Month: March 2022

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

So you’ve heard about mechanical keyboards and you want to learn more.

Sure, a standard membrane keyboard will get the job done, but the long-lasting keys and trademark tactile responsiveness of mechanical keyboards offer a premium experience that many people swear by. If you’ve ever remarked with dismay about a keyboard’s “mushiness,” a mechanical keyboard might be just the thing you need.

Every key in a mechanical keyboard has its own switch, and registering an input requires pushing a plastic stem inside the switch down, with resistance coming from the switch’s spring. In contrast, membrane keyboards (also known as rubber dome keyboards) use thin layers of plastic underneath the keys. Pressing a key sends a dome-shaped piece through a hole in the membrane, creating a circuit and sending an input to the PC. While membrane keyboards are typically thinner, quieter, more spill-resistant, and cheaper to make, they can feel flat and make it difficult to know if you’ve pressed a key or not. Mechanical switches offer way more physical feedback.

Enlarge / A 13-year-old celebrates getting the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 13, 2021. (credit: Getty | JOSEPH PREZIOSO )

So-called “natural immunity” against COVID-19 has always been a dodgy argument for avoiding vaccination during the pandemic. But amid omicron, natural immunity is clearly rubbish.

Unvaccinated people who have recovered from an infection with the omicron coronavirus variant are left with paltry levels of neutralizing antibodies against omicron and almost no neutralizing antibodies against any of five other coronavirus variants, including delta. People who were vaccinated before getting an omicron infection, on the other hand, have strong protection against all five variants, and they are among the highest levels of neutralizing antibodies seen against omicron.

That’s all according to a new study surveying neutralizing antibody profiles in people who have all recovered from an omicron infection, with or without pre-existing immunity. The study was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine by a team of Austrian researchers. The researchers were led by virologist Janine Kimpel of the Medical University of Innsbruck.

Enlarge / The back of the iPhone 13. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple is working on a way for users to acquire iPhones as part of a subscrption service, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The service could launch as soon as this year, but it could also arrive in early 2023.

The new offering would fit neatly into Apple’s ongoing efforts to emphasize recurring subscription revenue. That model has worked well for big tech companies like Microsoft, which earn most of their revenue from subscriptions, albeit mostly not hardware ones.

Microsoft does offer a hardware subscription for the Xbox Series S console, though, and that subscription might be similar to what we would see from Apple with the iPhone. Users pay for an Xbox in installments with a flat monthly fee that also includes online and software subscription services like Xbox Game Pass.

Enlarge / Microsoft’s DirectStorage API makes a measurable, if minor, difference when it comes to loading PC games. (credit: Luminous Productions via The Verge)

Microsoft’s DirectStorage API promises to speed up game-load times, both on the Xbox Series X/S and on Windows PCs (where Microsoft recently exited its developer-preview phase). One of the first games to demonstrate the benefits of DirectStorage on the PC is Square Enix’s Forspoken, which was shown off by Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono at GDC this week. As reported by The Verge, Ono said that, with a fast NVMe SSD and DirectStorage support, some scenes in Forspoken could load in as little as one second. That is certainly a monstrous jump from the days of waiting for a PlayStation 2 to load giant open-world maps from a DVD.

As a demonstration of DirectStorage, though, Forspoken‘s numbers are a mixed bag. On the one hand, the scenes Ono demonstrated do clearly demonstrate DirectStorage loading scenes more quickly on the same hardware, compared to the legacy Win32 API—from 2.6 seconds to 2.2 seconds in one scene, and from 2.4 seconds to 1.9 seconds in another. Forspoken demonstrated performance improvements on older SATA-based SSDs as well, despite being marketed as a feature that will primarily benefit NVMe drives—dropping from 5.0 to 4.6 seconds in one scene, and from 4.1 to 3.4 seconds in another. Speed improvements for SATA SSDs have been limited for the better part of a decade now because the SATA interface itself (rather than the SSD controller or NAND flash chips) has been holding them back. So eking out any kind of measurable improvement for those drives is noteworthy.  

On the other hand, Ono’s demo showed that game-load time wasn’t improving as dramatically as the raw I/O speeds would suggest. On an NVMe SSD, I/O speeds increased from 2,862MB/s using Win32 to 4,829MB/s using DirectStorage—nearly a 70 percent increase. But the load time for the scene decreased from 2.1 to 1.9 seconds. That’s a decrease which wouldn’t be noticeable even if you were trying to notice it.