Although Microsoft’s Bing search engine was greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism when it was first unveiled almost a year ago, but Microsoft must be doing something right—like setting up Bing as the default search engine for Internet Explorer and Motorola Android phones—because the service is continuing to gain share in the U.S. search market. According to media metrics firm Nielsen, during February 2010 Bing was the number three search engine with a 12.5 percent share of the U.S. search market. What’s interesting about that numbers is not that Bing was third, but that Bing was at 10.9 percent in January 2010…and Google dropped over a point from a 66.3 percent share in January to 65.2 percent. Proportionately, that’s a 14.7 percent increase for Bing.
In the past, Bing’s market share gains have seemed to come mainly at the expense of Yahoo. Although Yahoo and Microsoft have entered into a long-term agreement that will see Bing handling the back end of Yahoo search queries, Yahoo says it is keeping its hand in the search game, and according to Nielsen the company still accounted for 14.1 percent of U.S. Internet searches in February. Although Yahoo lost ground between January and February, this time it amounted to 0.4 percent—less than half the share of the overall market Google seemingly lost to Bing during the month. Of course, in proportional terms, Yahoo’s loss is more substantial: month to month, Yahoo saw 2.7 percent of its search traffic go away, where Google saw only a 1.7 percent drop over the same period.
Overall, in raw numbers Nielsen found that U.S. searches dropped by over 1 billion in February, dropping from 10.27 billion searches in January to 9.18 billion in February.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.