Ben Funk
Follow Ben on Twitter.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Right about a year ago, Apple announced the first Macs with its own home-grown processor technology, dubbed the M1. The first 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini shipped with the company's new wonder-chip, and even the base model $700 Mac mini knocked our socks off at the time. However, CPUs don't stand...
Read more...
The Left 4 Dead games were great cooperative fun. For the uninitiated, four players blasted their way through frantic zombie hordes in the L4D games, working together as a team just trying to survive. Developer Turtle Rock Studios, which was acquired by Valve prior to the release of the first game, re-established itself as an independent studio...
Read more...
Month after month since its launch in March of 2020, Nintendo has released new content for Animal Crossing: New Horizons like clockwork. The smash hit feels like a living, breathing organism all to itself because it seems like every time we look, there's a content update just around the corner. ACNH features special...
Read more...
The raid on this fort is reminiscent of infiltration missions in Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag A whole new crop of blockbuster games are lining up for a big holiday shopping season. Ubisoft didn't really intend for that to be the case for Far Cry 6, but early this year the COVID-19 pandemic had other plans. The game...
Read more...
Another Apple iPhone launch event has come and gone, with the company's latest flagship and mid-range phones already shipping to customers, arriving on front porches just a few short days ago. In a second consecutive year of component shortages, Apple's deep resources and influence seemed to mitigate any potential issues securing chip...
Read more...
Did you pick up a shiny new iPhone 13 Pro expecting silky-smooth 120-Hz animations and seamless integration with an Apple Watch? I know I sure did, but things haven't gone as expected on Apple's new smartphone platform right out of the gate. One would think that Apple tested its APIs with the Pro Motion Display and...
Read more...
Like many big tech companies including Microsoft and Google, Apple has a bug bounty program that pays big bucks for newly-discovered security vulnerabilities. The fees for confirmed reports of issues range from $25,000 for "limited" unauthorized control of an iCloud account, to a cool million bucks for a zero-click...
Read more...
Samsung has been refining its innovative foldable phone line-up for a couple of years now. While the first iteration of the company's Galaxy Z Fold may not have been terribly robust out in the wild, last year's follow up was by most accounts a solid device. This year, the newest Galaxy Z Fold3 5G seems to have it all: a malleable 7.6" screen,...
Read more...
Just because Epic Games got a big win against Apple in court yesterday doesn't mean that the fight over the developer's cash cow Fortnite on the world's second-biggest mobile platform is over. The ruling wasn't a clean sweep for Epic, but Apple has 90 days to comply with allowing third-party payment methods on its app...
Read more...
Apple's 4th generation iPad Air has a lot going for it. The A14 Bionic SoC at the heart of the device offers great performance in a wide variety of apps and games, and the 10.9" Liquid Retina display looks great under many different conditions. In fact, for some use cases, the iPad Air could rival a full-fledged...
Read more...
The original Nintendo Game Boy and its follow-up Game Boy Color weren't the first portable video games. However, they were incredibly successful and spawned many successful franchises, like Pokemon and Super Mario Land. For millions of Gen X and Millennial gamers, it was their first exposure to the wonders of video...
Read more...
The Surface Go 2 took all the good looks of Microsoft's more expensive tablet + keyboard combinations and brought the price point down to a very affordable level. That machine has been hanging around since its release in the middle of last year, so it's getting a little long in the tooth. If rumors pan out to be true...
Read more...
Intel's high-performance Arc family of graphics architectures resemble an adventuring party from tabletop role-playing lore or a classic turn-based computer RPG. The Intel Arc Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid delegation set off across a barren wasteland where GPUs are scarce to take on the mighty Dragon...
Read more...
Since its release, NVIDIA's Broadcast effects suite has been enhancing camera video and microphone audio for streams and teleconferencing tools using the company's machine learning hardware baked into the GeForce RTX series of graphics cards. Back when it was just RTX Voice, we found the AI-assisted cleanup tools did...
Read more...
More powerful, more capable and feature-rich -- the current crop of gaming laptops with the most recent CPU and GPU platforms can offer a major upgrade to the enthusiast laptop experience. That's especially true these days with discrete graphics cards being hard to come by and marked up by factors of two to three...
Read more...
Windows 11 is coming just about six weeks from now, on October 5th -- at least, on new PCs. One of the biggest pieces of application-related news was the ability to run Android apps directly in Windows. Thanks to Intel, Android apps compiled for Arm64 would still be able to run on x86 PCs directly from Amazon's App...
Read more...
Sony's PlayStation 5 launched in November of 2020 somewhat incomplete. While the hardware had an M.2 slot to expand the internal storage needed by PS5 games, the software didn't know what to do with it out of the box. Earlier this year though, Sony opened up a beta program with early access to firmware that can use that slot, and we managed...
Read more...
Windows 11's Insider Preview builds keep coming fast and furious. Just a couple of weeks ago, the next version of Windows made the shift from developer builds into beta, indicating that Microsoft thinks that it's time to let more people in. The Beta Ring gets fewer builds that have purportedly undergone additional...
Read more...
Laptops are complicated beasts. There's a whole PC jammed into the base of a foldable computer and as such thermal management is a huge challenge. To get the best performance out of a CPU or GPU requires giving it as much power as possible without overheating the innards or making the outside of the system too hot to...
Read more...
It seems that just about everyone's excited about Valve's Steam Deck, the tiny portable computer with big PC gaming aspirations. Right out of the gate, just securing a position to pay for one was a hot commodity on online marketplaces like eBay. That doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon, either. Already...
Read more...
While it may not have been the first 3D accelerator to market, the 3dfx (then, 3Dfx) Voodoo Graphics PCI was the add-in card that kickstarted the 3D gaming revolution. The company made its name on Voodoo graphics, but ultimately could not weather the storm of speedy cards that could process both 2D and 3D graphics...
Read more...
Halo Infinite is the first brand new Halo installation since 2015, when Halo 5: Guardians came to the Xbox One. To say there's a lot of hype around the much-delayed return of Master Chief after apparently going rogue in the previous installment, ultimately being recovered by Spartan Locke. Apologies for the spoilers...
Read more...
