Kalakshar US

Amazon is cutting more jobs than it had previously planned, CEO Andy Jassy has admitted in a blog post. Back in November, reports came out that the e-commerce giant was eliminating 10,000 jobs, just as other companies in the tech sector had announced layoffs of their own. Now, the company is expanding its job cuts, and between the employees who’d already lost their jobs and the ones losing theirs in the near future, Amazon will be eliminating over 18,000 roles in the company. 

Jassy said majority of the upcoming layoffs would be from its retail and recruiting divisions. As The Wall Street Journal notes, Amazon benefited from the COVID lockdowns over the past few years, since people had to shop online more often than before. The company reportedly added hundreds of thousands of employees to keep up with the surge in demand — and then launched cost-cutting reviews to see which units weren’t making profit. It then froze hiring, closed brick-and-mortar stores and shut down business units.

When news broke that Amazon was planning sweeping layoffs, Meta had also just revealed that it was letting more than 11,000 of its employees go. Like Amazon’s executives, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg significantly increased Meta’s investments following a large revenue growth due to the pandemic. However, people’s spending habits eventually went back to pre-pandemic trends, leading to a smaller revenue for the company. More recently, Slack owner Salesforce revealed that it’s cutting 10 percent of its workforce and closing down offices. The company also grew rapidly during the pandemic and can’t sustain its bloated workforce in the current economy. 

Amazon will be cutting more jobs than Meta did by the time it’s done. Jassy said the company will reach out to impacted employees starting on January 18th, so the layoffs will likely take place over the coming weeks. He added that Amazon will offer them packages that include a “separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits and external job placement support.”

Robot delivery firm Ottonomy has unveiled a new Ottobot model called the Yeti with a new automated package delivery mechanism. That could allow it to do last mile drop-offs directly to a locker or remove the need for someone to receive a package, TechCrunch has reported. 

As shown at the end of Ottonomy’s latest video, the Yeti uses a simple tilting mechanism and rollers to dispense the packages. That would allow it to drop packages onto a doorstep or transfer them to a locker, making it fully independent from humans. It may also allow for easy returns, as TechCrunch noted. 

The Brooklyn-based firm operates in multiple cities including Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Oslo and Madrid, with plans to expand across north America and Asia. It recently unveiled the Ottobot 2.0 with modular delivery bins, a navigation engine that merges data from lidar and cameras, and a new four-wheel drive “crab mode” system for extra maneuverability in tight spaces. The company works in partnership with Verizon in the US.

Sony has focused its CES efforts of late on electric cars, now in partnership with Honda, and this year was more of the same. Sony Honda Mobility unveiled its first prototype called Afeela, replacing the previous Vision-S 02. Its laden with sensors (radar, ultrasonic, cameras and more), uses Qualcomm’s new automotive chip and promises “interactive communication between mobility and people” via the so-called Media Bar. Pre-orders will start in mid-2025 with deliveries scheduled for spring of 2026.

Sony also provided a first look at its Neill Blomkamp-directed Gran Turismo movie, revealed that the Gran Turismo 7 game would be getting PlayStation VR 2 support and announced that Beat Saber was also coming to PSVR 2. The PlayStation 5 console has now passed 30 million units sold, and from now on, anyone who wants a PS5 should be able to get one.

Finally, the company revealed Project Leonardo aimed at building controllers that are easier to use for people with limited motor control. Taking a page from Microsoft’s gaming accessibility efforts, it uses a set of customizable circular gamepads. There’s no release date window or price yet. 

Samsung introduced new QD-OLED TVs and a 57-inch 8K gaming display, the 2023 Freestyle projector and new Bespoke smart appliances at this year’s CES. During the company’s keynote, it also talked about its products’ new features and upgrades in detail, including a new wash cycle for washing machines that can reduce microplastic pollution. 

Presenters talked about SmartThings Workspace, which lets you connect to linked devices remotely, and SmartThings Pet Care, as well. Samsung’s pet service can send you alerts when your dogs bark and put on a show or video on a connected display to keep them entertained. Plus, it enables the camera on the brand’s robot vacuum to recognize dogs and cats. 

