We head north to frigid Boston this week so Marin can bask in the warm glow of our employee spotlight! Marin has been an iFixYouri technician for 9 months, repairing smartphones and computers for the good people of Cambridge. Hailing from Albania, Marin supports the New England Patriots and Italian soccer giants Juventus FC along with his hometown club KF Vllaznia Shkodër. Marin is a regular jack-of-all-trades, interested in financial markets, astrophysics, and stock trading, and can repair almost anything, from plumbing to electrical systems. As an economics and accounting graduate of UMass Boston, he can do taxes and balance checkbooks, and hopes to one day have his own accounting firm. This former coffee roaster (back in Albania) has an odd history of mishaps: electrocuted at age 4, hit by a car at 8, and at 10 years old he fell from the second floor of a building. Luckily, Marin survived all that, and repaired a Nokia 3311 when he was 14. We find this to be poetic, as the 3311 is as indestructible as he is. We’re glad Marin’s bad luck has improved, since he’s a warm, friendly guy and a great asset to iFixYouri’s team. If you’re ever in the Cambridge area, stop in and say hi to Marin!
Bought a Computer 10 Years Ago? Here’s 10 Bucks!
If you bought a computer with a CD drive back when 50 Cent was a top-selling artist and Tobey Maguire was still Spider-Man, you have a Hamilton headed your way. The European Commission, which is responsible for proposing legislation and upholding the EU treaties, contacted 13 optical drive manufacturers about major antitrust violations back in 2012, and they’re beginning to file settlement. These companies, many of them major players in the tech industry, are being investigated for what the Commission terms “one of the most serious breaches of EU antitrust rules.” Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi-LG, and others are suspected of being involved in a bid-rigging cartel between 2003 and 2008. For those unfamiliar with competition law, we’ll break it down.
- A cartel is an agreement between competing firms to control prices.
- Bid-rigging is a conspiracy in which a cartel agrees about who will submit the winning bid when there is a call for bids.
In this case, whenever HP or Dell needs an optical disk drive for a new laptop or desktop, they initiate an auction in which the lowest bidder wins the contract to manufacture the component. Instead of competing with each other for the chance to end up with the tiniest of profit margins, these 13 companies would decide, ahead of time, which one would get the contract, and the other 12 would purposefully give weak bids. The 13th company gets to sell their optical disk drives to HP or Dell for a higher price than if they bid fairly.
Let’s get to the important part. A class-action lawsuit is being filed against these 13 companies. Four of the companies have settled so far, a total of $124.5 million. A large portion of the money will be distributed to consumers who bought a optical disk drive or a computer with an optical disk drive (ODD). If you’re one of them, you’re eligible for up to $10 per drive. It doesn’t seem like you need any proof of purchase; the settlement administrators are (for now) simply collecting names, email addresses, and the number of drives purchased. Here are the details:
- You purchased a new computer with an internal ODD, a stand-alone ODD designed for internal use in a computer, or an ODD designed to be attached externally to a computer.
- Your purchase was for personal use and not for resale.
- You made your purchase between April 1, 2003 and December 31, 2008.
- You made the purchase as a resident of Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, or Wisconsin.
- Claim must be filed before July 1st, 2017.
Juggernaut: Kingston Releases the Last Thumb Drive You’ll Ever Need
Are you a videographer shooting hours and hours of raw 4K video? A photographer with a couple hundred thousand 18-megapixel photos to handle? Or maybe a hardcore PC gamer who needs to have dozens of your favorite titles with you at all times? If you said yes to any of those, it’s likely that you understand the headache that comes with huge amounts of data management, keeping track of hard drives and cloud accounts and cables. Good news! Even if you’re all of those things and more, your memory woes can be solved with one single USB flash drive. At CES 2017, portable storage mavens Kingston Digital debuted their DataTraveler Ultimate GT drive in a whopping 2 terabytes. The Fountain Valley, California-based company is doubling-down, proving that their 1TB drive from a few years back wasn’t the limit of their potential. If you’ve ever dreamed of holding absolutely ridiculous amounts of storage in your palm, either as a “daily driver” or just as a backup stick, here’s your chance.
2TB is enough for 70 hours of 4K footage at 30fps, more than 250,000 24-megapixel photos, 166 full-length HD films, or 50 copies of huge AAA-title The Witcher 3. While external hard drives in that capacity have been available for some time now (and are rather affordable) this is the first stick-style USB drive to hit that mark. A durable zinc-alloy metal casing gives the Ultimate GT a professional, industrial look, but the device’s size isn’t anything that could fit on your keyring. The choice of USB-A means that you might quickly need to purchase a dongle adapter for USB-C devices…but, given the size and shape of the Ultimate GT, you’ll need one anyway for use with most laptops, unless you want to leave the USB-side of your MacBook hanging over the edge of the table. The price hasn’t been released yet, but sources are speculating the 2TB model to be in the $800-$900 range.
At iFixYouri we find it odd that Kingston (and other USB drive manufacturers, soon) went straight from 1TB to 2TB; no 1.5TB flash drive in the interim. Seems that USB drives follow Moore’s Law and only double in capacity, so be on the lookout for a 4TB drive in the future.
