Intel's Core Ultra 200S desktop processors—the company's biggest overhaul of its desktop platform since 2021—consume less power and run a lot cooler than the company's 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs. However, early reviewers found that the processors sometimes struggled to match, let alone beat, those older desktop CPUs in some tasks. This was particularly true for games, and people who build their own gaming PCs are a key constituency for these kinds of brand-new high-end chips.

Intel quickly blamed optimization issues for some of the problems, promising performance fixes sometime later in November or December, and the company has outlined the first batch of fixes in a lengthy support document. Of the five identified problems, Intel says it has fixed four; users can get those updates by installing Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.2161 or higher, updating their motherboard's BIOS to the latest version. Non-performance-related blue screens related to Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat software have also been resolved, and users should update to the latest version if they're still having issues.

The performance problems resolved via the Windows update are both related to a missing power plan specific to the Core Ultra processors—Intel didn't have those power plans ready for reviewers, who did all their testing using the generic power profiles provided with Windows. Intel said that this by itself could reduce performance by between 6 and 30 percent, depending on the software.

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Arm and Qualcomm's dispute over Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips is continuing in court this week, with executives from each company taking the stand and attempting to downplay the accusations from the other side.

If you haven't been following along, the crux of the issue is Qualcomm's purchase of a chip design firm called Nuvia in 2021. Nuvia was originally founded by ex-Apple chip designers to create high-performance Arm chips for servers, but Qualcomm took an interest in Nuvia's work and acquired the company to help it create high-end Snapdragon processors for consumer PCs instead. Arm claims that this was a violation of its licensing agreements with Nuvia and is seeking to have all chips based on Nuvia technology destroyed.

According to Reuters, Arm CEO Rene Haas testified this week that the Nuvia acquisition is depriving Arm of about $50 million a year, on top of the roughly $300 million a year in fees that Qualcomm already pays Arm to use its instruction set and some elements of its chip designs. This is because Qualcomm pays Arm lower royalty rates than Nuvia had agreed to pay when it was still an independent company.

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Rumors have suggested that Nvidia will be taking the wraps off of some next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES in January. And as we get closer to that date, Nvidia's partners and some of the PC makers have begun to inadvertently leak details of the cards.

According to recent leaks from both Zotac and Acer, it looks like Nvidia is planning to announce four new GPUs next month, all at the high end of its lineup: The RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 were all briefly listed on Zotac's website, as spotted by VideoCardz. There's also an RTX 5090D variant for the Chinese market, which will presumably have its specs tweaked to conform with current US export restrictions on high-performance GPUs.

Though the website leak didn't confirm many specs, it did list the RTX 5090 as including 32GB of GDDR7, an upgrade from the 4090's 24GB of GDDR6X. An Acer spec sheet for new Predator Orion desktops also lists 32GB of GDDR7 for the 4090, as well as 16GB of GDDR7 for the RTX 5080. This is the same amount of RAM included with the RTX 4080 and 4080 Super.

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Intel doesn't have a ton to show for its dedicated GPU efforts yet.

After much anticipation, many delays, and an anticipatory apology tour for its software quality, Intel launched its first Arc GPUs at the end of 2022. There were things to like about the A770 and A750, but buggy drivers, poor performance in older games, and relatively high power use made them difficult to recommend. They were more notable as curiosities than as consumer graphics cards.

The result, after more than two years on the market, is that Arc GPUs remain a statistical nonentity in the GPU market, according to analysts and the Steam Hardware Survey. But it was always going to take time—and probably a couple of hardware generations—for Intel to make meaningful headway against entrenched competitors.

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The macOS 15.2 update that was released earlier today came with a handful of new features, plus something unexpected: an apparently accidental reference to the upcoming M4 MacBook Airs. MacRumors reports that the "Mac16,12" and "Mac16,13" model identifiers reference 13- and 15-inch models of the M4 Air and that both are coming in 2025.

That a MacBook Air refresh is planned for next year isn't much of a surprise at this point—in reporting that pretty much nailed the details of the first M4 Macs, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has said that the Air, the Mac Studio, and the Mac Pro are all slated for updates throughout 2025.

But a reference in the current release of macOS could point to a launch sooner rather than later; the M4 Mac mini was referenced in a macOS update in mid-September around a month and a half before it was released. The M3 Airs came out in March this year, but Apple has been known to put out new Macs as early as January in recent years.

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Apple has announced that it will be releasing the iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 updates to the public later this afternoon, following weeks of beta testing for developers and users. As with iOS 18.1, the headlining features are new additions to Apple Intelligence, mainly the image-generation capabilities: Image Playground for general images, and "Genmoji" for making custom images in the style of Apple's built-in Unicode-based emoji characters.

