Month: March 2026

They are setting up express wedding stalls at festivals

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China is going through deep birth crisis and it is being implemented all kinds of measures to reactivate it. One of the axes on which policies to increase birth rates are based is to encourage weddings, which also have plummeted as divorces rise. The desperation is such that they are setting up express Las Vegas-style wedding booths. Yes, I want to (go to a festival). It happened in the last edition of the Super Strawberry festival in Uruqmi, in Xinjiang. In addition to the typical stalls to buy drinks, food or merchandise, they also set up a temporary office to celebrate weddings on the spot. Three couples got married. They count in South China Morning Post that these offices for express weddings are part of the offensive to reverse the drop in birth rates, but they have not only appeared at festivals, they have also been installed in picturesque places and tourist attractions such as parks or lakes. Facilities. In March of last year, The Chinese government simplified the procedures for getting married with the aim of encouraging marriages and reducing associated costs. Previously, it was mandatory to complete a procedure in your hometown, but now registration can be done at your place of residence and you only need to bring your DNI. By eliminating this bureaucratic barrier, travel is avoided and everything is streamlined. The government also proposes lower the legal age to marry (currently it is 20 years for girls and 22 for boys), but at the moment this has not been implemented. The cost of getting married. A wedding in China doesn’t exactly come cheap; It is one of the reasons for the drop in the number of commitments. He caili or “bride price” is a tradition in which the groom’s family makes a transfer of money or property to the bride’s. In 2023 the national average was 69,000 yuan (about 8,700 euros, at the current exchange rate), an unaffordable figure, especially in rural areas with lower incomes. The government has carried out campaigns against ostentatious weddings and very high cailis and this seems to be getting into something more. In rejection of this tradition, more and more couples are fleeing celebrations in ostentatious halls and celebrating their weddings in cheaper places such as restaurants, some even at McDonald’s. More measurements. As we said, China is trying literally everything to encourage young people to get married and have children. Some of the measures that have been implemented are: It’s not working very well. The efforts to increase the birth rate are undeniable, but the figures are clear: They are failing. China continues to lose population for the fourth consecutive year and everything indicates that it will not be able to reverse the curve in the short term. Despite the measures, the cost of raising a child in cities is very high and there is a labor and housing crisis that especially affects youth. To all this we must add the cultural change; more and more women reject the traditional family model and they prioritize their career. Image | Đào Việt Hoàng (Unsplash) and Tom Fisk on Pexels In Xataka | In the midst of the collapse of the birth rate, China has made a radical decision: suspend foreign adoptions

Microsoft killed the traditional Xbox by saying that everything was an Xbox. Now he wants to resurrect it with Project Helix

