Hardware

China’s smartphone shipments slumped 23% in Jan-Aug • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apple, China, chips, Gadgets, Hardware, Huawei, iPhone, oppo, Phone, semiconductors, shipment, XiaomiNo Comments

Smartphone shipment is often seen as the bellwether of China’s consumer spending, and right now, the picture isn’t very rosy. The world’s largest market for smartphones shipped 175.1 million handsets between January and August, marking a sharp 22.9% decline year-over-year, according to research from a state-backed institution. In August alone, shipments dropped 21.9% year-over-year. The global smartphone market as a whole is experiencing a slowdown, logging a 9% decline in the second quarter due to a mix of challenges including a COVID-struck economy, inflation, and deceleration following years of frantic growth. China’s growing consumer appetite obviously played a big part in driving the boom, and now that the world’s second-largest economy is hitting a speed bump, the smartphone industry is inevitably taking a hit. The era of economic miracles is coming to a close in China. On Monday, official data reported a 3.9% GDP growth rate from July to September, which beat forecasts but was way below the double digits that propelled the country’s economy forward for three decades. China is not only the world’s largest market for hanset users but is also its largest phone producer, with home-grown brands like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi rising over the years to rival Apple and Samsung. These domestic phone markers began seeking overseas expansion well before their home market start cooling down. And they’ve successfully carved out their international market share and have in recent years consistently shared the top five spots alongside Apple and Samsung. The smartphone industry is notoriously cut-throat with modest margins, so it wasn’t unsurprising when Xiaomi and Oppo, which are long known for selling budget phones, started offering higher-end models in recent years. Huawei established a strong presence in the premium handset space before the U.S. cut off its supply of critical chipsets and key Android services. Having seen how overdependence on advanced U.S. technologies and geopolitical tensions has wrecked Huawei’s revenues, Oppo and the likes are rushing to work on their own smartphone processors. The need for Chinese firms to have their own high-end chips is getting dire as the Biden administration hit China with possibly the strictest export controls earlier this month. Analysts are still parsing the impact of the policy, but initial observation shows that the new rules will not only restrict Chinese companies’ access to high-end U.S. chips but will also bar their access to chip-making equipment, which will hobble the country’s ability to develop such advanced technologies.

Meta will release a new consumer grade VR headset next year • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Hardware, meta, Quest 2, Virtual realityNo Comments

A follow-up to the Quest 2, Meta is launching another consumer grade virtual reality headset next year. The company announced this during today’s Q3 earnings call, in which the company marked yet another $3 billion quarterly loss to its metaverse investments. But CFO David Wehner says that some of this continued cost can be explained via Meta’s continued investment in new hardware development, including another consumer-grade headset that will come out next year. Just weeks ago, Meta unveiled the Quest Pro, a $1,499 headset that is targeted toward power users, especially those who will use it to work. But existing headsets like the Quest 2 are aimed to immerse average people in the company’s dreams for the metaverse. Right now, the Quest 2 retails for $399, but this summer, Meta hiked the price by $100 to try to make up for lost costs. We don’t know much more about Meta’s new headset, aside from the fact that… it’s in the works! But in the lead up to the Quest Pro, previously referred to as “Project Cambria,” Meta dropped a whole lot of breadcrumbs to hype up the powerful headset, so it’s only a matter of time before we learn more. “There’s still a long road ahead to build the next computing platform. But we’re clearly doing leading work here. This is a massive undertaking and it’s often gonna take a few versions of each product before they become mainstream,” Zuckerberg said on today’s earnings call. “But I think that our work here is going to be of historic importance and create the foundation for an entirely new way that we will interact with each other and blend technology into our lives, as well as the foundation for the long term of our business.”

Drones in cities are a bad idea • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in delivery drones, drones, Hardware, Opinion, Robotics & AI, TransportationNo Comments

