Tag: review

Edifier Stax Spirit S5 Headphones Review: Great Sound, No Noise Canceling

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Sports cars tend to be less common, and more aspirational, than SUVs or people-carriers. Headphones with planar magnetic drivers tend to be less common, and more aspirational, than headphones with dynamic drivers. In some ways, the reasons for this are very similar. Planar magnetic drivers, which use thin pieces of metal held between magnets—are a bit like sports cars: They’re designed for uncompromised performance. Like sports cars, they’re also trickier, more expensive, and more time-consuming to produce. They tend to make the headphones that feature them bigger and bulkier than the dynamic driver alternative, which is the only place where my clever sports car/SUV analogy rolls into a wall.

The broad point still stands. Planar magnetic drivers tend to be the preserve of specialist brands and tend to be fitted to headphones costing a great deal more than those alternative designs that feature dynamic drivers. But no one, it seems, has mentioned any of this to Edifier.

Edifier was established in Beijing in 1996 and hit the ground running where loudspeakers and headphones are concerned. By 2012 it had wholly acquired the venerated Japanese headphone brand Stax, which, in terms of prestige, is a bit like the time Fiat acquired Ferrari. (I promise, this will be the last of my auto industry comparisons.) Now Edifier has launched a new pair of wireless over-ear planar magnetic headphones called the Stax Spirit S5 that are no bigger or more expensive than some of the leading dynamic driver designs. They’re fantastic headphones that bring music and films to life better than dynamic drivers can, and they are well worth considering for audiophiles who may otherwise have purchased wired headphones.

That’s the Spirit

The Stax Spirit S5 are not, it’s worth noting, Edifier’s first affordable planar magnetic headphones to go wireless. Where pricing and specs are concerned, with one notable exception, it’s hard to dispute that they’re the company’s most ambitious.

So yes, planar magnetic drivers: Unlike the far more common dynamic driver alternative, which produce sound via a conical diaphragm driven by a voice coil within a magnetic field, planar magnetic drivers use a tremendously thin, flat diaphragm with implanted wires. It’s suspended in a gap between two magnets that vibrate the diaphragm to produce sound. The magnets need to be big enough to cover the entire surface area of the diaphragm, which is why this type of design tends to be bigger and heavier than the dynamic alternative. It’s a more power-hungry arrangement too.

Photograph: Simon Lucas

In the case of the Stax Spirit S5, the diaphragm is a mere 2 microns thick and is embedded with the second generation of Edifier’s “EqualMass” wiring. By connecting different numbers of wires of the same width in a symmetrical structure, uniform driving force can be achieved; the diaphragm will move back and forth with the same momentum across its entire surface, keeping distortion to a bare minimum.

The esoteric nature of their drivers aside, the Edifier Stax Spirit S5 feature most of what the market tends to demand at the price. They use Bluetooth 5.4 for wireless connectivity, and thanks to the Qualcomm QCC5181 SoC they have codec support up to and including LHDC, LDAC, and aptX Lossless. With an appropriate source of music, they can deliver a lossless 16-bit/44.1-kHz resolution, as well as “lossy” 24-bit/96-kHz. AptX Voice is onboard in an effort to deliver optimal call quality, and multipoint connectivity is available for the multitaskers among us.

Battery life is a very impressive 80 hours from a single charge, and if you’re negligent enough to run out of power, a 15-minute pit stop will hold you for another whopping 13 hours. If you’ve an Android device running Marshmallow or newer, Google Fast Pair is available.

The USB-C socket on the right ear cup can be used for data transfer as well as charging the battery, and there’s a 3.5-mm input on the left ear cup for the same hard-wired purpose. Edifier provides both cables in the S5 packaging.

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August 2, 2024
MSI Claw Review: Don’t Buy This Gaming Handheld

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In the world of Transformers toys, there’s a concept known as “redecos.” This is when the manufacturer takes the mold for one figure but uses a different color plastic or paint and calls it a new figure. As I was testing the MSI Claw, a gaming handheld from a PC manufacturer, all I could think of was that it felt like a redeco of the Asus ROG Ally.

That’s not great because I rated the Ally quite poorly (though Asus’ new ROG Ally X fared a bit better). So we’re left with what feels like a reskin of a poor product, but other factors make the Claw even worse. Our review unit took some time to arrive at our doorstep, yet in June—mere months after the launch of the Claw—MSI announced two new successors expected to arrive this fall. Bizarrely, despite the poor reception at launch and the rush of sequels coming soon, the Claw remains for sale. So here’s a PSA: Don’t buy it.

