The $4,399 16-inch gaming laptop will feature a self-contained liquid cooling system.
ByMonica Chin, a senior reviewer covering laptops and other gadgets. Monica was a writer for Tom's Guide and Business Insider before joining The Verge in 2020.
For a meager $4,400, all this can be yours.
Image: Lenovo
Lenovo has announced a new Legion 9i, and it might just be the wildest thing I’ve ever seen from the Legion line. It’s coming in October, it starts at a whopping $4,399 (you know, a totally normal price to pay for things), and Lenovo is throwing in all kinds of eccentric stuff.
The company is clearly most excited about the fact that the 9i is the first 16-inch gaming laptop with a self-contained liquid-cooling system. This is exactly what it sounds like. Most laptops use air cooling to transfer heat along heat pipes to a radiator; a fluid-cooled device instead does that with water and a pump which, as you might imagine, can handle much more thermal mass. Such a system could theoretically allow the 9i to pull truly massive amounts of power (up to 230W, Lenovo claims) for a ridiculous gaming experience.
To be clear, liquid cooling is a thing that’s been tried beforein laptops of this size. But it’s generally done externally — that is, you plug a thingamajig into a little port in the back, and that thingamajig swooshes some water around inside. Lenovo’s claim appears to be that the Legion 9i can fully cool itself with this method, no thingamajig needed.
Now, this could be very exciting, but I cannot stress enough that we have no idea how well it’s going to work. Also, I feel compelled to point out that Legion cooling is already, famously, very good. The last two Legion 5i generations that The Verge has reviewed have been remarkably cool, without much noise, throughout testing. I’m sure a liquid system will make some amount of difference, of course, but how much remains to be seen.
So before we all throw our Legion 7i models out the window (and I know some of you are tempted), we’ll need to see how this performs when the units actually hit shelves.
Colorful keyboard, and lightstrip along the edge.
Image: Lenovo
Both a 330W adapter and a USB-C adapter are included in the box.
Image: Lenovo
Another interesting feature is the forged carbon cover, which will give every unit a unique pattern. The design has kind of a funky vibe, and it can be neat to know that your unit looks different from the thousands of others on the shelf.
But what I’m happiest to see here is the 165Hz 16:10 Mini LED display. This has a 94 percent screen-to-body ratio, which is impressive, not just among gaming laptops but among laptops period. Mini LEDs aren’t cheap, but when you spend some time gaming on one, it can feel downright painful to go back to a regular IPS panel. I still miss the Mini LED on the Razer Blade 16, and I reviewed that half a year ago.
Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 are supported.
Image: Lenovo
And then we come to the insides. The Legion 9i will be powered by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, which is the most powerful mobile GPU in today’s gaming market. Up to 64GB of memory and 2TB of storage will be available. Good stuff.
The processor I have more mixed feelings about; it’s a 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13980HX. This is the most powerful mobile processor Intel has ever made, and it’s nothing to sneeze at. Still, it’s a bit hard to be too ecstatic about Intel machines right now because AMD’s 7945HX3D chip is hitting shelves soon, and that chip, in our testing, left the Core i9 in the dust. (The ROG Strix Scar X3D, the monstrous 17-incher that houses that X3D chip, is also a good deal cheaper than this Legion model.)
So I see this 9i device, at the moment, primarily as a wacky idea that will showcase Lenovo’s cooling solution and how much additional performance it actually brings. But if you have the cash to buy one, please know that I am very jealous of you and am cheering you on from afar.
This time last year, I was unenthusiastic about the release of the iPhone 14 Pro. Despite impressive improvements with its 48MP sensor on its main camera, allowing it to capture the biggest and most detailed photos yet on an iPhone, and stunning 4K video at 24 or 30 fps in Cinematic mode with optical zoom quality, I yawned.
Why is that? Although you could create much more detailed image files and higher resolution photos with that big sensor, there was no upgrade to the data transfer speed of the USB 2.0 Lightning port.
