Windows 8.1 went on sale on October 17, 2013 as a free update from Windows 8, delivered through the Windows Store — the first time a major Windows upgrade was distributed this way. The update came less than a year after Windows 8 launched on October 26, 2012, an unusually fast response driven by poor reception: Windows 8 had been criticized for replacing the Start menu with a full-screen tile interface that made no accommodation for mouse-and-keyboard users on non-touch PCs. Read more
The New York Times called 2012 “The Year of the MOOC.” Massive open online courses arrived with enormous energy: Coursera launched in April 2012, founded by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng; edX launched two months later as a nonprofit from MIT and Harvard; Udacity, founded by Sebastian Thrun after his Stanford AI course enrolled 160,000 students online in 2011, was already operating. By September 2013, millions of students worldwide have enrolled in courses on these platforms, often from institutions they could not have attended in person. Read more
Apple announced the iPhone 5s on September 10, 2013, introducing the A7 — which Apple described as the first 64-bit processor in a consumer smartphone. The A7 used Apple’s Cyclone CPU cores, designed in-house around the ARMv8 architecture, and contained 1 billion transistors manufactured on Samsung’s 28nm process. Cyclone’s dual high-performance cores ran at up to 1.3 GHz; Apple claimed 2× CPU and 2× GPU performance compared to the A6. The chip paired with 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM — the same as the iPhone 5, and nowhere near the 4GB minimum where a 64-bit address space provides a practical RAM benefit. Read more
Microsoft released Windows 8.1 to manufacturing (RTM) on August 27, 2013, completing the build that would go to device makers and enterprise customers before the October 17 public release. RTM meant the code was final and ready for hardware certification — OEMs needed this lead time to preinstall 8.1 on new PCs shipped around the holiday season. The August milestone arrived less than ten months after Windows 8 launched on October 26, 2012, signaling how seriously Microsoft was treating user complaints. Read more
Google announced and began selling the Chromecast on July 24, 2013 for $35, alongside a limited-time offer of three months of Netflix free — which effectively made the device free for existing Netflix subscribers. Google sold out of the first production run within hours. The dongle was 72mm long, plugged directly into a TV’s HDMI port, and drew power from a USB port (on the TV or via the included wall adapter), with no remote control, no standalone interface, and no local application storage beyond a small bootloader. Read more
If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2013, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more
Apple’s WWDC 2013 keynote on June 10, 2013 featured two redesigns that signaled different directions: iOS 7 replaced the skeuomorphic visual language that had defined iPhone software since 2007, and the new Mac Pro abandoned the aluminum tower form factor that had served professional desktops since the Power Mac era. iOS 7 was led by Jony Ive following the departure of Scott Forstall in October 2012 — Forstall had championed the leather-and-wood textures, torn paper, and felt-covered stitching that Apple called skeuomorphic design. iOS 7 replaced all of it with flat, translucent surfaces, a system-wide blur effect (processing layers beneath the current view as frosted glass), a new thinner system font (Helvetica Neue Light), redesigned icons with a consistent rounded-rectangle grid, and physics-based animations using UIKit Dynamics. New features included Control Center (swipe up from any screen to reach brightness, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and media controls without leaving the current app), AirDrop for peer-to-peer file transfer over Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth LE, and iTunes Radio as a streaming music service competing with Pandora. iOS 7 shipped September 18, 2013 alongside the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, and within four days Apple reported 74 percent of active devices had updated — the fastest adoption rate for any iOS version to that point. Read more
Nikola Tesla is one of those historical figures whose real achievements are impressive enough without adding legends. He was born in 1856 in Smiljan, in what is now Croatia, and moved to the United States in 1884. His work in electrical engineering became especially important during the development of alternating-current power systems. Read more
Google announced Android Studio at Google I/O on May 15, 2013 as a replacement for the Eclipse + ADT (Android Development Tools) plugin combination that had been the official Android development environment since Android’s first SDK release in 2008. The preview (version 0.1) was available immediately for download; Android Studio 1.0 stable shipped on December 8, 2014. The choice of JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition as the base was a departure from Eclipse, which Google had promoted since 2008 but which suffered well-known performance problems under heavy Android project loads — long startup times, memory pressure on projects with many modules, and frequent crashes under refactoring operations. Read more
Google announced Blink on April 3, 2013 as a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit — the rendering engine Google had used in Chrome since its initial release on September 2, 2008. WebKit itself had origins in KHTML, the rendering engine developed by the KDE project for the Konqueror browser, which Apple forked in January 2003 to create Safari. Chrome had adopted WebKit because it was already mature, standards-compliant, and open-source, but Chrome immediately diverged from Safari’s architecture by using V8 (Google’s own JavaScript engine, developed separately) rather than WebKit’s JavaScriptCore, and by implementing a multi-process model in which each browser tab ran in a separate sandboxed renderer process. This multi-process architecture — fundamental to Chrome’s stability and security properties — created permanent architectural tension with WebKit, which had been designed for a single-process model. Chrome engineers working in the shared WebKit repository found themselves maintaining complex compatibility layers and workarounds to support Chrome’s multi-process design in a codebase whose primary consumers (Apple Safari) used a different architecture. Opera simultaneously announced it was also abandoning its long-running Presto rendering engine in favor of Blink, becoming the third major browser to share a Chromium-based engine alongside Chrome and the various Chromium-derived browsers already in existence. Read more
