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SanDisk has quietly retired the familiar WD_BLACK and WD Blue NVMe SSD badges and resurrected an old name — Optimus — as the new umbrella for its client SSD lineup, and with that change it introduced a compact, high-performance M.2 2230 drive built specifically for handheld gaming: the SanDisk Optimus GX 7100M. Background SanDisk’s decision to rebrand comes at an inflection point for both the company and the broader SSD market. After completing its separation from Western Digital in early...

AMD’s ROCm stack has quietly but substantially tightened its grip as a viable open-source alternative to NVIDIA’s CUDA, delivering a run of platform and developer-facing improvements that matter to cloud operators, AI researchers, and Windows users eager to run GPU-accelerated workloads outside the CUDA ecosystem. Background / Overview ROCm (Radeon Open Compute) has been AMD’s strategic answer to CUDA: an open-source software stack that spans drivers, runtime libraries, and developer tooling...

Samsung’s new 130-inch Micro RGB TV arrives at CES 2026 as a statement piece — not just in size but in ambition: a gallery‑style, AI‑driven display that redefines how the company talks about color, sound and what a living‑room screen should feel like. Background Samsung unveiled the R95H 130‑inch Micro RGB TV at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 in Las Vegas, positioning it as the company’s largest Micro RGB display to date and a flagship for a larger 2026 Micro RGB lineup. The...

Google’s AI pivot is no longer an abstract strategic exercise — it’s a live commercial problem that could hollow out the very ad economics that financed the company’s growth for two decades, even as Microsoft doubles down on Azure and the data-center ecosystem that will host the next wave of AI. Background The debate that has surfaced in financial media and investment circles is straightforward and existential: will generative AI’s ability to answer questions directly reduce the...

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus is a deliberate, mid-market strike aimed at mainstreaming on‑device AI in Windows 11 Copilot+ laptops by combining a beefed‑up Hexagon NPU with an efficiency‑tuned 3rd‑generation Oryon CPU and modern connectivity—promises that, if realized in shipping hardware, will broaden Copilot+ availability while reshaping buyer priorities around local AI throughput, sustained performance, and battery life. Background Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Plus at CES 2026 as...

Qualcomm’s move to broaden its Snapdragon X2 family with the new Snapdragon X2 Plus marks a deliberate push to put meaningful on‑device AI into mainstream Windows laptops, promising high neural processing performance and improved per‑watt CPU gains while aiming to hit price points below premium Ultrabooks. The launch—announced at CES—positions the X2 Plus as a scaled, cost‑conscious sibling to the company’s X2 Elite silicon: it keeps the same class of Hexagon neural engine and Adreno...

A day-long blackout in the Iberian Peninsula in April 2025 exposed a stark operational reality for modern energy systems: when data is fragmented or delayed, even advanced grids can fail in ways that are hard to predict and hard to investigate afterward. The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO‑E) and subsequent reporting identified cascading overvoltages and a lack of complete, high‑quality telemetry as core issues that complicated both the response and...

Windows can survive a lot of mistreatment, but many otherwise well‑meaning maintenance moves quietly chip away at the health and recoverability of an installation — sometimes until the system won’t boot or requires a full reinstall. The MakeUseOf piece that spawned this discussion lists five everyday habits that commonly degrade Windows installations: careless registry edits, over‑tweaking privacy/telemetry controls, deleting system files (including recovery partitions), unsafe driver...

Microsoft’s latest push to keep Windows users in the Microsoft ecosystem has taken a new, highly visible turn: experimental in‑browser nudges and a high‑profile Windows 11 ad have combined to produce headlines claiming Microsoft “stops Chrome downloads,” while an embarrassing production oversight in the ad — a pinned Google Chrome icon on the taskbar — has become the internet’s favorite punchline. The reality is more nuanced, and the technical, privacy, and regulatory implications deserve...

Qualcomm’s announcement of the Snapdragon X2 Plus at CES 2026 reshapes the mid‑tier of the Windows 11 Copilot+ PC market: it pairs a third‑generation Oryon CPU with an 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, Wi‑Fi 7 connectivity and optional 5G, promising faster single‑core performance, materially lower power consumption, and more capable on‑device AI than the previous Snapdragon X generation. Background Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Series has been the company’s strategic vehicle for pushing Arm‑based silicon into...