Lightning is slowwwwwww
As any content creation professional has experienced, transferring images and video from your iPhone to your Mac using a Lightning cable is agonizingly slow. First, the Photos app has to synchronize and index the file listings and thumbnails, which takes a while. Then you have to do an import procedure.
If you have a hundred 75MB ProRAW photographs (7500 MB) you need to transfer from your iPhone 14 Pro, it might take you upwards of two minutes at 480 megabits per second or roughly 60 megabytes per second (MB/s), assuming optimal transfer rates.
A five-minute 4K ProRes video clip at 6GB per minute will be roughly 30GB. At that rate, it could take you 8 minutes to transfer that much data over a Lightning cable. If you are using the Photos or iMovie database to store them, the indexing could take significantly longer, as it's not just a simple copy from a mounted file system, and there will be protocol overhead.
Did I upgrade to the iPhone 14 Pro Max from my iPhone 13 Pro Max last year? Yes, because when you are on the iPhone Upgrade Program, short of loan termination payments, you effectively swap one monthly payment for another. But I have to say that it was not as big of an improvement as I liked because, as a food photographer, it did not improve my creative content workflow or productivity at all; the data transfer was as slow as it ever was.
A USB-C iPhone has all the potential
That was last year. As I write this, the anticipated iPhone 15 launch is just two weeks away. While there are a lot of rumors and spy photos about what components are due to be upgraded (the camera is suspected to incorporate a new "periscope" design for improved optical zoom, among other things), very little is "confirmed" in terms of what we can expect from the phone.
We don't yet have the full specifications on whether any iPhone 15 models have been upgraded to USB 3.2 or USB 4. Regarding Apple's current product portfolio, the latest USB-C iPads have USB 3.2 connectivity, whereas the current iPad Pro models have Thunderbolt 3/USB-4.
USB 3.2 Gen 2 is fast. The theoretical upper limit is 10Gbps, and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which no smartphones support today -- only laptops -- is 20Gbps.
And USB 4/Thunderbolt 3, the same used on iPad Pro and current Macs? 40Gbps or 5,000Mbps per second, an over 80 times increase over USB 2.0 transfer rates.
USB 3.2 Gen 2 on an iPhone will be a welcome change, bringing it to parity with the fastest Android devices. But if we get USB 4 on any iPhone 15 model, that will be quite an upgrade and would leap ahead of Android regarding device connectivity speeds.
Other benefits, but also challenges
Data transfer speed will not be the only advantage of USB-C on the iPhone; it will also allow for increased wattage and, thus, faster charging speeds.
3rd-party Lightning cables are certified under Apple's MFi program for up to 18W, which limits USB PD charge rates. USB PD through a USB-C cable supports up to 240W for desktop computers and other small appliances (such as portable power stations) as a potential replacement for the old-school 110V AC cable.
While I don't expect an iPhone to charge at 240W, we could see it as high as 35W, according to recent rumors. That's even faster than current generation iPad Pros, which charge at 20W.
An iPhone with the same charge connector as other devices in its household will allow consumers to standardize on a single cable type. But as we know, and as my ZDNET colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes pointed out last year, not all USB-C cables are built the same or support all transfer speeds and wattage limits.
The most recent iPad received a USB-C upgrade, at the expense of this concoction.
June Wan/ZDNET
We've all got USB-C to USB-C cables strewn around the house for different devices and accessories, and up until now, I've used them fairly interchangeably without thinking about device safety or potential transfer speed. However, I've also bought from trusted suppliers such as Anker, Nomad, and Apple's own USB-C and Thunderbolt cables (for charging my MacBook Pro and my iPad Pro).
That pack of $15 Amazon Basics USB-C cables introduced in 2020 that I bought for basic charging needs discounted on Prime Day should be okay, as it is 60W rated and supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps). But a random cable that came with some cheap Chinese lighting gadget I have stuffed in my box-o-cables that I occasionally reach for? Probably not.
