Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere. Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant have become indispensable to millions of users. Tesla Autopilot has the potential to change driving forever. And IBM Watson took a new job providing big data solutions to corporations after its first job was in jeopardy.
Those are just the most prominent examples. Helpful applications of AI are being deployed in a broad spectrum of industries, but AI also has the potential to be misused.
About the author
Jason Egnal is Chief Marketing Officer at Zenfolio. His background spans a variety of industries, including SaaS, AI, Fintech and Consumer Electronics.
Zenfolio, the website builder and photo sharing site, recently introduced technology that applies AI to assist photographers in selecting the best photos from the thousands of shots typically taken during a photo session. The advanced image recognition technology is tremendously powerful and can make photographers more efficient than they ever dreamed.
When exploring the best way to roll out AI to the photography community, Zenfolio had some fascinating discussions about corporate responsibility generally, and its obligations specifically.
AI: ancient concept, new reality
The concept of AI was theorized centuries ago by Greek philosophers, with myths about Talos and Pandora creating chaos and destruction.
Perhaps these cautionary tales about artificial beings influence our thinking today. While the ancient Greeks would no doubt have been amused by the rudimentary nature of philosophical discourse at Zenfolio, the advantage the company had were discussions based on actual implementations, not merely theoretical pondering (and the team wore more practical clothing, to boot).
Artificial Intelligence contributes to efficiency, accuracy and productivity in ways the early Greeks could not have imagined. It has evolved to be capable of language processing, optical recognition, and human interaction.
Yet, there are positive and negative aspects to consider surrounding the responsible deployment of AI.
The positive application of AI in photography
The photography industry is generating exponentially more images than ever thanks to digital cameras and the best photo editors. Photographers need to be more efficient and productive in the time-consuming process of finding the best images out of thousands.
AI can analyze large amounts of data and perform specific functions, getting faster and more accurate as it learns, usually when fine-tuned by a human.
Since each photographer has a unique style, and relies on their creative eye to characterize their work, it's important to establish a model where AI can assist in a specifically defined task, yet leave ultimate creative control in the hands of the photographer.
The inherent bias of AI in photography
A major challenge in many types of artificial intelligence is bias. Especially in facial recognition technology.
Some AI models inherit bias from the datasets upon which they’re trained, and may therefore reinforce or exacerbate societal biases. This tends to occur due to the lack of variety in the training set for the models.
Diverse data can help mitigate problems that lead to biases in the system, but datasets still require filtering to prevent errors.
Image generated with DALL-E AI using text “Photographer with camera opening mythological Pandora's box”(Image credit: Zenfolio)
Personal information tied to photographs
We have already seen several controversial uses of facial-recognition technology. Earlier this year, a New York-based startup was fined tens of millions of dollars by European authorities for amassing billions of facial images and personal information from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other websites. Then, using it to train facial-recognition software to identify individuals based on face scans.
The company justifies its actions by stating that its technology is designed to be used by law enforcement agencies in fighting crime. However, there are other companies whose websites allow anyone to upload any photo to identify the subject.
Facial-recognition technology is undeniably a powerful tool for photographers and their clients to easily group and view photos of a specific person. It’s one of the best features in the Google Photos app, for example.
However, there is no need for a business to associate Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with the image in order to achieve these results.
For photo sessions that generate thousands of images, with a set of similar subjects appearing in many of the photos, applying facial-recognition to find a specific person does not require the application to know anything about that person, other than their unique facial features.
Once all photos of a person are selected by the AI, it can then rate each image based on a set of criteria ranked in importance, e.g. the sharpest image, the happiest faces, whether eyes are open or closed.
By keeping the initial set of photos stored locally on a photographer’s computer, the technology can be applied in extremely useful ways, without the subject in the photo being at risk of having AI models learn to more accurately identify them from a large group of private images.
Should the photographer then share a subset of the best photos with their client through the Zenfolio cloud storage services, for instance, the gallery is password-protected, and advanced settings for the photographer to either enable or disable facial-recognition features for each client's gallery.
Deploying AI with intelligence
Empowering professional photographers with affordable access to advanced AI is a very new initiative.
And the team behind PhotoRefine.ai have been cautious and thoughtful, and perhaps even philosophical, in deploying the solution.
Using cutting-edge technology, drawing on almost two decades of experience in securing images and video, and partnered with the best security technology providers.
There is always a possibility that circumstances will evolve in unexpected ways, but the approach the company has taken is to try to ensure that it does not enable or contribute to negative applications of AI technology.
Perhaps the Ancient Greek philosophers would be surprised that today, their Talos steers a Tesla. Or that the chaos and destruction they feared from Pandora is limited to the music industry. If all companies spend time contemplating the moral and ethical impact of their creations – tunics and sandals optional – perhaps we can prove those ancient concerns unfounded.
But as the more contemporary philosopher Douglas Adams said: “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Nvidia’s RTX 4080 has popped up at retailers with one graphics card showing at the MSRP in the US as we near the official on-sale date – but the news isn’t so good in the UK sadly (or elsewhere in Europe).
So, the official MSRP in the US is $1,199 for the GeForce RTX 4080 (16GB version – which is the only variant now, of course, since the 12GB spin was canceled), and we’ve also seen that it will retail in the UK at an MSRP of £1,269 (we’ll come back to that).
This is the price Nvidia will sell for, but third-party custom versions of the RTX 4080 will command more of a premium in some cases, but not in every instance, and we’ve seen that illustrated with a PNY graphics card that has the official MSRP pinned to it.
As Tom’s Hardware highlights, this is the PNY Gaming Verto RTX 4080 which is priced at bang-on $1,199 and might be up for pre-order before long, bearing in mind the 4080 isn’t officially on sale until November 16, just over a fortnight away yet.
There’s also the faster overclocked (OC) edition of this graphics card listed on Newegg, but it isn’t yet priced – obviously with the boost clock made to run a bit faster, offering a little better performance, it’ll be somewhat more costly.
VideoCardz further spotted that Laptops Direct in the UK has Palit’s RTX 4080 OmniBlack at £1,450 actually on pre-order (with delivery time listed as “from three weeks”), and more expensive models from Palit reaching up to £1,530 (that’s the GameRock OC at the top-end).
There are RTX 4080 models listed elsewhere (in the US and UK) but none yet have pricing attached. Doubtless that’ll change soon as the launch nears.
Analysis: The good, the bad, and the Ampere alternative
From what we can see so far, there’s obviously good and bad here. It’s good to see that in the US, a third-party model of the RTX 4080 is sticking to the MSRP – assuming the price tag doesn’t shift from that point, of course.