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Microsoft has quietly withdrawn its “This is an Xbox” campaign, the initiative with which it had spent 16 months trying to convince the world that any device (television, mobile phone, tablet) It was technically an Xbox.. The deletion coincides with the replacement at the top managementthe debut of Project Helix at GDC and a market paradox: Sony and Microsoft have become, at the same time, the main defenders of the concept “a console is a console.” The campaign. The series of ‘This is an Xbox’ ads were launched under the presidency of Sarah Bond and functioned as the great manifesto of the post-hardware era of Microsoft Gaming. Now it has disappeared without an official statement: the blog entry that opened it on Xbox Wire gives error 404and searching for the term in the official Xbox news repository only returns one article about ROG Xbox Ally. The files indicate that the page was still accessible on March 1, 2026. What was it about? The idea behind “This is an Xbox” was, in theory, reasonable: expand the ecosystem beyond its own hardware, bet on the streaming in the cloud as a gateway and normalize that playing Xbox did not require purchasing an Xbox console. The problem is that the argument, taken to its extreme, destroyed the reason for the hardware. The campaign generated more confusion than interest, with fans wondering why they would buy an Xbox if the titles were available on any platform. The rejection. Apparentlythe initiative was not well received internally, and the company made some strategic lurches. For example, the announcement of an Xbox mobile store in summer 2024 never materialized. A few months later, with the arrival of Asha Sharma as the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming and the departure of Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, the campaign has ended up being withdrawn. The phrase with which Sharma summed up this new change of direction speaks for itself: “The plan is the plan until it isn’t“. More from Helix. The same day that the 404 of “This is an Xbox” was discovered, Microsoft had a presence at GDC 2026 with the Developer Summit dedicated to Project Helix. Jason Ronald, vice president of Next Generation at Xbox, presented the technical details of the upcoming hardware: a console powered by a custom AMD SoC, co-designed for next-generation DirectX and FSR technology, and which the company describes as “an order of magnitude leap” in gaming performance. ray tracing: pscaling Next Generation ML, ML Multi-Frame Generation and Ray Regeneration for games with path tracing The technical details that AMD provided completed the picture: the custom chip is built on RDNA 5 architecture and TSMC’s 3nm process, and incorporates a dedicated NPU that will power all advanced rendering capabilities, including FSR Diamond. Developer alpha kits will begin shipping in 2027, and the company is committed to maintaining compatibility with games from four generations of Xbox. Not everything is perfect. The complicating point in the “return to consoles” story is that Microsoft told the developers at GDC that “build for PC” is the correct approach going forward, suggesting that Project Helix is, at heart, a PC disguised as a console. That is, it is closer to the ambitious project of Valve with its Steam Machine that of the Sony gives up making more PC games. In addition, Xbox Mode will arrive on Windows 11 in April, bringing the console experience directly to the desktop PC, and the Play Anywhere catalog already exceeds 1,500 titles. The Sony thing. It is commented that Sony is returning to the old strategy of exclusives as a hardware sales lever after the PC ports did not work as expected. Part of the problem was one of timing: games arrived on PC months or years after the console launch, making it difficult to build a stable audience on the platform. There is Steam data very significant: ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered’, for example, reached a peak of just 66,000 simultaneous players, a figure that did not justify the continued investment in big-budget game ports. Sony and Microsoft, two companies that took opposite paths in the last generation (one opening up to the PC, the other trying to dissolve the very idea of ​​the console), have simultaneously reached the same conclusion. A console is a console, and hardware has to have value. In Xataka | “We will not flood our ecosystem with soulless AI garbage.” We already know what Asha Sharma wants to do as CEO of Microsoft Gaming

Without helium there are no chips or RAM. And the largest producers are in the eye of the Iran war

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Think of the world as if it were a puppet. It is supported by threads that move, but when one of those threads breaks, the whole wobbles. If several strings break at once, the puppet falls apart. In the technological world, 2026 has started on the wrong foot. The main RAM memory companies They have turned to producing memory for AI, leaving the consumer market. This has caused an unprecedented increase of prices that affects consumers, but also companies. Right now, it’s impossible to guess when it will return to normal because each party involved thinks one thing. And, for a few days now, we have another of those threads that I talked about at the beginning: the iran war. The consequence We are already seeing it immediately: the Strait of Hormuz boilingthe barrel of crude oilreaching stratospheric prices and a gasoline –dieselabove all- through the clouds. But since everything that goes wrong can get worse, now there is another crisis knocking at the door: that of helium. And it is the perfect union between RAM crisis and the war in Iran because without helium… well, without helium there are many things that do not work. Neither does artificial intelligence. RAM crisis + Iran war = no helium For many, helium is that gas that gives us such a funny voice and allows us to inflate balloons that float. For the semiconductor industry, helium is a critical and irreplaceable element in the manufacturing process. Being a noble gas, it does not chemically interfere with the materials of the silicon crystal growth process. inside the huge machines that companies use to create the wafers that are later used to make chips. They prevent materials from reacting with oxygen or other contaminants, so the results are purer. They are like a shield, but helium is also essential to dissipate the heat of the extreme lithography machinesto eliminate waste after each manufacturing cycle and even to identify any leaks in one of these machines. Its particles are among the smallest that exist and are what reveal even the smallest leaks in manufacturing chambers that must be under vacuum. Come on, it is not an element that can be easily replaced. There are two companies that right now have such a deep dependency that any variation in supply would be fatal. What companies? Exactly: Samsung and SK Hynix, the same ones that have dedicated themselves to AI and the same ones that do not plan to lift a finger to alleviate the crisis of RAM memory prices (and therefore of SSDs and any device that has a NAND chip). Both are involved in the manufacturing process of the sophisticated HBM4 memoryand both need helium. The problem is that helium is a byproduct in natural gas production, and some of the world’s largest refineries are in the Middle East. With the war in Iran, it is clear that the civilian targets are data centers and energy producers. If these infrastructures are attacked, the rest of the West is paralyzed, and they have begun to launch kamikaze drones against them. There is the oil company Ras Tanurabut also that of Ras Laffan, from QatarEnergy. It is one of the whales in the production of natural gas and, therefore, in the production of helium. And if the refineries close and the ships do not arrive, the smelters’ reserves begin to run out. There are already voices that they point to problems in the medium term if the situation persists. SK Hynix claims that they have a “diversified supply chain and sufficient helium inventory”something similar to what has commented another of the large chip manufacturers: TSMC. The problem is that these guarantees are short-term. If the situation continues with a prolonged closure of Hormuz, more than 25% of the world’s helium supply will be affected. This will cause the companies that ‘use’ gas the most to begin to see that their reserves are depleted at a faster rate than they are replenished. the market, always so unstablehas already reacted and actions Both Samsung and SK Hynix have fallen in recent hours due to supply concerns. Because we are no longer talking about a price of RAM and runaway gasolinewe are talking about helium being necessary for the manufacturing of any advanced chip, but also in quantum computing or for the numerous space launches. And as Hormuz continues, there will be many entities fighting for an essential, irreplaceable and very valuable good. Faced with SK Hynix’s moderate optimism, more pessimistic voices are already seeing echoes of the component crisis of 2020. Images | VALGO, ASML In Xataka | ‘Focus: The ASML Way’: the book that reveals the secrets of the most powerful European company in the chip industry

