These Sound Solutions From Motorola Are 20 Percent Off Ahead Of The New Year

Listen to your favorite tunes without wires in 2021! We’re all not quite sure what the new year will bring, but you can make sure it’s filled with your favorite playlists and podcasts with the right sound solution for the job.

And fortunately, as we’re all still a little tapped out from so much gifting, there’s a 20 percent off sitewide sale ready to help you ring in the new year. From Bluetooth-ready speakers to wire-free in-ear headphones, there are all kinds of options available on sale right now. Snag them now for 20 percent off with promo code HOLIDAY20 for a limited time.

Motorola Sonic Sub 530 Wireless Bluetooth Speaker

Don’t stop the music, wherever you go. This Motorola Sonic Sub 530 Wireless Bluetooth Speaker gives you 9 hours of powerful stereo sound quality thanks to the 5-watts speaker. It answers to voice commands like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, and it can also tag along to your next pool party or beach hang since its IPX5 certified waterproof.

Get the Motorola Sonic Sub 530 Wireless Bluetooth Speaker for $39.86 (reg. $59) with promo code HOLIDAY20.

Motorola Tech4 Smart True Wireless Earbuds

Looking for earbuds that do more? These 3-in-1 earbuds let you listen to up to 11 hours of quality audio via sports loop, audio plug-in, or completely wireless. The handy plug-in option means you can have unlimited playtime and you never need to worry about how strenuous your workout is thanks to their water-resistant status. There’s even a feature to help you find them if you misplace them, making these an ideal pick for those that hate searching around for their earbuds.

Get the Motorola Tech4 Smart True Wireless Earbuds for $67.96 (reg. 99) with promo code HOLIDAY20. 

VerveBuds 100 True Wireless Earbuds

Ditch the wires and take your music to go anytime with the VerveBuds 100 True Wireless Earbuds. They deliver 5 hours of playtime and 9 hours with the case, all providing superior sound quality. They offer hands-free calling, an ergonomic design that ensures a comfy fit, IPX5 waterproof status and the ability to use voice command like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant when needed, all with an impressive 4.1 out of 5 stars on Amazon.

Get the VerveBuds 100 True Wireless Earbuds for $33.56 (reg. $49) with promo code HOLIDAY20. 

Moto Buds Charge True Wireless In-Ear Headphones

Don’t miss a beat with 10 hours of battery life thanks to The Moto Buds Charge True Wireless In-Ear Headphones. These wireless earbuds provide superior sound quality for music and calls. Charge them on the go using the integrated Mobile-charge cable and then relax with these ergonomic, water and sweat resistant sound solutions. And if you are partial to a specific power option, they also include a USB-C cable and USB-C charging port to suit your needs.

Get the Moto Buds Charge True Wireless In-Ear Headphones for $47.96 (reg. $69) with promo code HOLIDAY20.

Motorola Sonic Sub 500 Wireless Fast Charging Speaker

If you’re in need of a Bluetooth speaker that does more, the Motorola Sonic Sub 500 Wireless Fast Charging Speaker is up to the task. Equipped with a powerful 5W RMS speaker unit with built-in subwoofer, you’re guaranteed to receive outstanding powerful sound, and the slim size makes it perfect to bring along anywhere. Aside from playing music, you can also take calls and use it to charge up your phone or headphones that to its 10W wireless turbo charging pad.

Get the Motorola Sonic Sub 500 Wireless Fast Charging Speaker for $42.36 (reg. $59) with promo code HOLIDAY20. 

Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information. For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.

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• ET Deals: $60 Off Apple Watch Series 6, Dell Inspiron 15 5000 AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Laptop for $499
• Keep Your PS5 Cool And Your Controllers Charged With This Dock
• ET Deals: $549 off Dell XPS 13 7390 13.3-Inch Intel Core i7 4K Laptop, iRobot Roomba i6+ 6550 Self Emptying Robot Vacuum for $549

ET Deals: $549 off Dell XPS 13 7390 13.3-Inch Intel Core i7 4K Laptop, iRobot Roomba i6+ 6550 Self Emptying Robot Vacuum for $549

Today you can get a compact 13.3-inch Dell laptop with a Core i7 processor, a 4K display and an aluminum chassis all for just $999.99. You can also save $250 on a new iRobot Roomba i6+ robot vacuum that has an automatic dirt disposal base station.

• Dell XPS 13 7390 Intel Core i7-10510U 13.3-Inch Laptop w/ 16GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD for $999.99 from Dell with promo code 50OFF699 (List price $1,549.99)
• iRobot Roomba i6+ 6550 Robot Vacuum w/ Self Emptying Bin for $549.99 from Amazon (List price $799.99)
• Oculus Rift S VR Gaming Headset for $299.00 from Amazon (List price $399.00)
• Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones w/ Alexa Voice Control for $278.00 from Amazon (List price $349.99)
• Apple Watch Series 6 40mm GPS Smartwatch for $339.99 from Amazon (List price $399.00)
• Dell Inspiron 15 5000 AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 15.6-Inch 1080p Laptop w/ 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD for $499.99 from Dell with promo code EXTRA50 (List price $629.99)
• Eufy Anker RoboVac 11S Robot Vacuum for $149.99 from Amazon (List price $229.99)

Dell XPS 13 7390 Intel Core i7-10510U 13.3-Inch Laptop w/ 16GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD ($999.99)

Dell designed this notebook to be a high-end solution for work and travel. The metal-clad notebook features a fast Intel Core i7-10510U quad-core processor and a 4K display touchscreen. According to Dell, this system also has excellent battery life and can last for up to 19 hours on a single charge. Right now you can one from Dell marked down from $1,549.99 to $999.99 with promo code 50OFF699.

iRobot Roomba i6+ 6550 Robot Vacuum w/ Self Emptying Bin ($549.99)

All robot vacs help save you time by cleaning the floors in your home for you, but the Roomba i6+ takes this a step further by reducing the amount of time you need to spend servicing the robot vacuum itself. Most robot vacuums can only hold a limited amount of dirt before they need to be cleaned out. But the i6+ has a charging station that also will empty the rubbish bin in the vacuum, which ultimately means you have to do this less often. Currently, you can get one from Amazon marked down from $799.99 to just $549.99.

