Laptops

With all that's happening in the Mac market the past weeks, it's almost too easy to forget other manufacturers have their own new wares to show. Intel is, of course, making sure no one forgets by making a lot of noise about its 11th-gen processors and new Intel Iris Xe graphics. One company that has been unusually silent, however, is Microsoft, whose line of Surface products used to be the talk of the PC town. Microsoft seems to be taking a more modest strategy if these leaked photos and information about its upcoming Surface computers are anything to go by.

Continue Reading

Apple's M1 Silicon has definitely been hogging the computing news spotlight these past weeks, most of them comparing its performance with Intel's chips. Not all M1 Macs are the same, of course, and not just counting the difference between an M1 MacBook Air and an M1 MacBook Pro. Even the MacBook Pro (Late 2020) offers two slightly different models with different RAM capacities. Thankfully, someone took the time to benchmark these two variants, and the results might surprise you a bit.

Continue Reading

The iFixit 000 has published a teardown of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models featuring Apple's M1 chip. The teardown shows what remains the same and what has been changed, the most notable, of course, being the new Apple Silicon heart powering the machines. The 000 notes, among other things, that the new MacBooks 'could hardly be any more similar to their predecessors.'

Continue Reading

This week Intel revealed the Intel NUC M15 Laptop Kit, a system formerly code-named Bishop County. This kit includes an 11th Gen Intel Core mobile processor as well as Intel Iris Xe graphics. It's made to exceed "the stringent requirements of the new Intel Evo platform brand," and makes a good case for the excellence of the mobile, portable, powerful laptop of the near future.

Continue Reading

The first MacBook Air powered by Apple's first M1 Silicon has started shipping and there's reason to be excited, even if you're not a MacBook or Apple fan yourself. This new breed of Macs represents not just another turning point in Apple's history but, given the company's reputation as a trendsetter, could also make waves in the computing industry in general, tipping the scales away from the likes of Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD. While we take the Late 2020 MacBook Air for a thorough testing, we're just a little bit too excited to share our first impressions of this important milestone in Apple's story thus far.

Continue Reading

2020 will definitely be remembered for the drastic, sometimes very negative, changes that happened due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has affected all quarters and industries around the world, though not all in the same way. The PC market, for example, has found a bit of reprieve after years of slumping sales and profits. But while PC shipments have gone up, not all categories enjoy that same growth and the computers normally associated with the term "PC" are actually still in the red, perhaps even more than before.

Continue Reading

Apple's announcement of the first generation of Macs running on its own Silicon processors was unsurprisingly filled with bold claims. Given the novelty of the M1 chip and its ARM-based design, there might be some apprehension if the new MacBooks will be able to hold their own against Intel's most powerful processors. Geekbench scores for these new computers have started popping up that does seem to confirm Apple's claims, trumping Intel-based MacBooks except in one case.

Continue Reading

Apple may have come out strong with its new Apple M1, the first notebook chipset of its own design, but there's a conspicuous gap in the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13: 5G connectivity. In a year where Apple didn't just adopt 5G in iPhone, but embrace it wholeheartedly by including on every new iPhone 12 series device, the fact that it's not to be found in its new notebooks despite the ARM family resemblance seems like a missed opportunity.

Continue Reading

The first MacBook Pro with Apple silicon inside is the MacBook Pro (late 2020) 13-inch. This device is one of three in the first run of M1 devices from Apple. These devices are able to run MacOS app and iOS (and iPadOS) apps and has significantly more processing power than previous-model MacBook Pro machines.

Continue Reading

Razer is back with its new Razer Book 13, an ultraportable productivity laptop featuring 11th-generation Intel Core processors and Intel Iris Xe graphics. The company, which is best known for its gaming laptops, promises consumers features 'not yet realized in a work laptop' and configuration options for those who engage in heavy multitasking, among other things.

Continue Reading

Arm's CPU designs and technologies practically power a large chunk of the computers in the world, from the ones we put in our pockets to those that drive our cars' brains. The one segment that Arm-based chips haven't yet truly taken over is the desktop and laptop market. That might be changing quickly, especially with Apple Silicon close to launching, and Arm itself is launching a new Cortex-A78C CPU that it envisions will power on-the-go devices, a.k.a. Arm-powered laptops like those pushed by Microsoft.

Continue Reading

Intel may have the lion's share of the PC desktop and laptop CPU market, at least for now, but it has struggled to gain any foothold in the graphics sector of the industry. It has always been touting its Iris graphics technologies and while they have definitely improved over the years, they still mostly fall short compared to those with a discrete graphics card, especially on desktops. Laptops, on the other hand, offer an opportunity for Intel to break through and that is exactly what its new Iris Xe MAX discrete GPUs promise for thin and light laptops.

Continue Reading