Asus’ new featherweight laptop is aiming to be the latest Windows rival to the Apple MacBook Air. The Asus Zenbook A14 is a new thin and light productivity machine announced at CES 2025 sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor for a claimed battery life of up to 32 hours and a weight of just 2.18 pounds — just over half a pound lighter than the current M3 MacBook Air. The A14’s ultralight magnesium alloy chassis is decked out in Asus’ “Ceraluminum” ceramic coating to keep its weight down and give the laptop a matte, stone-like finish.

Asus is undercutting Apple’s M3 Air in price as well as weight. The Zenbook A14 with a new base-model eight-core Snapdragon X will start at $1,099.99 in gray when it launches in mid-January with 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and a 14-inch OLED display capable of 1920 x 1200 resolution running at 60Hz with 600 nits of peak brightness. Later in March, Asus will launch an even cheaper $899.99 model in beige that’s a little heavier at 2.4 pounds, with a slightly higher-end eight-core Snapdragon X Plus chip but only 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage — exclusively sold at Best Buy.

The A14 has a 70Wh battery, compared to the smaller 52.6Wh cell in the MacBook Air. And it offers a decent selection of ports, with two USB 4 Type-C for charging / data, one USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, a 3.5mm combo headphone / mic jack, and a full-size HDMI 2.1 port. The A14 can connect to up to three external monitors with its lid open, compared to the M3 MacBook Air’s two monitors while its lid is closed (though, keep in mind, one of those monitors will have to provide power to the Zenbook over USB-C).

It all sounds pretty compelling on paper, but while Windows on Arm proved its competence in 2024 through Snapdragon X’s balance of performance and battery life, there can still be compatibility headaches in some unsupported apps and games. And frankly, while our benchmarks of Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite processors were competitive in some ways with Apple’s M3 MacBook Air, I’m skeptical a new lower-end version can really hang against it — let alone an anticipated M4 model.

I had a very brief moment to get my hands on the Zenbook A14 at an early preview event in December, and I can attest to how surprisingly light Asus’ new laptop is. You can pick it up from a corner with just two or three fingers with ease, but it doesn’t feel flimsy or cheap. The matte finish and sad beige aesthetic may not be to everyone’s liking, and I wager most people might think a MacBook Air’s exposed aluminum feels fancier, but Asus put some of its build quality where it counts. For example, the A14’s hinge can be opened with just one finger, while far too many Windows laptops out there require both hands to pry open their lids.

There have been plenty of claimed “MacBook killers” and past Windows laptops aiming for Apple’s crown as the go-to pick for the average user, but few stack up as the complete packages like those offered by Apple. Maybe pairing a Snapdragon X’s excellent battery life with some nice extras like OLED screens and solid build at affordable-ish prices might bring something special to the table — though we’ll have to see about performance.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

I can confidently say Lenovo’s ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 stole the show for me at CES. I knew it the second I hit a button on the keyboard and saw the concept-turned-real laptop extend its rollable OLED display upward — motors whirring motors and a dumb smile forming on my face.

Compared to the many new laptops, desktops, gadgets, and handhelds Lenovo is announcing at CES, the ThinkBook may be completely ridiculous in a lot of ways — and it’ll start at a whopping $3,499 when it launches sometime in Q1 2025. But damn it, I love its quirkiness and the fact that you can soon buy something so utterly unique for mundane tasks like working on extra-tall spreadsheets.

The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 has a flexible OLED display with small motors built into its hinge to unfurl the screen and roll it back down. It starts out looking like a fairly unassuming 14-inch productivity laptop, albeit with a slightly square-ish aspect ratio and a resolution of 2000 x 1600. But hitting a dedicated key or raising your hand to the webcam activates the motors and makes the display climb to a tall 16.7 inches, with an extended resolution of 2000 x 2350. It took roughly 10 seconds for the ThinkBook’s screen to extend or contract, and while its motors aren’t egregiously loud, they’re noisy enough to draw attention in a quiet environment. That, and the fact that your laptop just freakin’ grew out of nowhere.