This is how Q&As work with Xataka editors included in Xataka Xtra

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The best way to summarize Xataka Xtra It is with one word: “community”. The community has been one of the cornerstones of Xataka since its inception and in this new adventure we wanted to take it one step further. We have Discord, where we spend the day talking about the things we like; and El Consultorio, a direct line with the in-house experts to resolve your doubts and questions. Today we present to you the Q&As with Xataka editors. When we hold events we normally do them with a predetermined theme. The clearest example is Xataka Live. But many times we simply want to talk to you and for you to talk to us without an agenda. Talk, simply chat about whatever is appropriate or what interests us at that moment. That is precisely what we propose with the Q&As. Q&A sessions are one of the exclusive advantages of Xataka Xtraour new community for subscribers that includes giveaways, discounts, exclusive newsletters and more. How to have coffee with friends These meetings, exclusive for subscribers of Xataka Xtrawill have a monthly cadence and will be carried out through Google Meet. The first will take place soon and we will notify you both here and on our Discord server, where we are also waiting for you if you are subscribed to Xtra. And what can we talk about? Whatever we want. Has a new game come out that we’re all hooked on and want to discuss? Forward. Do we want to talk about anime and convince everyone to watch One Piece once and for all? Go ahead too. Shall we talk about the latest releases from company X? Of course. Shall we put an end to the debate of potato omelette with or without onion? There would be more to go, even though there is only one correct answer. The idea is that it is a meeting of xatakeros in which we can talk about what we would talk about when leaving the office, on the street or having a coffee on any given afternoon. Needless to say, participation is not mandatory, far from it. It is an advantage that we include in the subscription to Xataka Xtrabut under no circumstances is it necessary to attend all the sessions, or none in fact. As we said before, the first session will take place shortly, so don’t go too far. See you at the Q&As! More information | Xataka Xtra

Meta has been buying chips from NVIDIA and AMD for years. Now it also makes its own so as not to fall short

