Laptops - Page 13

In 2023 (and the soon-to-be 2024), trying to find a brand-new laptop with a DVD drive is like trying to find a still-standing Blockbuster that offers DVD rentals. The PC market, both desktop and mobile, has moved on from optical storage - but there is one location where you can still pick up a laptop with a DVD drive. The land of the rising sun, Japan.

In addition to a 13th Gen Core processor, the new NEC VersaPro Type VD also sports a DVD drive and VGA port.

The new NEC VersaPro Type VD is a laptop geared toward the business crowd, and yes, it includes a DVD Super Multi drive. This blast from the past feature is joined by a few more blasts from the past - an actual VGA connector and a removable battery. Having a removable battery is admittedly pretty cool, as that's one feature that we'd love to see make a comeback.

Apple has today released a new macOS software update that is designed to fix a particularly nasty bug that had the potential to really embarrass a Mac user when they shared their screen.

The bug, which was reported online, caused random windows in other macOS Spaces to appear on-screen when a Mac's screen-sharing feature was enabled. While the Space on-screen may be clear, it was possible for screen sharing to accidentally make another Space available to those watching along. The potential consequences there are obvious, ranging from showing others embarrassing things like a browser window that was believed to be hidden. But there was also a potential privacy issue that could have seen data accidentally shared with a third party.

Thankfully, Apple says that this macOS 14.2.1 update fixes this issue, adding that it fixed a session rendering issue to improve session tracking. The result? It appears that the bug has been fixed and that those who share their screen should now have a better understanding of exactly what is being shown to others.

Lenovo's new Legion Pro 5 gaming notebook has been spotted at a retailer, with a cost of $1800 and packing Intel's latest 14th Gen Core "Raptor Lake Refresh" CPU.

The new Lenovo Legion Pro 5 gaming laptop features up to the Intel Core i9-14900HX processor rocking 24 cores and 32 threads of power (8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores) at up to 5.8GHz clock speeds and a maximum turbo power design of 157W (55W PL1). Intel just launched its new Meteor Lake GPUs, but Lenovo has decided on the 14th Gen Core CPUs inside of its new Legion Pro 5 laptop.

The laptop in question here for $1800 packs the Intel Core i9-14900HX processor, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, 1TB of SSD storage, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 8GB Laptop GPU. There's an additional Gen4 M.2 SSD slot inside, while the RAM can be upgraded to a huge 96GB of DDR5 memory if that's what you need.

HP's new Omen Transcend 14 gaming laptop has been teased with some new images released by Windows Report, teasing the world's lightest 14-inch gaming notebook... check it out:

The new Omen Transcend 14 gaming notebook is the latest member of the Omen Transcend gaming laptop family, with a smaller 14-inch display compared to the usual 16-inch displays in the Omen Transcend family. Windows Report says that the same design language is used with the new Transcend 14 as the current-gen Transcend 16, with some hardware changes inside.

When it comes to hardware, HP is shipping its new Omen Transcend 14 gaming laptop with either an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H or Core Ultra 9 185H processor, which are Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs with built-in NPUs for generative AI goodness. Both of the CPUs are 16-core, 22-thread Meteor Lake chips, with the Core Ultra 9 185H packing a 45W default TDP, which is the same as Intel's 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake-H" series mobile CPUs for gamers.

We can safely say this is something we haven't seen before: a workstation laptop with an AMD EPYC processor and desktop NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card.

Welcome the new REV-9 workstation laptop, a custom laptop that packs a data center-level processor and desktop graphics that's designed for advanced compute rendering, scientific research, and the film industry for a portable, on-the-go solution for 3D artists and more.

The considerably chunky laptop is made by a Chinese company, with a 17.3-inch display with an option for 4K 120Hz or 2.5K 240Hz and a 3.5-inch display that provides diagnostic data for both the CPU and the GPU. The CPU inside of the REV-9 comes in two varieties: an EPYC 7713 or EPYC 9554 processor, the difference is the former is a Zen 3 chip, while the latter is a Zen 4 chip. We have up to 225W TDPs supported here, with an average Cinebench R23 score of 49,000 points.

