Apple is planning to refresh all of the Mac models that it offers, with an onslaught of updates planned for the latter half of 2026 and into 2027. That's going to include new M6 chips in some models, as well as the introduction of an OLED model that supports touch.

We've previously reported on Apple's plans for a high-end MacBook Pro model that could adopt the name MacBook Ultra. This is said to come in 14- and 16-inch sizes, with the internal names K114 and K116.

The launch window isn't exactly known as yet, but it's said it will be between the end of 2026 and early 2027. It's also thought to be powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.

The details come from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who details that the first models to launch will be the refreshed version of the current MacBook Pro. That will see the debut of the Apple M6 chip, but the design will, in the short term, remain the same.

However, there's a replacement for the base MacBook Pro in the works too, with plans to launch this in 2027.

The staggered launch of what appears to be the same product line might be confusing, but it seems that Apple's focus is on getting the M6 into the hands of consumers, before updating the design to match the new MacBook Ultra. That might cause some who are planning an update to wait to see the new design before committing to a purchase.

Apple will also release a redesigned MacBook Air, it's claimed, which is slated for an early 2027 release.

Both 13- and 15-inch models are expected and it's said that the design "will closely resemble the current version" which some might be disappointed with. That's considering the dramatic design that the MacBook Air has offered in the past and the current likeness to the MacBook Pro.

An OLED MacBook Air is reportedly in the works, but this isn't expected until 2028.

Finally, the MacBook Neo will also be updated to keep it fresh, although plans are less certain. It's said that a model with the A19 Pro chip (which powers the iPhone 17 Pro) is in testing, but given the recent launch of the Neo, it's unlikely to appear soon. Apple will likely change the colour to retain its appeal.

Apple's desktop models are also getting updated

It's not just MacBook models that are in the frame for updates, Apple's desktop computers are also in the works. Gurman says that's going to start with refreshed iMac models, launched alongside the updated base MacBook Pro. It will likely benefit from the M6, but there's no mention of a redesign.

In the future, there are plans for an iMac with OLED display.

The Mac mini and Mac Studio are also in line for a refresh, with the M5 Pro and M6 in testing for the mini, while the Studio is testing the M5 Max and M5 Ultra. However, it's said that the supply situation makes the timeline for these updates less certain. The Mac Studio has been popular with those running AI applications, so demand is high.

That's a huge run of updated models planned by Apple, so to clarify, here's a timeline of what to expect when based on the information we have so far:

• 2026: MacBook Pro M6
• 2026: iMac M6
• 2026/2027: MacBook OLED M5 Pro, M5 Max
• 2026/2027 (?): Mac mini M5 Pro, M6
• 2026/2027 (?): Mac Studio M5 Max, M5 Ultra
• 2027: MacBook Air M6
• 2027: New MacBook Pro M7
• 2027/2028: MacBook OLED M7 Pro, M7 Max
• 2028: New MacBook Air OLED
• TBC: MacBook Neo A19 Pro

Focus timers aren't exactly exciting, but this one stopped me scrolling. Called Immersion, the tiny gadget transforms the passing of time into a calming stream of digital sand, and somehow makes the whole idea of concentrating feel more appealing.

Nottingham Trent University design student, Carrie Lee, has created Immersion, a minimalist timer designed to help you concentrate without adding another screen to your life.

About the size of a Tamagotchi, Immersion strips away almost everything you'd expect from a timer. There's no ticking countdown clock or barrage of numbers. Instead, its circular display fills with animated digital sand as your session progresses, giving you a gentle visual cue rather than a constant reminder of the seconds slipping away. Better still, rotate the device and the sand shifts naturally, making it super satisfying to interact with.

Focus sessions can be set anywhere from five minutes to two hours, making it suitable for everything from a quick reading sprint to a full Pomodoro-style work session. Crucially, because it's a dedicated device rather than an app, it keeps your phone out of the equation – removing the temptation to check messages or just quickly open Instagram.

The design is just as considered as the interface. Immersion sits in a sculptural charging dock inspired by stacked balancing stones, turning it into a desk ornament when not in use. There's even an optional strap so it can hang from a bag, making it easy to take to a library, coffee shop or shared workspace.

Sadly, there's one catch: it's currently only a concept. Lee developed both digital renders and a working prototype as part of her design project, so there's no word on commercial availability.

But with digital wellbeing becoming an increasingly hot topic, this is exactly the sort of gadget I'd happily make room for on my desk. It proves that sometimes the smartest tech is the technology that deliberately does less.

The rise of the mini PC in the last couple of years has been nothing short of extraordinary. Even during a worldwide RAM and components crisis, mini PC manufacturers are pushing the boundaries of what's possible in a compact box.

GMKtec is one of the companies you might have spotted on the likes of Amazon, with its numerous AMD and Intel mini PCs. They're available at all price points and configurations, but if you really take your productivity seriously, there's a new flagship model you need to take a look at.

The GMKtec EVO-X3 is a mini PC in theory, but more an an AI workstation in practice. It's capable of general computer use, even AAA gaming, but the power under the hood can do so much more besides.

The slim form factor contains an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 CPU supported by Radeon 8060S integrated graphics. This is one of the best iGPUs ever made and considering its made up of 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, there's little it can't handle.

On top of that, the standard EVO-X3 comes with 128GB of unified memory (LPDDR5X) running at 8,000 MT/s. It also has a 2TB SSD inside, with an upgraded version expanding that up to 4TB.

You can even upgrade further yourself, with dual M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD slots and a head limit 16TB.

Premium connectivity

Wi-Fi 7 is on board, along with Bluetooth 5.4, 2.5G LAN, and a host of ports, including USB 4.0, HDMI 2.1 and even Oculink, if you want to add an external GPU.

It is, in short, a beast – in the body of a supermodel.

GMKtec claims that it's designed for running local LLM AI processes and can be used for AI software development. But it's also well suited to image and video generation, 3D rendering and CAD workflows. And it comes with Windows 11 Pro preinstalled.

And if you fancy running the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 while the boss isn't looking, you can easily achieve up to 90fps it in high settings at 1440p.

Of course, all this grunt comes at a price – the GMKtec EVO-X3 usually starts at £3,212, although the brand currently has it reduced on its website, for £2,939.99. It's currently $3,799.99 in the US.

Hopefully, the tech will bleed down into other mini PC builds soon, maybe even more consumer level. We'll keep you informed of any future updates.

The retro gadget revival shows no signs of slowing down, but the latest throwback might be one of my most tempting yet. Called the PocketMage, it's a tiny clamshell computer that blends the best bits of old-school PDAs with a distraction-free writing machine. Plus, there's even a DIY kit if you fancy building your own.

Designed by Talisman Design and currently seeking crowdfunding, the PocketMage looks like a miniature laptop. Open it up and you'll find a 3.1-inch E Ink display paired with a tactile QWERTY keyboard that's clearly aimed at writers, note-takers and anyone nostalgic for the days before smartphones became endless notification machines.

So while it might be a bit small to make it onto our best mechanical keyboards list, this definitely serves its purpose well.

Interestingly, there's also a second display. A slim OLED panel sits above the keyboard to handle menus and other fast-moving interface elements, leaving the E Ink screen free to deliver its eye-friendly reading experience without feeling sluggish.

Under the hood, it's intentionally modest. An ESP32-S3 chip, 2MB of RAM and 16MB of storage (expandable via microSD) are enough to run a Markdown editor, calendar, journal, dictionary and other lightweight productivity apps. There's also WiFi, Bluetooth, USB-C and even an expansion port for hardware tinkerers who want to customise the device further.

The best part? If you're the sort of person who enjoys assembling gadgets as much as using them, the PocketMage is available as a DIY kit that only requires a screwdriver – no soldering necessary.

There's also a fully assembled version if you'd rather get typing straight away. Prices start at around $185 (roughly £135) for the kit or $235 (around £170) assembled, with shipping currently expected in March 2027.

The ultrawide gaming monitor is slowly but surely undergoing something of a shift in reputation right now, even while the wider gaming world is battered by price hikes and component shortages. Even just a couple of years ago, an ultrawide felt like the status symbol of a super-rich gamer – not really something 'normal' folks bought.

Well, times change, and display technology has been moving quickly. While ultrawides still look much like they have for years, they're now getting better and cheaper, a double whammy that you love to see. Dell's newest Alienware launch, in fact, the AW3426DW, comes in at a price that I think is really tempting given its QD-OLED status.

Price and Availability

The AW3426DW went on sale in late June here in the UK, so you can order it now directly through Dell and possibly some other enthusiast storefronts. Its RRP is £709.

US shoppers will have to pay $799.99 – with a later release date penned from 9 July 2026. There's no Australian pricing or pre-order details as yet.

Design and Specs

You might think there's a limited amount to say about the design of an ultrawide monitor. In some ways you'd be right, but the flexibility that manufacturers have on key points can be massive for the experience of using one.

The AW3426DW is a 34-inch ultrawide with an aspect ratio of 21:9, which makes it fairly typical for the market. This means that it's not the tallest monitor, so it's perhaps easier to fit onto a desk than some others I've tested, although the width is clearly the main point of contention.

The AW3426DW is built largely out of a matte-finish dark blue plastic, with a real sturdiness to its frame and stand. There's been some online criticism of that blue finish, but in person I think it's quite nice – although the footprint of the stand is fairly significant on your desk.

The arm that the screen attaches to is sturdy and offers some tilt both in terms of up-and-down and left-or-right motion. That means you can position the monitor relatively easily if you have a peculiar setup in mind. The arm also has a channel to route cables through in quite a rudimentary way.

The back of the screen is unremarkable, but there is one bit of ornamentation – a glowing RGB Alienware logo that looks nice, but really doesn't emit too much light. I could probably do without it, but it hardly impacts usability at all.

The front of the display has a status light at the bottom right that's surprisingly large, until you realise theat is doubles as the on/off button (which some monitors make much more difficult to find).

The screen's actual user interface (UI) and settings menus are accessed using a control nub right under the middle of the display, which I found really easy and responsive to use.

The panel itself is a 3440 x 1440 resolution QD-OLED Penta-Tandem RGB Stripe type, with an improved refresh rate of 280 Hz and a higher peak brightness of 1,300 nits – an increase over its '3425' predecessor.

It has HDR (high dynamic range) certification and works with Dolby Vision – which is fairly rare in this market – and can boast a VESA DisplayHDR True Black level of 500, which is also impressively rare.

Perhaps the biggest single upgrade on the monitor, though, is a new anti-reflective coating. It's hugely impactful in person, as I'll get to later in this review.

If there's a big downside to testing ultrawides, it's where multi-device functionality is concerned. The array of ports here is solid rather than outstanding – two HDMI 2.1 and a DisplayPort 1.4 are what you get, along with a 5Gbps USB Type B, plus Type A and Type C USB charging.

I usually have a 27-inch flat panel on my desk, and swap between my work MacBook Pro, my gaming PC, and my PS5 Pro according to what I'm doing and who I'm gaming with. The key part here is the PS5 Pro, which doesn't really work nicely with this monitor.

The AW3426DW does allow you to crop its picture down to a 24.5-inch version that works for devices that don't support ultrawide screens, but it's limited to 1080p and therefore loses a lot of clarity. This is far from a Dell-only issue, and really is just about what you want from your monitor – so be aware that console gaming isn't really a great fit here.

Performance

So, the AW3426DW isn't great for a PS5 Pro – what else is news, Einstein? This is a PC gaming monitor, so I used it that way for almost all of my testing. And what a lovely time I had, too.

The AW3426DW's QD-OLED panel is a really lovely one for the price. It has those inky dark blacks that you want from the technology, plus really impressive vibrancy to colour – especially with Dolby Vision-compatible content.

I used the monitor to play a dozen or so hours of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, and the bright, bold blues of that game's oceans were really well-represented, as were its torches at night and multifaceted underwater hues.

One small miss is the lack of integrated speakers – sure, they're never great, but I sometimes find it more relaxing to game without a headset, which isn't an option with this monitor (unless you have other speakers, of course).

Another welcome factor in my enjoyment of the screen has been that anti-reflective coating; I saw it briefly at Computex in Taipei, but at home it's been revelatory – even bright and pointed lights barely make a ripple when I'm gaming. The boost this gives to immersion is truly great.

While I don't recommend it for consoles, I did also do enough PS5 Pro gaming to confirm that it's entirely acceptable on that front, too, and that swapping back and forth between modes is quick and easy to accomplish. That's worth more than nothing, at this price.

It's also worth highlighting that, unlike some other monitors of this type, the cooling for what is a big panel is all done through ventilation rather than actual fans. Some other monitors can indeed have a distracting whirr, but there's no such bugbear here.

Using the monitor for work has also been a reminder that ultrawides can be really quite practical – you get so much real estate for multitasking and windows. At 3440 x 1440, things are nice and sharp, although I have found that text can suffer from a little fringing at times, so a point of note if you're sensitive to that.

Verdict

I think Dell's Alienware brand has played a great hand here. The AW3426DW doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it crucially also doesn't charge the world – unlike some competitors.

While its QD-OLED panel isn't radically upgraded over its predecessor, instead going for modest but welcome gains, the price feels really fair for what you get.

Sure, you can get more expensive monitors that push things further in terms of resolution, size, and indeed processing power and internal capabilities – but you'll find that these upgrades come with discomfiting price spikes, too.

By avoiding those hikes, you'll be getting a monitor that feels premium in all the most important ways, even if it's secretly not as best-in-class as it looks. The Alienware AW3426DW is a great deal.

Also Consider

If you do want something that's more like the best of the best, then consider going for LG's crazy UltraGear 45GX950. It's simply massive, and therefore not quite in the same category, but it's a stunning piece of gear. It remains the high-water mark for the ultrawides I've tested.

Another alternative comes in the form of a counter-proposal. If you do want to game on both PC and console, maybe an ultrawide isn't right for you. In that case, the Sony Inzone M10S is a beautiful OLED panel – while there's now a new version, that means you might be able to find lower prices on last year's model.

The new OASIS 1 smart ring swaps heart rate sensors and sleep tracking for productivity. This new take on wearables packs a miniature touch-sensitive trackpad and microphone into a ring designed to control your devices without you reaching for a keyboard or mouse.

The touch surface supports swipes, taps and scrolling, while the built-in microphone is designed for private voice dictation. The idea is that you can hold the ring close to your mouth and quietly dictate messages or AI prompts, rather than broadcasting them across the office.

OASIS says the ring works with Macs, iPhones and Apple Vision Pro, with integrations including Spotify and Apple Music already listed. Pre-orders are open now for $289 (around £210 / AU$430), with shipping expected by Christmas 2026.

It's an intriguing twist on the smart ring formula. While rivals have spent the past few years trying to shrink fitness trackers onto your finger, OASIS is betting that AI is creating demand for a completely different type of wearable – one that's all about interaction rather than health.

Whether people really want to replace a keyboard with a ring remains to be seen, but there's something undeniably futuristic about the concept. If the hardware proves as intuitive as it sounds, it could be one of the more interesting wearable ideas to emerge this year – and certainly one of the few that lets you edit a document with the wave of a finger.

Apple could launch a new entry-level MacBook Pro with a redesign that's related to the rumoured MacBook Pro Ultra. This would likely usher in a new era of design for the MacBook Pro family.

There seems to be a lot happening in the world of MacBook at the moment. Not only have we seen the cheapest member of the family in the MacBook Neo (albeit getting a price bump thanks to component shortages), but we're also looking at a new high-end MacBook Pro, called the MacBook Ultra.

The MacBook Ultra, thought to be launching in Q3 2026, could usher in an OLED display, touchscreen support, a new design, as well as dropping the notch for a Dynamic Island type tool instead.

A report from the often-reliable Mark Gurman at Bloomberg points to an updated MacBook Pro (codenamed K104) that offers a new design "in line with what Apple is preparing for high-end MacBooks with touch screens".

That suggests that the new entry-level MacBook Pro won't just soldier on with the current design, but will be closer related to the MacBook Ultra. That would see the Ultra launching in late 2026 and the refreshed cheaper models adopting a similar design in early 2027.

What this entry-level, possibly 14-inch MacBook Pro is unlikely to get is touch support, and with OLED being a new addition for Ultra, it's unlikely to get that either.

Instead, it seems that Apple will go all-out on the MacBook Ultra in 2026, loading it with new features through that display and showing off a fancy new design that's slimmer and more compact.

Then it looks like it will follow up some six months later with an updated MacBook Pro, with a slimmer design of its own to keep customers happy. Whether there will be models between the two isn't clear, but it's likely that we'll end up with the MacBook Neo, MacBook Air, new MacBook Pro in 2027 and MacBook Ultra in 2026.