Oculus Rift S VR Gaming Headset ($299.00)

Oculus’s Rift S VR headset was designed from the ground up to provide you with an enjoyable gaming experience. It comes with a pair of wireless touch controllers and has everything you need to run VR games — except a PC that is. You will need a capable computer to get the most out of this hardware with Oculus suggesting an Nvidia GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card or better. Currently you can get one of these HMDs from Amazon marked down from $399.00 to just $299.00.

Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones w/ Alexa Voice Control ($278.00)

With powerful noise-cancelling technology, these headphones provide a superior music-listening experience by eliminating ambient noise. They can last for up to 30 hours on a single charge, and for a limited time you can get a set of these headphones from Amazon marked down from $349.99 to just $278.00.

Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information. For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.

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• Keep Your PS5 Cool And Your Controllers Charged With This Dock

Keep Your PS5 Cool And Your Controllers Charged With This Dock

Are you a PS5 lover? It turns out there’s reason to be, as the PS5 recently outperformed the Xbox Series X in tests. And if you’re a big fan of the gaming platform, you know it can be a pain to always keep your PS5 controllers powered up and keep your PS5 system cool. Thankfully, there’s now a gadget for that.

The PS5 Charging Dock provides some handy services for either yourself of the PS5 lover in your life. And right now it’s available for 20 percent with promo code HOLIDAY20, making it cost an amazing $32.76 (reg. $89).

As this crazy year comes to an end, we could all use more distractions and fun in our lives. Let the PS5 Charging Dock make gaming a little easier for you in 2021. This vertical stand serves as both a cooling and a charging system. There are 2 cooler fans that keep your Playstation 5 cool and calm while it charges, and a dual charging station that lets you store and charge your controllers simultaneously without needing to connect the PS5 system.

The PS5 Charging Dock includes a 2 USB hub and 1 USB port for data transferring and charging. The controllers will be held steadily in place thanks to the vertical nature of the stand. And you will know when your controllers are charged up and ready to go thanks to the handy LED indicators that tell you if they’re still powering up or are fully charged. Red means they still need more juice, and blue means it’s game time and they’re all powered up.

Keep the games coming well into the new year with the PS5 Charging Dock. Keep your controllers organized, neat, steady and safe and make sure your Playstation 5 stays cool simultaneously with these smart solution. It’s available now for $32.76 with promo code HOLIDAY20.

Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information. For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.

Now read:

• ET Deals: $549 off Dell XPS 13 7390 13.3-Inch Intel Core i7 4K Laptop, Roborock S5 Max Robot Vacuum and Mop for $439
• This Ergonomic Mouse Fights Carpal Tunnel For Less Than $20
• ET Deals: $60 Off Apple Watch Series 6, Dell Inspiron 15 5000 AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Laptop for $499

Star Citizen Developer Unveils New Roadmap, Cancels Squadron 42 Beta

Earlier this year, Cloud Imperium Games, makers of Star Citizen, declared that it would publish a new roadmap, laying out both recently completed work and showcasing new goals to be completed over the coming year. In his discussion of the new roadmap, CIG founder and CEO Chris Roberts gave readers some specific guidelines for how much they should rely on the roadmap for accuracy:

Our desire is to show you four quarters of releases, but one critical takeaway is that only the immediate quarter in front of us has a chance to have a release view that will be hardened, as the deliverables that appear on the card for the quarter in front of us will have passed Go/No Go gates or be close enough to completion that we can predict their delivery with a high degree of confidence. You could say at that point that we have a ~90% degree of confidence that this deliverable will make its indicated release quarter. Once you go past the quarter in front of us though, that predictability and confidence for delivery will begin to degrade.

The roadmap, as displayed, is still only a partial document — CIG is showing the work of 20 of its development teams, out of 50 total — but it does establish a basis for concrete improvements that can be used to judge the game’s progression. One thing it shows is that a number of key systems are still quite a while from being ready to deploy, including:

• Looting and an associated inventory system.
• Healing (via using items)
• Hacking
• Dynamic mission system (allows missions to be tailored to environments)
• Bounty hunting (said to require “various new backend tech, including Virtual AI, the NPC Scheduler, and Security Service”).

In other words, CIG is still working to integrate what we typically view as core gameplay mechanics. While bounty hunting isn’t a core gameplay mechanic, the features it depends on probably are.

According to the roadmap, the work to “Designing, implementing, and iterating on Chapter 01 of Squadron 42’s single-player campaign” will begin in January 2021. It is unclear if development on the listed chapters of Squadron 42’s single-player campaign began prior to the publication of this roadmap. The roadmap lists 13 chapters out of 27 mentioned in the document, implying that these are either the chapters left to be finished or the first chapters to be implemented over the course of 2021. Roberts only promises a single-year roadmap and no item on this section of the roadmap extends additionally into 2022.

The long-awaited Squadron 42 beta, which was expected to drop this month, has been delayed into the indeterminate future. According to Roberts, “it is too early to discuss release or finish dates on Squadron 42.”

Roberts Pledges Not to Act Like CD Projekt Red Before Acting an Awful Lot Like CD Projekt Red

Most of Roberts’ lengthy update is devoted to laying out the particulars of how the roadmap works, how the company will update the document in the future, and how seriously readers should take the roadmap’s claims. When he gets to the Squadron 42 section, Roberts makes two arguments:

1). The game will be released when it is done, not to make a launch date. Roberts says the game will only be released ” when all the technology and content is finished, the game is polished, and it plays great.” He notes that over the past few years, he’s seen a number of games released before they were ready, and notes that the current holiday season is “no exception” to this problem. He pledges that the game will not be released in the name of making quarterly numbers or the holiday shopping season.

So far, so good.

2). CIG will not be showing any gameplay, locations, or assets related to Squadron 42 until we are much closer to the release window. Since there is currently no given release window, this is CIG’s way of saying it will not be releasing any additional material showcasing the game for the indefinite future.