In addition, Samsung introduced the latest SmartThings hub, which is its smallest yet. The SmartThings Station, as it’s called, has a button that you can use to program smart lights, air conditioner or other home devices like smart blinds. It’s the first Samsung product to come with built-in Matter support, giving it the capability to connect with Matter-enabled devices from other manufacturers.

Any content played on the latest Samsung smart TVs can now sync with Philips Hue Lights for immersive lighting effects. The company also talked about the Knox Matrix, its security solution that acts as your private blockchain system for its smart home devices. Finally, Samsung presented the in-cabin car technology it developed in partnership with Harmon, as well as a new display technology called Relumino mode that can help people with low vision to see images more clearly. 

You can watch a condensed version of the event to get the gist of Samsung’s announcements in the video above.

The market for percussive massage guns is pretty packed. So is there space for another? Symbodi hopes so. Its Vertigun is a quiet-running massager that locks into a patented suction-cup wall mount. While massage guns might feel great, it’s often hard to get to tricky nooks and tight areas without someone else controlling the device for you. Symbodi even claims that because you’re not reaching or straining to get a massage gun in place (and put pressure on it), your body should be further relaxed when coming into contact with the percussive massage.

The Vertigun certainly runs quieter than the competition. Vertigun says it tops out at 48dB, comparing favorably against rivals like the Theragun (75 dB) and Hypervolt (60 dB). In a demo – Engadget was sent an early model – the hardware seemed a little clunky compared to the competition, but the size of the Vertigun’s battery ensures it can last a while between charges. The company claims it should be able to massage away for up to eight hours. It’s roughly the same weight as similar massage guns, too, but what makes it different is that you can use it without holding it.

That’s accomplished with the help of a solid, substantial airlock mount. With a sizable rubberized cup, you pull a lever to lock the mount to the wall. I assumed I might need a flat, polished surface, like glass or tile, to mount the Vertigun. However, the airlock mount attached to my apartment’s painted doors and walls pretty easily, without scraping or affecting the surface. Symbodi warns that it won’t stick to textured drywall, brick, concrete or wallpapered surfaces. The massage gun itself slides and locks into the mount, and can be removed by pressing the lever inwards. The mount occasionally fell off the wall, so I eventually got into the habit of removing it after use.

The six speeds seem perfectly functional – I’m not sure I need more than three settings – but the inclusion of several different massage attachments is definitely welcome. The Vertigun sample I received ahead of CES included an angled head, which did wonders for the side of my thighs and a pinpoint head for digging into shoulder blades. Three heads will come packaged with the Vertigun.

The challenge could be standing out from all the other percussive massage guns, including the aforementioned Therabody and Hypervolt, not to mention cheaper options. It’s probably why the company is launching at CES 2023. Symbodi has also signed several athlete ambassadors, including former professional US soccer player (and two-time Olympic gold medalist) Carli Anne Hollins, Dallas Cowboys’ Ceedee Lamb and Steelers All Pro Minkah Fitzpatrick. The Vertigun will become available online later this month for $400.

In March of 2022, Honda and Sony shocked the world by announcing that not only were the venerable electronics and automotive manufacturers were teaming up, they were doing so to build a battery electric SUV. By June, the project had been spun of into its own company and less than a year after being announced, Sony Honda Mobility took to the CES 2023 stage to officially unveil its first prototype. The Vision-S 02 is now the Afeela. 

Sony executives shared a few details about the upcoming vehicle including that it has 14 exterior cameras — 45 of them in total! — as well as a grille-mounted “Media Bar” that will display pertinent charging and vehicle information, “which allows intelligent mobility to express itself to surrounding people using light, enabling interactive communication between mobility and people,” according to Wednesday’s release. SHM also noted that online pre-orders will begin in mid-2025 ahead of deliveries scheduled for spring of 2026. We’ll have a hands-on from the show floor on Thursday, stay tuned!

Sony is building a better PlayStation 5 controller with Project Leonardo, a kit that promises to make games easier to play for people with limited motor control. In initial images, Project Leonardo is a set of circular gamepads lined with buttons and directional input methods, all of it customizable. Sony says the system will work “out of the box” with the PS5, allowing players to craft their ideal gamepad by mapping buttons, swapping out hardware bits and creating distinct profiles.

