Tag: computers

How to Choose the Right Laptop: A Step-by-Step Guide

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Intel Core i7-1455U is how a laptop manufacturer’s website might list the type of processor. Now that we know Core i7 means it’s one of the more powerful chips in the lineup, let’s break the rest of the numbers down. The first numbers (“14”) refer to the generation; in this case, it’s a 14th-generation chip (as of now, that’s the latest generation available for laptops). The i7-1355U would be a 13th-generation chip or one that’s probably a year or so older.

The next two or three numbers (“55”) are related to performance. The higher these numbers are, the more powerful the chip is. This is true within only that chip line, though. The Intel Core i7-1465U is slightly more powerful than the Intel Core i7-1455U, but much less powerful than the Intel Core i9-1435H. The i9 chip is always more powerful than the i7, the i7 more powerful than the i5, and the difference is greater than the difference between any two chips in the same chip line.

The letter at the end of the chip name (“U” in our example) is Intel’s designation for the chip’s purpose. For laptops, the letters you’ll see at the end are Y, U, H, and HX. The Y series chips are optimized for battery life, which is good if you’re frequently away from a plug for long periods of time, but that added battery life comes at the expense of some performance. H chips are optimized for performance, and U chips are “power efficient” but not “extremely” efficient like the Y line. The newest of the bunch is the HX designation, which are chips that Intel calls “desktop replacement class.” They’re the most powerful of the bunch, but you will get less battery life from laptops with HX chips.

AMD Processors

AMD’s chip naming is just as difficult to decipher as Intel’s. In the name AMD Ryzen 5 8600X, the “8” is the generation (how old it is—higher is better), and the “6” is how powerful it is. A “6” would make this example a medium-powered chip, whereas a 3 or 4 would be weaker (slower). The next two numbers don’t have much impact on anything. The “X” at the end indicates high performance. Other letter designations include U for ultra-low power (for better battery life).

Is there a huge difference between Intel and AMD chips? My experience, testing dozens of both every year, is that it depends. Generally speaking, an Intel i5 is indistinguishable from a Ryzen 5 outside of very specific benchmarks. They’re similar when you’re doing things like browsing the web or editing documents. The same goes for the Intel i7 and Ryzen 7, and the Intel i3 and the Ryzen 3.

Graphics performance is where you’ll notice a difference. In my testing, in both benchmarks and real work use, AMD’s integrated graphics tend to perform better than Intel on graphics-intensive tasks—think editing videos or playing games. Intel’s most recent series of chips has closed that gap significantly, but AMD still has an edge. You may benefit from buying an AMD machine if you’re a video editor or gamer, but what you most likely want is a dedicated graphics card. (More on that in the GPU section below.)

ARM Processors

There are quite a few chips based on the ARM architecture, but the latest and greatest is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X CPU, which made a splash in 2024 when it debuted as the sole chip supporting Microsoft’s new Copilot+ AI capabilities. (Microsoft says Copilot+ will be coming to Intel and AMD machines eventually.) We’ve tested two Copilot+ laptop with Snapdragon X chips and have been very impressed. Speed is good (though not all benchmark tests run on them yet, so head-to-head comparisons are difficult), battery life is fantastic, and software compatibility is pretty good thanks to Microsoft’s Prism translation layer, which allows popular apps to run on the ARM platform (albeit slowly). It’s early days for the Snapdragon X chips, but so far we like what we’ve seen and think it has, if nothing else, shaken up the Intel/AMD duopoly that’s long reigned over the PC market.

Apple Processors

Apple makes a number a chips these days, used in both MacBooks, iPads, and iPhones. Fortunately the designations are pretty simple. There are three chips in the lineup: the M1, M2, and M3. The M1 is the oldest and slowest; the M3 is the newest and fastest. Within each of those chip lines there are different models, ranging from the base model, Pro, Max, and Ultra. The base model is the least powerful, while the Ultra is the most powerful. Again, we have a separate guide to Macs with a full breakdown of each chip, all the model designations, and which one you want for different tasks.

How Much Processing Power Do You Need?

If you’re a typical user who runs a web browser, Microsoft’s Office Suite, and perhaps even some photo editing software, we recommend a laptop with an Intel Core i5 10th-generation or later processor. That would be displayed as something like “Intel Core i5-10350U.”

If you can afford it, an Intel i7 chip makes a nice upgrade and will make your laptop feel snappier. The extra power often means shorter battery life though, so you’ll need to balance that with your needs. A gaming laptop, for instance, would use an i7 (or i9) chip, but an i5 is usually fine for less demanding tasks. Likewise, for the average user, the AMD Ryzen 5000 series will suffice, but the Ryzen 7000 makes a nice upgrade—again at the cost of battery life.