Roberts goes so far as to say:

It is better to treat Squadron 42 like a beautifully wrapped present under the tree that you are excited to open on Christmas Day, not knowing exactly what is inside, other than that it’s going to be great.

This is spectacularly tone-deaf, given recent events concerning Cyberpunk 2077. The central problem with Cyberpunk 2077 was that the company expected and encouraged gamers to treat the game in the manner Roberts is recommending — namely, as one that’s so big, so fundamentally different, so advanced, it would break or redefine core genre concepts and impact the development of every FPS that comes after it. A game so big, we could all be certain it was going to be great.

Millions of PS4 and Xbox owners got an unplayable garbage game on launch day precisely because the company hid all the warts and problems before putting it on sale. Roberts claims that it is impossible to generate enough assets to show off a narratively-driven game before said title is 6-12 months from launch. This would be a good time to note that there are hundreds, if not thousands of videos currently posted to the Star Citizen YouTube account, most of which serve up small slices of content and explorations of gameplay mechanics.

I counted 720 released over the past four years. There are more — I just quit counting at that point. While I respect that Roberts’ doesn’t want to give away critical plot details, canceling the Squadron 42 beta and telling people they should expect the game to arrive like a beautiful Christmas present is asking a lot. Telling them it’s impossible to market the game because it might set unrealistic expectations when you’ve been aggressively marketing the multiplayer side on YouTube for over four years completely undercuts this argument. If it was acceptable to so thoroughly show Star Citizen, there has to be some Squadron 42 content that falls into the same category.

According to Chris Roberts, development on Star Citizen started in 2010, though it kicked into higher gear after a highly successful Kickstarter. What started as a single-player title with a fixed goal (and a 2016 release date) has since morphed into a “do everything” game, where most of the “do everything” is still under development. Squadron 42 may be released independently from Star Citizen, but it’s built from the same engine and at least some of the same underlying systems.

Roberts and CIG can truthfully point to the ongoing alpha releases as proof that Star Citizen is evolving, but the decision to cancel the Squadron 42 beta, combined with the declaration that the company will not be releasing gameplay videos, trailers, or asset demonstrations until some unknown future date “closer to release” does not inspire confidence in the final product.

Now Read:

• Star Citizen Developer Publishes a Roadmap…for a Roadmap
• Star Citizen Unveils $27,000 Content Pack, Because of Course
• Star Citizen will use Vulkan, not DirectX 12, DX11 to be phased out

Boston Dynamics Says Goodbye to 2020 With a Robot Dance Party

One day, robots may be dancing on our graves, and they’re going to be surprisingly good at it! Boston Dynamics, the robotics firm once owned by Google and now a part of Hyundai, has posted another fascinating and mildly disconcerting video showing off the smooth movement and agility of its robots. This time, the company put together a little dance routine set to the 1962 hit track “Do You Love Me” by The Contours. 

The song, which peaked at number 3 on the Billboard charts, is less than three minutes long, but it’s jam-packed with robots. The video starts with Atlas, a 6-foot humanoid robot that has previously leaped on top of boxes and done a flip, getting down with its bad self. The clever thing about the video is how it ramps up. You start with the single robot, and just as you’re about to get bored, boom, there’s another Atlas dancing in lock-step with the first. They’ve got great rhythm — digital, I assume. 

Again, you don’t have time to truly come to terms with the lifelike movement of the humanoid robots, because here comes Spot just a minute later. This quadrupedal robot is the only product Boston Dynamics sells to the public — you can get your own for a mere $75,000. Although, I imagine it’s not easy to program it to dance like this. Still, this shows how limber Boston Dynamics’ robots can be with a skilled operator, similar to the “Uptown Funk” dance from 2018. Even the clunky-looking Handle box-lifting robot joins the fun, rolling around like Big Bird on wheels. 

Boston Dynamics says in the video description that the demo features its “whole crew,” but there’s no sign of the classic BigDog robot that was the company’s first online hit. Presumably, it means just the bots it’s still actively developing. BigDog probably wasn’t agile enough to get its dance on anyway. 

Hyundai recently acquired 80 percent of Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million. SoftBank kept a 20 percent stake in the company via an affiliate but won’t have any say on how the company is run. Hyundai hasn’t announced any plans for Boston Dynamics, but at least the new management hasn’t put a stop to Boston Dynamics’ cheeky YouTube videos. The videos will have to do until we can all have robotic servants that definitely won’t rise up and destroy humanity while dancing to “Do You Love Me.” To answer that question: We kind of do, but only so we don’t have to be afraid.

Now read:

• Boston Dynamics SpotMini Robot Can Bust a Move to ‘Uptown Funk’
• Leaked video of ‘nightmare-inducing’ new robot from Boston Dynamics
• Hyundai Is Buying Boston Dynamics for Almost $1 Billion

Activist Firm Urges Intel to ‘Explore Alternatives’ to Manufacturing Its Own Chips

The Robert N. Boyce Building in Santa Clara, California, is the world headquarters for Intel Corporation. This photo is from Jan. 23, 2019. (Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation)

The investment firm Third Point LLC is pushing for Intel to consider splitting its foundry business from its chip design company. This seems to be a standard tactic for the firm, which has a long history of pushing various companies to engage in spinoffs, mergers, and acquisitions. In this case, Third Point believes Intel should consider spinning off its manufacturing arm. It anchors these arguments in the problems we’ve seen Intel struggling with over the past few years — the repeated delays to 10nm and the more recent delay at 7nm.

Some of Third Point’s… points are hard to disagree with. It’s true that Intel has struggled to execute in recent years. It’s been long enough, frankly, that “recent years” doesn’t really capture the scope of the problem. Intel’s 14nm was the first node to be delayed due to manufacturing issues, which means you can argue that the company has been struggling with node transitions for the past six years. That’s not trivial.

But there are a few specific reasons to think Third Point is stirring the pot. First, Intel has already stated that it’s considering tapping third parties for cutting-edge CPU production. The company is going to have to talk about these issues in its investor presentations in 2021 — there’s no way to avoid it.

