By Malcolm Owen
Tuesday, November 05, 2019, 10:31 am PT (01:31 pm ET)

Apple is set to ship between 20 million and 30 million units of the ‘iPhone SE 2’ in calendar year 2020 following its launch, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts, with the successor to the iPhone SE thought to be using a motherboard similar to the SLP version used in the iPhone 11.

The original iPhone SE

Rumors and speculation has Apple working to produce a follow-up to the popular iPhone SE. According to a research note from TF Securities’ analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the tentatively-titled ‘iPhone SE 2‘ is expected to sell about the same volumes that the iPhone SE did at its launch.

Kuo believes the ‘iPhone SE 2’ will sell at least 20 million units in its first calendar year of availability. Given the potential popularity of the device, Kuo also offers an optimistic prediction of up to 30 million units, if all goes well for Apple, though this is if Apple does indeed launch the model in the first half of the year as anticipated.

The original iPhone SE sold in the region of 30 million units in the first year of availability, putting the second-generation version slightly behind the first. However, the ‘iPhone SE 2’ also has to compete against the iPhone 11 as the cheapest model of the current generation, as well as the iPhone XS and XR from last year, as well as a relatively mature iPhone market.

According to the note seen by AppleInsider, Kuo passed comment on some of the components expected to be used in the model. Kuo is expecting the use of a ten-layer Substrate-like PCB (SLP) for the motherboard, the same technology used by the iPhone 11’s version, albeit a cheaper version. It is believed the choice of motherboard will help some existing iPhone supply chain companies, including Pending Holdings, AT&S, and Xinxing, due to the use of SLP.

Earlier notes from Kuo suggested the iPhone SE sibling will cost $399 when it ships at the end of March, with mass production expected to start in January.

The model is predicted to include the same 4.7-inch display as the iPhone 8, as well as take some of its physical design, but combine it with the A13 processor used in the iPhone 11 series, along with 3 gigabytes of application RAM. The model is also thought to use an updated antenna design that uses Liquid Crystal Polymer, but the need to keep the price down also makes Kuo believe it will continue to use Touch ID and not Face ID.

Today, we’re excited to launch what’s next for the 2-1 category – the all new Surface Pro X. When we started on this journey with Surface seven years ago, we created a new category that changed the industry forever. Now, as the world becomes more mobile and more cloud based, we’ve pushed the boundaries again with Surface Pro X to create a product that is at the intersection of mobility, productivity and speed.

What we’ve learned from our customers over the years is, as much as they love the portability, power and versatility of a 2-1, many of them also want that device that’s at the cutting edge of what’s next. This set of customers has new expectations for a modern device – the ability to be connected, productive and creative, with enough pixels and graphics performance for them to do more on the go. A device that lets them be mobile as they go from meeting to meeting to airport to hotel and back home again.

So, we pushed ourselves to evolve what it means to be mobile, powerful, and always connected with no interruption to your flow. The result is an incredibly thin, light, powerful and connected Surface. Hardware and platform innovation coming together to create an amazing experience for our customers.

Something new – custom silicon

Our vision for Surface Pro X was to take a mobile architecture and push the technology to make it a fully functioning powerful PC. To do this we created a piece of custom silicon, designed in partnership with Qualcomm. Surface Pro X is powered by the Microsoft SQ1 processor, creating a device that enables an incredible combination of pixels, performance, thinness, battery life and constant LTE connectivity.

This chip brings Snapdragon mobile DNA and an integrated AI accelerator together with incredible power. While ARM chips normally run in the 2-watt range, we know how important performance is to our customers and wanted to give them the power they need to achieve their goals.

With Microsoft SQ1 we’ve started with a phenomenal 7 watts of power by changing the chip itself, reengineering the tools and architecture for an incredibly fast, powerful experience found nowhere else. We redesigned the GPU and other silicon IP to create a product that’s 3x more performant per watt than Surface Pro 6. This means better battery life, a lighter and thinner product, and unprecedented performance, all while running full Windows, all the Office apps you love, Edge and Chrome.

Get into your flow anytime, anywhere

With the combination of the custom silicon and the amazing engineering and design work that went into the hardware, Surface Pro X is unbelievably light and thin. At 5.3mm thin at its thinnest point and 1.68lbs, it’s portable, versatile and always connected with LTE advanced. So you can work anywhere, anytime, whether you’re in the office, at home, traveling or at a coffee shop.

The display is stunning. With the thinnest bezels of any 2-1 on the market, this display provides a 13” screen in a 12” form factor, the most working space possible on a 13” screen, along with beautiful high contrast and high readability, colors that are vibrant and bright, and 2880×1920 resolution at 267 dpi.