It's thought that the MacBook Ultra will run on M5 Pro and M6 Max chips and it's also been suggested that an updated MacBook Pro would appear with M6 in 2026. With the suggestion now that a refreshed MacBook Pro will be launched in 2027 with M7, there's the potential that it's going to get confusing.

This might just mean that there's too much congestion around the MacBook line-up, with disparate chips, so there's every chance that these details may not all be correct.

The Mac Studio could be inline for some changes, with new details giving us an insight into Apple's plans for it's powerful but compact desktop computer. That includes new hardware coming over the next couple of years.

First up, the Mac Studio is expected to get an M5 Ultra upgrade according to Mark Gurman with the current configurations offering either the M4 Max or M3 Ultra, so it's a generation behind the latest MacBooks.

The Mac Studio was expected to get this upgrade around WWDC, but that didn't happen. The previous update was in May 2025, so we're not too far off an annual cycle – although pressures on component prices are likely causing some of the delays here.

The Mac Studio has seen strong demand from those looking for a powerful machine with high levels of unified memory for running AI, but in a perfect Catch-22, the AI boom has driven prices up and caused shortages in the industry.

That's something that's felt in Apple's supply chain, with price increases recently announced across a full range of products.

But according to what we know so far, Apple's M6 is going to be markedly different, with plans only including a base M6 chip, with a bigger push for the M7 through 2027. That should give component prices time to settle, something that's needed for the M7, M7 Pro, M7 Max and M7 Ultra with high levels of integrated RAM.

That leads us into the most powerful iteration of the Mac Studio, with a refresh expected in 2028. While the design is expected to stay the same from the exterior (something that Apple is known for), it's thought that there will be some internal changes, including a new heat sink.

That's going to help manage temperatures when pushing the Mac Studio hard to support increasing AI demands.

These plans present something of a mixed bag for those looking for a Mac Studio. Prices are only heading in one direction, demand has been high, with the real bump in performance coming in 2028. Exactly how much it will cost remains to be seen, but some of that will be dictated by AI's path and how component manufacturers scale to meet current pressures on demand.

Maybe it's time we all stop making pictures of talking cats to share on social media.

If you have a Mac, the Apple Studio Display is one of the best monitors you can buy. While there is now a newer Studio Display XDR model with Mini-LED and 120Hz, the original is more than enough for most users and is a far better price.

However, in the Amazon Prime Day sale this week, a Lightning Deal has seen the price of the monitor drop to just £1099 – that's 37% off the list price, making the Studio Display an absolute steal.

As I write this 46% have already been claimed, so this deal is likely to sell out today. So if you are tempted, you need to move quickly. It's certainly the biggest Apple deal we've seen on Prime Day for a long time.

This isn't the standard version either; the discounted model comes with the nano-texture glass, giving you a nice matte finish which eliminates reflections.

• Shop all Apple deals in the Amazon Prime Day sale

More great Apple deals

• Apple AirPods 4 with ANC: 26% off, now £125.40
• Apple iPad Air 13in M3: 23% off, now £650
• Apple Watch Ultra 3: 13% off, now £649
• Apple AirTag (2nd Gen) 4-pack: 15% off, now £84.55
• Apple iPhone Air 256GB: 4% off, now £719
• Apple MacBook Air 15-inch M4: 17% off, now £1000
• Apple Pencil (USB-C): 29% off, now £56.05
• Apple Watch Series 11: 21% off, now £317
• Apple Watch SE 3: 9% off, now £199

The Apple Studio Display XDR is the second generation of Studio Display, providing a relatively affordable home monitor to pair with the Mac Studio or MacBook Pro.

It replaces the former 32-inch Pro XDR model, which sat alongside the original Studio Display, which was close to five grand. At double the price of the original Studio Display, it’s by no means cheap though.

This new 27-inch model is a step up from the Studio Display in almost all areas. It uses a mini LED rather than an LED display, which is much brighter, and finally offers a faster refresh rate of up to 120Hz – something previously lacking from Apple’s lineup.

Those using a Mac mini or MacBook Air are probably better served by the standard Studio Display or one of the many third-party options. However, for those wanting ultimate performance, the Studio Display XDR is likely to fit the bill.

Having used the Studio Display as my main display for the last year, I was keen to see how much better this new model is. I’ve been running both the Studio Display and Studio Display XDR from a Mac Studio for the past few weeks, to compare. While the Studio Display still holds up as an excellent monitor, the XDR model is that much better.

How much is the Apple Studio Display XDR?

Released in March 2026, the Apple Studio Display XDR starts from £2999 in the UK, $3299 in the US or A$5499 in Australia. Unlike the Studio Display, the height-adjustable stand comes as standard, though you can purchase it with a VESA mount adapter for wall mounting or attaching to monitor poles.

The only configurable feature is the option to have the nano-texture glass display. This provides a matte surface to the display, much like on the iPad Pro and the MacBook Pro. This isn’t a coating, this is part of the display, and the difference is stark. It does add £300 to the price, but if you are placing it in a bright room where reflections are likely, it’s well worth it.

Design and features

Design-wise, it’s difficult to tell the XDR version apart from the standard Studio Display. From the front, the black bezels are identical, with a 12MP CentreStage camera built in at the middle of the top bezel. Meanwhile, the back view has the same two USB-C and two powered Thunderbolt 5 ports.

The one potential giveaway is if it has just a tilting stand, though it’s possible to get both with the height and tilt adjustments. To really tell the difference, you need to plug the display in and take a look at the picture, as that’s where the difference really lies.

While the Studio Display XDR still offers a 5K resolution, it now has a 120Hz refresh rate with adaptive sync to adjust the frame rate to suit different media. This makes the display ideal for gaming, which is an area the Studio Display range has previously fallen down on.

The display itself now also uses mini-LED backlight technology, as opposed to standard LEDs, with 2304 dimming zones to provide more precise lighting and, therefore, deeper blacks and whiter whites. This is high compared to most mini-LED TVs, especially considering the size of the screen.

It’s brighter, too with up to 1,000 nits in standard definition and a peak of 2,000 nits for HDR content

Using the Apple Studio Display XDR

The Studio Display XDR is a great-looking monitor. With the brushed aluminium stand and back, along with the clean black bezels on the front, it looks every bit the Apple product and therefore sits perfectly alongside any Mac.

Due to the cost of this monitor, it’s likely to be paired with higher-end machines, but it will work perfectly well with any MacBook, Mac mini or Mac Studio. A 27-inch display is the perfect size for most desks, and more than enough real estate for most users. If you are connecting it to a MacBook, you can still use the laptop’s screen as a second display, but in practice, it’s not necessary.

The main requirement is that your machine is running on Apple silicon (so M1 and above) and is using macOS 26.3.1 or later. It is also compatible with newer iPad models, including all iPad Pro models and the iPad Air 5th generation or newer. The latest iPad Pro M5 will even support 120Hz when connected to the Studio Display XDR, while all other iPads are limited to 60Hz.

I love how clean and simple the Studio XDR display looks, thanks to the ports being kept on the back. I also love the height adjustment on this model, as it means you can position the screen in the right place for your line of vision – there’s nothing worse than spending out on a fancy monitor and then having to prop it up on books, or an additional stand.

As with the standard studio monitor, the built-in webcam is excellent, giving you 12MP images or high-quality video calls. It also has built-in microphones and speakers – the speakers especially sound nice and big, giving you full spatial audio from the six-speaker system.

The best thing about the display, though, has to be the picture. As I said in my review of the original Apple Studio Display, its picture is absolutely stunning, and for general use the Studio Display XDR looks very similar.

Where it differs most is in the brightness, though there are subtleties between the images from the XDR and the standard model, with a little more contrast and gentler gradation on tones. It’s a tough call to the naked eye, though, and you wouldn’t be unhappy with either.

Refresh rate is the big ticket feature here, and having 120Hz on the XDR. You can test this quite easily for yourself using different online tools, like Test UFO, but you can really see it if you play fast-frame-rate games, such as DOOM Eternal. I noticed the difference playing Cyberpunk 2077 and even in the sequences of Civilization VII.

Should I buy the Apple Studio Display XDR?

For most Apple users, the regular Studio Display is still more than enough monitor, and if you want 120Hz, there are other options that cost significantly less. However, if you want the very best experience for your Mac, the Studio Display XDR is the one to go for.

Using this monitor is a dream, whether you’re working or gaming. The quality of both still and moving images is hard to beat, and the built-in speakers, microphone and cameras save you needing any add-ons apart from the computer itself.

While possibly overkill for most home users, it does offer pro-quality, so whether you’re editing video, images or 3D modelling, you will get a precise image and accurate colour. It’s the perfect pairing for the Mac Studio devices, but equally at home with a MacBook Pro.

Some users may miss the 32-inch size of the former model, but there’s always the option to pair two of these screens together for a giant workspace. Personally, I wouldn’t want anything bigger than 27 inches on my desk. I would love to see an iMac Pro offering, though, at this size.

If you've got hundreds of thousands burning a hole in your trouser pocket, there are lots of ways you could spend it. Many of us would look to a car, or a house payment – others might splash on a stunning watch, or some hi-fi equipment.

But there are few instances where you might think of spending it on a computer. If you do fancy that, though, Asus has you covered with a new model, with a staggering US$99,999 (approx. £74,500 / €86,150 / AU$140,000) price tag.

That comes with a whopping 748GB of RAM on board, which is likely to make up a significant portion of that price tag. The ongoing price rises for RAM – known colloquially as RAMageddon – have seen the cost of many consumer electronics grow significantly in recent years.

The bulk of that popularity comes from those seeking to power AI models, which requires exorbitant amounts of computing power. It's part of the reason why so many devices are facing stock issues and seeing their prices increase.

Here, that RAM is paired with an Nvidia Grace Blackwell Ultra chip, which is paired with a Blackwell Ultra graphics chip. All of that is powered by a built-in power supply which delivers 1,600 watts, while the cooling system is said to be capable of handling the chip's full power under sustained load without throttling, which is probably the least you'd expect at that price.

You'll find eight USB 3.2 ports on board, as well as a USB 2.0 port and a pair of 10 Gbps Ethernet ports. There are, however, no USB 4 or Thunderbolt ports on offer, which feels a little short-sighted at this price point.

Still, this is never going to be the option for the everyman. This is designed with one goal in mind, and that's to power AI models, and it should do a fine job of that. Personally, I'd still buy the Porsche Taycan, but that's just me.

2026 is certain to be a landmark year for Apple. With the departure of long-term CEO, Tim Cook, happening in just a few months, we're expecting big things to mark the dawn of John Ternus' reign.

According to the latest reports and rumours, that could include as many as four new members of the Mac family. It comes after a trio of MacBook models arrived earlier in the year, including the more affordable MacBook Neo.

Here's everything you need to know about what's expected.

Mac Studio

The most professional Mac in the brand's range looks set to get another boost later this year. That's set to include the M5 Max and an as-yet-unreleased M5 Ultra chip.

Current reports don't suggest any other changes, but that's not too uncommon. More power is never a bad thing, and it should make a big difference for power users.

iMac

The iMac got boosted up to the M4 chip in late 2024, which does make another change feel sudden. Still, fans certainly won't complain, with a bolstered M5 chip-equipped model slated this year.

The report also suggests a new palette of colours for the range, though there's no greater detail on offer.

Mac Mini

This is the one I'm personally most excited for. I've been eyeing up the current Mac Mini for a while, but I've been holding out for the added boost of an M5 chip.

According to reports, the new device will look much the same as its predecessor, but will gain the M5 and M5 Pro chips inside. That's a decent enough boost, and should make it worth the wait.

MacBook Ultra

Last, but certainly not least, is the long awaited MacBook Ultra. That's the expected name given to the redesigned MacBook Pro model, which has been the subject of rumours for years now.

That's said to include an OLED, touchscreen panel as the key feature of a new design. It's also said to feature a Dynamic Island in place of the current notch, which would tie the design in more closely with other devices like the iPhone.

When Logitech told me it was making a folding mouse, I immediately needed to know what on earth that meant, and it didn't take much time reading the Mobi Fold's press release to know I also needed to test it out for myself.

After all, when you see a mouse that folds like a little wallet or a flip phone, you immediately wonder what it's like to use, and whether it can possibly be comfortable enough to actually feel worthwhile. Well, after getting my sample midweek, I've spent 24 hours working with it, and it's confirmed my suspicions in more than one way.

The Mobi Fold is a fascinating bit of design. When you unbox it, you'll find it already unfolded, looking much like a mouse but with much of its bulk missing. It sits on your desk like a little hill, and only when you lift it out can you see how easy it is to snap it shut.

Doing so powers it down, so flipping it shut is basically the power switch. You can pair it with Logitech's included dongle for the best connection, but it also has Bluetooth and can swap between three devices with a button press near its sensor.

Actually getting into some regular use with the Mobi Fold, though, its design immediately raises some obstacles. My daily work mouse is the Logitech MX Master 4, so I'm used to good ergonomics, and the Mobi Fold has basically none to offer. It's flat and narrow, and my two outer fingers end up dangling over it onto the desk as I use it.

Because of the open space beneath it when it's unfolded, I also end up clawing around it a little, and that just isn't too comfortable. The main mouse buttons are very solid, thankfully, with good clickiness and travel, but the scroll wheel between them is far from ideal.

To keep that surface flat, it's a touch-sensitive system, and I found it a little stilted and not too fluid. It's miles worse than a mechanical wheel, and because of the mouse's design, there are also no extra buttons to speak of (like a forward or back toggle, for instance).

Using the mouse all day, I've been struck by its limitations pretty constantly, but Logitech obviously intends it for quite a niche audience. After all, at £70 it's far from a really affordable option, and a top-end MX Master 4 is only £40 right now on Amazon – step down to the older but still phenomenal Master 3S, and you might end up paying similar money.

With that comparison in mind, the sole advantage the Mobi Fold offers is its portability, which is extremely impressive. Is it so much better than one of Logitech's already small, much cheaper devices, like the Pebble Mouse 2 M350s, which is literally £15 direct from Logitech right now? No – in fact, it's worse. Yes, it's smaller in your bag and can be pocketed more easily, but in every other way, I'd rather have the cheaper mouse (having used it a decent amount, too).

This means the Mobi Fold ends up being a classic case for that famous Jurassic Park quote: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Logitech made a folding mouse, and from a technical standpoint, that's hugely impressive, sturdy and solid as it feels in the hand.

Separately, though, Logitech was already making the best productivity mouse in the world, and that obvious comparison means the Mobi Fold looks more like an experiment than it does a device I'd ever recommend to anyone.

There are rumours that Apple could be planning to announce a MacBook Ultra, a premium tier device that sits above the MacBook Pro and offers something we've not seen in Apple's laptops before – a touchscreen OLED display.

With WWDC 2026 came the announcement of Apple's next macOS software, called Golden Gate. That new software has been released in beta and it contains an interesting new function – full touch support for a Mac via Sidecar.

Previously, with macOS 26, you could only control your Mac on iPad using a mouse or trackpad – ie., it behaved in the same way as it did on your actual Mac. That's now different in macOS 27, pointing to Apple implementing full touch support across macOS.

This was discovered by @BLCNYY on X, who shared a video of the touch support in action after accessing the macOS 27 beta (via Notebookcheck).

As with rumours about Apple's iPhone Ultra, this isn't an absolute confirmation of Apple launching a touchscreen MacBook – it's more the case of showcasing software support for something we expect to happen. It might simply be that Apple decided to add touch controls via Sidecar.

But, that doesn't account for other pointers we have towards a new touchscreen MacBook. We've previously reported that Samsung Display is expected to ship OLED screens to Apple for the new MacBook in July, in 14.3- and 16.3-inch sizes.

That's on top of previous confirmation that Apple is creating an Ultra tier of devices, as well as other Apple plans from Mark Gurman, one of the most reliable leakers of Apple's future products.

The idea of a touchscreen MacBook was shot down in 2010, with Steve Jobs saying during the launch of Mac OS X Lion that it wasn't a good experience: "We've done tons of user testing on this and it turns out it doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical… it's ergonomically terrible".

But the assumption that Jobs had made was that you're using touch a lot of the time. I have a Windows laptop that supports touch and I don't use it often, but I can't imagine it not being there.

I use it for ad hoc interactions, for casual things. It's not a replacement for the keyboard or trackpad, but sometimes, I just want to tap – especially when I'm showing someone else something on the screen.

The introduction of touch to the Mac would open up a whole new world of opportunities for users and for some, that might be the incentive to move to the MacBook Ultra.

Just make sure that if it does happen, you have your Apple Polishing Cloth to hand.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that Logitech's new mouse is the smallest I've ever seen, or the most portable – but it is undeniably a first in one big, obvious way: it folds. That's a feature that makes almost no sense when just written down, but if you check out the header image at the top of this piece, and the product image a little further down, it might start to clarify for you.

