Intel's new Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors promise longer battery life for thin and light notebooks

Intel's stepped up chip production on lower powered processors that can offer longer battery life. Under fire from ARM processors slowly creeping up to thin laptops and 2-in-1's, Intel's new Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors "raise the bar for connectivity, performance, entertainment, and productivity." The U-series chips introduce support for integrated Gigabit Wi-Fi for up to 12-times faster connectivity speeds, support for USB 3.1 Gen 2 transfer speeds, and built-in support for voice services like Alexa and Cortana.

Slim and light laptops and 2-in-1's running these processors can last up to 16 hours with power optimized systems running up to 19 hours. These chips will ship in the fall and could appear on new laptops and tablets released during that period.

Apple celebrates seven years with Tim Cook as CEO

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

It's been seven years since Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs passed on the reins to Tim Cook. It was a bittersweet passing of the torch as Jobs was in advanced stages of Cancer and then-COO Cook, who had already served as pinch hitter for Jobs in years past, was reluctant to replace his friend and mentor.

Since then, Cook has represented Apple and steered the company to its greatest heights culminating in the recent trillion dollar valuation, a first for a technology company. Cook has also been a positive force for good, opening up Apple to charity and causes which he believes in.

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Adobe XD opens up for collaboration with third party developers

Today, Adobe announced that Adobe XD is opening its platform to enable users to customize their tools with an ecosystem of community and partner-built plugins. Adobe XD now tightly integrates with designers’ existing workflows via other popular collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams (Adobe’s preferred collaboration service), Slack and Jira Software Cloud, making it easy for designers to collaborate with stakeholders across their organizations.

The open platform will be made publicly available later this year, but Adobe is already working with early developer partners to build plugins for XD, including Microsoft, Trello, UserTesting, Airtable, Dribbble, Silicon Publishing, Slope, inMotionNow, Astute Graphics, Anima and Google Cloud, along with its own Behance and Stock services.

Bose crashes smart speaker and soundbar party with new products

Anyone would be foolish to count out Bose in the smart speaker and soundbar market. The company who spearheaded hi-fi consumer audio for decades simply waited for the dust to settle and is now launching its own Alexa-powered smart speaker as well as a smart soundbar.

Newly released from Bose are the Home Speaker 500, Soundbar 500 and Soundbar 700 which all have Amazon Alexa built-in and will supposedly allow for Google Home and whatever bits of Siri and AirPlay 2 Apple is willing to share with third-party manufacturers.

Coming in OCtober, Bose's Home Speaker 500 will cost US $399.95, while the soundbars begin at $549.95.

Source: Engadget