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Meta has not thrown in the towel with its MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerators) chips. And although they didn’t have it all on their sidestopping depending on NVIDIA is a very juicy candy to jump to conclusions. For that very reason, They have presented a roadmap of four new chips with which the company intends to accelerate both its content recommendation systems and its generative AI capabilities. The first chip is now operational; The other three will arrive before the end of 2027. Below are all the details. Dependence. For years, Meta has relied almost entirely on NVIDIA and AMD to power its data centers. The development of our own silicon is complicated, but if it is achieved, it can be a very successful financial and strategic bet in these times. According to statements According to its vice president of engineering, Yee Jiun Song, designing its own chips allows the company to “eliminate what we don’t need,” which directly translates into cost reduction. Added to this is greater independence from possible price variations or supply restrictions. Which is exactly what you have announced. The four new chips are the MTIA 300, 400, 450 and 500. Each one has a different use: The MTIA 300 is already in production and is intended to train the algorithms that decide what content Facebook and Instagram users see. The MTIA 400 (known internally as Iris) has completed laboratory testing and is en route to data centers. Meta claims that it offers performance “competitive with leading commercial products,” according to its official statement. The MTIA 450 (Arke) will double the high-bandwidth memory compared to the 400 and is scheduled for early 2027. The MTIA 500 (Astrid), the most advanced, will arrive in mid-2027 and will incorporate, according to the company, improvements in low-precision data processing. The chips are manufactured by TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor producer, and have been developed in collaboration with Broadcom on the RISC-V open architecture. The rhythm is the most striking thing. What’s unusual is not just that Meta makes its own chips, but the speed at which it plans to do so. The usual cycle in the industry is one or two years between generations. Meta aims to release new versions every six months. “The pace of AI evolution is so fast that we always want to have the most advanced chip available when we need it,” counted Song. This accelerated cadence is possible, according to the company, thanks to a modular design that allows components to be reused between generations. ANDthis does not replace NVIDIA. It is important not to lose sight of the context. Meta remains one of the largest buyers of GPUs on the market. just a few weeks ago signed multi-million dollar agreements with NVIDIA and AMD to supply chips for the next few years, and has also reached an agreement to rent computing capacity on Google chips, as share Wired. MTIA chips are designed for specific and internal tasks (inference and recommendation systems), not for training large language models, so this strategy is complementary to your chip plans with NVIDIA or AMD. Nor should we forget that Meta recently had to abandon its most ambitious training chip, known internally as Olympus, after the project became complicated in the design phase, according to counted The Information. Susan Li, CFO of Meta, confirmed at a Morgan Stanley event that the company still has the goal of developing processors capable of training models, but without giving more details. And now what. The real test of this bet will come when the chips are deployed at scale. The challenge at the moment is to guarantee HBM memory supply before a RAM crisis that is affecting the entire technology sector. Song himself recognized to CNBC that the company “is absolutely concerned” about it, although it stated that they have assured supply for their current plans. In the long term, we will see if Meta can achieve something similar to what Google did with its TPUs. Cover image | Mariia Shalabaieva and Goal In Xataka | OpenClaw has caused a real media earthquake in China. The Government has prevented its officials from using it