Create intuitively

With the new Surface Pro X Signature Keyboard and Surface Slim Pen, you can create intuitively with typing, pen or touch. One of the things we’ve heard consistently from our customers is that they love using Surface Pen but want to have a way to make sure they can keep it with them, so it doesn’t get lost. With the Surface Pro X Signature Keyboard, the Pen stores securely and automatically recharges so it’s always with you and always charged.

You bring our products to life

Nothing inspires the team more than seeing the amazing things our customers do with our products. Surface Pro X is available in the US and Canada today, and additional markets where Surface is sold in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to see what you create.

We’re just days away from the launch of Pokémon Sword and Shield on Nintendo Switch, and all sorts of leaks are appearing all over the internet. We’re talking starter evolutions, new Gigantamax forms, and pretty much the full Pokédex – if you want to know something, you can probably find it.

Innocently scrolling through your social media platform of choice can be a nightmare for those looking to avoid new content, so we’d recommend muting certain phrases if you’re particularly concerned. Facebook and Instagram are tricky, but Twitter allows you to essentially block any words of your choosing – such as ‘Sword and Shield’ or ‘Pokemon leaks’, for example.

From here on out, Nintendo Life will remain a spoiler-free zone throughout the entire pre-release period, so if you’re wanting to keep on top of your gaming news without having the new Pokémon titles ruined, feel free to remain glued to our homepage. We will, of course, still share anything officially released by The Pokémon Company and will have a full review of the games for you in due time.

If you’ve landed on this page in the hope of finding leaks, we’re sorry to disappoint, but you can easily find everything with a little bit of searching online.

We do have leeks, though.

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Developing a master plan to transform John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Replacing a double-deck road with a massive tunnel in Seattle. Keeping beachgoers safe from polluted waters in New Zealand with advanced analytics.

Those are just a few of the thousands of complex projects delivered each year by Mott MacDonald, a global engineering, management and development consulting firm headquartered in London. With 180 principal offices in 50 countries, the company helps solve some of the world’s most urgent social, environmental and economic challenges.

Because Mott MacDonald doesn’t create physical products, its success relies on the knowledge and expertise of its 16,000 employees. To help them share and learn more easily, the company uses Project Cortex, a new service in Microsoft 365 that is part of Microsoft’s vision to transform knowledge and help people learn and grow their skills and expertise.

Announced this week at Microsoft Ignite, Project Cortex uses artificial intelligence to create a knowledge network that automatically connects and organizes organizations’ content into topics and generates topic cards, wiki-like “topic pages” and other new experiences in Microsoft 365.

The experiences will appear seamlessly in familiar tools like Office, Outlook and Microsoft Teams to help people find information, learn quickly and get up to speed faster within the apps they use every day. When employees see an unfamiliar acronym or project in email or chat, for example, they’ll be able to hover on the word and pop out a topic card with a description and related experts, documents and videos. A click on the card will call up a topic page, curated by AI and experts, with richer information like diagrams that link related and adjacent topics.

These capabilities “are going to further enhance our ability to reach our business goals with quicker access and connection to colleagues and their expertise — what we call our connected thinking,” says Simon Denton, Mott MacDonald productivity applications architect. “They’re going to help us build an even stronger knowledge network so people can have the right knowledge at the right time to deliver more excellent project outcomes for our clients. It’s going to be brilliant.”

The company already organizes its many experts and vast business knowledge into 47 communities that cover aviation, bridges and other practice areas. It began building its initial knowledge management system a few years ago to classify content in SharePoint and add people to Yammer groups based on interest.

Project Cortex, currently in private preview, will give Mott MacDonald even more advanced capabilities. Already secure and compliant, the product will allow automated policies based on precise document tags for added security. Its knowledge experiences, which build on an organization’s existing SharePoint content services, will permeate everyday work tools in Microsoft 365 and could one day include learning content from such platforms as LinkedIn Learning.

The solution will have powerful capture technology to make ingested content smarter. Powered by AI, it can extract information from structured content like forms, receipts and invoices. With machine teaching – having experts teach the AI how to respond – Project Cortex can also pull information from unstructured content like legal contracts and employee agreements.

It then adds metadata and classifies the documents into topics, automatically doing tasks that are traditionally manual and slow.

“We’re really excited about that,” says Denton. “We’re already talking about processing 30 years’ worth of drawings with good information on how something was built and how it needs to be maintained for the future. It’s going to unlock a lot of latent knowledge.”

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The knowledge vision

Scheduled for general availability in the first half of 2020, Project Cortex is the first new product to emerge from Microsoft’s knowledge vision, which includes new capabilities in other Microsoft 365 services such as Yammer, for communities of practice; Microsoft Stream, for intelligent video creation and sharing; and Workplace Analytics, for organizational insights.

