U.S. consumers are expected to drop a bundle this Black Friday on smart speakers and home hubs. A Nov. 15 Canalys report estimates that shipments of voice-assisted speakers grew 137 percent in Q3 2018 year-to-year and are on the way to 75 million-unit sales in 2018. At the recent Embedded Linux Conference and Open IoT Summit in Edinburgh, embedded Linux developer and Raspberry Pi HAT creator Leon Anavi of the Konsulko Group reported on the latest smart speaker trends.

As Anavi noted in his “Comparison of Voice Assistant SDKs for Embedded Linux Devices” talk, conversing with computers became a staple of science fiction over half a century ago. Voice technology is interesting “because it combines AI, big data, IoT, and application development,” said Anavi.

In Q3 2017, Amazon and Google owned the industry with 74.7 percent and 24.6 percent, respectively, said Canalys. A year later, the percentages were down to 31.9 and 29.8. China-based Alibaba and Xiaomi almost equally split another 21.8 percent share, followed by 17.4 percent for “others,” which mostly use Amazon Alexis, and increasingly, Google Assistant.

Despite the success of the mostly Linux-driven smart speaker market, Linux application developers have not jumped into voice app development in the numbers one might expect. In part, this is due to reservations about Google and Amazon privacy safeguards, as well as the proprietary nature of the hardware and cloud software.

The Pinebook is available in both 11.6" and 14" models for $99 (the 14" model has a lower resolution screen at time of publication, although mine had a "surprise" upgrade to 1080p before it was advertised on the site), and it's being offered in "Buy To Order" format. That basically means you buy it, they build them in small batches, then periodically ship them out from China.

Let's set expectations early. The Pinebook is built around a 64-Bit Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, with 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM. That's the same board Pine64 sells for $29.99. To arrive at $99 on my model, the Pinebook surrounds that board with a white clamshell-style enclosure, 16GB of eMMC flash storage, Wifi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, a full-size keyboard, multi-touch touchpad, an SD webcam and a 1080p IPS display.

Usually, when I get review hardware in, it's not a big deal. It's like working in a candy shop. At first, it seems great ("All the candy I can eat!"). Then, you quickly get sick of dealing with the extra equipment.

But, every now and again, I get a really fine machine, like Dell's latest XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. And I get excited again.

• New iPad Pro Reportedly Suffering From Bending Issues

  It has not been one month since Apple launched its latest iPad Pro models. It has been found that the nearly bezel-less iPad Pro models are prone to bending issues.

  In a durability test video by the famous YouTuber JerryRigEverything, iPad Pro models bent when a slight force was applied to it. Many new iPad owners also took to MacRumor’s forum to complain about the bending of the latest iPad.

• How Apple tricked me into buying a new MacBook Air

   

  I have been using MacBook Air laptops for several years now and I like them much better than anything in the Windows space. However, my experience has been far from problem-free and I am angry at what I believe is a deceptive business practice designed to screw money out of loyal users.
   

   

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  So for $175 I got my computer completely fixed after being told by both Apple and an Authorised Apple repairer that it could not be salvaged. Furthermore, I subsequently discovered through online inquiry that this particular keyboard had a design fault and that I was not to blame at all for the damage. I had been tricked into buying a new computer needlessly.