Gemini just pushed you towards something more ambitious

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If we need to get somewhere, check how long a trip will take or find a nearby restaurant, it is very likely that we will open Google Maps. The application has become over the years one of those everyday tools that we use both when we travel and when we move around our own city. Since its debut in 2005 as a service designed to help us get from point A to point B, Maps has been incorporating functions that expand its role in digital life. What Google just announced points to a new change in that evolution: the incorporation of artificial intelligence so that the map not only guides us, but can also answer our questions about places, routes and plans. Ask the map. This novelty turns the map search engine into a conversational interface. Instead of typing the name of a site, we can ask more open-ended questions and get recommendations tailored to the context. According to the Mountain View company, the system is based on information about more than 300 million places and contributions from a community of more than 500 million users who publish reviews, photos and ratings. Additionally, recommendations that appear on the map can be quickly converted into actions within the application itself. If we find an interesting restaurant, for example, we can save the place, share it with friends or start browsing in a matter of seconds, and the company adds that in some cases it will also be possible to make reservations. For travel, the system can suggest stops between different destinations and display them on the map with clear directions and estimated arrival times. Google further explains that these responses can be customized based on signals such as places that the user has previously searched for or saved in Maps. More visual navigation. If Ask Maps changes the way we explore and decide, the other big leg of the announcement points directly to how we follow a route within the application. This is where Immersive Navigation comes in, the redesign with which Google wants to make driving more intuitive. In this case, the map starts to show a three-dimensional view of the environment with buildings, overpasses and relief, and also highlights elements of the road such as lanes, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings or stop signs when they can help in a turn or merge. Google also ensures that this new navigation will offer a broader view of the route, more natural voice directions, information about the pros and cons of alternative routes and help in the final section, such as the entrance to the building or the nearby parking lot. Google’s bet on Gemini. The technology that makes Ask Maps possible is part of a much broader strategy within Google. Gemini is the company’s family of artificial intelligence models, designed to work with different types of data, such as text, images, audio, video and code. Google is progressively deploying it in several of its products, from the Gemini chatbot to tools within Google Workspace or the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Prowhere it acts as the default assistant. Integrating these capabilities into Maps fits with that movement: bringing generative AI to services that are already part of the daily lives of millions of users. Google Maps evolves. When it launched more than two decades ago, the idea was relatively simple: offer an easier way to get between two points. Over time, however, the product has expanded its reach with new features and sources of information. Google introduced real-time traffic a few years after the launch, Street View in 2007 and turn-by-turn navigation in 2009. Added to this were tools such as offline maps or the ability to consult hours, ratings and prices of millions of businesses. This entire data ecosystem is what now allows functions like Ask Maps to interpret more complex questions about places and plans. When will it be available. As is usually the case with this type of function, the rollout will be progressive and will not reach all markets from day one. Google has announced that Ask Maps is now rolling out in the United States and India, available on both Android and iPhone devices. The company has also announced that the experience will come to the desktop later, although for now it has not specified when it will expand to other countries. In parallel, Immersive Navigation begins to be deployed in the United States and will be extended in the coming months to compatible iOS and Android devices, in addition to CarPlay, Android Auto and cars that incorporate Google built-in. We will have to wait to know exactly when it will land in Spain. Images | Google In Xataka | At Amazon they have realized something: their developers spend more time fixing AI bugs than anything else

Getting married in Switzerland was equivalent to paying more taxes than a single person. And a referendum has put an end to the problem

