Lexus showed off a pair of EV concept cars at the Tokyo Mobility Show designed to highlight its electrified future. The first is the LF-ZC concept designed to go into production next year and includes wild features like using the steering wheel for racing games. The other is the LF-ZL flagship that represents the "future vision" of the brand, Toyota said in a press release. 

The luxury Toyota sub-brand is committed to becoming fully electric by 2035, and the LF-ZC will be a big part of that with a market launch by 2026. Unlike Honda's Prelude concept that looks nearly production ready, however, the LF-ZC looks more like a showcase for ideas than a real car. 

Lexus

Some of those ideas include "more versatile vehicle packaging" that minimizes core components. That will improve performance, according to Toyota, allowing for a low center of gravity, steer-by-wire, and an all-wheel drive powertrain. The company is also focusing on aerodynamics, promising drag coefficient of just 0.2, while still allowing for a wide stance. The design is certainly eye-catching, but is unlikely to bear any resemblance to the final production vehicle.

Details on the drivetrain are vague, but Lexus is aiming for "twice the range of conventional BEVs." That will be achieved through the use of "advanced high-performance batteries" made with a prismatic structure, designed to increase range via improved aerodynamic integration and reduced weight. These notably won't be solid state batteries, which won't arrive until a few years later.

Lexus

The concept mentality extends to the cockpit, as well. Along with a yoke-style steering wheel, there's a left-hand "digital pad" that controls functions like shifting, driver assistance functions, drive mode and more. On the left hand pad are secondary controls like music, climate, phone and AI functions. It also features digital mirrors and a heads-up display that's de rigeur for such vehicles. 

The dashboard wide display, meanwhile, is what Lexus calls an "open platform for entertainment and diverse applications." The seating is low, and the LF-ZC features materials like bamboo fibers and threads. It'll also use AI tech Lexus calls "Butler" that uses self-learning to customize personal settings for each driver and user, while also allowing for a personalized driving experience.

Lexus

One particularly crazy feature is using the drive-by-wire feature to somehow marry gaming with the real world. "Customers will be able to engage in e-sports using Steer-by-Wire technology inside the vehicle, for example, then implement their preferred settings through OTA to allow them to experience it in the real world." In other words, you can tune the steering and brakes using Gran Turismo or Forza, then take those settings into the real world. 

Lexus also unveiled the LF-ZL (below), calling it a "flagship BEV concept with a vision of the electrified future." It didn't go into much detail about that vehicle, other than promising some very high-tech features like "Interactive Reality In Motion" that seem implausible for a vehicle at this point. "When drivers point to objects or places of interest during their journey, the car's display promptly delivers information along with voice guidance, enabling the car to enhance the connection between occupants and their surroundings," the company said. 

Lexus

The company also talked up things like using "big data" to allow the LF-ZL to integrate into the electrical grid. Lexus also took car show-speak to a new level, promising "Omotenashi" features that will allow for a serene cabin and "unprecedented mobility."

Treat all these promises and designs with appropriate skepticism, as it's unlikely that much of the loftier ideas will arrive to market anytime soon (though gaming on your car's steering wheel sounds fun). Toyota is famously late to the EV game, though it is trying to catch up quick by releasing seven "beyond zero" all-electric models by 2025. The company is also working on solid-state battery technology, promising a range of over 600 miles and saying it's near production with a potential launch in 2027 or 2028. If it achieves those goals, great, but so far solid state batteries have been nothing but hot air. 

Lexus

In addition to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and the Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm has also introduced the S7 and S7 Pro Gen 1 at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. The company said its new chips deliver six times the compute power of their predecessor's, along with on-device AI capabilities. More intriguing, perhaps, is the S7 Pro's micro-power Wi-Fi connectivity, which will apparently allow users to "walk around a home, building or campus while listening to music or making calls." 