And just because a cable supports a fast charge rate/wattage doesn't mean it supports USB 3.2. For example, Anker's cables only support faster speeds if you buy their USB-IF certified $35 USB4/Thunderbolt cable with a relatively low bend lifespan, so it won't be your daily driver for charging.
Anker's best-selling $16 Powerline III can handle a 100W load, making it a good charge cable, but you won't be able to move data faster than USB 2.0. So, as a content creator, you'll need a few high-end cables around strictly for data transfer.
Screenshot by Jason Perlow/ZDNET
USB-IF or MFi?
This will lead to a certain degree of consumer confusion because most of the cables currently in the sales channel sold by most third parties are not marked as to what wattages and transfer modes they support -- it's already problematic when we think about device connectivity and charge rates in the Android and Wintel laptop ecosystem.
Apple's OEM cables can be trusted with its own equipment, and its USB-C and Thunderbolts are safely interchangeable (although there's a big price difference between the two, and Thunderbolt will be overkill for use strictly as a charging cable.) But as to the rest of the industry?
In 2021, the USB Implementer's Forum created new logos for certified solutions under its program. So far, there hasn't been widespread adoption of these logos on 3rd-party cables packaged with many products, only on the more expensive cables sold in retail, such as Anker's USB4 40Gbps mentioned above. And many aren't certified; they simply say "240W" and do not use the official USB-IF logo.
USB Implementer's Forum
Apple has so far not said if it will adopt these logos for its MFi products or on the iPhone packaging and device, and we also don't know if there will be increased adoption of USB-IF logos by 3rd-parties now that the iPhone will fully support USB-C.
More importantly, we also don't know what happens when a non-MFi USB-C cable (one missing Apple's licensed chip for authentication) is detected by the iPhone 15. Does it refuse to work altogether (something that would more than just irritate the EU), issue a scary warning, or will it charge and transfer data at slower rates?
So which label on a cable becomes more important now, MFi, or USB-IF? Talk Back and Let Me Know.
Starfield is a hugely ambitious roleplaying game from Bethesda Game Studios that delivers on the high expectations the developer set by creating a galaxy-sized RPG. Having this game be a Day 1 release for Xbox Game Pass makes it an unprecedented deal and a huge coup for Microsoft, which acquired Bethesda as part of a $7.5BN deal two years ago.
Bethesda took its formula for RPGs, perfected over the years with the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, and deployed it on a scale grander than I have ever seen. I spent 36 hours playing Starfield on an Xbox Series X and completed more than 100 missions, side activities and other jobs. I feel like I barely scratched the surface of the game.
It's one of the best games Bethesda has ever developed and easily one of the best games of the year. To top it off, it's available on launch date Sept. 6 on Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft's Netflix-like subscription service available on PC and Xbox consoles. It's a rarity that a game of this caliber is released on Day 1 for Game Pass. Instead of paying $70 to play the game, subscribers can pay $10 a month for the game on PC, $11 if they want to play it on the Xbox Series consoles, or $17 a month to access both versions.
At the forefront of any discussion on Starfield will be its sheer size. Open-world games often take place in a city or even a country, but Starfield takes place in an entire galaxy. There are more than 1,000 planets to explore. However, don't expect each of those planets to be like Earth, with billions of people spread out across the world. Most of the worlds are pretty empty, but some have alien wildlife, colonies, outposts and other signs of civilizations to interact with.
Before exploring the stars, my character was a no-name miner on a moon who came across an alien artifact. The artifact causes him to have a strange vision about space making him "special," which is a similar hero trope found in other Bethesda games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim where the random character just happens to be the "Chosen One" to save the world, or in this case, the galaxy. After that, the game kicks off. My character joined Constellation -- a group dedicated to unlocking the mysteries of the galaxy -- and got his own spaceship.