Intel enjoys some of the best profit margins in the industry, and owning its own factories has always been key to that equation. At the same time, it was only by delivering higher-performing products more reliably than any other firm that Intel was able to justify the high cost of maintaining its own dedicated facilities. So long as the high costs appeared justified by high performance, Intel could argue in favor of retaining its own manufacturing. If Intel is unable to compete with the likes of TSMC and Samsung, how can it possibly justify owning its own manufacturing facilities, as opposed to agreeing to build hardware at a pure-play foundry?

It’s a fair question, but it oversimplifies the practical difficulty of Intel moving its silicon volume to any other manufacturer. First, neither TSMC nor Samsung has enough spare capacity to absorb Intel’s manufacturing demand. Intel could undoubtedly partner with TSMC on leading-edge nodes, in much the same fashion that Apple does today, but that’s going to require TSMC to build out larger leading-edge facilities. That kind of buildout can take 12-18 months, while a new facility may require 3-5 years of construction time.

Second, it’s not clear that splitting Intel’s foundries from the design aspect of the company makes sense for either. Intel’s manufacturing rules are specifically designed for Intel microprocessors. Intel does not always use the same design rules for a given node that TSMC did, and it emphasizes high-performance silicon rather than ultra-low-power chips. The company had trouble finding customers for its client foundry business because Intel’s design rules are restrictive.

A hypothetical spinoff (Intel Foundry) could continue to build chips for a chip designer (Intel Engineering, let’s call it), but Intel Foundry would have to overhaul its own fabs to appeal to other customers. That, again, is going to take time. Literally nothing about the AMD / GlobalFoundries spinoff suggests we should assume this will go well. It might be the right move, but it’s likely to be a costly one.

This slide was published before Intel delayed 7nm into 2022. It shows the pre-delay expected cadence.

Intel’s biggest problem is that confidence in its manufacturing prowess has waned to the point that conversations like this are happening at all. Semiconductors require long investment cycles that pair poorly with the quarterly focus of the market. Before it delayed its 7nm node, Intel had announced it would regain process leadership with its own 5nm node in 2023. Presumably, the best-case date for that now is 2024. If 5nm were to shift outwards again, Intel might need until a hypothetical 3nm to regain superiority, with an extremely theoretical launch date of somewhere between 2026 and 2028.

All of these facts are already weighing on Intel based on comments made by Bob Swan when he announced the 7nm delay. The case Third Point makes for a spinoff isn’t as cut and dry as the company would like to make it sound, but whatever decision Intel makes on these issues will have a profound impact on the company in years to come, for good or ill. We’ll almost certainly hear more about these issues during the company’s quarterly conference call in January 2021.

Now Read:

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• Microsoft Is Building Its Own ARM CPUs for Servers, Surface PCs
• AMD, ARM Both Increased Their Server Market Share in Q3 2020

190,000 Ceiling Fans Recalled After Blades Fly Off, Hitting People

Most of the appliance stories we publish on ExtremeTech are about various IoT devices. We don’t tend to cover the more prosaic side of the industry, if only because you’ll look long and hard to find a “dumb” appliance manufacturer coating their washer in an interface specifically intended to resemble human skin. Grab a basic toilet at Home Depot, and it probably won’t come with an integrated butthole scanner. Shoes you have to tie yourself might not be very cool, but you also don’t run the risk of bricking your footwear.

But — in this case — we’re going to make an exception.

The Hampton Bay 54-inch Mara Indoor/Outdoor fan sold through Home Depot and manufactured by King of Fans has been recalled. Due to a manufacturing defect, fan blades may not remain connected to the body of the fan while in use. According to the company, this may pose “an injury hazard.”

This is a very mild way of saying “Our ceiling fan may attack you at any moment.” One wonders if the company couldn’t have made more money by selling a “Mara 54-inch Indoor/Outdoor Random Attack Fan.” A ceiling fan that hurls pieces of itself across the room at random intervals is very 2020.

To treat the topic with a very slightly more serious mien, Gizmodo reports that there have been about 88,000 of these fans sold in the United States. Not all Mara 54-inch fans are affected. There’s a manufacturing defect in some fans that left their fan blades attached by just one screw instead of two. The only way to tell if you have an affected fan is to manually examine it:

There have been 47 reports of detaching fan blades, with four reports of property damage and two reports of people actually being struck by the fan blades. While the defect rate appears disappointingly low, the fan appears to strike humans at a satisfactory rate — if, of course, your goal is to create a fan that doubles as a pet threatener/low-key assassination device.

If your goal isn’t to develop an assassination device, well, then, the product recall probably makes sense. The instructions above will show you how to fix the problem, but if you don’t feel comfortable performing the steps or lack the proper tools, you have the option of contacting the company and returning the fan.

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• This Smart Toilet Features Personal Butthole Recognition
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• Nike’s Android App Is Bricking Shoes

ET Deals: $60 Off Apple Watch Series 6, Dell Inspiron 15 5000 AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Laptop for $499

Today you can pick up a new Apple Watch Series 6 smartwatch with a $60 discount. There’s also a highly affordable Dell laptop on sale that comes equipped with a versatile AMD Ryzen 5 4500U processor.

• Apple Watch Series 6 40mm GPS Smartwatch for $339.99 from Amazon (List price $399.00)
• Dell Inspiron 15 5000 AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 15.6-Inch 1080p Laptop w/ 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD for $499.99 from Dell with promo code EXTRA50 (List price $629.99)
• Eufy Anker RoboVac 11S Robot Vacuum for $149.99 from Amazon (List price $229.99)
• Dell XPS 13 7390 Intel Core i7-10510U 13.3-Inch Laptop w/ 16GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD for $999.99 from Dell with promo code 50OFF699 (List price $1,549.99)
• Roborock S5 Max Robot Vacuum and Mop for $439.00 from Amazon  w/ clickable coupon (List price $549.00)

Apple Watch Series 6 40mm GPS Smartwatch ($339.99)

Apple’s Series 6 smartwatch has built-in hardware for tracking your blood oxygen level and heart rate. These features as well as a built-in fitness tracker make the Watch Series 6 an excellent accessory for any exercise routine. This model is also up to 20 percent faster than its predecessor, the Watch Series 5. You can now get one of these watches from Amazon marked down from $399.00 to $339.99.