Intel Evo laptops and the Evo branding were created to indicate that a piece of hardware delivers a certain level of quality in all areas. For a market as crowded as the laptop one, it can be confusing when you see two products with similar specs perform very differently - so the solution here is like a seal of quality.

With the arrival of Meteor Lake and the new Intel Core Ultra processors, Intel's most efficient mobile architecture to date, the new 'Intel Evo Edtion' sticker on a Core Ultra device now ensures that it meets Intel's high-end specs for battery life, noise level, AI performance, GPU performance, and an 'Instant On' feature that will turn the laptop on in under 1.5 seconds.

Intel is calling the new Evo branding 'no compromise mobile performance,' and it can already be found on new Intel Core Ultra products launching this week - including the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and the MSI Prestige 16 AI Studio B1V.

AI, AI, AI... it's all you're going to hear in 2024, with PC and laptop makers both betting the farm on the AI PC trend in 2024 and beyond.

TechInsights reports that laptop shipments dropped a chunky 27% in 2023 compared to 2021; we're expecting a "joyful" year for 2024 when it comes to laptop sales. Shipments are expected to drive up because of a mix of next-gen hardware -- Intel with its new Meteor Lake processors and AMD with its new Hawk Point processors -- and both featuring AI hardware.

The report says that we can expect an 11% growth in laptop sales in 2024 from artificial intelligence (AI) entering the world of laptops, as well as the consumer upgrade cycle, which is expected to be bigger in 2024. We also have new competitors powered by the Arm architecture that are also heavily jumping into the race, with the likes of Qualcomm and its latest Snapdragon SoC.

Apple's MacBook Air is among the best laptops on the market at its size, especially since the company added its own silicon and ditched Intel for good. But the current m2 model is about to get a refresh for an even better one if reports turn out to be true. And it's going to happen soon.

That's according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman who says that Apple intends to try and arrest a slowdown in laptop sales by adding a newly refreshed model to the lineup in the shape of the new M3 MacBook Air. Gurman cites unnamed sources when he says that Apple is already hard at work on the device and that it could debut in March 2024.

The new MacBook Air, codenamed J613 and J615, will reportedly come in the same 13- and 15-inch sizes that the current M2 model offers with the addition of that speedy new M3 chip. That M3 chip was announced not that long ago and is currently available in the 24-inch iMac. Expectations are high that Apple will also add support for the same M3 chip to the upcoming iPad Pro as well, a tablet that is also set to debut in March if rumors are true.

ASUS is cooking its new ROG Zephyrus M16 gaming laptop that will rock both the best CPU on offer from Intel and the best GPU on offer from NVIDIA.

Inside the new ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16 gaming laptop, we are to expect the flagship Core 9 Ultra 185H "Meteor Lake" CPU, which will be joined by the GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU with 16GB of VRAM. It will also be joined by 16GB of LPDDR5X memory and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD.

On the CPU side of things, we should expect the Core Ultra 9 processor to feature 16 cores and 22 threads of CPU power at up to 5.1GHz. This is the flagship Core 100 series "Meteor Lake" CPU and should be unveiled at CES 2024 in the first week of January, and not just in the new ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16 gaming laptop, but other gaming laptops unveiled in January 2024.

Dell's next-gen XPS and Alienware gaming laptops have been teased, rocking either 14th Gen Core or new Core 100 series CPUs from Intel.

The upcoming wave of next-gen Alienware gaming laptops is led by the new Alienware m16 R2 gaming laptop, powered by Intel's new Core Ultra H series CPUs and NVIDIA's current-gen fleet of GeForce RTX 40 Laptop GPUs. Dell is using a new redesigned chassis, a new thermal system to keep its new CPU and GPU as cool as possible, and more.

We'll also have a new feature called Stealth Mode, which will turn your new Alienware m16 R2 gaming laptop into something a little more inconspicuous. Stealth Mode will disable all of your RGB lighting, fan profiles will be changed, and more so that the gaming laptop can be used at school or even work without standing out.

The MacBook Air, powered by Apple's M2 chip, doesn't have a fan inside. That helps to make it thin, light, power efficient, and most important, silent. And all while being nice and fast as well. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with the same M2 chip inside has a fan with the aim being to allow people to run the chip harder for longer before the laws of thermal dynamics kick in and the silicon has to slow down to avoid permanent damage. But what if you added a new type of cooling to the fanless MacBook Air?