Outdated Hardware

Where the MSI Claw differs from the original ROG Ally is minimal. It uses an Intel processor instead of AMD on the Ally, has a 53-watt-hour battery instead of 40 Wh, and the power button with a built-in fingerprint sensor is on the left instead of the right. Yes, there are a couple of other minor hardware differences, but the similarities are so much more prominent. The button layout is nearly identical, right down to the two rear, customizable paddles. It has the same 7-inch 1,080p, 120-Hz screen, the same 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory, and the same 512 GB solid-state drive.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

You can get a slightly upgraded model with a 1-terabyte SSD and an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor (which is the model I tested), but with the recent release of the ROG Ally X, you probably shouldn’t. The Claw’s replacement, the MSI Claw 8 AI+, has better specs and it’s not far off.

Frankly, I could end the review here. Hardware iterations might move fast, but it’s rare to see a company announce a product’s successor three months after the original drops. There’s no good reason to buy the MSI Claw rather than wait until the follow-up. But we should still talk about how this one performs as a baseline. And, well, the bar is already set pretty low.

Square One

At this point, when I open up a new Windows-based gaming handheld, I know to expect a lengthy period of wrestling with the interface to get even basic things working. I don’t like grading on a curve—the kind of user interface issues that get a pass on devices like this would be inexcusable on, say, the Nintendo Switch or even the Steam Deck—but even with my expectations adjusted, I was constantly frustrated.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

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August 2, 2024
Echo Spot Review (2024): Small and Surprisingly Helpful

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Amazon added onscreen ads to the Echo Show slideshows and even the weather report on my Echo Show 8, and they’re almost impossible to turn off. The Echo Spot, so far, is ad-free. There’s a chance Amazon could add these in the future, but I’m crossing my fingers this screen is too small to make it worth it. I would’ve said the same about the tiny real estate available on the Show 8’s weather page, though, so I know it’s not a guarantee.

The Echo Spot can also display your calendar when you ask, scrolling through your four upcoming events in a little list while talking you through it. Again, it’s a nice visual companion to the voice assistant, without a large cluttered screen. It is a small screen, so you can’t read it from super far away, but I found it handy to read while at my desk or listen to while I got dressed.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The only thing missing is smart home control. Unlike regular smart displays or the newer Hub (8/10, WIRED Recommends), the Echo Spot doesn’t have a smart home control area on the menu, and I can access rooms or devices only via voice request. It does pull up a little power button onscreen when you ask to control a specific room or device, like “turn on my kitchen,” which you can then tap on and off. But there’s no way to access devices or rooms without first using your voice.

While I like seeing the widgets and having smart home control on my larger smart displays, I don’t love how distracting a smart display can be in my office or my living room. The scrolling screen is constantly catching my eye when I’d rather not look at it, and often isn’t showing me something I need to see right then. The Echo Spot’s balance of screen info without rolling clutter makes it a great addition almost anywhere in the house.

Sound Off

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The only thing that the Echo Spot lacks is, unfortunately, good sound.

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August 2, 2024
Asus Chromebook CM14 Review: An Uber-Cheap Laptop

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The good news is that the keyboard and trackpad are pretty good here. The Chromebook CM14 offers a comfortable typing experience, and the trackpad is spacious, though the material Asus uses has a little more drag than I’d like. They’re backed up by a solid base to the laptop without any flex during normal use.

You get a full 1,920 x 1,080-pixel resolution on the 14-inch screen, though Asus has display scaling set out of the box so it looks more like a 1,536 x 864-pixel screen. You can adjust the scaling back down to native resolution and it looks suitably crisp. However, I can’t say the same about the washed-out colors, dim max brightness, and poor viewing angles of the TN display.

Photograph: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster

If there’s one superpower the MediaTek platform brings to the CM14, it’s efficiency. I was impressed with the battery life I could eke out of this laptop, clocking in around 10 to 11 hours of mixed use throughout a normal workday. Asus claims you can get up to 15 hours of battery life, so you may be able to squeeze out even more depending on how you use it.

