Ben Funk
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Recent posts
Apple Mac Studio (2025) with M4 Max: Starts @ $1,999 ($2,199 As Tested) If you crave the best performance an Apple Mac desktop system can offer, look no further than the latest Mac Studio and its very powerful M4 Max chip. It has all the tools you'll need. Apple's M4 Max CPU is very strong Apple's GPU technology shows...
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All the hubbub the last couple of days has been about the Switch 2's preorder date, and how that's been delayed due to Trump's tariffs, but something else caught our ear during Nintendo Direct this past week. The company talked about "compatible" original Switch games working with the new system, in addition to the...
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The NVIDIA GTC AI Development conference started yesterday, but the big announcements are coming in fast and furious today. This one is all about some powerful AI development hardware, known as DGX Spark and DGX Station. These names come out of left field, but the technology upon which they are built is a known...
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SiFive HiFive Premier P550 SiFive's latest development kit makes it easy to develop optimized software for the RISC-V platform, on real RISC-V hardware, while sporting lots of IO. Fastest RISC-V cores available for the edge Plenty of external and internal IO Standard form factor Multiple OS options Mesa driver...
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When Apple released a slew of MacBook Pros and some of the neglected Mac desktop line on the M4 generation of silicon last fall, one odd exclusion was the MacBook Air. It's Cupertino's most popular notebook, by the company's own metrics, and its continued existence with M2 and M3 versions was a head-scratcher. Well...
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Apple recently put its budget-minded iPhone SE lineup out to pasture while simultaneously increasing the cost floor of its historically $429 entry level smartphone lineup to a loftier $599 price point. The new baseline is the iPhone 16e, and it also marks the first time an iPhone has hit the market with the company's...
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Rightly or wrongly, most folks historically assumed that Macs were the way to go, for digital music production. However, Windows has been home to just about every digital audio workstation (DAW) outside of Apple's own Logic and GarageBand. Even though Windows on Arm has been around for several years now, DAWs have...
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Branding efforts are tricky business. Choose an obtuse name and it can be tricky to know what you're even selling. Of course, Dell's branding hasn't fallen into that category, but names like Latitude and Inspiron can be tough to decipher if you're new to PCs. That's why the largest privately-owned PC manufacturer...
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NVIDIA has a history of making some small, power-efficient development hardware for AI developers, data scientists, and students. But get ready for something much bigger than past efforts. At CES 2025 during tonight's keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced a huge expansion to the company's previous DIGITS DevBox...
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To say that NVIDIA is quite an AI powerhouse is a gargantuan understatement. Most enthusiasts know the company for its GeForce graphics cards, but machine learning has driven NVIDIA's profits for many consecutive quarters at this point. The company's Tensor cores and GPU architecture drives all kinds of artificial...
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Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition Lenovo's ultraportable AI PC collaboration with Intel has good performance, a beautiful display and outstanding battery life Outstanding battery life Excellent, sharp, and accurate display Good everyday workload performance Very good thermals and noise levels Solid graphics for...
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It's only Tuesday, but it feels like Apple is going to be trickling out updates this week. Hot on the heels of the company's iMac M4 announcement yesterday, today we are treated to a huge upgrade to the smallest Mac, the Mac mini. This thing is packed to the gills with either an M4 or an M4 Pro SoC, a minimum of 16 GB...
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Qualcomm's annual Snapdragon Summit is currently underway in sunny Hawaii, and the chipmaker is hitting hard right out of the gate. The company is best-known for its Snapdragon SoCs in smartphones and tablets, and the latest iteration promises to be the fastest and most efficient yet. The Snapdragon 8 Elite bursts...
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Back in late 2021, Intel's 12th generation of desktop CPUs, codenamed Alder Lake, was a revelation. After years of mostly spinning its wheels and ceding performance crowns to rival AMD, Chipzilla was finally back on top. And aside from some modest refinements like faster memory support and expanding the number of...
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SiFive HiFive Unmatched Rev. B - $299 This early entry into the RISC-V software development kit space has seen a revision that brings its price down to an affordable level. Affordable entry into RISC-V Works with off-the-shelf components Plenty of PCI Express and USB connectivity Easy to get up and running Much...
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Apple iPhone 16 Pro (Starts at $999, as reviewed $1,099) Apple launched the iPhone 16 Pro in an unfinished state, and it remains to be seen if Apple Intelligence will be worth the wait, but performance is excellent. Outstanding LTPO OLED display with 120 Hz refresh rage Versatile camera system produces great results...
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There's an old saying with social media: the users are the product. That used to mean that if you posted on a service like Reddit, then your data would be sold to advertisers, either individually or in aggregate. That has only become more true with the advent of AI, as companies race to acquire the data necessary to...
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In case you've been hiding under a rock, Apple's Glowtime event happened today, and some of the early parts of that slickly-produced video presentation (who else misses live demos? Just me?) were dedicated to the newly released Apple Watch Series 10. The hardware itself may not be very exciting, but some of the...
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If the news out of WWDC detailing all of the things on tap for iOS 18 wasn't clear enough, Apple has gone all-in on artificial intelligence. Its rebranded Apple Intelligence has gone native, with last year's iPhone 15 Pro range and presumably the whole iPhone 16 lineup sporting on-device machine learning features. And...
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IFA in Berlin hasn't officially started yet, but so much news has come out of the pre-show already that it's like Geek Christmas. Let's keep the good times rolling with Lenovo, which has taken all the new Lunar Lake CPU goodness that Intel announced this week and turned it into some very sleek portable PCs. All of...
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HP EliteBook Ultra G1q (Starts at $1699) HP's first foray into Copilot+ AI PCs mixes great portability with high-end battery life and solid performance. Great CPU Performance In Arm Apps Good CPU Performance In x86-only Apps Best-In-Class Battery Life Top-Tier NPU Performance For AI Apps Lightweight And Highly...
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IT infrastructure and security systems built in the cloud are great until one of them shuts down your company. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike's marketing material says an average cybercriminal can exfiltrate data within 62 minutes of breaking in. However, it only took the company's cybersecurity suite about three...
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