Other AI features include "Image Wand," which will take sketched images from the Notes app and turn them into a "polished image" using context clues from other notes; and ChatGPT integration for the Writing Tools feature.

The updates also include a long list of bug fixes and security updates, for those who don't care about Apple Intelligence. Safari gets better data importing and exporting support, an HTTPS Priority feature that "upgrades URLs to HTTPS whenever possible," and a download status indicator for iPhones with a Dynamic Island. Mail in iOS offers to automatically sort messages to bring important ones to the top of your inbox. There are also various tweaks and improvements for the Photos, Podcasts, Voice Memos, and Stocks apps, while the Weather app in macOS can optionally display the weather in your menu bar.

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One of the selling points of the Raspberry Pi 5 (released in October 2023) is that it was fast enough and had enough memory to be a credible general-purpose desktop PC, if not an especially fast one. For Pi-as-desktop enthusiasts, the company has a couple of new pre-holiday announcements. The biggest is the Raspberry Pi 500, which fits the components of an 8GB Pi 5 into a small keyboard-shaped case for $90.

It's a follow-up to the original Raspberry Pi 400, and like that system, it takes the components from the regular Pi 5 board and puts them on a different PCB with all of the ports positioned in a single row across the back of the device. It includes one USB 2.0 port, two USB 3.0 ports, a microSD slot, two micro HDMI ports, the 40-pin GPIO header, and a gigabit Ethernet port.

In addition to the standalone $90 system, the Pi 500 will also be sold as part of a Desktop Kit with a mouse, power supply, HDMI cable, and printed Beginner's Guide booklet for $120.

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Microsoft has formally discontinued its Surface Studio all-in-one desktop, the company confirmed to Windows Central, a $4,300 touchscreen PC that the company updated with new components twice in the space of eight years. Windows Central reports that there are currently no plans for a follow-up to the Surface Studio and that a Surface Studio 3 may have been among the casualties of cutbacks to Microsoft's Surface lineup.

Like the Surface Laptop Studio, the desktop's claim to fame was a unique hinge design for its screen, which could reposition it to make it easier to draw on with the Surface Pen. But the desktop's high cost and its perennially outdated internal components made it a less appealing machine than it could have been.

The first version of the Surface Studio desktop debuted in late 2016. As the company's first desktop PC, it used the same basic design as the current version and was praised for its high-quality screen and unique hinge. But the first Surface Studio of the machine had some of the same issues that the desktop would always have: a high starting price and relatively outdated and underpowered components compared to other desktop systems.

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Over the last few years, Apple has steadily been building password manager-style features into macOS and iOS, including automatic password generation, password breach detection, and more. Starting with this year's updates—iOS 18 and macOS 15 Sequoia—Apple broke all that functionality out into its own Passwords app, making it all even more visible as a competitor to traditional password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden.

One area where Apple has lagged behind its platform-agnostic competitors is in browser support. Users could easily autofill passwords in Safari on macOS, and Apple did support a basic extension for the Windows versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge via iCloud for Windows. But the company only added a Chrome extension for macOS users in the summer of 2023, and it has never supported non-Chromium browsers at all.

That has finally changed, at least for Firefox users running macOS—Apple has an officially supported Passwords extension for Firefox that supports syncing and autofilling passwords in macOS Sonoma and macOS Sequoia. Currently, the extension doesn't support older versions of macOS or any versions of Firefox for Windows or Linux. When you install the extension in Firefox on a Mac that's already synced with your iCloud account, all you should need to do to sign in is input a six-digit code that macOS automatically generates for you. As with the Chromium extension, there's no need to re-sign in to your iCloud account separately.

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For most people, Windows 10 security updates are slated to stop on October 14, 2025, just over 10 months from today. That could end up being a serious security problem, given that Windows 10 is still the version used by a large majority of the world's PCs.

Users will be able to buy a one-year reprieve for $30, and businesses and other organizations will have the option to pay for two more years after that. But the easiest and cheapest way out of the problem—an upgrade to Windows 11, which is still free for Windows 10 PCs that can run it—still remains out of reach for many active PCs because of Windows 11's more stringent system requirements.

Microsoft has reiterated this week that it has no plans to loosen those requirements to boost Windows 11's adoption numbers, focusing particularly on the need for a TPM 2.0 device. Short for Trusted Platform Module, a TPM stores encryption keys and performs other cryptographic functions, and Windows uses it to seamlessly decrypt your PC's disk at boot, among other things. A TPM 2.0 module is a "non-negotiable" requirement for boosting Windows 11's security baseline, says Microsoft, and that apparently won't be changing.

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Turnover at the top of the company isn't stopping Intel from launching new products: Today the company is announcing the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570.

Both are decidedly midrange graphics cards that will compete with the likes of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD's RX 7600 series, but Intel is pricing them competitively: $249 for a B580 with 12GB of RAM and $219 for a B570 with 10GB of RAM. The B580 launches on December 13, while the B570 won't be available until January 16.

