Content
- A banal thought about health
- We tear off the covers from insidious phones
- Apple performs better than the market
- Lenovo firmly holds the first place in the PC market
- Have you booked online?
- Moore’s Law => Huang’s Law
A banal thought about health
I want to start with a banal advice: go to the doctors for preventive examinations. The advice has nothing to do with the topic of the site, but maybe it will motivate someone to do something.
Once he regularly visited an ophthalmologist, but for 12 years he made laser vision correction, after which the visits came to naught. I tested my visual acuity using the barbaric method: sitting in the subway, on the opposite side of the carriage, read the numbers on a white sticker in the upper right corner of any advertising poster. My eyesight was corrected, but, unfortunately, my eyes remained exactly the same (with myopia, the size of the eyeball is increased). In short, I relatively accidentally visited a doctor I knew, who, after looking at the fundus, busily informed me that the other day there will be a hole in my retina and I urgently need to solder it with a laser, otherwise then only a full-fledged operation will come. And if not treated, then “total blindness.” I was lucky that in general the operation was simple, fast, everything was familiar, therefore, relatively speaking, I came the next day at lunchtime, and everything was corrected for me. The moral of the story is that I didn’t have any problems, any pain in my eyes or distortions of vision. It’s just that one day the eyes would stop working as they should.
PS I know that many people are interested in laser correction, and immediately the answer to a typical question. There was myopia in one eye -3, the other -3.75 + astigmatism, the output was not one, but 0.95 (they said that this was my maximum). After 12 years, there is no deterioration.
We tear off the covers from insidious phones
By chance I read a New York Times article dated October 13, 1877, exposing the nefarious nature of the telephone. If you speak English, then read the material. Have fun.
It turns out that telephones were invented so that the police could spy on people in the worst possible way. Imagine that cities already have electric lighting. Lighting poles are placed everywhere, to which cunning policemen bring not only electric wires, but also telephone cables. Thus, all the words spoken around the lamppost are transmitted directly to the police department, where a special person sits and listens to everything! Along the way, the story of two friends is given, stretching a cable 4 miles long over the rooftops to talk to each other. Imagine their surprise when they were able to listen to what people living in houses under the cable were talking about. In this way they have heard thousands of secrets!
Still, it’s nice that times are changing, but people’s concern for the safety of their privacy remains unchanged. Previously, they cut telephone wires and broke lampposts, now they destroy 5G towers.
Apple performs better than the market
The smartphone market is expected to shrink by 2020% by the end of 10. Interestingly, Apple sold better than the market in every quarter. And releasing the iPhone SE at a low price (low by the standards of Apple’s portfolio) helped the company survive its toughest months of quarantine.
Statistics say that at the moment the whole market has fallen by 23% in pieces (15% in money), the premium segment (which is traditionally less sensitive to such things) has decreased by 8%. Apple took 34% of the global market in revenue, as well as 59% of all profits.
Average price of a smartphone by region
Market share in revenue
Apple’s strategic genius remains beyond praise. It’s bad that the company is so dependent on the iPhone, but it’s good that it knows how to sell it so successfully. Apple is very accurate in bringing products to market. Just when they are most appropriate. I have already developed this idea on the example of Apple Watch with a blood oxygen measurement sensor. Previously, no one needed a sensor (which has been available from other manufacturers for a long time). The coronavirus sparked interest in the indicator, and Apple has clearly launched the product to market.
Exactly for the same reason, this time the company brings 4 smartphones to the market at once. There is significant pent-up demand for 5G iPhones among iOS users, according to research companies. Many have been waiting for a couple of years, postponing the purchase. This demand is especially high in the Chinese market, which, by the way, now accounts for 72% of sales of all 5G smartphones. Accordingly, given the difficult economic situation, Apple needs to be given the widest possible range of devices, because, despite the fact that most people do not need 5G, right now (not a year ago, not at the beginning of the year, but at the end of 2020) 5G is becoming one of the main premium features.
Lenovo firmly holds the first place in the PC market
2020 has been a blessed year for PC makers. Everyone was locked up at home, and everyone urgently needed good equipment. There was a real shortage in many markets.
Apple and Acer were the most successful at this holiday sales, and Lenovo fully established itself as the market leader. I wonder how Dell explains the stagnation in sales. I can assume that the company is experiencing a shortage of components. Unlike HP, whose managers, anticipating the pandemic, made a large purchase before the quarantine, Dell did not make any sudden moves. Here is the result.
Have you booked online?
It seems that the European part of Russia was lucky with the fall. Not without rain, but many clear, fine days. Wonderful went to Vladimir with Suzdal, and spent almost the entire last week in St. Petersburg and Vyborg.