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In Switzerland, marriages they are news. And not because of its rise or fall, demographic issues or new trends when celebrating them. They are for strictly tax reasons. In a historic decision the Swiss have supported majority (with 54% support) a reform that will basically put an end to what is called the “marriage penalty” in the country. In other words, saying ‘I do’ in Switzerland will no longer be (in most cases) a sentence to paying more when declaring income to the Treasury. The decision has come preceded by an intense debate, which gives a clue that the issue does not only have fiscal implications. The background is social, cultural and historical. What has happened? That after years of debate Switzerland has given the ‘green light’ to a key tax change for marriages. Couples in the country who formalize their relationship will stop paying taxes jointly, through a single tax return in which the sum of their income and assets is taken into account. From now on, each spouse will be taxed individually. Just as if he hadn’t gone through the altar. The measure has received the endorsement of 54% of voters during a referendum in which they have discussed more topicsbut it does not mean that it will be activated immediately. The idea is that it be adopted gradually, over the next five years. The cantons have margin until 2032. Is it so important? Yes. In fact in Switzerland (and other countries who have paid attention to the fiscal change) there is no talk of joint or individual taxation, but of something much more forceful: the end of the “marriage penalty”. Because? Because according to its promoters, the current Swiss tax regime punishes those marriages in which both spouses work and enjoy good salaries. In these cases, with the current system, couples are forced to bear greater burdens than they would face if they remained single. That is, the same couple can find themselves in one or another tax bracket (more or less beneficial) depending only on whether they have formalized their relationship. Why’s that? Basically because the Swiss system is a few decades old and is based on a traditional family model in which each household has a single base salary. If the family receives more income (a second payroll) they are usually taxed at a higher marginal rate. “The joint model came from a time when women’s income was considered a ‘complement’ to that of their husbands,” clarify Swiss Info. With the new system, that changes. Does it influence that much? What we have seen so far may sound abstract or too theoretical, but its scope is better understood with practical examples. In January Swiss Info carried out a simulation for different profiles of households with one or another tax system and found that the ‘photo’ changes quite a bit. The summary is very simple: new tax model It mainly benefits marriages in which both spouses earn the same or similar amounts and harms (forcing them to face a greater tax burden) those in which there is a greater imbalance of income between the members of the couple. A practical example. Let’s take the case of a couple in which both members earn the same: 100,000 francs. With the joint model that has been operating in Switzerland for years, its tax burden would be about 6,700 francs. With the new individual taxation system it would drop to 2,700. Things change in couples in which there is only one salary. In these cases (with the same level of income) individual taxation will mean an increase of 32% compared to joint taxation. What is the change looking for? Its promoters assure that the new model will solve a problem that has been dragging down the Swiss economy for some time: a tax system that discourages paid work for those people who provide a second income to their homes. When changing the legal framework, remember Financial Timesthe Swiss government hopes to increase the nation’s workforce by about 60,000 people and increase the national GDP by about 1%. Advocates of the change hope it will help women gain strength in the Swiss labor market. It is estimated that only 60% of Swiss women work full time, a percentage lower than the OECD average, which is around 78%. The “marriage penalty” has also led to some curious practicessuch as couples who marry without legally registering their union or even marriages that they divorce before retiring for tax reasons. Are they all advantages? Not at all. At least that is what the sectors most critical of the measure maintain, warning of several negative effects. The main one, that the new system will result in more bureaucracyincreasing the workload (and costs) of the administration. There are cantons that also fear that the change of model will affect their coffers, punishing them with a loss of income. Beyond the practical issues there is another ideological one: part of the critical sector warns that individual supervision will generate inequalities that will harm traditional families above all. According to the Government, the new framework will more or less half of the taxpayers see their tax burden reduced. 36% would not notice changes and only the remaining 14% will have to pay more taxes. Images | Leonardo Miranda (Unsplash), Ronnie Schmutz (Unsplash) and Leo_Visions (Unsplash) In Xataka | 40,000 euros to say “yes, I want”: weddings in Spain have become events and their price is skyrocketing