The extra screen real estate in 16.7-inch mode is enough to fit two 16 x 9 windows stacked on top of each other. Going back to 14-inch mode tucks the bottom portion of the screen into the laptop chassis, where it hides below the keyboard deck and displays black pixels to not waste power. Reps from Lenovo, including Samuel Shang of Lenovo research, who worked on the ThinkBook’s development team, said the nested location of the screen and small size of the motors in the hinge allowed for ample battery capacity — which seems to track since the laptop’s 66Wh battery is pretty typical for a laptop of this size. Shang and Lenovo product marketing’s Drupad Kandhi said the ThinkBook was thoroughly tested and rated for at least 30,000 closings and openings of its lid hinge and 20,000 rolls both up and down.

Watching the screen go up and down just didn’t get old in our short time testing it. By default, the ThinkBook plays a bright and colorful abstract animation of a flexible material coiling or unrolling while the screen rolls down or up. It’s a cute graphic that’s reminiscent of rolling homemade dough through a pasta machine, but you can thankfully turn it off and watch the display grow or shrink with your current window or app onscreen. I suspect part of the animation’s purpose is to distract from the little curls visible in the display, which are more obvious when it’s moving and there’s something darker onscreen like The Verge’s homepage.

The flexible OLED in the ThinkBook Plus is one of Samsung Display’s IT foldable panels. Like the creases in folding phones, the ThinkBook’s screen has plenty of smaller creases along its lower half that you don’t really notice when using it — but look closely or stare at the screen from steeper angles, and they’re clear as day. You can see them in some of my photos, but I must concede that my bounced flash really illuminates the creases and makes them look more pronounced than they are with the naked eye.

I went into this demo expecting anxious company reps wanting me to treat their precious creation like a fragile heirloom and feared that just looking at this thing the wrong way would break it. But much to the contrary, they seemed surprisingly confident in letting me tinker with it. I jammed the ThinkBook into a backpack just like I would any laptop I’m commuting with, and I also closed the lid while the display was still extended — putting it in a ridiculous-looking overbite position — and all was fine.

As for the ThinkBook’s conventional laptop stuff, it’s a fairly table stakes thin and light productivity machine — but not one with a bounty of ports. It can be configured with up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 processor, 1TB SSD, and 32GB of DDR5x dual-channel RAM. It’s got just two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack, so be prepared to live the dongle life if you need USB-A or a card reader.

One thing you may not need on your hub is an HDMI-out, as Lenovo told us the ThinkBook is not really designed to be used with external monitors. That’s because Lenovo had to program its extra screen real estate as a second monitor in Windows since Microsoft doesn’t have baked-in support for a setup like this. Even in our short demo, it didn’t take long to see some concerning and potentially deal-breaking software stuff. For example, you can’t snap windows and apps to the bottom portion of the extended screen. Instead, you have to open Lenovo’s built-in software and pin it to that window down there. This could be streamlined if Microsoft adds support for rollable displays in a future Windows update, but I wouldn’t bank on that happening soon.

While I’m super excited to see the ThinkBook Plus actually become a real thing people can buy, I fear the software and OS limitations may hold back its fun potential and make it too fussy. I’m very curious to test it over the long term to see what living the rollable life is like.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Asus has a new version of its Surface Pro-like gaming tablet for CES, and it’s making some sizable changes both inside and out. The Asus ROG Flow Z13 for 2025 is once again a slightly chunky, almost-half-inch-thick, 13-inch tablet with a built-in kickstand, magnetic keyboard cover, a bunch of ports, and a clear window on its rear with RGB lighting to show off its innards.

