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CES is filled with wild and wacky curios, to be sure, but there are also plenty of good old-fashioned laptops. Every year the big chipmakers announce new products and the big computer manufacturers unveil new laptops that take advantage of updated CPUs and GPUs. All told, companies announced nearly two dozen upcoming laptops at this year's conference. Some are bulky beasts made for gaming, while others are thin beauties intended for portability. The vast majority of them are filled to the brim with the AI tools that everyone loves so very much.
Here are all of the laptops that piqued our interest at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, just in case you need to start saving some money for a purchase later this year.
ASUS Zenbook A14
The ASUS Zenbook A14 is the MacBook Air competitor of our dreams. It weighs less than 2.2 pounds, which is actually a half a pound lighter than the Air. When it comes to specs, it actually outclasses Apple in nearly every category. There's a 14-inch OLED screen, up to 32 hours (!) of battery life and up to 32GB of RAM. It's also covered in a nifty ceramic coating that feels great to hold.
It comes in two versions. There's one that includes a Snapdragon X Plus CPU and 16GB of RAM, which starts at $900. The higher-end model features a Snapdragon X Elite chip and 32GB of RAM, starting at $1,100. The lap
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AMD's initial Z1 chip powered most of the first wave of gaming handhelds, while Valve's Steam Deck uses a close custom-made sibling. AMD says the Z2 can provide "console-class" graphics that last for hours and hours, though it didn't disclose any benchmarks or deeper performance context. (To be fair, that's difficult since the design limitations of handhelds can drastically affect performance.)
The Z2 isn't just a singular chip, but instead a lineup of offerings that all use Radeon RDNA graphics and Ryzen CPU cores — though the details vary wildly. There's the standard Z2 with RDNA 3 graphics cores, but also a Ryzen Z2 Go with fewer CPU cores, older RDNA 2 graphics, and (much) lower clock speeds. The Z2 Go will be exclusive to Lenovo's SteamOS-powered Legion Go S. Meanwhile, the high-end Ryzen Z2 Extr
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Google's Pixel 4a has long been considered a great smartphone for those on a budget, but it just received a software update that calls that into question. The update lowers the reported battery life. This isn't a side-effect of some new software. This is the actual intent of the refresh.
Wait, what? Google says the automatic software update to Android 13 will "reduce your battery's runtime and charging performance" but that it's necessary to "improve the stability" of each device. That's the only explanation the company offered. We reached out to Google to ask for a specific reason as to why this was necessary.
— Alexis Collins (@Lexiscee) January 7, 2025
There's a silver lining here for current Pixel 4a owners. While every Pixel 4a will receive the automatic update, only certain devices will see a reduction in battery life and charging performance. There's no information as to what designates which handsets will suffer as a result of the update, but owners of so-called "impacted devices" will have a few "appeasement options" to choose from.
Folks can send the phone in for a free battery replacement, but that will require the owner to go without a handset while Google performs the replacement. If that's not viable, the company will send impacted owners $50 or give them a $100 credit toward a new Pixel phone from the Google Sto
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This isn't just any retro-styled microphone, but an all-in-one tool for music creators looking to record vocals when on the go. It's the creation of Hisong, a startup looking to build a more elegant alternative to toting around a microphone, mixer and headphones wherever you go. The AirStudio One is a wireless condenser microphone with a few secrets buried inside, like a professional audio interface, a wireless USB-C dongle and a pair of true wireless headphones. The idea being you can record a banging vocal when you're on the road without any additional hardware.
AirStudio One isn't just a regular microphone, either, since it's been engineered with a multi-core Digital Signal Processor to help get the best sound from its slender body. Open the companion app on your phone, and you'll be able to mix the audio, set the EQ and even apply audio effects in real time. This isn't the first product we've seen this CES that puts more of the meat inside the microphone — Shure's MV7i carries its own two-channel audio interface.
You could also use this to record sound for your videos, and if you opt for the analog dongle, can even output your sound to any device with a 3.5mm line-in. It's worth saying the ambient noise at CES made it impossible to test the sound quality of microphone. But this is the sort of gadget that has "intriguing prospect" stamped all over it. We'll likely give this a deeper prod when it's available to buy later in the year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/airstudio-one-is-a-portable-microphone-thats-full-of-surprises-173019602.html?src=rss
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 I don't want or need 99 percent of the stuff on display at CES — don't get me wrong, most of what we're seeing this week is impressive in one way or another, but nothing had seemed like a necessary addition to my life until I happened upon the Copper Charlie, a battery-equipped induction range that plugs directly into a standard 120V outlet. Yes, among the robots, future cars, bionic exoskeletons and AI everything, the thing that's exited me most is a stove (OK, the fluffball robot is pretty great).