The Logitech Mobi Fold is basically an ultra-portable, slimline mouse that has a big folding hinge in the middle of it. When you're not using it, it can fold up clamshell-style, like a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7, and with pretty similar dimensions, to be honest.

The mouse comes with one of Logitech's Bolt USB receivers to let you connect it to just about any device (including Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and more). It also has Bluetooth, though, like almost any Logitech mouse, as an easy backup alternative.

Also consistent with other Logitech devices is outstanding battery life – rated at up to 30 days on a charge with normal use, and with 22 hours of use coming from just a single minute of charging. That last stat is fairly remarkable, obviously.

Of course, as those who moved early on folding phones can attest to, hinges are a failure point, so Logitech's keen to point out that this one should last for up to 15 years, and has been drop-tested and is dust-resistant. That's reassuring, albeit I haven't had my hands on one to test quite yet.

The part I'm probably most curious about is the scroll wheel, which is a touch area rather than a mechanical system, to keep the mouse super compact. We'll see how that works, although Apple's Magic Mouse has long proved that it can be satisfying when properly engineered.

The Mobi Fold should come out later this month, and is priced at $79.99/€79.99/£69.99. That's far from the bargain basement, of course, and suggests that Logitech thinks plenty of people will value its portability highly enough to make it worth spending a decent chunk on it. We'll see what I make of that very soon.

Plans for the next-gen MacBook Ultra have been revealed, detailing that it could use a hybrid OLED display, with the release expected in Q3 2026, likely October.

Rumours about MacBook Ultra have been floating around for some time. After a flurry of releases that gave us updated MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines – and introduced the MacBook Neo – Apple could have something even bigger in store.

The details come from analyst firm Omdia, talking about the rise in OLED display shipments for laptop use. In the report, it says that Samsung Display will provide the panels from July, lining up a launch later in the year.

Apple hasn't used OLED for its laptops so far, instead opting for Mini-LED. The report says that Apple will use "oxide TFT and RGB tandem OLED technology", which sounds like it will be similar to the display in the iPad Pro.

The aim will be to provide power efficiency, without losing the high brightness that Mini-LED offers. While OLED's self-emissive properties mean greater light control and the elimination of blooming, maintaining high brightness will be the challenge here.

But the MacBook Ultra might offer more: it could debut touchscreen onto the MacBook line for the first time, about a decade after the rest of the market. Apple has long maintained that touch doesn't fit on a laptop (despite the ill-fated Touch Bar), but rumours point to a significant shift in policy.

It's hard not to point out the irony in calling it the MacBook Ultra, if it's then the only model that supports touch, a feature the company has avoided for so long. It's expected that this model will sit above current M5 Pro and M5 Max model, and might also see the debut of the new M6 chip.

The Ultra name is expected to be introduced across Apple products, with the iPhone Ultra the anticipated name for the folding phone. We could also see an iPad Ultra and AirPods Ultra in the future to create a new super class of Apple devices.

According to 9to5Mac, the new MacBook Ultra could come in 14.3 and 16.3-inch sizes, while the new panel might allow for slimmer packaging than the Mini-LED panels in the current Pro models.

By the end of 2026, Apple could have effectively topped and tailed its MacBook line, with the Neo at the bottom and Ultra at the top, providing a wider choice of models and price points than ever before.

Computex was a pretty big deal this year, full of new chips from the likes of Qualcomm and Intel, but while those will likely change the market in bigger ways, the show also offered up some more particular innovations that I got to see. One of these very precise steps forward was taken by Samsung's displays division, which had a secret to share.

While it wasn't visible on the public-facing booth, Samsung had a genuinely tiny sideroom that I was ushered into at one point this week so that I could see a non-final version of the world's first 4K QD-OLED display with a 360Hz refresh rate. While we've obviously seen plenty of monitors go much higher than those numbers, on OLED displays there's been a fairly hard ceiling at 240Hz for technical reasons.

Samsung isn't the only display centre working hard on the problem, but it might just be the first one to get a monitor on the market to solve that problem and burst through that performance ceiling. The QD-OLED Penta Tandem, as it's labelled for now, uses a blend of Samsung's techniques to make things work. It was suitably vague about exactly how it did so, but the crucial thing is that it's been done.

The panel is 31.5 inches diagonally, so it's close to what many of us might call a small TV, but it has a bunch of obvious gaming features to offer. One is that the 360Hz cap only applies when you're in 4K – drop down to 1080p, and it rises up to 680Hz, making this theoretically adaptable to competitive needs.

It also boasts a DisplayHDR True Black rating of 600, which is hugely impressive and means that its blacks should have that super inky richness that you'd want for immersion. Plus, it brings Samsung's new V-Stripe OLED panel system, which again should boost the vividness of its colours a little.

Some of those specs are more than a little technical, of course, and I'm not sure I'm the one to break them down in crazy detail. What I can do, though, is give you a sense of what the monitor actually looked like in motion. The short version is that it's clearly a monster, but I'd have to test it in a more practical setting to get a better sense of its performance.

The brightness isn't to be questioned – showfloor lighting is always a stress-test for devices, and even in Samsung's side room, things were challenging. The monitor looked super bright and vivid, and that makes me think it should be nice and adaptable to different conditions.

The level of detail was exactly what you expect from a 4K demo, albeit with just a looping F1 25 trailer to go from – again, hardly the most comprehensive sizzle reel for a monitor of this sort, not least because it wasn't a 360Hz trailer.

That also cuts to the real dark heart of this hands-on time, which is that I can't really speak to the monitor's smoothness, because the demo wasn't geared that way. Samsung effectively wanted to put its money where its mouth is, and prove that it wasn't making up the monitor it had announced but not shown.

Well, now I can indeed confirm that it exists, but I'm relatively confident that there will be more occasions on which Samsung shows it off in more detail over the coming months. After all, we don't know the monitor's target price or release date, and the former of those is liable to be fairly frightening.

Early adopters in the world of gaming sometimes end up getting incredible deals that stand the test of time (like if you bought a Steam Deck OLED on release day, for instance). On other occasions, they can end up paying more than anyone else for devices that will only ever be better in subsequent revisions. I'm confident the QD-OLED Penta Tandem will be super polished, reducing any risk, but it's likely to be super expensive when it does arrive.

Last week Ferrari made its biggest announcement in years: its first electric car is the Ferrari Luce EV. But the general public reaction might be best summed up in a single word: yikes.

If people weren’t complaining about the very concept of an electric Ferrari, they were aghast at the design. And to be fair, the Luce EV wasn’t designed by Ferrari’s usual team – but one headed up by former head guff huffer at Apple, Jony Ive.

Given that the Luce EV costs £450,000 / $640,000, it’s fair to say it relies on that classic Ferrari desirability. It may not have enough of it though.

Weirder still, I actually think this just-announced HP laptop may have more of that special tangy Ferrari sauce than the auto-maker's new electric car.

And that’s not actually as mad as it sounds, as this PC was made in collaboration with Ferrari Design Studio, not the chap that gave us the cute and colourful iMac from the late ’90s – much as we bloody love those things.

This is the HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC, a laptop that has been in the works for around two years. The aim was to combine all of HP’s practical know-how and as much Ferrari flavour and design sensibility as possible to make one of the most desirable ultraportable laptops of all time.

HP and the Ferrari Design Studio have gone all-out with this one, and I'm not even talking about the specs here. There’s an excessive attention to detail that frankly goes far beyond what separates a bad laptop from a good one.

But then you need to get excessive when you’re talking about the rarefied air of an almost $6,000 laptop (that's circa £4,500 by conversion) where part of the appeal is it’s only made in a run of 4999 – mirroring Ferrari's cars.

So, have the teams pulled it off? I went to see this fancy new HP x Ferrari laptop collab – which, by the way, is called the 'HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC' – to find out.

Haptic touchpad: Ferrari style

The centrepiece of external design from the user’s view is the expanse below the keyboard. It’s a blank and at the same time completely eye-catching piece of textured glass with a sub-surface foil finish layer that shimmers as it catches the light. The idea is that it evokes the finish of one of Ferrari’s shinier cars, like the Scuderia.

You’ll notice there is no outline of a touchpad here, but there is one here nevertheless. It’s because the HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC has a haptic pad, which uses a motor to emulate the feel of a mechanical clicker. But there’s no need for any actual motion.

These kind of invisible pads have proved pretty controversial in the past, notably in laptops like the Dell XPS 13. Here, though, HP uses a light bar in the Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC that subtly shows you where the lateral borders of the pad are. Neat, right?

However, the really eye-catching stuff is found on the underside of the HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC. That’s right, the bit you never really look at.

Functional minimalism meets pure excess

There’s a lot going on down here. We have a great mass of carbon fibre composite below an oversize viewing window that lets you see a bunch of the internal components, including the fan system and cooling pipes. It’s all based on the exposed engine bay design of Ferrari performance cars.

And from a laptop-reviewer’s perspective, the really unusual part is what this is made of, and how HP hasn’t jammed all sorts of plastic or composite seams and bars between these panels. That viewing window? It’s a single piece of Corning Gorilla Glass in which 2000 holes – not all of the same size, by the way – are drilled in order to allow for air intake.

In the everyday world of laptop design, you tend to use more forgiving, or at least cheaper, materials for these more intricate parts. But the HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC isn’t about that life.

Just check out some of the other charming but ultimately unnecessary-from-a-practical-perspective bits down here. There’s the unique number out of 4999 of your laptop stamped on the cooling pipe, which is of course also Ferrari red.

A mini-map of Ferrari’s private Fiorano test track is printed on a heat shield, alongside the coordinates for the Ferrari workshop. The HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC is packed with evidence of both quiet and loud excess.

There’s more of this around the back too, where the heat outlet is a single piece of machined aluminium inspired by the Ferrari F76 “virtual” hypercar.

The funny part is it’s more real than the actual car, which was a purely digital 2025 project made in service to an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) – and as such has long since been consigned to the dustbin zone of Ferrari history in our minds.

Ferrari laptop: Specs and substance

One of the parts that may surprise when you take a closer look at this laptop is how “quiet” the Ferrari branding really is here. There’s the classic Cavallino Rampante ('little prancing horse', as it translates) logo on the bottom, and another small one that half blends into the corner of the rest below the keyboard.

The lid? You’ll only find HP up there. The HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC is a strangely humble show-off.

But let’s get to some more of the substance, not only because I've actually had a try of this exclusive laptop, but because some of the best stuff is here too.

First up, the HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC has a great keyboard, with more key travel than an Apple MacBook. It even uses Ferrari’s own font on those keycaps.

Taking a pinch (and thankfully only a pinch) of inspiration from gaming laptops, the HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC also has per-key lighting. You guessed it, they are red by default, but you can pick any colour combo you like, including some of those more obnoxious LED animations you’ll recognise if you’ve ever owned a high-end gaming notebook.

The screen is a 3K resolution, 14-inch OLED touch display, with a tandem panel design that lets it reach peaks of 700 nits.

There are no spec options to choose from here. Each HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC has 64GB RAM and a 1TB SSD, while the processor is an Intel X7 Ultra Series 3 chipset. It’s no new-fangled Nvidia Spark or Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite – both fresh off the start line – but is another area where the HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC is more classic in its bones, for all its other flashy parts.

The weight is telling too. At 1.382kg, HP and the Ferrari Design Studio have clearly not obsessively spent months shaving off every possible gramme. It’s light enough for ultraportable use, easily. But the focus seems to be on looking and feeling the best, not to lower weight for a more impressive-looking spec list – and that’s no bad thing.

The HP Limited Edition Scuderia Ferrari PC is available from June 12, priced at $5599 in the USA. It'll also be available in the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Switzerland. But only 4999 will ever been made – so it might be a trick to obtain one!

When I tested the new XPS 14 earlier this year, I thought I was on relatively safe ground calling it the Windows laptop of the year. Little did I know that Dell would one-up itself this quickly. The XPS 13, launched in front of my eyes at Computex 2026 in Taipei, has skyrocketed up as my most anticipated laptop launch of the year.

The MacBook Neo might be a sea-change for Apple, but having handled and used both, I'd rather have the XPS 13, and that's quite a statement to make while Apple's little fanless wonder impresses testers left, right and centre.

Dell teased the XPS 13 back at CES, with a prototype unit that it wasn't letting people really get hands-on with. Now, though, the laptop's here and ready – it should launch in its default configuration later this month, with more customisable options to follow.

Even without those upgraded SKUs, though, the base-level XPS 13 might just be the best-value Windows laptop I've seen in ages. That's not just because of its specs, which are extremely solid, but because of the superb design work that's evident in its every curve.

Apple was rightly lauded for sticking with an all-metal design for the Neo, and the XPS 13 matches it on that front. It's made from CNC-machined aluminium and looks simply gorgeous, plus it's hugely compact and slim. It weighs just 1kg, and honestly felt like less than that in the hand, and at just 12.7mm thick it's going to be one of the sleekest laptops you could hope to pack into a backpack or carry-on.

Dell's demo units behind closed doors at Computex were locked to a presentation mode, so I couldn't do even the remotest bit of performance testing, but they should come in very solidly. The default version will pack an Intel Core Series 3 to start, with upgrades to Core Ultra versions in the pipeline.

What I did get to do was a whole bunch of tapping and test-typing on the keyboard, which is an interesting one. Dell has moved back to a chiclet keyboard, different from the tighter and bigger-keyed XPS 14 and 16. I don't have strong thoughts on this change – I found the 14's keyboard really solid, and the 13's is clearly also great, just with a slightly different approach.

Key travel felt clicky and deep enough to be satisfying, and the trackpad similarly looks like a good one from my early impression. It's not a haptic one, unsurprisingly, and is a lot smaller than the equivalent on the XPS 14, but I'd be surprised if that caused much angst in everyday use.

If you want an OLED, you'll also have to make the big upgrade to the XPS 14, because the new XPS 13 has an LCD, no matter what, with no upgrade option. It does come with a touchscreen as default, though, which is nice, and it has a really good anti-reflective coating that was tested in harsh lighting and impressed me. With a variable refresh rate that can go between 30Hz and 120Hz, and a native resolution of 2.5K, it looked vibrant and impressive, but with limited on-screen action that'll need more testing.

Dell isn't being shy this summer – its blog post announcing the XPS 13 repeatedly calls out the MacBook Neo's specs and dimensions, to push the narrative that its laptop is a better buy. Crucially, we know only US pricing right now, but at $699 ($599 for students), it's going to end up as a close-run thing.

For $100 more, whether you're a student or more, you'll get a more powerful laptop that's smaller and sleeker, and you'll have the Windows ecosystem if it's your preference (not always a given). I think the Neo is a paradigm shift for Apple, but that doesn't mean it would be my default recommendation for everyone, and those looking for a mid-range, incredibly portable laptop should surely perk their ears up at the XPS 13.

That June launch estimate for the US means that we'll likely get UK pricing confirmed imminently, which will tell us more about the regional comparisons to the Neo, but I'd almost like to get out of that mode regardless. For Mac buyers, the Neo is a huge deal – I'd say that for Windows customers, the XPS 13 could be similarly game-changing.

For loads of people, that Intel Core Series 3 chip will be more than enough power to get them through light workloads and study, and the design notes of the XPS 13 make it irresistible. I can't wait to get my hands on it in a more in-depth test when it's closer to launch – the way it grabbed my attention on a busy showfloor in Taipei really shouldn't be undervalued.

If it can stick the landing, then the XPS 13 and XPS 14 will give Dell perhaps its most compelling XPS slate ever, which is a remarkable reversal from the brand being killed off just 18 months ago. Picking which one's the laptop of the year might be the hardest part.

Microsoft has announced its most powerful Surface Laptop ever – the Surface Laptop Ultra. This isn't just a powerful laptop, it's Microsoft's debut for Nvidia's new SoC – the RTX Spark – that's going to usher in a new era of notebooks.

There's a seismic shift happening in PCs that started with Qualcomm's drive to make Windows on ARM work and provide an alternative to the Intel hardware that's dominated Windows PCs for the last decade.

The Surface Laptop Ultra becomes the new hero device for Windows on ARM, while giving Nvidia exactly the partner it needs to really put some impetus into this side of the market. It also increases the competition with Apple's MacBook range.

New RTX Spark devices aren't going to be available until the "fall", which explains why Microsoft's announcement reads more like a love song to the new hardware, pitched as a laptop "for world makers".

My first thought was that it was designed for the political classes, but the emphasis here is on creators. Microsoft says it's "made for the kind of work that does not fit in a standard laptop".

While there's no end to the broad horizons hyperbole, the point Microsoft is making is that this is new, powerful and deliberately optimised – mechanically, electrically, thermally, acoustically – so that power isn't compromised.