As The Verge notes, the chip uses Qualcomm's Expanded Personal Area Network (XPAN) technology that can automatically switch a device's connection. When a user strays too far from their phone while their earbuds are connected to it via Bluetooth, for instance, XPAN switches the connection to a Wi-Fi access point. It can deliver 96kHz lossless audio via earbuds, Qualcomm's Dino Bekis told the publication, and it works with 2.4, 5 and 6GHz bands. Bekis also said that users only have to click on a prompt once to connect their earbuds powered by the chip to their Wi-Fi.

Outside of the S7 Pro's Wi-Fi connectivity, the platforms' on-board AI enable better responsiveness to the listener's environment if they want to hear ambient sounds. But if they want to block out their environment completely, the chips are supposed to be capable of Qualcomm's "strongest ever ANC performance" regardless of earbud fit. 

These features will only be enabled when headsets, earbuds and speakers powered by the S7 and S7 Pro are paired with devices equipped with the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform and Snapdragon X Elite, though. That means we won't be seeing products with the new sound chips on the market anytime soon. When they do come out, they'll most likely be meant for Android devices, seeing as Apple has its own ecosystem.

Motorola showcased some wacky concepts at Lenovo Tech World ’23 that may or may not ever see the light of day. The smartphone maker (a subsidiary of Lenovo since 2014) unveiled an “adaptive display” prototype that can be rolled into a phone, stand or smart bracelet. (It looks like a more advanced version of a prototype Lenovo exhibited in 2016.) In addition, the company highlighted several developmental AI-powered features for the Lenovo devices you can already buy.

The display concept is a rollable smartphone with an FHD+ pOLED display. The prototype “can be bent and shaped into different forms depending on users’ needs,” the company wrote in its announcement blog post. The device can stretch out entirely flat to use as a traditional smartphone, or you could bend it partway to sit on a desk (similar to foldable phones). You can even wrap the concept device partway around your wrist as it transforms into something akin to a smart slap bracelet.

Motorola / Lenovo

The conceptual prototype has a 6.9-inch display and runs “a full Android experience, just like any smartphone” (well, except for iPhones). When upright in a stand mode, it switches to a compact form of Android on a 4.6-inch section of its display.

As fun as it can be to gawk at futuristic concepts, we wouldn’t recommend holding your breath for this gadget to become an available consumer product anytime soon. However, Lenovo has repeatedly proven that it isn’t afraid to go zany with shipping consumer products, so who knows?

In addition to its flexible prototype, Motorola also introduced several AI-powered concepts since that’s what corporations do in 2023. The company is tapping into generative AI’s powers to supply the people with… better wallpaper?

Motorola / Lenovo

“With this concept, users can upload or capture a picture of their outfit to produce multiple unique AI-generated images that reflect their style,” the company wrote. You can then transform those AI-made images into a custom wallpaper for your device. A video the company published on its blog post shows a person taking a selfie of an outfit (using the rollable display device, of course), which the software then turns into a variety of wallpaper options for the bendy phone.

The company also announced that it’s working on a personal voice / text assistant for PCs and smartphones that runs on a large language model (LLM). Dubbed MotoAI, the company says the assistant could “answer questions, draft messages, schedule tasks, and so much more.” MotoAI would emphasize privacy, processing data and running tasks locally rather than in the cloud. The company says the tool could uniquely personalize your device as it learns more about you, becoming more useful over time.

Motorola also tackled document scanning, teasing a feature that can minimize wrinkles and shadows when scanning physical images or documents with a phone’s camera. “This innovation aims to improve final image quality by minimizing wrinkles and shadows to ensure documents or images appear as crisp and clear as possible,” the company wrote.

Microsoft's most recent Q1 2024 earnings report continues the company's upward trajectory thanks to the cloud. Microsoft's earnings reached $56.5 billion, up 13 percent from last year! Profits hit $22.3 billion, up 27 percent. Almost every aspect of Microsoft's business is a success — that is, except for its devices, which dropped 22 percent from last year.

