Microsoft’s Xbox One Update to Bring Common Sense Back to the Console

The first thing I did with my Xbox One, after peeling off the plastic shrink-wrap and tying down the cables, was download a bunch of games. Most of my Xbox One games are disc-less because most of my press copies came as QR codes. So after loading the system up, I did what any responsible console owner might do and went poking around for a storage management option to see how much space I’d used and had left.

Imagine my surprise — and if you own an Xbox One, you know how the words to this tune go — when I discovered there is no storage management option (not even a view). You can add games and apps or remove them, but that’s it.

Here’s Microsoft’s position on the matter:

Xbox One monitors your available hard drive space. When it starts to fill up, a message appears warning you that you’re low on space. These messages are stored in Notifications. You can check to see if you have any unread messages by saying “Xbox, go to notifications” or by selecting the notifications icon at the top of Home screen.

If you don’t have any notifications, it means you have plenty of free space. If you are running low on space, try deleting unused or seldom-used content.

Like an invisible and silent descendent of Clippy, the Xbox One is supposed to anticipate your needs on the sly instead of letting you behind the curtain to pull the knobs and levers yourself. Fussing about free gigabytes or megabytes (much less “blocks,” as in Nintendo’s goofy, confusing, pointlessly once-removed approach to storage management) is apparently last-gen, or at least that’s what the decision-path flowcharts must have read in the design rooms at Microsoft when the Xbox One’s interface was still in the kiln.

I don’t have a survey to back this up, but anecdotal evidence suggests this hasn’t been a popular feature. I’m pretty sure that gamers, especially the sort of early adopters buying PlayStation 4s and Xbox Ones right now, expect to participate in the content curation process. Taking that option away (or nerfing it) sends the message that you’re pandering to a kind of “least competent demographic” (that is, not the sort of buyer forking over $400 to $500 for one of these things).

Mark February 11 (next Tuesday) on your calendars, because that’s when all this thinking-on-your-behalf business goes away. Microsoft just unveiled the details of a major Xbox One update, including the option to roll up your sleeves and get at your content directly. What’s more, Microsoft says the following are just a few of the new features gracing the download:

• The ability to see and manage your storage space. With this update, you will find it easy to find how much space your content takes up and better manage your content. You can also control your install lineup and more easily manage your download queue. We’ve separated My Games and My Apps into separate lists, so you can easily create separate queues for both. Now you can pick the order in which you want your content to load and we’ve added a boot progress indicator so you can better track updates while they load.
• The battery power indicator is back! You can see it right on the home screen, so you can easily track how much battery life is left on your controller.
• And, you will be able to use your USB keyboard with your Xbox One.

Microsoft’s keeping the rest under wraps, writing:

These are just a few of the many updates we will be shipping on February 11. We’ll share more details on these and other upcoming features in the coming weeks. We have several surprises in store that we think you’ll love.

You have to give Microsoft credit for listening and acting. This isn’t Apple Knows Best, and it’s refreshing to see a company handing a modicum of control back over, instead of working to take more of it away.

Apple CEO Tim Cook Says iPhone Expansion Plans Include 50 More Carriers This Quarter

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained his views on topics ranging from smartphones to cash return to shareholders. To understand how Apple will make decisions in the future, it’s important to parse his words and thoughts. Briefly below we’ll look at the financial and the strategic comments made by the technology executive.
Strategic

As has been recently pointed out by ZDNet’s Ed Bott, Apple generates more than half its revenue from the iPhone line of smartphones. No other product group at Apple breaks the 20 percent mark.

Given that reality, Apple’s work to expand the carrier base that it can sell iPhones into is key for the company. According to Cook, Apple will pick up 50 new carriers globally this quarter alone. That’s nearly breakneck pace.

For the company, the Chinese market is a key growth opportunity. Apple is working with China Mobile to drive adoption of its iconic iOS smartphones in the country. Still, according to Cook, “even with adding China Mobile, we still only present our products to two-thirds of the subscribers in the world.”

Next, the PC. Cook claims that Apple is still investing heavily in its Mac line of PCs. Said the CEO: “we haven’t given up on the Mac. A lot of people are throwing in the towel right now on the PC. We’re still spending an enormous amount on really great talent and people on the Macs of the future. And we have some really cool things coming out there. Because we believe as people walk away from the PC, it becomes clear that the Mac is what you want if you want a PC.”

So post-PC? Perhaps not yet.
Financial

Apple is more than open to potential acquisition deals that top the billion-dollar mark, its CEO TIm Cook disclosed. While rival firms, such as Google, have been using extra cash to reel in firms for sums in the 10-figure range, Apple has sat out. Ironically, almost, given that it has the most cash of any technology firm.