Dell Inspiron 15 5000 AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 15.6-Inch 1080p Laptop w/ 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD ($499.99)

Dell designed this modern laptop with an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U processor, which has six CPU cores and a relatively powerful integrated graphics accelerator. This enables the CPU to perform most tasks relatively quickly and even gives it enough power to run some games with low to medium graphics settings. The notebook also features an LED-backlit keyboard, which makes the system look cool as well as being useful while typing in the dark. Currently, you can get this system from Dell marked down from $629.99 to $499.99 with promo code EXTRA50.

Eufy Anker RoboVac 11S Robot Vacuum($149.99)

Eufy designed this slim Robovac with a vacuum capable of 1,300Pa of suction. This gives it the power it needs to help keep your home clean, and it can also last for up to 100 minutes on a single charge. Right now you can get one from Amazon marked down from $229.99 to just $149.99.

Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information. For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.

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• ET Deals: $549 off Dell XPS 13 7390 13.3-Inch Intel Core i7 4K Laptop, Roborock S5 Max Robot Vacuum and Mop for $439
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Comparison of Apple M1, A14 Shows Differences in SoC Design

Apple's new M1 SoC

Ever since Apple launched the M1, there have been questions about how the new SoC would differ from the A14. While the two SoCs are based on a common CPU microarchitecture, the M1 incorporates additional on-die functionality that the A14 does not, along with more CPU cores in-total and a larger overall die size.

TechInsights has published a comparative shot of both SoC dies:

Apple A14 SoC. Image by TechInsights. CPU 1 = FireStorm, CPU 2 = IceStorm.

Apple M1 SoC. Image by TechInsights. CPU 1 = FireStorm, CPU 2 = IceStorm.

Compared with the A14, the M1 has 2x as many DDR interfaces, double the number of high-performance CPU cores, double the number of GPU cores, and the L2 cache backing up Apple’s Firestorm cores is 1.5x larger than the A14 equivalent. The smaller IceStorm cores use the same-sized L2 in both A14 and M1. The NPU is also identical between both chips.

The M1 has 25 percent less overall system cache than the A14, according to TechInsights, and its overall die size is 1.37x larger. The increased die size is mostly driven by two factors. First, the M1 increases the number of CPU and GPU cores, the L2 cache, and the number of DDR interfaces. Second, the M1 integrates silicon that the A14 doesn’t, like the Apple T2 security processor, as well as support for standards like PCIe.

According to TechInsights, Apple used about 2.1x more silicon to implement 2x the CPU and GPU cores found in the M1. The slight disparity could be evidence that Apple used transistor libraries optimized for performance rather than power consumption with the M1, but there’s no evidence as of yet to support this argument, and the M1’s clocks are only modestly higher than the A14’s.

There has been a great deal of talk about the deployment of specialized accelerator blocks inside the M1, but relatively little discussion of what they are. We know there’s an image signal processor and Apple’s own Thunderbolt 4 controller, and there will be the usual storage and I/O controllers any chip of this sort requires. It is possible that Apple even implemented certain software functions directly into hardware to make them faster and more power-efficient. This method of using so-called “dark” silicon is something we discussed back in 2013 as one way SoC designers might improve transistor utilization without blowing up power budgets.

It is not clear if Apple took the concept as far as mapping specific applications into circuitry, or what functions the company has mapped to the still-unlabeled hardware blocks. Rosetta 2 is not believed to map to any specific hardware functions on the chip, and there’s no indication that the M1 is somehow cheating at various benchmarks by utilizing some kind of secret hardware acceleration beyond that which PC CPUs possess. The fact that the M1 continues to perform strongly under Windows 10 when compared against Surface Pro X also pushes back against the idea that the M1’s performance is being driven by specialized hardware blocks.

Additional analysis work will probably shine a light on these resources long-term, but it’s interesting to see the curtain pulled back on Apple’s first homegrown laptop SoC, one bit at a time.

Now Read:

• Apple’s M1 Crushes Windows on ARM in 64-bit Benchmarks
• Why Apple’s M1 Chip Could be a Real Threat to Intel and AMD
• Apple’s M1 Continues to Impress in Cinebench R23, Affinity Photo

This Ergonomic Mouse Fights Carpal Tunnel For Less Than $20

Working from home is tough. Aside from the struggles of dealing with kids and significant others and too many distractions, most of us don’t have ideal desk setups either. If you’re getting tired of dealing with hand pain and numbness, it might be time to upgrade your mouse. The Sinji Ergonomic Mouse can help with this, and it’s currently on sale for a limited time for the holidays. Give yourself the gift of comfortable scrolling and snag it today for $18.36 (reg. $33) with promo code HOLIDAY20.

The Sinji Ergonomic Mouse has a patented shape that supports your right hand and helps relax your arm in the process. Awkward working postures can lead to the dreaded condition of carpal tunnel, and this mouse is working hard to make sure you don’t fall victim to this annoying numbness and tingling.

The mouse helps support the hand, which prevents pain and damage while you work at your computer for long hours. And there’s a light-emitting edge the helps you work in low light on those rough days when you’re burning the candle at both ends.

With the Sinji Ergonomic Mouse, aside from benefitting from the positioning of your arm, you’ll also gain the ability or adjusting the speed of the cursor. This handy device works with both Windows and Mac computers, so it’s great for all users. And by adding it to your home office setup, whether you’re using it while working or playing, it will help keep your arm feeling healthy and comfortable as we go into 2021.

Get the Sinji Ergonomic Mouse for just $18.36 today with promo code HOLIDAY20.

Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information. For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.