It will come in two colours, Platinum and Nightfall, with a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra touchscreen sporting a 3:2 aspect and boasting 2000 nits peak brightness (comfortably brighter than the MacBook Pro). It'll also feature a pixel density of 262ppi.

We're told that it's less than 18mm thick and weighs under 2kg, again, MacBook Pro territory, while it also features a 30% larger trackpad than previous Surface laptops.

Finally, it's well equipped with connections, including USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, SD card and a 3.5mm headphone socket.

But the star of the show – and the bit that's also an unknown right now – is the Nvidia RTX Spark that sits at its core. This is a new super SoC that's designed to handle local AI, integrating a powerful GPU, while offering up to 128GB unified memory.

Effectively, it's pitched for the evolution of Windows computing that supports much greater AI workflows on the device without offloading compute into the cloud, while also offering the sort of power that will probably draw gaming to Windows on ARM too.

Perhaps the icing on the cake, is that a footnote on the Surface Laptop Ultra page outlines that the SSD will be user replaceable too.

Early benchmarks suggest that the Nvidia RTX Spark offers 54% more power than the Apple M5, but is bettered by the M5 Pro. This is just the start of the RTX Spark journey, though, so I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about the performance in coming months.

While it might well be ruffling feathers at the more long-established likes of Intel and AMD, Nvidia’s announcement that it’s bringing its first SoC, the RTX Spark, to the market in the coming weeks and months seems not to have caused too much stress at Qualcomm.

The San Diego giant has been making strides of its own in the PC world for the last couple of years, building up its Snapdragon X line to become a player in the high-end laptop market. Now, it’s launching the Snapdragon C to also take a tilt at the low-end segment, and that means that it’s basically further along than Nvidia, but still very much a direct competitor.

When asked about Nvidia at a media Q&A in Taipei, where it announced Snapdragon C at Computex, Qualcomm’s Kedar Kondap, SVP and general manager of compute and gaming, had a concise and bullish response to Nvidia’s arrival in the market: “Welcome to the family”.

Expanding on that a little, he said that Qualcomm is “excited” about the new competition and sees Nvidia’s arrival as a useful bellwether for the industry more widely. There’s clearly some institutional ego, though – as evidenced by vocal reminders that Qualcomm was in the sector first.

Kondap underlined that Qualcomm “invested early on” in breaking into the PC market as Nvidia now hopes to, and claimed that this added experience has seen it “driving the entire ecosystem” of its chips into relevance. That perhaps tilts a little bit more of his company’s hand – competition is generally good for the consumer, but it’s surely not the best news for a giant player in the sector like this.

Kondap went on to say that the RTX Spark represents evidence of “positive tailwinds for the entire ecosystem” of the PC market, though, and that’s probably a little easier to accept at face value. When the most valuable company in the world thinks there’s more money to be made in the laptop market, that suggests it’s in a solid place.

Of course, given price spikes, memory shortages and stock issues, that might not feel all that accurate from a customer’s point of view, but we’re getting used to shareholders and regular folks having slightly different reads on the tech industry, at this point.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang does love a long keynote speech, and like any other head honcho in tech, he also loves to keep the tidbits that might actually matter to normal customers until the very last minute.

That’s what happened during Nvidia’s presentation at this year’s Computex here in Taipei – after pretty much 90 minutes of detailed waffle about data centres (sorry, AI factories) and big-stack server racks, Huang got to the extremely heavily-leaked important bit. Nvidia’s getting into the Windows PC business in a new, and very important way.

Huang got to do what Intel and AMD have been doing for years – hold up a tiny system on a chip onstage and greet it as the dawn of a new computing age.

That’s almost certainly hyperbole, but it’s nonetheless a really big business move for Nvidia, which has spent a couple of decades being heavily associated with graphics cards specifically.

The RTX Spark, its first SoC, means that for the first time, we’ll be able to pick up and test Windows laptops and desktops later this year that run entirely on Nvidia architecture. It’s built into a combined chip called the Arm-based RTX Spark, and basically pairs the N1X CPU (the all-new bit) with a Blackwell GPU, with 128GB of unified memory on board.

That’s quite a powerful pairing of hardware, and from Nvidia’s point of view, the motivation seems to be in removing potential bottlenecks where users’ CPUs are concerned. Of course, raising its market value by another few billion might be a side objective.

Crucially, as underlined by Huang having a chip to hold in his hand onstage, the RTX Spark and N1X are going to be in actual laptops this year. Huang had prototypes from the likes of Dell, Asus, MSI and a bunch more, so this shouldn’t be pie-in-the-sky stuff.

While we don’t really have full or detailed specs around power to refer to right now, the performance that Nvidia’s estimating on the graphical side looks remarkable. It says that the RTX Spark is roughly equivalent to a 5070 laptop GPU, which means you’ll get very solid performance from it in recent releases, and it confirms that in a few years, I’d expect almost any laptop to have gaming chops we’d have dreamed about years ago.

What does this mean for normal people? In short, the laptop market is about to get extremely competitive. Qualcomm has already injected real urgency by pushing so hard on its Snapdragon chips for laptops, but Nvidia wading in will make things even messier.

For now, the first generation or two of RTX Spark laptops is going to be premium – think laptops around £2,000 or $2,000 or more. Give it a few years, though, and you'd imagine it'll have more entry-level options to bring to the table, too.

Dell doesn't always bother to do much at Computex, but this year it's bucked that trend in a big way by debuting what might be the most consequential part of its XPS brand revival. After bringing out some frankly gorgeous 14 and 16-inch XPS laptops earlier this year, it's now showing off a more final XPS 13, which crucially comes in way more affordably.

In the US, which is the only place for which we have some confirmed pricing right now, the laptop will start at $699.99, with a student discount reportedly bringing it down to $599.99 when it launches in July, making it only a little bit pricier than the MacBook Neo. While we don't actually yet have sales figures to back things up, most analysts are confident that the Neo is a huge change for Apple, and it's clear that the rest of the industry is moving in the same direction.

While the XPS branding has been around for ages, it's been a very long time since a new XPS could be picked up this affordably, and it's very impressive to note that the laptop still looks pretty gorgeous and is the lightest XPS ever made at just 1kg. It's around 12.7mm thin, too, so also the thinnest ever.

How is Dell keeping the cost of the laptop down? By going with slightly older silicon – the Intel Series 3 Core 5 320 on the most affordable version, a chip that should still be more than enough for most light users (including the all-important student market). The laptop will come with a 512GB SSD to begin with, and either 8GB, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, depending on configuration, with a 256GB SSD version seemingly to follow.

You'll also be able to step up to Intel's Core Ultra 7 335 for a pretty significant boost in power, although the price hike isn't yet clear and could make that something to hesitate on. Regardless of internal specs, you'll get a 13.4-inch IPS touchscreen display, with a resolution of 2560x1600, and a 30-120Hz variable refresh rate.

The big downside to the laptop's otherwise very sleek design is that it cuts down on ports significantly, with a USB-C port on either edge being the sum total (not even a 3.5mm audio port, even). That's a throwback, but also familiar from the MacBook Neo, so might just be par for the course now.

I adored the XPS 14 this year when I tested it, and while there are plenty of major differences between that super-premium model and the XPS 13, I still can't wait to get hands-on with the new laptop. I might get that chance here at Computex in Taipei, but we'll certainly be raring to test it when it comes to the UK later this year, regardless.

There is now a place that you can go, online, which lets you experience what it was like to use computers in years gone by. The Virtual OS Museum is a live space for you to actually try the OS offerings of old.

Yup, this isn't just a list of old operating systems from machines no longer in use, it's a live experience. That means you can try out these working OS examples as if you were really using them back in the day.

At time of publishing, the Virtual OS Museum is home to over 250 platforms with more than 570 distinct operating systems and, it says, over 1,700 installs.

You can go way back to 1948 and try out Manchester Baby, or try out more modern options.

Currently you can try out early mainframe systems, CTSS, early Unix, Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint, classic MacOS, DOS, OS/2, BeOS, Windows from 1.0 to early Longhorn betas, PalmOS, Newton OS, early Android, and iOS.

Thanks to emulation you can try all these systems and more where you may have never had access or been able to try them before this.

So there is a chance to experience some nostalgia, for those that has these systems in the past. This is also an opportunity for anyone to experience what it was like to use these systems, and to see just how we got to where we are digitally today.

Curated by Andrew Warkentin, the museum is a way to run systems that might otherwise only work with certain emulators, exact versions, or with patched emulators that can take days to build. The museum makes access far more simple and open to all.

While this does make access far easier, it's not run within a browser. That means you will need to download and install this. The full edition is a massive 121GB zipped, which expands to 174GB when unzipped. Or go for the lite version, at 14GB zipped, where images are downloaded as needed.

If you want to give it a try, you can get started at The Virtual OS Museum website for free.

It shouldn't come as a huge surprise to anyone that Qualcomm's big launch at Computex 2026 isn't an ultra-premium one. After a year or so of flaunting the Snapdragon X2 lineup at various trade shows, it's using this one to branch out into potentially more important territory – the lower end of the market.

Its Snapdragon C chip is now public, albeit without a huge number of detailed metrics attached when it comes to its relative potency, but I just handled one of the first laptops that'll hit the market with the chipset on board. Acer's new version of the Aspire Go 15 will have the system-on-chip and should be out in a couple of months' time, with August looking most likely.

Acer isn't quite ready to nail down that release date, though, and it's also not yet made a final price public, which leaves two fairly large question marks open over this laptop's name. Still, Qualcomm has said that the Snapdragon C is targeting the $300 price bracket, so we can make fairly obvious guesses there.

That makes the Aspire Go 15 a direct competitor to Chromebooks of years past, Googlebooks of years future, and lower-end Windows machines in their millions. From that point of view, it looks like it has decent enough options to offer.

You get a 1080p display, 512GB of SSD storage and 8GB of RAM, with that latter spec being key to keeping the laptop's price from ballooning given global inflation. It also has a full-scale keyboard along with a number pad, which might well be useful for some of the students Acer hopes will buy the machine.

I gave that keyboard a quick bit of test typing, much to the concern of Acer's local reps, and it felt solid enough. That concern was because this wasn't a finalised machine, but a supply chain prototype – with apparently non-final materials, too. The laptop is plastic, as we've come to expect from this sort of price.

That means that picking it up, opening it and closing it, and giving it a bit of a squeeze surreptitiously, the Aspire Go 15 didn't feel too great from a durability standpoint. There was flex in the chassis aplenty, and I wouldn't necessarily love to test it with a drop from a few feet onto hard flooring.

Still, the likely price really does excuse that to a huge extent, and the real test of the laptop will be something I couldn't get into in my brief session – how Snapdragon C stacks up. If it can run Windows 11 really smoothly, albeit with a power ceiling that almost certainly won't make it a true productivity powerhouse, then it could be a pretty big deal.

Google might be rebranding Chromebooks, but its new Googlebooks will still be restricted by running on a simplified web-based OS, and even with its feature bloat and annoying AI integrations, Windows 11 remains hugely adaptable and compatible. A generation of super-affordable chips that can run it well moving forward could be pretty tidy.

Apple will still be sitting pretty and smug on the £599 MacBook Neo, mind you, with a couple of extra hundreds of your local currency to account for its vastly superior build quality and design choices. I suspect Qualcomm won't mind that vibe one bit, though, if it can shift a serious number of laptops £300 and under. From this first look at the Aspire Go 15, Acer might just give it a helping hand there.

Samsung has announced that it has developed the first monitor combining 4K resolution with a 360Hz native refresh rate. The new 31.5-inch OLED monitor will be shown off at Computex 2026.

Samsung is claiming a world's first with its new QD-OLED screen, as previous monitors featuring a 360Hz refresh rate have required a drop in the resolution to 1440p or 1080p, losing some of that essential detail.

Samsung says that optimisation of the panel circuitry and driving system means that this OLED screen can deliver both for the first time, meaning it will be able to produce incredibly smooth and detailed fast-moving graphics better than ever before.

The options for refresh rates don't stop there, because users can drop the resolution to 1080p to benefit from 680Hz, which Samsung says is ideal for competitive first-person shooter gaming.

Beyond the appeal for smooth and detailed graphics, the Samsung monitor doubles-down on picture quality, with support for Vesa's DisplayHDR True Black 600 standard, and higher brightness than existing OLED monitors. That should boost colour performance, give rich contrast and mean that blacks are really well handled.

The panel itself uses a V-stripe pixel structure where red, green and blue sub-pixels are aligned in vertical stripes, allowing sharper edges to text, which boosts readability and clarity.

Samsung has a strong reputation in this category, producing some of the best monitors, especially in its Odyssey family, designed specifically for gamers. Currently, Samsung's Odyssey G7 monitor offers 4K resolution, but to get 360Hz you have to drop it to 1920 x 1080 pixels.

Samsung's new monitor doesn't appear to have a name – it's just the world's first 4K 360Hz QD-OLED monitor – as it's exhibited by Samsung Display rather than the consumer division. That's likely to change though, once Samsung Electronics offers it for sale, probably in the Odyssey range.

It's also unlikely that Samsung will keep this panel as an exclusive, so it's likely to appear from other brands that have Samsung as a display supplier, such as Asus, Dell or Gigabyte.

Qualcomm has broken some of its own Computex news a little early this year, revealing the new Snapdragon C processor – one that takes it into new territory by explicitly targeting entry-level, more budget-friendly laptops and devices.

Unlike the Snapdragon X lineup, this chip should end up in laptops that cost far less (certainly less than £500, although we don't have pricing from any brands at the time of writing). It's a super interesting step for Qualcomm to take, but in some ways an obvious one, when even premium brands like Apple have made it clear recently that it wants to make more affordable devices.

The MacBook Neo, after all, is one of the most sensational laptop launches in ages, bringing Apple's design excellence to a far more approachable price for the first time in ages. Now, Qualcomm will hope that it can become an even more ferocious rival in silicon terms.

We know that Acer has a laptop with the Snapdragon C ready to go – the Aspire Go 15, and it's one of a few brands that Qualcomm has confirmed it's working with. That said, it's also keeping its cards close to its chest on both pricing and a release window, so we're still guesstimating on that front.

Given that Qualcomm was already in the process of building out more levels to the Snapdragon X portfolio, though, with some X2 Plus laptops coming in well under £1000 in theory, so it makes sense that Qualcomm says the chip will target "$300 and up" in pricing terms.

In a briefing call earlier this week, Qualcomm spokespeople were guarded but did confirm that the chipset could theoretically work with future Googlebooks, meaning that it could dovetail with Google's big new strategy direction in laptop, so it's really quite a big time in budget laptops.

I'll be in Taipei for Computex next week and expect to learn a lot more about Snapdragon C and its capabilities – including more technical details about its performance ceiling. We know that it has an NPU for AI work, but how powerful that ends up being is hard to gauge.

All of this is great news for you, if you're in the market for a new laptop and don't want to spend much. The lower end of the laptop world is getting far more potent and interesting, which should drive more competition and innovation to come.

LG has taken its competitive gaming monitor offering to a new level with its latest creation that promises to offer a blistering fast refresh rate.

According to the Korean company, this is the "world's first Full HD gaming monitor with a native 1,000Hz refresh rate". That should mean this offers the fastest possible delivery of visuals to ensure gamers can respond quickest – ideal for competitive gaming.

The LG UltraGear 25G590B is a 24.5-inch monitor with Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 resolution that sits in a compact design and is optimized for high-level gaming.

This is specifically designed and built to work with FPS games, with the ultra-fast visual updates needed for enhanced smoothness and motion clarity, that lead to faster reaction times.

The key here is that this is a native 1,000Hz monitor. Other options may have required you to adjust screen size or resolution settings to hit that level of speed. This monitor comes with that level of speed, and FHD resolution, as standard.

LG has also enhanced this with its own software smarts including Motion Blur Reduction Pro. This should make fast moving objects sharper and more easy to track.

The IPS screen can deliver rich colours, while it's covered in a low-reflection film, to ensure there is minimal glare for the best possible visibility and immersion.

AI Scene Optimization is another feature which allows the monitor to adapt output based on the scene being displayed, to get you the best depth and realism. While the AI Sound ensures spatial audio is offered with super clear in-game communications.

The monitor emblem itself also features lighting, allowing you to customise this for ambient illumination.

When is the LG UltraGear 1000Hz monitor released?

LG says the UltraGear 25G590B will become available to buy in the second half of 2026. It says this will be available in "select markets" with availability on a wider scale rolling out later in the year.

Usually LG launches in Korea the US and Europe first, so they are likely to be the first places to get access to the blistering refresh rates of this new class of LG gaming monitor.

We’re less than a month away from Apple’s developer conference, WWDC, where the company is expected to announce its future software releases for its iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch models and MacBooks.

Following a name change last year, the upcoming software builds are likely to be called iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, and macOS 27, and they will arrive on all the latest devices announced this year, along with those still to come. The folding iPhone Ultra, anyone?