That fun glass window is now larger, with a direct view of the motherboard, but the biggest change for the ROG Flow Z13 is its switch to integrated graphics. That may seem like a step backward for a gaming-focused tablet since gamers covet dedicated GPUs, but Asus is outfitting it with AMD’s powerful new “Strix Halo” processor. The ROG Flow Z13 can be configured with the Ryzen AI Max 390 for $1,999.99 or the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 for $2,199.99. The top-end model with the Max Plus 395 has 16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores, while the base-model Ryzen AI Max Plus 390 (curse these names) has 12 CPU cores and 32 graphics cores. The Z13 utilizes a redesigned stainless steel vapor chamber for cooling these graphics-heavy chips, which are capable of 120W TDP.

All that power in the Z13 is responsible for driving a 13-inch, 2560 x 1600 touchscreen display with a speedy 180Hz refresh rate (up from 165Hz on the last-gen model), which you don’t often find in laptops and tablets of this size. For ports, it’s got two USB 4, one USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, HDMI 2.1, a microSD card slot capable of UHS-II speeds, and a 3.5mm combination headphone / mic jack. It’s also got a 5-megapixel front-facing webcam and 13-megapixel rear-facing camera — so you can flash your RGB as you awkwardly take tablet photos in public. It also has Wi-Fi 7.

The Z13 supports USB-C Power Delivery for charging, but that won’t be powerful enough to allow its full performance under load. Instead, it comes with a 200W power adapter that uses Asus’ proprietary and reversible slim power jack — like on its recent laptops.

Other quality-of-life improvements for the Z13 include a new detachable keyboard with larger keycaps and a more generously sized touchpad. And on its right side, beside the power button and volume rocker, is a new “ScreenXpert” button that summons a Command-Center-like widget that includes multiple-display window management controls, quick access to operating modes like Turbo mode or Silent mode, and other settings like muting your mic. It’s primarily there to help control things while in tablet mode since the keyboard contains shortcuts for most of these functions.

I got a quick glimpse of the new ROG Flow Z13 at a preview event, and Asus sent me a preproduction model right before CES to get a little bit of hands-on time. It’s what I’m writing this post on right now, and boy do I appreciate the updates to this keyboard cover. The 1.7mm key travel and bigger touchpad go a long way toward getting work done. While the Ryzen 395 chip has the potential to be power-hungry, the battery life on the Z13 shows some promise. Asus is only claiming 10 hours of battery life, and I did manage to get through a full eight-plus-hour workday of Chrome tabs, streaming music (though the speakers seem kind of bad at first listen), and writing across multiple virtual desktops the day before flying to CES — with pretty much no issues.

I definitely prefer a proper laptop to a tablet with a kickstand and keyboard cover, but being able to remove the keyboard deck for a little more flexibility and comfort when it’s time to fire up a game is pretty slick. I tried out a little Helldivers 2 on the Flow Z13, and it performed quite well, especially for a tablet. Set to the Z13’s native 2.5K resolution, in-game render scale on Ultra Quality, and texture details on medium, I saw 60fps or just slightly under, and it looked really nice. If I bumped it down from Ultra Quality to Quality scaling, it jumped up to an even smoother 80fps. This was, of course, while the tablet was plugged in and its fans were blasting on Turbo mode. Diving in again while unplugged dropped the Ultra Quality render scale performance down to the 45 to 50fps range since playing on battery limits you to Performance mode instead of Turbo.

This is preproduction hardware, but so far, it’s pretty impressive for integrated graphics. AMD’s new chip might have something special here for thin and light devices, but since it lacks Thunderbolt 5, that means the Flow Z13 can’t use the full GPU bandwidth of Asus’ new XG Mobile eGPU. (Previous models could use the older XG Mobile via its proprietary connector.) But of course, that would make this somewhat portable PC gaming solution a little less portable, and the new XG Mobile costs about as much as the Flow Z13 itself.

But does a gaming tablet make much sense in 2025 when portable PC gaming is being so adequately served by the Steam Deck and a bunch of other dedicated handhelds? We’ll have to see how a production model of the ROG Flow Z13 fares when it launches sometime in February.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Nvidia’s launch of its new RTX 50-series graphics cards is a big moment for a gaming-focused company like MSI. The PC component maker is refreshing most of its laptop line with new Nvidia GPUs, revised designs, and of course, plenty of AI branding fluff. It’s also offering more CPU options from AMD across its dizzying array of models and configurations. But while there’s a plethora of choices here for gamers, they’re best if you’re partial to jumbo-sized laptops, since many of them are big and heavy 18-inchers.

