Tech Spite

Whether you need a portable machine to take with you on vacation or you're already thinking about sending your college student back to school with a new laptop, now's a great time to get a laptop deal. We’ve compiled the absolute best laptop deals of the week in addition to a selection of perpetual favorites for the best cheap laptops. Purchasing a new laptop can be an often confusing task of comparing storage, memory, processing power and features, but our guide below will help you find the best laptop deals and get the most for your money. From huge names like Dell to lesser known brands like Acer, you’re sure to come away happy with these bargains. At the top of the page, you'll find our selection of the very latest and best cheap laptop deals of the week. Beneath those, you'll find our pick of the latest best cheap laptops along with their lowest available prices. The best laptop deal of the week More top cheap laptop deals of the week Where to find the best la...

As technology continues to progress, we audiophiles haven’t changed a bit: At the end of the day, we want our sound clear, full, and true to the original source.  Finding a set of speakers that checks our laundry list of requirements, however, is much easier said than done.  To find the best stereo speakers on the market, we reached out to some of the best audio companies on Earth to review and test a wide variety of stereo speaker setups, ranging from compact bookshelf speakers to room-dominating towers with built-in subs. We will be reviewing more units in the future and adding them to this list, so keep your eyes (and ears) peeled for that.  The testing process In testing these speakers, we compared each stereo set at a comparable power level and tested the same tunes, plucked a variety of music genres.  Our test songs spanned the dynamic range of music and artists, from John Mayer to Tom Petty, and from U.K. prog-metal band TesseracT to the likes of John Wil...

Even though the Xbox One is approaching its fifth birthday (which makes it positively geriatric in console years) we think it's just reaching its peak. With a strong library of games and services to offer and lots more exciting new games in the pipeline, we think the Xbox One family of consoles has a lot of life in it yet.  Although the Xbox One receives criticism for its first-party lineup, it does have some unmissable genre-defining exclusives which include the Forza, Halo, Gears of War and Sea of Thieves series. And with the 4K capabilities of the Xbox One X , these games are looking better than ever.  Aside from its AAA releases, Xbox One is also a great place to find high-quality indie games thanks to its ID@Xbox program which has made titles like Ori and the Blind Forest and Cuphead absolutely essential plays for this generation.  It's from this massive collection of titles that we compiled our list of the best games on the Xbox One - 25 essential games we th...

In 2017, Intel reacted to the threat of Threadripper by pumping out high core count (HCC) Skylake-X processors in the consumer space. And, while processors like the Core i9-7980XE outperformed the highest-end Ryzen Threadripper 1950X , they were also much more expensive, leading more enthusiast consumers to go with AMD’s high-end desktop (HEDT) solution.  While we know that Threadripper 2nd Generation is coming, Intel has been pretty quiet about its next generation (HEDT) processors. However, we recently got our hands on some leaked roadmaps that suggest that Intel will be releasing its next HEDT platform soon later this year. Whether this “Basin Falls Refresh” is Cascade Lake-X remains to be seen, though.  Unlike last year, where Intel announced and then released Skylake-X processors at Computex 2017 , all we saw at Computex 2018 was a vague 28-core processor. While Intel has since clarified that this 28-core behemoth was running on a 14nm architecture and can overclo...

Before we dive into any of this, let’s just get one thing out of the way: Intel Coffee Lake-X isn’t confirmed to exist in any way, shape or form. This is all just speculation at this point. Intel has had a rough couple of years. Ever since the onset of AMD Ryzen and Threadripper , Intel has been on the defensive – haphazardly throwing out CPU refreshes to keep ahead of AMD.  Last year, when AMD released the first generation of Ryzen Threadripper, Intel responded with Skylake X , which topped out with the $1,979 (£1,649, AU$2,729) 18-core, 36-thread Core i9-7980XE . Fortunately for Intel at the time, it out-powered the Threadripper 1950X, but only just barely. Now, in 2018, AMD is poised to release the rumored Threadripper 2990X which, if rumors are to be believed, is a $1,700 (£1,300, AU$2,300) 32-core 64-thread behemoth . If it’s actually real, Intel is going to want to come out with something to compete.   Enter Coffee Lake-X.  Now, according to gossip around the ...

Remember how Intel was going to release Cannon Lake in 2016? And, then when it got pushed back to 2018? Well, according to Intel’s Q1 financial results we won’t see the long-awaited follow-up to Kaby Lake until 2019 – at least in a consumer-ready state. But, at least Intel is still on top of the processor game . However, before we dive into all the juicy Cannon Lake gossip, we’re going to take a step back, because Intel’s recent releases have been kind of hard to follow. So, in the past Intel followed a predictable ‘Tick-Tock’ release schedule, where generations would switch between introducing a new die process and architecture. This is why we all expected Cannon Lake to succeed Skylake in 2016. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, Intel changed things up by pushing Cannon Lake back and released Kaby Lake instead – an ‘optimization in a new ‘process-architecture-optimization’ release model. Ok, so the 10nm Cannon lake would follow after Kaby Lake, right? Well, that’s what you’d t...

Kodi boxes are a massive success no matter how you slice them. The best models deliver 4K video to your TV and allow you unfettered access to audio and video streams of every format and service. If there's a better, more versatile piece of AV software out there, we've yet to see it.  On top of giving you the capability to stream video and music files over a local network, the software also includes the ability to install add-ons to stream from almost any streaming service you could think of, including Amazon Prime Instant Video , Spotify and Netflix. One of the main selling points of Kodi is the fact that it’s supported by pretty much any platform you could think of, up to and including macOS, Android, Linux and Windows. The only real drawback we can think of is that Kodi doesn’t actually manufacture streaming boxes (no, the official Kodi Raspberry Pi case doesn't count), so you need to find your own device to run it on. Luckily, dozens of manufacturers the world over...

The company removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” from Wired https://ift.tt/2OB6uEa

The National Risk Management Center will give critical infrastructure companies much needed-support when under cyberattack. from Wired https://ift.tt/2LOKyGT

If you’ve been a MacBook user for many years now, you might feel like Apple has lost that edge that essentially propelled the company out of its dark ages. While they’ve been rolling up new MacBook Pro models (and other devices, for that matter) faster than our bank accounts can keep up – and some of those individual upgrades have definitely helped make for improved machines – those updates have felt a little hollow. Since 2016, Apple has taken a different tack with the MacBook Pro, focusing on features friendlier to the mainstream, like the Touch Bar, and even further streamlining its design, as with the removal of all ports but Thunderbolt 3. . It’s a case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and it’s been disappointing to seasoned users. Granted, the MacBook Pro 2018 has been upgraded to boast the 8th generation Intel processor and a newer, faster SSD that some have argued is better than anything else out there, giving it unprecedented speed. They’ve also upped the display with...

When it was revealed by Microsoft, the Windows 10-powered Surface Studio shocked the world. Fast forward to 2018, and we’re extremely eager to get our hands on the sequel. While the original was lacking when it came to ports, the Surface Studio could – and should – rectify this by coming with an 8th-generation Coffee Lake CPU and a 5K display. If Microsoft pulls this off, it could be the perfect competition to Apple’s iMac Pro . We don’t have much to go off of, though, as Microsoft remains tight-lipped about the Surface Studio sequel. However, we don’t need to know much to do some speculation, though, so let’s dive into what the Surface Studio 2 may look like. Cut to the chase What is it? The would-be second Surface Studio desktop When is it out? Possibly between September and November 2018 What will it cost? Likely as much as – if not more than – the current model Surface Studio 2 release date The original Surface Studio launched in late 2016, so Microsoft’s iMac compe...