The main quest involves completing missions for Constellation that primarily consist of collecting more artifact pieces, but there is so much more to do. Different factions such as the United Colonies Vanguard or the space pirates of the Crimson Fleet have their own set of missions available, but some will fall in your lap by overhearing what people are gossiping about. My favorite missions were the jobs from the megacorp Ryujin Industries, which required a combination of stealth, deception and hacking. They gave me Cyberpunk vibes.
Sometimes the adventure calls for a night in the club.
Screenshot by Oscar Gonzalez/CNET
Completing missions is the primary way to level up a character, giving you the most experience points. Each level gained adds another usable skill point. There are different categories of skills such as tech, combat and science, and more than 20 skills in each category are separated into tiers. The highest level skills require unlocking multiple tiers. Learning a skill can improve abilities such as using certain guns, pickpocketing or bribery.
My personal favorite was Persuasion, which can be used to make characters in the game give up items important to a quest without a fight. For example, I used Persuasion on some space pirates to get them to release a hostage just by convincing them it would be annoying to keep the hostage around.
Since Starfield is set in space, there are, naturally, spaceships. There's one assigned to you at the start of the game, but you don't have to keep it. The most direct way to get a new ship is to buy one from a star yard or spaceport, but those can cost a lot of money. Another option is to steal a ship from space pirates, but they can take some time to find.
What I did to get a better ship was complete a mission early on about a space hero known as The Mantis. Think Batman, but in space. I did it way earlier than recommended but my reward was a set of rare armor and a great ship. Worth it.
Screenshot by Oscar Gonzalez/CNET
For times when I didn't feel like exploring or doing missions, there was the option to create my own outpost. This can be done on numerous planets and can be a way to gain resources for crafting. I'm not a big fan of this Sims-like activity, but I can see people spending plenty of time creating their own colonies that will house members of their crew.
The flip side of being so ambitious is that Bethesda games are notorious for their bugs, and I came across a variety of glitches in Starfield. The most common involve objects and people floating just off the ground, but there were also instances where enemies and characters simply didn't move or respond. I did have a few crashes and an almost game-breaking bug where a companion would start a conversation only to never finish it, causing the game to get stuck waiting for them to talk. The solution, I found, was to stick the character onto an outpost before they could start a chat with me.
There was also some obvious dropping of frames on the Xbox Series X that I was playing on, so PC gamers should be aware that this will likely happen on the PC version as well, depending on their hardware.
Even with these issues, I still loved Starfield. I can easily see it being Game of the Year and being one of the best reasons to have a Game Pass subscription.
Starfield will be released on Sept. 6 for PC and Xbox Series X and S consoles. Those who preordered the Premium Edition will gain early access to the game starting on Sept. 1.
Starfield almost immediately nudges its players to the edges of the cosmos. In the opening hours of the role-playing video game, it’s possible to land your spaceship on Earth’s moon or zip 16 light-years to Alpha Centauri. When you open your map and zoom out from a planet, you can behold its surrounding solar system; zoom out again, and you’re scrolling past luminous stars and the mysterious worlds that orbit them.
That sprawling celestial journey within Starfield, developed by Bethesda Game Studios, reveals both the tremendous potential and the monumental challenge of an open-world space adventure. Bethesda has hyped an expansive single-player campaign with 1,000 explorable planets. And expectations around the game, officially releasing on Sept. 6 after a 10-month delay, are nearly as vast.
It’s the first new universe in 25 years for Bethesda, known for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. It’s also a high-stakes moment for Microsoft, which makes the Xbox and has long faced criticism that it produces fewer hit games than its console rivals, Sony and Nintendo. To compete, Microsoft went on a spending spree, acquiring Bethesda’s parent company in 2020 and agreeing to purchase Activision Blizzard in 2022, a $69 billion bet that is being challenged by regulators.
