#### Issue 1712 - Thursday 13th October, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Microsoft's Surface event was kinda boring this year
- Signal to remove support for MMS and SMS in Android app
- ABS releases 2021 Census data on IT the growing number of workers
- John Carmack tells it like it is about the metaverse as it currently stands
- Cheap ex-mining RTX 3070 Ti GPUs, Surface Laptop 4, Metz 65" OLED, Patriot 1.92TB SSD, Ring Doorbell & Amazon Show combo, Lenovo Chromeobok, 24" Dahua monitor

## The News

### Microsoft's Surface event was kinda boring this year

Microsoft's got new Surface gear for ya, mostly spec bumps and price rises.

- Surface Laptop 5 looks and feels mostly the same as the Laptop 4, but ditches AMD as a CPU option. That's a shame.
- Surface Pro 9 now comes in different colours (platinum, sapphire, graphite, forest and a limited edition floral design) and has 12th-gen Intel CPUs or a Qualcomm SQ3 SoC (with built-in 5G) depending on which one you get. They got rid of the headphone socket for some unknown reason.
- Surface Studio finally got some love, with modern CPU and GPU options but the same chassis and huge sliding touch screen. Apple-like pricing.
- Microsoft Audio Dock is a basic USB-C dock with the usual stuff and built-in speakerphone designed for Teams.
- Designer is a new app for Office 365 that uses Dall-E 2 to generate any image you want for your content. Here's a video of it in action. They're gonna shove it into Edge too.
- Apple gives some crumbs to Windows users. Apple Music is now on Xbox, Apple TV and Apple Music apps will come out Windows soon and iCloud Photos is now built in to the Windows Photo app.

### Signal to remove support for MMS and SMS in Android app

Signal is removing support for SMS and MMS messages from its Android app. For sheltered iOS users that have never left Apple's white shiny prison, Android lets you choose an app to handle SMS and MMS messages instead of the built-in one and many people liked using Signal to handle all their messages so when they texted someone using Signal, it would be secure. Signal's justification for removing this feature is "prioritizing security and privacy, ensuring people aren’t hit with unexpected messaging bills, and creating a clear and intelligible user experience for anyone sending messages on Signal". This blog post goes into detail on the decision and this forum post by one the developers goes into even more detail.

### ABS releases 2021 Census data on IT the growing number of workers

The 2021 Census reckons there's now "more than 470,000 people holding IT qualifications in Australia, with more than 260,000 ICT professionals and 74,000 ICT managers employed at the time of the census". The most common qualification is "computer science at almost 84,500 people, followed by programming at almost 33,000 people". That's a 36% increase in IT skilled people in Australia over the last 5 years and according to an Australian Computer Society also released yesterday, there's still incredible demand for IT workers with job ads increasing by 14% since 2016. What I'm reading here is that there's 470,000 people in Australia who might want a free trial of The Sizzle and if I can convert 1% of them to pay me, I'm sitting on $235,000/yr of income. Another interesting stat is that two thirds of "software and applications programmers were born overseas".

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### John Carmack tells it like it is about the metaverse as it currently stands

If you didn't watch it, John Carmack's talk at Meta Connect yesterday was very candid and honestly quite negative about Meta's efforts in VR. Arstechnica has a great summary of John's presentation that highlights what's really going on, not the PR bullshit Meta spews out:

- "Last year I said that I'd be disappointed if we weren't having Connect in Horizon this year... This here, this isn't really what I meant" - in regards to the VR arena he was giving his talk in not being how he envisioned a VR conference going down.
- He had to turn off the fancy face tracking features on the new headset because "there's at least a decent chance that I would do something very embarrassing looking" with it turned on.
- "A lot of people internally [are] paranoid about showing anything but the highest quality avatars" after that hilarious image of a cartoon Zuck in front of an Eiffel tower went viral and everyone (rightfully) mocked it.
- "I've always been clear that I'm all about the cost-effective mass-market headsets being the most important thing for us and for the adoption of VR," Carmack said, "and Quest Pro is definitely not that". He has a mantra of a "$250 for 250 gram" headset, which "we're not building that headset today, but I keep trying".
- General impressions of the Quest hardware: "basic usability of Quest really does need to get better", "update hell", VR sessions "aborted in frustration", "our app startup times are slow, our transitions are glitchy", "we need to make it a whole lot better... much, much faster to get into".

Thank you John.

## Bargains

- Ex-crypto-mining Colorful GeForce RTX 3070 Ti - $557.07 from MetroCom's eBay
- Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 13.5" (Ryzen 5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) - $960.45 from Microsoft's eBay store
- Metz 65MXD9500A 65" 4K OLED TV - $1699.15 from The Good Guys
- Patriot Burst Elite 1.92TB SATA 2.5" SSD - $165 from Amazon
- Ring Video Doorbell 4 & Amazon Echo Show 5 - $329 at JB Hi-Fi
- Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 3 Chromebook (11" 2K display, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD) - $509 from JB Hi-Fi
- Dahua 24" 1080p VA-panel monitor - $99 from Scorptec

## The End

📻 Iron Lung - King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.

💬 Checked out the paid subscriber only forum? It's a tidy little place to discuss tech with like minded Aussies.

👋 Forums not your thing? The Sizzle has a Slack group you can procrastinate in and chat with other nerds bored at work.

💳 Paid subscriber looking to manage your billing info or change email address? Visit the customer portal.

📚 Browse The Sizzle Archive. A few issues are missing and it's not searchable, but it's better than nothing.

🫂 Friends of The Sizzle is a small group of businesses or organisations operated by Sizzle subscribers. Support your fellow Sizzler!

💔 Tired of my bullshit? Unsubscribe and I'll never speak to you again.

## Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.