Hardware

We've long been fans of Lenovo's X1 line. The X1 Carbon (a conventional laptop) and the X1 Yoga (a laptop with a 360 degree hinge) have consistently sported solid build quality and classic ThinkPad good looks while being packed with features, albeit at a price. This year's refreshed models continue this tradition but with a particular focus on the materials they're made from.

Personal technology is getting a bad rap these days. It keeps getting more addictive: Notifications keep us glued to our phones. Autoplaying episodes lure us into Netflix binges. Social awareness cues—like the "seen-by" list on Instagram Stories—enslave us to obsessive, ouroboric usage patterns. (Blink twice if you've ever closed Instagram, only to re-open it reflexively.) Our devices, apps, and platforms, experts increasingly warn, have been engineered to capture our attention and ingrain habits that are (it seems self evident) less than healthy.

It's the start of a brand new year, and as usual there is a lot happening in the first half of 2019, for both Apple itself and for connected companies in the rest of the technology sphere. AppleInsider details some of the things you should expect to hear more about in the next few months.

Apple hasn't updated the Mac Pro for a considerable amount of time, with the only real change to the product line being an update to the 2013 model in 2017 that added a six-core Xeon configuration and dual AMD G500 GPUs. A change is well overdue.

Your computer's graphics card (GPU) is the most important component when it comes to determining gaming performance. To help you choose the right graphics card for your rig, we thoroughly test and review all the major cards, ranking each platform in our GPU hierarchy and publish our list of specific make and model recommendations on this page.

Quick Shopping Tips

When buying a graphics card, consider the following:

    Resolution: The more pixels you're pushing, the more performance you need. You don't need top-of-the-line to game at 1080p.

Just $200 separates the 11-inch and 12-inch 2018 iPad Pros. This is a fairly narrow gap, and we've been told it's a hard call —so AppleInsider is here to help.

Both iPad Pros — regardless of size — have the same internal specs. That means you won't get better performance for choosing one over the other, so the decision really comes down to screen size.

Of all the different reasons one would prefer a particular size over another, there are three where one model excels over the other.

Nvidia unveiled its lineup of real-time ray-tracing graphics cards back in August, claiming huge performance improvements over the last generation of GPUs. As usual, though, the company started the lineup with its top-tier cards, from the RTX 2080 Ti down to the 2070, and we haven't heard anything about successors to models such as the GTX 1060. That is, until now.

Let's be honest here: modern processors aren’t exciting. Speed bumps no longer thrill us, and we’ve become blasé about adding more cores. But we are living in a time when computers casually offer amounts of processing power that would have made previous generations swoon.

NVIDIA has announced that the culprit behind some of the defective early boards for the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition was limited test escapes. Test escapes refers to the testing of the parts such as resistors, capacitors, etc., that are on the PCB. Sometimes these parts are defective or of marginal quality.

Radxa has posted specs for a $39 and up, community backed “Rock Pi” Raspberry Pi lookalike with a Rockchip RK3399, USB 3.0, M.2, HDMI 2.0, and native GbE, plus optional WiFi, BT, and PoE.

Radxa is prepping a Raspberry Pi pseudo clone called the Rock Pi that runs Linux or Android on a hexa-core Rockchip RK3399 SoC. It joins the RK3399-based NanoPi M4 in closely matching the RPi 3 layout, and it appears it may be the most affordable RK3399 based SBC yet, starting at $39 with 1GB RAM.

Apple's new iPad Pro sports several new features of note, including the most dramatic aesthetic redesign in years, Face ID, new Pencil features, and the very welcome move to USB-C. But the star of the show is the new A12X system on a chip (SoC).