The UK appears to be a different story thus far, but Laptops Direct is not where most people go for their graphics card needs (as you might guess, that retailer is pretty popular for, er, laptops though). The likes of Scan or Overclockers UK (OCUK) for example still don’t have prices attached to the RTX 4080 models that can be spotted on their respective sites (actually, Scan doesn’t even have standalone cards listed yet, just prebuilt systems with the RTX 4080, unpriced).
Those prices we can see at Laptops Direct are nonetheless an ominous sign, and the fact that the MSRP itself is more than the US is disappointing too (even if highly predictable given recent currency movements and so forth). What we can see at Scan is the price of the RTX 4090 being between £1,950 and £2,000, and at OCUK it’s a similar story of £1,980 to £2,030, which doesn’t bode well for the RTX 4080 coming in at its MSRP of £1,269 in that country.
We could well be looking at £1,500, then, or maybe even creeping up from there with beefier RTX 4080 models, particularly if stock is thinner on the ground initially. And how will that compare with Ampere graphics cards? Well, you can pick up an RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition for £1,149 (at Scan) right now – and it’s unclear how much better the RTX 4080 16GB will be than the 3090 Ti (outside of the bigger boosts for DLSS 3 games, that is, which are of course very much a niche proposition still).
This kind of pricing makes the beefier RTX 3000 models look tempting, for sure, and some might argue perhaps that’s the idea with the initial RTX 4000 launches (as we keep hearing, Nvidia and partners do have a lot of Ampere stock to clear, still).
Another argument might be if you’re going to fork out that much for an RTX 4080, why not just go the whole hog and get the 4090 anyway (though melting power adapters might concern you at this point with the Lovelace flagship).
We can’t get carried away with early hints of pricing, of course, and there’s still that glimmer of hope for decent pricing in the US – providing that PNY card doesn’t turn out to have a placeholder price tag – even if that’s not the case in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe for that matter, where Lovelace cards can be even more expensive).
Whether or not the RTX 4000 range ends up at MSRP, mind, these recommended prices are still rather ridiculous, certainly for the RTX 4080 when you compare it to the RTX 3080 which came with an MSRP of $699 (or £649), even if you couldn’t actually buy it for anything like that.
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Nvidia RTX 4080 GPU early prices pop up – and there’s good and bad news
We're not even a week in from Elon Musk becoming the owner (or 'Chief Twit' as he calls the position) of Twitter, and already his plans for overhauling the verification process sounds like a terrible idea.
According to The Verge, Musk is planning to raise the monthly price of Twitter Blue, which gives you the ability to edit tweets, as well as get custom icons and exclusive features, from $4.99 / £4.99 / AU$5.99 to $19.99 / £19.99 / AU$20.99. By subscribing, Twitter Blue users will also now be verified, which gives them a blue tick next to their username - something that was once limited to verified users, such as notable public figures, politicians and members of the media.
Users who are already verified will have a 90-day window to sign up for this new plan, or they will lose their blue tick.
This could already be a fatal decision for the platform, especially when this could allow trolls with few followers to pay to get verified, making the blue tick system irrelevant.
Paying for the blue tick is just wrong
The whole verification process is being revamped right nowOctober 30, 2022
See more
Getting verified on Twitter can be a slow, frustrating affair, in which you have to send the company multiple web links as proof that you're a real person and deserving of the blue tick.
Some people have been denied multiple times, and it took two tries for me to get the blue tick. I still don't know why I was denied the first time, but it's fair to say that the process should be looked at.
However, charging $20 a month for this is not the way to go. It's the equivalent of opening the floodgates and diminishes the point of verification - which was to help users know if an account is authentic, or of public interest. At four times the price of what a Twitter Blue subscription currently is, it's going to be a hard sell.
Combined with the fact that Musk has allegedly told Blue's developers that they will be fired if this feature isn't live by November 7, we could be about to see Twitter's dark days begin, and possibly the end of how you can freely use your account on the platform.
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Elon Musk's latest stupid Twitter idea could kill off the platform for good
While we wait patiently for The Witcher season 3, there's some good news and some potentially bad news for fans of the fantasy series: Netflix has renewed the show for a fourth season, but star Henry Cavill won't be returning as Geralt of Rivia.
As per the Netflix announcement, Liam Hemsworth – perhaps best known as Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games series – will be stepping into the role. That casting change is just about the only information we have on season 4 at the moment.
"My journey as Geralt of Rivia has been filled with both monsters and adventures, and alas, I will be laying down my medallion and my swords for Season 4," said the departing Cavill in a statement. "In my stead, the fantastic Mr. Liam Hemsworth will be taking up the mantle of the White Wolf."
"As with the greatest of literary characters, I pass the torch with reverence for the time spent embodying Geralt and enthusiasm to see Liam's take on this most fascinating and nuanced of men. Liam, good sir, this character has such a wonderful depth to him, enjoy diving in and seeing what you can find."
"As a Witcher fan I'm over the moon about the opportunity to play Geralt of Rivia," added Hemsworth. "Henry Cavill has been an incredible Geralt, and I'm honored that he's handing me the reins and allowing me to take up the White Wolf’s blades for the next chapter of his adventure."
"Henry, I've been a fan of yours for years and was inspired by what you brought to this beloved character. I may have some big boots to fill, but I'm truly excited to be stepping into The Witcher world."
Wait and see
You can of course find reactions of all kinds to the news on social media, but it's probably best to reserve judgment on the switch until season 4 actually appears – though it's fair to say Cavill has been great in the role and is going to be hard to replace.
In an ideal world the casting would have stayed fixed, but there's no reason why Hemsworth can't also impress as Geralt. We've recently seen deliberate casting changes in HBO's House of the Dragon – another epic fantasy series that's developed a loyal following – showing that they can work if done right.
Then there's Doctor Who of course, which recently said goodbye to Jodie Whittaker as its main star. The difference here is that casting changes are built into the narrative of the show, but again its evidence that they don't have to kill the momentum of a series.
We are going to have to wait a while to see how Hemsworth does though. Presumably filming hasn't yet started on The Witcher season 4, and there's no indication that it will get underway shortly either. We're looking at a 2024 release at the earliest.
Netflix will be hoping the change from Cavill to Hemsworth won't have an impact on the popularity of the show, which is one of its biggest hits. The spin-off The Witcher: Blood Origin is making its debut on Christmas Day and should keep fans going until season 3 drops at some point next year.
What we didn't get from Netflix is any reason for the change. Given Cavill has just revealed that he's returning as Superman in another movie, perhaps he just doesn't have the time for The Witcher any more – or perhaps he just feels like he needs to take some time away from the Continent now.