That is what a company called Frore Systems did before it took The Verge out to see what it had been working on. The machine in question was a 15-inch M2 MacBook Air while the cooling system uses three AirJet Minis, products that use a piezoelectric cooling chip that weighs nine grams but can still remove 4.25 additional watts of heat. So what happened?

According to The Verge, the MacBook Air was able to run longer and faster than it was capable of doing previously. Examples show the Xcode benchmark finishing in 172.7 seconds with the AirJet cooling system involved but taking 178.2 seconds without it, suggesting that the additional cooling means the M2 chip doesn't need to throttle itself quite so aggressively, if at all when it's kept cooler. Longer gaming sessions also benefited greatly from the additional cooling.

AMD announced its new flagship RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7900M 16GB mobile GPU, with the first laptop maker to get hands-on with it and get it inside of their new gaming laptop is Dell with the introduction of the new Alienware M18.

Now the good folks at Notebookcheck.net have had hands-on with the Alienware M18 gaming laptop, and well and truly put it through its paces against the GeForce RTX 4080 and GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPUs. The new Alienware M18 gaming laptop features the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX CPU alongside the new flagship Radeon RX 7800M 16GB GPU.

In their testing, Notebookcheck.net reports that CPU performance is 10% faster in raw multi-threaded performance against the Intel Core i9-13980HX processor, while it's between 5-10% slower in single-threaded performance.

If you own a current Mac laptop like the excellent MacBook Air or the powerful MacBook Pro, you only have a couple of options in terms of getting online. The first is to use a Wi-Fi network like the one at home or at work for example. The other is to use your iPhone and connect to its hotspot and tether that way. But that can be expensive if you don't have the right plan. However, Apple could be about to add a third option and it'll all be thanks to a new piece of hardware.

That hardware will of course be a new 5G modem, with Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reporting that Apple is working on bringing such a thing to future MacBooks. There have been rumors to this effect in the past, but this is the closest that we've come to hearing something more concrete - because Gurman has a timeframe.

Gurman shared the timeframe in his weekly Power On newsletter, saying that Apple intends to be able to put a 5G modem of its own design in the future. But only after it's brought its own modem to the iPhone. That's likely to happen in 2026, which means that we are unlikely to see Apple's 5G modem make its laptop debut until 2028 or 2029. That means that there's still quite a while to wait.

Samsung's new Galaxy Book 4 laptop has just smiled for the camera, with a new leak from WindowsReport teasing a new family of Galaxy Book 4 laptops that are around the corner.

Samsung will offer a wide range of Galaxy Book 4 configurations, using the new 1st Gen Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPU or the 14th Gen Core "Raptor Lake Refresh" CPUs. They'll also feature discrete GPUs from NVIDIA, right up to the GeForce RTX 4070 8GB Laptop GPU. Samsung will have its new AI PCs being pushed with the Meteor Lake CPU-powered Galaxy Book 4 laptops, too.

We can expect Samsung to have the Galaxy Book 4, Galaxy Book 4 360, Galaxy Book 4 Pro, Galaxy Book 4 Pro 360, and finally, the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra. Definitely not a confusing naming scheme -- especially with the Galaxy Book 4, 4 Pro, 4 Pro 360 -- with a split between different CPUs and other hardware changes between models.

MSI's new fleet of AI laptops are on their way, with Intel's new Core Ultra 100H "Meteor Lake" series CPUs starting at $1049.

We are to expect MSI's new AI laptops to arrive in designs between 13.3-inch and 16-inch, with "AI" everywhere... for gamers, content creators, and everyone in between. MSI is getting Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs into their AI laptops, with new models in their Prestige, Stealth, and Creator Pro range of laptops.

The upcoming MSI Studio laptops have Intel Meteor Lake CPUs, compared to the current fleet that has up to the Intel Core i9-13900H processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU. The first few models of MSI's new AI laptops don't have discrete graphics, but I'm sure that will be changed in the coming months with even more "AI laptops" unveiled by MSI and other laptop makers.