That segment, which includes its Surface hardware, HoloLens and accessories, has been in decline over the last two years. It fell from $7.2 billion in revenue in 2020 to $6.5 billion in 2021 and $5.4 billion in 2022. And there doesn't seem to be any sign of that stopping. Ahead of the company's most recent device event in New York City, it was obvious that its Surface PCs were in a rut. The arrival of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and Surface Laptop Go 3, while welcome, likely won't change that.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the time of the Surface may be over for Microsoft. Panos Panay, the charismatic product lead for those devices, has moved to Amazon. The iconic Surface tablet line hasn't been touched at all this year. Given Microsoft's wildly successful cloud business, as well as its gamble on AI this year, is there any point in duking it out in the PC market?

Between Apple's successful transition towards its own efficient-yet-powerful Arm chips, and more nimble PC makers who can quickly adopt new CPUs and GPUs, there just isn't much room left for Microsoft.  

Apple is reportedly set to overhaul the Apple TV app. On Tuesday, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that the company plans to consolidate its video offerings, placing them exclusively in the TV app on all its devices. Citing “people with knowledge of the matter,” Gurman reports that the company will launch a new version of the app “around December” as part of an upcoming tvOS software update.

As part of the move, Apple will reportedly remove its dedicated (iTunes-based) Movies and TV Shows apps from the Apple TV set-top box’s interface. In addition, it plans to axe all video-related sections from the iTunes app on iOS and iPadOS. The TV app already duplicates the functionality of renting and buying digital video content, making the alleged change more about streamlining and removing redundancies than altering any core features.

The updated app will reportedly include a left-side panel for video categories, similar to what’s found on Netflix and other streaming rivals. Apple’s TV app consolidates video content from the Apple TV+ subscription service, rented and purchased movies, live sports networks and compatible third-party services like Amazon Prime, Paramount+ and Starz.

Apple

Apple has increasingly invested in video content, spending billions on programming like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which premiered in theaters last week. (The film will arrive on Apple TV+ “at a later date.”) Original series on Apple TV+ include Ted Lasso, Severance, The Morning Show, Silo and Foundation, among others. The company reportedly (and abruptly) canceled The Problem with Jon Stewart this month following disagreements about Stewart’s planned editorial content surrounding AI and China.

In other Apple developments, the company sent out invites today for an event on October 30. The “Scary Fast” streaming event is expected to focus on new Macs. These could include a refresh of the aging iMac line and MacBook Pro, possibly running on a new M3 chip.

Universal Audio has gone all-in on the amp-in-a-pedal concept and just announced its latest entry, the UAFX Lion '68 Super Lead. This pedal digitally recreates a trio of classic 100-watt Marshall Plexi setups from the 1960s. You get the titular Super Lead based on the classic tube amp, the Super Bass inspired by the 1967 low-end icon and the Brown, which emulates the sound of a 100-watt Marshall Plexi heading into a Variac to recreate Eddie Van Halen’s infamous guitar tone.

This is a modern pedal with high-tech features, however, so it goes well beyond simple amp recreations. The onboard IR includes recreations of different classic microphones and speaker cabinets to adjust the sound. There’s also built-in reverb, volume boost, presence and a variety of assignable preset switches that are customized by using a smartphone app. There are also plenty of artist presets to select from if you’ve grown weary of fiddling with knobs.

All of the speaker models derive from the company’s OX Stomp pedal. There’s six in total at launch, with more to be added at a later date. Updating is easy, as there’s a USB-C port on the back, in addition to mono/stereo jack connectors.

You can even bypass the cabinet and mic emulations entirely if you would rather rely on your actual amp. UA says these features combine to create “the most authentic late ‘60s British 100-watt tube sound ever placed into a stompbox.” The UAFX Lion '68 Super Lead is available now for the usual high-end price tag of $400.