The Google Pixel Tablet is taking its time on the journey between the first reveal of the device (May 2022) and it actually being available to buy (sometime in 2023), and that means a wide window of opportunity for leaks and rumors to appear.
As spotted by the team at 9to5Google, we may have been given our first look at the software running on board the Pixel Tablet, via a blog post on keyboard shortcut updates that are coming to the Google Keep app on Android.
It's difficult to know for sure, but it makes sense that Google engineers would already be using the tablet internally, and the size of the GIF scales up to the expected Pixel Tablet screen resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels.
Details, details
The animated image doesn't tell us too much about how the Pixel Tablet is going to look in terms of its software, but we can see a docked row of icons along the bottom of the screen, and the familiar Android status bar along the top.
That status bar is bigger than it would normally be on an Android phone, making room for what looks like a Google account switcher button – enabling you to quickly jump between different users on the device.
The green and black color scheme matches some of the promotional material that Google has already put out as well, further evidence that this image has indeed been grabbed from a Pixel Tablet running Android 12L.
Analysis: what we know so far
When it comes to what we know so far about the Google Pixel Tablet, we've got a mixture of officially confirmed details plus a few unofficial leaks and rumors. For example, Google has itself said that the tablet will use the same Tensor G2 chipset that runs the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones.
We also know that there will be a Charging Speaker Dock accessory available for the Google Pixel Tablet, which will charge up the slate and also turn it into something of a smart hub for the home – much like the Google Nest Hub, in fact.
When it comes to unconfirmed rumors, a 10.95-inch screen, Wi-Fi 6, and internal storage options of 128GB and 256GB have been mentioned. There has also been chatter that the tablet is going to come fitted with 4GB of RAM.
Those leaks suggest something a bit more mid-range rather than premium, but we'll have to wait and see to know for sure. Google has told us that the device is going to make an appearance at some point in 2023 – we can't be more precise than that, but considering it was announced in May 2022, we're expecting it sooner rather than later.
It’s the early 2010s, and Mohit Lad and Ricardo Oliviera are working well into the evening, developing their internet monitoring software ThousandEyes in their startup’s first office in San Francisco. The city is energy conscious enough that the lights in the building will go off at 6pm on the dot, and it takes a phone call and a passcode to get things back up and running. Oliviera has had enough of this, and has written a script using Twilio, which offers APIs to automate phone calls.
This works for a week, until the lights turn off of their own accord again. After frantically debugging the script in the dark, the founders realize that their script is absolutely fine. The problem is that Twilio is hosted on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center on the other side of the country, which has been brought down due to a storm.
As he speaks from Austin, Texas in 2022, Lad thinks this was a prescient moment to describe the way the internet works today.
The changing internet
“Every time there’s an Amazon outage, something breaks because the way applications are being built right now, there’s a lot more API calls than ever before,” he tells TechRadar Pro.
“Previously, you would see - 10 years ago, 20 years ago - when you were building applications, you would include the code inside through libraries. Now you do an API call. An API call means you insert a dependency into some provider that may be sitting somewhere you don’t know.
“So as things get concentrated, if there are outages in parts of Amazon's environment, what happens is even things you don't anticipate breaking will break, like your doorbell cam may not work because they have an API call where on Amazon.”
“And I think one, one pattern you will start to find is that there's more and more unpredictability that will come through in terms of ripple effects. When large networks or large hosting providers, cloud providers go down.”
The best illustration for how the internet has changed, according to Lad, is the switch from data being stored on a business’ own premises to trusting cloud service providers, like AWS, Google Drive, and Microsoft Azure, with the data, usually as a cost-cutting measure. That, and a familiar interface, are the most obvious benefits, but this too, comes at a price.
“Companies used to put everything in their own data center,” he notes. “Now they’re going into cloud, they don’t control it. They used to build their applications in their own premises, like a CRM, or HR application. And even that is now done on Salesforce, Workday, or Office 365. We’re using Teams, right? Teams is hosted in the cloud.”
“The single thing that connects all of this together is the internet. And if it doesn’t work. Or portions of it don’t work, then it severely impacts user experience. The whole concept of ThousandEyes was started because we believe that the quality of the internet impacts quality of life.”
The ThousandEyes software
Part of what makes ThousandEyes indispensable to over 170 Fortune 500 companies, the top ten banks in the US, and customers such as Mastercard, Volvo, and HP, is that it maps routes between vital company infrastructure and the cloud providers hosting it.
“Think about Google Maps, or Waze. It’s all about providing a visual around what’s happening between point A and point B, so you can make the right decision,” says Lad. “That sort of end-to-end view of what the journey is between your end users and application, which is missing in the current market world.”
Lad maintains that ThousandEyes remains a vital resource because of the way the internet works. “The internet is essentially a collection of different networks. What ThousandEyes is doing is providing a view showing that journey and highlighting if there’s an outage somewhere, and that gives you the ability to route around it.”
To illustrate, he shares what he calls “the 30,000 feet view” inside the ThousandEyes software - a total overview of outages across the internet, with the estimated geographical impact depicted on an interactive map.
The closest, publicly available approximation to the “30,000 feet view” Lad showcased, available on the ThousandEyes website.(Image credit: ThousandEyes)
Another example Lad gives of ThousandEyes’ unique functionality is its ability to drill down into where exactly an outage is coming from within a network. He picks an ongoing outage at random - a US provider is down, impacting traffic coming from Australia, via Cloudflare.
“So if we drill down, it shows up as Sydney, and you can look at specific parts of this network in Sydney, where the outages are,” he explains. “And knowing this, if you’re using this provider and you have critical customers in Australia, you actually know there’s an outage going on in that part of the environment. You can avoid this network, and make sure your users have a consistent experience and be able to help them out of a blind spot.”
Getting ThousandEyes funded
Since the company began around ten years ago, Lad says that this belief has only become more important. The road to getting to where he and ThousandEyes are today was difficult, and, it turns out, a last ditch effort. Lad’s plans to enter into academia at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) were scuppered, and his US visa was running out. Something had to be done.
In July 2008, Lad began working at an internet startup, but within two months was told that he was being let go as a result of layoffs because of the financial crisis. This, he says, opened his eyes. Oliviera, his labmate at UCLA, had been asking him to start a company with him, and he wasn’t interested. Redundancy, Lad says, made him decide to take a chance, although it initially seemed an unlikely one.
“Nobody was willing to fund ThousandEyes,” he notes. “A lot of people didn’t think the internet was going to be important enough to be monitored. We ended up raising money from the National Science Foundation, from the US government.”