The MacBook Neo is everything Microsoft dreamed of with the disastrous Windows 8

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It was 2012 and Windows 8 He defied all canons. The mouse and keyboard were no longer enough: Microsoft wanted let’s touch the computerthat we handle it like an iPhone. That ambition led to the birth of one of the operating systems most original and brave in history. And also one of the most hated. Its greatest architect, Steven Sinofskyhas compared that launch almost 15 years ago with that of MacBook Neo which has just occurred and has left a clear message: with Windows 8 Microsoft was right. The only problem is that they arrived too soon. The Mac Neo is a “paradigm shift”. In its ‘Hardcore Software’ newsletter, Sinosky counted how he had bought one of the new MacBook Neo in “citrus” color with 512 GB of storage and “it completely blew my mind. It is a computer that changes the paradigm.” Their impressions coincide with other independent reviews: the performance of this device is indistinguishable from that of a conventional MacBook Air in everyday tasks. And that despite use a phone chip and not a “pure” laptop one. Windows 8 nostalgia. The use of the Neo has generated a feeling of melancholy and sadness in Sinosky when remembering his time at Microsoft. This Apple product is in fact the culmination of a concept that he tried to push more than a decade ago. At Microsoft they believed that a Windows laptop with an ARM processor made sense, and Sinofsky led that vision that led to the launch of Windows 8 and later Windows RT and the Surface RT. we were right. The MacBook Neo is for this former Microsoft executive the demonstration that he and his company were right when they tried to launch that product. According to him Windows on ARM and the Original Surface from 2012 They were not a technical error: that computer had an NVIDIA Tegra chip, 2 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage, and “it had no problems running Office or browsing.” In his opinion, the hardware and software were not green – a very debatable point – and the failure was something else. People don’t like changes. Sinofsky explains that the mistake was trying to move the ecosystem to a new application model too quickly. “People wanted the old Windows application model,” but there was no way at the time to make it more efficient or secure, “it was designed for another era.” Microsoft certainly had the problem that its installed base was mostly conservative users: proposing a change as big as that, jump to an ARM architecture for goodit was unviable. Apple knew how to transition. Apple’s triumph with its ARM chips was due to the fact that its transition process has lasted almost two decades. During that time the company has been eliminating old code and obsolete APIs, allowing a smooth transition to its own Apple Silicon chips. Being early is not being wrong. Sinofksy also highlights how often being first on an idea—as was the case with Windows 8 or the Surface ARM—is often mistaken for being wrong, when in fact the problem was the execution of the ecosystem transition and not the concept itself. Reasonable sacrifices. Although there are clear hardware limitations (fewer ports, slightly different screen, smaller trackpad), they are irrelevant compared to the efficiency and portability of the device. The MacBook Neo is the definitive Chromebook. Apple’s affordable equipment is for this manager a “better Chromebook” focused on productivity, which is just the rescue plan he proposed for Windows RT after his departure from Microsoft in 2012. His vision, he argues, was the right one: the transition to ultra-efficient ARM devices was the inevitable future of personal computing. Yes, but. Sinofsky’s arguments are powerful, but also debatable. To begin with, Windows 8 and RT were designed to be much more “touchable”, but the touch interface has never gone beyond being an accessory in convertibles with Windows. Apple has in fact not touched the MacBook Neo operating system and has moved away from the idea of ​​the iPad converted to laptop. This is a MacBook with a cell phone chip, yes, but with a desktop operating system designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse. Without further ado. The condemnation legacy. There is another element that made it almost impossible for Windows RT to succeed: Microsoft had been feeding a monster called Windows on x86 architectures for a quarter of a century. End users could certainly have assumed an architectural change, but things were much more complicated in companies, where Windows adoption was massive. And of course, there are the apps. Applications that ran well on x86 ran poorly or not at all on Windows RT with ARM chips. Although Microsoft tried to address that problem —keep doing it with the “standard” of PC Copilot+—, he never completely succeeded and the public perception was clear: I don’t trust that the app I use on my x86 PC works well on an ARM PC. Apple overcame that obstacle with its Rosetta emulation layer (an invisible bridge) and the support of users and developers, but for them it was clearly simpler: they did not have the burden of millions of computers running legacy applications in offices and servers. Microsoft attempted a radical “clean slate” that left users without their long-standing programs. The Copilot+ PCs promised something like this. Microsoft actually wanted to resurrect the concept recently. The launch of the Copilot+ PCs relied heavily on ARM chips such as those manufactured by Qualcomm. The promise was that we would have cheap laptops, with enormous autonomy and that also no longer had compatibility problems with the software. The reality? The prices are basically the same as those of Intel/AMD equivalents, and although there are improvements in autonomy, the perception is that there is nothing particularly differential in this bet by Microsoft and some manufacturers. This is an opportunity. But all is not lost. Microsoft and manufacturers have in the MacBook Neo a demonstration that the concept … Read more

Before, stars were born in movies and ended up on Netflix. Now they are born in streaming and end in movies

