All posts tagged: surface

Microsoft’s New Surface Laptop and Surface Pro Get Faster—and Way More Expensive

Microsoft’s New Surface Laptop and Surface Pro Get Faster—and Way More Expensive

Published by skeptic

Microsoft has announced some long-awaited updates to its Surface Laptop and Surface Pro devices, both of which are being refreshed with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 chips. The company hasn’t given specific names to this new generation of devices, but this is technically the eighth-generation Surface Laptop and 12th-generation Surface Pro. These new Qualcomm chips have been slowly rolling out on various Windows laptops throughout this first half of the year. Microsoft says the new chips provide “up to 53 percent faster graphic performance than the previous generation,” as well as 15.5 hours of battery life. While these chips are certainly impressive in the testing I’ve done (whether that’s the Snapdragon X2 Elite or Snapdragon X2 Plus), the real story here is the accompanying price hike. The new Surface Laptop starts at $1,599, a $600 increase over the $999 starting price of the previous generation, which was known as the Surface Laptop 7th Edition when it launched in 2024. That initial $999 price was then officially increased a couple of months ago, bringing it up …

Microsoft’s New Surface Laptop and Surface Pro Get Faster—and Way More Expensive

Microsoft’s New Surface Laptop and Surface Pro Get Faster—and Way More Expensive

Published by skeptic

Microsoft has announced some long-awaited updates to its Surface Laptop and Surface Pro devices, both of which are being refreshed with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 chips. The company hasn’t given specific names to this new generation of devices, but this is technically the eighth-generation Surface Laptop and 12th-generation Surface Pro. These new Qualcomm chips have been slowly rolling out on various Windows laptops throughout this first half of the year. Microsoft says the new chips provide “up to 53 percent faster graphic performance than the previous generation,” as well as 15.5 hours of battery life. While these chips are certainly impressive in the testing I’ve done (whether that’s the Snapdragon X2 Elite or Snapdragon X2 Plus), the real story here is the accompanying price hike. The new Surface Laptop starts at $1,599, a $600 increase over the $999 starting price of the previous generation, which was known as the Surface Laptop 7th Edition when it launched in 2024. That initial $999 price was then officially increased a couple of months ago, bringing it up …

I tried the Surface Laptop Ultra at Computex, and it’s clear: Microsoft means business

I tried the Surface Laptop Ultra at Computex, and it’s clear: Microsoft means business

Published by skeptic

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is the flagship RTX Spark laptop unveiled at Computex.  It features the RTX Spark SoC: a 20-core CPU, equivalent of a GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, and up to 128GB of unified memory. Despite the dazzling specs and premium build, unanswered questions remain.  At Computex 2026, Nvidia announced its new RTX Spark processor, an ARM-based chip with some impressive performance specs across a cadre of new devices: up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, a 20-core CPU, and up to 128GB of unified memory to power creative tasks with the rough equivalent power of a GeForce RTX 5070.  At the head of the pack is Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Ultra — the flagship RTX Spark laptop and a powerhouse that doubles down on its premium branding and an edgy, aggressive branding that speaks to developers, pro creators, and AI powerusers.  Also: I saw the first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops – these 4 models will lead the new ultrabook …

Microsoft debuts Surface RTX Spark Dev Box to run large AI models without cloud costs

Microsoft debuts Surface RTX Spark Dev Box to run large AI models without cloud costs

Published by skeptic

Microsoft on Monday unveiled the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a compact desktop computer designed to let software developers run large AI models on their desks instead of paying for cloud computing — a move that directly challenges the per-token pricing model that has defined the AI industry’s economics since ChatGPT launched three and a half years ago. The device, announced at Microsoft Build 2026, packs Nvidia’s new Blackwell-architecture RTX Spark processor and 128 gigabytes of unified memory into a small-form-factor chassis, delivering what Nvidia rates at one petaflop of AI compute. In practical terms, that means a developer can load, run and interact with AI models exceeding 120 billion parameters without sending a single API call to the cloud. “These class of devices, we think, will get to about 100 billion parameter model running,” Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Windows and Devices, said during a press briefing ahead of the event. He emphasized that raw model size is only part of the equation: “The model size is one thing, but for the …

Everyone Has Their Targets Set on the MacBook Neo

Everyone Has Their Targets Set on the MacBook Neo

Published by skeptic

Yet it’s only $699 (or $599 for students). The XPS 13 makes similar trade-offs as the MacBook Neo. First, it starts with only 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. It also starts with a slower Intel Core 5 processor (note: not Intel Core Ultra). I’ll be interested to find how the performance and battery life stack up against the MacBook Neo, but Dell is clearly taking notes from Apple, which used a slower iPhone chip in the Neo instead of an M-series laptop-grade processor. What’s nice about the Dell XPS 13, though, is that you can scale it up appropriately. The MacBook Neo is capped in both storage and memory, but the XPS 13 can be configured up to 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. I’ve been testing a lot of $500 to $600 laptops recently from companies like Acer, Lenovo, and HP, many of which take a more conventional Windows approach to rivaling the MacBook Neo by offering better specs at lower prices. They all have 16 GB …