That initial grant of $150,000 built the first version of ThousandEyes, but Lad is quick to point out that, in practice, it wasn’t a life-changing sum of money. ThousandEyes’ first datacenter, he says, was built in a garage with servers that had been thrown out into the street.”
“One of the things that came out of [the financial crisis] was a lot of equipment being put in recycle bins outside companies in the Bay Area. Even today, we have the first server we put in place in our office.”
Ricardo Oliveira (left) and Mohit Lad (right) with ThousandEyes’ first server, still live and kicking.(Image credit: ThousandEyes)
The state of funding for technology startups right now isn’t quite so bleak, says Lad. “Last year was quite crazy. Everybody was throwing a lot of money. I think, this year, investors are more disciplined around fundamentals, and are being pretty selective about where they invest and how they invest. And sometimes these market shifts are a good opportunity to really understand where to focus.”
“Take ThousandEyes as an example. If we had gotten a lot of money from day one, we would have gone and tried all these different things to build a product and probably failed. The fact that we had very little money meant that we had to really focus on the one thing we could sell. And sometimes I feel like overfunded companies are essentially writing their own failure when they raise too much money and try to grow faster.”
“There’s still a lot of investor money. [...] There are other government programmes in different countries, and I would definitely encourage people to leverage [them]. Sometimes these programmes won’t give you quick money - [the National Science Foundation grant was] spread out over increments every three months. But it does help you, and puts more discipline in how you operate. So, I think: look for alternative ways.”
“My recommendation to entrepreneurs building software companies [today] is to focus on getting early customers. That’s the best way to build the company, validate the product.”
Predicting the internet
To commit to monitoring the internet is also to commit to the idea that the internet is constantly changing. It’s the first thing Lad admits when we ask him about the unpredictability of ThousandEyes’ monitoring solutions. That change can be problematic, he says, in that companies’ own senses of self-preservation sometimes govern the internet.
“[The internet’s] also very complex, and it’s not controlled by one entity. So every network is making decisions that are sometimes in their own self-interests. For example, occasionally networks will announce IP addresses that don’t belong to them, and they can suck traffic into their site, and this is how even big sites like Google have gone down. This is what’s called BGP hijacks, or route hijacking. ”
“Even the best networks with the best engineers can’t control availability, because somebody else on the internet announces that they are Google and traffic starts going to them. This is part of what makes the internet really fascinating, and really difficult to predict.”
The ThousandEyes platform in action.(Image credit: ThousandEyes)
ThousandEyes is by no means giving up hope, though, and Lad says that the company has built technology that uses historical data to predict outages at particular times of the day - much like those early days for the company in San Francisco, but without having to wait for the outages to happen before companies can react.
“We can’t predict every outage,” he's quick to point out. “We won’t predict if a lightning strike takes out a data center. But if there’s a certain pattern that we can predict based on past data - for example, at 9AM on a Tuesday you always have issues with Microsoft 365 from this office, but you won’t have this problem if you switch [internet service providers]. That’s the kind of prediction we can make.”
The mention of natural disasters is genuinely surprising, and we have to admit that we haven’t thought too much about how environmental factors, or indeed climate change, are impacting the stability of the internet. Separately, Lad uses recurring fires in New York, which impact a large portion of the East Coast’s ability to connect to the internet, and beavers chewing through cables as examples of unpredictable events that affect connectivity.
Cisco's acquisition of ThousandEyes
Lad claims that a large part of ThousandEyes’ ability to help as many companies as possible (and, by extension, people) is the company’s acquisition by Cisco in 2020 which, as it turns out, is an unusual and engaging story.
“Cisco was a customer of ThousandEyes from 2014, and they actually spoke at our conferences as well,” he explains. “They were using it on their internal side to understand their employees' experiences, as they were adopting the internet more and more between their offices, moving things to cloud, so they were using ThousandEyes internally to be proactive on outages that were happening.”
“Every product functionality we released, they were adopting it. And I think a couple of things happened. One: the Cisco engineering teams made some changes where they decided that the Cisco platform should potentially run other applications as well, and when they were making these changes, the IT team, the customer side of Cisco, came to us and wanted to run ThousandEyes on all the Cisco devices in the branch offices. So we worked with them to get 1000s running on the Cisco devices.
“A couple things happened as a result [of that]. The leadership side [of Cisco], all the way to the CEO, started learning about how ThousandEyes [was] being used within Cisco. And Cisco being the company that basically helped build the internet, [they think] “if there’s something that we’re using as a first party, we should look at it.”
“The other thing [was] that, before we came to Cisco, we had more than a hundred Fortune 500 [customers]. So every time Cisco would have advisory meetings with some of these customers, they would bring ThousandEyes up to the leadership and say “you should consider partnering.”
Lad believed - and still believes - that Cisco and ThousandEyes’ goals were aligned: wanting to build the best view of the internet. He and Oliviera thought that, by partnering with Cisco, they would be best equipped to gather data from all corners of the world.
Lad has agreed to this interview largely to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the acquisition, although it is still tempting to ask him whether he finds it difficult being a huge cog in a big machine. However, he preempts this question before it’s asked, by discussing ThousandEyes’ unique role within Cisco.
“We’re set up as an independent business unit, not part of a certain product group within Cisco. And that’s because the internet threads to every piece of Cisco’s business. And because we help monitor, visualize, and understand the internet, [we’re] helping all the product lines sort of benefit from the galvanized data. [...] We’re still operating like a startup, except at that Cisco scale.”
He says that one of the key benefits of the Cisco partnership is the ability to get first meetings with customers, as the ThousandEyes company can trade on Cisco’s brand recognition. Another is that, by continuing to integrate ThousandEyes with Cisco devices, the amount of data that ThousandEyes can collect is increasing exponentially. “I look back,” he says, “and it was one of the best decisions we made.”
The internet in the future
As Lad looks forward, he thinks that there are challenges coming, but, equally, to celebrate.
“There isn’t one thing I would say that’s going to change,” he says. “I just feel connectivity is so critical that people live their lives around just being able to connect to something really quickly.”
“It’s also the devices that are becoming increasingly internet connected. That’s also going to challenge how the internet is evolving and how it needs to support all these billions of billions of devices that are coming online.”
“The last thing I would add is that there’s a large population of the world that is still not online. And there are areas, especially in Africa, and parts of Asia and India, where people are connected through their cell phones. [...] And I do think, in those markets in particular, the ecosystem is evolving around that lifecycle versus building things for desktops and laptops.”