Despite its lack of participation in this particular dance, Cook said that his firm has “zero” issue spending more than a billion dollars on a smaller company, provided that the deal is “in the best interest of Apple in the long-term.” With cash reserves north of the $100 billion mark, Apple could afford a grip of such deals.

Google recently purchased Nest for $3.2 billion. Lenovo recently picked up much of Motorola for $2.9 billion. Yahoo tossed more than $1 billion at Tumblr. Microsoft threw down north of $7 billion for Nokia’s hardware division, and Facebook tried to pick up Snapchat for several billion. Apple, the Journal notes, has never spent a billion or more on a single purchase.

Acquisitions aside, Cook also explained his views on how best to return cash to stakeholders in the company. It’s no small issue: Apple is so rich some investors want it to return more dollars, more quickly, to the distributed pool of owners of its stock. Apple’s dividend and share repurchase plans only started a few years ago and have returns in gross dollars more than most firms could dream of.

However, according to Google Finance, Apple’s dividend yield of 2.35 percent is lower than Microsoft’s 3.06 percent. To ask Apple to increase its cash return strategies is therefore not beyond the pale.

In the face of questions regarding a $50 billion distribution proposed by activist investor Carl Icahn, Cook was demure:

We think you want a cash-return program that’s flexible. We may see a huge company tomorrow that we want to acquire or something may happen in the stock market that’s unpredictable. You want to be able to adjust for the long-term interest of the shareholders, not for the short-term shareholder, not for the day trader.

As far as subtle jabs at gadflies go, that’s not a bad one.

Finally, is Apple’s growth slowing? Slightly, but that doesn’t mean the firm is no longer a growth firm in the view of its CEO: “So when you say $14 billion to $15 billion [in revenue growth] compared to those numbers, it’s clearly smaller and a smaller percentage, but, to put it in some context, that’s like adding three Fortune 500 companies in a year.”

Facebook Paper (for iPhone)

Facebook announced that it was about to release an iPhone app called Paper. The app is now available from Apple’s App Store. If you use Facebook on an iPhone, you really need to try it.

That’s because the app — unlike other Facebook mobile efforts such as Messenger and the failed Snapchat knockoff Poke — isn’t a specialized tool or a side project. It’s Facebook — almost all of it, anyhow — rethought for a small screen, with 2014 aesthetics.

By calling it Paper and leaving the original Facebook app untouched in the App Store, the company smartly avoids leaving users feeling like radical, jarring change is being imposed upon them. But it’s hard to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg & Co. don’t see the ideas in this app as a first rough draft of Facebook’s future, period.

(Side note: For now, at least, I’m going to err on the side of usually referring to this app as “Facebook Paper,” since a well-known and excellent iPad app already has the name “Paper.”)

Most of what you can do in the standard Facebook app for iPhone, you can do in Facebook Paper. There are some exceptions: I don’t see lists, apps or events, for instance. Whether you’re likely to want to use Paper full-time depends in part on whether you’re a heavy user of any of the missing items. (I’m not.) And what’s new basically boils down into two things: The interface and the sections of news organized by topic.

First, that new interface. It really does dispense with much of the stuff you associate with Facebook, including the company’s trademark blue trim and emphasis on lots and lots of vertical scrolling. Now everything’s cleaner, with a large content panel on the top, smaller horizontally-scrolling ones on the bottom, lots of big images and a profusion of fluid animation effects.

Overall, I like it very much, though I expect that not everybody will be fond of all the horizontal scrolling, which departs from the norm of smartphone interfaces. And the type in the small panels is pretty darn teensy: People with aging eyeballs may need to squint.

Besides the new look, Facebook Paper involves a bunch of gestures that may not be intuitive from the get-go. For instance, you swipe the large panel to the left or right at the top to move from section to section, and pull down on a story you’re reading to move back into the section it came from. Photos show up in oversized views you can pan back and forth by wiggling your phone to and fro.

Within five minutes, I’d figured everything out — where to find features, and how to navigate with flicks of my thumb. But it’s such a daring makeover that people who are largely comfy with Facebook as it already exists on the iPhone may find it a shock to the system.

(Side note: When you first launch the app and begin exploring it, a tutorial keeps butting in, with no way to shut it off. I assume that I’m not the only person who bristles at such things and therefore ignores them, rendering them ineffective. I’d much prefer more conventional help I could peruse at my leisure — which Facebook Paper doesn’t seem to have.)

Then there are those topic-based sections. You can add whichever ones appeal to you and order them as you please, then read them like a magazine. It gives Facebook Paper a bit of a Flipboard feel.

I count 19 sections in all, many of which have names that emphasize cleverness over clarity, as sections in dead-tree magazines often do. There’s a sports section called “Score” and a photo section called “Exposure,” for instance. One called “Pride” has the tagline “There’s strength in community” — you can probably guess the theme, but I’m curious why Facebook doesn’t just state it directly.

