Intel may be planning to buy one of the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturers. Xiaomi overtook Apple to become the world’s second biggest smartphone company (in terms of shipments) last quarter, behind Samsung. And Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming computer is now up for pre-order for $399 and up… if you can get your order to go through.
Read the replies to Valve’s announcement on Twitter and you’ll find story after story about people running into trouble with Valve’s website. The good news is that at least some people have been able to place orders. But many have not. Hopefully the company will work the kinks out before it’s time to ship the Steam Deck in December.
Here’s a roundup of tech news from around the web.
- Intel Is in Talks to Buy GlobalFoundries for About $30 Billion [WSJ]
Intel may be considering a $30 billion acquisition of GlobalFoundries, a chip manufacturing company that was spun off from AMD over a decade ago. The deal may not go through, but it comes at a time when Intel wants to increase its manufacturing capacity. - Xiaomi becomes number two smartphone vendor for first time ever in Q1 2021 [Canalys]
Xiaomi shipped more smartphones in Q2, 2021 than any company beside Samsung according to the latest numbers from Canalys. That’s the first time Xiaomi took 2nd place, pushing Apple into 3rd. Oppo and Vivo rounded out the top 5 list. - There’s enough Steam Deck demand to take Steam’s store down [The Verge]
Valve may have underestimated demand for the Steam Deck. Pre-orders for the handheld gaming PC are live, but the company’s servers are having trouble keeping up with demand and many potential customers are getting error messages when trying to reserve one. - Popular Podcast App Pocket Casts Joins Automattic [Automattic]
WordPress maker Automattic has acquired Pocket Casts, the popular podcast app that had started as an independent app before being bought by a group of public radio organizations in 2018. - Introducing the next feature update to Windows 10: 21H2 [Windows Blogs]
Windows 10 21H2 is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Release Preview channel. It includes a handful of new features including WPA3 H2E WiFi security, Windows Hello for Business, and GPU compute support in Windows Subsystem for Linux. - The “Freedom Phone” is an overpriced smartphone that doesn’t free you from anything [xda-developers]
If you want to avoid big tech spying and/or censorship, the Freedom Phone probably isn’t the way to go. The $499 phone being positioned as phone for conservatives seems to be a rebranded $179 Chinese device. Its software is just LineageOS. And the app store is a front-end for Google Play that provides a little more privacy protection.
I can’t even put it in my cart 🙃 pic.twitter.com/pXvDYjKtM9
— Lacifer 𖤐 (@lacecicle) July 16, 2021
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They were, in fact, able to take orders later but my reservation is estimated to ship in Q3 2022. They were definitely not ready for this. Good thing I have my Win Max to tide me over.
Oh wow. It’s pushed off to a year now for newer pre-orders. Too bad these kinds of estimates are often off and usually they move in the direction of being later rather than earlier.
I wonder how much buffer Valve gave themselves with these estimates.
I wouldn’t call over 110k in the first couple of hours “some”. Actually compared to Onexplayer campaign which barely attracted over 2k buyers, I think this is a very successful pre-order especially that this is a niche market.
Yeah, those companies were made irrelevant overnight. This is the perfectly based APU for 720P. One, no one should ever need more than four cores of Zen 2 to do that. Two, it has Navi 2, at double the performance per watt and with 5500 MHz of dual channel LPDDR5, meaning 30 to over 100% higher bandwidth than the competition. People are estimating GTX 1050 performance here, well above Intel’s Xe and AMD’s own Ryzen 5000 series Vega 8, which are more equivalent to a GT 1030. They may have inadvertently tested the waters for Valve who profited from their weather balloons. But now that the top predator Valve is descending onto the forest floor, they are all going to get wiped out.