Lad isn’t necessarily convinced that future changes to the way humanity takes to technology will be quite so rapid. “It’s not typical to have such a rapid acceleration of a trend overnight, so I feel like some of these changes are going to be accelerated more regionally, or are going to be gradual, globally. But [things] will continue to evolve.”
“What I see is that some of the changes are stirred by an application that makes life easier for people. And suddenly people start coming online or using a cell phone because they can get something done. They can accept payments for their work [for example], so that's the reason why they have a cell phone.”
For the most part, Lad won’t be drawn to discuss fears about the future of the internet. He describes himself as an optimist for the internet’s future, and continues to see it as a force for good. There’s an overriding sense that to him, ThousandEyes is not about keeping watch over and pushing back against the internet, but embracing it as a tool, and working to keep it accessible.
“Obviously, the internet is one of the reasons why your online accounts can get hacked, and all of that. So there's definitely a lot of bad stuff happening, but I think my hope and optimism is the good trumps the bad.”
“And we're able to use it for the right reasons. And it really continues to change lives and connect people and create, you know, an experience where people from different parts of the world are able to come together no matter where they are.”
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How to buy the right gaming laptop this Black Friday without breaking the bank
Gaming laptops are a great way to play the latest games when you're away from home, and they are increasingly powerful enough to make great desktop PC replacements for many gamers.
It's no wonder then that gaming laptops are some of the most popular deals during Black Friday, especially because many of the best gaming laptops are also fairly expensive. This is even more true for laptops with RTX 3080 GPUs or high-resolution and high-refresh displays from top brands like Razer, Gigabyte, and Alienware. But with some good Black Friday gaming laptop deals, these laptops can see some dramatic price cuts, sometimes by more than $500/£500.
But even if you're looking for something more in the midrange or budget category, there are still going to be some great cheap gaming laptop deals, and in many cases, you'll be able to find plenty, like the HP Victus 15, that won't force you to sacrifice too much when it comes to hardware or performance.
There are some laptop deals that you'll want to avoid though, and not just on the low end of the price spectrum where you'd expect to find some of the shoddier products. There are going to be plenty of high-end gaming laptops that look great at first glance, but are much less of a deal when you dig deeper into the specs.
As we all get ready for the holiday sales event, there are a whole lot of reasons to expect great deals this year and we'll help you sort out which ones to look for and which ones to avoid.
What to look for in a Black Friday gaming laptop deal
So what should you be on the lookout for when you go Black Friday shopping? There are some key points to remember when it comes to buying a gaming laptop.
First, we're already pushing the bounds of what a great gaming laptop really needs to play the best PC games, since nearly every modern AAA game is targeted at console compatibility first rather than trying to max out what the best gaming PC is capable of handling. The days of asking "But can it run Crysis?" have come and gone, honestly.
As such, there's very little reason to turn your nose up at a 12th-gen Intel Core i5 or an AMD Ryzen 6000-series CPU paired with an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU, since this kind of gaming laptop is more than capable of playing everything currently available at pretty high settings at 1080p.
And since 1080p is what even high-end gaming laptops generally stick with in order to max out the display's refresh rates, you don't need much more than this right now and these are going to see some great price cuts this Black Friday.
Second, keep in mind that on a laptop, a 4K display doesn't really get you that much more than a 1080p in terms of crispness. Yes, you're doubling the pixels-per-inch, so images will be twice as sharp, but the images are also going to be much smaller on a 14- or 15-inch display than they would be on the best gaming monitors pushing 32 or 42 inches across.
Our eyes just aren't able to appreciate the fine details on something as small as a gaming laptop display, especially not when things are blazing across in an action-packed title like Doom Eternal or some competitive shooters. At most, look for 1440p if all you care about is PC gaming. You're not missing out on much by settling for 1080p, but you will likely save a lot of money.
There are a couple of Black Friday-specific considerations to mention as well. First, you're going to see a lot of high-end laptops with very gaming-specific hardware get some eye-popping price cuts this Black Friday.
Here's an example from last year:
Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED YD, 15.6-inch 4K AMOLED, Intel i7-11800H, Nvidia RTX 3080, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD |$2,999$1,899 at Newegg (Instant savings and rebate)
Save $1,100 - Right off the bat, you're saving $800 with this Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED, but with an additional mail-in rebate offer, you can save another $300, bringing the total savings to $1,100. This is definitely one of the best Black Friday gaming laptop deals we've seen, but it ends early tomorrow morning, so you need to move on it soon if you want to save big on this beast.
If you are keen on getting a laptop that can play the latest games with the highest graphics fidelity possible, then you can find some great deals on the best mobile workstations for creative professionals that have all of the same hardware as the most premium gaming laptop, but come with perks like OLED 4K displays that gaming laptops generally lack.
The drawback is that these displays are going to have standard 60Hz refresh rates, since that isn't the kind of thing that creatives really need for their work. Non-OLED displays might also have awful pixel response as well, which make them less suitable for fast-paced gaming.
That said, if you're looking to take in the eye candy at a leisurely pace, then a creative workstation might be a smart way to get a great deal on very powerful hardware. If you're looking to game competitively though, you're going to want to stick to proper gaming laptops with more responsive, higher-refresh displays.
Gaming laptops across the board will see price cuts
(Image credit: Future)
We've been doing this for many, many years now, and we've got plenty of experience watching how the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events tend to run. The past couple of years has, with the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting supply chain issues, upended things for sure.
There are still some pretty consistent throughlines though, namely that the cadence of gaming laptop releases provides plenty of incentive for retailers to clear out some inventory and make way for newer products with the very latest hardware.
These latter gaming laptops are usually the least likely to see price cuts, but that will still happen, so don't expect the only gaming laptops to go on sale to be those that are one or two generations behind everyone else.
What's more, most of the newest mobile computing hardware, like new mobile processors and GPUs, are announced early in the year, typically around CES. And since most laptop hardware has been on the market for several months now, if not for over a year, we're expecting new mobile CPUs and GPUs to be announced or at least teased in January from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.
That means that demand for the current-gen tech is likely to soften this Black Friday as people wait to see what is revealed next year. As a result, prices on current-gen gaming laptops will have to drop lower to compensate, and you should definitely take advantage of these deeper price cuts.
One of the best ways to see what kind of gaming laptop deals to expect this year is to look at what we saw last year. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we're able to bring you some highlights from our 2021 Black Friday coverage to illustrate.
Asus ROG Zephyrus M16, RTX 3060, Intel Core i9, 40GB RAM: $3,329$2,449 at Newegg
Save $880 on this incredible gaming laptop from Asus ROG, one of the most respected producers of gaming laptops in the world. Not only are you getting that RTX 3060 GPU, but also an 11th-gen Intel i9 processor and a whopping 40GB of RAM.