Apple might have only just announced new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros as recently as late October, but these new models obviously won't be the last that Apple releases. With that in mind, it shouldn't come as a surprise that a new report claims to have information about what will come not next, but a little further down the line. According to that report, Apple is getting ready to upgrade the MacBook Pro's display to something new, and it'll borrow technology from the Apple Watch of all things.

That technology, analyst Jeff Pu of Haitong Intl Tech Research says, is an OLED display that will replace the mini-LED technology that currently powers the Liquid Retina XDR used in today's laptops. OLED is of course the same technology that is already being used in the Apple Watch and has been used in Apple's phones ever since the iPhone X back in 2017.

What's more, we're already expecting Apple to begin to offer OLED in the iPad Pro as soon as next year. The rumored OLED iPad Pro will get the new display alongside an updated chip, likely the same M3 silicon that was announced alongside the iMac and MacBook Pros last month.

If you're thinking about buying a new Mac any time soon you might want to take a look at a new leak before you do. That leak, we're told, includes the roadmap for Apple's plans for its future products that will use OLED technology in their displays.

Apple is already strongly rumored to have designs on bringing OLED to the iPad Pro as soon as next year, with a 2024 refresh also thought to bring the new M3 chip into the mix. But a new leak by @Tech_Reve on X claims to have confirmed that there are many more Apple devices making the switch to OLED in the not-too-distant future.

The leaker, who is normally known for sharing information on Android devices, shared the entire roadmap that includes those OLED iPad Pros alongside many other products. Most notably, we're told that Apple intends to launch OLED versions of its 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros in 2026 while the most interesting addition is the MacBook Air. That's said to be moving to OLEd as soon as 2027 with both the 13- and 15-inch models namechecked.

Apple of course announced the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips a week or so ago but that leaves one chip still missing. The M2 Pro remains the chip with the most cores available in Apple's lineup and still powers the Mac Pro and Mac Studio. But those hoping for the arrival of a chip to replace it are likely to have to wait quite a long time, it seems.

That's according to a new report by Mark Gurman writing in his weekly Power On newsletter that covered a variety of subjects, not least Apple's plans for the rest of its chip lineup. According to Gurman, Apple is yet to start broad testing of the M3 Ultra which means that it's unlikely to arrive inside Apple hardware until much later in 2024.

One factor to consider here is the issue of availability. Gurman says that there are only so many 3nm chips to go around, with the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max taking up the majority of those. Chipmaker TSMC can't produce such chips fast enough, leaving Apple with just enough to put into the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max-powered machines. Adding the M3 Ultra and the Mac Studio and Mac Pro to the mix is a step too far right now.

Apple announced its new M3 family of processors alongside new M3-powered MacBook Pro laptops in both 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, with the larger 16-inch MacBook Pro maxed out costing a whopping $7199.

The Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch features the Apple M3 Max processor with a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU, a gigantic 128GB of unified RAM, and an equally impressive 8TB of SSD, all costing you $7199. 128GB of RAM is a huge amount of memory, with the 128GB version of the laptop taking 2-3 weeks to ship. There are 48GB and 64GB of unified RAM options, which would drop the price by $1000 and $800, respectively.

The previous-gen Apple M2 Max processor was limited to 96GB of RAM, so the new M3 Max supporting up to 128GB of RAM is a nice upgrade for new MacBook Pro laptops powered by the new M3 chip. Another upgrade is that the M3 Max has 12 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores on the CPU side of things, which is a big upgrade from the 6 performance and 6 efficiency on the M2 Pro and the 4 performance and 4 efficiency on the base M3 chip.

If you own a Mac running macOS Sonoma 14.1 you might want to be even more careful than usual when you have liquid around it, especially if you're hoping to have Apple repair it should the worst happen.

While Apple has long had Liquid Contact Indicators (LCI) in its devices, including the iPhone, to allow it to know when devices have gotten wet, a new addition to the latest Mac software takes things a step further, according to a new 9to5Mac report.

That report claims that macOS Sonoma 14.1 has a new daemon called liquiddetectiond which runs and monitors the computer to see if it has been exposed to liquid. It runs in the background and analyses the moisture in every one of the computer's USB-C ports, we're told.