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• Get A MagSafe Wireless Charging Cable and USB-C 20W Adapter For Just $27
• ET Deals: $549 off Dell XPS 13 7390 13.3-Inch Intel Core i7 4K Laptop, Roborock S5 Max Robot Vacuum and Mop for $439

Stadia Could Have a Huge 2021 If Google Can Just Focus for Once

Google launched Stadia just over a year ago to a distinct lack of cheers, and for good reason. There weren’t many games, the controller bundle was expensive, and the service was unreliable. Stadia has not been completely rehabilitated in the past year and change, but circumstances have given Google a boost. With more people than ever looking for a way to pass the time thanks to quarantine, Stadia has emerged as a surprisingly reliable and economical way to play the latest games. Maybe this cloud gaming thing isn’t so crazy after all. In fact, 2021 might be a huge year for Stadia, if Google can overcome its tendency to lose focus. 

Signs of Improvement

Stadia began life as a premium-only service, but Google opened it up to everyone as the pandemic lockdowns bloomed across the world. Reliability improved markedly over the course of the year — I’d say I have no issues about 90 percent of the time. That other 10 percent is usually thanks to the app on my phone needing a restart or (rarely) a problem with my network requiring a router reboot. Regardless, the latency and sharpness are both within spitting distance of game consoles. 

At several points, Stadia’s performance seemed to tank for days at a time. I can’t rule out something with my network, but the timing was suspiciously similar to Google’s Stadia bundle giveaways in late 2020. Google was throwing controllers at anyone who had subscriptions to services like YouTube Premium and YouTube TV. The spike in new users may well have contributed to my issues, but I still think this shows Stadia is working. A large user base is necessary for Stadia’s survival, and people are using those free controllers based on what I’ve seen around the web. 

Speaking of the controller, it’s even better than it was at launch. Initially, it only worked wirelessly with the Chromecast. Now, you can connect it to the Stadia cloud via Wi-Fi for smartphone gaming. The process is sometimes a little clunky in the app, but you get improved latency compared with a Bluetooth connection, which is how you play with other services like GeForce Now. 

The convenience of Stadia is starting to show as this never-ending year drags on. I can pick up the Stadia controller and be playing AAA games on my phone or TV in a minute. There’s no installation, no worrying about drivers, no hunting for sold-out game consoles or GPUs, and Stadia’s game catalog is getting competitive. 

Google launched Stdia with a few Pro freebies, but that program has expanded dramatically. Now, there are five or six free games every month, and there are some real gems in there. Google has also been running Steam-style holiday sales with prices on new-ish titles slashed by as much as 80 percent. You can even buy Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia, and it runs flawlessly. That’s more than you can say for the current-gen Xbox and PlayStation. On the PC, it takes a $1,000 GPU to get the game even close to playable. 

Getting It Together

Stadia might be in a better place than I expected it to be, but there’s still a long way to go. Some of the remaining issues are all Google’s fault, but some are beyond even its control. 

There’s no way around the bandwidth requirements — even if your internet connection is far above the 10Mbps requirement, you might find your game pixelates or stops working as local network conditions impact your available bandwidth. Unlike regular streaming video, there’s nothing to buffer in a game that’s being rendered live. Google can’t just wave its magic wand and fix the sorry state of internet connectivity in the US. 

Stadia’s game catalog is an issue, too. Yes, it’s getting better with games like Cyberpunk 2077 launching alongside other platforms. However, the back catalog is very weak. Awesome games from just a few years ago like The Witcher 3, GTA V, and Fallout 4 don’t exist on Stadia, and developers can’t just flip a switch to add games as they can with GeForce Now (which is essentially a virtual desktop). It takes time to optimize for Stadia’s custom platform, and that might mean some of these last-gen games fall by the wayside. 

Ctrl+f is not an acceptable substitute for search, Google.

One thing Google can (and should) address is the Stadia app. Both the web app and the Android client are annoyingly barebones. Google, which is a search company, still doesn’t have a search function in the Stadia store. You can look at various categories or just see a full alphabetical list of games, which is not very helpful as the number of games has expanded to over 100. Some basic features, like pairing a controller, are also needlessly clunky. And heaven help you if you want to manage your screen captures. You can’t even zoom on screenshots. 

Google is not alone in trying to make cloud gaming workable; Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon are also in the mix. Google has a bit of a headstart, but now is not the time to rest on its laurels. Amazon’s upcoming Luna service could be particularly vexing for Google. Amazon has its AWS backbone that will no doubt help with Luna performance, and the service will be fully integrated with Twitch. Meanwhile, Google has barely talked about the supposedly revolutionary features of Stadia like Stream Connect.

Possibly the smartest thing Google could do is to keep giving away those controllers in 2021. Unfortunately, it keeps ending the giveaways too soon. The recent Cyberpunk pre-order deal ended ahead of schedule after just a few days, but it should be doing the opposite. It should look for excuses to give long-time customers Stadia bundles rather than ending the deal when some arbitrary number of units are claimed. Google One? Free Stadia bundle. Bought a Pixel? Free Stadia bundle. Play Pass subscriber? Yes, free Stadia bundle. That’s a lot cheaper than handing out free Xboxes.

Now read:

• Stadia Is Now Playable on iPhone Thanks to Google’s New Web App
• Cyberpunk 2077 Has a 43GB Pre-Launch Patch, With More to Come
• Review: The Oculus Quest 2 Could Be the Tipping Point for VR Mass Adoption

Report: Nvidia Ada Lovelace GPU Could Pack 18,432 CUDA Cores, 64TFLOPS

Fresh leaks suggest that Nvidia’s next-generation GPU will be named after computing pioneer Ada Lovelace with an enormous jump in maximum GPU core counts relative to current parts. The leaks, written by @kopite7kimi, suggest the chip could pack 12 GPU processing clusters, 72 texture processing clusters, and a total of 144 streaming multiprocessors. Assume the company sticks with 128 GPU cores per streaming multiprocessor group, that brings Lovelace up to 18,432 cores.

So, nVidia's AD102 chip maybe is like:
12 GPC
72 TPC
144 SM
18'432 FP32 units
~66 TFlops FP32 power (on 1.8 GHz) https://t.co/A8OnUktE1s

— 3DCenter.org (@3DCenter_org) December 28, 2020

3dcenter.de believes the GPU will clock at around 1.75GHz (the 1.8GHz prediction above got trimmed back a bit). This would imply clocks roughly comparable to current chips like the RTX 3090, though that card can boost higher than Nvidia’s official clocks. Ada might or might not follow the same behavior.