Accompanying today’s release is a new tremolo pedal, a chorus/vibrato pedal and a compressor pedal based on the classic Teletronix LA-2A. This is not the company’s first foray of amp recreations. Universal Audio cut its teeth making plugins, including many based on classic amps. More recently, it released a trio of amp emulation pedals based on the Fender Deluxe Reverb, the Fender Tweed Deluxe and the Vox AC30. We reviewed all three and said that they sounded amazing, despite the hefty $400 price tag.

Qualcomm is no stranger in running artificial intelligence and machine learning systems on-device and without an internet connection. They’ve been doing it with their camera chipsets for years. But on Tuesday at Snapdragon Summit 2023, the company announced that on-device AI is finally coming to mobile devices and Windows 11 PCs as part of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and X Elite chips.

Both chipsets were built from the ground up with generative AI capabilities in mind and are able to support a variety of large language models (LLM), language vision models (LVM), and transformer network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, up to 10 billion parameters for the SD8 gen 3 and 13 billion parameters for the X Elite, entirely on-device. That means you’ll be able to run anything from Baidu’s ERNIE 3.5 to OpenAI’s Whisper, Meta's Llama 2 or Google’s Gecko on your phone or laptop, without an internet connection. Qualcomm’s chips are optimized for voice, text and image inputs.

“It's important to have a wide array of support underneath the hood for these models to be running and therefore heterogeneous compute is extremely important,” Durga Malladi, SVP & General Manager, Technology Planning & Edge Solutions at Qualcomm, told reporters at a prebriefing last week. “We have state-of-the-art CPU, GPU, and NPU (Neural Processing Unit) processors that are used concurrently, as multiple models are running at any given point in time.”

The Qualcomm AI Engine is comprised of the Oryon CPU, the Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU. Combined, they handle up to 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) and can crunch 30 tokens per second on laptops, 20 tokens per second on mobile devices — tokens being the basic text/data unit that LLMs can process/generate off of. The chipsets use Samsung’s 4.8GHz LP-DDR5x DRAM for their memory allocation.

Qualcomm

“Generative AI has demonstrated the ability to take very complex tasks, solve them and resolve them in a very efficient manner,” he continued. Potential use cases could include meeting and document summarization or email drafting for consumers, and prompt-based computer code or music generation for enterprise applications, Malladi noted.

Or you could just use it to take pretty pictures. Qualcomm is integrating its previous work with edge AI, Cognitive ISP. Devices using these chipsets will be able to edit photos in real-time and in as many as 12 layers. They'll also be able to capture clearer images in low light, remove unwanted objects from photos (a la Google’s Magic Eraser) or expand image backgrounds. User scan even watermark their shots as being real and not AI generated, using Truepic photo capture.

Having an AI that lives primarily on your phone or mobile device, rather than in the cloud, will offer users myriad benefits over the current system. Much like enterprise AIs that take a general model (e.g. GPT-4) and tune it using a company’s internal data to provide more accurate and on-topic answers, a locally-stored AI “over time… gradually get personalized,” Malladi said, “in the sense that… the assistant gets smarter and better, running on the device in itself.”

What’s more, the inherent delay present when the model has to query the cloud for processing or information doesn’t exist when all of the assets are local. As such, both the X Elite and SD8 gen 3 are capable of not only running Stable Diffusion on-device but generating images in less than 0.6 seconds.

The capacity to run bigger and more capable models, and interact with those models using our speaking words instead of our typing words, could ultimately prove the biggest boon to consumers. “There's a very unique way in which we start interfacing the devices and voice becomes a far more natural interface towards these devices — as well in addition to everything else,” Malladi said. “We believe that it has the potential to be a transformative moment, where we start interacting with devices in a very different way compared to what we've done before.”

Mobile devices and PCs are just the start for Qualcomm’s on-device AI plans. The 10-13 billion parameter limit is already moving towards 20 billion-plus parameters as the company develops new chip iterations. “These are very sophisticated models,” Malladi commented. “The use cases that you build on this are quite impressive.”