Apple Breaks Sales Records in End of 2016…but How Well Are They Doing?
The results for the final quarter of 2016 are in, and Apple came out as the winner. With 78.4 billion dollars, the tech giant broke its own incredible records for quarterly earnings. CEO Tim Cook presented these findings, citing record sales company-wide, including the iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, and Services divisions. However, Apple had the advantage of a fiscal quarter that ran a little longer than their competitors. Due to (totally legal and normal) calendar quirks, Apple’s Q1 was 14 weeks instead of the usual 13. It is worth noting that the calendar year doesn’t line up with the Apple’s fiscal year, which ends on September 24th, so 9/25-12/31 is Apple’s first fiscal quarter in their 2017 fiscal year. In the earnings report, Apple CFO Luca Maestri openly addresses the extra week while mentioning a number of handicaps that he claims counteract the year-over-year boost. Among them, the company received a one-off $548 million patent infringement payment in the same quarter last year, the iPhone 7 being released earlier in September than the iPhone 6S was last year (causing more revenue to be accrued in Q4 instead of the following quarter), and supply issues in the new products failing to meet customers’ demands. No mention of demand for the iPhone 7 being so low that Apple scaled down production almost immediately after its release, but the company traditionally refuses to discuss sale counts.
Financial mumbo-jumbo aside, clearly getting a big leg-up from the 14th week was the iPhone. 2016 overall wasn’t a strong year for iPhone sales; it was actually the first full year of decline, with a 7% drop. But the added seven days helped Q1 2017 iPhone sales beat out the last quarter of 2015 by 4.7%. On a bigger scale, Apple is now the largest provider of smartphones worldwide, finally beating out close rivals Samsung Electronics. This isn’t so much a huge achievement for Apple as it is a down note for Samsung, and no, the Note 7 issues weren’t much to blame. The South Korean mega-corporation is slowly losing its foothold over smartphone-crazed Asia, and Chinese competitors are popping up with high-quality phones at lower price points and better innovations. Take OPPO, for instance, arguably the most successful smartphone company in China (exact numbers are difficult to come by). They took the Chinese smartphone market by storm after popping up in 2008, and since then have debuted both the world’s thinnest phone (2/3rd the thickness of an iPhone 7) and possibly the first “selfie-phone” with a 16-megapixel front-facing camera (and a paltry 12MP shooter on the back). Other Chinese brands like Vivo (owned by the same parent as OPPO) and Huawei are close behind, and their presence is leaking into other major Asian markets such as India. Samsung just can’t keep up.
So, yes, Apple made a fair amount of money in late 2016, but when you look past the headline, it wasn’t as earth-shattering as it is at first glance. In our opinion, you’d expect a lot more to happen when a company of Apple’s size and stature releases a new phone, new laptop, new smartwatch, and debuted their first wireless headphones…all in the span of a few weeks. The sign of a truly successful quarter in this case would see Apple sweeping the tech world, annihilating everyone in their path. Instead, each product was met with grumbles about price, gimmicky features, and/or availability.
As both consumers and other manufacturers look to Apple to innovate within the tech industry, the pressure builds. Criticism is coming in whispers, of the product ecosystem growing stale, of Tim Cook’s inability to fill the massive shoes left behind by the late Steve Jobs, of the famed cult of die-hard fans becoming disheartened with the most recent device lineup. Apple can’t rest on their laurels (despite the nice stock jump the announcement gave them) and they need to let this good news push them through 2017, where we’ll hopefully see, at the least, a new iPad model.
Employee Spotlight – Andy
This week’s iFixYouri employee spotlight focuses on Andy. One of iFixYouri’s senior repair technicians, this Plymouth, Indiana native has been with iFixYouri for two years but has more than seven years in the smartphone repair industry. Repair is in Andy’s blood: his dad is an automotive mechanic back home, and Andy worked on cars alongside him. His first fix in the smart-device realm was a Sony VAIO laptop at the tender age of 12. Andy studied graphic design at Purdue University in Lafayette, IN, and ultimately wishes to start a business in the alternative herbal medicine industry: “I want to be able to help people through natural medicine. It’s been a goal of mine for quite some time.” Like a number of iFixYouri employees, Andy is a musician. He’s played guitar for heavy metal bands (including Home of The Brave back in Plymouth) and is in the process of recording an EP that will be released this year. When not working on music or iPhones, Andy enjoys riding his motorcycle, video gaming, boating, and fishing. Thanks, Andy!