It’s year five, or maybe ten, of “drones are going to revolutionize transport” and so far, we’ve got very little to show for it. Maybe it’s time to put these foolish ambitions to rest and focus on where this technology could actually do some good, rather than pad out a billionaire’s bottom line or let the rich skip traffic. The promise of drone deliveries, drone taxis, and personal drone attendants has never sat, or rather floated, right with me. There’s so little to be gained, while braving so much liability and danger, and necessitating so much invention and testing. Why is anyone even pursuing this? I suspect it is the Jetsons-esque technotopianism instilled in so many of us from birth: It’s only a matter of time and effort before we have the flying cars, subliminal learning pillows, and robot housekeepers we deserve, right? It feels like because we have things that fly, and things that can navigate autonomously, we should be able to put those things together and make delivery drones and air taxis. Just have to wait for the right genius kid building the future out of their garage, with the help of your friendly neighborhood VCs. Of course it’s not quite that easy. And although the Jetsons mentality explains our acceptance of the development of these technologies — unlike others that we disapprove of for their impracticability, cost, or ethics — it doesn’t really explain why a company like Amazon is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue it. The answer there, fortunately, is as clear as why Amazon does anything. To paraphrase Dr Johnson: “Sir, no man but a blockhead ever [spent a decade trying to build an autonomous drone delivery network], except for money.” That’s certainly the case with drone delivery. Amazon has made no secret of its intention to take over the logistics and delivery industry bite by bite, partly through sideways subsidy from other parts of its lucrative, mutually buttressed businesses, and partly with a punishing franchise model that offloads risk and liability onto contractors. That said, the end goal is, as in its warehouses, to replace those flesh and blood workers with tireless automatons. The best evidence for this is that Amazon’s warehouses already treat workers as if they are components in a machine, so it’s just a matter of swapping out a worn out part with another, more reliable part that doesn’t try to unionize. Same with delivery. High hopes Image Credits: Amazon But in the last-mile world, drones are kind of a funny idea. Certainly it has its merits: many packages are small and light and a drone could skip traffic or travel in a straight line over residential blocks to cut hours off delivery times. But that’s before you reckon with any of the actual needs or restrictions of the logistics world. To begin with, drones wouldn’t even cover the last mile — more like the last few hundred meters. Part of the reason for this is regulatory; it’s extremely unlikely that Amazon could procure a permit to fly its drones over all the private property in a city. The liability is just too damn high. Sure, you can do some sweetheart test markets in a random suburb, but good luck convincing urban areas to let commercial drones infest their skies at all hours. So what are they going to do, fly along the streets? High enough that they don’t hit any wires or trees? Carrying a 1-pound package? Only at certain hours? It isn’t particularly efficient! And then, the first time one of those packages or drones drops out of the sky and cracks a windshield next to a grade school, those drones are done in that city, and probably every other city. Done! Even if they could guarantee no accidents, no one wants those things flying around their neighborhood. Best case scenario is: fucking annoying. Drones are pretty loud, and it’s not even the kind of loud you can get used to, like the dull roar of a freeway a few blocks off. No, drones make the most annoying sound in the world short of Jeff Bezos’s laugh. Small ones, big ones, they all sound horrible. There are advances to be brought to bear here, but really, when you have 4 to 8 little rotors spinning at however many thousand RPMs and moving the necessary air downwards to lift a couple dozen pounds of body and payload, you tend to create a certain amount of truly obnoxious noise. That’s just the physics of the thing. If we could make helicopters quiet we would have done so by now. Even if we allow these drones dominion over the air and let them fly with impunity, they’re laughably limited. Where do packages go normally? In a big clearing in your building’s courtyard? On the roof? No, they go to the lobby, which locks, or perhaps in a parcel box… which locks. As commerce has moved online, parcel delivery has skyrocketed, and so has parcel theft. Imagine if a package made a really loud whining noise wherever it went then was guaranteed to be left out in the open somewhere. It’s a really frictionless experience for the criminals, at least. Image Credits: Walmart A drone can’t ring a doorbell or buzz your apartment (unless you hook it into your smart home infrastructure — best of luck with that). It doesn’t have a key to the lobby. It can’t ask you for a signature. Cities are diverse and complex physical environments with a wide variety of obstacles, methods, and requirements for making a package go from here to there in a safe and satisfactory way. We haven’t figured out how any robot can successfully deliver something without the recipient coming out to get it immediately, and doing it from the sky is even harder. Air-dropping is one of the worst possible ways (outside of combat) to deliver anything, only slightly better than yeeting it over the fence — admittedly common,

Nothing’s third device is a pair of pared down earbuds • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in earbuds, Gaming, Hardware, nothing, nothing stickNo Comments

