Apple's MacBook Pro has new graphics card options, with the AMD Radeon Pro Vega GPUs now being added to the notebook's configurator. Promised earlier this month, alongside the big Mac mini and MacBook Air launch, the new graphics options are targeted at graphics professionals doing tasks like 3D rendering, as well as gamers.
Intel has revealed its second-generation artificial intelligence USB stick, with the Neural Compute Stick 2 promising up to eight times the performance of its predecessor, despite the compact size. It's part of Intel's push to place its silicon the heart of AI, by making developing new machine learning and AI projects and applications far more straightforward.
There is a growing number of smart virtual assistants in the digital world today and almost all of them have one thing in common. Most have female-sounding or even unambiguously female names. Some, like Google Assistant, have a non-human name but, while you can change the voice, its still defaults to female. Many have decried this perpetuation of gender roles in the tech industry and Voicera, the startup that’s making one of the most advanced in-meeting assistants in the market, is taking steps to break away from that culture.
The folks over at iFixit recently celebrated a small victory for third-party repair industry when exceptions to the DMCA allowed self-repairs for certain classes of devices. That victory, however, might have been short-lived at least as far as Apple’s latest Mac products are concerned. Because while some part of the new Macs and MacBooks can be replaced with no problem or issue, some parts, like the logic board and Touch ID fingerprint sensor, would now require official re-authentication using a diagnostic tool that only Apple provides to its authorized service providers.
Microsoft has a Surface Go with LTE for those unwilling to compromise on connectivity, with the cellular version of the 10-inch tablet up for preorder today. It's the latest iteration of the software company's Surface range, and along with LTE Advanced it also offers some of the highest specs for the tablet.
While majority of today's laptops are growing slimmer and lighter, workstation maker Eurocom is going the opposite direction. Unwilling to sacrifice power and performance for the sake of portability or luxurious-looking designs, the company's newest workstation pushes the envelope of what it means to be mobile and portable. Because while the Eurocom Tornado F7W may look like a laptop, its spec sheet will make you feel like you're actually carrying your desk, and your work, with you everywhere.
Fans of DIY gadget repairs haven't had much good news over the past few years, but there are signs the tides may be changing - at least - for Apple devices. The Cupertino company hasn't exactly led by example when it comes to making repairs, battery replacements, and other unofficial tinkering easy with its laptops, tablets, and smartphones, but that could be changing.
Late last month, Apple announced a sorely needed update for the Mac mini. We've gone four years in between models, but you wouldn't be able to tell that simply by looking at 2018's Mac mini, as it shares a familiar aesthetic with its predecessor. Obviously, the internals are a lot different, which begs the question of how easy the new Mac mini will be to repair. As always, iFixit has torn the Mac mini to shreds in pursuit of an answer to that question.
Today we see inside the MacBook Air 13-inch Retina (late 2018), behind the keyboard, and under the metal. This is the model with a 13.3-inch LED-backlit IPS "Retina" display with 2560 x 1600 resolution and a 1.6 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor under the hood. The version we're looking at here is GOLD - though compared to some of the more standard "yellow" golds, this one's positively rosy. You'll be happy to find that the color of the screws holding this device together are matched with the color of the casing.
Amazon has released Alexa for PC, bringing its smart assistant to Windows 10 and turning your notebook or desktop computer into a smart speaker. The free app brings features familiar from Amazon's Echo line-up to Microsoft's platform, including smart home control.
Its foldable phone, or at least its foldable phone UX, might make the big headlines this week, but that is hardly all that Samsung has planned. It’s probably going to take the backseat for a while, but Samsung’s augmented reality ambitions are just as big. At its Samsung Developers Conference, the Korean tech company has alloted six sessions to AR. And while some of them seem to be devoted to the AR Emojis everyones either loves or loves to hate, Samsung might also have big news planned in the form of an AR cloud platform and even an AR headset prototype.
One of the perks of an open platform such as Android is that almost anyone, with enough knowledge and time, can put it on any device imaginable. Including devices that Google may have never approved of. Of course, Android does run on devices powered by x86 chips, notably Intel’s, but it hasn’t been something that easily available for anyone to just install on their computers. That’s what the Android-x86 project has been trying to do and a newer project called PrimeOS is building on top of that to bring a better desktop experience to laptops and PCs, especially those with slightly older hardware.