Many older devices will also be treated to the software updates. That's usually at least those launched in the last five years, but as is typically the case, a few older devices will drop off the support list. And for Mac, we already know a couple of those models.

Which Macs won't support macOS 27?

As noted by 9to5Mac, Apple confirmed at WWDC25 that macOS 26 Tahoe would be the last software build to support Intel-powered Macs. The new macOS 27 software will therefore be the first to be exclusive to Macs powered by Apple’s silicon.

That means if you are still holding onto a Mac that doesn’t have one of Apple’s M chips under its hood, you won’t be able to download the new software when it is released.

There are currently four Macs that run macOS 26 Tahoe that are on the chopping block, based on the 9to5Mac report: MacBook Pro (16‑inch, 2019), MacBook Pro (13‑inch, 2020, four Thunderbolt 3 ports), iMac (2020), Mac Pro (2019).

All other Macs are expected to be supported by the new software, though we won’t know for sure until Apple unveils macOS 27 and the system requirements for that software at WWDC26.

There are also rumours that Apple will drop support for a few iPhone models with iOS 27. The iPhone models rumoured to lose support are the iPhone 11 Pro Max, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 and iPhone SE (2nd generation).

However, this isn’t confirmed as yet – Apple hasn’t actually mentioned anything about older iPhones and upcoming software to date.

For Intel Macs though, it’s the end of the road when it comes to new software features. Maybe it's time to upgrade?

Google has just announced Googlebook, designed as a new category of premium laptops built on the intelligence that Gemini has brought to Android. But the company has also confirmed that support for Chromebooks remains in place.

Chromebooks have been something of a breakthrough in the affordable segment of the laptop market, great for basic computing tasks and avoiding the expense and complication of a full laptop OS.

That's made them popular with educational institutions, for example, the very same budget-limited places that might be concerned that they've invested in obsolete hardware.

There's no need to worry though: Google has come forward to confirm that ChromeOS will continue to get 10 years of automatic updates, despite the evolution of Googlebook.

For those with a large fleet of Chromebooks, these can still be managed by the Google Admin console.

Finally, Google has also confirmed that it's going to be facilitating the move over to the "new experience" that comes with Googlebook, which integrates Gemini Intelligence to make for a smarter computing experience.

So, while those with an existing Chromebook will continue to enjoy that experience, fully supported, some will move to something newer and smarter.

At the moment it's not clear which models will move to the Googlebook experience, but I don't think it would be too much of a surprise if it includes models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo, the very same brands name-dropped in the Googlebook announcement.

At the Googlebook announcement – part of The Android Show – Google showed off new powers that will come through the OS, including some really clever Gemini-powered skills.

The platform leans on Gemini Intelligence to join the dots, while working to seamlessly integrate Android, allowing instant access to your Android device.

The launch window for Googlebook is later in 2026, when those brands above are expected to release commercial devices, but there are still a few unanswered questions, like what the OS is actually called, and if Google will have its own model, something it has done in the past with Pixelbook, Chromebook Pixel and Pixel C.

What will be next? The Pixel Googlebook?

After months of speculation, Google has confirmed the phase out of Chromebooks in favour of an Android-based laptop platform.

Googlebook will replace its current portable computing solutions and uses a blend of Android, Chrome OS and Gemini to make an all-new, AI-powered MacBook Neo rival.

Unveiled during The Android Show on Tuesday, Googlebook has Gemini and agentic AI built into its heart. As with Chromebook, devices will be built by third-party manufacturers, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo, but they will have to adhere to strict standards.

Every Googlebook, says Google, will be made using "premium craftsmanship and materials" – although they'll come in all shapes and sizes. And there will be a "unique glowbar" on the front of each, with RGB LEDs highlighting the laptop.

As well as its own software and applications, Googlebook will be able to run Android apps from the Play Store, but it's biggest USP is baked-in Gemini Intelligence.

Even the cursor will be AI-powered, becoming a new Magic Pointer. This will enable you to simply wiggle the cursor and it will turn into a Gemini tool that will understand the context of where you move to and click.

That will then give you suggestions of things you might want to do with that specific window or content. Point it at an email, for example, and you might be asked if you want to set up a meeting or action a response. Or point it at two images and it could combine them to make a single picture.

You will also be able to create your own widgets through Gemini prompts, and use agentic AI to create workflows through multiple apps in the one window.

There's a lot still to learn about Googlebook – not least its availability and pricing plans – but it certainly looks like it'll be gunning for Apple's MacBook Neo as a student's next best friend.

We could find out more during Google I/O next Tuesday, 19 May 2026.

Apple’s MacBook Neo launched back in March to rave reviews. It’s the cheapest laptop the company has ever offered, with a starting price of £599 (or £499 if you can take advantage of the education pricing), and it’s superb for the money.

Rather than running on the M-series of processors like the rest of the MacBooks launched in the last five years, the MacBook Neo is powered by leftover A18 Pro chips that previously made for the iPhone 16 Pro.

However, it’s said the leftover processors were kept in storage after they were produced with partially defective cores, meaning they couldn’t be used in the iPhone 16 Pro that required a six-core CPU.

They were fine for the MacBook Neo though – the only issue is, there was only a finite number of them.

Why is there talk of price increases for the MacBook Neo?

Rather than letting them go to waste, it's said the spare chips were repurposed into five-core CPUs and put into the latest MacBook, but now the stock is apparently running out. And that leaves Apple with an intriguing decision.

According to 9to5Mac, analyst Tim Culpan claims Apple has revised its plans after the runaway success of the new device. It now expects to make 10 million MacBook Neos in total – double what was initially ordered.

As a result, this will require a new run of A18 Pro processors to be manufactured, which would consequently be accompanied by a bill from Apple’s chipset manufacturer TSMC.

The cost of the previous run of A18 Pro processors had already been accounted for, being as they were discarded chips left in reserve. The report goes on to say that it's therefore unclear whether the price of the MacBook Neo will increase as a result of more processors having to be manufactured – especially during the global RAM crisis.

We think it's unlikely. It could be that Apple will instead have to accept lower profit margins on the Neo going forward – to keep the buzz about its new laptop continuing apace.

Culpan suggests Apple might actually stop selling the 256GB version of the MacBook Neo though, and only sell the 512GB model in the future, which costs £100 more and offers larger profit margins.

At the moment, it isn't clear, but there have already been rumours of a second-generation MacBook Neo so it might not be a problem for too long.

Satechi has begun selling its latest drive enclosure called the DotDisk as a way to get maximum speed out of the SSD inside, thanks to active cooling.

The drive case supports up to 80Gbps transfer speeds for sustained transfers – something most other enclosures struggle to deliver for anything more than a short burst.

Many current enclosures use breathable materials to try and keep things as cool as possible. Yet you often find a transfer will begin fast and slow down as the drive gets hotter and hotter. This is called thermal throttling and it's exactly what this enclosure is built to fix.

How does the Satechi DotDisk work?

The enclosure works on two levels to ensure the SSD inside stays as cool as possible. Firstly, the precision-milled aluminium cassis helps to dissipate heat while also giving the enclosure durability.

Secondly, it's the active cooling that really sets this apart. The DotDisk uses a thermal pad in conjunction with a micro-fan to actively pull heat away from the drive.

The result is an enclosure that offers consistent speeds with support for up to 80Gbps using USB4 V2 or Thunderbolt 5 connections.

That means this works across Mac and PC options and specifically supports M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs up to 8TB in size. You will, of course, have to buy the drive separately to the enclosure itself.

On the plus side that means you can spend the money on the enclosure itself and then upgrade the drive as and when suits your needs.

The drive features a small LED which works as an indicator light to signal connections status. You also get a 30cm Thunderbolt 5 cable included as well as screwdriver and mountain screws for setup.

How much is the Satechi DotDisk and when can I buy it?

The Satechi DotDisk is available to buy now from the company's own website where it is priced at $199.99, or about £146.

When you review as many gadgets, laptops, headphones and more as I do, you start to notice a pattern when you've been testing something high-quality. Plenty of the time, even a creditable device won't leave me pining away for it once it's gone, since I have my daily drivers that tend to be the best stuff I have access to.

Sometimes, though, when I package a review unit back up to be returned to the brand, I get a pang of regret, and that's how it felt waving goodbye to the Dell XPS 14. This 2026 revision (and revival) of one of Dell's most influential product lines is a superb success in my books, and I underlined that opinion with a five-star review last week.

While it's never a great tragedy to go back to my M3 MacBook Pro, which still performs absolutely as well as I could need it to, I can't help but miss parts of the XPS 14, which stands out as probably the most desirable non-gaming laptop I've tested in the last couple of years.

Sure, something like the Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 has more chops when it comes to plugged-in gaming performance thanks to its discrete graphics card, but aside from that I think the XPS 14 is the laptop I'd most like to own if I was abandoning the life of the Apple ecosystem.

The most crucial thing is probably its refreshed design, which is simply gorgeous and full of high-quality materials. It properly rivals the MacBook Pro in most ways, with a lack of flex or give under your hands, and a really sturdy hinge that can be opened with one hand.

The fact that I tested the upgraded OLED version of its display also meant it was simply brilliant for viewing content, whether that meant streaming a show in the evening or editing some photos for another review. The warm colours and deep blacks of OLED displays are always memorable.

With a Panther Lake chip from Intel at its heart, I was also blown away by the gaming potential of the XPS 14, which can play new games capably if you tune them right (and if they're optimised right). For older titles, it's a genuine option, and I think we're only a few years away from laptops that make separate gaming GPUs look like bad value.

The reality for me is that it would take one heck of a crowbar to pry me away from Apple, since I've got an iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch and MacBook Pro. That's a quartet of devices that work together pretty dreamily in my everyday working life. Still, for those who aren't as bought in, the XPS 14 is simply gorgeous.

It isn't the cheapest option on the market if you want a new laptop, especially in the configuration I tested, but a week after boxing it back up, I'm still thinking about how well-built it is. That's a pretty high compliment, so check out my review if you want to know more about the details of its accomplishments.

Apple has quietly killed off the cheapest version of the Mac mini.

This is the Mac mini with M4 processor and 256GB storage. It brought the entry price for Apple’s brilliant pint-sized personal computer down to £599, but now you’ll have to pay £799 to get on board.

The pricier version does have 512GB storage, which is an upgrade we can recommend to any remotely serious Mac user — SSD storage juggling gets old fast. However, a £200 real-world price bump in this economy? It’s no small affair for buyers on a budget.

The good news is that, at least at the time of writing, some retailers still have the old deal in stock. You can pick up a 256GB £599 Mac mini from Argos, subject to collection-ready stock in your area. Other key UK retailers appear to have pulled this lower-capacity model from sale already.

While Apple hasn’t released a statement on this decision, you don’t have to be a market analyst to have a decent guess at why this has happened.

In case you missed it, the tech industry is going through a major RAM and components cost crisis. And as both the old £599 and current £799 baseline Mac minis have the same 16GB of RAM, it’s likely Apple was feeling too much of a profit margin squeeze on the cheaper version.

One of the core reasons for this whole techy crisis is the rapid building of computer infrastructure for AI services. It’s also thanks to AI that the Mac series’s baseline amount of RAM was raised from 8GB to 16GB in 2024. Artificial intelligence is hungry for the stuff.

This could also be taken as a sign we can expect Apple’s hardware prices to increase in the future, despite the company already charging a small fortune for bumps in RAM and storage capacity. You'll currently pay £200 for an additional 8GB RAM in a Mac mini, another £200 to make the jump from 512GB to 1TB storage.

Tim Cook even warned that increased RAM costs will impact Mac pricing from June onwards, during a recent earnings call. And, well, we’re clearly already seeing that impact in a slightly sneakier form already.

In April, Cook announced he plans to step down from the role of Apple CEO on 1 September, to be replaced by leading Apple hardware geek John Ternus. You’ll have seen plenty of him if you have watched some of Apple’s product launch presentations in recent years.

Apple's MacBook Neo didn't launch long ago and already the rumour mill is churning out stories about the next generation model.

According to supplier sources, Apple is currently in talks around MacBook Neo upgrades, following its great uptake success since launch.

One upgrade that is expected is to the CPU. The current model uses the same A18 Pro chips found in iPhone 16 Pro phones. In fact, it's been suggested by suppliers that it uses the leftover chips from that original production run. So, now that Apple has seen this is a viable new product, it should get its own chips, conceivably.

As such this source is saying we could see an upgraded MacBook Neo, packing in more advanced chips.

So, while Apple managed to reuse the A18 Pro chips as an effectively free way to run the laptop, future models could see more dedicated power offerings. How that affects the price remains to be seen.

The original plan, according to the source, was to use old A19 Pro chips on the next model. But since the Neo has proved to be such a success, the company is looking at other alternatives now.

Anther consideration here is the longer term goals of Apple. The MacBook was previously reserved for high end computing needs, with powerful onboard processing. But in an age of AI and cloud based processing, that is starting to become far less in demand.

This move towards the lighter and more affordable Neo makes sense to extend accessibility, while also transitioning across to more mobile friendly solutions.

Apple looks set to pull in a lot more users to the macOS world. If it hopes to continue that draw, with the next generation of Neo, it's likely it may need to spend a bit more to upgrade components – especially in the face of rising RAM and aluminium costs.

Expect to here more on the new Neo early next year.

The HP OmniBook X Flip is a hybrid laptop aimed at the everyday buyer who wants a bit of everything without paying an absolute fortune.

It has a 360-degree hinge, includes a stylus for sketching and handwriting, has a metal casing, and includes Intel's AI-ready Core-series processors. There's a version of this laptop line with AMD chipsets, too, if you’re that way inclined (of the price is even more persuasive).

A perfect PC pick ’n’ mix? The only serious potential roadblock here is the more affordable HP OmniBook X Flip version reviewed has a fairly low colour saturation screen. While solid in other respects, it's a ways apart from the step-up OLED version of the same laptop. Consider this carefully before buying.

Price & Availability

There are two key versions of the Intel-powered HP OmniBook X Flip you’ll tend to find online.

Our base model costs £1030 (£799 at the time of writing) / $1299. And it features an Intel Ultra 5 processor, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD and an LCD screen.

For £1249 / $1399 you get a bump up to the Ultra 7 processor, 1TB SSD and a more vibrant OLED display.

Want an even better screen? While some of this review’s observations may not apply to this model, the AMD Ryzen 7 version has a gorgeous 3K resolution OLED panel, which may be the pick of the bunch here if you want a top-tier entertainment experience.

Design

The HP OmniBook X Flip is a proper jack of all trades laptop that can fulfil a whole bunch of roles. But the first one you'll clock is that of a fine-looking portable PC.

There's a general air of classic MacBook-style minimalism here, but the distinctive keyboard gives it a thoroughly different aftertaste. Brush your fingers over the keyboard surface and it feels almost smooth, with just the tiniest gaps between the keys, and no contouring.

The entire outer shell is nicely anodised aluminium, for a feel as pleasant as the appearance. And while all that metal leads to unremarkable ultraportable weight of 1.39kg, sometimes that extra-metallic character is worth it.

This is also a style of laptop that doesn’t generally benefit from super-low weight, the hybrid. The HP OmniBook X Flip has a 360-degree hinge, for tablet or tent-style use.

The hinge is decent, although as with many hybrid laptops you may notice a bit more micro-wobble when you type away, with reflections on the glossy screen (which obviously make slight wobble far more apparent).

The relatively unadorned style of the HP OmniBook X Flip will let it slide effortlessly into roles as an exec PC, a family computer or a coffee shop-hopper. And it also has an attractive edge-to-edge glass top display layer.

Display

When you shop for a HP OmniBook X Flip screen, tech is a crucial element you need to take into account. It's available with two screen types, and there's a big gap between them.

I have the lower-end one, so we're working with a "worst-case scenario" at least. This is a 14-inch IPS LCD of 1200p resolution. Pixel density is only fair and the refresh rate is your standard 60Hz, but brightness is entirely respectable, capable of pumping out 443 nits. While not miraculously high, it’s enough for comfort in brighter spaces.

The HP OmniBook X Flip's screen issue is colour. Once you get close to filling the old sRGB standard, my eyes are going to be pretty happy. But this laptop only hits around 62% of it according to the screen tester tool I use, and this means you just don't see anything like the vibrance of today's OLED screens. These come in some pretty cheap laptops today too.

Our laptop also suffers from some noticeable backlight bleed, with greater raised blacks nearby the hinge areas.

Take the step up to the HP OmniBook X Flip with an Ultra 7 processor, rather than this Ultra 5 version, and you get a far punchier OLED screen. This is likely to impact battery life to some extent – more on that later – but is well worth considering for the screen fiends. It’s still "only" a 2K resolution one, though, while the AMD line of this family has a higher-res 3K one.