Here’s the rundown of what MSI is offering for its gaming laptops in 2025, starting from the top. (MSI hasn’t sent us finalized pricing and availability, but we’ll update this post once we have it.)

MSI Titan 18 HX AI

Image: MSI

Toward the top of MSI’s lineup is the new Titan 18 HX AI — the standard one, not the ridiculous Dragon Edition.

MSI’s halo gaming laptop sports an 18-inch Mini LED screen with a resolution of 3840 x 2400 (16:10) and 120Hz refresh. It only comes with an Intel CPU option — specifically, the new Core Ultra 9 275HX — where many other new MSI notebooks now offer AMD alternatives. For the standard-edition Titan’s GPU, you can pick from Nvidia’s new RTX 5080 or flagship 5090. It can be outfitted with up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM and both Gen5 and Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD slots (the Gen5 slot even has extra cooling by way of a dedicated heat pipe for maximum performance).

The laptop weighs in at 7.94 pounds and has a 99.9Wh battery inside it, which is the largest capacity allowed on a plane. For ports, it’s got two Thunderbolt 5 / USB-C, three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, HDMI 2.1, gigabit ethernet, and an SD card slot.

As the Titan is the capital-F flagship of MSI’s lineup, it’s once again got a sky-high starting price of around $5,000.

MSI Raider 18 HX AI

But you’ll notice some similar specs are present in cheaper MSI laptops, like the new Raider 18 HX.

The Raider has always been one of MSI’s most powerful laptops, with some of its showiest RGB lighting. For 2025, the Raider has a similar Mini LED screen, GPU options, RAM, ports, battery, and storage with dedicated SSD cooling as the Titan. It looks a bit like the Titan, too, but without the light-up touchpad and an added RGB strip on its front instead. Unlike the Titan, the Raider offers configurations with either the Intel Ultra 9 275HX or AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D.

MSI Vector A18 HX

Image: MSI

If excessive RGB isn’t your thing, the MSI Vector line (in 18-inch, 17-inch, and 16-inch versions) offers a slightly more subtle gray styling with no colorful lights to speak of outside of its per-key RGB keyboards.

The Vector A18 has an 18-inch 2560 x 1600 (16:10) 240Hz IPS display, the choice of RTX 5070 Ti / 5080 GPUs, AMD CPU configurations, 99.9Wh battery, and a plethora of ports like its pricier counterparts (but with slower Thunderbolt 4 instead of Thunderbolt 5). The Vector 16 HX AI and Vector 17 HX AI models may have slightly smaller screens, but they still support 2560 x 1600 resolution and 240Hz. Each of them has new Intel Arrow Lake CPU options, but the 17-inch has more configurations that go up to the RTX 5090 GPU.

MSI Stealth 18 HX AI

While many of the above laptops are thick and heavy, the Stealth line is one of MSI’s most popular due to its slightly smaller and thinner size for those who don’t want to carry around a cinder block of a notebook.

For 2025, MSI offers the Stealth in 16-inch and 18-inch configurations with GPUs ranging from the RTX 5070 Ti to the 5090. The 18-inch model also offers a 4K 120Hz screen or QHD 240Hz model as well as either an Intel Ultra 9 275HX or AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. The 16-inch Stealth only comes with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 .

MSI Cyborg A17 AI

Image: MSI

But if you want something cheaper and funkier, MSI’s Cyborg is back again with yet another take on its partially seethrough design.

