Hardware

Google unveiled its first 2-in-1, the Pixelbook, back in 2017. The device was the company’s first Chrome OS convertible and was launched along with the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones. A successor to the laptop, codenamed ‘Atlas’, sporting a 4K display and a dedicated Google Assistant button was rumored to make its debut in 2018 alongside the Pixel 3 smartphones, which never happened. However, a recent FCC filing might point towards the possibility of the next generation.

Like virtual reality, 3D printing is one of those things that always seems just on the cusp of going mainstream, without ever really crossing over. Even though we've seen the concept play out in movies and on TV for years (what do you think a Star Trek replicator is doing?), having a 3D printer at home is still considered wildly exotic outside of a small enthusiast audience.

An awful lot of feedback from our Winter 2019 Server Build Guide wanted to see a Hot Rod version updated with a Ryzen, AMD's big comeback CPU line. Since then, ASRock has released a Ryzen motherboard that explicitly and officially supports ECC (Error-code correcting) RAM—the X470D4U. And on top of that, Ars reader dermott suggested I take a look at a Rosewill RSV-L4412 4u rackmount chassis.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds, today at the KubeCon + CloudNative + Open Source Summit China conference, warned attendees that managing software is about to become a lot more challenging, largely because of two hardware issues that are beyond the control of DevOps teams.

After an extremely brief tease at last year's E3 presentation, Microsoft revealed the first details of the successor to the Xbox One today, called "Project Scarlett" for now. The hardware will launch in the 2020 holiday season, the company said.

Fresh from a $530 million fundraising round earlier this year, self-driving startup Aurora made a big bet on lidar last week. The company—founded by veterans of Tesla and of Google's self-driving car projects—scooped up a Montana-based lidar startup called Blackmore.

Lidar sensors have a lot in common with fiber-optic communications gear. Both work by sending out information encoded in light, then recapturing it and interpreting the information it contains.

More than a year and a half after some MacBook owners began vociferously complaining about broken MacBook keyboards, Apple is making what it says is a material change in the keyboards in its high-end MacBook Pro laptops. It will also extend its keyboard repair program, in a bid to appease Apple laptop owners who have been frustrated by stuck or double-typing keys.

Google Glass is not only a product that still exists inside Google, but today, Google is announcing a new version of Google Glass, called "Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2." It has a new design, new specs, and a $999 price tag. We can't believe it either.

Mark Cerny would like to get one thing out of the way right now: The videogame console that Sony has spent the past four years building is no mere upgrade.

You’d have good reason for thinking otherwise. Sony and Microsoft both extended the current console generation via a mid-cycle refresh, with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 spawning mini-sequels (the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro). “The key question,” Cerny says, “is whether the console adds another layer to the sorts of experiences you already have access to, or if it allows for fundamental changes in what a game can be.”

Apple's iPad lineup has had a gap in it lately.

At the top end, you had the 2018 refresh of the iPad Pro—an immensely powerful, envelope-pushing tablet priced and positioned as a laptop replacement. At the bottom, you had the entry-level iPad, which lacked many of the best features in newer Apple products and shipped with a CPU much slower than what's in the latest iPhones.