The interesting thing about that prediction is that it doesn’t square with what’s been conventionally predicted for 5nm GPUs. According to TSMC, 5nm is only expected to introduce modest performance and power consumption improvements of ~15 percent and ~20 percent, respectively. The big winner on 5nm is supposed to be density, with up to a 45 percent gain over 7nm, though these improvements tend to depend on exactly what kind of chip you are trying to build in the first place. Larger, more power-hungry structures intended for high-speed operation tend to draw more power than a more modest implementation.

Nvidia’s huge core count expansion would make sense given predicted density improvements, but power consumption is a major unknown. The RTX 3090 significantly outperforms Turing, but Nvidia had to expand the GPU’s power consumption to do it, up to 350W from 280W. It’s not clear how much additional headroom exists to keep pushing GPU power consumption. I won’t claim to know exactly where the cutoff would be, but it’s difficult to imagine Nvidia shipping 450W-500W cards for consumer systems. At some point, Nvidia is going to have to limit its own growth. Intel and AMD will allow their respective CPUs to draw over 200W of power in short boosts, but they don’t sit at those TDPs long-term by default.

Remarks on the increase in L2 cache don’t mean much, at this point. If you scaled up Ampere from RTX 3090 to the 18,432 cores contemplated by this design, you’d wind up with more total L2 on-die no matter what. It’s an unknown whether Nvidia will adopt any of the features we’ve seen AMD deploy on its own RDNA2 architecture, like a large, on-die central cache (AMD refers to this as its “Infinity” cache).

Lovelace is currently expected in 2022. It’s not known if Nvidia will launch a true Ampere refresh cycle in 2021, or if the company will instead opt to launch high-VRAM variants of cards. There are rumors of an RTX 3080 Ti (20GB) and an RTX 3060 Ti with 12GB of RAM — an RTX 3070 Ti with 16GB of RAM would fit neatly in the stack. Nvidia could potentially pair these VRAM jumps with higher clocks or slightly more GPU cores across the new hardware for any 2021 refresh cycle.

We haven’t heard anything yet about additional features Ada might introduce, or where Nvidia will choose to build the chip. Nvidia began building its Ampere cores at Samsung on that firm’s 8N node, but there have been rumors that poor yields with Samsung pushed Nvidia to swap back to TSMC for future product launches coming in 2021.

Feature image is Nvidia’s Ampere. No images or mock-ups of Lovelace have been released. 

Now Read:

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• Every CPU, GPU, and Console Debut This Fall Was Effectively a Paper Launch
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Geekbench 5 Results Show Core i7-11700K Beating Ryzen 7 5800X

Leaked results from Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake CPU have suggested that the new core could be more competitive with AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series than what we saw with the 10th Gen family. New Geekbench 5 leaks, taken with the usual spoonful of sodium chloride, continue to point in this direction.

The new results show Intel’s Core i7-11700K outperforming the Ryzen 7 5800X by about 9 percent in both single-threaded and multi-threaded code. This is not necessarily unexpected. While Rocket Lake is still a 14nm CPU, it represents the first new desktop CPU architecture for Intel since 2015. It’s based on the Cypress Cove CPU core, which is itself a backport of the 10nm Sunny Cove CPU core that Intel introduced back in 2019.

A quick primer: Whiskey Lake is Intel’s previous 14nm mobile platform. Comet Lake is Intel’s previous desktop platform, with support for up to 10 CPU cores. Rocket Lake has trimmed the core count back to eight again and (reportedly) lowers the core clock slightly, as we’ll discuss.

The claimed clock speeds for the CPU imply that Intel has backported all of its IPC gains and only sacrificed a modest amount of clock to do it. WCCFTech reports that based on GeekBench 5 results, the Core i7-11700K is 1.34x faster in ST and 1.26x faster in MT compared with the Core i7-10700K. This is a little surprising relative to what we saw happen in mobile a few years back.

Image by WCCFTech

When Intel transitioned from Whiskey Lake (14nm mobile) to Ice Lake (10nm mobile), the CPU performance story was generally a wash. While Ice Lake / Sunny Cove CPUs were faster than the older Skylake CPU family in certain tests, the gains weren’t uniform. Intel only predicted a net gain of ~3.5 percent. GeekBench, however, tends to show larger gaps.

According to the GB5 database, GeekBench 5 ST can run 1.09x faster on Ice Lake compared with Whiskey Lake. Multi-threaded performance is as much as 1.19x higher.

The implication here is that GeekBench 5 may exaggerate the performance difference between CPUs like the Core i7-8665U and the Core i7-1065G7 — and could therefore also exaggerate the degree of actual improvement between the Core i7-10700K and the Core i7-11700K.

Higher clocks could account for some of the improvement, but as we noted at the beginning of this story, Rocket Lake CPUs officially clock slightly lower than their Comet Lake counterparts: The Core i7-10700K is an 8C/16T, 3.8GHz / 5.1GHz CPU, while the Core i7-11700K is (rumored) to be an 8C/16T, 3.6GHz / 5.0GHz CPU. It’s possible that Rocket Lake holds turbo for a longer period of time than Comet Lake does — and if that’s true, it would explain some of the performance difference between the two CPU families.

As for the 9 percent gain over AMD in both ST and MT, it’s not entirely unexpected and it may not be a good predictor of real-world performance based on the way GB5 appears to respond to Sunny Cove. The fact that GB5 might run particularly well on a given architecture is why we run multiple tests in the first place.

If we take the performance improvement at face value, it would give Intel some room to sell the Core i7-11700K at a higher price relative to the 5800X. Historically, this is Intel’s preferred move, but the company could opt to shake things up this time around.

A 9 percent performance improvement is enough to declare clear victory over AMD at the eight-core level, but it won’t insulate 11th Gen Core CPUs from AMD’s ability to bring more cores to bear per-socket. The Core i7-11700K scores 1,810 and 11,304 compared to 1,697 / 13,963 for the Ryzen 9 5900X. Intel wins ST by about 1.06x against the 5900X and loses multi-threading by 1.23x.

