Hardware

ZTE has announced that its long-awaited (by some) crowdsourced phone will go up for pre-order starting January 4 and will be delivered nine months later, in September, barring any unforeseen delays.

The device, born under ZTE's ambitious Project CSX, which stands for Crowd Source X, gleaned suggestions from people around the world, integration the two most viable into the finished product: eye-tracking navigation, and adhesive properties .

The Intel Core i7-7700K is what happens when a chip company stops trying. The i7-7700K is the first desktop Intel chip in brave new post-"tick-tock" world—which means that instead of major improvements to architecture, process, and instructions per clock (IPC), we get slightly higher clock speeds and a way to decode DRM-laden 4K streaming video. Huzzah.

For the average consumer building or buying a new performance-focused PC, a desktop chip based on 14nm Kaby Lake remains the chip of choice—a total lack of competition at this level makes sure of that.

The new MacBook Pro is the black sheep in Apple’s product line, at least according to a new review.

Apple’s latest MacBook Pro has failed to receive a buy recommendation from Consumer Reports, making it the first MacBook in history to lack this stamp of approval. Consumer Reports cites extreme inconsistencies with battery performance as the key issue for withholding their recommendation.

Apple is pitching the AirPods, its new wireless headphones, as "effortless" and "magical."

But I found them to be as much annoying as awesome.

Against my better judgment, I’ve tried a couple of times to snag one of those adorable little $60 mini NES Classic Editions—once when Amazon put some of its limited stock online and crashed its own site, and once when Walmart was shipping out small quantities every day a couple of weeks ago. In both cases, I failed.

Ever since the HDTV standard emerged in the mid-'00s, screen producers have struggled to come up with new standards that feel anywhere as impressive. That's been a tough sell, as no baseline image standard has yet surpassed the quality jump from CRT sets to clearer panels with 1080p resolution support.

HDR, or high dynamic range, has finally begun rolling out in a major way this year, thanks to compatible hardware, games, and videos also rolling out in droves. But how long ago did HDR content really start to come down the pipeline?

Japan is reportedly planning to build a 130-petaflops supercomputer costing $173 million (£131 million) that is due for completion next year.

Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director-general at Japan's ‎National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, where the computer will be built, told Reuters: "As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast."

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its latest batch of drive reliability data. The release covers failure information for the 67,642 disks that the company uses to store nearly 300PB of data.

A new video game console is usually a chance to envision an entirely new future for popular gaming. After years of developers and players exploring the old console inside and out, a new console cleanly breaks with the past. Typically, it introduces new features, new exclusive franchises, and a clear, new high-water mark in what's possible as far as graphics and processing power (in a non-PC living room console, at least).