“When you start thinking about ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) and you have multi-modality [data] coming in from multiple cameras, IR sensors, radar, lidar — in addition to voice, which is the human that is inside the vehicle in itself,” he continued. “The size of that model is pretty large, we're talking about 30 to 60 billion parameters already.” Eventually, these on-device models could approach 100 billion parameters or more, according to Qualcomm’s estimates.

At its annual Snapdragon Summit on Tuesday, Qualcomm revealed its latest mobile chipset. Perhaps the biggest change in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the introduction of on-device generative AI (akin to Google's Tensor G3). The chipset’s AI Engine supports multi-modal generative AI models and what Qualcomm claims is the world’s fastest Stable Diffusion system with the ability to generate an image in under a second. So, you should be able to whip up backgrounds and images for social media posts in a flash.

Because GAI requests are handled on-device, Qualcomm says they remain private. There’s an AI assistant based on Meta’s Llama 2 language learning model. It can securely use personal data such as your favorite activities, location and fitness level to provide more personalized responses, Qualcomm says. The Qualcomm Sensing Hub (which powers this feature) is said to deliver an AI performance increase of up to 3.5 times that of Qualcomm's previous mobile chipset. The company also claims the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 delivers up to 98 percent faster Hexagon NPU performance and 40 percent better performance per watt.

Qualcomm

The camera and editing systems include support for features such as the ability to remove people and objects from a video with the tap of a finger. Qualcomm is promising voice-activated GAI photo and video editing thanks to its Cognitive ISP, along with the option to optimize different parts of a photo in up to 12 layers, whether you capture it with the front or back camera.

The Photo Expansion feature uses GAI to extend the borders of a photo, akin to Adobe's Generative Fill tool. The Vlogger's View mode allows you to share video from both your rear and front-facing cameras at the same time, so you can feature your face in what you capture as you narrate what you're seeing.

Qualcomm says that Dolby HDR tech allows for image playback and capture with a fuller range of colors, tones and shades. Meanwhile, you can apply a cryptographic seal from Truepic to a photo to indicate that it's the real deal and not something you whipped up with GAI, because that's the world we're living in these days. It's a different approach to applying a label to AI-generated content.

Elsewhere, Qualcomm is promising some gaming upgrades in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. There's support for Unreal Engine 5.2 along with hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with global illumination, which the company says is a first for a mobile chipset. This, Qualcomm says, helps deliver "lifelike, multi-source lighting" in games.

NetEase/Qualcomm

The Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 can double framerates while sustaining the same power consumption as the previous chipset, Qualcomm claims. If you're so inclined to hook up a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered device to an external 240Hz display, you'll be able to play games at up to 240 fps. 

Snapdragon Game Super Resolution, Qualcomm's answer to upscaling tech like NVIDIA's DLSS, will help games to run at up to 8K on supported displays too. The company notes that it's open-sourcing Snapdragon Game Super Resolution.

You can expect gameplay audio to be synced to the millisecond, according to Qualcomm, meaning that you shouldn't experience any lag while using earbuds. It's also promising uninterrupted lossless audio even as you move away from your phone or from one room to another thanks to its Expanded Personal Area Network Technology system. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is said to support 24-bit 96 kHz lossless music over Bluetooth.

On the subject of connectivity, Qualcomm is using AI hardware acceleration in the X75 Modem-RF System. It says this can help to deliver better 5G speeds, coverage, mobility, link robustness and location accuracy. There's Wi-Fi 7 support too.

Compared with the previous chipset, Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's Kryo CPU delivers 30 percent better performance and 20 percent more power efficiency. As for the GPU, it claims you'll benefit from a 25 percent performance improvement and 25 percent greater power efficiency, along with a 40 percent ray-tracing upgrade. Overall, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is slated to have 10 percent overall power savings compared with last year’s chip.

You won't have to wait long to try out a phone with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 if you really want to. Qualcomm says devices that use the chipset should start to appear in the coming weeks. Among the brands and manufacturers that will use it are Sony, ASUS, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Honor and ZTE.