Project Leonardo can be used on its own or paired with DualSense controllers — up to two Leonardos and one DualSense can be read as one gamepad by the PS5. This grants players flexibility and also allows other people to help control games.

The hardware includes four 3.5mm AUX ports to accommodate a variety of existing accessibility accessories and switches. The controller itself lies flat on a table or can be mounted on a tripod; it doesn’t need to be held. Sony partnered with a handful of organizations, including AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up, while designing Project Leonardo.

With Project Leonardo, Sony is taking clear cues from Microsoft, which has been a leader in accessibility tech, particularly in the gaming space. Microsoft released the Xbox Adaptive Controller in 2018 and it had many of the same selling points as Sony’s new endeavor, but in a longer and flatter package. Microsoft has a new laboratory focused on building inclusive hardware and a five-year plan to improve the technology landscape for people with disabilities.

One of the major draws of the Xbox Adaptive Controller is its price, which was also designed to be accessible: $100. There’s no word on how much Project Leonardo will cost; there’s also no release window.

On the PlayStation Blog, Sony designer So Morimoto described Project Leondardo as follows: “Our team tested over a dozen designs with accessibility experts, looking for approaches that would help address key challenges to effective controller use. We finally settled on a ‘split controller’ design that allows near free-form left/right thumbstick repositionability, can be used without needing to be held, and features very flexible button and stick cap swapping.”

There was more positive news for the PS5 out of Sony’s CES press conference today — PlayStation head Jim Ryan declared an official end to the PS5 shortage, saying, “Everyone who wants a PS5 should have a much easier time finding one at retailers globally starting from this point forward.” That should is doing a lot of heavy lifting, of course.

After taking a big swing at high-end desktop gaming with its RDNA 3 GPUs, AMD is bringing that technology down to laptops. At CES today, the company unveiled an array of Radeon RX 7000 mobile graphics cards. There’s the Radeon RX 7600M XT and 7600M, both targeted at high fps 1080p gaming, as well as the RX 7700S and RX 7600S, which are meant for thin and light notebooks. But that’s not all! There are also a few more mobile GPUs using AMD’s last-gen RDNA 2 technology, which will likely end up in more affordable laptops.

Let’s start with the RX 7600M XT, though, as it represents the pinnacle of AMD’s laptop gaming ambitions. It features 32 compute units, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and it can use up to 120 watts worth of power. According to AMD, it soundly beats the desktop RTX 3060 GPU, which is notable since that card is faster than NVDIA’s laptop models. The 7600M XT can reach up to 184 fps in Hitman 3 with maxed out graphics settings, whereas the 12GB RTX 3060 hits 160fps. It’s not faster in every title, though, as AMD notes that the new GPU is 9fps slower than the 3060 in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (145fps vs 154 fps).

It’ll be more interesting to see how the RX 7700S and 7600S actually perform in thin and light machines. The 7700S features the same 32 compute units and 8GB of RAM as the 7600M XT, but it maxes out at 100W of power. AMD says the 7700S can reach up to 87fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 147fps in Death Stranding with maxed out 1080p graphics.

Based on my review of AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs, it’s clear the company has some powerful architecture. But those cards also lagged far behind NVIDIA’s when it came to ray tracing performance, especially once I enabled DLSS 3 upscaling. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0 upscaling just couldn’t compete. The company says it’s developed a new feature, dubbed Smart Shift RSR, which offers upscaling “decoupled from the GPU.” Details are a bit fuzzy, but it supposedly adds more performance. AMD says it’ll arrive sometime in the first half of 2023.

You can expect to see AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 GPUs in laptops next month. It’ll be featured in AMD Advantage editions of Alienware’s M16 and M18, as well as ASUS’s TUF Gaming A16. Almost as an afterthought, AMD also briefly noted the launched of several new Radeon 6000 GPUs, including the Radeon RX 6550M, featuring 16 compute units and 4GB of RAM. A wider variety of GPUs is ultimately a good thing for consumers, since it means you’re more likely to find a gaming laptop within your budget.