Seems like there’s little room for surprises left in the industry, these days – and not just because of all the leaks. Like Google with its Pixel line, Nothing has moved away from the standard model of revealing a products in one fell swoop. Instead, it’s taken to shaping its own news cycle through slow, official teasers. With its third – and latest – device, the company gave us practically everything but date and price. This morning, founder Carl Pei officially unveiled the product. Like, officially, officially. The arrival of the Nothing Ear (stick) finds the company returning to the groundwork laid last summer by its first product, the Nothing Ear (1). The two immediately clear distinctions here are the new “lipstick-style” case that gives the product its parenthetical and move to a “half in-ear” design, versus its predecessors’ silicone tips. Image Credits: Nothing The (stick) isn’t replacing the (1), mind you. The pitch is instead focused on people who prefer the more traditional design, a la the AirPods vs. AirPods Pro. I’m not among them, but don’t blame you if you are. Everybody’s body’s different. The company says the design was “tested on over 100 people.” Otherwise, the buds (the stems, really) look more or less like the other product. Certainly no complains there. The Ear (1) promised 24/34 hours of battery life, all told, depending on active noise canceling and other usage. The (stick) is rated at 29 hours with the case and the big caveat that active noise canceling isn’t an option here (also like the standard Airpods). Still, if they can duplicate the sound of the (1) with their 12.6mm driver, you can justify the $99 ($149 CAD) price tag pretty easily. Image Credits: Nothing On that note, Pei took to Twitter last week to note that the price of the (1) had coincidentally increased from $99 to $149, owing to “an increase in costs.” Certainly the cost of producing devices at scale has jumped recently, thanks to supply chain shortest and inflation. The founder added that the company has sold “almost” 600,000 pairs of its first product. Sales for the (stick) open November 4 in 40-odd countries, including the U.S., U.K. and Canada. They will also be available at Nothing’s first store in London, naturally.

Say goodbye to the notch? OTI raises $55M for technology to remove screen obstructions • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apple, Hardware, LG, oled, Samsung, StartupsNo Comments

OTI Lumionics, an eye-catching startup out of Canada that has been working on display materials for device makers to create uninterrupted, full-view displays on their devices without the need for “notches” or cut-outs to account for camera technology — and whose name has been connected with Apple as a key supplier for a future notch-free iPhone — has raised $55 million in funding. The money will be used both to take its technology into production with a number of partners, and to develop a secondary line of operations that was borne out of the first: OTI credits the breakthrough that it had with its own work on display materials to a “quantum and AI-driven computational platform” that it built itself, and so the plan will be to productize that as well to help other technologists and engineers solve their own thorny material science conundrums. The funding is coming from a mix of strategic and financial backers that speak to its current business funnel, too: it includes LG Technology Ventures, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, UDC Ventures (the venture arm of United Display Corporation), Anzu Partners and the Family Office of Lee Lau — LG, Samsung and UDC being some of the biggest names in display technologies. Areas where the display materials are likely to make an appearance in coming years include smartphones, tablets, laptops, AR and VR headset makers, televisions and potentially automotive applications. OLED screens have changed the game when it comes to connected devices, literally and figuratively, with brighter and more contrasting colors, and better responsiveness that all improve the experience in visually-intensive experiences like gaming and much more. But one of the shortcomings in their structure is that when they are used, typically in full-screen scenarios, manufacturers have had to create “notches” or other dark spaces to share that real estate with cameras and other technology needed for features like facial recognition, a challenge that becomes even more compounded when considering how and where newer technology, like transparent screens, might be used in the future (automotive windshields, for example, is one area where obstructing the viewing space would not work at all). It also means that there have been limitations in introducing features like touch ID on the smooth screens. OTI’s breakthrough is something that it calls CPM Patterning, a new material and approach that allows for the cathode display technology to essentially be knit together with the sensor technology in a seamless design, so that the screen essentially becomes one with the functionalities of the cameras or other sensors, which it says also produces a more efficient process that uses less power. Michael Helander, the CEO and president of OTI (pictured, above), said that the process of coming up with the material was something that OTI could not have done without building and using its own quantum computing-based algorithms — the platform that it is looking to productize alongside this specific material. Helander said the platform runs using “classic hardware” with some compute from third-party quantum companies like D-Wave. Beyond coming up with the design, the company has already gone through the process of getting the production method tested and qualified by manufacturers, meaning that one typically long step in bringing something new to the market has already been passed, and that OTI’s technology is “production ready.” And if the name OTI rings a bell, you might recall that it was named as a key partner of Samsung’s in a report earlier this year, subsequently picked up by others, that alleged the two were working on building screens using the technology for a future generation of Apple’s iPhone. This is a long-play game. In an interview, Helander would not comment on customers or where we might see OTI’s technology in action first, he did say that it was unlikely to be making its way to consumers’ hands for some years still. He added that although hardware companies are known to build and acquire IP technology all the time, there is an interesting opportunity here for more nimble startups that are focusing on and fixing very specific problems. A company like Samsung, he pointed out, has made a few acquisitions of material science startups, but “the challenge is that because of the timelines and work involved, if one device maker buys from one manufacturer [but not another], or changes its strategy, then the whole supply chain could shift. It’s a lot of investment and it’s a risk, so you see a lot of cases where display competitors will co-invest in supporting smaller companies, and even collaborating,” as LG, Samsung and UDC are doing here with OTI. “Even though they would like to have total exclusivity, supporting them together can be beneficial for everyone.” Robert McIntyre, LG Technology Ventures’ MD, said that the display material alone sealed the deal for investing in OTI, with the platform opening the door to more possible collaborations in the future. “OTI at its core has a materials discovery engine that we think is uniquely powerful, using AI and quantum computing to run simulations to arrive at material endpoints that were previously undiscovered,” he said. “The unique thing about the company is that it realizes the importance of bringing applications to market.”