As a longtime concept for organizing and re-using information, knowledge management has never fully solved the challenges it seeks to address due to disconnected information silos, technical limits and clunky end-user experiences, says Seth Patton, general manager of Microsoft 365 marketing.

But demand for knowledge has become particularly timely due to sweeping changes in the workplace. Automation, gig economies, flex work, skills shortages and retiring baby boomers have heightened the need for organizations to retain knowledge, share it with employees and help them learn new skills and expertise faster, Patton says.

“Business leaders and CEOs are recognizing the importance of their people’s skills and talent in their organizations’ ability to succeed,” he says. “It’s a recognition that upskilling and learning are the new workplace competitive advantage.”

Microsoft’s advances in AI and machine learning, SharePoint’s massive cloud content repository, the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph and integration with Office 365 apps have helped overcome previous challenges in knowledge management to help customers solve unmet needs.

 “All of us have had the experience of joining a new project, team or company,” Patton says. “It takes a long time to understand the language before you can contribute and participate. With Project Cortex you can get up to speed quickly and start contributing right away.”

Microsoft Search will also integrate Project Cortex, so people will be able to find topic cards and knowledge pages when they search. Microsoft Search is an important component in the company’s knowledge vision, bringing a unified, intelligent search experience across Microsoft 365 and Bing. It also extends to externally connected content, such as file shares. As content is crawled, it’s added to the knowledge network.

As video becomes an increasingly powerful way to capture and share knowledge, Microsoft Stream applies AI to provide automatic transcription for things like recorded meetings. AI-powered voice enhancement helps reduce background noise so people can better focus on what was discussed, and they can also now create short videos from mobile devices to share in Teams and Yammer.

More than a decade after it was created, Yammer has been completely redesigned with dozens of new capabilities, as well as new integrations with Teams, SharePoint and Outlook. These new features allow people to connect and share knowledge across teams and geographic locations.

Mott MacDonald connects people in Yammer communities that span 47 practice areas so they can share knowledge, ask questions and get answers.

As another way Microsoft 365 helps people share knowledge, Workplace Analytics provides business leaders insights into how people collaborate and spend their time with new self-service dashboards. These insights provide the context of industry benchmarks, as well as AI-driven analyses of business processes and networks of people.

This information can help identify high-performance trends such as close relationships between effective salespeople and engineers, or correlations between good onboarding experiences and more managerial one-on-ones. Leaders can then encourage and replicate similar patterns elsewhere.

The solutions are designed to be easy-to-use, customizable solutions. For the new Project Cortex, AI does the behind-the-scenes “heavy lifting” of mining and collecting useful, internal information, says Naomi Moneypenny, Microsoft director of content services and insights. Then experts can edit, update and add content to make sure knowledge pages are current and relevant.

“Our goal is to put intelligent content and knowledge services into the flow of the work you do every day to help you find the information you need, discover what you want and make your business processes more efficient,” says Moneypenny, who leads the Project Cortex product team. “All while enhancing and enforcing your security and compliance policies.”

At Mott MacDonald, Project Cortex will help build stronger connections across the company’s large, global communities and deliver timely information that helps employees create solutions to many complex challenges, build expertise and save time, all while enhancing service to customers, Denton says.

“I’m really excited by Microsoft’s vision for creating Project Cortex,” he says. “It fits completely with our strategy for knowledge networks. The idea of connecting people to content and content to people and building this network out, powered by Microsoft 365 — it’s going to be a game-changer for us.”

Lead image: From left to right, civil engineer James Balla, project principal Jonathan Hine and civil engineer Cleopatra Meade work together at Mott MacDonald offices in London. (Photos by Mark Mercer)

With the western Nintendo Switch release of Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy – Deluxe Edition just days away, we thought we’d get in the mood for some quizzing with these suitably tricky head-scratchers taken from the game.

Nintendo has been sharing these pesky brain teasers over the last few weeks, building up to the game’s 8th November release. If you’re looking forward to picking up a copy for yourself, why not try these out for size as a little bit of practice? Good luck, though. You’re probably gonna need it.

Puzzle 1

Look closely at these weaselly sums – can you work out what the missing number is?

Puzzle 2

This island is submerged under the waves every day, at the time displayed on this mysterious monument. At what time does the island sink?

Puzzle 3

These clocks read 4:05, 2:18 and 3:05. One is 32 minutes fast, another is 28 minutes slow and the remaining one is broken. What time is it in this scene?

Puzzle 4

Look at the boards these characters are holding. If ‘1’ has one, ‘2’ has one, ‘3’ has none and ‘4’ has three, how many does ‘5’ have?

Think you’ve solved them? Go ahead and post your answers (and your reasoning!) in the comments below. If you’re stuck, don’t worry – these had us stumped for a good while, too!