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‘War Machine’, the war science fiction film starring Alan Ritchson, has accumulated 39.3 million views in its first three days on Netflixbecoming the most viewed title on the platform globally today. The second most viewed film that week was ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’, by a huge margin: 6.7 million. The result is also a symptom of how the star factory has changed: the new star system is born on the platforms, not in the multiplexes. Other figures. The opening of ‘War Machine’ is the second best placed of the year on Netflix to date. If it keeps up the pace, it could aspire to enter the platform’s all-time Top 10 in the English-language film category. To gauge the magnitude: in all 87 countries tracked during that four-day windowthe film ranked number one in 80 of them. What is it about? The film is not especially original in its premise, and its authors do not intend it to be. Directed by Patrick Hughes (from the weak ‘The Expendables 3’ and the fun ‘The Other Bodyguard’) and produced by Lionsgate, it follows a group of candidates for the American Rangers during the final selection phase. Their training maneuver becomes a fight for survival when a robotic threat of alien origin appears. Alan Ritchson plays the character known only as 81, a traumatized combat engineer, even more silent and introverted than his famous Jack Reacher. Although all the critics have stressed its derivative and unpretentious nature, the truth is that its two-hour chase structure finds an enjoyable middle ground between ‘Predator’ and Heinlein’s Space Troops (not Verhoeven, there is no irony here, as seen in an ending with will continue that replies, without venom, the recruitment spots of that masterpiece 1997). ‘War Machine’ embraces its spirit of an effective and direct B series with a healthy brainlessness that makes perfect sense that it has found a millionaire audience, eager to disconnect and let themselves be dazed. The star. It has taken Alan Ritchson almost two decades to become a star. He debuted in ‘Smallville’ as Aquaman and then went unnoticed through multiple series as a secondary character until in 2022 he played the protagonist of ‘Reacher’ on Prime Video. The series, which championed the return of the television “for parents” (of which ‘War Machine’ is also an excellent example), is one of the biggest hits on the Amazon platform, and is already preparing its fourth season. In just a few weeks, Ritchson has managed to position himself as the number one actor simultaneously on Netflix and Prime Video with different projects. The distinction that for years existed between the star of streaming and the one that can sell a blockbuster in theaters with its mere presence is blurring. It is not the only case. Although the case of Ritchson, exclusive streaming star, is particular due to his almost total absence of films in his filmography, there are many other cases of proper names who owe a good part of their fame to the platforms. Pedro Pascal is now a global star whose fame was born entirely in hits for streaming (‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Narcos’, ‘The Last of Us’, ‘The Mandalorian’). Henry Cavill or Chris Hemsworth were born as movie stars, but they consolidated (‘The Witcher’, ‘Tyler Rake’) their fame in streaming. Dave Bautista or John Cena is also finding a second home in streaming thanks to hits like ‘Trap House’ or ‘El Pacificador’. Unmistakable signs of the change of times. Stars germinate in different places, but they generate hits with figures that rival the biggest blockbusters on the big screen. In Xataka | When medical dramas seemed to be in the doldrums, ‘The Pitt’ appeared. And that has forced Netflix to make decisions

There is something that worries us even more

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Ban-Seng Teh, Seagate’s commercial director, has put on the table in statements that SCMP has been published What are we facing if we stick to the current memory crisis: “It is difficult to know if it will last forever (…) The current cycle is very unusual because in the past we went through cycles of shortages and excess supply.” As we have explained to you in other articlesthe sharp rise in the price of memory chips is due to the very high demand for this class of semiconductors from data centers for artificial intelligence (AI). Nothing seems to indicate that this demand is going to relax in the medium term, so it seems reasonable to assume that the cost of memory will most likely not reduce as soon as users would like. However, a very important idea emerges from Ban-Seng Teh’s statements that are worth not overlooking: the expansion of data centers for AI has the capacity to cause increases in the price of memory and storage chips to be more frequent and structural. In this context they would stop responding to temporary market cycles. “The new semiconductor cycle” is approaching Historically, the market for DRAM memories and NAND storage chips has behaved like a real roller coaster. In periods of high demand, prices rose and factories were forced to produce more. Some time later there was usually an excess supply that caused prices to plummet and manufacturers decided to moderate their production capacity. This cycle of successive growth and decline has described market behavior for decades, but AI has the ability to end this pattern once and for all. Several Chinese companies are investing aggressively to create HBM supply chains independent of Western influence. And it requires a type of memory, known as HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), which currently only three companies produce on the entire planet: the South Korean Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and the American Micron Technology. Several Chinese companies, such as CXMT (Changxin Memory Technologies), are investing very aggressively to create HBM memory supply chains independent of Western influencebut for now these chips are only in the hands of the three companies that I mentioned a few lines above. An interesting note: CXMT hopes to launch its first HBM3E chips in 2027. The outlook for AI hardware manufacturers is desperate. So much, in fact, that NVIDIA has publicly asked HBM memory producers to build more factories, assuring them that it will buy all the production they are capable of generating. At this juncture SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron they have decided to sacrifice a part of its conventional DRAM memory production capacity with the purpose of dedicating more resources to the manufacture of HBM chips for AI. Presumably the demand for these latest integrated circuits will be persistent and massive, so the market will hardly reach saturation stocks that has cyclically occurred in the field of DRAM memories. And the main consequence of this behavior will be that prices will be consistently high. Image | Generated by Xataka with ChatGPT More information | SCMP In Xataka | While the US tries to stop it at any price, the Chinese industry exports more chips than ever: it has AI in its favor

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