The webcam isn’t anything special, giving you a 720p shooter that looks OK on video calls. You get a physical switch to block it for extra privacy, which is a nice touch. Ports are also relatively good for the price. There are two USB-C ports, one USB-A port, a 3.5-mm headphone jack, and one microSD card slot. The microSD slot is handy if you want extra storage, as the 64 GB of built-in storage is sure to become restrictive.

Hunt for Sales

So should you buy the Asus Chromebook CM14? Maybe. When you dip into the budget range, there are always trade-offs, and they’re evident in the poor display and performance struggles. However, bright spots like great battery life, a solid build, and a good keyboard make the CM14 a Chromebook worth considering if you can get by with the most basic of basics.

What makes this a tough decision is the aggressive pricing I’ve seen on more capable Chromebook Plus laptops, which start at $399 but are frequently on sale for much less. At the Chromebook CM14’s full $299 price, it’s worth considering whether you can pick up a more powerful option, like the Acer Chromebook Plus 514, by spending a little extra when it’s on sale. That said, I’ve seen the CM14 dip to $180 when it’s on sale, and it’s absolutely a great buy at that price.

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August 1, 2024
LG C4 OLED Review: The Best High-End TV for Most People

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The C4 supports Dolby Vision and other leading forms of HDR, which means you get excellent color highlights when watching HDR-enabled content. I was particularly wowed by the performance when streaming the latest Dune film, which has exceptional color grading. It also does super well with darker content, like any Game of Thrones or Star Wars episodes that you might find annoying to watch elsewhere.

Speaking of color: This TV is finally bright enough to compete with the LED displays from Samsung and others. It peaks at more than 1,000 nits, which is eye-watering stuff in most instances. You can place it in a well-lit room with no fear. I did find that the panel can get a bit wonky when viewed from extreme side angles—another reviewer called it a bit green from the side, but I see more of a teal blue tint—so I wouldn’t pick this if you plan on having a lot of seating at the edges of your space.

You’ll want to upgrade your audio. Down-firing speakers don’t sound particularly awesome on any TV, and the C4 is no exception, but the TV can sync up with soundbars (like the pictured LG S95TR) in order to help contribute to a larger soundstage. That’s a nice option for folks who like to same-brand their purchases and are doing a whole-theater upgrade. Just remember to buy a soundbar or outboard speaker system for a TV like this, or you’re missing out on the real theater-like experience it can provide.

Exceptional Picture, Normal Money

When I think about just how good this TV looks, whether I’m in gaming mode, sport mode, or filmmaker mode, I am astonished that the price starts well below the $2,000 mark. This TV would have easily been tens of thousands of dollars just a few years ago, not that the technology it uses even existed.

It used to be that you had to make compromises to color, brightness, or backlighting to get a TV that could play games as well as it could play Spielberg, but that is no longer the case. With the C4, you can plug in and play your gaming PC with equal perfection as you can with a 4K Blu-Ray player and your favorite releases. Soon enough, the differences between gaming monitors and TVs will disappear completely.

For now, if you’re looking for an excellent viewing experience and are willing to spend more than a thousand bucks for a TV—lest we forget, you can get also-great models for well under that—you really won’t find many models, at any price, that look better than the LG C4. Given how things have gone, I expect to have similar thoughts about the C5 next year.

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August 1, 2024
Moog Muse Review: A Machine for Musical Inspiration

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In 2018 Moog introduced its first analog polysynth in nearly three decades, the Moog One. It’s an enormous, intimidating beast designed to allow musicians to play multiple analog synth voices at the same time. Even more daunting than the front panel filled with controls is the price. When it was originally released the Moog One came in eight- and 16-voice flavors at $5,999 and $7,999 respectively. Since then the Moog One 8 has been discontinued, and the 16-voice version has jumped in price to $10,000, leaving an enormous gap in Moog’s analog synth lineup.

The Muse is an attempt to plug that gap and make a Moog polysynth more attainable. This $3,499 eight-voice bi-timbral analog machine has two oscillators, a mod oscillator, three low-frequency oscillators (LFOs), two filters, two envelopes, a digital delay, and aftertouch (though not polyphonic). There are more feature-rich synths out there, but this is still a pretty solid core with a lot of flexibility. Besides, there’s one thing that the Muse has over those other synths: It’s a Moog.

Classic Sound

There is something about the sound of a Moog synthesizer. There are plenty of synths out there that do an admirable job of emulating the iconic sound of a Moog bass, but they can never quite stand toe-to-toe with the real deal.

