Wednesday’s top tech news: Sony’s Afeela EV and Amazon is laying off 18,000

AMD has announced its new Ryzen 7000 mobile CPUs for laptops. The list is a real who’s who of mobile processor architecture, including Zen 4, Zen 3 Plus, Zen 3, and Zen 2 chips.

The potential star of the show is the “Dragon Range” Zen 4 Ryzen 9 7945HX, which has 16 cores and 32 threads, frequencies of 2.2-5.4 Ghz, 80MB cache, and 55-75 watt TDP. I repeat — 16 cores in a laptop. These aren’t Intel’s little efficiency cores. These are 16 full Zen cores in a laptop’s chassis.

Asus is releasing a new Xbox PC controller later this year that has a built-in OLED display and a host of connectivity options for PC. The ROG Raikiri Pro has a tiny 1.3-inch OLED display above the Xbox button that will display custom animations, battery or microphone status, and more.

The OLED display (128 x 40 resolution) will largely be used for swapping profiles during games, or for checking charging or mic status, Bluetooth pairing, and running text or animated wallpapers. The custom animations remind me a lot of the OLED display that replaced the Xbox “jewel” on the revamped Duke controller in 2018, or the classic Sega Dreamcast controller.

Sony and Honda’s joint mobility venture unveiled a new EV prototype called Afeela during Sony’s presentation at CES in Las Vegas Wednesday. The brand will appear on the joint venture’s first production electric car, set to go on sale in North America in 2026.

Much is still unknown about the new brand, but Sony Honda Mobility CEO Yasuhide Mizuno said the car would leverage Sony’s experience with AI, entertainment, virtual reality, and augmented reality to present a unique EV.

Amazon’s ongoing layoffs will affect around 18,000 workers, according to a memo from CEO Andy Jassy, which says that the “majority” of the roles being eliminated will be in Amazon Stores and People, Experience, and Technology organizations.

That’s significantly more than previously rumored — in November, The New York Times reported that the company was aiming to cut its workforce by around 10,000. In September 2022, the company said it had around 1.5 million employees in total.

I don’t know if Schneider Electric will be the one to crack it, but I like what it’s promising here at CES 2023 — a smart home where the electrical circuits themselves are smart enough to keep your house powered, save on your energy bill, manage solar, and charge electric vehicles, all through a single app.

Schneider Electric isn’t a household name, but there’s a good chance you’ve got one of its Square D circuit breakers in your home — the company says four in 10 US households already do. Today, it’s announcing an ecosystem of gadgets that won’t be hidden inside your walls, including:

For years, the HP Elite Dragonfly has been one of the most sleek, luxurious, and exorbitantly expensive business laptops you can buy. The new Dragonfly Pro is HP’s attempt to market those models to a broader, consumer-focused, and more price-conscious audience. There’s a Windows-based Dragonfly Pro, and there’s a Dragonfly Pro Chromebook, and while we don’t know the pricing yet, the hope is that they will be cheaper than their business counterparts.

I spent a few minutes with the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook and the Dragonfly Pro, and they seem nice. They’re well-built and pretty-looking (and I’d be shocked if they weren’t, coming from HP). They come in black and white options. But the first thing you’ll probably notice is that the Chromebook has an RGB keyboard.

TCL’s displays are in TVs, smartphones, and maybe in the near future, the metaverse, too. At least, the company wants to make the screen that gets you there. At CES 2023, the company is announcing its latest experiments with wearable displays, including a VR headset and mixed reality glasses. Plus, its personal display glasses, which have only been available in limited markets, are now heading for the US. It’s kind of a “cover-all-your-bases” strategy for whatever the future of display technology looks like.

The company’s NXTWear S glasses are the latest version of its wearable display — kind of like a TV contained in a pair of (sort of) ordinary-looking glasses. They aren’t AR or VR glasses; they plug into a device like your phone or laptop and mirror content onto what looks like a massive 130-inch screen.

TCL is overhauling its TV strategy for 2023 by ditching the company’s long-running 6-Series, 5-Series, and 4-Series branding in favor of two new lines: higher-end sets will be part of the Q-Series, while more value-focused TVs will fall under the S-Series. Within the two segments are six different models in all.

