AI in 2026 will bring harsher harms and huge gains, forcing business to prioritise governance, greener models and pragmatic industrial uses. Read...

Fire and Emergency says there is no fire at the site. Read...

Fire and Emergency says there is no fire at the site. Read...

CES 2026 is in full swing and there’s a surprising amount of cool stuff on the show floor, and it’s all pretty exciting even with high memory prices and uncertain availability throwing cold water on the party. Laptops in particular are turning heads, but there’s one trend that caught the attention of PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray: repairability. In a hands-on live-on-the-floor video, Adam shows how easy it is to user repair the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura Edition. He starts by tearing down the demo unit and removing the backplate for immediate access to the internals. The battery, SSD, and even USB ports are easily swapped out—and not only that, the laptop can be flipped over to pop out the entire keyboard. All of it is simple to replace. Everything is held together by Lenovo’s new magnesium-based Space Frame, which improves upon past designs with its focus on user-accessible parts. The one big downside here is soldered RAM, which is a huge bummer if you want to level that up later. But, to be fair, Lenovo is leaning into user repairs, not user upgrades. Overall, it’s nice to see Lenovo move in this direction with its latest ThinkPad, as user repairability has sort of fallen by the wayside in recent years (aside from Framework). And all of it’s here without sacrificing battery capacity, cooling power, or anything else. It’s a significant shift from just last year when Lenovo laptops got an F for repairability. That said, it is a ThinkPad, so it’s a business-oriented machine and the repairability is primarily designed for IT managers in large-scale organizations. But it’s a step in the right direction and it’d be great to see this trend extend into the consumer space soon. If nothing else, it’d help with the e-waste problem with laptops. For more on the latest PC and laptop ponderings, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube and check out our weekly podcast The Full Nerd. Read...

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The ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist may be a mouthful to say, but the concept is a simple one: it’s a laptop that can recognize you and swivels itself to face you. Why? Because not everyone sits at their desk. Lenovo’s new ThinkBook might be useful for lecturers walking around a stage or simply for those people who can’t help but pace during a video call. And if that’s not enough, the laptop can pop up at your command. If you’ve been following Lenovo, you probably are familiar with the company’s ongoing proofs-of-concept, which generally evolve into actual products. That’s the case for the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist, which my colleague Chris Martin of Tech Advisor saw Lenovo show off in 2024. Today, Lenovo is announcing it as a product, shipping in June 2026 for a starting price of $1,649. Lenovo has shown off similar concepts in the past: at CES 2025, for example, Lenovo showed off a display that could twist and track your face as you moved, presenting the display at an optimal angle. That’s the same concept as the Auto Twist. It swivels, and opens and closes so that the screen is facing you at all times. It’s similar to the OBSBOT webcams I’ve reviewed for PCWorld, which have an independent gimbal that allows the camera to twist and turn to follow your face. Lenovo’s Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist incorporates a “Space Frame” motif that collects all of the I/O components in the same area without needing to extend the thicker portion of the laptop across its entire length. Mark Hachman / Foundry While I didn’t have a chance to test the original proof of concept, Lenovo now says that the electromagnetic motors inside the Auto Twist are quieter than before. They’re certainly not silent, however. Lenovo also showed off the laptop’s ability to respond to gestures and even spoken commands. Otherwise, the new ThinkBook Auto Twist is very similar to the other business and consumer laptops Lenovo is showing off here at CES 2026. Inside the 14-inch ThinkBook is an Intel Core Ultra Series 3, code-named Panther Lake. The display itself is a 2.8K touchscreen OLED, with a 120Hz refresh rate and one capable of pumping out 500 nits of brightness. Frankly, I was surprised that Lenovo seems committed to giving this ThinkBook premium specs: up to 32GB of LPDDR5x DDR5 memory, and up to 2TB of M.2 2280 PCIe SSD storage. Of course, who knows what they’ll cost, given the ongoing memory shortage which has driven DRAM and storage prices through the roof. Inside is a 75 watt-hour battery, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth, paired with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports. The notebook weighs in at 3.09 pounds. The other side of the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist. On the screen some of the controls can be glimpsed including the laptops’ ability to use voice commands. Mark Hachman / Foundry I didn’t have time to really dig into the the ThinkBook, though my brief hands-on showed that it worked as advertised. I’m a little curious to see how sensitive it will be over time, reacting to minor head movements and glances between multiple displays. I’d also agree with Chris Martin’s assessment that it might be a little jerky when moving around the room, leading to a rough experience to whoever you’re talking to. Sure, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist might be a bit niche. Maybe even weird. But everyone still wrestles with laptops and webcams that don’t always show your face, directly facing the camera. Lenovo’s ongoing work in this area may continue to pay dividends down the road. Read...