I was reminded of this multiple times during my testing. I played the Moog Muse side by side with a number of different instruments, ranging from the Korg Monologue and Minilogue XD to the Novation BassStation II and the Arturia Polybrute 12. There is just something about the sound of a Moog oscillator and its iconic ladder filter that feels bigger and warmer than almost anything I’ve ever played.

Photograph: Moog

Part of that is due to the particular characteristics of the oscillators here, which are based on the Minimoog Voyager. They are not just analog, but aggressively so; where other modern analog polysynths do everything in their power to stay perfectly in tune, treating natural analog drift as something to be dialed in to taste, the Muse leans into its natural imperfections, giving it a lot of character and body.

It’s easy, with eight voices at your disposal, to assume you should be using the Muse to play chords and pads, but don’t ignore the bass on this thing. It is massive, putting basically every other polysynth I’ve played to shame. It’s especially absurd when you stack all eight voices in unison mode. This thing may be built with pads and key sounds in mind, but it’s every bit a beast on bass and leads as you’d expect a Moog to be.

Of course, you have plenty of other, cheaper options for beefy mono synths. To justify the price the Muse has to deliver on more complicated and wide-ranging sounds. Thankfully it excels at epic pads, cinematic strings, and plucky keys as well.

The sound-shaping options here are pretty robust. The dedicated mod oscillator can control pitch, the filter, or pulse width, or even be turned into a third audio rate oscillator. Its tuning isn’t quite as stable as the main oscillators though, which makes it great for getting queasy and dissonant.

There are also ring mod and FM (frequency modulation) circuits for turning that analog warmth into clanging and metallic bells and plucks and an overload circuit for adding even more grit. Plus, there are three LFOs and two envelopes, and all of these can be connected through the 16-slot modulation matrix to create complex sounds ranging from chaotic EDM bass to long-evolving soundscapes.

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July 31, 2024
Linner Mars Review: Great Hearing Aids for Streaming Media

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I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hearing aid that looks quite like Linner’s Mars devices. Depending on your point of view, that’s either a good or bad thing.

Let’s start by getting the appearance out of the way. The Mars hearing aids are in-ear devices designed to look and feel like an earbud, and they make no effort trying to be discreet. Each aid is bright white with a strip of color across the outward-facing side—blue for left, orange for right—and these strips include a tiny LED that illuminates when charging and pairing via Bluetooth. (The units are also available in “cosmic blue.”)

More immediately noticeable is the rubber hook that sticks up from the top of each aid. This horn-like “ear fin” wedges into your ear and helps hold the device in place, following the contour of the concha. While the hook largely disappears when worn, the hearing aid itself is bulbous and quite visible (you can remove the ear fin if it’s bothersome). At 5.52 grams each, they’re the second-heaviest hearing aids I’ve encountered.

Photograph: Christopher Null

Despite being a low-cost offering, the Linner Mars hearing aids come with support for Linner’s mobile app and pull double duty as robust media-streaming Bluetooth earbuds. Again, for a relatively entry-level product, there’s quite a lot to explore here, including independent volume controls for each aid, four operational modes (dialog, restaurant, commute, and outdoor), and a “focus mode” that allows the aids to directionally focus on sound coming from in front of you.

An “advanced settings” button gives you access to an equalizer of sorts, though it’s rather obtuse and takes a bit of trial and error to figure out what sounds best. Each ear can be tuned separately along five dimensions: overall, thickness, fullness, clarity, and transparency, with weightings of -3 to +3 for each. What do these settings mean? I haven’t had much luck figuring that out. Each changes the audio experience but in a way that is difficult to fully explain, either introducing or removing a slight level of hiss at a different pitch. User experimentation is clearly in order, but the impact isn’t significant enough to merit investing a lot of time.

You can feel a much more powerful influence by tweaking the three levels of noise reduction, though the higher levels tend to mute sounds you probably want to hear (namely voices). The higher you go, however, the lower the amount of hiss you’ll experience. There’s fortunately not a lot of hiss to contend with throughout the user experience, but it did tend to be present even at low volumes and in all types of settings.