MSI Creator 15 A11UE-491 | Intel Core i7, RTX 3060, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD:$1,849$1,449 at Newegg
Save $400 - Black Friday / Cyber Monday sees this mid-range laptop from MSI's Creator line at 22% off. That's $400 in savings for a notebook that will supercharge your creative workflows, whether that's photo and video editing, graphic design, or streaming your gaming sessions. Besides the 11th-gen i7, RTX 3060, 16GB RAM innards, you're also getting that crisp 4K display.
MSI Sword 15 A11UD-001 | Intel Core i7, RTX 3050 Ti, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD:$1,199.99$899.99 at Best Buy
Save $300 - MSI's Dragon Blade-inspired not only looks good, but also comes with a lot of power. And, it's 25% off from now until Black Friday, dropping this specific configuration below $1,000. What do you get in exchange? An 11th-gen Intel Core i7, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 TI GPU, 8GB RAM, and 512GB SSD storage, alongside an FHD screen. That's not too shabby for 1080p gaming.
MSI Pulse GL66 11UGK-001| Intel Core i7, RTX 3070, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD:$1,499$1,294 at Amazon Save $204 - You need not spend over $2,000 on an RTX 3070-powered gaming laptop. For one day only, MSI is dropping the price of this powerful piece of kit down and giving you $204 in savings. The only thing better than its high-end internals are its fast 1080p screen that boasts a 144Hz refresh rate, perfect for fast-paced games.
Dell G15, AMD Ryzen 7, Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti, 8GB, 512GB |$1,149$879 at Best Buy
Save $270 - This 15.6-inch gaming laptop from Dell brings some serious power for less than $1,000 this Black Friday. With an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SSD, and a 120Hz refresh rate, your games will look and play great on the go.
Things to avoid this Black Friday when shopping for a gaming laptop
(Image credit: Ninma)
No matter what kind of gaming you plan to do, there are a couple of things that you're likely to see this Black Friday that you're going to want to avoid unless the price is absolutely unbeatable.
First, don't look for anything less than 8GB RAM unless you are only planning on casual gaming. Windows 11 is going to take up a lot of RAM, so you're not going to have a whole lot to work with for your other programs, and gaming generally requires a good bit of RAM in order to run smoothly.
If you're looking at high-end devices, make sure that you're not paying extra for "premium" hardware from two or three generations ago. If you see a $2,000 gaming laptop with a ninth-gen Intel Core i7 in it, you can get new hardware for roughly the same price elsewhere, and you definitely should.
Another thing you might see a lot of right now is a "gaming" Chromebook. Look, don't get us wrong, we love Chromebooks, but Chromebooks typically don't have the specs required for locally installed games (and couldn't run almost any of them even if they did), and cloud gaming is viable but still iffy on a Chromebook. Come back to us next year once we've had a chance to really push the new line of gaming Chromebooks to see what they are capable of before making that kind of jump.
Finally, there is the question of MacBooks. Typically, MacBooks haven't been seen as gaming machines in a serious way and that hasn't really changed even with the latest Apple silicon.
There are plenty of games that you can play on a Mac, mind you, and some of us are actually quite bullish on the Mac's gaming potential in the years ahead. Capcom just released Resident Evil Village on the Mac and other developers are likely to start following suit in the coming years, but we're not there yet and the future of Mac gaming remains to be seen. If you're looking to play all of the latest PC games right now, you're still going to need a Windows laptop.
Gaming laptop spec cheat sheet
One of the most overwhelming things about shopping for a gaming laptop on Black Friday is trying to make sense of the completely incomprehensible specs that manufacturers tend to throw at customers. If you've never bought a gaming laptop before or you're buying one for someone else and you aren't a gamer yourself, it can feel like you're reading a foreign language.
Fortunately, we have tested so many gaming laptops that we've learned what's worth buying and what is best avoided. We've broken down the kinds of specs you're going to want to target for premium devices, our suggested specs for the best balance between performance and price, and the minimum specs you should be targeting if you're looking for a more budget option but still want the laptop to provide a solid gaming experience.
Component
Premium
Suggested
Minimum
CPU
Intel Core i9-12XXX or AMD Ryzen 9 6XXX
Intel Core i7-12XXX or AMD Ryzen 7 6XXX
Intel Core i5-11XXX or AMD Ryzen 5 5XXX
GPU
Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti or greater
Nvidia RTX 3060 or RTX 2070
Nvidia GTX 1650
RAM
32GB or greater
16GB
8GB with a free DIMM slot
Storage
More than 1TB
1TB
256GB
Monitor Resolution
2160p (4K)
1440p
1080p
Monitor Refresh Rate
240Hz or higher
165Hz
144Hz (60Hz if 4K resolution)
Today's best gaming laptop deals
If you don't want to wait for Black Friday, you can check out some of the best gaming laptop deals available right now.
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The metaverse at work is going to alienate your disabled employees, here’s why
If you’re a business owner or leader thinking about bashing the “metaverse” button, you’re in luck.
New research appears to suggest many workers are willing to embrace the concept, despite often not being able to say why the metaverse at work should exist, how it will improve their working lives, or even exactly what it is.
A report released at the end of September 2022 claims over three-quarters (78%) of “business professionals” - presumably at all levels - want to “embrace the metaverse”, which is definitely a phrase that normal people use.
The majority (71%) of respondents said they could see the metaverse being incorporated into their working lives, and 40% saw the metaverse replacing “static collaboration environments” - presumably the likes of Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or any of the online collaboration tools that have become common since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
This is despite Deepak Agarwal, Project Manager at GlobalData, admitting that, “the Metaverse is still largely conceptual” following the company’s latest report on the gargantuan size of the metaverse market. It doesn’t yet exist, but the firm says there’s $23 billion in it.
This is disgusting. An affront to being.(Image credit: Meta)
“Conceptually”, using the metaverse to sit at a virtual representation of your desk, attempting basically any task with those ergonomic controllers, sounds rancid. And if I ever suffer prolonged exposure to my line manager as a Playmobil man, I’ll sell my earthly belongings and live in a cave. Giving him legs is not the point. Instead, it's a patronising, exclusionary diktat about all the functioning limbs you need to be "normal".
Because the most compelling reason why I’m sick of reading about the metaverse at work isn't that it's a dull, strange power fantasy, it's that I’m not going to be able to participate anyway.
The metaverse at work is exclusionary
In late August 2022, The Conversation published an article by three academic researchers in England discussing the potential benefits of the metaverse for people with disabilities.