Lenovo’s latest prototype rollable, the ThinkPad Rollable XD Concept, clearly demonstrates that Lenovo feels that rollable displays are the future — or if not the future, than a niche that it can serve while its competitors do not. Yes, it looks familiar: the ThinkBook Plus Rollable debuted in 2025, extending the laptop’s screen vertically upwards by about 2.5 inches. Now, the ThinkBook Plus has given way to the ThinkPad Rollable XD at CES 2026, with a few tweaks to presumably make the laptop more accessible to corporate customers. The key feature of the ThinkPad Rollable is that the extended display is functional in both modes, in both the “extended” configuration as well as in a “normal” laptop configuration. While in its compact “laptop” mode, the display actually wraps around the back of the laptop, creating a small rectangular screen a few inches on the rear of the ThinkPad Rollable XD. In this configuration, the rear display is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass Victus cover, which allows the laptop to be stored in a backpack or carrying bag without harm to the display. Lenovo also believes that the rear-facing screen could be used as a business tool, and the concept that the company showed reporters included such items as a calendar, various widgets, and potentially an ongoing translation of what the speaker was expressing in a different language. Lenovo didn’t state whether the ThinkPad Rollable XD would be a candidate for Qira, its AI tool that will debut on “select” Lenovo devices and Motorola smartphones, but it’s likely that it could be. Mark Hachman / Foundry Otherwise, the ThinkPad Rollable XD learns from its consumer-oriented counterpart. The laptop’s display also extends from 13.3 inches upwards to nearly 16 inches, creating an extra ribbon of screen space, or transforming a landscape laptop into one oriented as a portrait screen. Lenovo didn’t release specifications for the device, given that it’s still in prototype mode. But I was told to imagine it as a potential candidate for Panther Lake, Intel’s Core Ultra 300 processor which is debuting this CES 2026 as well. Naturally, Lenovo claims that the ThinkPad Rollable XD is still a prototype, and will remain so for now. But Lenovo has a habit of actually launching its prototype devices as finished products, so keep your fingers crossed that it eventually comes to market. Read...

A young family are redefining self-sufficiency by growing a new salad business. Read...