The Cyborg 14 and 15 have designs that look like last year’s models, with their innards only visible on the sides and bottom, but the Cyborg 17 has a new chassis with a smoked translucent top deck, allowing you to look directly into it from above. Unfortunately, it’s also uglier than ever thanks to its weird mix of Venom symbiote-style webbing / tribal tattoo line art / whatever that design is. It has CPU options up to the Intel Core Ultra 7 240H or AMD Ryzen 7 260 and RTX 50-series GPUs.

MSI Crosshair 18 HX AI and MSI Pulse

Lastly, MSI is also updating its economy-class Crosshair and Pulse series gaming laptops, which top out at configurations with just the Nvidia RTX 5070. MSI says the Crosshair will be its cheapest 18-inch laptop.

With the jump to RTX 50-series GPUs, MSI is taking its usual shotgun approach and trying to hit all facets of gamers who prioritize specs. It’s also riding the AI train hard. In addition to adding “AI” to the name of most everything, even its latest Claw handheld, MSI’s laptops will ship with a new chatbot dedicated to controlling your computer. Considering some Windows settings are buried in legacy menu structures that still look like they’re from the XP era, the thought of asking your computer to adjust those settings for you sounds a teeny-tiny bit appealing. But I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, and I fear it won’t work as it should — because, let’s be honest, Windows gonna Windows.

If you didn’t like MSI’s giant spec-heavy laptops before, there’s a good chance its new offerings may not move the needle for you. But if Nvidia’s new GPUs are all they’re cracked up to be, perhaps MSI can impress with raw performance per dollar.

Lots of gaming laptops go for maximum performance with maximum RGB showiness, but nothing goes harder than MSI’s Titan. The company announced its Titan 18 HX laptop at CES 2025. It’s an 18-inch behemoth with an illuminated touchpad, Intel’s Core Arrow Lake processor, and Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series GPU for a starting price of around $5,000.

But is that really outrageous enough?

It’d be much wilder to also release a fully unhinged Titan adorned with dragon designs and runes inspired by Norse mythology. And that’s exactly what MSI is doing with its Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Norse Myth. It has the innards of the standard Titan, complete with a new dedicated heat pipe cooler just for its PCIe Gen5 SSD to maximize transfer speeds, and it adds a massive etching of a hand-drawn dragon head to its lid as well as a 3D-printed dragon coin under glass within the palm rest. Now we’re talking.

We’re still awaiting pricing information, but spec-wise, this thing is roaring. It packs an Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX CPU, Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM, up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM, one slot of Gen5 NVMe M.2 storage, and three extra slots of Gen4 SSD storage.

It has an 18-inch 4K Mini LED screen capable of 3840 x 2400 (16:10) resolution at 120Hz refresh, a six-speaker audio setup (two of which are woofers), Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, Cherry mechanical keyboard switches with per-key RGB illumination, a 99.9Wh battery, and a power adapter capable of delivering 400-freaking-watts.

For I/O, you get two Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports, three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, HDMI 2.1, gigabit ethernet, and a full-size SD card slot. This whole fire-breathing magnesium alloy package weighs in at a hefty 3.6 kg / 7.94 lbs, but it’s somehow not as heavy as Alienware’s boat anchor of a new 18-inch Area-51 laptop.

MSI has done Dragon Edition laptops before, but compared to previous incarnations, the new Titan Dragon Edition looks more fierce and actually less garish — just look at this old thing. And true worshippers of Bahamut or Baal (or take your pick) may be able to get their draconic Titans in an accessory bundle with a matching mouse, keychain, and colorful desk pad when it launches in March.

Image: MSI

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Alienware is bringing back its Area-51 computer line, and its new flagship laptops are much showier than the secretive air base they’re named after. The bombastic, UFO-like Area-51 laptops are paired with a range of top-flight specs featuring Intel Arrow Lake CPUs and next-gen Nvidia GPUs — coming in two sizes: big (16-inch) and bigger (18-inch). They’ll start at a pricey $3,199 when select configurations launch by the end of Q1 2025, with an entry-level $1,999 model and other configs coming later.

