Lenovo’s upcoming Yoga 9i has the first Bowers & Wilkins sound system designed for a laptop PC, the companies emailed Thursday. The four-speaker system includes two tweeters and a pair of mid/bass woofers. Two speakers for the Yoga 9i are integrated into the laptop’s 360-degree rotating sound bar hinge facing the user; sideways-firing speakers are fitted along the edges to create an “immersive” experience, the companies said. The Yoga 9i has a 4K OLED display with HDR and 100% DCI-P3 color, Lenovo said. The 14-inch laptop is due to ship in Q2 starting at $1,399.
Windows 11 is the “biggest update” to Microsoft’s operating system in a decade, said CEO Satya Nadella on a fiscal Q4 call Tuesday. “We are reimagining everything” in the OS “to help people and organizations be more productive and secure and build a more open ecosystem for developers and creators,” he said. “More people have downloaded our early builds than any other Windows release or update in the history of our insider program. ... We are excited to bring Windows 11 to new PCs, beginning this holiday.”
It's “fair to say” that demand for laptop CPUs “exceeded our planning” in 2020, said Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su on a quarterly investor call Tuesday. “We did have some supply constraints as we ended the year,” mainly at the low end of the PC market and in the gaming markets, she said. “We're getting great support from our manufacturing partners. The industry does need to increase the overall capacity levels, and so we do see some tightness through the first half of the year, but there's added capacity in the second half.”
Quantum networks and communications are likely a decade away but have big implications for network security, Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday at the FCC’s virtual quantum internet forum. “By applying the laws of quantum physics to make calculations, we’re entering a place we’ve never been before and doing things computers have never done.” Quantum networks could facilitate “distributed quantum computing and giving us a level of computational clout far beyond what is possible with today’s internet,” he said. A quantum-secured communications link “could offer foolproof security for data communication,” Pai said: “If the link has been eavesdropped or tampered with, the sender will know.” Quantum physics “holds the potential to solve pain points in our everyday lives that we may not even recognize,” said Commissioner Brendan Carr. He compared it to moving from 3G to 4G: “Our job is to convene stakeholders to do what we can to help give this transition a better shot of taking place even more quickly.”
Acer recorded a 27.3% revenue increase in Q3 from a year earlier, to 8.4 billion new Taiwan dollars ($293.7 million), including a 94.4% Chromebook revenue increase, said the PC vendor Wednesday. Profit of 2.29 billion new Taiwan dollars ($80.1 million) was the highest in nearly a decade.
Lenovo plans to introduce its first 5G Chromebook in the second half next year at the premium tier of the laptop space, said Chief Operating Officer Gianfranco Lanci on a fiscal Q2 call Tuesday. “I'm not afraid of any deterioration of the average selling price of Chromebook.” Competition in the Chromebook segment is limited to “four to five players,” he said. “I don't see additional players coming.” Lenovo had $10 to $20 "improvement" in Chromebook ASPs the past three quarters, he said. Chromebook demand for remote work and learning soared during the pandemic (see 2009110020). PCs and tablets “are now one device per person” in the “new normal” of COVID-19, said CEO Yuanqing Yang. Lenovo projects total PC market will grow by about 25 million units globally this year from 2019 and will “reach very close to 300 million units” in 2020, he said. The forecast is for 7% growth in 2021 PC demand, said Lanci. There’s a “dynamic shift” in PC demand that will “continue to create tailwinds for e-learning, work from home, play from home, cloud infrastructure and 5G,” said Chief Financial Officer Wai Ming: “We are optimistic that these long-term structural trends could enlarge the addressable market” for PCs and cloud infrastructure products, plus speed deployment of 5G services.
PCs are “mission-critical” for working and studying from home in a “remote-everything world,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told investors Tuesday evening. Windows 10 monthly active devices are up double digits year over year, and Microsoft will have its largest lineup ever of Surface devices “this holiday season to support every person and work style,” he said. Microsoft Teams has more than 115 million “daily active users,” and the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity apps “generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day this quarter,” he said. Q1 ended Sept. 30. It added more than 100 “new capabilities” to Teams in the past six months, “including breakout rooms, meeting recaps, shift scheduling and large-scale digital events up to 20,000 participants,” said Nadella. CTA picked Microsoft last week as its “cloud platform" contractor to run CES 2021 as a virtual event (see 2010190043).
HP’s Pavilion 13, 14 and 15 are its first consumer laptops built with post-consumer-recycled and ocean-bound plastics, said the manufacturer Tuesday. They're HP’s first consumer laptops with 11th-generation Intel core processors and Iris XE graphics cards, it said. The Pavilion 15 has AMD's Ryzen mobile processor, it said. “Never before has the PC been more essential among the Gen Z population,” said HP. “They have turned to PCs to connect with friends and family, stay entertained, and learn in digital classrooms. They have spent almost 10 more hours a week on their PC during COVID-19 than before, and over half of them are using the PC more than their phones.” The devices will be available in October. Pricing is between $579 and $679.
Shelter-at-home activity in Q2 drove 27% year-on-year growth in notebook PC shipments, reported Strategy Analytics Thursday. HP and Lenovo had about half of the unit volume, with Lenovo holding a 200,000-unit edge over HP’s 13.4 million shipments. HP totals were 42% higher than in Q2 2019. Total shipments in the quarter were 54.2 million. Dell shipped 8.4 million, 15.6% share; Apple 4.6 million, 8.5% share, and Acer 3.6 million, 6.7%, said SA. Vendors improved supply chain demand by working closely with channel and retail partners, said analyst Chirag Upadhyay. “Most vendors started the quarter by delivering panic buy/backlog orders which were held back in March due to the lockdown imposed on majority of the countries,” said Upadhyay, but as the quarter progressed, all vendors were able to fulfill customer orders efficiently. The biggest surprise of the quarter was the robust demand generated from consumers buying their own devices for work, study and play despite tough economic headwinds, said analyst Eric Smith. Chromebooks got a boost from schools and consumers in the quarter.
ASUS launched thin and light ZenBook laptops in 13.3- ($800) and 14-inch ($900) screen sizes. The 0.55-inch-thick PCs, with a 90% screen-to-body ratio and numeric keypads, have a 1-watt display said to optimize battery life. Features include 10th-generation Intel Core processors, hinge mechanisms, IR face recognition cameras, 802.11ax Wi-Fi, SSD storage up to 512 GB and three ports for USB-C, USB Type-A and HDMI connectors.