A day after AMD announced the Ryzen AI 400 (Gorgon Point) processor for laptops, PCWorld and a handful of other reporters sat down with Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of the client business at AMD, to ask about AMD’s client processors: its mobile Ryzen processors, the Ryzen AI Max, desktop processors, and more. Below are excerpts of the interview, edited for space and clarity. Client played a very minimal role in Lisa Su’s keynote last night. What does that mean? Tikoo: It was supposed to be about a 75-minute keynote, and client was about 15 of the 75 minutes, right? So if that gives you a clue, it’s roughly 25% to 30% of the time, and client business is roughly 30% of our revenue right now, right? I mean, so it’s an important part of our revenue profile, and it’s very, very important to us. This is just my characterization, but it appears that the Ryzen AI 400 is a modest upgrade to the Ryzen AI 300, which was a very good chip. How do you see it? I mean Qualcomm, kudos to them for continuing to fight the good fight. But you know, Arm is a big challenge in this marketplace, just because of the application compatibility, I feel really good about our [Gorgon Point] portfolio. Of course, we haven’t had a chance to get our hands on the competitive products yet, but everything that we heard yesterday did not surprise us, because, you know, we have our own market intelligence and what’s happening and what the competitive landscape look like, and so we didn’t see any surprises there. Based on that, what I would say is we have a pretty good head [of steam]. You had a certain number of design wins heading into the Ryzen AI 300, and a number of wins with the Ryzen AI 400. If you can’t give us specifics, which are larger? It’s about the same. What we’re going to see is about between the Ryzen AI 300 and 400 product, and the Ryzen Halo product, we have roughly a little over 250 designs that will be in the market. That’s all three chips. All three chips, yeah, roughly a little over 250 designs, give or take, that will be in the marketplace by the middle of this year, right? Because we just have notebooks that are coming out this month. Desktops will come out in early Q2. [The additional] Strix Halo is also coming out this month. Pro is March. So let’s just call it, the first three-to-four months of the year are going to be busy for us launching the portfolio. You mentioned the AI 400 desktop. It’s going to be a socketed AM5 part? Yeah. It’s a socketed AM5 part. I think the interesting thing about the desktop Gorgon part is that it’s going to be the first Copilot+ part, so the first part with a 60 TOPS NPU. We’ve been working with Microsoft and our partners on optimizing for desktop, because you can imagine desktop has a different set of challenges, right? I think we have a lot of opportunity in that space, and we weren’t there two years ago. We weren’t playing as heavily. We didn’t have enough of a portfolio last year, we had a really reasonable portfolio. This year, we’re going to have even better portfolio. What we’re seeing is a lot of interest in mobile on desktop, even small desktops and even in large desktops, they’re actually putting mobile on because the socket infrastructure is cheaper on mobile. Even traditional desktops? Okay, yeah, even traditional desktops, we’re seeing mobile on desktop now. It’s more relevant in the smaller form factors, like, you know, you have the one liter boxes, the eight liter boxes, the small form factor. So that’s where it’s more relevant, right? But we’ve seen all kinds of desktops use mobile parts. There was a time a few years back where mobile shifted into two categories, high performance and thin-and-light, right? And it’s sort of the same inflection that you see in desktops. Let’s talk about what the prices of RAM and storage are doing, and the effects they’ll have. What are your customers telling you about how they’re going to configure their systems? Are they going to continue on pushing upwards to 2TB SSDs or 16GB of RAM? It depends on the market segment. If you think about creators, they want all the capabilities they can get. Let’s talk about a car company. They’re designing a car. They’re running wind tunnel simulations on a car. Are they going to sweat a 20% or 30% increase in price and say, well, you know, my seven-year research on the car is going to have to be slower? No, they’re going to invest. Now, consumers, on the other hand, you and I, you know, when we sit at home and we’re using the laptop for basic internet, web browsing, or email, we’re going to have to make a choice, right? Do we really need the highest end components in the laptop, or not? Now, we do know there’s a floor. A floor has been set where people like 1TB SSDs are the norm. Nobody buys anything smaller, you know? I mean, even phones, nobody tends to buy anything smaller than a certain capacity, right? So, I think consumers will have to make a choice based on that. But I do expect gamers will continue to invest. Creators will continue to invest. There’s a rumor that AMD was going to launch a Ryzen X3DX2, which didn’t materialize. What’s going on there? X3D dual-cache, right? Stay tuned. Stay tuned. I just came back from Intel, where they planned to invest heavily into the handheld space, which you’ve dominated. They claim that you’re selling “ancient silicon.” What’s your strategy going forward in the handheld space? We’re very committed to the handheld [space]. I mean, we created the space, so it’s a space that we’re very committed to. Here’s the beauty, though, of AMD and why we have a much higher chance of success in that space: because of our console business, or how we develop semi-custom silicon for the console business. You can’t just use mobile silicon and put it in the handheld. You can, but the handheld or the consoles, they care about high graphics. They don’t care about as much compute, and they don’t care about the I/O. So, if you’re putting a notebook chip like Panther Lake in there, and you’re not purpose building it, you have all this baggage that Panther Lake is going to carry around their chiplet architecture. You know, the interconnects of the chiplet architecture, the I/O that they have in there. I mean, it’s a Swiss army knife, and it’s good for certain things. We can do that, too. In fact, we do that in the handheld space in some segments. But when you think about the core of the handheld space, they want purpose-designed, purpose-built chips that have great graphics technology, great software like FSR, integration with game developers on Xbox, PlayStation, etc. We can have high battery life, good fidelity of content, high frame rate, and we do that very well. Intel believes their low-power E-cores give them an advantage, as they extend battery life. Does AMD have a response to that? We haven’t seen any issues there. I’ll tell you this, Intel does play games sometimes, and it’s very interesting. We had a customer. They said the same thing. They’re like, hey, I can get more battery life with Lunar Lake against the 300 series. So, we’re like, okay, let’s do a quick experiment. And we did this in the lab. And actually, Qualcomm did a video on this too, because we didn’t want to go out and do a video and everything. Qualcomm did a video on this: Lunar Lake has great battery life when measured with MobileMark with the power connected. As soon as you go in DC Mode, battery life climbs and performance drops. The Core i7 performs like a Core i3. So, the E-cores are very good for efficiency, very bad for performance. We balance the two, and we’re already making those choices for our customers and saying, hey, you don’t have to worry about it. Can you talk about the desktop X3D processor and the direction that it’s going? It’s a very critical part of our portfolio. I mean, the channel market overall. If you look at IDC, the DIY market is about 30, 35 million units. And give or take, we’re close to 60 points of share in that market, right? We’re pretty high. And then as you look at X3D, which is the top of that market, we have over 80 points of share in that market, and it’s driven by the fact that there’s really nothing else that comes even close in terms of performance. And then with the new X3D part that we just announced, the new part to the stack that, with that boost clock you see on it, it now separates us even more, right? We used to be about 20% better now, or 27% better, when you look at average game performance, and so we’re very committed to that space. That customer base is very demanding, as you can imagine, right? And they’re very vocal. Do you have anything to say about AMD’s ability to supply chips to its customers? We’re using the biggest and the best supplier in the world, TSMC. And our Gorgon portfolio is based on four nanometer technology and is a fully ramped, highly yielding, very proven technology. So, we don’t have the same challenges our competition has where they’re bringing up a new technology. We feel very good about it. No challenges. Threadripper, X3D, and the Ryzen AI Max: these are all innovative though niche products. Does AMD remain committed to all three? We are very committed to those spaces. We’re very, very committed to those spaces. How do you see the Ryzen AI Max going forward? First of all, we will continue to invest in that space. That’s an important space for us. Stay tuned. There will be more announcements in that space over the course of this year. Our focus has been in ramping developers and gamers around that product. You know, thin-and-light gaming is a space where that product has done well. Creative users is another space that product has done well, and now AI. Read...

