the Android version including support for rewinding to a previous state and a button for opening SD cards on devices running Android 11. - A new video editor, plus enhanced editing features [Google]
Google brings new video editing features to the Google Photos app, including cropping and adding filters, as well as granular brightness, contrast, saturation, and warmth adjustments. Google One subscribers are also getting new(ish) photo editing tools… they’d previously been available for recent Google Pixel devices, but now they’re available for all Google One customers.
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Our company has started using the RP2040 as the CPU in custom workstations. With a midrange graphics card they are fast as lightning.
Sure sure. Chip shortage…. Complete nonsense.
It’s funny how many companies are not seeing any shortages, only the unprepared ones are. What I can’t understand is why some companies will not raise prices to keep demand lower when supply is lower? If your product is going to sell out in 1 day, why not raise prices proportional to demand? Because that is effectively what scaplers are doing, and I would rather pay the company than the scalper. At least there is no chance in getting ripped-off when buying from the company.
No, I rather pay the scalpers.
That’s going to an individual instead of a corporation. They know they can only sustain their profits for that limited window. If you start with higher costs for a product, the bean-counters at the companies (along with the marketing department) will pressure the product designers and management to follow with this trend. In other words, the price will “stick”. Famously happened with dGPUs when Nvidia raised prices for their midrange (but labelled is flagship) GTX-680, further hikes with GTX 10-series, then a massive hike with the RTX 20-series, and a small bump with the RTX 30-series.
Other examples? Case in point, iPhone X caused a massive shotsterm with its price, and followed-up with a bloody diarrhoea with the iPhone Xmas (and AirPod, and iWatch, collect them all !!!)…. and now every other me-too manufacturer is trying to copy them from Google, Sony, Samsung, to even Huawei and Xiaomi.