Laptops - Page 19

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.