I’ve been using triple monitors for over 15 years, longer than I’ve been writing about monitors at all. And though some of the super-ultrawide gaming offerings have tempted me, I’ve never strayed, kept in place by easier window management and lower prices. But Dell might just have my number with its newest Ultrasharp design.  Dell is calling this the “Ultrasharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor.” That’s a mouthful, but here are the basics. The U5226KW is a business-class display with an odd resolution, 6144×2560. That “6K” number is meant to emulate one 4K monitor in the center and two 1440p monitors on the side, with the side monitors in a vertical orientation. It doesn’t quite match up perfectly — that works out to a little taller than 21:9 aspect ratio, with a slightly lower total pixel count than two 4K displays.  Michael Crider / Foundry So, trying to run games at fullscreen on this 48-inch-wide monster will probably cause said games to pitch a fit, even if you could get them to the IPS panel’s 120Hz maximum and take advantage of VRR support. But this definitely isn’t designed with gaming in mind, or at least not as a primary aim. This is a business-slash-media production monitor right down to its bones. Programming, data analytics, video editing, stock trading — any application that demands tons of screen space and typically needs multiple displays, this beast is right at home serving.  That includes multiple device inputs, naturally. The monitor can handle four virtual splits in its panel across two different devices simultaneously, with inputs spanning two HDMI 2.1 ports, two DisplayPort 1.4, and USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 with 140 watts of power delivery. That includes a virtual KVM that can let you share a keyboard and mouse between devices. The back panel, as indicated by the name, also includes plenty of extra ports: three USB-C (data only), four USB-A ports that max out at 10 gigabits, and an Ethernet port that can handle 2.5 gigabits.  Dell But wait, there’s more! That’s just all the stuff ’round back, meant for semi-permanent setups. A handy little pop-down expansion port includes two more USB-C ports with 27 watts of device charging, and one last USB-A port for the odd gadget or flash drive. Very cool. The little pop-down USB ports are kind of adorable. Dell Other technical details include a very mild curve, dual 9-watt speakers (hey, better than usual I suppose) 400 nits of brightness, a 2000:1 aspect ratio, and an integrated light sensor for automatically adjusting the backlight, laptop-style.  Dell If you want this massive monitor on your desk, preferably with some reinforcement for its 40-pound weight, you’ll have to lay down some serious cash. Dell is asking $2,900 USD for the standard package, though you can save a hundred bucks if you supply your own 200mm VESA-compliant stand. Considering you’ll need a reinforced model to hold it, It’s the rare example of an upsell that’s probably worth it. At least you won’t have to wait very long — it’ll be available from Dell.com starting tomorrow, January 6th. Read...