There are a couple of things to consider when choosing a navigation route: Which one will be the fastest? Which one is the fewest miles? Google Maps can also show you which route will save the most gas.
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The Pixel 6 Pro. [credit:
David Urbanke
]
The Pixel 6 is finally official, with Google taking the wraps off the phone during a livestreamed event on Tuesday. We have so much to talk about.
| SPECS AT A GLANCE | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pixel 6 | Pixel 6 Pro | |
| SCREEN | 6.4-inch, 90 Hz, 2400×1080 OLED | 6.7-inch, 120 Hz, 3120×1440 LTPO OLED |
| OS | Android 12 | |
| CPU | Google Tensor
Two 2.8 GHz Cortex-X1 cores |
|
| GPU | ARM Mali G78 MP20 | |
| RAM | 8GB | 12GB |
| STORAGE | 128GB/256GB UFS 3.1 | 128GB/256GB/512GB UFS 3.1 |
| BATTERY | 4600 mAh | 5000 mAh |
| NETWORKING | Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, GPS, NFC, 5G mmWave (optional) & Sub-6 GHz | Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, GPS, NFC, 5G mmWave & Sub-6 GHz, UWB |
| PORTS | USB Type-C 3.1 Gen 1 with 30W USB-PD 3.0 charging | |
| REAR CAMERA | 50 MP Main 12 MP Wide Angle Laser autofocus, OIS, spectral and flicker sensor |
50 MP Main 12 MP Wide Angle 48 MP 4x Telephoto Laser autofocus, OIS, spectral and flicker sensor |
| FRONT CAMERA | 8 MP | 11 MP |
| SIZE | 158.6×74.8×8.9 mm | 163.9×75.9×8.9 mm |
| WEIGHT | 207 g | 210 g |
| STARTING PRICE | $599 | $899 |
| OTHER PERKS | IP68 dust and water resistance, eSIM, wireless charging, in-screen fingerprint reader | |
First, the basics: There are two phones, the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. The big news today is the price, which is lower than we were expecting: $599 for the Pixel 6 and $899 for the Pixel 6 Pro. Both phones are an incredible $300 cheaper than comparable devices from Samsung. The $900 Pixel 6 Pro spec sheet compares well to the $1,200 Galaxy S21 Ultra, while the $600 Pixel 6 lands somewhere between the $800 Galaxy S21 and $1,000 S21+. Right off the bat, it’s pretty hard to go wrong when you’re this much cheaper than your major competition.
As for specs, the Pixel 6 Pro has a 6.7-inch, 120 Hz, 3120×1440 LTPO OLED display; 12GB of RAM; 128GB of UFS 3.1 storage; and a 5000 mAh battery. LTPO means that the Pixel 6 Pro has a dynamic refresh rate display that can drop down to a more power-efficient display mode for specific content. You get 120 Hz for scrolling, a framerate-appropriate refresh for video (think 60, 30, or 24 Hz, depending on the content), and 10 Hz for still images. This is also the only Pixel phone with UWB, or ultra wide-band, a Bluetooth tracker technology. There are three rear cameras—a 50 MP main camera, a 12 MP wide-angle, and a 48 MP 4x telephoto.
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Having a great idea isn’t enough when you’re starting a startup. You have to execute well on that idea by making the right decisions at the right time. In particular, you have to pick the right tech stack for your product. Without a good technical foundation, you can end up accumulating a lot of technical debt.
So to help founders understand what a good tech stack should look like, we invited two experts on this topic, Preeti Somal, the EVP of Engineering at HashiCorp, and Jill Wetzler, the VP of Engineering at Pilot, to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 to discuss everything from evaluating vendors to making sure you can rely on an open-source product.
Making sure your team can ship quickly
Some development environments are more familiar than others. For instance, if you choose to work with a popular framework, it’ll be easier to find engineers to join your team, and the learning curve will be easier for your existing developers.
Your tech stack isn’t limited to the language your team is using. Choosing a good CI/CD (Continuous integration and continuous delivery) framework can help you release updates more frequently. Using test suites is also a key element of a good development pipeline.
“I looked at how we were thinking about developer productivity and our environment. What are the things that can help our team move really fast and ship really fast? Because I think that is the name of the game when you’re talking about a startup. It just comes down to how you can get your code out the door as quickly as possible,” Wetzler said.
Wetzler knows what she’s talking about on this front as she experienced the opposite of that in a previous job when she was working for Twitter. “Twitter was making some decisions that I think were based on some people’s personal preferences at the time. We started to fork our own versions of git and our build system as well. It just became a mess that had to be untangled over a number of years. And so you really do pay for those decisions down the line,” she said.
The ability to reuse your code across different platforms can also help you manage multiple projects more easily. That can be important if you’re in charge of the roadmap and you want to have some visibility when you’re planning the next quarter.
“We had done a really good job of making some investments in our back-end productivity. But when it came to front end, we were really missing a lot of the key infrastructure pieces that helped us build a front end really quickly,” Wetzler said. She worked on fixing that when she joined Pilot.
Enlarge / A promo image for the Google Tensor SoC. (credit: Google)
The Pixel 6 is official, with a wild new camera design, incredible pricing, and the new Android 12 OS. The headline component of the device has to be the Google Tensor “system on chip” (SoC), however. This is Google’s first main SoC in a smartphone, and the chip has a unique CPU core configuration and a strong focus on AI capabilities.
Since when is Google a chip manufacturer, though? What are the goals of Tensor SoC? Why was it designed in its unique way? To get some answers, we sat down with members of the “Google Silicon” team—a name I don’t think we’ve heard before.
Google Silicon is a group responsible for mobile chips from Google. That means the team designed previous Titan M security chips in the Pixel 3 and up, along with the Pixel Visual Core in the Pixel 2 and 3. The group has been working on main SoC development for three or four years, but it remains separate from the Cloud team’s silicon work on things like YouTube transcoding chips and Cloud TPUs.
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Enlarge / Farthest right: The HDMI port on the MacBook Pro. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)
The newly announced 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models have HDMI ports, but they have a limitation that could be frustrating for many users over the long term, according to Apple’s specs page for both machines and as noted by Paul Haddad on Twitter.
The page says the HDMI port has “support for one display with up to 4K resolution at 60 Hz.” That means users with 4K displays at 120 Hz (or less likely, 8K displays at 60 Hz) won’t be able to tap the full capability of those displays through this port. It implies limited throughput associated with an HDMI 2.0 port instead of the most recent HDMI 2.1 standard, though there are other possible explanations for the limitation besides the port itself, and we don’t yet know which best describes the situation.
There aren’t many monitors and TVs that do 4K at 120 frames per second, and those that do are expensive. But they do exist, and they’re only going to get more common. In fact, it seems a safe bet that after a few years, [email protected] Hz may become the industry standard.
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