Apple exec says future iPhones will comply with EU’s USB-C mandate • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apple, Apps, Hardware, iPhone, USB-CNo Comments

There has been a lot of consumer demand and regulatory push on Apple to change the iPhone’s charging port from the lightning connector to USB-C. Earlier this month, the European Parliament voted in favor of the legislation that mandated phonemakers to adopt USB-C connectors from 2024 — increasing pressure on the tech giant to make the switch. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior Vice President of marketing, confirmed on Tuesday that the company will comply with EU’s ruling, but stopped short of sharing any other detail. Speaking at Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live event, Joswiak didn’t seem pleased with how governments across the world are approaching this issue. A decade ago when the EU was pushing for micro USB connectors the firm had a disagreement with them, he said. While the regulatory body’s aim was to reduce the type of power adaptors consumers were using to make it easier on them, Apple approached the problem differently, he mentioned. Apple debuted the lightning connector almost 10 years ago and it has been the primary connector for many devices including the iPhone, the iPad, and Airpods. Over the last couple of years, Apple has launched iPads using USB-C as the primary connector — including the latest baseline iPad. “…we got to a better place which is power adapters with detachable cables. All of them being USB-A or USB-C and you choose the cable which is appropriate for your device. That allowed over a billion people to have that (lightning) connector and to be able to use what they have already and not be disrupted and cause a bunch of e-waste,” Joswiak said. The EU is not the only region pushing for a common charger for mobile phones. In June, Democratic senators including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ed Markey sent an open letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo pushing the US to follow the EU’s steps. Other countries like Brazil and India are considering a common connector rule.

Ahead of launching its third product, Nothing announces a brick-and-mortar store • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Carl Pei, Gadgets, Hardware, nothing, storeNo Comments

Nothing today announced the upcoming launch of a brick-and-mortar retail store in London’s Soho district. The store will, of course, carry Nothing. In a less literal sense, one wonders precisely what the store will carry, given that the hardware startup has officially launched two products, with a third being revealed soon. GM Ryan Latham says in a release, “Opening our first store in the UK is a huge milestone for Nothing. Following the successful launch of Ear (1) and Phone (1), it’s the perfect time to shake things up again and offer our community a space where they can engage with each other and our products. To do this in our home market, in the heart of Soho — the home of innovative design — makes perfect sense.” Latham also notes that the shop will be down the road from a Supreme store, which certainly speaks to founder Carl Pei’s vision of creating a company that is as much fashion as it is consumer tech. And speaking from experience stepping into boutiques in New York’s own Soho, I can attest to the fact that the virtually empty luxury storefront is certainly a thing. The company is also, fittingly, playing on the sort of artificial scarcity product launch that has been a driving force in sneaker culture. Specifically, the store will make available 100 numbered Ear (stick)s — still figuring out the proper pluralization there; Ears (stick) or Ear (sticks), perhaps? — the upcoming headphone product Nothing has been teasing out for a few months now. Non-numbered versions of the product will also be available. A sign in the store’s window featuring a blown up Ear (stick) notes that it will open “before Christmas.”