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Scott Gilbertson

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September 2, 2024
The Best Cheap Laptops We’ve Tested

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For our full take on what to look for in a laptop, see our guide Choosing the Right Laptop. The condensed version (even if your budget is limited) is to try to get at least an Intel i5 processor and at least 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB is even better. Recent versions of Windows (both 10 and 11) use an astronomical amount of RAM (sometimes as much as 6 GB in my testing). If you only have 8 GB total, that doesn’t leave much RAM for applications, and results in a slower laptop.

Aim for these specs: Try to get a laptop with at least a 10th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of storage in the form of a solid state drive. We suggest getting a 13- or 14-inch display that’s close to FHD (1080p resolution). If you’re going to use it for watching movies, consider a 2-in-1 model (although these do tend to cost more). If your budget is tight and you want the most bang for your buck, or you just want to keep something out of the landfill, consider the used or refurbished laptop market. I’ve had great luck buying used laptops on eBay from all sorts of sellers (both pros and regular people).

To score the best deal, make sure you know the market. Do some research to figure out what kind of machine will suit your needs. The easiest to come by, and therefore (usually) the best deals, tend to be the more boring, business-oriented models. I happen to like ThinkPads, which are used by—and then dumped all at once by—large corporations, which means there are lots to choose from, and they’re cheap.

Finding used laptops on eBay: Once you know what you want, search for it on eBay. Scroll down and check the option to show only “Sold Listings.” Now take the 10 most recent sales, add up the prices, and divide by 10. That’s the average price; don’t pay more than that. Keep the lowest price in mind—that’s the great deal price. Now, uncheck the Sold Listing option. See what’s between the lowest price and the average price. Those are the deals you can consider. I suggest watching a few. Don’t bid or participate at all. Just watch them until the end and see how high the auctions end up going.

Once you have a feel for the market and what you should be paying, you’ll know when you’ve found a deal. When you find it, wait. Don’t bid until the last few minutes of the auction. You don’t want other bidders to have a chance to react. Remember that if you miss out on something, it’s not the end of the world. There’s always something new being listed on eBay.

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Daniel Thorp-Lancaster, Scott Gilbertson

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August 11, 2024
Intel Is Cutting More Than 15,000 Jobs Despite Getting Billions From the US Government

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In a move likely to raise a few taxpayer eyebrows, Intel said today that it will cut 15 percent of its workforce, or more than 15,000 jobs, as it struggles to rebound from disappointing results. In March, the US government said it would give Intel no less than $8.5 billion to help it rebuild its US chipmaking operations.

Intel said that its revenues were down 1 percent year-on-year for the second quarter. “We do not take this lightly, and we have carefully considered the impact this will have on the Intel family,” CEO Pat Gelsinger said on an earnings call today. “These are hard, but necessary decisions. These reductions do not impact our ability to execute our plan.”

The job cuts will affect areas including sales, marketing, and administrative roles, Intel said, and would be part of a general cost-cutting plan. The move follows a 5 percent reduction in staff announced by Intel last year. In after-hours trading, the company’s stock fell more than 17 percent.

“It is a lot of jobs,” Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, a chip industry consultancy, tells WIRED. However, Moorhead says, it is a positive sign that the proposed layoffs appear to be targeted and not across the board. “Layoffs don’t always mean there’s something wrong with a company, but to me it’s all about the strategy,” he says.

Intel is struggling to execute a challenging turnaround plan that involves refocusing on making chips for others through its foundry business and moving more quickly to cutting-edge manufacturing methods. In February, the company said its accelerated road map for producing cutting-edge chips was on track and promised to become the world’s second-place foundry company by 2030. Intel said today that it is still on track to meet these goals.

The money Intel received in March is the biggest grant awarded by the US government so far through the CHIPS Act, 2022 legislation passed that will appropriated $52.7 billion to reshore chip manufacturing and invest in chip research and workforce training. The company will also receive tax credits of up to 25 percent on $100 billion in investments and will be eligible for federal loans of up to $11 billion.

The $8.5 billion given to Intel will go toward building plants in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon. Intel said the investments it is making in these chipmaking plants will create over 10,000 company jobs, 20,000 construction jobs, and thousands more roles in supporting industries. “The money that Intel has brought in is being used to build factories,” says Moorehead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “That isn’t stopping, and it does create a lot of jobs.”

After decades of success thanks to the rise of personal computing, Intel failed to capitalize on the smartphone era, ceding market share to chips based on Arm’s designs. More recently, it has seen Nvidia, a company that started out making graphics chips for gaming, rise to prominence thanks to the importance of its hardware for training AI algorithms. Intel has also fallen behind its manufacturing competitors, TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea.

The US government is helping fund Intel’s reboot because advanced chips are seen as crucial to economic and geopolitical competitiveness. The pandemic highlighted how vulnerable many US industries are to a fragile global supply chain. Advanced chips are also crucial for building AI, which is increasingly seen as a national imperative.

Today the US makes 12 percent of the world’s semiconductors, compared with 37 percent in the 1990s. The consulting firm McKinsey has predicted that the value of the semiconductor industry would grow impressively this decade, from $600 billion in 2021 to more than $1 trillion by 2030.

Dan Hutcheson, an analyst with Tech Insights, says Intel’s revenue shortfall reflects an ongoing shift toward AI-focused data center computing. “It used to be that [Intel] owned the data center,” Hutcheson says. “What we’ve seen in the last few years is that the big hyperscalers have focused on AI and GPUs—entire AI data centers.”

Hutcheson says Intel’s overall strategy seems to make sense, but the cuts suggest that the company is struggling to solve the dysfunction that saw it fall behind in the first place.

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Will Knight

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August 1, 2024
Lenovo’s Latest Yoga 9i Doesn’t Change Much, but That’s a Good Thing

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The 9i offers excellent usability with gently concave keys that have plenty of travel, a responsive touchpad, and the flexibility to flip the screen around and put the laptop in an inverted-V tent shape or lay it flat for the full tablet experience. A simple stylus is included for those looking to do more detailed work. I found typing to be a breeze, and nothing has changed about the chassis design either, which is all rounded edges and corners, weighing in at a svelte 2.4 pounds and measuring 18 mm thick.

As for performance, Intel’s latest chip is giving all manner of laptops a leg up, but as has been the case with most of the devices I’ve tested of late, power hasn’t exactly shot through the roof. My benchmark scores were mixed across the range of general business and graphics-focused apps, ultimately turning in slightly above-average numbers compared to the field of similarly equipped devices.

Photograph: Best Buy

Battery life, however, is a significant concern. While Gilbertson achieved double-digit hours of running time in 2023, my YouTube test saw the laptop dying after just under seven hours. This is a real disappointment for a machine of this size, so much so that I ran the test a couple of times to verify I hadn’t messed something up. The score held. Bizarrely, the 9i is also quite slow to boot; I clocked a lengthy 38 seconds to reach a state of usability—more than double the typical booting time for a 2024 laptop—and that doesn’t include the time it takes to figure out where the power button is.

At $1,450, the 2024 Yoga 9i is fairly priced, though I wouldn’t be averse to suggesting you keep your eyes open for a sale or two. Still, even at list price, it remains, just like Lenovo itself said, as tried and true as ever.

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Christopher Null

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July 28, 2024
HP’s New Elitebook Laptop Has the Best Battery of All Copilot+ PCs We’ve Tested

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Say what you want about the creative power of AI in the new Microsoft Copilot+ PCs, with its new EliteBook Ultra G1q, HP says, “Why not take it to the office?”

This is a laptop that’s all business—an “atmospheric blue” (not black) 14-inch clamshell, with nothing in the way of design frills aside from a silvery HP logo on top and a row of half-height function keys that are a bit lighter in color. Oh, and there’s a baby blue power button! Never accuse Hewlett-Packard of not knowing how to have a little fun, even in the corner office.

The feature list here is a familiar one for the Copilot+ PC market, though the specs on this machine are surprisingly entry-level. The slower Snapdragon X Elite X1E78100 serves as the CPU, backed by 16 GB of RAM and a 512-GB solid-state drive. The 14-inch touchscreen resolution sits at an oddball 2,240 x 1,400 pixels, a step down from the 2,880 x 1,800 resolution that has become the prevailing standard for machines with a 16:10 aspect ratio. Port selection isn’t impressive either, with two USB-C ports (one specified at Thunderbolt-class 40 Gbps, the other at 10 Gbps) and a single USB-A port. Contrast that with the Asus Vivobook S 15, which has two fast USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, and a microSD card reader.

Photograph: Christopher Null

At 18 millimeters thick, the machine cuts a svelte profile, but its 3-pound weight is on the high end for 14-inch laptops. That’s surely in part due to the tough aluminum chassis—50 percent recycled, and the keycaps are made of 50 percent plastic—and it’s also clear that the laptop has been designed to be beaten up a little bit: tossed in a shoulder bag, abused on an airplane’s tray table. If nothing else, the EliteBook certainly feels sturdy enough to hit the road with you without worry of damage.

Alas, the fairly low-end specs under the hood beget disappointing performance, and across the board, the EliteBook turned in the lowest benchmark scores among Copilot+ PCs I’ve tested to date. The delta isn’t huge—2 percent slower than the Microsoft Surface Pro on broad CPU-focused workloads, and slower by up to 10 percent on most graphics tests—but it’s measurable, and sometimes noticeable on tasks such as Live Captions, which had trouble keeping up with faster-moving speech. As expected, the EliteBook has the same lingering compatibility issues as other Qualcomm Snapdragon-based laptops that utilize the ARM architecture, which I explain in broader detail here.