Let’s cover the best first, shall we? With its flagship QM8, TCL is promising double the peak brightness of its best Mini LED TVs from 2022 — and those were already fairly impressive in their own right. Set to come in screen sizes between 65 inches and 98 inches, the largest QM8 packs in more than 2,300 dimming zones. TCL claims that’s the most of any 4K Mini LED TV on the market — and even more than 8K models. The QM8 features Wi-Fi 6 and has a built-in subwoofer for powerful audio. The design has been refreshed with a “bezel-less” design and height-adjustable stand.

For some companies that sell gaming and creator-oriented laptops, glasses-free 3D has become a bit of a dream. Acer first tried it back in 2021. Its SpatialLabs technology, which uses a combination of a stereo camera, optical lens, and real-time rendering technology to create decently realistic 3D images, has since made its way to a number of laptops, including the Predator Helios 300 gaming rig.

This year, it’s Asus’ turn. The company has announced Spatial Vision, a “glasses-free (autostereoscopic) 3D OLED technology.” The screens are 3D, 3.2K, OLED, and 120Hz. In a similar manner to Acer’s tech, machines that support Spatial Vision will use a combination of a lenticular lens and advanced eye-tracking camera technology. They render separate images for each eye and follow the position of your head and eyes to adjust them accordingly.

There are a number of 14-inch gaming laptops floating around, but the most notable one by far is Asus’s ROG Zephyrus G14. It’s a powerhouse and an easy recommendation to anyone seeking a portable device that can really game.

But this year, MSI has decided to throw its hat in the ring. It’s just announced the new Stealth 14 Studio, which it’s boldly claiming is “the most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop.” That is a tough title to live up to, considering that the G14... exists (not to mention Razer’s Blade 14, which is also a strong, and sometimes even stronger, performer).

There’s something wrong with the seemingly hundreds of laptops that have been birthed so far during CES 2023: almost none of them are translucent. Using a see-through design is proven [no citations found] to make more people want to buy a product because, for one, it looks cool, and two, the company must be pretty confident in its engineering handiwork to want to show it off like that.

The thing is, if a company uses translucent plastic on your gadget, it’s got to go for it 100 percent or go home. And that’s where MSI goes wrong.

Vimeo is doing another round of layoffs, this time affecting 11 percent of the company, CEO Anjali Sud announced in a letter posted online.

Citing “a further deterioration in economic conditions,” Sud told Vimeo staff that nearly every department and region of the company will see cuts. The majority of layoffs will occur in large departments like sales and research and development.

The purpose of Eve’s MotionBlinds Upgrade Kit for Roller Blinds is apparent right from the name: it’s a device meant to make your regular old shades smart by adding a motor and a way to talk to your existing smart home setup. That means you’ll be able to add automations that close or open your blinds when doing so can save you energy or just ask your phone or voice assistant to let some light in without having to shell out for an entirely new window covering.

The company says that the device can be “easily installed without any wiring or technical know-how,” though you’ll have to charge it via its built-in USB-C port. The battery should last “up to a year with regular use,” according to Daniel Turk, a publicist working with Eve, and the kit includes several adapters, which the company says will allow it to “fit into a wide range of roller blind tubes.”

Samsung is starting off 2023 with a budget phone refresh, making some smart upgrades with the Galaxy A14 5G — at least on paper. The A14 will cost $199, which is $50 lower than the A13 5G’s list price. Compared to its predecessor, it comes with a higher-res display and selfie cam while leaving many other core specs alone. Samsung will also offer up to four years of security updates and two OS version upgrades, which is a significant step up from the two or three years of security updates that are much more common at this price.

The A14 5G has a MediaTek 700 chipset and 4GB of RAM, just like the A13. That’s fine — the A13 delivered good performance with that combination, so Samsung isn’t trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. There’s still only 64GB of storage, but as before, microSD expansion is an option. The screen is a little bigger at 6.6 inches, and resolution has been boosted from 720p to 1080p. It’s still a 90Hz screen, which makes scrolling a little smoother than the standard 60Hz, but the extra pixels on such a big display should be the real difference-maker.