Google Pixel 7 Pro’s camera has a fatal, really dumb, totally avoidable flaw • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Camera phone, Google, Google Pixel, Google Pixel 7 Pro, Hardware, OpinionNo Comments

A lot has been written about how incredible Google Pixel 7 Pro’s camera is. The camera itself gets no beef from me. Last week at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Brian and I were gawking in amazement at how well the 5x optical zoom lens does, for example. We had plenty of opportunities to contrast and compare. During Disrupt, I was shooting with about $6,000 worth of camera equipment and as my files were downloading from my mirrorless camera’s SD cards, I snapped this photo: Photo taken at ZebethMedia Disrupt using the Google Pixel 7 Pro’s 5x optical zoom lens. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia Granted, my dedicated Sony A7r3 with a 70-200 f/2.8 lens is still capable of taking better photos; a giant hunking piece of glass and a full-frame sensor is hard to beat: Photo taken at ZebethMedia Disrupt with a Sony A7r3 camera and a Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom lens. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia But let’s be clear — for the purposes of shooting pictures for the web, in good light, the Pixel 7 Pro gives it a pretty serious run for its money, at a fraction of the cost. As soon as I saw the design of the Pixel 7 Pro (and, for that matter, the 7, which has the same stupid gaffe), however, I spotted a pretty fantastically stupid design flaw. That beautiful metal front surrounding the lenses does a great job for marketing purposes. If I point my Pixel 7 Pro at you, there’s no way you’ll mistake it for an iPhone, a Pixel 6 or any other camera on the market. Well done, Google’s industrial designers, for creating an eminently recognizable phone. No doubt, it’ll be a conversation starter for a lot of folks. The problem with adding any light or reflective surfaces, however, is that it becomes exponentially harder to take photos through reflective surfaces: windows, primarily. As a photographer, I wouldn’t generally recommend that you shoot through glass, but let’s be honest; sometimes we’re in a car, on a plane or in a building, and we might want to shoot a time-lapse or a photo or two. It’s a pretty common use case for most photography applications, which makes it all the harder to grok why Google went out of its way to make that experience worse. This really is a Camera Design 101 choice of epic stupidity. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia I have a number of friends who have vinyl cutters, and the solution is simple: a small strip of matte black vinyl covering up the high-gloss reflective surface on the front of the phone. I might be the only person in the world who cares about this, so it feels silly even to complain, but damn it, Google Pixel is positioning itself as the best camera phone out there, and this is such a fantastically n00b mistake that I’m truly flabbergasted at how the hardware giant could make such a dumb misstep, after getting it right for so long. I imagine there will soon be an aftermarket niche for stickers covering up the chrome, and I hope Google doesn’t made a mistake this silly again in the future.

Microsoft’s Windows Dev Kit 2023 lets developers tap AI processors on laptops • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in AI, Apps, Hardware, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Robotics & AI, WindowsNo Comments

At its Build conference in May, Microsoft debuted Project Volterra, a device powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform designed to let developers explore “AI scenarios” via Qualcomm’s Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit. Today, Volterra — now called Windows Dev Kit 2023 — officially goes on sale, priced at $599 and available from the Microsoft Store in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. Here’s how Microsoft describes it: With Windows Dev Kit 2023, developers will be able to bring their entire app development process onto one compact device, giving them everything they need to build Windows apps for Arm, on Arm. As previously announced, the Windows Dev Kit 2023 contains a dedicated AI processor, called the Hexagon processor, complimented by an Arm-based chip — the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 — both supplied by Qualcomm. It enables developers to build Arm-native and AI-powered apps alongside and with tools such as Visual Studio (version 17.4 runs natively on Arm), .NET 7 (which has Arm-specific performance improvements), VSCode, Microsoft Office and Teams and machine learning frameworks including PyTorch and TensorFlow. Microsoft’s Windows Dev Kit 2023, which packs an Arm processor plus an AI accelerator chip. Image Credits: Microsoft Here’s the full list of specs: 32GB LPDDR4x RAM 512GB fast NVMe Storage Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform RJ45 for ethernet 3 x USB-A ports 2 x USB-C ports Mini DisplayPort (which supports up to three external monitors, including two at 4K 60Hz) Bluetooth 5.1 and Wi-Fi 6 The Windows Dev Kit 2023 arrives alongside support in Windows for neural processing units (NPU), or dedicated chips tailored for AI- and machine learning-specific workloads. Dedicated AI chips, which speed up AI processing while reducing the impact on battery, have become common in mobile devices like smartphones. But as apps such as AI-powered image upscalers and image generators come into wider use, manufacturers have been adding such chips to their laptops (see Microsoft’s own Surface Pro X and 5G Surface Pro 9). The Windows Dev Kit 2023 taps into the recently released Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK for Windows, which provides tools for converting and executing AI models on Snapdragon-based Windows devices in addition to APIs for targeting distinct processor cores with different power and performance profiles. Using it and the Neural Processing SDK, developers can execute, debug and analyze the performance of deep neural networks on Windows devices with Snapdragon hardware as well as integrate the networks into apps and other code. The tooling benefits laptops built on the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 system-on-chip, like the Acer Spin 7 and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. Engineered to compete against Apple’s Arm-based silicon, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3’s AI accelerator can be used to apply AI processing to photos and video. Microsoft and Qualcomm are betting the use cases expand with the launch of the Windows Dev Kit 2023; Microsoft for its part has started to leverage AI accelerators in Windows 11 to power features like background noise removal. Image Credits: Microsoft In a blog post shared with ZebethMedia ahead of today’s announcement, Microsoft notes that developers will “need to install the toolchain as needed for their workloads on Windows Dev Kit 2023” and that some tools and services “may require additional licenses, fees or both.” “More apps, tools, frameworks and packages are being ported to natively target Windows on Arm and will be arriving over the coming months,” the post continues. “In the meantime, thanks to Windows 11’s powerful emulation technology, developers will be able to run many unmodified x64 and x86 apps and tools on their Windows Dev Kit.” It remains to be seen whether the Windows Dev Kit reverses the fortune of Windows on Arm devices, which have largely failed to take off. Historically, they’ve been less powerful than Intel-based devices while suffering from compatibility issues and sky-high pricing (the Surface Pro X cost more than $1,500 at launch). Emulated app performance on the first few Arm-powered Windows devices tended to be poor and certain games wouldn’t launch unless they used a particular graphics library, while drivers for hardware only worked if they were designed for Windows on Arm specifically. The Windows on Arm situation has improved as of late, thanks to more powerful hardware (like the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3) and Microsoft’s App Assurance program to ensure that business and enterprise apps work on Arm. But the ecosystem has a long way to go, still, with Unity — one of the most popular game engines today — only this morning announcing a commitment to allow developers to target Windows on Arm devices to get native performance.