Now Bethesda must deliver. Known for letting players navigate competing factions and undertake eccentric quests, the studio hopes Starfield will dazzle those clamoring for engaging encounters with alien life-forms or space mercenaries as well as a sense of boundless exploration.
Starfield draws inspiration from movies and television shows like “Interstellar,” “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Martian.”Bethesda Game Studios
“We could have made a game where there are four cities and four planets,” said Todd Howard, the executive producer of Bethesda. “But that would not have the same feeling of being this explorer.”Bethesda Game Studios
But creating a game the size of a galaxy is extraordinarily time-consuming and expensive, and several past attempts that shot for the stars failed to stick the landing.
“The biggest challenge you face when building any sci-fi game is the almost limitless imagination as players we have about space and about the universe,” said Aaryn Flynn, the chief executive of Inflexion Games and a former general manager of BioWare, which makes the sci-fi Mass Effect series. “Players want that captured in the experience.”
Todd Howard, the executive producer of Bethesda, was well aware that Starfield, which is being released for Windows computers and the Xbox Series X and S, would have to be expansive to reflect the allure of space travel.
“All of us, I think, at some point look to the sky and say, ‘Man, I wonder what it would be like to blast off and land on the moon?’ or ‘I wonder what would be beyond that?’ or ‘What’s in that star?’ or ‘Is there life out there?’” Howard said in an interview, adding: “We needed the scale to have that feeling. We could have made a game where there are four cities and four planets. But that would not have the same feeling of being this explorer.”
So Starfield has promised 1,000 searchable planets, about 10 percent of which contain life in addition to quests and valuable raw materials. That scale has caused some concern that the studio responsible for glitchy releases like Skyrim and Fallout 76 is in over its head — and that some aspects of space will be a black hole of fun.
The game’s developers say they are confident they have struck the right balance by using a mix of scientific data and artificial intelligence to generate realistic planets, and then fine-tuning those worlds with human programmers who also craft the quests and the enemies that players will encounter.
Some Starfield planets are temperate, made of rock and filled with fauna and flora. Others are gas giants in a deep freeze that cannot be landed on. Still others have chemical water or a surface so hot it emits scalding vapor fog.Bethesda Game Studios
“We have artists who hand-built the rocks, partly from scanning real rocks in our world and changing them,” Howard said. “And then we have algorithms that create the landscape of a planet and put the rocks and the trees in all the right places.”
When players land on a new planet in Starfield, they may encounter a tangle of atlas weed or discover that giant crabs can viciously attack. Those who enjoy hoarding can pick up items as innocuous as a jar of sealant in an abandoned laboratory.
But exactly how the game unfolds will differ for each player. Howard acknowledged that Starfield posed “an incredibly difficult design challenge” — one his team tried to solve by building a planet content manager that allows certain quests to be placed as players reach the surface. One player might run into a derelict outpost; someone else might hear another spaceship’s engine as she wanders. Developers have also tried to ensure that very little will happen in some cases, so that players “get some periods of loneliness,” Howard said.
Despite the technological advancements that have made it possible to generate countless planets with ease, more than a dozen gaming executives, analysts and developers said in interviews that studios must be wary of overpromising what they can deliver.
No Man’s Sky drew incredible hype when its developers at Hello Games spoke of a procedurally generated universe of no fewer than 18 quintillion planets. But when the game made its debut in 2016, players found its worlds uninteresting and its alien dinosaurs crude. The criticism was so harsh that one of the company’s founders said he received death threats; the independent studio was investigated for false advertising and eventually cleared.
Of the game’s 1,000 explorable planets, about 10 percent will contain life, as seen in concept art for Starfield.Bethesda Game Studios
“Procedural generation can generate new maps but not compelling gameplay,” said Elena Bertozzi, a professor of game design and development at Quinnipiac University. “No Man’s Sky had a lot of planets with nothing interesting going on.”