On Tuesday, at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced a major addition to its line of mobile chips with the Snapdragon X Elite, which the company is calling its most powerful processor to date. 

The Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite is the successor to last year's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 line of laptop chips, which recently got a name change to reflect the huge leap in performance for this upcoming generation. Powered by 12 Oryon cores, Qualcomm claims the X Elite provides up to two times faster CPU performance compared to Intel's 13th-gen Core i7-1360P and i7-1355U processors while also drawing up to 68 percent less power. 

The chip is based on a 4nm design fabricated by TSMC with standard clock speeds of 3.8GHz with a dual-core boost of up to 4.3GHz. Qualcomm also includes 42MB of total cache with an LPDDR5x memory bandwidth of 136 GB/s. When compared to Apple's M2 chip, Qualcomm says the X Elite boasts 50 percent faster peak multithreaded performance. And thanks to its integrated GPU, the X Elite is said to offer twice the graphics performance as the i7-13800H at ISO power. 

Qualcomm

Qualcomm's new AI Engine should also provide a significant boost to machine learning-based tasks. Between its Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU, the X Elite looks to deliver up to 75 TOPs, which Qualcomm claims is 4.5 times more than its competitors. The chip was also designed to run large language models with up to 13 billion parameters locally with Qualcomm saying the chip offers the fastest Stable Diffusion performance of any laptop chip on the market. Other features include support for AV1 4K HDR video encoding/decoding, 5G connectivity (with downloads of up to 10 Gbps), Wi-Fi 7 and the company's built-in Sensing Hub.

The arrival of the Snapdragon X Elite is poised to be a major breakthrough for Qualcomm as it attempts to better compete against rivals like Intel and more specifically Apple, following the latter's transition away from x86-based chips to its custom-designed M-series silicon. The development of the chip's Oryon cores has been a multiyear process following Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia back in 2021. 

Roya Kohbodi/Qualcomm

That said, while the X Elite boasts some impressive specs and power numbers, the major challenge for Qualcomm is translating all that oomph into actual performance. That's because unlike Apple, Qualcomm doesn't have the luxury of being able to design both its chips and the software/OS its processors are running. And as we've seen in the past on devices like the Surface Pro 9, systems running Windows on Arm still don't feel as fast or responsive when compared to their more traditional x86-based counterparts. 

Thankfully, with retail PCs powered by the Snapdragon X Elite expected to arrive sometime in mid-2024, it won't be too long until we can see how Qualcomm's latest laptop chip performs in the real world. 

Apple just confirmed another streaming event for October 30 at, wait for it, 8PM ET. Tis the spooky season, so why not hold a presentation at night? The tagline for the event is “Scary Fast” so it certainly sounds like there will be some hardware announcements. We already had the big iPhone 15 event, so that leaves the company’s desktop and laptop computers.

To that end, it’s been a surprisingly long time since there’s been a new iMac. Analyst Mark Gurman suggested that this event will feature a refresh of the aging iMac line, and his track record is pretty good when it comes to Apple. Gurman also suggested that it’s likely we’ll see an update to the MacBook Pro.

Apple

This analysis is based on current retail supplies and shipping dates for forthcoming models, with retail stores noting they have short supply of the current iMacs and the 13-inch MacBook Pro. The colorful 24-inch M1 iMac came out all the way back in April 2021, which is a lifetime in tech circles, and hasn’t been updated since. The MacBook Pro M2 is newer, releasing in 2022, but still due for an upgrade.

With that said, there are also rumors that the event will reveal the followup chip, the M3. It’s also possible we’ll get an iPad reveal, as the company’s flagship tablet is also due for a refresh.

In the past, Apple has typically reserved its October press event for computers, which is another mark in the “new iMac” column. In any event, we don’t have that long to wait, as October 30 is just around the corner. Here’s hoping Tim Cook will be dressed as a mummy or Barbenheimer or something.