Computing

A lot of modern gaming PC hardware these days tends to focus on high-resolution, high-fidelity graphics. Whether it's 2K, 4K, or even 8K, PC makers, monitor manufacturers, and graphics silicon developers put almost all the emphasis on raw power or artificial intelligence to push millions of pixels around. AMD's newest GPU, in contrast, goes the opposite direction and aims to instead utilize its latest Radeon technologies to optimize gaming at 1080p resolutions.

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Amazon's Kindles have long been the device of choice by voracious readers, especially those that want to take their books with them anywhere. Of course, the books they hold inside don't come from thin air and have to be downloaded directly to the device or transferred from a computer. The former naturally requires an Internet connection, which almost all Kindles have. Unfortunately, some older models support don't support anything beyond 3G networks, and those will lose their ability to connect to the Internet by the end of the year.

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Apple naturally wants its fans and customers to buy Macs running on its own M1 Silicon, but it also knows it can't really push them to do so. "Planned obsolescence" is already a dirty word in the consumer electronics market, and it has been thrown at Apple a number of times already. It is, however, unavoidable that some software features might be exclusive to its M1 Macs because of this or that hardware requirement, so it's reassuring to hear that it won't be the case for at least one of those.

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Apple's mobile ecosystem has been marked by two main pillars in the past few years. While it has been singing praises about its work on protecting users' privacy, it has also been designing its iPhones and Apple Watches to record and store health-related data, from activity tracking to biometrics monitoring. Not all activities, however, can be tracked through phones and wearables, and Facebook is reportedly looking into syncing activity data from its Oculus headsets with Apple Health for a more holistic overview of a person's fitness goals and state.

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The ongoing legal spat between Apple and Epic Games over alleged app store monopolies has sent ripples throughout the entire software industry. App store owners have started making changes to appease a growing number of disgruntled developers, and Microsoft is pushing itself at the forefront of those developer-friendly changes. To be fair, the upcoming changes to the Microsoft Store policies will indeed benefit developers, but one change, in particular, could be trading users' security in exchange.

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Intel has detailed what it says is one of its most detailed roadmaps for its process and packaging technology ever published -- one that sets the stage for its ambitious goal of "process performance leadership" over the next few years. Among other things, the company is launching a new naming structure for its process nodes in order to present "a clear and consistent framework" for customers.

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Microsoft's new Surface could adopt a very different screen hinge design, with newly-spotted patents suggesting the company is flirting with an iPad Pro-style floating hinge. Currently, the Surface Book has a detachable screen - which pulls away from the keyboard to form a standalone tablet - while the Surface Laptop adopts a more traditional notebook form-factor.

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Apple's Face ID may have been logging us into iPhone and iPad for several years now, but the facial recognition tech looks set to finally be coming to Mac too. While recent Mac models have been able to unlock either with a nearby Apple Watch or using a Touch ID sensor, an equivalent to Microsoft's Windows Hello is predicted to be in the pipeline.

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Valve's Steam Deck, just like many of the company's hardware endeavors, has stirred up mixed responses to the portable PC gaming handheld. The device itself seems to have a yin yang characteristic to it. Its tempting price tag was offset by pre-order chaos, while its capable hardware, at least for a portable computer, was balanced by some puzzling decisions about its performance. The most controversial aspect seems to be the "30 FPS target" for the Steam Deck that Valve revealed. As it turns out, the story is actually more confusing than that simple statement.

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Despite the minimal improvements and changes it will bring, the upcoming Windows 11 release still proved to be interesting enough for some people to want to get their hands on it. Of course, Microsoft limits the availability of the pre-release version of the software to a select few testers. On occasions like these, people tend to try outsmarting the system by acquiring installers from other sources. Unsurprisingly, these Windows 11 installers not only do not work, but they also bring with them all kinds of unwanted and potentially harmful software.

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The current semiconductor shortage has undoubtedly frustrated a lot of people. Not only have shortages made some in-demand hardware exceedingly difficult to find, but it's even prompted manufacturers to raise prices in some cases. We've seen that happen in the GPU segment, where new NVIDIA and AMD cards are routinely priced above MSRP as manufacturers contend with supply constraints.

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Apple is reportedly working on a new external display equipped with both a dedicated iPhone chip and a Neural Engine, potentially giving the Pro Display XDR a high-end replacement. Currently the company has just one official external display in its line-up, the 6K-capable Pro Display XDR with a $5k starting price.

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