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 While the headline feature of Apple's new lowest-cost iPad is an A16 chip, the device has some other new features and changes.
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 Apple CEO Tim Cook yesterday teased that there was "something in the air" this week, and it turns out that could be "things" plural. Following today's announcement of a new iPad Air with an M3 chip, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman now says that Apple plans to announce the long-rumored MacBook Air with the M4 chip tomorrow.
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 Mobile World Congress is taking place in Barcelona this week, offering manufacturers an opportunity to show off new gear without needing to hold their own splashy event. So far, we've learned about some new laptops and phones, as well as upcoming AI updates to Android and an internet connectivity announcement from Meta.
Here's a look at everything announced at Mobile World Congress that caught our eye. We'll update this story throughout the week.
Lenovo
Sam Rutherford for Engadget
Among the bigger-name manufacturers, Lenovo has arguably had the busiest MWC so far. The company has revealed a whole bunch of laptops, including upgraded ThinkPads and several intriguing concept models.
The ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 has a design that's more aligned with the convertible format of the Yoga lineup than a typical ThinkPad. The 14-inch machine can be equipped with a 400-nit WUXGA touch display. Other ThinkPads are getting spec upgrades, while Lenovo claims the new ThinkPad X13 Gen 6 has "one of the lightest ThinkPad designs ever." The company has a fresh slate of
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 Apple's new iPad Air contains the M3 chip, upgraded from the M2 chip in the previous generation, so how much better really is M3?
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Apple today updated the entry-level iPad with an A16 chip. Unfortunately, however, the device continues to lack support for Apple Intelligence.
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The latest Pixel feature drop is here with Google rolling updates across its family of smartphones and wearables. If you're a Pixel 9 owner in the US, you'll soon have access to a new version of Pixel Studio capable of creating stickers and images of people. As a refresher, Pixel Studio is an AI image app that is exclusive to Pixel devices. "Just type a description of a person or scene you'd like to see, or choose the style you want, like 'video game' or '3D cartoon,'" Google says of the new feature. The approach Google taking here is similar to the one Apple currently employs with Image Playground. Photorealistic images are off the table so that you can't use Pixel Studio to confuse your friends and family.
Beyond Pixel Studio, Google is bringing other AI features to the Pixel family in the US and beyond. Most notably, the company's live scam protection, which Google brought to testers last fall, is expanding to more devices, with additional functionality for those with Pixel 9 handsets in the US.
If you own a Pixel 9, it will start screening English calls to protect you from scams. On the Pixel 6 and newer, Google is expanding the availability of scam text detection, with the feature rolling out to phones in the US, Canada and United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Pixel 9 and Pixel 8 Pro users in Japan can look forward to a large portion of the brand's AI suite, including Pixel Screenshots and Pixel Studio, rolling out to their devices.
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In November, Microsoft began testing the addition of AI rewrite capabilities in Notepad, and then developed it further as part of a February update. Now, Windows Latest has reported that the AI-powered Notepad appears to have rolled out to everyone. It has certainly shown up on my PCs, whether they're running the stable version of Windows or one of its test Insider editions.
In the upper right-hand corner of Notepad, you should see a little "magic pen" icon. That's the new Rewrite (preview) application. You may not see it if you don't subscribe to Microsoft 365, as those AI capabilities appear to be part of Microsoft's productivity subscription.
Rewrite, as the name suggests, won't actually create text for you; that's left to Microsoft Word. However, you can copy a block of text into Notepad, highlight it, and then ask Notepad to "rewrite" it in several ways. You have the choice of simple editing, or to make the text shorter or longer.
More importantly, you can change the style and format. You can ask Notepad to rewrite in a formal, casual, inspirational, or humorous tone; and you can also ask it to rewrite text as a list, a business memo, in an academic style, in marketing speak, or as a poem.
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 Apple today announced the newest additions to its tablet family, the 11th generation iPad and M3 iPad Air. Alongside these refreshes, the company has introduced a Springtime refresh of iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands, introducing bright new colorways for the new season.
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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's top semiconductor manufacturer, has pledged to invest another $100 billion over the next four years to boost advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. The company's chairman and CEO C.C. Wei has announced its expanded investment in the US at the White House with President Donald Trump. TSMC was originally going to invest $40 billion into building chip-making facilities in Arizona, which it then raised to $65 billion after it was announced as a CHIPS Act recipient getting $6.6 billion in grants under the Biden administration. This announcement is for an additional $100 billion, bringing the company's total planned investment to $165 billion. TSMC called it "the largest single foreign direct investment in US history."
During the announcement at the White House, Trump reportedly said that his threat to impose new tariffs on chip imports prompted TSMC to invest more into its US manufacturing efforts. The president previously told reporters that his administration could collect 25 percent in taxes, or higher, for chip imports. The tariffs could go substantially higher over the course of a year, he said.
The company's original investment already included plans for three fabrication factories in Arizona. This expansion will allow TSMC to build three more fabrication plants, two advanced packaging facilities and a major research and development center. TSMC's facilit
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The prospect of using taxpayer money to stockpile cryptocurrencies in a national reserve has drawn criticism from lawmakers and investors.
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Movie nights could get a lot more compact and mobile.
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But the real question for hardcore gamers is… how do they handle Fortnite? We show you in the latest PCWorld YouTube video. (Okay, maybe that's only a question if you're the kind of degenerate PC gamer who still plays Fortnite after you've gotten gray hairs. I'm in that particular brigade, as is my fellow Fortnite fan Will Smith.)
Will loaded up a Fortnite replay — a recorded session that renders in the game's live engine — and applied the recommended competitive settings from Reddit at 4K, then let the test bench rip with all the new RTX 50-series cards, plus the RTX 4090 for comparison's sake. Adam assisted on whiteboard duty, showing off the technical side of these breakdowns.
