Tech Advisor January 2022

Users of Microsoft’s first-party cloud storage are going to get a less-than-gentle nudge to upgrade to a newer operating system early 2022. According to a post on its tech support forum, Microsoft will be ending support for the OneDrive desktop app on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 starting on 1 March, 2022. Users who want to preserve the backup and sync functionality will need to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11. OneDrive won’t become completely useless for those on older operating systems: the files themselves aren’t going anywhere, and the OneDrive system (and updated, synced contents) can still be accessed via Microsoft accounts on the web. OneDrive apps for iOS and Android are unaffected. It should be noted that, since this is a rather arbitrary end of service, Microsoft…

The ongoing chip shortage is causing low stock and high prices for everything from computers to cars and games consoles. And unfortunately, it isn’t going away anytime soon. Speaking to shareholders to announce Intel’s third‑quarter financial earnings, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said that he doesn’t expect the shortage to end until 2023 – at the earliest. “We’re in the worst of it now, every quarter next year we’ll get incrementally better, but they’re not going to have supply-demand balance until 2023,” Gelsinger told CNBC. Intel recently said that the chip shortages are dragging down laptop sales, and warned that it might be hard to find juicy PC deals this holiday season. The other titans of the chip trade agree, to one degree or another. In a similar earnings call in August, Nvidia…

Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger has said that he expects Intel to maintain or even supersede Moore’s Law for the next decade, revving up the pace of Intel’s manufacturing, despite having slowed down just a few years ago. Gelsinger also said he believes the progress of manufacturing innovation will be unique to Intel, and that rivals will be unable to keep up. It’s no secret that while silicon manufacturing has been the foundation of much of Intel’s success for generations, there’s been a fundamental limitation: Moore’s Law, which has proven to be surprisingly prescient in determining how quickly chips can be made more powerful. Historically, the ‘law’ (really an axiom) has been that transistor density doubles over a fixed period, usually 18 months to two years. That, in turn, governs how…

Intel opened its recent Intel Innovation conference by unveiling what everyone has been waiting for: how fast its new 12th-gen ‘Alder Lake’ desktop Core chips will be, and how much they’ll cost. The flagship, the Core i9-12900K, will be the “world’s best gaming processor”, Intel executives said; it will be priced around £50 higher than the last-gen Core i9-11900K at launch, too. Perhaps not surprisingly, there won’t be that much variety to Intel’s first ‘performance hybrid’ processors: just six new chips, which won’t even include a Core i3 processor. By contrast, Intel launched 19 new 11th-gen ‘Rocket Lake-S’ processors back in March, which will conceivably fill any gaps in Intel’s 12th-gen portfolio. (At the Intel Innovation event, Gregory Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, said that…

A new dawn has arrived for Google’s own-brand Pixel phones and with the 2021 models receiving a design and hardware overhaul, they aim to be the firm’s most exciting flagships to date. The regular Pixel 6 on test here is on sale now and starts at a more than reasonable £599, arriving with new cameras, Android 12 and Google’s own Tensor processor. There’s a lot of good stuff that’s gone into this phone, but the design is more divisive than any other Pixel and may well result in many fans going elsewhere. DESIGN Gone, it seems, are the days of the standard Pixel being one of the most compact and easy-to-handle phones on the market. There’s no two ways about it, the Pixel 6 is chunky and this is despite being the smaller…

After the initial hype surrounding Google’s answer to the iPhone – with the debut of the original Pixel, back in 2016 – subsequent releases, although competent, have failed to capture the attention of mainstream smartphone buyers and remain reserved for the tech-savvy Android fans already aware of the Pixel line’s particular strengths and standout selling points. This year, however, Google is hoping to shake things up, with the latest and greatest entry in the Pixel lineage – the Pixel 6 Pro – sporting a feature set specifically engineered to position it as a direct competitor to the Pro Maxes and Ultras that occupy the top end of the smartphone market, all the while maintaining an approach that’s distinctly ‘Google’. The ‘Pro’ suffix may already be commonplace in the smartphone space but this…