LG’s return to the “Wallpaper” TV is both a design manifesto and a technical gamble: the OLED evo W6 promises a near‑paper‑thin, wall‑hugging OLED panel — marketed as a 9 mm‑class display — that receives high‑bandwidth video and audio wirelessly from a separate Zero Connect Box, while bringing brighter sustained HDR, anti‑reflection engineering, and expanded AI features to the premium TV market. Background LG pioneered the Wallpaper TV idea nearly a decade ago, and the W6 is the latest...

Qualcomm’s latest salvo in the PC silicon wars brings the company’s Snapdragon X2 family downmarket with a purpose-built part for mainstream Windows 11 Copilot+ laptops: the Snapdragon X2 Plus. Announced around CES 2026, the X2 Plus packages the same Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) class used in Qualcomm’s premium X2 Elite chips, while trimming CPU cores and GPU clocks to hit lower price and thermal envelopes — a move designed to put meaningful on‑device AI into laptops that cost...

TCL’s CES-era reveal that the Xbox app will arrive on its new X11L Google TV line later this year marks the clearest signal yet that Google TV is finally being folded into Xbox Game Pass’s living-room playbook — an over‑the‑air update for TCL’s flagship models will convert those sets into console‑free gaming screens and closes a conspicuous gap between Google’s platform and rival TV ecosystems already hosting Microsoft’s streaming app. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming...

LG’s return to the Wallpaper TV concept with the OLED evo W6 is as much a design manifesto as it is a technical statement: a 9 mm-class, wall-hugging OLED that promises true wireless video and audio, dramatically higher brightness, and gaming credentials that push the concept beyond art-piece status into the realm of high-performance living-room hardware. Background The Wallpaper TV was first introduced by LG in 2017 as an audacious experiment in how a television could disappear into a...

A recent hands‑on comparison that installed Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, 10 and 11 on identical Lenovo ThinkPad X220 notebooks found Windows 11 finishing near the bottom in most real‑world responsiveness tests, while Windows 8.1 emerged as the most balanced performer on the vintage hardware used — a striking reminder that modern OS design assumptions have tangible costs on older machines. Background The testbed was six identical Lenovo ThinkPad X220 laptops equipped with an Intel Core i5‑2520M...

Windows 11’s real productivity story isn’t flashy animation or rounded corners — it’s the small, well-integrated tools that quietly shave minutes off everyday workflows and add up to hours saved over weeks. Built‑in features like the Snipping Tool, the modern clipboard, Snap Layouts, Focus Sessions, and Microsoft’s PowerToys transform routine tasks (screenshots, window arrangement, notification control, and quick text capture) from friction points into near‑invisible parts of a productive...

Microsoft hasn’t said “Windows 12” out loud — and yet everything from Copilot’s widening footprint to a new class of Copilot+ PCs points to a single, strategic truth: Windows is being rebuilt into an AI-first platform, and Microsoft is deliberately choosing to evolve the experience inside Windows 11 rather than rush a numbered sequel. Background / Overview Microsoft’s public posture has been consistent: invest in Windows 11, continue annual feature updates, and shepherd customers off Windows...

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus arrived at CES as the company’s strategic mid-tier salvo in a rapidly intensifying arms race for Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs — a chip designed to deliver sizable on-device AI performance, multi-day battery life, and mainstream price accessibility without surrendering the premium features that defined Qualcomm’s earlier X2 Elite launches. Background The Snapdragon X2 Plus is the newest member of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Series, introduced at CES 2026 as a complement...

The long-running feud between John Donovan and Royal Dutch Shell has entered a new, surreal phase: a public “bot war” in which generative AIs — prompted from a partisan archive and then set against one another — openly contradict, correct, and amplify contested claims about events that began in the 1990s. What started as litigation over promotional ideas and allegations of surveillance has become a modern stress test for model grounding, corporate communications, and journalistic...

Zenity’s warning that Microsoft Copilot’s Connected Agents can create an “invisible control plane” — where a privileged or shared agent enables other agents to reuse tools and knowledge without clear logs, attribution, or native visibility — has pushed a fresh, urgent wrinkle into the enterprise AI security conversation: agent-to-agent connectivity is no longer an abstract capability, it is a new attack surface that organizations must govern, observe, and defend in real time. Background /...