Except the article bases its arguments on a reductive view of disability that amounts to “wheelchair-bound”. That’s not my experience of disability. I can walk, but I can’t even hold the controllers, and so any virtual reality is a non-starter for me.
It also concedes that virtual mobility - the idea that technology can give disabled people with limited physical mobility more agency and independence - is already achieved by the internet.
I can agree with this. The internet lets me make a living, have a social life, and absorb information and culture. It is literally the apex of human existence, and that includes the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - which the internet lets me look at any time I want.
Computers have been around for so long that accessibility solutions - speech recognition, text-to-speech, on-screen keyboards, eye tracking, you name it - make working life accessible to pretty much everyone. Is it really progress if we tear all that up? That’s a rhetorical question, Mark.
Worse still, we haven’t reinvented the internet just once, but at least fourteen times. Geekflare keeps adding to this number, and I keep lamenting that God is dead. You can’t expect accessibility standards to bed in across that many platforms.
We need the solutions that already exist, especially at a time of massive upheaval like - oh, the one we’re living through now. If Microsoft's latest Work Trend Index report is to be believed, 85% of leaders don’t trust that their employees are being productive in a hybrid work environment.
That’s nonsense, obviously. But I’ll tell you what - a chunk of your disabled employees won’t be productive when you put them in an environment where they literally can’t work. And you’re going to sack them, are you, because of “the future”? That should be an interesting day in court.
Forcing the metaverse into a work setting is going to disenfranchise so many people. If you really want to recreate Ready Player One or Snow Crash - that’s how you get there. Oh, you haven’t read them? You just thought their Wikipedias were cool? Okay.
(Image credit: Twitter / Alex Blechman)
It’s irresponsible to push for “the metaverse at work” without considering these implications and ensuring that alternative working environments exist. And we do have those environments, because a plague forced us to make - a-ha - progress.
And if your gotcha here in the MENSA meeting is “well you can still dial in on video conference”, that’s a tacit admission that we’ve already cleared this high bar of invention. It also disregards my staunch religious belief that contact with the metaverse of any kind will make my heart explode.
Reconsider.
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iPhone 15 Pro could jump to 8GB RAM, include a periscope camera
It’s the season of major computer hardware releases, with everything from new laptops and PCs to new graphics cards and processors.
And as we saw with our recent Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and Intel Core i9-13900K reviews, this new crop of gaming hardware is more powerful than we could have imagined before we got our hands on it all and tested it. But there is one thing that is also undeniable: the best graphics cards are increasingly more expensive than the average consumer in even the wealthiest western nations can afford, much less gamers in the global south – assuming they aren’t simply ignored by major product launches entirely.
In many ways, this is at the heart of the disappointment around the end of Google Stadia. For all its faults, it did allow gamers who were priced out of the best gaming PCs to play games like Cyberpunk 2077, and experience these games along with the fortunate few who managed to grab one of the even the best cheap graphics cards during the past couple of years.
With the shutdown of Stadia, one might draw the conclusion that cloud gaming itself had failed, but I think that would be a serious mistake. Cloud gaming’s success was always going to be tied to the speed of a user’s internet connection, and despite a frustrating delay, the rollout of 5G networks around the world will finally put cloud gaming services in the position to succeed.
Cloud gaming is primed to be 5G’s ‘killer app’
(Image credit: YouTube)
Every cellular telecommunication network generation had a single app or service that came to define it, the so-called “killer app.” First-generation mobile technology brought wireless voice communications to the masses, while the second-generation networks of the late 1990s and early 2000s gave us SMS texting. 3G networks powered the social media revolution on smartphone devices, and 4G LTE networks empowered streaming media like Spotify and Netflix.
What 5G’s killer app will be remains to be seen, but David Cook is all-in on cloud gaming. Cook is the CEO of Radian Arc, a cloud gaming infrastructure firm that’s partnering with AMD to lay the foundation for making cloud gaming a practical reality worldwide.
“We would sit in these meetings with the telecom operators, and they had all made huge investments in 5G,” Cook told me earlier this year, “And there were some very interesting applications that they would talk about, such as drones and self-driving cars. I would always smile and say, ‘yeah, I don’t see many of those out the window though I do believe it’s an important use case, but what we do know is that everyone is playing games’.”
When cloud gaming services like PlayStation Now, Google Stadia, and Nvidia GeForce Now first launched several years ago, even the best home internet services with wired fiber optic connections struggled to deliver the kind of experience that gamers were hoping for. Network bottlenecks would often cause games to lag or graphics quality to suddenly plummet, which has really caused cloud gaming adoption to stall. With 5G though, there is a much greater opportunity to take advantage of the significantly less congested 5G frequencies and provide a smoother gaming experience without sacrificing quality.
Improving AAA gaming access globally
(Image credit: Shutterstock / Dean Drobot)
There are literally billions of gamers around the world, and the market is only going to grow in the years ahead. But not all gamers have the same opportunity to enjoy the best PC games the way many of us take for granted. Many, if not most, gamers don’t even have a PC or console to play on, instead needing to rely on their phones or dedicated gaming cafes where they can play modern AAA titles using better hardware than they could buy themselves.
This is reflected in the economics of video games itself. Mobile gaming is far and away the largest segment of the global video game market – it’s not even close – whether you’re talking number of gamers or the revenue these games bring in. But gamers the world over aren’t playing Candy Crush over Elden Ring because they don’t care about the deeper gameplay experience that a modern PC or console game can provide, it really does come down to access.
“In territories like Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, and Africa, the use case is more mobile, but gamers still would love the ability to get access to better graphics and games on their mobile devices,” Cook said. “And same with the game publishers, the game publishers would love to have more creativity and more functionality in those games and be able to get that out across a wider range of mobile devices.”
Laying the groundwork for the cloud gaming revolution to come
Recently, one of our partners in Central Africa was literally on the phone, and the closest server they could reach...was in South Africa
David Cook, CEO Radian Arc
And while the physical interface a gamer might use to play could be anything from a smartphone to a Chromebook or even an older gaming PC, the key is to offload the actual hard work of rendering a game somewhere else and simply output the video to a network connection rather than an HDMI or DisplayPort cable.
Transmitting the visual output of a server to a client device is something we have been doing for literally decades, but gaming has been held back by the real-time, low input latency required to play a modern video game. 5G networks are the first telecom infrastructure that can provide that kind of responsiveness and network stability - all you have to do is look at the remote surgeries performed in recent years using 5G networks to see that.
All that’s missing now is the physical servers to actually run the game you’re playing remotely, but it won’t be missing for long. Already, companies like Radian Arc are moving GPU servers into telecom network centers to lay the groundwork for a proliferation of cloud gaming services.