Unlike last year’s M16 R2, which trimmed down the protruding butt found on many Alienware laptops, the Area-51 has a full-on dump truck for a rear. And this protrusion, where all its ports are located, even lights up with a soft, supple glow of RGB illumination. The Area-51’s RGB light show extends to per-key keyboard illumination, a light-up trackpad, and lit case fans. The light-up fans are visible through the intake holes on the top deck as well as a seethrough Gorilla Glass panel on the underside, also showing off some of the laptop’s innards.

The Area-51 duo will rely on their RGB lighting for their splashiest pops of color, as both sizes of Alienware laptops come in just one chassis color, called liquid teal. The anodized finish is said to take inspiration from the aurora borealis, looking nearly charcoal black in a dimly lit room until its lid or underside shows a slight shimmer of iridescence when the light catches it.

Housed within that aluminum chassis, the Area-51 sports some high-end specs. It can be outfitted with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, Nvidia’s new 50-series GPUs, up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR5 RAM, and up to 2TB NVMe PCIe Gen5 SSD. Powering all of that in each the 16-inch and 18-inch laptops is a sizable 96Wh battery. Alienware doesn’t list any battery life estimates in the Area-51’s tech specs. We’ve asked how many hours of use people should expect when unplugged and haven’t yet heard back.

The Area-51 duo use a new thermal architecture to keep all this hot hardware cool, and Alienware claims it moves up to 37 percent more airflow while running 15 percent quieter than the older Alienware X16 R2 from 2024. All those specs and improved thermals sound nice on paper, but keep in mind, these new Area-51 models are hefty laptops. Remember that older X16 R2 laptop that Alienware compares them to? The X16 R2 weighs six pounds. At 7.6 pounds, the new 16-inch Area-51 weighs about as much as the average American newborn baby, and the 18-inch is even heavier at nearly 10 pounds.

Tipping the scales like that, the Area-51 laptops don’t feel like just a resurrection of Alienware’s flagship brand name but a throwback to older, basically immobile desktop replacement laptops. That does come with some benefits, like a plethora of rear-mounted ports including HDMI 2.1, 2.5 gigabit ethernet (RJ-45), three USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 5Gbps ports, two Thunderbolt 5 / USB-C ports, and a headphone jack and full-size SD card slot on the side.

The big drawback here is that the displays also feel a little retro, since the laptops use older IPS display tech. Both machines have 2560 x 1600 QHD panels with 3ms response time and up to 300Hz refresh (240Hz on the 16-inch), but there’s no fancy tandem OLED or anything of the sort like Alienware’s parent company Dell put in its upcoming Pro Premium laptop. If you want OLED displays from Alienware, you’ll instead have to check out its gaming monitors — of which, it announced a new 27-inch 4K QD-OLED at CES 2025 as well as some Area-51 and Aurora prebuilt desktops.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

We’re all impatiently awaiting Nintendo’s next console, but in the meantime, it’s been quite the sendoff year for the Switch.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Lux Optics has released a loose product roadmap for its next big iPhone photo app, Halide 3.0 (which it’s calling Halide Mark III). After being more forthright than usual in the development of its Kino video app, which was recently awarded iPhone app of the year for 2024 by Apple, Lux is giving the next version of its popular photo app a touch of the Steam indie dev treatment.

Not only is Lux already hyping key upcoming features in a blog post by cofounder Ben Sandofsky, but it also plans to open up the development process via a Discord server, where users can give feedback once they start trying Halide Mark III.

So far, Lux has detailed three upcoming features for Halide Mark III that subscribers will be able to try early: Color Grades, HDR photos, and an app redesign. Color grades will operate a lot like they do in Kino, with users able to quickly load an aesthetic look / color palette based on Lux’s own creations, film stocks, and imported recipes cooked by other users. In addition to what sounds like Lux’s take on Fujifilm’s film emulations, Halide Mark III will also include the developer’s take on HDR photos — now that iOS 18’s Adaptive HDR feature is making it easier to view HDR images on more platforms.

