Daily Authority: 📦 Samsung's 50 million unsold phones

🖍️ Good morning! Have you tried Craiyon yet, the Dall-E mini platform that migrated to a new site? The only limitation is your imagination!

Samsung and 50 million problems

Supply and demand have funny ways of shifting subtly, speedily, and can easily catch companies off guard.

And where supply chain issues had seen massive shortages of components and smartphones, now companies are facing excess stock problems.

Samsung:

• The story is that low demand could leave Samsung with a large unsold smartphone stock problem: as many as 50 million smartphones sitting on shelves at its global distributors.
• So says The Elec in Korea, which has sources pointing to lowering production targets due to the unexpected slowdown.
• 50 million smartphones means about 20% of annual production is …just sitting around.
• The response has been for Samsung to slow monthly production, cutting the 20 million smartphones made each month down to half in May.
• The report further says that it’s not the S22 or foldables that are stuck on shelves but the Galaxy A series, which has been a bright spot for Samsung in the past.
• It’s not exactly a surprise to see the waxing and waning fortunes, but the amount of stock on shelves seems excessive, and the slowdown affects Samsung and its entire supply chain of devices.

What it means:

• It depends on the desperation. Samsung reportedly has this excessive stock but at the same time, there’s a general trend of economic and consumer slowdowns due to both recession and inflation.
• If Samsung is facing a slowdown, and cutting back on manufacturing only works slowly to solve the inventory problem you’d think excessive stock would become… cheap?
• That could mean deals and cut prices, at least on the Galaxy A series.
• Problem is: there’s no real way of knowing where and when that might happen, given how spread out Samsung is around the globe.
• Or, if you give credit to Samsung for running a smartphone business and inventory system and so on, maybe they’ll manage.

Roundup

🤔 Pixel 7 Pro leak suggests Tensor 2 might lag behind once again (Android Authority).

🔦 Hands-on video with Nothing Phone 1 shows off many of its secrets, including the “Glyph interface,” aka the light-up features on the back, but we still don’t know a lot about this phone yet (Android Authority).

🆕 ZTE Axon 40 Ultra launches in the US: A flagship with under-display camera (Android Authority).

👉 MediaTek Dimensity 9000 Plus launched: Its power level is (technically) over 9000 — phones with the Dimensity 9000 Plus are set to launch in Q3 2022 (Android Authority).

🚗 The end of the road for Android Auto on phones; only available for car screens (Android Authority).

⌚ Xiaomi Mi Band 7 goes global for $52 (Android Authority).

♻️ Vodafone wants to salvage a phone for every new one sold. Is it worth it? (Gizmodo).

📝 Copilot, GitHub’s AI-powered programming assistant, is now generally available for $10 a month (TechCrunch).

🍎 Analysis of how Apple’s ad tracking approach is anti-competitive and harms targeted advertising, which has been vital to the internet economy. What’s fun is that Apple doesn’t class its tracking as tracking because all of the data is Apple’s (Stratechery).

📦 Amazon announces its first fully autonomous mobile warehouse robot: A bot called Proteus uses “advanced safety, perception and navigation technology” to avoid humans, plus some other robotic systems and new ideas. Seems fine? (The Verge).

👉 PCI Express 7 will be eight times faster than PCI Express 5: The standard will launch in 2025 with 512 GB/s speeds (Engadget).

🚀 NASA counts down to within 29 seconds of launching the large SLS rocket (Ars Technica).

🧠 The power and pitfalls of AI for US intelligence: Artificial intelligence use is booming, but it’s not the secret weapon you might imagine. (Wired).

🛰️ “Where do old satellites go when dead?” (r/askscience).

Weirdness Wednesday

There’s always room for the weird side of photography and the 2022 Creative Photo Awards celebrate just that. The main difference with this contest is that, unlike some others that put sensible limits on Photoshop editing, these Awards put no limit on post-production work for images.

The results are, well, creative!

The winner titled “The False Illusion” by Andre Boto:

And I enjoyed: “Golden Retriever Chasing Beach Bal” by Clemens Van Der Werf:

And why not something by Junwu Yang: “The Mountain in Silence”

Unrelated bonus: A list of weird-looking dogs!

My last week of hunting weirdness was a good one,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor