Laptops News - Page 1

Intel's Panther Lake processors will be powering up laptops in 2026, and a bunch of further revelations have been made courtesy of a Dell roadmap.

As discovered by VideoCardz, this hefty piece of spillage consists of a presentation from Dell about an XPS laptop with a Snapdragon X SoC, and it runs to something like 300 pages (including a deep dive into the design of the hardware).

While the material focuses on that Snapdragon portable in the main, it also contains roadmap details of laptops further out than that ARM-based XPS model, including Panther Lake and Nova Lake.

After weeks of beta testing, Apple has today made macOS 14.5 available for download by the public. The update is compatible with all macOS Sonoma-based Macs and comes more than two months after Apple made the macOS 14.4 update available to the world. However, anyone who hoped that Apple had spent those two months adding a ton of new features is unfortunately going to be left very disappointed indeed.

On the contrary, this macOS 14.5 update is far from exciting and while we would always suggest installing the latest macOS software updates, this one isn't going to knock your socks off. These kinds of updates often bring with them bug fixes and other improvements, but in terms of big new software features, you're going to be out of luck. That is, unless you're a big Apple News Plus user who also happens to be a fan of word games. And you like playing them on your Mac, of course.

Just like the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 updates, macOS 14.5 brings the Quartiles game to the Apple News app. It's an original daily word game that's available to all Apple News Plus subscribers, albeit only those who happen to be in the United States and Canada.

ASUS is going to have a helluva show at Computex 2024 this year, with 14 next-gen ROG, TUF, and ProArt laptops powered by AMD's next-gen Zen 5-based Strix Point APUs.

The new leaks are coming from ITHome, which reports that the leaked product page of the new 240W and 180W TOG Compact Plug adapter which lists the new variants. The new "W" models are the next-gen variants with AMD's Zen 5-based Strix Point APUs while the "U" variants are the Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APUs.

However, since this news hit the web, the new ASUS VivoBook S16 laptops have been teased with CPUs that aren't named in the Ryzen 8050 naming scheme. The new ASUS VivoBook S16 laptop has been teased on the official ASUS website with a CPU called the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor.

The new ASUS Zephyrus G16 will be powered by AMD's new 12-Core next-gen Ryzen "Strix Point" APU, which a South African retailer has leaked. The high-end AI and gaming laptop also comes packed with mobile GeForce RTX 4070 8GB graphics, 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 16-inch WQXGA OLED display. Although regional pricing varies, the listing price is translated to roughly $3,700 USD, so it won't be cheap.

The price could be a placeholder, with the final SKU launching at a much lower price point of around $2,000 USD. Based on information from a related ASUS leak, it seems that AMD's next-gen "Strix Point" Ryzen APU featured in the new ASUS Zephyrus G16 will be called the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 - a new naming convention from AMD that puts AI front and center.

That leak confirms that the APU features a 12-core, 24-thread CPU that clocks up to 5.1GHz (with 36MB of cache) with AI performance of up to 77 TOPS. Paired with the GeForce RTX 4070, it'll be an impressive machine for any AI or non-AI-related task.

Lenovo has just teased its new ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 laptop with "Ryzen 8050" splashed front and center, which could be one of the earliest Zen 5-based laptops.

In the brochure for the ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 laptop, the company has "Ryzen 8050" right in your face, and AMD Ryzen AI technology at bottom. The Ryzen AI tech Lenovo is referring to is the NPU (neural processing unit) for AI workloads, which the Ryzen 8050 "Strix Point" APUs feature an upgraded XDNA2-based NPU for AI workloads.

AMD has its current-gen Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APUs in the wild now, with an XDNA-based NPU with up to 16 TOPS of AI workload performance from the NPU alone.

NVIDIA is currently baking its next-generation Blackwell GPU-based GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards in both desktop and notebook form, with some new leaks regarding VRAM capacity on the Blackwell-based GeForce RTX 50 Laptop GPUs.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, we get some juicy leaks about the VRAM capacity on the stack of Blackwell-based GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs. Starting with the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU which will roll out with 16GB of VRAM, but so too will the RTX 5080 Laptop GPU under that; they'll both have 16GB of VRAM.

Under that, we've got the GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU which should have 12GB of VRAM, while the RTX 5060 Laptop GPU will have 8GB of VRAM. Compared to the Ada Lovelace-based GeForce RTX 40 series Laptop GPUs had 16GB, 12GB, 8GB, 8GB, and 6GB for the RTX 4090 Laptop, RTX 4080 Laptop, RTX 4070 Laptop, RTX 4060 Laptop, and RTX 4060 Laptop GPUs, respectively.

Targus has just revealed its new USB4 Triple Video Docking Station with 100W Power, the new DOCK460, which has both USB4 and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity. Check it out:

The new Targus DOCK460 is a triple video enterprise-grade dock, with this new Alternate Mode dock featuring all of the ports and power required to support and run countless devices on laptops and other devices.

Targus includes two DisplayPort ports and a single HDMI output for regular monitors, as well as a higher-end 2.5GbE ethernet port. The two DisplayPort and single HDMI port allow owners of the Targus DOCK460 to support up to 8K resolution in single-monitor and even dual-monitor use, or up to 3 x 4K displays at once over the DOCK460.

ASUS is jumping on the Snapdragon X Elite laptop bandwagon with the announcement that it has a notebook, or rather an AI PC, to reveal next month.

The unnamed laptop - presumably a Vivobook, or certainly that's the theory from VideoCardz (we'll come back to that), which spotted the press announcement from ASUS - will be unveiled at a virtual launch event online at 1pm CDT (11am PST) on May 20, 2024. So that's just a few short weeks away now.

If the date sounds familiar, that's because this is when Microsoft will reveal its new Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 devices for consumers (business targeted models have already been launched - but they don't have the Snapdragon ARM-based chip inside).

Following months of reports that suggested Apple has had a significant fall from grace in China, new smartphone sales figures suggest that there is no sign of a resurgence. Not yet, at least. In fact, things have gotten so bad that Apple now finds itself in fifth place in the Chinese smartphone market.

That will be particularly galling for Apple considering the company was once the number one smartphone company in China, and it's a problem that it will want to arrest as soon as possible.

The news comes via analytics company Canalys whose latest report covers the first quarter of 2024. The figures have Apple sitting in fifth spot behind other companies that are competing for sales in China, a vitally important part of the world for Apple.

When you buy a new iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air, and the entry-level MacBook Pro, all of those computers will have one thing in common. That thing isn't the Apple logo, and it isn't the fact that they're all powered by Apple silicon, either. The common trait is that they all have just 8GB of RAM as standard, although you can of course choose to pay extra and upgrade to 16GB or more, depending on the machine in question.

Now, it seems that the decision to stick to 8GB of RAM at the low-end is once again making headlines. Apple had previously justified the decision by saying that more simply isn't needed for what most people use these Macs for. It also noted that the M-series chips that are used in modern Macs mean that the computers are performant enough to be perfectly fine with just 8GB of RAM. But whether or not you go along with that assertion, it seems that we might be able to blame CEO Tim Cook for the lack of RAM as well.

A chart put together by Mastodon user David Schaub, reported by the Accidental Tech Podcast recently, and now shared by MacRumors, charts the base RAM in Apple's computers from 1984 onwards. The graphs show that Apple often increased the base RAM every two years or so but that all changed when Steve Jobs left and was replaced by current CEO Tim Cook. Since Cook took over from Jobs there has only been a single base RAM increase.