Hardware

If you’re a casual or mainstream gamer, you don’t need a discrete graphics card, Intel says.

Instead, look at integrated graphics, which are getting more powerful by the day, said Gregory Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel’s desktop clients platform.

The top-level graphics processors integrated in Intel’s chips, called Iris and Iris Pro, can outperform 80 percent of discrete graphics chips, Bryant said.

Way back at the beginning of 2015 I tasked myself with building a gaming PC for the living room. 12 months later and finally—after coming to work for Ars, travelling halfway around the world a few times over, and patiently waiting for someone to release a console-like case that didn't suck—it is done.

Hackaball, a children's toy designed to create an interest in programming, started life as a Kickstarter in 2015, and the company behind it is ready to start shipping product in March.

The device itself is relatively straightforward, consisting of a rubberized sheath wrapped around a durable outer shell, inside of which is a miniature computer complete with gyroscope, accelerometer, vibration motor, multicolor LEDs and a speaker. It's what kids can do with Hackaball that makes it different.

Intel's original Compute Stick was a neat idea that ultimately wasn't executed very well. Any system based on one of Intel's Atom processors is going to be a little slow, but flaky wireless, inconsistent performance, and a clunky setup process all made it less appealing than it could have been. It had all of the hallmarks and rough edges of a first-generation product.

Meet George Hotz. He’s a bit of a character. He’s 26 and lives in San Francisco. At the age of 17, under the name “geohot”, he became the first person to unlock the iPhone. Shortly after he started working on the Sony Playstation 3 and became the first one to hack that too.

I was on vacation last week when Apple’s new first-party Smart Battery Case arrived on my doorstep, which was actually kind of nice—freed from the pressures of having to write something about it as soon as humanly possible, I could just use it for a few days and worry about writing everything down at a later date.

The ease with which you can “just use” the battery case is probably the best thing about it; you slide your phone into it and go about your business. But it’s not for everyone, and when I send it back to Apple I probably won’t end up buying one of my own.

A few days ago, Facebook open-sourced its artificial intelligence (AI) hardware computing design. Most people don’t know that large companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon don’t buy hardware from the usual large computer suppliers like Dell, HP, and IBM but instead design their own hardware based on commodity components. The Facebook website and all its myriad apps and subsystems persist on a cloud infrastructure constructed from tens of thousands of computers designed from scratch by Facebook’s own hardware engineers.

Google is back with yet another Android tablet. The latest hardware effort, the Pixel C, comes from an odd place inside Google: the Pixel team. Usually a "Pixel" is the latest, fancy high-end Chromebook, but with the Pixel C, the traditionally Chrome OS-centric team decided to make an Android tablet. It's not just a tablet, though, there's also a clip-on keyboard base making it a Surface-style convertible.

The iPhone 6S is great, but its battery life was never its strong suit. I said that in my review, and I felt the same way about the iPhone 6, too. I pair multiple fitness bands and smartwatches, stream music and generally wear out my iPhone so that it always needs a top-off charge by 4 p.m.

Hipsters and selfie addicts beware: infosec man Steve Lord has crafted a tool designed to sever your line of addiction to Instagram by quietly blocking it over public Wi-Fi.

The British security bod built the Raspberry Pi Zero-powered "hipster slayer" out of nothing more than off-the-shelf components and "questionable life choices." The gizmo will continually deny people's attempts to connect to Instagram and other social media vanity sites.