Welcome to another edition of your weekly tech round-up! Things are getting back to normal after Amazon Prime Day, and we can once again focus on things like Apple tinkering with the performance of its laptops, and the fact that the death of the DSLR is in fact a good thing.
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While things like a cost-of-living crisis or a pandemic cause all kinds of awful problems, such events also elicit interesting reactions from tech brands looking to peddle their wares – and one of the more curious side-effects of Covid and the ongoing financial squeeze is a drop in the price of OLED TVs.
The upshot, as our TV & Audio Editor Matt Bolton explains, is that you can now get one of the world’s best OLED TVs, the LG C2, for just over £1,000 in the UK and $1,300 in the US, which is pretty darn cheap for this top-end tech. We even saw the LG A1 dip to under $700 during Prime Day, which is completely unheard of – OLED technology is now very much mainstream.
What’s the reason for this plummet? Well, we all bought new TVs during the pandemic, it seems, as we were forced to sit inside and watch Tiger King on Netflix over and over, and that means demand for new sets has now fallen off. That, combined with the economic uncertainty, means Samsung and LG have had to drop the prices to attract customers – and that’s good news for all of us.
Apple is reportedly throttling the performance of the new MacBook Air (Future)
Before I begin, I should say that it’s totally fair for brands to tinker with the performance of their devices in order to optimize their performance – nobody wants to buy something that doesn’t work as well as it could.
However, Apple is reportedly throttling the performance of its new M2-powered MacBook Air by up to 25% – the machine doesn’t have any fans to help with cooling, and apparently this is the only way to prevent overheating.
Yes, the MacBook Air isn’t marketed as a high-end video-editing tool in the same way as the MacBook Pro is – and that model does have a fan onboard, and isn’t exhibiting signs of the same throttling.
The reason that I’m annoyed is because Apple has gone for an aggressively sleek design for the new Air – could it not have made the device a touch thicker to allow for better air circulation?
Actually, I’ve been here before – I’ve railed for years about brands making phones thinner and thinner at the expense of battery life, and they just kept getting slimmer. So if you do want a new M2 MacBook, and your top consideration is performance, go for the M2-powered MacBook Pro.
Firefox has lost much of its market share to Google Chrome (Mozilla)
I used to be a strong advocate for Firefox over the ‘tyranny’ of Internet Explorer. Then I was slowly, slowly coaxed over to Chrome, eventually migrating my entire online life to Google’s browser, after which I constantly found myself wondering how much I was fuelling the great big Google ad machine.
I’ll admit, I hadn’t opened up the ol’ Fox for a while – its market share has become miniscule and I didn’t see the point. But our new Computing Writer Allisa James has changed my mind – there’s a whole world of browsing out there that I can go and re-explore, and I’ll be doing just that this week.
Especially if it means my laptop won’t start howling in pain every time I try to open a video meeting – Chrome gobbles RAM so hard that using a less-demanding browser is a real blessing in that regard.
Lance makes a strong case from an investment perspective – you’ll get longer device life, consistency of brand and features, and great customer support for much longer than many competing brands offer – that’s why Apple is growing its share in a declining market.
Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you’ll think his piece is too ‘Apple fanboy’. But there’s no doubting the strength of the Apple ecosystem in these economically challenging times, and sometimes it can pay to invest in high-quality tech.
Both Nikon and Canon have announced that they plan to stop making DSLRs (Nikon/Canon)
I’ll happily admit that cameras are probably the area of tech I know the least about, even though I was one of the earliest of early adopters of digital cameras, because I loved the idea of not panicking if the picture I took wasn’t great… just delete it and try again.
I don’t need to know much about them because we have Mark Wilson, a veritable photography genius, on our team. And while many are lamenting the possible demise of the DSLR camera, with the ‘Big Two’ of Nikon and Canon rumored to be ending production of such models, Mark highlights how this is, actually, a good thing.
He points out that the camera market as a whole is declining rapidly (or, to quote Mark: “plummeting harder than Bitcoin on a skydiving trip”), and with mirrorless cameras going from strength to strength, brands can’t continue to carry enthusiast products like DSLRs if there isn’t the demand for them.
He’s not gleeful at the prospect though, and he offers some good advice for those who want to continue to enjoy the ‘clunk’ that comes with each press of the shutter button; the article is a great read, even if, like me, you’re not ‘into’ cameras.
Welcome to the party: the 1More Evo true wireless earbuds (Future)
“Welcome, 1More; we've been expecting you”. That’s the tagline that our reviewer, Jennifer Allen, hit us with on her review of the new 1More Evo true wireless earbuds – finally, this ‘nearly’ brand has brought a decent set of buds to the wireless game.
The 1More Evo headphones aren’t perfect, but they’ve intrigued me: for £135 / $145 they offer decent sound, good wearer detection (I hate it when my headphones don’t stop playing the moment I remove them) and nice audio controls.
They’re not the most water-resistant, with just an IPX4 rating, so for that reason I’m out, as I’ve destroyed too many pairs of headphones with my apparently all-powerful sweat; but these are nice, mid-range earbuds that I think could attract a few AirPods Pro naysayers.
The Pons Neronianus – Latin for 'Bridge of Nero' – has reappeared in the River Tiber in Rome during a drought (Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
It was a tough decision this week over which story to put into the sign-off, because the James Webb telescope has been at it again, taking never-before-seen photos of Jupiter – and that was just as part of its calibration process. That’s how good it is.
But I love a story with a real, well, story to it, and this tale of a bridge that was (probably) built in Italy by the Emperor Nero, and which disappeared for hundreds of years but has suddenly reappeared as Rome's Tiber river runs low, was enthralling.
Nero was a ruler who loved decadence over politics, so much so that he may have built the bridge simply so he could march over it; unfortunately, it was built in a really stupid place, and was always going to be eroded.
If you like your history you're going to love this – although the downside is that the only reason the bridge has reappeared is because of a severe drought in Italy.
This is from the editor
I won’t be here next week, so I'll be leaving you in the capable and possibly superior hands of another of TechRadar’s editors – I’m not being cryptic in not telling you who it is, I just haven’t got around to asking anyone yet.
Keep those emails coming, and have a lovely weekend – I'll catch up with you soon!
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