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Samsung's Display division is demonstrating these new OLED panels independently of Samsung's mobile hardware at the show, which is interesting since MWC is generally an event laser-focused on smartphones and other small devices. Among many other OLED panels, the most compelling offering for PC gamers is definitely "the world's first 500Hz QD-OLED monitor." That's only a hair faster than the current 480Hz record for OLEDs, while still lagging behind the fastest LCDs on the market. OLED is turning more heads for monitor upgrades at the moment, thanks to its vibrant colors and perfect contrast.
Samsung is also showing off a 15.6-inch 240Hz OLED for laptops, pushing the tech into a faster format for gaming machines, which still mainly rely on LCD panels for their higher refresh rates. Yet while OLEDs look great, faster OLED panels could complicate matters for a laptop that needs to mind its power efficiency.
Note that these announcements come from Samsung Display, the division that provides OEM hardware to other companies. While i
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iFixit today shared one of its traditional teardown videos, taking apart the new iPhone 16e to take a closer look at the internal components.
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NEW RESOURCES Found on LinkedIn: the Western North Carolina Housing Guide. From the front page: "Where do I go for housing repairs? How do I find trusted information about the recovery process? […]
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In order to be eligible for using the JPEG XL image extension, you'll need to be on Windows 11 24H2. Once you're on 24H2 and after you've downloaded and installed the extension, you can start viewing and saving image files with the .jxl extension in apps.
With the extension installed, existing JPEG files can also be converted to the lossless JPEG XL format, significantly reducing the file size without harming its quality. Conversely, JPEG XL files can easily be converted back to the original JPEG format as needed.
What are the advantages of JPEG XL?
Not only does JPEG XL offer better compression versus old-school JPEG, the format (ISO/IEC 18181) is optimized for web environments so that content can be displayed on a wide range of devices. It was developed to meet the image requirements for both web content and professional photography, as the old JPEG format is quite outdated.
JPEG XL supports a wide color scale (32 bits) and images with a high bit depth and dynamic range. Furthermore, features like animation, alpha channels, layers, thumbnails, and both lossless and progressive coding are supported to cover as many modern applications as possible.
The new format offers significantly better image quality and compression compared to the older JPEG format, and the codec is designed for computationally efficient encoding and decoding. The codec isn't dependent on any additional hardware acceleration, which is particularly beneficial for
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NEW RESOURCES Calishat: SearchTweaks.com Updated - 16 Free Tools for Better Web Search. "I learned so much overhauling WikiTwister that I immediately came up with several ideas for improving SearchTweaks, my collection […]
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Celebrate Sleep Awareness Month by improving your sleep quality. These six strategies can get your bedtime habits back on track.
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Mobile World Congress is taking place in Barcelona this week, offering manufacturers an opportunity to show off new gear without needing to hold their own splashy event. So far, we've learned about some new laptops and phones, as well as upcoming AI updates to Android.
Here's a look at everything announced at Mobile World Congress that caught our eye. We'll update this story throughout the week.
Lenovo
Sam Rutherford for Engadget
Among the bigger-name manufacturers, Lenovo has arguably had the busiest MWC so far. The company has revealed a whole bunch of laptops, including upgraded ThinkPads and several intriguing concept models.
The ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 has a design that's more aligned with the convertible format of the Yoga lineup than a typical ThinkPad. The 14-inch machine can be equipped with a 400-nit WUXGA touch display. Other ThinkPads are getting spec upgrades, while Lenovo claims the new ThinkPad X13 Gen 6 has "one of the lightest ThinkPad designs ever." The company has a fresh slate of
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Hulu's Oscars stream on Sunday was plagued with issues from the word go, with many would-be viewers unable to log in to Hulu just as the broadcast was starting, Deadline reported. It took Hulu more than two hours to squash the bugs, with a spokesperson tweeting on X that "our team took the necessary steps to resolve this" and advising users to reboot their devices.
Even after the login kinks were worked out, Hulu users continued to complain about sporadic issues, including stream freezes as well as image problems, with one streamer noting that the "show seemed to lose the HD" near the half-way point of the broadcast. But those issues merely served as the prelude to the evening's capper: Hulu ended its Oscars simulcast early, cutting off the stream just after the best actress presentation and before the awards for best director and best picture.
Hulu users were left starting at a
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It's usually best to buy a laptop with lots of storage in the first place, but you can't go back in time and do anything about that now, can you? Fortunately, there are other ways to expand your laptop's storage. Let's dive into the various options available to you.
SD and microSD cards are cheap
If your laptop has an SD card slot, this is the easiest storage upgrade you can make. SD cards are relatively inexpensive compared to other storage options, and all you have to do is pop one into the slot. But there's a trade-off: they're slower than other storage options.
Most laptops support UHS-I SD cards, which offer speeds up to 104 MB/s. Faster UHS-II cards can go up to 312 MB/s, but many laptops don't support those. Maybe yours does. Ultimately, it's your laptop's SD card reader that determines the maximum data speed.
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SpaceX is slated to launch its Starship for the eighth time from Boca Chica, Texas, Friday, though plans could be thwarted if the FAA fails to give the green light.
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Turning your phone off protects it from some hacks
Surprisingly, this includes a very basic task that many people never do: switching your phone off completely. According to security experts at the NSA, this alone helps to protect the device from some hacking attacks. It is now not only common to gain access to smartphones via malicious links, but also via zero-click exploits.
This involves bypassing the smartphone's security features step-by-step, starting with a missed call, then the first installed files, which gradually allow access to the system so hackers can tap into your information. Zero-click exploits usually go unnoticed, but can be prevented by completely rebooting the device.
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