A spokesman for Hello Games declined to comment, referring to public remarks that one of its founders, Sean Murray, made in 2019. By then, the game had improved and was being praised for its successful postrelease updates.
“Innovation is in such short supply in the industry, and we need it so badly,” Murray said at the time. “We need to encourage it, we need to foster it. We need to ask people to shoot for the moon. And if they fail on their first attempt, we need to be there to support them.”
The team behind Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth installment in the role-playing series, also planned to leverage procedural generation, said Mac Walters, who worked for BioWare for almost two decades as a writer, producer and director and joined the Andromeda project partway through.
“There was this vision that we were going to have a thousand planets,” Walters said, confirming some details of an investigation into what the gaming news site Kotaku called a “turbulent and troubled” development. When Andromeda was released in 2017, there were about a half-dozen planets to explore.
Starfield’s main story can be completed in about 30 hours. But players can spend hundreds more customizing spaceships, harvesting resources, exploring alien planets and fighting bloodthirsty pirates.Bethesda Game Studios
BioWare did not respond to a request for comment. Flynn, the studio’s former general manager, said the team was hamstrung by decisions such as the choice to use the Frostbite game engine, which was not intended for content-heavy role-playing games. He said the team had hoped to have enough sophistication in its algorithms to make the procedurally generated worlds “indistinguishable” from what developers were making, so that they could focus on building a transporting narrative.
“We didn’t get there,” he said. “And so our developers still had to come over and work on the procedural content a fair bit.”
When players finally got their hands on the game, many were shocked by its lack of polish. The characters’ facial animations were so clumsy, they became fodder for internet memes. Criticsassailed what they described as cheesy dialogue, subpar voice acting and major plot problems.
Avoiding similar pitfalls with Starfield is paramount for Microsoft, which desperately needs a new blockbuster game as its flagship franchise, Halo, fades in relevance. Some time after Bethesda announced an open-world space game in 2018, Microsoft executives learned that Sony was considering a deal to make it available exclusively on PlayStation consoles.
“When we heard that Starfield was going to potentially end up skipping Xbox — we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind on console ownership,” Phil Spencer, the chief executive of Microsoft Gaming, testified during a court hearing in June that focused on the Activision acquisition. “We had to secure content to remain viable.”
Microsoft shelled out $7.5 billion for ZeniMax Media, the parent company of a swath of game studios that included Bethesda, but is still looking for a return on investment. Redfall, the most prominent Xbox game resulting from the deal so far, flopped when it was released in May.
Xbox owners have also been denied a seat at this year’s feast of role-playing games, including Final Fantasy XVI, which is currently available only on the PlayStation 5, and Tears of the Kingdom, a Zelda game for the Switch. Baldur’s Gate 3, which has been rapturously received by computer gamers, hits the PlayStation 5 on Wednesday; an Xbox version is due later this year.
Microsoft has pioneered a shift in gaming away from $60 or $70 retail purchases and toward a Netflix-style subscription service that offers hundreds of games for between $10 and $17 per month. That service, Game Pass, had more than 25 million subscribers last year but needs a steady supply of marquee games to make it a can’t-miss subscription.
If Starfield wins over players, “it becomes a crowning jewel in that portfolio,” said Yung Kim, the head of partnerships at the gaming data firm Aldora and a former analyst for Piper Sandler.
Spencer said he would measure Starfield’s success simply by how many people play it, regardless of how they do so. “Everything comes from that. How many people are playing across devices?” he wrote in an email. “I want Starfield to be Bethesda Game Studios’ most played game ever.”
Bethesda’s games are known for letting players navigate competing factions and undertake eccentric quests.Bethesda Game Studios
Starfield has a planet content manager that allows certain quests to be placed as players reach the surface.Bethesda Game Studios
Starfield draws inspiration from movies and television shows like “Interstellar,” “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Martian,” Howard said, but also from real organizations like NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The game’s main story focuses on collecting mysterious alien artifacts and can be completed in about 30 hours. But players can spend hundreds more customizing spaceships, harvesting resources, exploring planets and fighting bloodthirsty pirates.