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Christopher Null

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July 27, 2024
Asus’ CX34 Is a Pretty and Powerful Chromebook Plus Laptop

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One major omission from this model is a backlit keyboard, which is disappointing if you want to use it in the dark. Older CX34 models came with a backlit keyboard, so, curiously, Asus opted not to ship one on this updated version.

The good news is that, despite the lack of a backlight, the keyboard is comfortable to use for long periods. It has a solid amount of travel and never feels onerous to type on. If I had to name one quibble, it’s the small size of the home-key ridges on the “F” and “J” keys, which make it a little harder to touch-type.

The trackpad is large and spacious, though the material it’s made of creates more drag on your finger than I’d like. I also encountered one bug with the trackpad during testing where it was unresponsive after waking the CX34 from sleep. This seemed to be a one-off and was remedied by a restart (a quick process for Chromebooks), but it’s worth noting.

For everyday work and web browsing, the touch display on the CX34 is fantastic. It’s a 14-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 pixel panel that looks crisp and cuts down on a decent amount of glare with a matte finish. It isn’t the brightest display out there though, and it can struggle when working outdoors on a sunny day.

Photograph: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster

While the 16:9 screen ratio is pretty standard for laptops, I would have liked to see Asus go for a slightly taller 16:10 display here. The increased vertical space on a 16:10 screen is great for the productivity work the CX34 is targeting. You can see this in action on competitors like Acer’s Chromebook Plus Spin 714.

Port selection on the CX34 is pretty good, with two USB-A ports, two USB-C ports, an HDMI slot, and a standard headphone jack. The USB-C ports can charge the laptop with the surprisingly compact 45-watt charger Asus includes in the box, but they can also be used for DisplayPort over USB-C connections to external monitors.

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Daniel Thorp-Lancaster

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July 27, 2024
Steve Jobs Knew the Moment the Future Had Arrived. It’s Calling Again

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Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it down. It is 1983, and he’s about to ask designers for their help in improving the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But first he will tell them that those computers will shatter the lives they have led to date.

“How many of you are 36 years … older than 36?” he asks. That’s how old the computer is, he says. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, are sort of “precomputer,” members of the television generation. A distinct new generation, he says, is emerging: “In their lifetimes, the computer will be the predominant medium of communication.”

Quite a statement at the time, considering that very few of the audience, according to Jobs’ impromptu polling, owns a personal computer or has even seen one. Jobs tells the designers that they not only will soon use one, but it will be indispensable, and deeply woven into the fabric of their lives.

The video of this speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibit called The Objects of Our Life, presented by the Steve Jobs Archive, the ambitious history project devoted to telling the story of Apple’s fabled cofounder. When the exhibit went live earlier this month—after the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection—I found it not only a compelling reminder of the late CEO, but pertinent to our own time, when another new technology is arriving with equal promise and peril.

The occasion of the speech was the annual Aspen International Design Conference. The theme of that year’s event was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be,” making Jobs the perfect speaker. While much of the talk is about his views on making products beautiful, the underlying message is straight out of that Bob Dylan tune: Something is happening and you don’t know what it is. He told his audience things that seemed preposterous: that in a few years more computers would be shipped than cars, and that people would spend more time with those computers than they spend riding in those cars. He told them that computers would become connected with each other, and everyone would use something called electronic mail, which he had to describe because it was such a strange concept then. Computers, he insisted, would become the dominant medium of communication. His goal was to make all that happen, to get to the point “where people are using these things and they go, ‘Wasn’t this the way it always was?’”

Jobs’ vision seemed to sway his audience, which gave him a standing ovation. Before he left Aspen that week, Jobs was asked to donate an object that would be placed in a time capsule that would commemorate the event. It was to be dug up in 2000. Jobs unhooked the mouse from the Lisa Computer he had brought to demo, and it was sealed in the capsule, along with an 8-track tape of the Moody Blues and a six-pack of beer.

The speech itself is kind of a time capsule. Jobs was right when he said one day we would not be able to imagine what life was like before these new tools he was ushering into the mainstream. Those of us still around who are, in Jobs’ term, “born precomputer” often astound young people by describing how we did our work (manual typewriters! carbon copies!), communicated with each other (phone booths!), and entertained ourselves (three TV channels! Bonanza!) before computers became our virtual appendages.

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Steven Levy

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July 26, 2024
How the CrowdStrike glitch crippled operations across the globe

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How the CrowdStrike glitch crippled operations across the globe – CBS News

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A flaw in a software update from CrowdStrike, a firm that provides cybersecurity services through Microsoft for half of the Fortune 1000 companies, has caused a major worldwide tech outage. Carter Evans examines exactly what caused the glitch and how it is being fixed.

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July 19, 2024
Historic IT outage causes travel chaos, leaves airlines reeling

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Historic IT outage causes travel chaos, leaves airlines reeling – CBS News

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A software meltdown caused one of the largest tech outages in modern history, grounding thousands of flights worldwide Friday, stranding travelers and leaving airlines scrambling for answers. Kris Van Cleave reports.

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July 19, 2024
The Tiny and Affordable Beelink SER8 Mini PC Could Be Your Daily Driver

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The Beelink SER8 costs as much as a mid-range GPU but is actually a capable PC in a tiny package. It has the 2023 AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS all-in-one laptop processor along with 32GB of upgradeable DDR5 RAM and a 1TB NVME SSD. Video ports include HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, and Thunderbolt. Check out Gear Seekers’ hands-on review for more.

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Lambert Varias

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July 3, 2024
The Best Chromebooks for Every Budget

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Chromebooks can come with a lot of different hardware inside, so it can be hard to figure out exactly what you need. Fortunately, the Chromebook Plus program has made the jumble of specs easier to parse. ChromeOS is also light enough that it doesn’t require incredibly beefy specs to get a good experience. Here are some general tips on what to look out for.

Processor: For the best experience, you should avoid older Chromebooks with Intel Celeron processors. The Chromebook Plus specifications offer a good baseline to guarantee speedy performance, and I’d recommend going with at least an Intel Core i3, Core i5, or AMD Ryzen 3 7000 processor. Just watch out for overspending on configurations with Intel Core i7 processors unless you need the extra horsepower for multitasking Android games, Linux apps, and dozens of Chrome tabs. While Intel and AMD dominate the processor scene, you’ll occasionally find Chromebooks using ARM processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 in the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 above. These can be fine for very basic tasks, but they won’t fare as well under sustained, intense loads (at least until something newer comes along).

RAM: Always opt for at least 8 GB of RAM if you can afford it. You won’t find 4 GB of RAM in anything other than basic, super-budget Chromebooks, but it severely limits your ability to multitask. If you want to avoid slowdowns, 8 GB of RAM is the standard you should aim for.

Storage: Unlike a Mac or Windows PC, a lot of your Chromebook work will live on the web. This means you can typically get away with less storage, but I wouldn’t recommend going below 128 GB. If you can afford it, you’ll be much more comfortable with at least 256 GB. You’ll get the best speed out of an NVMe solid state drive, so look out for that on the spec sheet when you’re comparing models.

Screen: The vast majority of Chromebook displays you’ll find will be IPS LCD panels, and that’s just fine. Until OLED displays make more of a dent in the Chromebook space, IPS LCD screens offer the best contrast and color accuracy. If you’re shopping in the extreme budget range, watch out for TN LCD panels, as they’re generally lower quality and offer worse viewing angles. For resolution, a 1,920 x 1,080-pixel resolution should be your standard. You’ll get crisp visuals at 13- and 14-inch screen sizes and it’s passable at 15 inches. Higher resolutions will look even better, but be wary of the battery life tradeoff you’ll see from pushing power to more pixels.

Ports: USB-C ports have become commonplace on the newest Chromebooks, so there’s no longer any excuse to buy one without them. Try to get one that charges over USB-C so you can recharge with a portable power bank when you’re on the go. A microSD card slot can also be beneficial if you want an easy way to expand your storage on the fly. You’ll find that some Chromebooks support Thunderbolt 4 over their USB-C ports as well. While that’s an excellent option to have if you plan to plug your Chromebook into some high-end monitors, it isn’t necessary for most people. Instead, you can get similar external monitor support (and spend a lot less) with an HDMI port or DisplayPort over USB-C support.

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Daniel Thorp-Lancaster

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June 24, 2024
AI “might take over” one day if it isn’t developed responsibly, Geoffrey Hinton warns

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AI “might take over” one day if it isn’t developed responsibly, Geoffrey Hinton warns – CBS News

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There’s no guaranteed path to safety as artificial intelligence advances, Geoffrey Hinton, AI pioneer, warns. He shares his thoughts on AI’s benefits and dangers with Scott Pelley.

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June 16, 2024
The Repair-Friendly Framework Laptop 13 Can Now Have The New Intel CPUs

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The latest version of Framework’s modular 13″ laptop can now be bought with Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 1 CPU, which offers significant improvements in battery life, particularly when playing videos. There’s also a new 2880 x 1920 display option with a 120Hz refresh rate. Existing Framework 13 owners can swap their display with this new one as well.

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Lambert Varias

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June 7, 2024
It’s Chromebook’s Turn for an AI Injection

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The first notable feature is Help Me Write, which works in any text box. Select text in any text box and right-click—you’ll see a box next to the standard right-click context menu. You can ask Google’s AI to rewrite the selected text, rephrase it in a specific way, or change the tone. I tried to use it on a few sentences in this story but did not like any of the suggestions it gave me, so your mileage may vary. Or maybe I’m a better writer than Google’s AI. Who knows?

Google’s bringing the same generative AI wallpaper system you’ll find in Android to ChromeOS. You can access this feature in ChromeOS’s wallpaper settings and generate images based on specific parameters. Weirdly, you can create these when you’re in a video-calling app too. You’ll see a menu option next to the system tray whenever the microphone and video camera are being accessed—tap on it and click “Create with AI” and you can generate an image for your video call’s background. I’m not sure why I’d want a background of a “surreal bicycle made of flowers in pink and purple,” but there you go. AI!

Here’s something a little more useful: Magic Editor in Google Photos. Yep, the same feature that debuted in Google’s Pixel 8 smartphones is now available on Chromebook Plus laptops. In the Google Photos app, you can press Edit on a photo and you’ll see the option for Magic Editor. (You’ll need to download more editing tools to get started.) This feature lets you erase unwanted objects in your photos, move a subject to another area of the frame, and fill in the backgrounds of photos. I successfully erased a paint can in the background of a photo of my dog, and it worked pretty quickly.

Then there’s Gemini. It’s available as a stand-alone app, and you can ask it to do pretty much anything. Write a cover letter, break down complex topics, ask for travel tips for a specific country. Just, you know, double-check the results and make sure there aren’t any hallucinations. If you want to tap into Google’s Gemini Advanced model, the company says it is offering 12 months free for new Chromebook Plus owners through the end of the year, so you have some time to redeem that offer. This is technically an upgrade from Google One, and it nets you Gemini for Workspace, 2 terabytes of storage, and a few other perks.

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Julian Chokkattu

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May 28, 2024
Everything You Can Do to Keep an Old Computer Running

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While Windows gives you the choice of keeping your personal files when you reset the OS, for the best results (on both macOS and Windows) you need a complete wipe. You’re going to need to take all your files and applications off the disk, then put them back on afterwards. With this in mind, make sure they’re somewhere safe while you’re doing the reset: The OneDrive and iCloud services built into Microsoft and macOS can be used for this, but you can choose whichever backup method you prefer.

On Windows, head to Settings from the Start menu, then choose Windows Update, Advanced Options, Recovery, and Reset this PC.

On macOS, open the Apple menu, then pick System Settings, General, Transfer or Reset, and Erase All Content and Settings.

Install Linux

ChromeOS Flex can give an old computer a new lease of life.

Courtesy of Google

Maybe you can move away from Windows and macOS entirely: Linux, for the uninitiated, is a free and open source desktop operating system that comes in a wide variety of flavors known as distros. While Linux lacks some of the polish and power of the platforms developed by Microsoft and Apple, it’s lightweight and straightforward to use.

In other words, certain Linux distros will run just fine on older computers that are making Windows and macOS slow to a crawl—and you’ve got a whole host of these distros to choose from. You’ll find plenty of lists and comparisons online, but the likes of Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Zorin are all great for getting started.

Alternatively, turn your Windows or macOS computer into a Chromebook with ChromeOS Flex from Google (which is actually based on Linux too). It’s simple to download and install, and while you’ll only be able to use a browser and web apps on your newly refreshed device, nowadays that’s all that a lot of people actually need.

Repurpose Your Computer

Plex can serve up media content to all of your devices.

Courtesy of Plex

Your computer can still be useful—and be saved from the recycling center—even if it isn’t actually a computer anymore. You can repurpose a desktop or laptop to take on a different role that isn’t quite so demanding, so it’s able to enjoy something like a well-earned retirement.

One option is to use your computer as a server, which means it simply stores media files and serves them up to the other devices on your home network. The Plex software suite is just about the best option available for this—all of its core features are free to use, and it’s easy to configure. After setting up your computer as a Plex server, you can install the free Plex app on your phone, tablet, Roku, or Apple TV and stream your music and movies around your house.

You can also use an old computer as a security camera, if it has a webcam attached. iSpy is the program you need for this, and it’ll let you record footage to the old computer’s hard drive as well as log in to the feed from wherever you are.

Depending on where your computer is and what it’s connected to, it can also work as a basic media player. It doesn’t take much processing power to stream Netflix or Disney+, and perhaps you could use an HDMI cable to hook it up to an older television that doesn’t have smart apps already installed.

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David Nield

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May 25, 2024
The Freewrite Alpha Is for People Who Just Want to Get Stuff Done

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Four blank lines and a cursor. After getting through the setup pleasantries, that’s all you’re left with when you start a new draft on the Freewrite Alpha.

No spell check, no AI-powered notes on your grammar, and most certainly no other browser tabs to distract you from the ultimate goal of getting words down on the page.

Instead, Freewrite has taken its already distraction-free writing experience and shrunk the price tag some by cutting the Alpha’s screen down to almost nothing.

