Apple for the first time ranked second in China’s smartphone market.

Counterpoint analysts assessed the Chinese market based on the results of the last quarter and the entire 2022. In the fourth quarter, Apple was the undisputed leader, as well as in the global market, thanks to the new iPhones. The company occupied 23.7% of the market against 17.2% of the nearest competitor. At the same time, Apple’s sales, like almost everyone else’s, sank. Only Huawei stands out here, having managed to increase supplies by 15%.

At the end of the year, Apple overtook Oppo and took second place with an 18% share. The leader represented by Vivo occupies 19.2%, that is, the gap is small. At the same time, Apple’s share has grown from 16% in 2021, while Vivo’s share has fallen from 21.5%. If the trend continues, Apple may well take the lead this year.

It can also be noted that the share of Oppo has also decreased, as well as the share of Xiaomi and Huawei. But Honor grew from 10.4% to 16.7%, that is, very significantly.

Overall, the Chinese market sank 14%, marking the fifth year in a row that smartphone sales have declined in the country.

The host of the Optimum Tech YouTube channel showed and talked about the new Alphacool product, which allows you to radically reduce the size of the GeForce RTX 4090. This is the Alphacool ES water block, which allows you to abandon the standard bulky cooling system.

The dimensions of the system are only 210 x 150 mm. In PC space, the GeForce RTX 4090 occupies only one slot with it – such a video card can be installed even in a very compact case designed for a Mini-ITX motherboard.

In tests, the water block performed well: the video card, being connected to a 280 mm radiator, heated up to 57 degrees Celsius in the Furmark stress test, heating in games was 53-54 degrees. True, this is in the conditions of an open stand, in a closed case the temperatures will obviously be higher.

The Alphacool ES for the GeForce RTX 4090 is available now for $166 and comes with a heat spreader plate. True, there is one caveat: the device is only compatible with the reference GeForce RTX 4090, as well as four versions of Inno3D production – X3 OC, iCHILL X3, iCHILL Frostbite and iCHILL Black.

The MacWorld resource decided to compare all the current Apple M and Apple A platforms in one big test.

Unfortunately, there are only results in Geekbench, albeit including the GPU. These results do not always correspond to the alignment of forces in real tasks, but at least we have a comparison of two dozen SoCs.

As you can see, the difference in single-threaded performance is very small, even when comparing the 2020 A14 Bionic to the latest M2 Pro/Max. Multi-threaded mode puts everything in its place. The undisputed leader remains the M1 Ultra, as it contains a 20-core CPU. The base M2 Pro with a 10-core CPU performs almost on par with the M1 Max, and all other platforms are already far behind. It is immediately clear at the same time that there is actually quite a big difference between the SoC for the iPhone and for the Mac, although the A16 Bionic is still not catastrophically behind the base M1.

As for the GPU, the difference between the platforms is even greater, which is logical, given the difference in the number of GPU cores. Here, too, the M1 Ultra in the top version has no competitors, although the M2 Max with a 38-core GPU outperforms the base M1 Ultra with a 48-core GPU. It should also be noted that the M1 Max in any configuration is faster than the M2 Pro. The result of the M2 in the iPad Pro also looks interesting, where the GPU is not much slower than in the base M2 Pro.