Focusing on realism helped ground the project, Bethesda executives said. Engineers toured NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which Ashley Cheng, Bethesda’s managing director, said helped inspire Starfield’s realistic simulation of the galaxy — down to how quickly a planet rotates around its axis. The trip also helped set parameters on Starfield’s procedural generation of planets to ensure that their geography was realistic.
All of the names, locations and characteristics of Starfield planets are the same for every player. Some are temperate, made of rock and filled with fauna and flora. Others are gas giants in a deep freeze that cannot be landed on. Still others have chemical water, low gravity or a surface so hot it emits scalding vapor fog. (Earth, in 2330, is essentially a desert filled with corrosive gas.)
“They all have different biomes,” Angela Browder, Bethesda’s studio director, said. “We all have this idea of what space is supposed to be like. Whatever you thought it was going to look like, we probably have a planet that matches up.”
Browder said developers also had to weigh realism against enjoyment. Survival in space needed to be challenging, but not too burdensome. The team ditched the idea of making players refuel their spaceships, and tried to make the controls for piloting them accessible.
Their desire for accuracy also kept expectations in check. Cheng said part of the balance was making sure there was enough to do without jam-packing all 1,000 planets with content. Not every location, he said, “is supposed to be Disney World.”
“The point of the vastness of space is you should feel small. It should feel overwhelming,” Cheng said. “Everyone’s concerned that empty planets are going to be boring. But when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.”
When Samsung unveiled the first Galaxy Fold generation back in early 2019, most hardcore Galaxy Note fans probably shrugged or even laughed off the experimental device, not sensing how dangerous that would prove to be for their beloved stylus-wielding smartphone family.
But then the Z Fold 2 appeared to receive far more attention from its manufacturers at the same 2020 Unpacked event where the Note 20 lineup was unveiled, and when the Galaxy S21 Ultra arrived with S Pen support in early 2021, it became abundantly clear that the days of the once-mighty Galaxy Note series were numbered.
Fast-forward to today, and after polishing its foldable handsets to near-perfection, Samsung can finally justify its controversial decision to kill off the incredibly successful Galaxy Note franchise with a very significant (European) milestone.
Here's how big the Galaxy Z Flip 5 is in Europe
If you felt like Samsung was being suspiciously quiet about the early sales results and popularity of the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5, well, that stops today with a number of very juicy and very impressive official details on the matter.
For starters, it appears that the cheaper Z Flip 5 is more than twice as popular as the state-of-the-art Z Fold 5 on the old continent, which is... hardly surprising for folks who've been following the (official and unofficial) shipment scores of previous Flip and Fold models.
The exact sales ratio in Europe this time around is 7:3 in the Flip's favor, which more or less coincides with the Korean pre-order gap between the two devices confirmed by Samsung a few weeks back. Graphite and Mint are the top-selling Z Flip 5 flavors, while the Z Fold 5's Phantom Black and Icy Blue color options are so far proving exceptionally successful across European markets.
But the most important achievement the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5 have apparently contributed to is an improvement of the Note family's annual sales in Europe. Yes, Samsung's foldables are officially bigger and more popular on the old continent than their "conventional" Galaxy Note-series ancestors, which is yet another strong sign that this "niche" is rapidly moving into the mobile industry's mainstream scene.
10 million global milestone in sight
If you're wondering exactly how many Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5 units Samsung has so far sold in Europe and around the world, we're afraid we don't have anything resembling an official answer to offer you right now.
Instead, the world's number one smartphone vendor is focusing on its goal to ship 10 million foldables in total this year, which is likely to be surpassed with crucial help from the newest additions to the Z Flip and Z Fold families.