I might not be a novelist, but between news posts and reviews, I write somewhere in the region of 20,000 words a week. So, I thought, what better way to test a writing machine than to use it exclusively for a full week, to see how it holds up to the rigors of the online journalist’s grind?

Freewrite, in fairness to it, wouldn’t claim that this is the ideal plan for the Alpha—it’s a writer’s tool, sure, but it seems fairly clearly aimed at longer-term projects, on a grander scale. We’re talking novels, memoirs, manifestos.

Still, with cloud-storage syncing, I could have the Alpha immediately upload anything I write to Google Drive (or Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernote, or just its proprietary system called Postbox), so if I placed it on a desk in front of a computer monitor that I’d use to send drafts through to editors, there was nothing technically standing in my way.

So, one work week later, here I am, impressed by how the Alpha held up, but also wishing I were a novelist, since this device would so clearly suit that calling.

Writing Reformed

The Alpha is a simple plastic slab, with a small kickstand on the back that can’t be adjusted, and a mechanical keyboard on the front. It has a red power button, a few function keys on that keyboard, and a four-line LCD display.

It’s a word processor in the old-school 1980s sense of the word, capable of storing a large stash of drafts and syncing them over Wi-Fi when you’re connected.

Photograph: Freewrite

Moving between those drafts, changing your settings, and signing in and out can be a fiddly annoyance due to the lack of a touch interface or trackpad, but most people would find themselves doing that far more rarely than me, because, again, most people wouldn’t write eight news stories on it in a day.

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Max Freeman-Mills

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May 19, 2024
Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer

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At the same time, I understood almost immediately why Haskell was—and still is—considered a language more admired than used. Even one of its most basic concepts, that of the “monad,” has spawned a cottage industry of explainers, analogies, and videos. A notoriously unhelpful explanation, famous enough to be autocompleted by Google, goes: “A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors.”

The language is also more despised than explored. Steve Yegge, a popular curmudgeon blogger of yesteryear, once wrote a satirical post about how, at long last, the Haskell community had managed to find the one “industry programmer who gives a shit about Haskell.” For programmers like Yegge, Haskell is a byword for a kind of overintellectualized, impractical language with little industry applicability.

What Yegge didn’t understand, however, is that using Haskell is rarely a pragmatic decision. It is an intellectual, even aesthetic, one. In its essence, Haskell has more in common with the films of Charlie Kaufman than other programming languages: highly cerebral, charmingly offbeat, and oddly tasteful; appreciated by those in the know and judged by outsiders as pretentious. Haskell is, one might say, a cult classic.

That Haskell never gained widespread adoption exemplifies a paradoxical truth in software engineering: Great programming languages aren’t always great for programming.

Haskell is not inherently more difficult to learn than something like C, but the two languages pose different challenges. Writing in C is akin to precision engineering, requiring the kind of attention demanded of a skilled horologist. But Haskell code is, really, code-shaped mathematical expressions. C is a quintessential engineer’s language. Haskell is a pure mathematician’s.

A good engineer’s and a good mathematician’s aptitudes don’t always overlap. The industry’s not-so-well-kept secret is that most programmers aren’t as good at math or logic as you might think. This is mostly fine. After all, many doctors would make poor molecular biologists, few lawyers are legal philosophers, and the great majority of MBAs know zilch about econometrics. But this means few programmers can really master Haskell. This includes me, of course, whose legs weaken at the sight of such expressions as “F-coalgebra” and “typeclass metaprogramming.”

Still, when I think about Haskell, a line about Martin Amis’ prose comes to mind: “the primacy he gives to style over matter.” Haskell programmers are style supremacists, and it’s nothing to apologize for. In an industry often fixated on utility and expediency, the Haskell community should not feel obligated to summon evidence of its usefulness. Instead, it should simply retort: What’s the problem with useless intellectual exercises?

Because the thing about useless exercises is they don’t stay useless for long. Even when “industry programmers” shunned Haskell, language designers took note. In recent years, a Haskell-style paradigm has come into vogue because of the treasury of benefits it offers: rendering certain categories of bugs impossible by design, making a program’s correctness more provable, and enabling easy parallel computation. Some of the most anticipated updates featured in new versions of imperative languages are those inspired by functional programming. In the end, Backus’ anti–von Neumann plea was heard. Programming has been liberated.

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Sheon Han

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May 13, 2024
The Best Laptops to Work and Play Wherever You Are

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MSI Prestige 13 AI Evo for $1,300: This ultralight Windows laptop (7/10, WIRED Review) offers a great balance between price, performance, and portability. This price gets you an Intel Core 7 processor and a 2,880 X 1,800-pixel OLED display. The keyboard and trackpad are not the best, but if they don’t bother you this is a solid laptop at a good price.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra for $3,000: There’s much to love here (7/10, WIRED Review), but that price. Ouch. You get what you pay for at least, with the new Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, the current top-of-the-line processor in Intel’s Core Ultra CPU lineup, along with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card. The 16-inch AMOLED 2,880 x 1,800 pixels touchscreen is magnificent to work on and performance blew everything else we’ve tested out of the water. But that price.