More All-Black Apple Vision Pro Parts Surface Online

More All-Black Apple Vision Pro Parts Surface Online

Published by skeptic

Images of parts designed for an unreleased all-black Apple Vision headset have been leaked online, courtesy of X account @LusiRoy8. The image shows what appear to be power strap and audio pod parts that look identical to Apple’s existing Apple Vision Pro hardware, except with a dark finish that is not commercially available. The account that shared the images claims that the parts are for a “upcoming” second-generation Apple Vision Pro in black. It’s not the first time we’ve seen black versions of hardware related to Apple’s headset, with images surfacing of similar parts last year. The leaker of those earlier images claimed that Apple has been testing a thinner and lighter mixed-reality headset referred to internally as “Vision Air,” featuring a Midnight-colored exterior and reduced weight achieved by switching several structural components and the battery enclosure to titanium. Apple vison pro 2 upcoming black color pic.twitter.com/bCxtI7Yq5b — pipfix (@LusiRoy8) May 26, 2026 Apple was widely expected to launch both a lower-cost headset, tentatively dubbed “Vision Air,” and a redesigned second-generation Vision Pro. However, Bloomberg‘s …

‘If something goes wrong, you can’t simply surface’: Maldives tragedy shines light on dangers of cave diving | Maldives

‘If something goes wrong, you can’t simply surface’: Maldives tragedy shines light on dangers of cave diving | Maldives

Published by Sam Flores

The diving tragedy in the Maldives – which claimed the lives of five Italian divers inside an underwater cave, followed by the death of a Maldivian navy diver – has renewed warnings from experts about the risks of cave diving without proper training, planning and specialised equipment. On Thursday, the Divers Alert Network (DAN), which coordinated the complex search and recovery operation at the Dhekunu Kandu dive site in Vaavu atoll, announced all the divers’ dead bodies had been recovered. The victims were identified as Monica Montefalcone, an ecology professor; her daughter Giorgia Sommacal; marine biologist Federico Gualtieri; researcher Muriel Oddenino; and diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti. The body of Bendetti was recovered earlier outside the cave. Mohamed Mahudhee, a member of the Maldivian national defence force, also died in the tragedy, as a result of decompression sickness after taking part in a recovery mission. A Maldives sea ambulance conducts a search and recovery operation in the Vaavu atoll after the diving accident which claimed the lives of five Italian nationals. Photograph: Sophia Nasif/EPA After initial …

Scientists reveal why the Earth’s upper atmosphere is cooling while the surface is heating up

Scientists reveal why the Earth’s upper atmosphere is cooling while the surface is heating up

Published by Jenni Sidey

The air high above Earth has been moving in the opposite direction of the world below it. While the planet’s surface and lower atmosphere keep warming, the stratosphere, the layer that begins about 11 kilometers above the ground and stretches to roughly 50 kilometers, has been cooling for decades. Climate scientists have long treated that split as one of the clearest fingerprints of human-caused climate change. What they did not have, until now, was a detailed account of exactly why it happens the way it does. A new analysis from researchers at Columbia University lays out that mechanism in unusually clear terms. The work points to a central answer: carbon dioxide cools the stratosphere according to how it interacts with specific parts of the infrared spectrum, and some of those wavelengths are much better than others at letting heat escape to space. “It explains a phenomenon that’s a fingerprint of climate change, has been known to occur for decades, and has not been understood,” said Robert Pincus, a research professor of ocean and climate physics …

The emerging cancer treatment that’s exciting scientists: ‘We’ve just scratched the surface on what’s possible’ | Cancer

The emerging cancer treatment that’s exciting scientists: ‘We’ve just scratched the surface on what’s possible’ | Cancer

Published by Sam Flores

“Game-changer.” That’s how Prof Misty Jenkins, an immunologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, describes CAR T-cell therapy, an emerging but still costly cancer treatment that supercharges the body’s immune system to fight disease. Late last month, Jurassic Park actor Sam Neill put the treatment in the spotlight, revealing his stage three cancer was in remission after undergoing CAR T-cell therapy as part of a clinical trial in Sydney. He stopped short of describing his remission as a miracle – the success, he said, was “science at its best”. The history of CAR (for “chimeric antigen receptor”) T-cell therapy is one of small discoveries accumulating over decades, leading to major advances in patient care. Pioneered in the 1990s, the therapy has exploded in the past decade. Four CAR T-cell therapies have been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration for use in Australia since 2018. All are for blood cancers. The success of those therapies is increasing enthusiasm among researchers and clinicians that CAR T-cell therapies will soon become a major weapon …

Mercury has a 10-mile-thick layer of diamonds under its surface

Mercury has a 10-mile-thick layer of diamonds under its surface

Published by Jenni Sidey

Mercury does not look like a world built for extravagance. It is small, battered, sun-scorched and gray. Yet far below that dark surface, the innermost planet may hold one of the stranger planetary treasures in the solar system: a layer of diamond formed under conditions unlike those on Earth. That possibility emerges from a new analysis of Mercury’s interior, built on data from NASA’s MESSENGER mission and laboratory experiments designed to recreate the planet’s deep past. The work suggests that carbon inside Mercury may not be sitting only in the form of graphite, the soft mineral long tied to the planet’s unusually dark crust. Some of it may have ended up as diamond at the boundary between Mercury’s mantle and core. “We calculate that, given the new estimate of the pressure at the mantle-core boundary, and knowing that Mercury is a carbon-rich planet, the carbon-bearing mineral that would form at the interface between mantle and core is diamond and not graphite,” said Olivier Namur, an associate professor at KU Leuven. The proposed layer is not …