Steam added a free download this morning, that lets anyone with the right hardware open a cardboard box, pull out a GeForce 8800 GTX, and slide the card into a tower that boots Windows Vista. Unreal Engine artist Dylan Browne built the experience with help from Nvidia, three days before the card’s actual twentieth anniversary.
Once the workday begins, a compact nylon case that fits within a larger backpack can nonetheless carry more organization than its size would suggest. Mini Mega from Byron Seven begins as a simple laptop sleeve designed for MacBook Air and Pro models, as well as matching tablets, before revealing two integrated organizers that swing open 180 degrees and clasp together with magnets. Everyday cords, chargers, and compact drives are packaged during the travel and arrive on the table in a single flat arrangement with no separate bags or unnecessary procedures.
iFixit specialists recently opened Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra, the company’s priciest laptop to date, and assigned it a repairability score of 8 out of 10. That result doubles the 4 points awarded to the M5 MacBook Pro and shows how design choices affect long-term ownership of high-end machines.
Anyone who wants private AI tools can now carry them on a flash drive that works across computers. Portable Local Studio from Tech Jarves packs image generation, chat with language models, speech-to-text conversion, and text-to-speech into a single folder that launches without installing anything on the host machine.
Australian YouTuber TrashBench decided an old outdoor air conditioner unit sitting in the trash deserved a second life as the biggest radiator his test bench had ever seen. He took the outdoor half of a discarded Fujitsu split-system rated for four kilowatts of cooling, emptied the refrigerant, and kept only the parts that matter for water cooling: the large finned coil, its axial fan, and the pump.
Arctic Fox Technologies has built a wired mouse, called Super Mouse, that places a 3.1-inch square touchscreen directly beneath the area where a palm rests during normal use. The unit measures 109 by 91 by 29 millimeters, carries a boxier profile than most everyday models, and arrives in yellow, white, or gray finishes. Standard left and right buttons sit above a scroll wheel, with two programmable Hyper Keys positioned nearby for actions that feel better as a physical press. Power and data both travel through a single USB-C cable, so the device stays tethered to the computer at all times.
Journalists at the Los Angeles event today lifted the lid on Apple’s new MacBook Pro and immediately felt the weight drop before the screen even lit up. The 14-inch model comes in at three pounds, half a pound lighter than the previous version, while the 16-inch version sits at four pounds. In the hand it feels closer to a thinner machine, and several people noted that the difference shows up right away when the laptop goes into a bag.
Apple finally put a touchscreen on a MacBook Pro and paired it with a tandem OLED panel called PROLED XDR that reaches 2000 nits of peak brightness for both HDR and ordinary SDR content. Available in 14.2-inch and 16.3-inch sizes, the display hits a 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, supports ProMotion that ramps from 10Hz to 120Hz, and covers both the P3 and Adobe RGB color spaces with more than 80 percent of Rec. 2020.
Anduril has partnered with Qualcomm to launch BlueChip, a new line of rugged laptops designed and assembled in the United States for government agencies, the military, first responders, and public safety teams. Palmer Luckey’s defense company already has working prototypes, and it expects to start taking orders in 2027.
Apple launched an updated 24-inch iMac today that uses the company’s newest M6 chip and keeps nearly every outside detail from the version that arrived two years ago. Buyers still choose from the same seven colors: blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, orange, and silver. Each machine ships with matching keyboard and mouse or trackpad, and the thin all-in-one body sits on the same stand as before.