Serious About Tech

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Snapdragon 855 and 8cx, should 5G matter to you, and what to expect at CES 2019 – Episode 14

Serious About Tech podcast episode 14 collage

Snapdragon 855 and 8cx

Qualcomm announced the Snapgradon 855 and Snapdragon 8cx in early December at their annual Tech Summit in Maui, Hawaii. The 855 is a smartphone processor and the 8cx is a new chip for laptops running Windows or ChromeOS. Qualcomm has the 835 and 850 being used in Windows ultrabooks to provide long battery life and always-on connectivity with 4G LTE built-in. The 8cx promises to bring levels of performance that rival lower-end Intel processors.

5G

5G smartphones and hotspots have been announced and some are even released. But 5G coverage is not good yet, and will probably spread slowly. The speeds are not up to snuff with even the maximum throughput of 4G LTE. Because you, like many consumers, will not be able to use 5G phones for a while, you should not spend a lot of extra money to purchase a 5G-capable phone whose abilities you will not be able to use for several more years.

CES 2019 Preview

CES is next week, and we expect a lot of cool gadgets, smartphones, TVs, and more to be announced.

8K televisions are rumored to be shown at CES by manufacturers such as Samsung and LG Display. Do we really need 8K TVs? Not if we don’t have 8K content or the internet connection to stream 8K (or even 4K) content.

Apple stock

Tim Cook sent out a letter to Apple’s stockholders informing them that the revenue Apple had been expecting for the first quarter of 2019 has fallen from $84-90 billion to $83 billion.

This could signal that Apple’s consumers don’t upgrade as often as they used to, thus reducing Apple’s sales.

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