What impressed me most was how quickly everyone went over and got used to booking online. In Vyborg, there is an active restoration of everything and everyone, but the historical center of the city still looks like after a bombing. However, even in Vyborg, it seems that all the sights have switched to online booking. Someone on the site has a well-thought-out solution, someone has QR codes, someone has trivially connected TimePad. I was impressed that both the visitors (of all ages) and the grandmothers-caretakers resignedly use the online appointment. Without gasps-sighs, he held out his smartphone, read the code, named the reservation, went on. No deep thoughts, just fixing the situation provoked by history, when an extremely ancient dandelion grandmother reproached me for why I did not buy a ticket online, because it is so convenient, easy and generally I need to be more modern!
Subject to all safety measures, I recommend that everyone, before it’s too late, take a ride into nature.
Moore’s Law => Huang’s Law
At the GTC presentation in spring 2018, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that Moore’s Law no longer works. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that processor performance would double every two years. The principle worked for a long time, but now, when transistors on chipsets tend to the size of individual atoms, Moore’s law has stalled. Instead, Mr. Huang proposed a new theory based on the example of Nvidia video cards, saying that their performance has increased 5 times in 25 years. The media immediately dubbed the new concept Huang’s Law.
According to Nvidia itself, since 2012 the performance of Nvidia solutions has increased 317 times, so it turns out that the performance doubles every year. And if behind Moore’s law there was an increase in the number of transistors, then behind Huang’s law is artificial intelligence, which, relatively speaking, with less and less input data, it turns out to complete a complete picture (and it’s not just about graphics).
Thus, we are now in a transitional period, when the main task of video cards is gradually shifting from processing graphics or games to any other tasks in which artificial intelligence is involved – observation and face recognition systems, autonomous transport and traffic forecasting, processing big data, etc. etc.
At this year’s GTC last week, Mr. Huang shared his vision for the future, humans live in the Metaverse.
The metaverse is a collective virtual space where people are represented by their avatars. Have you watched Ready Player One? The gentleman rightly noted that games such as Minecraft, where huge virtual spaces are created, used not only for games, are the prototype of the metaverse. For example, Minecraft has a virtual library created by Reporters Without Borders, which contains texts that have not been censored.
Virtual library building
Mr. Huang is confident that future virtual spaces will be photorealistic and subject to the laws of physics, that is, they will become a virtual copy of the real world. Against the backdrop of a pandemic, when a dangerous disease can lock people in their homes, such ideas do not seem like fantasy. In general, Mr. Huang spoke about this within the framework of the story about the Omniverse. It is an open source platform from Nvidia for real-world development and simulation. Relatively speaking, this is such an environment for artificial intelligence, where it can train. For example, one AI can train, believing that it controls manipulators to assemble other robots or cars, which, in turn, can roll around the Omniverse, avoiding obstacles, gaining experience, and then use skills in the physical world.
Speaking about AI, one cannot fail to mention the second component of our wonderful future, where people live in virtual reality, and artificial intelligence writes software. As an example, Mr. Huang gave a slide showing the ever-increasing capabilities of AI, which, so to speak, are now doubling every couple of months. And, for example, already now, AI can read and understand texts 24% better than the average person. Interestingly, Nvidia is also working to make the AI sound more natural, and by the intonation of a person, the AI must guess how to respond correctly.
Such a curious moment that Nvidia has already learned and uses its artificial intelligence in areas such as medicine (drug creation), autonomous cars, robotics, recommendation systems, smart cities and virtual assistants. Here it should be understood that Nvidia creates B2B products, that is, it provides a platform on which it will already work, for example, Google Assistant or Alexa. Nvidia announced that now access to this platform will be in cloud services (and earlier it was necessary to independently download and deploy in the cloud from Nvidia’s website) Google, Amazon and Microsoft (that is, the leading “clouds” in the world).
But the stories about AI abilities lead me to think that in the near future humanity will face a powerful conditional midlife crisis, when it turns out that a machine does everything better than a person. AI is already better at playing chess or driving a car. But in both examples there are limitations: take the board away from the robot or give the road without marking, and then the person will do better. At the same time, people are left with such spheres as creativity in all forms, inspiration for the invention of something radically new, medicine, professions related to interpersonal communication, etc. There is room for self-realization (although for most, creative impulses are limited to posting on Instagram or social networks). But what to do in a world where machines will do everything better than humans?
Conclusion
Have a good week, wash your hands, watch your health. Read the Apple presentation overview. Enjoy your new iPhone.
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