More than any form of Facebook I’ve seen in the past, these sections are less about your friends and other assorted individuals, and more about established experts. The content in each one is dominated by brand-name media: In Tech, for instance, I see items from Gizmodo, The Verge, Techmeme, TechCrunch, Cnet, 9to5Mac and others. But I also see some posts from Facebook users — well-known ones, at least, such as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, the New York Times’ Nick Bilton and Mashable’s Pete Cashmore. (Full disclosure: I saw plenty of TIME stories in sections such as Headlines and Ideas.)

As with the rest of Paper, sections have a big panel at the top and browsable smaller ones below. Even though the app still displays articles by giving you the same view you’d see if you simply visited the site where the item was published, it now shows them in a less cramped full-screen mode, which makes for easier reading. You can also save stories to read-later services such as Pocket, Instapaper and Safari’s Reading List.

As far as I can tell, everybody who chooses to browse a section gets exactly the same feed, chosen by human editors rather than a fancy algorithm that knows I like to read about smartwatches but don’t care much about graphics cards — but that I prefer desktops over watches. So the sections don’t feel all that Facebook-y, and I don’t think they present an immediate existential threat to existing ways to read news on an iPhone, such as Flipboard, Zite, Circa, News360, Inside and many, many others.

Still, these sections are a big deal. Facebook is figuring out how to organize itself by subject. It’s incorporating external content more elegantly than before. And it’s giving you a way to efficiently find out what’s new in the world, rather than expecting you to dive into your newsfeed and hoping that your friends point you in the right direction. It’s easy to envision how this modest first pass at the idea might evolve into something much more powerful.

And even though Facebook’s last ultra-ambitious idea — Facebook Home — turned out to be, um, something less than a game changer, Facebook Paper feels like it has a shot at the big time. Especially if the influential types who will be the first to try it recommend it to friends and family, and especially if it arrives on the iPad, Android devices and other platforms. Assuming it doesn’t flop, it’ll be interesting to see how Facebook manages its two iPhone incarnations, and whether it ever takes steps to nudge less adventurous users into the Paper camp.

I’m a sucker for slick, modern interfaces, so I expect that Facebook Paper will be my Facebook app of choice on the iPhone. If you install it, let me know what you think.