Acer Swift Go 14 for $800: This one is very similar to the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, our top budget laptop. We found the Asus to be a little faster and have a much nicer build quality, but the Swift Go still offers outstanding performance, especially considering the price (7/10, WIRED Review). It also boasts an impressive 15-hour battery life. The downside is the speakers, which aren’t great, and overall the body feels a little plasticky. But this is the least expensive Intel Core Ultra laptop we’ve tested by a few dollars, so if the budget is tight, the Swift Go is worth considering.

Lenovo Slim Pro 7 AMD for $900: Lenovo’s Slim series are solid laptops. This AMD model (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is particularly nice with good battery life and impressive performance, especially in graphics-intensive tasks. It sports a bright 2.5K, 16:10 screen, aluminum construction, and a variety of ports. This one is frequently on sale; don’t pay more than $1,000.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 for $800: The look of the machine has barely changed since its inception, and it’s most evident with its obscenely sized bezels. It’s a shame, as the Laptop 5 sports a nice keyboard, and the outer design remains stylish if a tad stale. It’s hard to justify the price of the new model given its shortcomings, but it has started to go on sale for around $800, which makes it a little more reasonable.

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Scott Gilbertson

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May 11, 2024
The Razer Blade 18 Is a Beastly Gaming Laptop From the Future

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Razer’s Blade 14 is my go-to recommendation for anyone hunting for a good gaming laptop, but as impressive as it is, it trades power for portability. If that’s the kind of sacrifice you don’t want to make, then say hello to the Razer Blade 18—this is the powerhouse you’re looking for.

Side-by-side with the Razer Blade 14, the Blade 18 looks like a protective big brother. You can see the family resemblance, but the larger Blade is more imposing. Its 18-inch Mini LED display is so bright it’s almost overwhelming in dark rooms, and it produces vivid colors that rival the already stunning screen on the Blade 14.

The Blade 18 starts at $3,100, but the model I tested is $4,500. You get a lot of power for the price. It packs a 14th-generation Intel Core i9 14900HX processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (upgradable to the beastly RTX 4090, which is what I tested), 32 GB of RAM, and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. It’s the kind of power that can tear through even the most demanding games.

Smooth Screen

Razer outdid itself with the display on the Razer Blade 18. The Mini LED panel has a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel resolution, with 2,000 local dimming zones, delivering exceptional contrast between brighter and darker areas of the image. The Razer Blade 14 was already one of the most vibrant laptop screens I’d seen, but the Blade 18 makes it look dull by comparison.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

But what sets it apart is the 300-Hz refresh rate. At their best, most gaming laptops only support 240 Hz, which is plenty for most games, but for fast-paced titles like Overwatch 2, you want all the frames you can get, and the Blade 18 is one of the few laptops I’ve tested that can crank out that many reliably.

Maintaining such a high frame rate is going to be a drain on the battery, but Razer’s Synapse software has an option to automatically switch the display to 60 Hz when on battery power. This dramatically cuts down on how many frames your games have to render, conserving power, but will lead to less smooth gameplay. You can also press Fn+R to cycle between 60 Hz, 240 Hz, and 300 Hz while connected to a charger.

Synapse also has a color profile selector that lets you swap between DCI-P3, Adobe RGB, Rec.709, and other profiles to get precise, accurate colors. This is especially helpful for gamers who are also designers and photo or video editors—where color accuracy is incredibly vital to their workflow.

Powerful Performance

A great display doesn’t matter much if you don’t have the horsepower to back it up, but fortunately, the Razer Blade 18 rises to the task. The model I tested comes equipped with the GeForce RTX 4090 (you can also choose between the RTX 4070 or 4080), and it tore through most games. Starfield, a notably less-than-optimized game, was getting 60-plus frames per second in crowded areas like New Atlantis on Ultra graphics settings, and maintaining 80 to 90 fps on Medium.

Overwatch 2 is what blew me away, though. On Medium graphics settings, I maintained a full 300 fps (while the laptop was connected to power). This is a game where I’m constantly flying across the map in seconds, whipping out my pistol to land headshots on an enemy that wasn’t in my view a third of a second ago, before rushing back to heal my teammates. Three hundred frames per second is exactly what I need, and the Razer Blade 18 has the display and the power to give it to me.

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Eric Ravenscraft

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May 10, 2024
Dell announces data breach of customer names and addresses

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Dell announces data breach of customer names and addresses – CBS News

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The tech giant disclosed Thursday that a database was accessed through a Dell portal, which contains a database of customer information. CBS News’ John Dickerson has the details.

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May 9, 2024