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June 25, 2024
Tropf-Blumat Watering System Review: Key to My Gardening Success

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A couple summers ago, I started to have a plant problem on my roof deck. Specifically, I had no reliable way to water my herb garden for an extended period of time. Yes, I could ask my neighbors to do it once in a while, but I’m gone a lot and didn’t want to blow all of my goodwill credit in one place.

My setup posed problems, too. It’s a garden in pots, troughs, and planters—known as a container garden—that follows the periphery of my 10- by 17-foot deck. A sprinkler on a timer wouldn’t work, because I didn’t want to soak my entire deck and waste water, and watering spikes or globes wouldn’t last long enough. Plus, I had a variety of sizes of pots and planters, ranging from four 20-liter galvanized tubs to a pair of 100-gallon troughs, along with a 1-cubic-foot ceramic pot that isolates my mint, and a mini trough for my sage.

Altogether, it’s a nice little setup, but everything has different watering needs. Talking to people in garden centers confirmed there weren’t many options for the kind of automated watering I wanted to do.

Drip Drop

Ludicrous amounts of research later, I zeroed in on a solution. An Austrian company named Blumat has a system that uses a spike-shaped sensor (called a “carrot,” more colloquially) that has a ceramic cone under a sealed water chamber. The whole thing is capped with a diaphragm that’s connected to a tiny valve at the very top, making it like an autonomous, fancy, sealed, freestanding valve that controls flow through a 3-millimeter drip tube. When the soil around the cone becomes dry, osmosis through the ceramic pulls down a diaphragm at the top, gradually opening the valve and allowing water to flow through the tube. When the soil is moist, the diaphragm rises and the valve closes.

Photograph: Tropf Blumat

There are lots of specialized Blumat kits and parts, and figuring out exactly what I needed was daunting, so I called Sustainable Village, a Blumat dealer in Colorado, for help. It’s possible to wing it, but you will likely benefit from doing the same.

This meant I needed several different parts of what they call the Tropf-Blumat system (“tropf” is German for “drip”), including the sensors; stuff called “drip tape,” which is like a soaker hose; and little strings of “drippers” that connect to the sensor and distribute water around medium-size pots. There was also a “flow reducer” that connects to the spigot and regulates the pressure, a pencil-thick rubber feeder tube, and a roll of 3-millimeter drip tubing that connected the feeder line to the sensor in each pot.

The Blumat site recommends the Tropf setup for “plants on balconies, patios, in greenhouses, and raised beds.” The representative guided me toward a pair of kits and a couple of individual items.

Photograph: Tropf Blumat

Some Assembly Required

When everything arrived, there were enough bits and bobs that it reminded me of an adult Lego set, complicated enough that I cleared the table and chairs out of my dining room, made cardboard cutouts of my pots and troughs, and laid out all of my new material. This was extra work, but it allowed me to get organized, since every installation is essentially custom. My 20-liter tubs and sage trough would each have one sensor to control the flow to a string of drippers to distribute water evenly. The hundred-gallon troughs each got an extra-large sensor that controlled flow to the drip tape that zigzagged across the surface of the soil.

After a couple of hours setting up, I turned on the spigot and held my breath. Some of the drippers began dripping very slowly, and some did not. Nothing visible happened in the big troughs for a while, as it took some time for the drip tape to start sweating out drops of water. Soon it became clear that by having one sensor per container, the flow to each could be customized. A plant that was particularly thirsty or sun-drenched got more water, while a slow-sippin’ succulent in the shade got less. Over the next few days, I checked the soil in each pot and used the valve on top of each sensor to adjust the flow.

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June 25, 2024
Cozey Ciello XL Couch: Fine—If You’ve Got the Space for It

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I’ve had my fair share of gigantic boxes arriving at my front door. It’s the nature of my job. But despite checking the dimensions, and despite attempting to brace myself, nothing could have prepared me for the delivery of the Cozey Ciello XL Couch.

This sofa is huge. Dimensions vary by configuration (more on that later), but mine comes in at 148 x 68.5 x 26.8 inches—and that’s without the optional storage ottoman. Each section of the couch arrives in its own box, and mine had so many that I was able to fully lie down on top of the boxes.

A piece of furniture this big is bound to come with some quirks, but overall, the Cozey Ciello XL is perfectly fine—provided it’s what you’re looking for in the first place.

Modern and Modular

One of the biggest draws of this couch is its customizability. It’s available in three performance fabric colors and two chenille colors. I tested the sofa in the Gray performance fabric for a little under two months. You can order a swatch book for free to figure out which fabric you want.