Both styles are touchscreens, though, and support stylus input. Most seem HP OmniBook X Flip laptops appear to include the stylus, ours just happened to have been left out of the box.

But you can picture the drill: it will be a great tool for a bit of digital artwork, and is an MPP2.0 standard stylus, for those who want to look a little deeper.

Keyboard & Touchpad

If low colour saturation is the first contentious point here, the keyboard style is the second.

I think it looks great, but have to admit it does take a little getting used to. For the first couple of hours of use my fingers were mis-typing way more than usual, as there's just not quite the level of key contouring that lets you bed easily into unfamiliar keyboards.

But now? I'm fine with it. I enjoy the crisp but not-too-light tactile feedback you get on the depress of each keypress. The HP OmniBook X Flip doesn't have a super deep-dish keyboard, but it's a solid one. It feels snappy and responsive, once you've adapted to its ways.

There's a pure white backlight too. It only offers two intensity levels, but you can easily alter the timeout of the light, which is handy.

The HP OmniBook X Flip's touchpad also looks the part, a close match of the aluminium surround plate. The clicker feels nice too, with a pleasant mix of dark substance and bright definition to the clicker.

But it is ultimately a budget pad because the surface is plastic rather than glass, and therefore more prone to a squeaky feel as you drag your finger across it. At this price there's always a decent risk of ending up with a plastic pad. Not the end of the world, but one to consider.

Performance

As I have the lower-end version of the HP OmniBook X Flip, here we get the Intel Core Ultra 5 226 processor with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. This is more than powerful enough for general productivity and family use.

It runs Windows 11 perfectly, and I think plenty of folks won't really notice the different between this and the step-up Ultra 7 256V version – a processor I've used far more often.

There are differences, though. The Ultra 7 is better for hyper-threaded multi-core applications. That's going to make a notable difference in plenty of pro-style apps like video editing suites.

This entry-level HP OmniBook X Flip has a weaker graphics chipset too. The margin is not huge, but it does make a difference when you try to play a game that really stretches the HP's integrated graphics, like Cyberpunk 2077. This PC can only just scrape by, with significantly cut-down settings and resolution.

If you want to play console games, you can do better for the money. And it’s better to think as a PC that excels jumping between situations rather than pro-grade software suites. But it’ll still comfortably out-CPU the MacBook Neo according to some of our testing.

Its runs nice 'n' quiet when you're just doing simple work too.

Battery Life & Features

The HP OmniBook X Flip does not gave the most massive battery going, at 59Wh. But its power scaling efficiency is clearly pretty great because a charge still lasts ages. With very light work you can expect it to truck on for almost 17 hours. But you can easily bring that down closer to the 8-hour mark with less careful use.

And for gaming? You’re looking at about 100 minutes with a taxing title. Typical of a slim and light laptop, it uses a USB-C charging connector to top up the battery.

There are two of these, so you're not left high and dry if you need to charge. One is a super-fast 40Gbps Thunderbolt connector, the other a slower 10Gbps one, but you can use either to charge.

Alongside this pair the HP OmniBook X Flip has two old-style USB-A connectors, a full-size HDMI 2.1 port and a headphone jack. It's a solid selection.

The HP OmniBook X Flip also has good speakers for a competitively priced PC. They have a bit of bass weight to them, and respectable enough volume too.

Its webcam is a surprise too, although largely because it's a 5MP camera rather than a bog-standard Full HD one. More pixels and more detail, but it's still a fairly standard laptop webcam – don't come expecting it to outdo a good phone selfie cam.

HP OmniBook X Flip 14 review: Verdict

The HP OmniBook X Flip family is one of the better hybrid PC ranges of the moment for those who want to spend sensible rather than silly money.

It comes with an important disclaimer, though. There's a gulf between higher and lower spec models, a shift in display tech as well as a bump in storage and power. I'd recommend plumping for the OLED money for a little extra cost.

The HP OmniBook X Flip's lower-end version looks and feels great, though, and has a decent (is slightly contentious) keyboard. You just need to make peace with the screen's limited colour punch before buying – but at current pricing, it makes a great case for itself.

You might not be familiar with the Geekom brand, especially when it comes to laptops, but it's been making significant waves in the Mini PC arena in recent times. I've even used a couple of them in projects to build my own retro games console and Steam Machine.

Now it's turning its hand to Windows 11 notebooks and the Geekom X16 Pro is as confident a debut as it gets.

Available in 14- and 16-inch sizes, it's a direct rival to the likes of the Dell XPS 14 (2026), which we raved about, and other Intel Core Ultra peers. However, like other Geekom products, it is also remarkably affordable for its specs.

So would I recommend the Geekom X16 Pro over more well-known alternatives? Well, guess you'd better read on to find out.

Price and availability

One of the caveats of the Geekom X16 Pro at present is that it's only available in the US. It could be rolled out wider and farther soon – after all, Geekom's Mini PCs are readily available in the UK too – but we don't have specific details on that right now.

There are two variants – one running on an Intel Core Ultra 5-125H CPU and with 1TB of storage, the other running the Intel Core Ultra 9-185H and with 2TB. The former will usually set you back $1,399, while the more powerful model is listed at $1,749.

However, not only are those prices currently discounted to $999 and $1,349 respectively, Geekom is giving T3 readers an extra 12% off right now. That means you can get the i9 version of the X16 Pro for just $1,187, and the i5 for just $879.

You just need to enter the code T3X16PRO at checkout whether you buy it from Amazon or Geekom itself.

Considering similarly spec'ed rivals can set you back over $2,000, that's an attractive offer.

Design

When you first unbox the Geekom X16 Pro you can't help but admire one major thing – its weight. Or lack, thereof.

The laptop is large enough to accommodate a 16:10 16-inch display with a 1080p video call camera built in, yet weighs around 1.27kg (2.8lb). That's almost the same as the 13-inch MacBook Neo, and 28g lighter than a 14-inch MacBook Pro M5.

It is also superthin, measuring just under 7mm at its thinnest point (0.27-inches) and a little over 11mm at its thickest.

The Geekom is therefore easy to chuck it in a backpack and comfortable enough to carry around all day – yet also gives you that extra screen real estate for productivity and gaming.

Of course, you don't get an aluminium casing here – it's all metal, but magnesium alloy to achieve the lighter weight. It's still extremely rugged though, and feels nice and premium in the hand.

Once open, the display is mighty. Those 16-inches are filled with a 2560 x 1600 pixel IPS screen, sporting a 120Hz refresh rate. It's bright (400 nits), crisp and a particular highlight. Its matte coating means it is relatively glare-free for outdoor use, although it's also worth noting that there are no touch capabilities.

As a MacBook Pro user normally, that doesn't bother me. And whenever I test or use a touchscreen laptop, I find myself constantly having to wipe the screen to get rid of fingerprints. That usually results in me ignoring the touch capabilities anyway.

There's a large multitouch pad anyway, plus backlit keys. If buying from outside the US right now, you should note that you'll be getting a US keyboard (and the "@" key is in a different place), but again, I'm mostly used to that.

You also get a fingerprint reader on the power button above the top right of the keyboard, to unlock Windows 11 Pro, which comes preinstalled. And audio is served from under the laptop, via a pair of 2W stereo speakers.

Specifications

Looking at the left-hand side of the Geekom X16 Pro, there are two USB-C ports – one being USB 4.0 and also able to serve as a power port (for a 65W USB-C charger). A HDMI 2.0 port is also available for video out.

On the other edge, you get two USB-A 2.0 ports for accessories, a 3.5mm headphone jack (that can also be used with a mic), and a microSD card slot for memory expansion.

The version I received for review came with an Intel Ultra 9-185H SoC, supported by Intel Arc graphics. This chipset also includes an integrated NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to make certain tasks run smoother by taking the load off the processor – such as AI-intensive functions and Photoshop rendering.

There was also 32GB of LPDDR5x RAM – gold dust in the current climate. This ensured that not day-to-day use cases were achieved fast and fluidly, AAA gaming was possible on the PC (albeit at lower resolutions and/or settings), even using the integrated Arc GPU.

Unfortunately, as some others have pointed out too, there's no possibility of increasing the RAM – it's fully soldered onto the board. But again, during the current RAM crisis, you probably won't want to anyway. And 32GB with possible speeds up to 7500MT/s, you should be fine without.

That's not the same for the M.2 2280 SSD, which can be replaced. The model I tested had 2TB of storage, but the laptop supports up to 4TB.

Also inside the case lies a 77Wh battery, which is charged using an included 65W adapter. However, as I'm based in the UK and the laptop is a US model, I had to provide my own power. Thankfully it charged and operated fine from an alternative 65W brick I have with a three-pin plug.

It's also worth noting that I found the X16 Pro would run for a full day on a single charge with usual everyday tasks, such as browsing the net, processing Photoshop images, replying to emails and writing in Word. Even using Nano Banana 2 to create a few AI pictures and light gaming seemed to be fine.

Of course, play Cyberpunk 2077 on the battery alone and you'll shorten the battery life significantly, but then I'd suggest you'd likely only ever play more intensive games when plugged in anyway. It has a maximum of 35W TDP to utilise.

The final specs to note are for wireless connectivity. You get Wi-Fi 6E on board, with Bluetooth 5.4 for good measure. There's no Ethernet port, so you'll have to add your own via an adapter or dock if you want to wire it up.

Performance

As a heavy Photoshop user and gamer, those were the tasks I set the Geekom X16 Pro primarily – and for its size and weight, I came away impressed.

Although the chipset used is a couple of generations old, it performed great with all the tasks I'd usually perform for my job. Quickly resizing and editing images were simple, while the Wi-Fi 6E modem worked well with my Nest Wifi Pro system to upload them quickly.

There were also no problems operating several windows at once, with no slow down even with Steam, the Xbox app, several Chrome browser pages, and Photoshop all running in the background. And popping them up and down again was speedy.

Gaming performance was perhaps more surprising. The X16 Pro is in no way a gaming laptop, that's just a side hustle. That's a general trait of Geekom products – its Mini PCs are more geared for desktop use when space is at a premium, yet I've managed to eke out some impressive performance from several of them.

The same is true with this laptop. I've managed to get Cyberpunk 2077 running in 1080p and with medium graphics settings (no ray tracing). That's with an average of around 30fps too without frame generation, which is very acceptable. It's up to around 50fps with frame gen on.

Older AAA games, such as Tomb Raider, run even better – 1080p 60fps with only a few settings sacrifices. And Indie hits like Hades II and Hollow Knight: Silksong play beautifully, making much more use of that 120Hz refresh rate.

Basically, you wouldn't buy the Geekom X16 Pro to solely play games on, but it's a great bonus to find it so capable.

There's just one major caveat – fan noise. When working at its hardest, such as during my 3DMark tests (around 3,700 on Time Spy) and playing the more intensive games, the internal cooling fan was aggressively loud. The benefit is that this is a laptop that can actually stay on the lap, but it's not something you'd want to do out and about.

You'll probably want to wear headphones while gaming anyway, as the stereo speakers are fine for watching YouTube and other online content, but they're not really designed for a rounded audio experience. Sure, they support DTS:X Ultra, but the soundstage is not particularly wide – simply pleasant.

Verdict

Fan and thin speakers aside, the Geekom X16 Pro is a highly impressive all-rounder that puts some better-known, pricier rivals to shame. It is big yet light enough to be both your desktop and portable work PC, while also happy to play a game or two.

The keyboard is comfortable to use and full-sized, with a number pad included on the side, and the super-sized touchpad is responsive and precise.

I've been impressed by Geekom's latest Mini PCs recently, and it seems to have pulled a similar trick with its first laptop. The display is great, performance impressive, and you get a whole lot of tech for your buck – especially with the discounts that are currently available.

This is, for sure, an impressive debut – not least during a global RAM and storage crisis.

Let's just hope the manufacturer brings it to the UK in the near future, too.

Also consider

We recently also tested the Dell XPS 14 (2026) which is a similar Intel-powered all-rounder designed with AI functionality in mind.

While the display on that model is smaller, there is a 16-inch version you might want to consider, although it's likely you'll need to at least double your budget in comparison with the Geekom.

And, of course, you can't discount a MacBook Pro (M5). Again, the 16-inch version will set you back considerably more than the laptop tested here, but its performance is simply head and shoulders above.

It all depends on what you're looking for in a laptop and how much you have to spend.

We've long been hearing about a new, even higher-end MacBook Pro coming in the next year. And there's been talk about how it'll sport an OLED display with touchscreen functionality – a first for a MacBook. However, it now looks like it will never happen.

That's not because the next-level MacBook itself won't appear, but it is unlikely to sport the "Pro" name. Sources claim that the all-new, enhanced laptop will be the first in Apple's new Ultra range.

According to MacWorld, Apple is set to extend its Ultra branding across each of its main product lines – including MacBook, iPhone and iPad. Previous reports have also claimed that AirPods could get an Ultra model, too.

The iPhone Ultra is thought to be the final name for the iPhone Fold – Apple's first foldable phone. And although we don't yet know much about an iPad Ultra, it would make sense to keep the flagship lineup branding consistent.

But it's the MacBook Ultra that's arguably the most intriguing for now, not least because MacWorld claims it might miss its expected release window this year.

The OLED touchscreen MacBook has often been touted as a late 2026 model, with numerous industry experts suggesting so. However, MacWorld says that it's more likely to arrive in 2027 instead, largely due to the ongoing RAM crisis.

It's an issue that is affecting new products from all manufacturers, with AI centres gobbling up available RAM like Pac-Man munches on pills, and unless things change fast, we shouldn't expect many major upgrades and innovations this year.

That could well include Apple products. Indeed, it is widely understood that we should only expect the iPhone 18 Pro models to launch alongside the foldable iPhone Ultra in September. The standard iPhone 18 will be pushed back to early 2027 instead.

Still, considering just how pricey the MacBook Ultra is likely to be (even a entry-level MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip is priced at £2,200), at least we'll have extra time to save up our pennies.

Long live XPS, eh? After a slight rebranding debacle in 2025, during which Dell retired all of its laptop sub-brands, it's now seen the light and brought XPS back into the fold – and it's done it in some style. The 2026 refreshes of the XPS lineup are finally here, and I've had the XPS 14 for a couple of weeks to see how it stacks up.

Without spoiling my verdict entirely, what I've experienced has been probably the slickest Windows hardware I've got my hands on in years, and the first proper competitor to the peerless MacBook Pro in terms of a genuine day-to-day recommendation for people. Its price makes that a harder sell, to be fair, but purely in terms of the experience on offer, the XPS 14 (2026) is something special.

Price and Availability

Unveiled at the CES tech show at the turn of the year, you can now order the XPS directly from Dell, in both its 16-inch and 14-inch variants. I've tested the XPS 14, but in its most highly-specced version (featuring a Series 3 Intel Core Ultra X7 358H and a touchscreen). This version costs a whacking £2,198.99 here in the UK (or $2,309.99 in the US).

The lowest-spec version offers a Series 3 Intel Core Ultra 7 355, instead, and comes in at £1,599 or $1,699.99, which is more competitive – but remains a pretty tall order. Still, the redesign underlines that this is a premium laptop, so the proof is in the pudding, as I'll get to below.

Design and Specs

For a long time, the XPS line had stuck to a fairly tried-and-true design language that involved a wedge-like taper for its laptops, but in bringing the brand back from the dead, Dell has also given it a hardware makeover. I can't allege that it's actually copied Apple's homework, but anyone who's handled a recent MacBook will be in familiar territory.

Now, the 2026 version of the XPS 14 is flat with rounded edges, spreading its thickness evenly. It has a slight lip where the top meets the bottom, which you fairly easily grip to open the laptop, and it's 14.62mm thick throughout. That makes it really compact and packable, but it's worth pointing out that it feels super solid in your hands.

The laptop is made from CNC aluminium, and that gives it a really premium feeling that is again familiar from Apple's best work. But part of what I've really loved is how it's finished. It has a dark grey, almost blue finish that looks great in different lights, but the inside surface hosting the keyboard and trackpad is in a slightly contrasting soft finish that pairs so nicely.

Weighing in at 1.36 kg, it's not the lightest laptop in the world, but it has that premium feeling that makes it feel well worth the heft, in my view. The design isn't without some downsides, though. The chief one is that Dell is sticking to a low-on-ports vision that now feels a few years outdated.

One side of the XPS 14 houses a 3.5mm audio jack and a USB-C port, while the other side offers up two more USB-C ports – all three of those USB-C options have Thunderbolt 4, Display Port 2.1 and power delivery, so they're all really flexible. Still, for a high-end professional laptop like this, there's no substitute for the ease of an HDMI port, and plenty of people would welcome an SD card reader, too.

Still, I owned an XPS for years that had such fun design touches as a webcam on the bottom of the screen to ensure that you looked terrible on every video call, so the vast majority of design notes here are positive (including the webcam now being above the screen).

The keyboard is nice and sizeable, with big keys that take some getting used to, but which feel pretty great under your fingers. It's paired with a touchpad that you can almost lose sight of, so subtle are its edges, but it feels good in use and has solid haptic feedback.

That takes us to what's inside the laptop – and it's a bit of a specs list. The cheapest version of the XPS 14 comes with 16GB of RAM, with steps up taking this to 32GB. The cheapest build comes with a non-touch display at 2K resolution, as does the middle option, while only the tested version offers a 2.8K OLED that's touch-enabled.

The lowest-cost version also has a Series 3 Intel Core Ultra 5 325 powering it; an 8-core chip with Intel Graphics and no B390 iGPU. Either of the step-up models has the same 16-core Series 3 Intel Core Ultra X7 358H with the Arc B390 for graphical oomph.

Interestingly, all three versions come with 512GB of SSD space, which is a little cheeky in the more expensive versions' case. There are a host of rivals offering 1TB as standard for this sort of price, and Dell should really be matching that, I'd say.

Performance

I'm now quite a few laptops deep into my experience with Intel's Series 3 chips (otherwise known as Panther Lake) and I've yet to encounter a version that feels underpowered. There are quite a few variants to try, of course, but the Core Ultra Ultra X7 358H that I've been using is super-capable.

It's not quite the absolute top-end chipset, but that's a bit like criticising an Apple M3 Max for not being the M3 Ultra – if you really need that power, you can find a machine that includes it. For most people, though, the X7 358H is plenty beastly enough. It's chewed through image-editing tasks with no hitches, and my normal workload of open Chrome tabs, Slack and WhatsApp windows has it barely breaking a sweat.

This really comes into focus when you put the laptop through its gaming paces. The version I tested includes the B390 iGPU, and it performs so impressively, as I've found on other Panther Lake chips. In Doom: The Dark Ages, I've been able to get benchmark results hovering around 50fps on low settings, with some variance according to whether you target performance or quality using Intel's XeSS upscaler.

Even more impressively, I've been able to get a solid 65fps result from Cyberpunk 2077 on its low preset, which is immensely playable and far prettier than its nomenclature suggests. These are demanding games, so indie titles, older games and those with less photorealistic graphics could well be extremely fluid on this laptop, which is quite a boast.

Like some other Panther Lake machines I've used, the XPS 14 isn't afraid to spin up its fans pretty immediately when you put the chip under a little load, but they're not offensively loud, and that's a worthy price to pay for heat management and therefore performance.

Plus, the version of the laptop I tested had a gorgeous 2.8K OLED display that made actually looking at whatever I was doing a further pleasure. OLED displays are thankfully no longer the rarity they used to be among the best laptops, but they're still a real treat to use, especially when they're this sharp. It can also get up to 120Hz, which makes it extremely smooth, as a bonus.

Battery life can stretch to up to 31 hours according to Dell, although I didn't get anywhere near that number, especially if benchmarking. Still, in regular working use I was able to get through a whole day on battery power without dipping below 20%, which means that I feel confident in the XPS 14 as an all-day machine for light to moderate use.

Impressively, that webcam that I mentioned earlier is a 4K one, which is really rare in laptops that I've tested. It even has HDR (high dynamic range), and that delivers clarity in recordings and video calls that puts some others to shame. It doesn't have a privacy shutter, though, which is a surprising omission.

Verdict

The XPS is back in a big way – and after positive early impressions, it's great to confirm that this 2026 model is a major return to form, too.

The Dell XPS 14 is just about the most desirable non-gaming Windows laptop I've tested in years, and it's the first one that's had me genuinely wondering if I'd rather use it than my MacBook Pro.

It has a gorgeous design featuring a classy new chassis, superb Intel Panther Lake power at its heart, a beautiful OLED display in this premium model, and a keyboard that's pleasant to use.

All that makes it a laptop with basically no rough edges other than an undeniably steep asking price – but for those with generous workplaces or budgets of their own, this feels like a slam dunk from Dell.

Also consider

While I've mentioned the MacBook Pro a couple of times in this review, the MacBook Air remains the smart buy for most people, and given how it undercuts the XPS 14, it's a much more efficient pick if you want a capable laptop and don't mind limited ports. Of course, it means giving up on Windows, but that might be fine for you.

If you want a Windows laptop that's even lighter than the XPS 14, consider Asus' new Zenbook A14 or A16, which is incredibly thin and great to use. It's less premium in terms of build quality, and swaps Intel out for the latest wave of Qualcomm chips, but is no less capable as a work machine for that change.

The new Razer Atlas Pro is what the company claims to be the world's thinnest glass gaming mouse mat. It's certainly the thinnest the company has ever come up with and the first I've seen at this level.

Why does this matter? To put it simply, the thinner the mouse mat, the more comfortable a position for your wrist, which should mean longer term use without worry about any discomfort.

And why glass? As you might expect, the smooth low-friction surface of glass makes for one of the most effortless to use while gaming. That should result in longer term comfort and the most accurate detection of movements for ideal gaming controls.

The Razer Atlas Pro is just 1.9mm from top to bottom – and that includes the rubber base at the bottom that stops any slide.

This is the first time a mousepad has broken the sub-2mm barrier, making it the world's thinnest, says Razer. The glass itself is just 1.1mm thick – vastly thinner than the usual 3mm glass pad.

Crucially, this glass is also 9H rated on the hardness scale. That should mean you don't need to worry about scratches or scrapes as this will be super resistant. And, to be extra safe, there's a protective coating that makes it very easy to wipe clean.

Razer Atlas Pro: pricing and release date

The Razer Atlas Pro is out now and comes in White and Black colour options. This is priced at $129.99 / £97 on Razer. At that price you'll want to be extra careful not to drop this, or start using it as a drinks coaster.

Choosing a new gaming monitor is not a decision you want to rush. You're going to be spending a long time looking at this screen, and it needs to be one that matches your requirements exactly – and that's where this buying guide comes in.

I've reviewed many a gaming monitor down the years, so I know the sort of features to look out for, and what the difference between refresh rate and response time is. And here, I've picked out three excellent models that should definitely be on your radar.

The best gaming monitor for you will depend on your own particular tastes and preferences, but this should give you a good starting point to work from – and at least one of these models is likely to make its way onto your shortlist.

Best compact

Alienware AW2725Q

Alienware has a solid heritage when it comes to gaming monitors – to go with its gaming laptops and desktops – and the Alienware AW2725Q lives up to the reputation that the brand has built up. With a 3,840 x 2,160 (4K) pixel resolution, a 240Hz refresh rate, and a 0.03 millisecond response time, it offers some gorgeous-looking visuals.

As we put it in our Alienware AW2725Q review, this "does plenty to stand out from the pack" and is an "excellent choice" for those who want games to look their best. As well as showing off PC and console games really well, it's also great at everything else you might want to do with a connected computer (including watching movies and shows).

Add in two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4 port, three USB-A ports, one (non-input) USB-C port, and one USB-B upstream port, and you've got plenty of connection options as well. With the 27-inch size of this model – accompanied by some nice stand and back casing styling, by the way – it's our current pick for the best compact gaming monitor.

Best for most people

Samsung Odyssey OLED G8

When we say a product is the "best for most people", we mean it scores highly across all the categories that matter – performance, price, design, connectivity, and everything else. With that in mind, the Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 is a leading contender for the title, as it's proved to be a brilliant gaming monitor and also very good at everything else as well.

Our Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 review will give you the details: this is a monitor that's "one of the best [gaming monitors] out there", with a "superb OLED display" and a "subtly stylish aesthetic". Measuring 32 inches corner to corner, it also hits something of a sweet spot when it comes to giving you lots of screen space without being overly large.

As for the key specs, you get a 3,840 x 2,160 (4K) pixels resolution, a 240Hz refresh rate, and a 0.03 millisecond response time. When it comes to connectivity, there are two HDMI 2.1 ports and one DisplayPort 1.4 port, plus a USB-B port and two USB-A ports which you can use as a hub – adding to the appeal of the Odyssey OLED G8 as a superb all-rounder.

Best curved

LG UltraGear 45GX950

Curved, ultra-wide monitors, of course, take up a lot of space on (and above) your desk, but they also offer the ultimate in immersive experiences. With something like the 45-inch LG UltraGear 45GX950 in front of your eyes, you really are going to be right in the action, whether you're flying through space or shooting your way through a bunker.

Our LG UltraGear 45GX950 review has lots more on this monitor, detailing the 5,120 x 2,160 pixel resolution, the 0.03 millisecond response time, and the maximum 330Hz refresh rate. When it comes to ports around the back of the screen, there are two HDMI 2.1 ports, a single DisplayPort 2.1 port, and a USB-C port with display and power delivery.

In the review, we described the monitor as offering "rock-solid" OLED performance across all titles, with "all the vibrancy and deep colours that you'd expect" from a panel like this. Oh, and the built-in sound is fantastic too. In short, "there's no other curved monitor that can touch this" and "it's genuinely unbelievable – in the best of ways".

Verdict

I've tried my best to pick out something for everyone in this top 3 list, and even with a small selection like this, you can see how many options you've got in the gaming monitor department. Need a relatively compact screen? Try the Alienware AW2725Q. Need a giant screen that wraps around you? Consider the LG UltraGear 45GX950.

I'm happy to recommend all of the monitors you can see above, but if you want an overall pick, then the Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 would be it. The entire Samsung Odyssey OLED series is worth a look if you're a gamer, and you won't be in any way disappointed by the way the Odyssey OLED G8 renders your games on screen.

Although it has been rumoured for a while, Tim Cook's "retirement" announcement took many by surprise – including us. Apple is seemingly entering a new era, embracing affordability like never before, thanks to the MacBook Neo launch, and soon to (finally) thrust the more advanced, AI-powered Siri upon us.

It is collaborating with long term rivals, including Google (for AI) and Amazon (satellite), and speculation mounts that its traditional iPhone launch plans will be torn asunder and staggered. Oh, and there's the small matter of a foldable phone, too.

You would think that Cook would have wanted to see this period of adaptation through – for Apple 2.0 to be his legacy. But maybe now's the perfect time to step down, in fact. Let someone else take the rudder as the boat is so resoundingly rocked.

There's no doubt about it, Apple is changing, refreshing, adapting and it's time to for someone else to bring that to fruition. And that person is John Ternus.

Who is John Ternus?

Ternus will be Apple's new CEO from the start of September – just in time for arguably the biggest shift in the company's mobile phone plans since Steve Jobs launched the original iPhone almost two decades ago.

It is thought that his first task will be to launch the much-rumoured iPhone Fold alongside the iPhone 18 Pro models. And he'll have to explain why there won't be a standard iPhone 18 model this year.

But this should be easy enough for the Apple veteran and engineer – after all, he started at the company during the Jobs era and has spent 25 years in Cupertino. He has also lead its hardware division for the last five.

In fact, you could say he has been ultimately responsible for many of Apple's most notable success stories, including the Apple Watch and AirPods. His department also brought Apple silicon into existence, and that has changed and greatly enhanced MacBooks and iPad for evermore.

"I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple’s mission forward," he said in Apple's statement on Cook's decision.

"Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor. It has been a privilege to help shape the products and experiences that have changed so much of how we interact with the world and with one another. I am filled with optimism about what we can achieve in the years to come."

What can we expect from Apple under Ternus?

It's hard to say what products will appear in the new Ternus reign – some expected devices might still come during the transition. However, as a hardware engineer rather than marketeer, we could see the tech giant move into new product categories.

In the short term, it is likely that the CEO's first public task will to be host this year's iPhone launch – expected to see the debut of the iPhone Fold and the iPhone 18 Pro models. He will also hit the send button for the rollout of iOS 27 and the new Gemini-powered Siri.

We have heard previously that less emphasis will be put on services anyway, and his appointment makes sense in that regard. Apple's subscription platforms won't be going away, but it will be hardware launches that will more than likely take precedence going forward.

Another category that will be interesting for Ternus will be smart glasses. Apple is said to be developing its own glasses to rival the likes of Ray-Ban/Meta and Samsung, and as the new CEO is responsible for launching Apple Vision Pro, it's almost certain that he'll want to follow it up.

There are also changes coming to MacBook, it is claimed, with OLED panels, touchscreen (something Jobs always dismissed), and other intriguing technologies in the pipeline. And we hope that the affordable Neo brand will be attached to other products too – maybe a Mac mini Neo, perhaps?

Certainly, Ternus will have no trouble hosting major Apple events. He has appeared on stage during WWDC presentations and keynotes in the past, and recently introduced new Mac products during the press launch in March.

We should see him introduced formally during WWDC 26, too. It'll be an emotional event for Cook as well. Of that, there'll be no doubt.

Code referring to something called "Pixel Glow" has been revealed in Android 17 beta code, suggesting that the new feature will be coming to future Pixel devices.

Accompanying the details, there's a description that explains more – it "uses subtle light and colour on the back of your device to inform you of important activity when it’s face down."

It's also said that Pixel Glow will illuminate when talking to Gemini, something that is currently indicated by a pattern on the screen.

Pixel Glow, it seems, is a light-based notification system that will use both flashes and colours. It sounds a little like Nothing Phone's Glyph Interface, which also uses flashing lights on the back of its devices, too.

Where does "Pixel Glow" come from?

What's interesting about this leak – discovered by 9to5Google in Android Canary and Beta builds – is that this feature will be available on both phones and laptops.

In the settings page that the source was able to access, it checks whether this is a desktop or not. There are fewer details of exactly how the system will work on a laptop, but there is an icon suggesting it is a very real laptop experience.

That raises a whole lot of questions: integrating coloured lighting into the back of a phone is relatively simple, although there isn't anything obvious on the Pixel 11 renders that have leaked so far.

But, on a laptop that's less obvious. It's not the first time that Google has used coloured lighting on laptops however – the Chromebook Pixel way back in 2013 had that feature, as did the Pixel C.

The pairing of Pixel Glow with laptops suggests that Google has a new model in the works, something that will run Android and feature a light bar on the lid in some form.

As for phones, it seems more of an obvious thing to include, although it has to be said that just because a feature appears in beta software, there's no guarantee it'll definitely appear in a production device soon.

It's no secret that Apple has been working with Google for some time. After all, the Cupertino-based iPhone creator has already let slip that a Google-powered Siri will be out later this year.

Ahead of that, though, now your Mac – whether desktop or one of the best MacBooks – can get a boost from a native Gemini app download, which is available to download on macOS.

It's not via the App Store, though, you'll need to head to gemini.google/mac to obtain your download file.

That's a big step in the Apple-Google relationship, in embedding artificial intelligence (AI) access into your Mac workflow. It seems that, increasingly, you can forget about Apple Intelligence, as the Google arm of the operation increases its presence.

That's no bad thing for users, though, as the Gemini app is an optional download and you remain in control over what you want to feed it – and when. It's always "just a keyboard shortcut away," explains Google, for those who will download the native Gemini app for Mac.

What exactly will Gemini be able to do on your Mac from launch day? It brings the core conversational assistant, of course, but a key feature is permitting Gemini to view your screen – from which it can deliver context-relevant answers to prompts you may have.

Whether that's looking at a series of windows trying to find a pattern, getting a summary of local files, or viewing a complex dataset that you would like assistance with summarising – Gemini can do that, speeding up your workflow.

"Creatives can also quickly generate images with Nano Banana or videos with Veo," says Google. Best results will require a Google AI Ultra plan, though, which comes at a cost, if you plan on rendering a lot of 8-second videos.

Once installed, you can bring up Gemini using the quick shortcut 'Option + Space', meaning you needn't tab between different windows to activate or engage. That'll help with instant use, furthering like likelihood of use.

Whether you're big into AI tools, or just want a little added bonus, Google's integration of Gemini on Mac systems is an unexpected upgrade.

Microsoft has raised prices for its current line-up of Surface devices, citing the increases in memory and component costs. Pressure has been put on the industry because of increased demand for hardware to power data centres for expanding AI services.

That's seen the 12-inch Surface Pro move from the £779 price that it was a few months ago, up to £999, while the 13-inch model moves from £1,029 up to £1,199. These prices reflect similar changes on the US store, first highlighted by Windows Central.

It's expected that other retailers will follow suit, although a quick glance at Amazon sees the Surface Pro (12in) listed from £649.99, so there are still some competitive prices out there for savvy shoppers.

"Due to recent increases in memory and component costs, Surface is updating pricing on Microsoft.com for its current‑generation hardware portfolio," the tech giant told Windows Central in a statement, which anyone keeping up with news in tech will have already assumed.

The RAM crisis has already seen price increases coming from brands like Oppo and OnePlus, while we’re also hearing similar things about Steam Machine, PlayStation 6 and it's expected to run into the future, pushing up prices across the industry.

At the same time, the effect of the price increase is further felt because some of the entry-level models have been dropped, so everything looks more expensive across the board.

These sorts of increases are unlikely to be limited to Microsoft: in some cases, we might see the specs appearing to stall or head backwards as demand outstrips supply. We've already seen Western Digital confirm that its hard drive stock is sold out for 2026, so those looking for a new device could be hit hard in the pocket.

However, there do still seem to be some good deals available from existing stock, but it might not be long before prices start increasing on older devices too.

You really are spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing the best headphones at the moment – especially if you seek a pair of the best wired headphones, specifically.

A whole host of different models are available from experienced audio brands, covering a range of price points and styles, so it can be difficult knowing exactly where to begin your search for a pair – in particular given the significant costs of some.

That's where this expert-curated buying feature comes in, because we've whittled down all the different models to the top 3 picks. You can spend less time shopping on the web and more time enjoying the audio pleasures provided by your new wired purchase.

While wired headphones do have their downsides – tangled cables, for example – cutting the cord means you don't have to worry about latency, dropped connections, while gaining access to often better audio quality.

T3's Top 3

What to look for

If you're doing most of your listening in the comfort of your own home, then you'll perhaps be more comfortable with over-ear headphones compared to the wired and wireless earbuds that tend to suit travellers better. Given the larger size and the bigger audio drivers, you're going to get better audio quality.

If you go for over-ears, you'll need to choose between open-back (which leak audio) and closed-back (which are more concealed) types. We've included both here, so you have the option of either.

Open models typically have a wider soundstage but let in more outside noise, while closed models have a smaller and more intimate soundstage, and less sound leakage. You'll want to consider that as much for your own listening pleasure as for those around you – open-back models out in the open are a no-go, frankly.

Then there's impedance, measured in ohms (Ω). This reflects the amount of power needed to drive them – noting for some high-end models you may need a separate headphone amp to drive them. If you want to be sure you'll be able to listen on something like a smartphone with no issues, look for 32 Ω or below.

There's also audio quality to consider. Many wired headphones makers have audiophile quality in mind, which at the highest end of the scale can only be reliably and losslessly transmitted. While CD quality is 16-bit 24kHz, you'll find some file types – such as FLAC – will deliver 24-bit/96kHz.

The ceiling doesn't end there, though, with some digital-to-analogue converters (DACs) able to render 24-bit/192kHz. You'll need to ensure your file sources and equipment can cater for such high levels, though – and that you've got the quality of hearing to appreciate the benefit.

Be sure to check out the cables and connections you get included with your purchase, too, and ensure they're going to work with whatever devices you're using as your audio sources. If you're going to need an extra cable or adapter, then you'll also have to factor the cost of that.

Do you need wired headphones?

We've already talked about some of the benefits of wired headphones, but they're worth mentioning again. You don't need to mess about with Bluetooth settings or pairing processes, or indeed wait for any batteries to recharge. You just plug in the headphones to your audio source and you're ready to go.

While smartphones and tablets may have largely done away with headphone jacks, many laptops and audio devices definitely haven't, so wired headphones have the benefit of working across a number of different gadgets. You can switch between them quickly and still be assured of the same audio quality – if the amplification source remains the same.

That said, wireless headphones do offer the convenience of going cable-free – your audio isn't going to instantly cut out if you turn your head away too sharply or have to go and get something from the other side of the room – so there are absolutely benefits in going down the wireless route too.

It's also worth mentioning that most over-ear wireless headphones can double up as wired headphones, via a 3.5 mm or USB cable – though this isn't universally true, so make sure to check. That has the potential to give you the best of both worlds, so it's something else to consider when you're weighing up your purchase.

Honorable mentions

While the Sennheiser HD 660S2 headphones were launched quite a while ago now, they still offer superior audio quality, and have now come down to a very reasonable price considering what you get in return. These open-back headphones are comfortable and durable.

If open-back on-ear headphones are what you're after, then the Grado Signature HP100 SE are also worthy of your consideration – though they cost a significant sum, so they're not going to be in everyone's budget. If you can afford them, you'll be rewarded with "uncomplicatedly brilliant" sound, as we put it in our review.

Speaking of older models that still perform, the Audeze Euclid in-ears are wired earbuds that are going to elevate your listening pleasure from the level of the standard wireless earbuds you'll come across on the market today. The sound is poised and refined, and the quality of the engineering is evident in the physical design too.

Another pair of wired earbuds we must mention is the Activo Q1. These IEMs (In-Ear Monitors) are aimed at professional musicians, which says a lot about the sort of premium audio experience you can expect. They're also cheaper than many of the alternatives out there.

How we test the best wired headphones

T3 takes its gadget reviews very seriously indeed, across all product categories, and we put every pair of headphones on our review bench through a rigorous series of tests. Key to our testing is treating each product as if it were our own.

Our expert review team has heard an awful lot of audio through an awful lot of headphones over the years, and we know what sounds good. We've got the first-hand knowledge to be able to compare and contrast different products on the market, and to evaluate how particular ranges of headphones have evolved over time.

When it comes to wired headphones, the quality of the audio is of course paramount, but there's lots more to look out for. Our reviews include details on the connection options, the technical specs and additional features, plus how they feel to wear for extended periods of time.

As with any T3 review, each pair of headphones is awarded an overall score out of 5 stars, which helps justify where a product sits within our rankings. For more details on our methods and our scoring, check out our How We Test page.

Reviewer panel

It was a big day when Apple revealed the MacBook Neo in March. Not just because it was the last of a string of announcements the company had made that week, but because it was the cheapest laptop Apple has ever made.

Sure, it lacks a backlit keyboard, you only get Touch ID on the 512GB model, and there is no MagSafe charging or a charger in the box, but that’s really all there is to complain about. It’s been widely praised for its everyday performance, great build quality and repairability. And that's been further enhanced by Apple's latest development.

How to find the parts to fix your Apple device

As spotted 9to5Mac, MacBook Neo parts have now arrived on Apple’s official Self Service Repair Store.

This store has been around since 2022, offering parts and tools to enable those in eligible regions to fix their own Apple devices. The tools can be bought or rented, and parts are available for everything from the iPhone 17e's back glass and speaker to the logic board of the latest Studio XDR display.

For the MacBook Neo, you’ll now find parts to replace the antenna, bottom case, display, audio board and keyboard, as well as plenty of others should your new, colourful MacBook go wrong.

The Self Service Repair Store also has repair manuals for its products so you can find out how to fix your devices, with step-by-step instructions.

To order a replacement part for an Apple device, head to the Self Service Repair Store and tap on "Start your order". You can then select your Apple product from the drop down menu, or type in your serial number if you know it.

Once you have found the part you need, you’ll get a cost for the part and shipping information. Then it's a case of doing it yourself. Nice.

Asus has gone big with the 2026 refresh of its Zenbooks, not least by being the first to market with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chipset, basically the most powerful consumer chip Qualcomm offers right now. It's a beast of a laptop under the hood, then, but a lightweight one despite that.

I've had the Zenbook A16 (2026) for a couple of weeks now, and it's impressed me in a fair few ways as I've tested it, albeit with a couple of caveats that are worth exploring. So, how does it stack up against the (Intel-shaped) competition in an increasingly competitive laptop scene? Keep reading to find out.

Price and availability

As mentioned, Asus has got to the market quicker than any other brand when it comes to shipping the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, but that doesn't mean it's free of challenges. The big one is in terms of pricing; the version of the Zenbook A16 that I tested comes in at £2,099.99 in the UK, which is far from small change.

It can be ordered now, having been up for pre-order for a little while, and should ship fairly quickly, although at the time of writing I don't have regional pricing from Asus – so you might want to pump the brakes and check in on what sort of price you're seeing in your region.

Design and specs

The Zenbook A16 is actually something quite new for Asus – it's been making the A14 for a little while, but scaling things up from 14- to 16-inches is a new approach. Of course, it's not news that some people want a bigger laptop display to work with, but it's still interesting that this is where the company is making new strides this year.

That said, this is one of those bigger siblings that really does look an awful lot like its smaller equivalent. The A14 and A16 have incredibly similar designs, but the A16 is just that bit bigger. The most impressive headline numbers here are in its weight and thinness.

The 2026 A16 weighs just 1.2kg, which is extremely impressive for a laptop of this size, and that makes it really, really portable. For context, the recently-launched MacBook Neo is actually slightly heavier, despite being a 13-inch laptop that's got a way smaller display.

A big part of this weight-shaving comes down to the laptop chassis, which is made from what Asus calls Ceraluminum, and it's been used in a fair few of its machines by now. It's a fused version of both ceramic and aluminium that, in all honesty, feels more like soft-touch plastic than either of those materials.

It does have benefits in terms of scratch-resistance and durability, which is not to be ignored, but I can't help but feel like when it's kitted out with this kind of spec-sheet, it does let the machine down slightly, as it feels a little cheaper in the hand. It also has more flex than the machined metal that Apple favours, for example.

Still, the thinness of the machine brings us back to positive territory. Asus has stuck with the wedge shape that's brought it praise before, and the A16 is 13.8mm at its thinnest point. That makes it a dream to pack in backpacks and bags without feeling like your back is going to suffer too badly.

When closed, the laptop is nice and attractive, with a quite mature "Asus Zenbook" logo on the back of its display. The bottom has copious venting holes for cooling fans, too.

One edge of the laptop holds a USB-A port and an SD card reader, while the other has an HDMI port, two USB-C ports with power delivery, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. If you're wondering where the speakers are, they're on the bottom of the laptop in a stereo arrangement.

Opening the laptop up, you'll be greeted by that massive 16-inch display, and what a doozy it is. This is a beautiful 120Hz OLED panel, at 3K resolution (2880 x 1920) for genuinely pin-sharp details. It offers high dynamic range (HDR), too, and from a design standpoint, the bezels around it are impressively slim.

Above it, there's a webcam, while below there's another subtle Asus logo. That brings us to the keyboard, which is pretty expansive (although its compact version of the enter key is a small annoyance for me).

The amount of key travel is pretty decent, although I don't think the keyboard will win any prizes. The same goes for the very sizeable trackpad, which is mechanical rather than haptic – and has quite a lot of flex to it.

Then there's the all-star component to consider: the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, a genuine beast of a chipset. That's the reason this laptop features 48GB RAM – it's packaged on the Extreme chip, to improve performance.

The Asus is the only laptop with the X2 Elite Extreme at the time of writing, and while you can spec it with the less powerful (but still mega) X2 Elite, the Extreme version is what the hype's all about.

This means there's no discrete GPU – the Qualcomm chip has an Adreno X2-90 integrated – and positions the laptop as one for enthusiasts or creators. Most people simply will not need either the AI-capable TOPS or the raw processing power that this thing can bring to bear. That makes the A16 a curious one to categorise, but all I can do is test it as I found it.

Performance and battery life

Let's stick with the Snapdragon chip at the heart of this laptop, since it's probably the single most interesting component in the machine. It is, unsurprisingly, an absolute beast.

I tend to leave the benchmarking figures to others on our sister sites, but I've been using the A16 for work tasks for the last two weeks, and nothing I've thrown its way has even remotely made it pause.

I've had dozens of windows open, including more than one with photo-editing tools waiting to be returned to, and multiple 4K YouTube videos at the same time – all of this hasn't made for any lag whatsoever, either when switching programs or using individual ones.

Frankly, much like Apple's Ultra versions of its own silicon, there's really no reason for most people to need the X2 Elite Extreme – it's overkill, in every sense of the word. If you do have a heavy creative workflow, though, this looks like a screamer of a chipset for those uses.

It also has impressive gaming performance at a time when Intel has managed to make big strides. I loaded up Cyberpunk 2077, a game that's been used countless times to see just how far integrated graphics can really go, and found it really rather variable.

The game struggled unless set to the "Low" preset at 1080p, at which point it was very playable – averaging 44fps in the benchmark test and therefore offering fairly decent responsiveness.

Swapping to my other benchmarking game, though, I found much worse news: Doom: The Dark Ages won't even launch as it stands, underlining the fact that Qualcomm's drivers and partnerships are far from universal, and you won't always know if a game will run until you find out it won't.

That's not great at this price, especially given it's a problem Intel's equivalent Lunar Lake chips simply don't have. Qualcomm's claims (like roughly 45fps from Kingdom Come: Deliverance II on Medium settings) are impressive, but they're also not exhaustive.

Still, don't get it twisted – with the majority of games in theory compatible right out of the gate, there's great gaming to be had here. Any asterisk at all is a little sub-optimal for a flagship chip, is all.

Battery life is, however, pretty exemplary from my testing. It has superb standby performance compared to some laptops I've tested, able to sit for a few days without any use and drop only a few percentage points. Don't underestimate how useful that is if you want a laptop that won't get used for hours every day!

The 70Wh battery felt like more than enough for all-day usage in my testing, in short, and got through a workday capably, provided I wasn't doing the above gaming testing throughout. Asus says you can get roughly 21 hours on a charge, and while that probably means with a light load, it still lines up broadly with what I found.

The display, meanwhile, was a star – and that's something I don't want to take for granted. I've used Asus' laptops before, and when they have a Lumina OLED, I tend to be impressed, and that's no different here. Just like on its dedicated gaming machines, this display is just so vibrant and impressively bright, but with the deep blacks that OLED tech unlocks.

While the keyboard isn't best-in-class, nor is the trackpad, this all adds up really nicely in terms of how the Zenbook A16 is to actually use. I found it a bit of a sleeping giant – a laptop with a beastly chip for when I needed it, but also a super straightforward Windows machine when I was doing more typical tasks.

Verdict

In the Zenbook A16, Asus has managed to make what I feel confident in labelling the least cumbersome 16-inch laptop I've ever personally tested – and one of the first that didn't feel inconvenient compared to a 14-inch alternative. That's a bigger testimonial than it sounds, but it was only slightly let down by the Ceraluminum finish that I can't quite vouch for.

Pricing is also an impossible-to-ignore factor, and it might mean that the showstopping Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chipset isn't a smart choice for the vast majority of people – it does bring hugely impressive performance (but spotty gaming coverage).

That makes what feels like a mainstream contender more niche in reality, but some of the step-down versions (and the A14, of course) are likely to be more unqualified winners. As it stands, Asus' 16-inch Zenbook is a sleek beauty – so if you're after Windows laptop in such a size, then the A16 is a surefire high-end option.

Also consider

As I've mentioned a few times in this review already, I think that for the vast majority of users, the new Zenbook A14 from Asus is probably a more sensible choice than the A16. It's super lightweight, cheaper, smaller and more convenient, but can still pack in the standard Snapdragon X2 Elite for oodles of power.

Alternatively, there's the ever-present spectre of the MacBook Air to consider. The latest M5 variant remains an absolute banger, and it'll last for years given how well Apple's chips are ageing. It obviously has gaming limitations of its own, but for a lifestyle laptop, it's hard to beat.

The new Razer Blade (2026) has been unveiled and it remains the company's thinnest gaming laptops despite packing in utterly ridiculous amounts of power.

While the device already comes with the powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 386H, that can be clocked to 4.9GHz, it's also sporting some serious RAM to back that up.

You can spec this out with up to 64GB of the latest LPDDR5X-9600Mhz RAM covering most gaming, video editing and AI-tool related needs.

And this wouldn't be complete without a serious GPU to make the most of all these specs. As such you get an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 which is running Blackwell architecture.

The laptop also supports Razer's own HyperBoost which, with a connected Cooling Pad, can help push the laptop to maximum performance capabilities.

Despite being just 14.9mm thick and weighing in at 2.14kg thanks to that T6-grade aluminium unibody, this manages to offer a 33% CPU performance increase over last year's model.

The 16-inch display does all of that power justice as it packs a QHD+ 240Hz OLED with VESA DisplayHDR and TrueBlack 1000 certification, plus NVIDIA G-SYNC support.

Everything should be able to chug along even when unplugged thanks to a battery efficiency improvement that gets up to 15 hours of video playback use.

Connectivity is also excellent with Thunderbolt 5 for 120Gbps file transfers, Bluetooth 6.0, WiFi 7 and a further three USE 3.2 ports, a Thunderbolt 4, full-sized HDMI 2.1 port plus a UHS-II SD Card Reader.

Audio is worth a mention too as this uses THX Spatial Audio+ to offer 7.1.4 Surround Sound when using 3.5mm connected headphones.

Razer Blade 16: Pricing and release date

The Razer Blade 16 with a GPU of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 (16GB VRAM) and RAM of 32 GB LPDDR5X-9600 MHz is out to buy now.

Pricing is £3,099.99 / €3599.99 / US$3,499.99 (approx. AU$6,000).