Just when you thought it was a near-extinct dinosaur, the Apple iPad Mini comes roaring back to life in a new, updated edition. It’s the first entirely new iPad Mini since the Mini 4 launched in 2015 (although that’s been updated over the years).  Still, it looks the same from the outside, and the main …

This week’s new iPad Air and iPad Mini are not the last word in Apple hardware before the company’s expected video streaming service debut at an event on March 25. The iMac line of all-in-one desktops is getting a series of internal upgrades, with more powerful CPUs and better graphics. While the new iPad Air and last year’s MacBook Air got big …

Now that we’re a couple of months into the RTX laptop era, it’s time to pause and look at how this first wave of laptops with Nvidia’s hyped-up new mobile graphics technology fares in real-world testing.  If you’ve been living under a rock (or don’t follow the ins and outs of PC component upgrades), Nvidia’s new RTX 20-series GPUs are the biggest …

One rhetorical example I’ve used over the years is that a laptop is a lot like a pair of eyeglasses: It’s practical and it’s something most people can’t live without.  But at the same time, it’s an immensely personal choice, combining the sometimes contradictory forces of budget, features and style. Like a pair of glasses, a laptop is often a …

The internet has many birthdays.  There was 1969, when remote computers communicated directly for the first time. Then there was 1983, when the TCP/IP standard was adopted. Today we’re celebrating 1989, the year Tim Berners-Lee laid out the basic concepts of the World Wide Web in a proposal, which included ideas like HTML, URL, and HTTP.  March marks the 30th …

Anyone playing the new Metro Exodus game on PC, as it’s clearly meant to be played, has run into a few roadblocks along the way. Not only are monsters and mercenaries trying to stop your escape from Moscow, but the forces of PC game retailing are trying to stop you from sneaking in a little playtime at work. That’s because …

Between high-end phones and international intrigue, you might have forgotten that Huawei makes laptops, too. It even makes from pretty good ones, such as the Mac-alike MateBook X Pro. One of my colleagues called the 2018 edition of that 13.9-inch laptop “the best little laptop you’ve never heard of.” The MateBook X Pro is back. It’s got the same name …

The three games in the Metro series, inspired by Russian sci-fi novels of Dmitry Glukhovsky, have long been favorites of the PC gaming crowd because they took advantage of whatever the top-end PC graphics technology of the time was. Both Metro 2033 (2010) and Metro: Last Light (2013) were frequently used to benchmark gaming laptops and desktops (including in the …

I had to look long and hard to find anything I didn’t like about the 2019 Dell XPS 13. Pressed to come up with a list, I’d say the woven glass fiber palm rest doesn’t look or feel as high-end as it should. The white backlight shining through white keys (on the white and rose gold versions) sometimes makes it …

One of the first things every laptop shopper should think about in a new purchase is battery life. After all, you don’t want your PC shutting down in the middle of a big meeting or halfway through a cross-country flight.  Based on the extensive battery testing conducted in the CNET Labs, these are the laptops with the longest battery-life scores …