With last year’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D, AMD turned its long-awaited 3D V-Cache technology into a reality. That innovation allowed the company to stack more cache onto its CPUs, something that’s particularly helpful for demanding tasks like games. Unfortunately, AMD wasn’t able to reach the same clock speeds as the original 5800X, which made the chip tough for some reviewers to recommend. Now, it appears that AMD has (mostly) solved that problem.

Today at CES, AMD unveiled its first Ryzen 7000 CPUs with 3D V-Cache, the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D with 104MB of combined L2 and L3 cache, the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D with 140MB of cache, and the king of them all, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D with a whopping 144MB of cache. What’s truly impressive about the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, though, is that they can also reach the full 5.7GHz and 5.6GHz boost speeds of their 2D counterparts. Their base speeds are a bit slower, to be clear, but they shouldn’t feel like the step down the 5800X3D was.

It remains to be seen how much of an upgrade these chips will be, but cache-hungry gamers will likely be intrigued. AMD says the new V-Cache CPUs will be available in February, but there aren’t any pricing details just yet.

AMD also rounded out its Ryzen 7000 desktop family, which initially launched last year, with a slew of 65-watt chips coming on January 10th. Those include the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900 ($429), the 8-core Ryzen 7 7700 ($329) and the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600 ($229). Not everyone needs 3D V-Cache, after all.

AMD is bringing out some big guns to take on Intel’s powerful HX laptop CPUs, and once again, they’re also called “HX.” The company’s new Ryzen 9 7945HX processor is its most premium mobile offering, with 16 cores and 32 threads, as well as speeds between 2.5GHz and 5.4GHz. It’s joined by an array of other Ryzen 7000 CPUs unveiled at CES (AMD also announced low-end chipsin September), which will power everything from budget laptops to extreme gaming and creator machines. The big takeaway this year? There will be a Ryzen laptop chip for practically every need.

It makes sense for AMD to focus even more on its HX chips this year. Intel unveiled its high-powered lineup last year, and this week it revealed that there will be even more HX processors in 2023, led by the 24-core i9-13980HX. Like its previous chips, Intel is using a hybrid design which combines Performance and Efficient cores. So while Intel’s core count is higher, its chips may end up performing similarly to AMD’s, which utilize full-speed cores across the board.

The Ryzen HX CPUs will run at 55-watts and above (also like Intel’s), meaning they’ll focus more on raw power than battery life. AMD claims the 7945HX is 78 percent faster than the previous top-end Ryzen 6900HX in Cinebench’s multithreaded benchmark, and 18 percent faster in the single threaded test. Compared to Intel’s 12900HX, its high-end chip from last year, the 7945HX is 169 percent faster in Handbrake encoding and 75 percent faster with Blender rendering. You can expect to see the 7945HX in some of the premiere gaming laptops this year, like the Alienware m16 and m18, as well as the latest ASUS ROG Strix.

For a better balance between size and power, there’s also the new Ryzen 7040 HS series chips, running between 35W and 45W. AMD says these chips are aimed at thin enthusiasts, and you can expect to see them in laptops this March. The Ryzen 9 7940HS is the pinnacle of this lineup, featuring 8 cores, 16 threads and up to 5.2 GHz boost speeds.

The 7040 chips will also feature Ryzen AI, an integrated AI engine that can handle tasks like making background blurs during video calls, or sorting through your photo library. AMD says Ryzen AI can multitask up to 4 different AI workloads (or combine those capabilities on one task), and it’s reportedly 50 percent more power efficient than Apple’s M2. Intel is also planning to introduce a VPU AI accelerator in some of its 13th-gen chips — previously, we’ve only seen these accelerators on ARM chips, like the Microsoft SQ3 on the Surface Pro 9.

When it comes to true ultraportables, AMD has the U-series Ryzen 7030 and 7035 lineups, which range from 15W to 35W chips. Those include the Ryzen 3 7330U at the low end, featuring 6 cores and 12 threads, to the 8 core/16 thread Ryzen 7 7730U. (Curiously, Ryzen 3 7335U is just a quad-core chip, but it can use almost twice as much power as the 7330U.)