Hardware

Will Apple ever ship a MacBook laptop with a touchscreen? Most likely not. But next week, Apple will begin shipping a device that closely resembles a MacBook with a touchscreen.

To be clear, Apple didn’t show off a MacBook during Tuesday’s virtual product launch event. But it did show off a tablet that feels a lot like a computer. (“What’s a computer?” you ask. We'll get to that.) Apple's new device is the 2022 iPad Air, the fifth generation of this product line. A few of its features have been updated to keep with the times: 5G connectivity, an ultrawide camera, a USB-C port.

Apple is adding "one last chip" to the M1 processor family. The M1 Ultra is a new design that uses "UltraFusion" technology to strap two M1 Max chips together, resulting in a huge processor that offers 16 high-performance CPU cores, four efficiency cores, a 64-core integrated GPU, and support for up to 128GB of RAM.

For months, everyone has been speculating that Apple would soon update high-end, Intel-based Mac mini configurations with its own custom-designed silicon, and now Apple has announced just that at its spring product event. But what we got is actually a little more than what we expected.

The new desktop Mac is called the Mac Studio, and it's like a Mac mini, but bigger—bigger in size and bigger in performance. The thicker desktop comes in multiple configurations based on Apple's M1 Max and the new M1 Ultra processor, which doubles the CPU and GPU core counts of the M1 Max.

Setting up a Raspberry Pi board has always required a second computer, which is used to flash your operating system of choice to an SD card so your Pi can boot. But the Pi Foundation is working on a new version of its bootloader that could connect an OS-less Pi board directly to the Internet, allowing it to download and install the official Raspberry Pi OS to a blank SD card without requiring another computer.

Once again, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has published a predictive report. This time, Bloomberg's sources have shared details on Apple's upcoming Spring event.

The report claims that Apple will host this year's event on March 8, which is a little earlier than usual. And the report names four major announcements expected at the event. In contrast to some of Gurman's recent newsletters, he cites sources familiar with Apple's plans, lending the report some credibility.

We were impressed with Intel's top-tier 12th-generation desktop chips. Though still power-hungry compared to competing AMD Ryzen processors, their combination of big performance cores (P-cores) and clusters of small efficiency cores (E-cores) helped them shine under all kinds of workloads, including games that favor fewer, faster cores and video encoding and rendering tasks that benefit from every core you can throw at them.

Google engineers are developing a new augmented reality (AR) headset, according to a report by The Verge citing two people familiar with the project.

Google hopes to ship the product—codenamed "Project Iris"—sometime in 2024, but that date is likely not set in stone.

A common complaint about mechanical keyboards is that they're too expensive. Options are limited further for budget-minded buyers if they want a wireless device, especially if they're looking for a Mac-specific board. But the market has come a long way, and you can now pick up mechanical keyboards, including cable-free options, for under $100. And not only can you buy a wireless mechanical keyboard that works with Apple computers, but in the case of the Keychron K14, you can get one that comes with a Mac layout out of the box (don't worry, Windows keycaps are also included).

AMD will begin selling its latest budget GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, on January 19th. Its retail price is $199. But the ongoing GPU shortage, caused in part by cryptocurrency miners and scalpers who are snapping up every card they can get, has made it mostly impossible to get any graphics card at its list price over the past year.

In November 2020, Microsoft unveiled Pluton, a security processor that the company designed to thwart some of the most sophisticated types of hack attacks. On Tuesday, AMD said it would integrate the chip into its upcoming Ryzen CPUs for use in Lenovo's ThinkPad Z Series of laptops.