Up until a few years ago, I had no idea natural gas cooktops were bad for your health, not to mention the environment. Unfortunately, if your home is set up on gas, it's not easy or cheap to switch up to electric. Nearly all full-sized induction stoves require a dedicated 240V outlet and if you don't have one where the stove goes, a call to a electrician is likely in your future.
Charlie is a full-sized oven and range that packs a ceramic glass cooktop, a 4.5 cubic-foot oven and an integrated 5 kWh battery. That battery allows the stove to run off a standard plug by storing up a charge that can bump up the power output when it's time to cook (it can also cook three to five meals during a power outage).
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CES 2025 is ongoing, but if you're wondering if some of the products showcased there are available, you're in luck. Many of them are up for pre-order, if not already on store shelves. This year, there are wireless headphones, smart glasses and even a baby bouncer and bassinet combo.
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Ex-employees of Annapurna Interactive who quit en masse last year have reportedly found their next project. According to Bloomberg, the team is taking over the games and franchises of Private Division, a former Take-Two label that published indie games.
A new enterprise that doesn't have a name as yet is said to have been formed and it appears that some of the remaining 20 or so employees of Private Division will be laid off as part of the transition. Take-Two said in November that it had sold Private Division (which published The Outer Worlds and physical copies of Hades) to an unnamed buyer, reportedly a private equity firm called Haveli Investments.
Haveli is said to have brought in the former Annapurna employees in recent weeks and handed them the keys to Private Division's portfolio. That includes an upcoming cozy life sim based on The Lord of the Rings called Tales of the Shire, the Kerbal Space Program series and a new project from Game Freak, which is best known for making Pokémon games.
The entire Annapurna Interactive staff
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 As promised, newly minted electric powertrain startup Donut Lab has premiered its first batch of all-electric motors you can see straight through. The company has descended on the annual CES show with not one or two motors but a family of five, ranging from a tiny drone drive to a high-performance hypercar cornerstone the company crowns the world power and torque density king. Each motor promises to cut mass, boost torque and improve overall performance of the target machine.
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You probably didn't have X CEO Linda Yaccarino praising Meta and Mark Zuckerberg on your CES 2025 bingo card, yet here we are. Speaking during a keynote address in Las Vegas, Yaccarino described Meta's decision to end its longtime fact checking program and implement community notes as "exciting" and "validating."
Yaccarino and and X owner Elon Musk have both championed the crowd-sourced fact-checking feature that Meta now plans to emulate on its own services. "I think it's really exciting when you think about community notes being good for the world … and it couldn't be more validating than to see that Mark and Meta realize that," Yaccarino said. "Mark, Meta, welcome to the party."
Meta and Zuckerberg may find themselves in dubious company at the "party," however. While X often touts the number of users who contribute to Community Notes, some researchers have pointed out flaws in the feature. A report last year from misinformation researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) noted that many misleading posts, including prominent posts from Musk himself, can rack up billions of views without receiving a correction.
It's not surprising at all that Yaccarino would prais
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NEW RESOURCES KLKN: Nebraska treasurer announces new website that tracks state spending. "Nebraska State Treasurer Tom Briese announced a new website Monday that tracks every penny spent by the state…. The site […]
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Surprising no one, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang isn't too worried about a future filled with robots and superintelligent AI. In fact, he welcomes it. During a CES Q&A session with media and analysts, Huang was asked if he thought intelligent robots would ultimately side with humans, or against them. "With the humans, because we're going to build them that way," he replied confidently.
"The idea of superintelligence is not unusual," Huang continued. "I have a company with many many people who are superintelligent in their field of work. I'm surrounded by superintelligence. And I prefer to be surrounded by superintelligence than the alternative."
Given that the hype around generative AI has been huge for NVIDIA's business — it's currently vying with Apple and Microsoft for the largest valuation in the world — it makes sense that Huang would be all for a future where we're more reliant on smarter AI. He falls short of proclaiming the arrival of god-like artificial general intelligence (AGI) like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla's Elon Musk, instead Huang's vision sounds more task-focused.
"That's the future, you're going to have superintelligent AI that will let you write, analyze problems, deal with supply chain planning, write software, design chips," he said. "The technology, of course, can be used in many ways, but it's humans that are harmful. I think machines are machines."
During the morning Q&A session, which came after Huang's lengthy CES keynote to a mostly unenthusiastic crowd, he admitted that he did a poor job of conveying his vision for AI in the real world. Huang thinks the combination of NVIDIA's Omniverse technology for visualizing 3D routines, as
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 If you spot a snazzy silver ebike at CES this week, you should know that it's more than just a pretty face. It's the 3D-printed Titanium Zero, and it sports what is claimed to be the world's smallest, lightest, highest-torque-density motor.
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Bicycles, Transport
ebikes, World's Smallest,
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