How to Buy a Laptop

The laptop market has undergone major changes in the last year, and there may be more confusion in the laptop aisle today than at any other time. Today’s laptops encompass everything from featherweight Ultrabooks that barely tip the scales at less than 2 pounds, to lap-crushing behemoths of 10-pounds or more. But the regular laptop doesn’t look the same, with dozens of convertible designs that rethink the standard clamshell to take advantage of touch interfaces. Some laptops double as tablets, with hinges that bend and fold, while other touch PCs are actually slate tablets that come with accessory keyboards for laptop-style use. There’s simply too much variety in the laptop space for one size or style to fit every person’s needs. That’s where this buying guide comes in. We’ll brief you on all the latest styles and features, and parse the latest buzzwords and trends, helping you figure out which features you want, and how to find the laptop that’s right for you. Ultrabooks and Ultraportables Walk down any laptop aisle and you’ll notice that the selection of laptops has gotten dramatically thinner and sleeker in the last year or so. Intel has spent the last few years pushing Ultrabooks, a breed of laptop that combines svelte lightweight designs with the latest energy-efficient hardware and long lasting batteries to produce a laptop that deliver productivity with the sort of portability that old bulky clamshell designs could never offer. Ultrabooks took the ultraportable category and refined it with industry wide standards governing everything from boot times to chassis thickness—no more than 18mm (0.71 inch) thick for units with screens smaller than 14 inches. Dubbed ultrabooks, these wafer-thin systems represent a new vision for portable computing, a no-compromises laptop light enough that you’ll forget it’s in your briefcase, whose battery and storage let it resume work in seconds after being idle or asleep for days. Solid-state drives (SSD) —whether a full 128GB or 256GB SSD or, more affordably, a small one used as a cache with a traditional hard drive—give ultrabooks their quick start and resume capability. In the last year, these slim portable systems have gone from being the exception to the rule, with dozens of new ultrabooks, offered by every major PC manufacturer. Most importantly, the slim designs ushered in by the push for ultrabooks has resulted in a general slimming down of the entire laptop category. Whether you’re looking at ultraportables that are carefully designed to be sliver thin, or mainstream PCs and even gaming machines, the entire laptop category is thinner, lighter, and better suited to life on the go. The best of these ultraportables will still cost you a pretty penny, but the performance they offer is remarkable, and often comes with several high-end features to boot. The Acer Aspire S7-392-6411 $1,241.97 at Amazon, for example, is only a half-inch thick, yet still manages to offer a 1080p HD touch screen, a full-size HDMI port, and more than 8 hours of battery life. The similarly long-lived Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus takes things even further with an astonishing 3,200 by 1,800 resolution. Windows 8 and Touch The most dramatic change to come to the PC in the last year is Windows 8. If you haven’t spent anytime with a new Windows PC of late, you may be a bit disoriented by the new interface which is tile-based and focused on touch instead of the traditional desktop. Windows 8 has gotten a major overhaul, and is meant to bridge the gap between laptops and tablets, but it does that by introducing a new navigation scheme, a tile-based Start Screen that replaces the traditional Start Menu, and an app friendly software environment. There’s more to Windows 8 than can be addressed in this buying guide, but the bottom line is that Windows 8 has brought the touch interface to the forefront. As a result, the majority of new PCs will also feature a touch screen, and those that don’t will have features in place to provide similar functionality. If you’re in the market for a Windows 8 laptop, a touch screen is highly recommended. Even entry-level models, like the Dell Inspiron 14R-5437 $649.99 at Dell or the Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch $559.00 at Lenovo, feature touch displays, and the Windows 8 user experience is dramatically more intuitive when using it with touch input. The one area where you won’t see many touch screens is among gaming machines, where touch would potentially interfere with the precision control schemes needed on the gaming grid. Convertible Hybrids This emphasis on touch has done more than encourage the adoption of touch screens. In a further effort to enter the tablet market while still meeting the needs of laptop buyers, a new category of laptop/tablet hybrid has emerged. These new convertible designs can transform from laptop to tablet and back again, some by way of specialized folding hinges, like the flip and fold hinge of the Dell XPS 12 $1,199.99 at Dell or the sliding hinge of the Sony VAIO Duo 13. Other systems allow you to dock a tablet PC with an accessory keyboard for laptop-like functionality, like the Asus Transformer Book T100TA (64GB) $495.99 at Amazon, or the Acer Aspire P3-171-6820 $758.98 at Amazon. Some of these hybrid designs offer docking keyboards with secondary batteries providing all-day charge, while others opt for Bluetooth keyboards, forgoing the bulk of a docking hinge and connecting wirelessly. Mainstream and Premium While the entire laptop category has gotten slimmer, there’s still a market for the desktop replacement and laptops that blend premium design and function. Desktop replacements aren’t quite as portable as smaller Ultrabooks, but these 14- and 15-inch laptops offer everything you need for a day-to-day PC. Systems like the Asus N550JV-DB72T $1,019.99 at Amazon and the Asus VivoBook V551LB-DB71T $899.99 at Amazon offer larger displays, a broader selection of ports and features, and are one of the few categories that still offer optical drives. While many PC manufacturers have moved en masse to the Ultrabook category, Apple hasn’t abandoned the desktop replacement, with the the ultra-high-resolution display of the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (2013) $1,899.00 at Amazon becoming the new standard for high-quality graphics. These sorts of 1080p+ displays are also showing up in Windows laptops, like the Toshiba Kirabook $2,000.00 at Amazon, which boasts a 2,560-by-1,440 resolution screen and premium magnesium construction. Media and Gaming There has been a lot of hand wringing among industry experts and pundits over the last several months as laptop and desktop sales have started to decline and tablet sales have expanded to fill the gap, but gaming PCs have actually sold more. For the gamer who wants top of the line performance, the combination of a high-end processor, a potent discrete graphics card, and a large high-resolution display is well worth the higher prices that gaming rigs frequently command. And boy do those prices run high—the Alienware 18 $3,499.00 at Dell Small Business, our Editors’ Choice for high-end gaming laptops, runs well over $3,000 and even entry-level gaming systems like the CyberPower FangBook X7-200 $1,329.99 at Amazon will cost $1,500 or more. Before you drop a grand or two on a gaming laptop, however, you should know what you’re getting for your money. Powerful quad-core processors are par for the course, with Intel Core i7 and AMD A10 chips pushing serious performance even for non-gaming applications. Discrete GPUs from Nvidia and AMD provide silky smooth graphics and impressive framerates. Additional features to watch for include high-resolution displays offering 1080p resolution or better, and hard drives that offer 1TB or more of local storage space, letting you store your entire game library on the machine. Not all gaming laptops are hulking beasts, however. The sleek designs of ultrabooks have given rise to a new breed of portable gaming machine that puts gaming level performance into a more portable design. These gaming ultraportables, like the Razer Blade (2013) $1,998.90 at Amazon, draw inspiration from ultrabooks, and offer the same sort of thin dimensions and long-lasting battery life. But, just like other gaming rigs, this sort of performance doesn’t come cheap, with gaming ultraportables running in the $2,000 range.