Not much has been revealed so far about Halide 3.0’s redesigned interface, but Sandofsky said in the blog post that form follows function, and “if Halide’s version of Instant Grade goes as smooth as we think it will, we’ll make grade-picking central to the UI, just like Kino.”

Sandofsky’s blog post also didn’t go into further detail about when Halide Mark III will ship beyond sometime in 2025, and it didn’t say how much Halide Mark III will cost. But the @halideapp account on Threads indicated to a commenter that Mark III will be included for Mark II users, and an upgrade for v1 users.

From basic and affordable to premium and ultra-customizable, these are the best controllers we’ve tested for Xbox. And they work with PCs, too.

Read the full story at The Verge.

The best laptops for you, from ultraportables to gaming machines, MacBooks to Chromebooks.

Read the full story at The Verge.

The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros are still the best laptops for creative professionals. This year they’re a little faster, with better webcams, new anti-glare screen options, and that’s mostly it.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Thanks to Qi2, there are way more great chargers for your MagSafe phone than ever before.

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you mostly play games on PC and you’re in the market for a new monitor, there’s a glut of excellent OLED options with significant discounts for Cyber Monday. Some of the best current models are 32-inch QD-OLED panels with 4K resolution, super-fast 240Hz refresh rate, and the necessary ports to take full advantage of those specs on both PC and consoles (DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1, respectively).

Here’s the rundown on these excellent monitors from MSI, Asus, LG, HP, and Alienware — each around the $900 range and saving you up to $450 on their normal prices.

• Dell’s Alienware AW3225QF is the sole curved option in this list, on sale for $899.99 ($300 off) at Best Buy and Dell. Just like the others here, it supports 4K resolution (3840...

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Sony and other game makers are running all kinds of Black Friday sales right now, allowing you to save on games, consoles, and plenty of accessories. However, one of the better offers still available is on the latest PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, which is on sale at Walmart, Best Buy, and Sony’s PlayStation Direct storefront for an all-time low of $374 ($75 off). It’s also available at Amazon as part of a Fortnite bundle that includes some in-game cosmetics and other freebies.

Alternatively, if you prefer your console to come with its disc drive (instead of having to potentially add one later), you can get a disc-ready PS5 for $424 (regularly $499) at Best Buy, Walmart, PlayStation Direct, and Amazon (in that same Fortnite bundle). A...

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There’s no telling exactly what the new year and new administration in the US will bring. But there are likely big changes afoot in the world of tech, especially if President-elect Donald Trump enacts all the tariffs he threatened on the campaign trail. We don’t have a crystal ball that tells us exactly what may get pricier or by how much, but there are several categories of big-ticket products that are at serious risk of being priced out of reach for many folks.

Trump said on Monday that he’d put “an additional 10 percent tariff above any additional tariffs” on all products coming in from China, after campaigning on the pledge to implement 60 percent tariffs on Chinese imports. A lot of tech products are imported from China, including...

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A laptop is one of the larger tech purchases for most people, and now’s your last chance at some Cyber Monday savings for that big investment. Windows laptops, MacBooks, and even Chromebooks all have their regular cadence of discounts and sales promotions from retailers like Best Buy, but this time of year is often when you can save a few hundred bucks and get a quality machine that should easily last more than a few years.

Yes, the timing can feel slightly awkward because CES is right around the corner in January, and all the big Windows laptop makers debut new generations of products there. But those anticipated models can take another couple of months to actually hit store shelves — and even longer before they see any sizable sales....

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Nintendo recently announced a batch of Black Friday deals, all of which run through November 30th. This includes a steep discount on the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, which drops it to an all-time low of $49.99 ($20 off) at Best Buy, GameStop, and Target. This is one of the more notable Black Friday discounts from Nintendo this year — that is, aside from the current promo on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Nintendo’s latest Switch OLED bundle — namely because the Pro Controller rarely goes on sale, even today.

Although there are many great third-party gamepads available, the Switch Pro Controller remains the best all-around controller for Nintendo’s aging console. It’s much more comfortable to use a full-size controller...

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