The Raspberry Pi is one year old. It launched in February 2012, and in the time since, about a million boards have been sold — far more than the Raspberry Pi Foundation expected when they planned the initial production run of ten thousand. Read more
Samsung announced the Galaxy S4 on March 14, 2013, at a theatrical event at Radio City Music Hall in New York — 3,000 people attended — and launched it globally in April 2013, priced around $649 unlocked ($199–$249 on two-year contracts in the US). The S4 had a 5-inch Full HD (1920×1080) Super AMOLED display at 441 PPI, up from the Galaxy S3’s 4.8-inch 306 PPI display. Samsung shipped two different chipsets by region: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 (quad-core 1.9 GHz) in North America, Europe with LTE, and several Asian markets, and a Samsung Exynos 5410 (octa-core, but only 4 active at once using big.LITTLE) in other markets. Both had 2GB RAM. Read more
Canonical announced Ubuntu for Phones on January 2, 2013, with a promotional video and detailed specification document. The interface relied entirely on edge gestures: swiping right from the left edge revealed a launcher bar, swiping left from the right edge exposed a notifications panel, swiping up from the bottom edge revealed app controls, and swiping down from the top edge showed settings and quick toggles. There was no physical home button in the design; all navigation was gestural. Canonical intended to ship Ubuntu Phone on hardware in 2013 but the first commercially available devices — the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition — did not reach the market until February and November 2015 respectively. Read more
For most of my life, a digital file and a physical object have belonged to different worlds. A document can become a printout. A photograph can become a print. But a bracket, a gear, a custom case, or a replacement part for something discontinued — these required a factory, a workshop, or a person with specialized tools. Read more
Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Graph Search on January 15, 2013 at an event at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, releasing it in a limited US English beta. Graph Search was led by Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen — Rasmussen was the co-founder and original engineer of Google Maps (sold to Google 2004) and creator of Google Wave (launched 2009, discontinued 2010), who joined Facebook in 2010. The system accepted natural-language queries structured around Facebook’s Open Graph data model: “Photos of my friends taken in Paris,” “Friends of friends who work at Google who went to Harvard,” “Restaurants in New York my friends have visited,” and “People who like The Dark Knight and Star Wars.” The queries were parsed into structured graph traversals over Facebook’s social graph — nodes (people, pages, photos, places, events, groups) connected by typed edges (likes, tagged-in, lives-in, works-at, attended, friend-of) — rather than keyword-based text retrieval. Bing web search was integrated as a fallback when queries lacked sufficient social data to produce useful results. Read more
Google announced Google Compute Engine in preview at Google I/O in June 2012 and expanded it to a limited general availability in December 2012, removing the invitation requirement and allowing any Google account to create virtual machines. Compute Engine launched with standard Linux VM types (n1-standard-1 through n1-standard-16, up to 16 vCPUs and 60 GB RAM), persistent disks, and snapshots for backup and clone — directly comparable to Amazon EC2 instance types that Amazon had been selling since 2006. Google priced standard instances approximately 10% below Amazon’s equivalent pricing at launch. Read more
Windows RT devices went on sale October 26, 2012 alongside Windows 8, led by Microsoft’s Surface RT ($499 for 32GB, $599 for 64GB, with the Type Cover keyboard sold separately at $129). ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung also launched Windows RT tablets the same day. All ran on ARM processors — primarily the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core at 1.3 GHz in most devices including Surface RT — rather than the x86 CPUs that had defined Windows PCs since the early 1980s. The ARM chips offered better power efficiency: Surface RT quoted ten hours of battery life vs. roughly five to six hours on contemporary x86 Windows 8 ultrabooks. Read more
Microsoft released Windows 8 on October 26, 2012 at $119.99 (Windows 8) and $199.99 (Windows 8 Pro) retail, with a $39.99 upgrade promotion for Windows XP/Vista/7 users available through January 31, 2013. The launch was the most radical Windows interface change since Windows 95: the Start menu was removed entirely and replaced by the Start Screen — a full-screen grid of live tiles that updated dynamically with app content (news headlines, weather conditions, email previews, calendar appointments). The Start Screen and all “Metro” (later “Modern UI”) apps ran in a full-screen tiled environment designed for touch input, contrasting with the traditional desktop environment that remained present as a separate mode. Switching between them required either a hot corner gesture, keyboard shortcut, or Start button click — on a non-touch laptop or desktop PC, this context switch felt unnatural, as the Start Screen’s large tile targets and swiping gestures were sized for finger input but controlled with a mouse cursor. Read more
Apple announced the iPhone 5 on September 12, 2012 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, with units available for purchase September 21. It was the first iPhone to support LTE (4G Long Term Evolution) cellular connectivity, the first with a 4-inch display, and the first to use the Lightning connector. The hardware design was notably thin at 7.6 mm (versus iPhone 4S at 9.3 mm) and 112 grams — Apple’s marketing characterized it as “the thinnest and lightest iPhone ever.” The 4-inch Retina display (1136×640 at 326 ppi) maintained the same 326 ppi pixel density as the iPhone 4/4S while adding 176 rows of pixels, switching from a 3:2 to a 16:9 aspect ratio that matched the aspect ratio of widescreen video — meaning iPhone 5 could display 1080p HD video content without letterboxing on the sides. The Apple A6 SoC was Apple’s first processor using custom-designed CPU cores (codenamed Swift) rather than standard ARM Cortex implementations licensed from ARM Holdings, clocked at 1.3 GHz in a dual-core configuration, delivering approximately 2× CPU and 2× GPU performance versus the A5 in iPhone 4S. The A6 packaged 1 GB LPDDR2 RAM and a PowerVR SGX543MP3 GPU. LTE was supported through a Qualcomm MDM9615 modem, which for the first time combined GSM/UMTS and CDMA radio support in a single chip, enabling Apple to consolidate what had previously been separate hardware variants for AT&T and Verizon/Sprint into a smaller number of antenna configurations. Read more