In 2022, mind you, Samsung sold an estimated 83 percent of the world's 12.9 million foldable devices, or around 10.7 million units. That makes the company's projected 2023 achievement sound... not that remarkable, but as you might be aware, the foldable market shrank during this year's first quarter compared to the same period of 2022.
Things changed in Q2 and both Q3 and Q4 results are also expected to grow, but that's due (at least in part) to rising competition from brands like Google and Motorola. With all of that in mind, a 10 million+ annual sales score certainly feels like (another) feat worth celebrating for Samsung. Oh, yeah, and the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5 have predictably exceeded the "early sales record" of last year's Z Flip 4 and Z Fold 4 in Europe as well. Not too shabby for two devices widely criticized for being too expensive, looking too familiar, and lacking "true" innovation.
Article From & Read More ( Samsung's hugely popular Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Z Fold 5 are putting the Galaxy Note memory to rest - PhoneArena )
https://ift.tt/KoiLTG2
Technology
Google (GOOG, GOOGL) is expanding availability of the generative AI-powered version of its search engine, dubbed Search Generative Experience (SGE), outside of the US. The software, which the company says is still an experiment, will soon be available in India and Japan.
SGE serves as a testbed for a future in which Google Search is intertwined with the conversational interface of a generative AI chatbot. India and Japan will allow Google to better gauge how SGE works at scale in different languages.
In India, the app will offer support for both Hindi and English, as well as voice search and audio responses. Users in both Japan and India will have to opt into using SGE.
In addition to growing the software's presence outside of the US, Google says it’s improving the way links to web pages appear in generative AI responses. Now, the company explained, generative AI answers will feature arrows next to them indicating drop down menus that, when clicked, show the websites where the search engine grabbed its information from.
Google is bringing generative AI to its search engine. But it's just a test for now. (Image: Google)
Google also offered a handful of insights into how early users are receiving SGE. According to Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management for Search, Google is seeing the highest rate of satisfaction among users between the ages of 18- and 24-years-old. In particular, Budaraju explained in a blog post, those users like being able to ask follow-up questions to their initial search queries.
“People tell us they find the suggested follow-up questions beneficial to see examples of how to refine their search, and they’re asking longer and more conversational questions in full sentences because generative AI in Search can help them quickly find what they're looking for,” Budaraju said.
“Overall, we’re seeing people try queries that they never may have thought they could search for before, creating new opportunities for Google to be helpful.”
Importantly, for Google’s business, Budaraju says that users are finding ads either above or below the large SGE box on the screen. Google earns the bulk of its revenue from ad sales, and reinventing the search engine experience meant having to figure out how ads would live alongside the SGE box. By acknowledging that users are still finding ads in SGE, Google is looking to assuage any concerns that change would be a negative for its ad business.
Sign up for the Yahoo Finance newsletter.
SGE isn’t the only generative AI-powered search engine in town, though. Microsoft (MSFT) has been offering its generative AI-powered version of Bing search for months, giving it a sizable lead over Google, which is still testing SGE.
Microsoft is intent on stealing market share from Google bit by bit by keeping ahead in the generative AI space. In February, the Windows maker said that just 1% of market share in Search is worth $2 billion.
The two companies are locked in a back-and-forth over which will run away with the AI crown. Microsoft has been adding generative AI capabilities to both its consumer and enterprise products, including its Microsoft 365 productivity software.
On Tuesday, Google responded with its Duet AI in Workspace and Duet AI in Google Cloud. Adding to the competitive showdown, Google priced Duet AI in Workspace at $30 per month per user, the same amount Microsoft is charging for its Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Daniel Howleyis the tech editor at Yahoo Finance. He's been covering the tech industry since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter@DanielHowley.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24886170/16_Legion_9i_Hero_A_Cover.png)
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24886167/01_Legion_9i_Hero_Front_Facing_JD.png)
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24886169/02_Legion_9i_Hero_Front_Facing_Right.png)
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24886178/05_Legion_9i_Hero_Top.png)