The Samsung Galaxy S8 Needs to Be the Best Phone Ever, for Everyone’s Sake
2016 was a rough year for Samsung, with their Note 7 fiasco being an absolute PR nightmare. No one could imagine a phone starting fires and causing injury and property damage…much less the same issue occurring after a recall, with the “fixed” devices. After an even bigger recall, a ban on bringing the Note 7 onto airplanes, and ultimately their forced deactivation, Samsung desperately needs a boost, and they’re putting all their chips on the Galaxy S8 due to be released this spring. Following the popular S7, the S8 will be similarly styled with an emphasis on curved edges. The screen will be even larger while the phone itself remains the same size as its predecessor. The South Korean tech giant plans to move the fingerprint-sensing home button to the back of the phone instead of on the bottom chin, bringing it in-line with other Android devices like the Google Pixel and LG G5. This allows the display to take up virtually the entire front of the device, the 5.8-inch QHD AMOLED display being even larger than the Galaxy Note’s 5.7-inch display. Not just a pretty face, the S8 should be even faster as well. While the phone may include different systems-on-chip depending on sales region, manufactured by either Qualcomm or Samsung (this is nothing new for these devices) they’ll all have processors created using 10-nanometer fabrication methods. Reports say this will make the phone 11 percent faster than the Galaxy S7 overall, with 23 percent faster graphics processing while being 20 percent more energy-efficient. Energy efficiency is important, as battery life for the S8 is reported to be nothing impressive.
New to the Galaxy family will be a USB-C connector (instead of micro-USB) and Samsung’s new AI assistant Bixby. Refreshingly not-new are the standard 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as a microSD removable storage slot to boost internal capacity by up to 256GB. 4GB of RAM is another S7 holdout, but that seems to be the current upper benchmark for smartphones. The 12-megapixel rear camera seems to be from the S7, as well, but the front-facing “selfie” camera is now 8MP. There will be two sizes of the S8, 5.8” and 6.2”, and both will feature the same rounded corners of the Samsung S7 Edge.
We mentioned Bixby, the AI assistant earlier, and Samsung plans to make it an integral feature to the S8 user experience, claiming it will be able to handle more complex commands (such as multi-part instructions). Another new feature is the ability to connect the S8 to a computer monitor and control it with a keyboard and mouse. It’s called Samsung DeX, and although it will require a separate HDMI-enabled dock, it’ll prove to be an important feature for those who wish to use their smartphone as part of their workstation.
Overall, we’re excited to see what the Samsung S8 can do in the hands of its users and hopeful that we get one in our hands soon. It should be a huge success, as most Samsung phones are, and should help the brand hold its place at #1 in terms of worldwide smartphone market share. Samsung desperately needs the phone to be a hit, and you can be sure that they’re going to go the extra mile to make this the best Galaxy smartphone they’ve ever made. The company lost about $17 billion in the wake of the Note 7 debacle and took a major publicity blow when news of the malfunctioning phones went viral. The S8 needs to deliver…and then some.
Employee Spotlight – Fitz
Shining bright in this week’s iFixYouri employee spotlight is Daniel “Fitz” Grant. Fitz was born in the Bronx, New York, to a nurse mother and a father who worked in the World Trade Center as an accountant. After his father passed away due to illness, Fitz moved to South Florida with his mother and has lived here ever since. While the local live music scene lacked in comparison to New York, he played bass and guitar for several rock bands in the Palm Beach County area as a teenager. He performed his first repair at this time, reviving the family dishwasher after watching a home-repair TV show on fixing appliances. Fitz is currently studying forensics at Palm Beach State College, but is “thinking of switching.” In addition to his love of the White Castle burger chain, his interests include military history, and medieval history, and firearms, and he engages these in very active ways. For the past four years, he’s enjoyed pistol shooting, competing in IDPA, a shooting sport based on defensive pistol techniques, using equipment including full-charge service ammunition to solve simulated “real world” self-defense scenarios. Having recently performed in a qualification match for IDPA, Fitz is honing his skills in the hopes of moving up to IPSC, a more advanced organization of the same sport. He became interested from the videos of a Youtuber named Jessica Cross, who competes in the same sport. In addition, Fitz has been learning the ancient art of blacksmithing, creating objects from wrought iron or steel by forging the metal and using tools to hammer, bend, and cut it into shape. So far, he’s only created simple armor and blades but hopes to become advanced enough to combine both hobbies and fashion metal components for firearms (gunsmithing). Fitz has a girlfriend and is the proud dad to Dawn, a Chow Chow/Jack Russell mix. His family is from Jamaica, and he has spent extensive time studying on the island nation. Before becoming a technician, he had the interesting job of working security on a construction site freight elevator. While he now enjoys repairing devices for the customers of iFixYouri, Fitz dreams of owning a business or becoming an inventor. Thanks for letting us in your head, Fitz!
Employee Spotlight – Chase
This week’s iFixYouri employee spotlight is on Chase! As our recycling manager and online sales specialist, Chase is responsible for making sure our broken screen glass and other parts get safely and ethically disposed of. Beneath his quiet exterior, Chase is a complex individual. A student of Dreyfoos School of the Arts and New York Film Academy, the Jupiter, FL native has worked on feature films, short films, music video, and more. He makes music, primarily playing guitar and singing, and performed on many stages throughout South Florida and beyond. He’s even a black belt in tae kwan do! A hard worker with a journeyman streak, Chase has been a mascot at Roger Dean Stadium, a sous-chef, an artist-in-residence at Dreyfoos, and an iFixYouri repair tech before arriving at his current position. We’re glad to have Chase as part of the iFixYouri team and appreciate all the great work he does.
Photo taken in front of iFixYouri Northlake