The two cards are Intel's first dedicated GPUs based on its next-generation "Battlemage" architecture, a successor to the "Alchemist" architecture used in the A-series cards. Intel's Core Ultra 200 laptop processors were its first products to ship with Battlemage, though they used an integrated version with fewer of Intel's Xe cores and no dedicated memory. Both B-series GPUs use silicon manufactured on a 5 nm TSMC process, an upgrade from the 6 nm process used for the A-series; as of this writing, no integrated or dedicated Arc GPUs have been manufactured by one of Intel's factories.

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One of the key differences between Apple's Macs and the iPhone and iPad is that the Mac can still boot and run non-Apple operating systems. This is a feature that Apple specifically built for the Mac, one of many features meant to ease the transition from Intel's chips to Apple's own silicon.

The problem, at least at first, was that alternate operating systems like Windows and Linux didn't work natively with Apple's hardware, not least because of missing drivers for basic things like USB ports, GPUs, and power management. Enter the Asahi Linux project, a community-driven effort to make open-source software run on Apple's hardware.

In just a few years, the team has taken Linux on Apple Silicon from "basically bootable" to "plays native Windows games and sounds great doing it." And the team's ultimate goal is to contribute enough code upstream that you no longer need a Linux distribution just for Apple Silicon Macs.

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In a surprise move, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has stepped down as head of the company after less than four years, as reported by Reuters and other outlets. The change caps a chaotic year for Intel, which is poised to report its first annual financial loss since 1986 and announced layoffs of at least 15,000 employees this year as it attempted to cut costs.

Intel CFO David Zinsner and Client Computing Group head Michelle Johnston Holthaus will be sharing the title of interim CEO while the company's board of directors searches for a new CEO. Gelsinger has also stepped down from his seat on the board.

A statement from board chair Frank Yeary suggests that Intel plans to continue Gelsinger's signature push into the chip foundry business.

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Over five months after publicly scrapping the first version of the Windows Recall feature for its first wave of Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft announced today that a newly rearchitected version of Recall is finally ready for public consumption.

For now, the preview will be limited to a tiny subset of PCs: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Plus Copilot+ PCs enrolled in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider program (the build of Windows that includes Recall is 26120.2415). Intel and AMD Copilot+ PCs can’t access the Recall preview yet, and regular Windows 11 PCs won’t support the feature at all.

If you haven’t been following along, Recall is one of Microsoft’s many AI-driven Windows features exclusive to Copilot+ PCs, which come with a built-in neural processing unit (NPU) capable of running AI and machine learning workloads locally on your device rather than in the cloud. When enabled, Recall runs in the background constantly, taking screenshots of all your activity and saving both the screenshots and OCR’d text to a searchable database so that users can retrace their steps later.

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Windows 10's free, guaranteed security updates stop in October 2025, less than a year from now. Windows 10 users with supported PCs have been offered the Windows 11 upgrade plenty of times before. But now Microsoft is apparently making a fresh push to get users to upgrade, sending them full-screen reminders recommending they buy new computers.

The reminders, which users have seen within the last few days, all mention the end of Windows 10 support but otherwise seem to differ from computer to computer. My Ars colleague Kyle Orland got one focused on Windows 11's gaming features, while posters on X (formerly Twitter) got screens that emphasized the ease of migrating from old PCs to new ones and other Windows 11 features. One specifically recommended upgrading to a Copilot+ PC, which supports a handful of extra AI features that other Windows 11 PCs don't, but other messages didn't mention Copilot+ specifically.

None of the messages mention upgrading to Windows 11 directly, though Kyle said his PC meets Windows 11's requirements. These messages may be intended mostly for people using older PCs that can't officially install the Windows 11 update.

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Microsoft is announcing some new hardware today, but it’s a bit different from a typical Surface device. The Windows 365 Link, which launches in April for $349, is a mini desktop PC that exists exclusively to connect to the Windows 365 cloud service rather than running Windows locally.

The Windows 365 Link is a plain black plastic box with a Windows logo imprinted on the top—it looks like a smaller, squarer version of the Windows Dev Kit 2023, an Arm desktop that Microsoft released for developers a couple of years ago. The box has one USB-A port on the front for easy access. On the back, you get a single USB-C 3.2 port, two more USB-A ports, a full-size DisplayPort, a full-size HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and a power jack.

Windows Central reports that the device is fanless, uses an unspecified Intel processor, and includes 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. It runs a cut-down Windows variant that exists only to connect to local peripherals and make contact with Microsoft’s Windows 365 service. When not connected to the Internet, the PC is mostly non-functional, though there is presumably some kind of basic UI available for connecting to networks and accessories locally.

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