Pantheon Design alleviates supply chain uncertainty with factory-grade 3D printing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 22, 2022Posted in 3d printing, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Hardware, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

In the midst of the pandemic, Pantheon Design, a maker of industrial 3D printers from Vancouver, BC, suddenly found itself getting orders from factories in the Midwest, the center of heavy industries. The reason? These manufacturers were having a hard time getting parts out of China as COVID-19 restrictions in the country squeezed global supply chains. One of Pantheon Design’s e-mobility customers waited 18 months before its injection molds, which are used for producing parts, arrived from China. If your electric vehicle or home appliance order is taking longer to arrive, chances are port closures and lockdowns in the factory of the world are messing up your supplier’s production timeline. For a long time, 3D printers were too expensive, slow, and short-lived to be economically viable for manufacturers, observes Bob Cao, co-founder and CEO of Pantheon Design, as he speaks to ZebethMedia as one of the Disrupt Startup Battlefield 200 companies. Many of the 3D printing startups that secure big VC checks are run by smart people who have never been in a real factory, which is hot and smelly, says the entrepreneur. “So their machines break down all the time.” “They make the product for prototyping, but they try to sell the idea for manufacturing,” he adds. Cao’s founder story follows a familiar pattern seen among engineers: five years ago, he and his co-founders bought a bunch of 3D printers to build products for industrial customers, but the third-party devices weren’t meeting their expectations, so they set out to build their own. Parts created by Pantheon’s 3d printer. The result is the HS3 3D printer, which is a sleek-looking cube measuring 300mm on each side and weighing 46.7 kilograms, featuring black anodized aluminum, which has been treated to achieve a durable finish. The device is able to print carbon fiber parts that are as sturdy as metal and 5-10 times faster than other options on the market thanks to the startup’s patented methods, according to Cao. Moreover, it’s able to do it at a competitive cost even in comparison to Chinese suppliers. The startup has sold 40 HS3 units — all assembled in-house in Vancouver with parts manufactured in Canada — since starting shipping the machine nine months ago. Each printer costs $15,000, but the bigger chunk of the company’s revenues comes from selling filaments. Also called the “ink” for 3D printers, filaments range from $50-150 a kilo, which brings a nice 90% profit margin, and most of the company’s customers spend about $500-800 a month on them. Pantheon Design has raised $800,000 in funding from a mix of investors in Canada and the U.S., including the Boston-based accelerator Techstars. The company is also buoyed by revenues it generated from its previous business of printing products and prototypes for clients, and two of its proudest moments include printing entire concept motorcycles for Honda and all the sci-fi props in the Netflix film The Adam Project.