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

I recommend having a partner or friend help you set up the sofa. Once you get into the groove, the couch is really easy to assemble—even easier than some smaller couch-in-box setups that I’ve tried. The covers and hardware ship inside the hollow seat, backrest, or armrest. We configured our sofa and assembled it piece by piece, then snapped the pieces together. It can be a little tricky to line up the brackets perfectly when seating everything into place, but take your time and you should be fine. Just be prepared to break down a LOT of cardboard afterward.

The performance fabric is fine. It feels a bit scratchy, but it’s easy to clean, and the removable cushions mean you can sort of wash your couch in the washing machine. The couch didn’t have an offensive smell, and it was pretty comfortable right from the jump. Which brings me to my next point—exactly how comfy is it?

Okay-est Nap of My Life

I’m an awkward sitter. I’m constantly pretzel-ing my body, draping my limbs over furniture, and folding my legs up as I shift in my seat. The Cozey Ciello XL made this simultaneously very easy and very difficult.

The seats of the couch themselves are great, if a bit crinkly-sounding. They’re deep and comfortable, provided you sit in the seat itself and not across the edge of two of them (in which case the rigid structure underneath you will make it feel like you’re being split in two). Unless you’re exceptionally tall, if you scoot all the way back, your legs and/or feet will dangle. The back cushions leave a lot to be desired. The back of the couch and the arms are both very boxy and low, so when you scoot back and attempt to throw an arm over the back of the sofa, it feels a bit awkward. The seat cushions also tend to slide forward, away from the back cushions, and the back cushions and arm cushions don’t like to stay in place. That means I spent a lot of time rearranging the sofa instead of just sitting on it. This same design issue means when you’re sitting side-by-side, you end up sinking into the person sitting next to you. There’s more than enough room for two people to sit at opposite ends of the sofa, but again—I should be able to sit next to somebody else without invading their personal space.

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June 24, 2024
Microsoft Surface Pro (11th Edition) Review: An Overpriced 2-in-1

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Ah, Surface Pro, how I’d forgotten all about your epic journey to get to this point.

Microsoft’s converti-tablet is back, again, and the excitement is palpable. Microsoft’s excitement, at least. This is the fastest, bestest, most AI-est Surface Pro computer ever, we’re told, all thanks to Copilot+—the company’s suite of artificial intelligence features baked into its Windows operating system—Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X CPU, and a collective memory that has forgotten some of the misguided Pros of yesteryear.

This is my sixth round reviewing the Surface Pro, which includes editions from 2015, 2019, and 2020, to highlight a few. If you don’t want to slog down memory lane, I’ll give you the highlights: Everything was fine until Microsoft decided to abandon Intel and the x86 architecture for an ARM Qualcomm chip in 2019, and then abandoned Qualcomm in 2020 for its own ARM silicon (which was developed with Qualcomm as a partner).

The TL;DR on the shift to Qualcomm in 2019 is pretty straightforward: Thanks to the ARM silicon, the computer couldn’t run anything, at least not very well. Windows has supported the x86 architecture for decades, but hardly any apps at the time were compatible with ARM-based Windows machines. None of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps would run on it. Users unwilling to work with the Edge browser had to use a dog-slow, emulated 32-bit version of Chrome. Oh, and it was twice the price of Microsoft’s other Surface product at the time. I predicted in my review that the Pro X would be discontinued, and after just two iterations it was, though ARM CPUs became a configuration option on the Pro line in the hardware that followed.

With the 2024 Surface Pro (aka 11th edition), Microsoft has returned to Qualcomm’s arms in full, having bought into the promises of the Snapdragon X, the “It Chip” that will bring AI into the mainstream via Windows. Plenty of other PC manufacturers are on board too—I’ve already reviewed the Asus Vivobook S 15 Copilot+ PC and will be testing more of these Snapdragon-powered machines soon. Everyone wants their piece of that AI pie.

Note, however, that even though we’re back to Qualcomm-first, an Intel option “for business” is out there, unpromoted. No one much cares, though, because you’ll need the Qualcomm version if you want to access Copilot+ PC features, since for the time being they aren’t supported on Intel. So score one for Qualcomm: This is the first time the company’s CPU can run something on Windows that Intel and AMD can’t.

Photograph: Christopher Null

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June 24, 2024