“What we see is quite a difference in the market need in North America, Australia, or western Europe than what we see in places like Southeast Asia. Recently, one of our partners in Central Africa was literally on the phone, and the closest server they could reach, even for traditional mobile gaming, was in South Africa,” Cook said. “So getting these GPU servers inside some of these smaller telecoms, we suddenly open up a whole new world of functionality, on both sides with the consumers and the publishers.”
Getting gamers to the cloud
(Image credit: Google)
With the demise of Google Stadia and the fairly tepid adoption of cloud gaming services in the past few years, convincing gamers to make the move to cloud gaming is a genuine challenge. Many are going to be coming in with prejudice, prefering physical hardware they can hold, while others might have tried it in the past and been turned off by the experience.
Cook believes there’s a secret weapon in cloud gaming’s arsenal though: the telecom providers themselves.
“When we walk into a telecom,” Cook said, “we walk in and say we want to put the POP (point of presence) inside your network so that we can all have the benefits of low latency, scale, cost benefits, etc., but we also sit down with them and actually come up with a marketing plan to say, here’s how you market these games to this user base – kind of team up with them on that. Part of that marketing plan does include a controller, and that controller can be quite different. So, what you’ll see in a lot of those markets is an Android set-top box for the living room and we can run an application on that set-top box and create a similar game console-like experience.
“One thing that telecoms are really good at is selling those kinds of bundles,” Cook said, “selling hardware plus a data plan, or hardware, plus a data plan, plus a gaming plan, which is a really unique value proposition.”
This distributed, localized telecom network approach might be an unexpected asset for cloud gaming. Google Stadia was a single cloud gaming provider, so its demise was a significant blow to the cloud gaming industry. If Google or Nvidia are the sole providers of cloud gaming services, then cloud gaming will always be held back by the level of commitment to the project that a small handful of companies have.
By going through the telecoms most people already use, you might not get the kind of extensive catalog that Google could leverage, but you end up with more cloud gaming providers overall, which should help speed its adoption.
“So if you’ve got the GPU inside of the telecom network, you can really take advantage of scale. The new AMD GPUs can run twelve games per GPU. They’re very energy efficient, about 30% less power on a per-user basis. All those things really ought to make cloud gaming the potential killer app for the 5G rollout.”
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has finally premiered, and the first fleet of reactions are now swarming over our social media feeds like a...
Wakanda Forever reactions are in, and it's "very different" to Black Panther
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has finally premiered, and the first fleet of reactions are now swarming over our social media feeds like a vibranium nanite super-suit.
The embargo for a full review of the movie isn’t for another week (November 8), but attendees were able to tweet some initial, spoiler-free impressions that start to give a picture of how the hugely anticipated Black Panther sequel has fared.
Wakanda Forever picks up the story after the end of 2018’s Black Panther, seeing the afro-futurist community of Wakanda in conflict with the undersea nation of Talokan, led by king Namor. We know the film also debuts Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, also known as Ironheart – an MIT student who creates an Iron Man-esque suit of armor – alongside returning roles for Letitia Wright (Shuri) and Lupita Nyong’o (Nakia).
A sequel was surely a daunting task, given the immense popularity of the first Black Panther film, as well as the glaring absence of former lead Chadwick Boseman – who tragically passed away in 2020. The sequel does appear to pay tribute to Boseman’s legacy, while you can see director Ryan Coogler wearing a commemorative chain to honor the late actor on the red carpet.
So with a truly star-studded cast, musical contributions from Rihanna, and the weight of expectations on this film’s shoulders, how did it fare?
She-Hulk actress Jameela Jamil went all-caps in her praise for Wakanda Forever, calling it “UNBELIEVABLY GOOD [...] ACTION, SCENERY AND COSTUMES TO DIE FOR”.
GO AND SEE BLACK PANTHER IT IS FUCKING UNBELIEVABLY GOOD. PREMIERE WAS A VIBE. LETITIA WRIGHT DESERVES ALL THE GOOD SHIT. WILDLY TALENTED CAST AND CREW. ACTION, SCENERY AND COSTUMES TO DIE FOR. #WakandaForever pic.twitter.com/5CxppAbPrMOctober 27, 2022
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Host of Comicbook.com’s Marvel podcast Phase Zero, Brandon Davis, called the movie “epic, especially in scope” – while adding in a later comment that Wakanda Forever and 2018’s Black Panther are “VERY different movies”, making comparison difficult.
#BlackPanther #WakandaForever is epic, especially in scope.Namor is one of the better villains the MCU has had to offer. Tenoch Huerta just kills it!Emotions are heavy. Ryan Coogler ups his game on the action. It’s a lot to take in, balance so much, and is powerfully good. pic.twitter.com/NYxk1UvTYzOctober 27, 2022
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Film critic Elijah Boxhill points to the impact that Letitia Wright has had on the film – seeing her fill the space left by Boseman’s T’Challa is certain to give the film a different feel.
#WakandaForever is PERFECT! Even with the heart-wrenching weight that it had to carry on its back, Black Panther 2 executes in making one of the most memorable Marvel films ever. Letitia Wright’s impact on this film is still has me still shaken up a bit, (1/3) pic.twitter.com/Agsf041VjGOctober 27, 2022
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Film critic Fico Cangiano calls it “a soulful, wondrous sequel that packs an emotional punch & effectively explores relevant world themes.” Meanwhile, Ghanian singer Amaarae said it's “truly an amazing movie”.
Film critic Orlando Enelcine calls Black Panther the “crown jewel” of the MCU, with the sequel offering “some of the best acting I’ve seen all year.”
Actor Matt Ramos wasn’t quite as complimentary, calling Wakanda Forever “a step down from the first film”, adding that “there’s a lot that just didn’t sit right with me that I can’t explain without getting into spoilers”.
#WakandaForever is a definitely a step down from the first film. It has great qualities in Letitia’s performance, NAMOR & the action but there’s a lot that just didn’t sit right with me that I can’t explain without getting into spoilers. I’ll explain more once the film comes out.October 27, 2022
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There’s definitely a tendency with social media impressions to be fleeting praise – it’s hard to justify criticism of a film when you can’t immediately back your argument up with further descriptions, and the purpose of companies allowing these tweets is largely to help stoke up online chatter around a film.
So, we expect a fuller picture to emerge when the film opens to the public, and reviewers can thoroughly have their say – but if there’s any common thread in these reactions so far, it’s that Wakanda Forever feels like quite a different beast from the original, and we'll see whether fans of Black Panther feel split on the result.
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