Intel will, of course, launch a Core i9-11900K, and we can expect that chip to modestly increase its ST lead while reducing its MT loss, but an additional 4-8 percent performance isn’t going to dramatically change the equation. Of course, this does assume that an application scales effectively to 12 cores in the first place.

The big question mark will be whether Intel can retake the lead in gaming performance. That’s a critical consumer market that AMD arguably snagged away from Intel for the first time in over a decade, and Intel will be very interested in reclaiming it. Again, as always, treat leaked or early results with caution.

Now Read:

• Leaked Benchmarks Paint Conflicting Picture of Intel’s Rocket Lake
• Microsoft Is Building Its Own ARM CPUs for Servers, Surface PCs
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ET Deals: $549 off Dell XPS 13 7390 13.3-Inch Intel Core i7 4K Laptop, Roborock S5 Max Robot Vacuum and Mop for $439

Today you can get a compact 13.3-inch Dell laptop with a Core i7 processor, a 4K display and an aluminum chassis all for just $999.99. You can also save $110 on a new Roborock S5 Max robot vacuum.

• Dell XPS 13 7390 Intel Core i7-10510U 13.3-Inch Laptop w/ 16GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD for $999.99 from Dell with promo code 50OFF699 (List price $1,549.99)
• Roborock S5 Max Robot Vacuum and Mop for $439.00 from Amazon  w/ clickable coupon (List price $549.00)
• Fossil Gen 5 Smartwatch for $139.00 from Amazon (List price $295.00)
• Dell OptiPlex 3080 Micro Intel Core i5-10500T Desktop w/ 8GB DDR4 RAM and 128GB NVMe SSD for $599.00 from Dell with promo code DELL50 (List price $1,070.00)

Dell XPS 13 7390 Intel Core i7-10510U 13.3-Inch Laptop w/ 16GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD ($999.99)

Dell designed this notebook to be a high-end solution for work and travel. The metal-clad notebook features a fast Intel Core i7-10510U quad-core processor and a 4K display touchscreen. According to Dell, this system also has excellent battery life and can last for up to 19 hours on a single charge. Right now you can one from Dell marked down from $1,549.99 to $999.99 with promo code 50OFF699.

Roborock S5 Max Robotic Vacuum ($439.00)

This high-powered robot vacuum has 2,000Pa of suction power and it also has a built-in mopping function to help keep your floors extra clean. The Roborock S5 Max also supports Wi-Fi and can be controlled using a smartphone app and Alexa voice commands. Right now you can get it from Amazon marked down from $549.00 to $439.00 with a clickable coupon.

Fossil Gen 5 Smartwatch ($139.00)

With its long history in the watch industry, Fossil designed this smartwatch as a premium competitor to other smartwatches like Apple’s and Samsung’s. This model has a 44mm case and it’s battery can be recharged to 80 percent with just one hour of charge time. The watch also has 8GB of storage space and 1GB of RAM, giving it strong performance on its own even when not connected to a smartphone. Currently you can get this watch marked down from $295.00 to just $139.00.

Dell OptiPlex 3080 Micro Intel Core i5-10500T Desktop w/ 8GB DDR4 RAM and 128GB NVMe SSD ($599.00)

This compact desktop features solid performance thanks to a six-core Intel Core i5-10500T processor that can hit clock speeds of 3.8GHz. It’s also easy to hide out of the way to leave your work area looking clean and organized. Today you can get this system from Dell marked down from $941.42 to $467.10 with promo code STAND4SMALL.

Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information. For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.

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Fusion Reactor Sets Record By Running for 20 Seconds

Most of the methods we currently use to produce power come with substantial drawbacks such as pollution or limited availability. Reliable fusion power could theoretically change all that. By harnessing the power of the sun, we could safely produce more power than ever before. The problem, however, is that fusion power generation doesn’t work yet. A team from South Korea just made a major advancement — the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device recently ran for 20 seconds. That might not sound impressive, but it doubles the previous record. 

The sun and other stars produce energy through nuclear fusion — the process of sticking together two hydrogen atoms (and later heavier atoms) yields enormous energy, and the byproducts are entirely safe, unlike the leftovers from nuclear fission and combustion. However, fusion only takes place at extremely high temperatures and pressures. It’s not a self-sustaining chain reaction like fission. 

KSTAR is one of the most advanced Tokamak-style reactors in the world. These devices use powerful magnetic fields to shape super-heated plasma into a torus (ring) shape. Currently, our ability to sustain artificial fusion reactions in this way is extremely limited. The best experimental reactors like KSTAR can only keep super-heated plasma active for a few seconds. The number of seconds is finally increasing, though. 

KSTAR recently maintained fusion plasma at 180 million degrees Fahrenheit for 20 seconds. This device’s previous record was just eight seconds in 2019, and the global record before this experiment was a mere 10 seconds at 100 million degrees or higher. The longer plasma remains active in the reactor the more likely the atoms will undergo fusion and produce usable amounts of energy. That’s the goal, but current fusion reactors like KSTAR consume more power than they produce. The record holder in that arena is the Joint European Torus (JET), which can produce 16MW of power from 24MW of input power. 

The team says an improved Internal Transport Barrier (ITB) performance was the key to this most recent improvement. An ITB reduces the movement of ions inside the plasma, leading to improved plasma confinement and stability. Thus, the KSTAR reactor was able to smash the previous record. 

We’re still a long way from making fusion a viable source of energy. For now, the KSTAR team hopes to continue improving its reactor stability, eventually scaling to 300 seconds of continuous operation by 2025.

Now read:

• The Navy Just Patented a Compact Fusion Reactor, but Will It Work?
• MIT Plans New Fusion Reactor That Could Actually Generate Power
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Get A MagSafe Wireless Charging Cable and USB-C 20W Adapter For Just $27

Whether we like it or not, we’ve all been spending a whole lot of time on our phones in 2020. And though we hope we’re not staying safer at home much longer into 2021, it’s important to make sure our lifelines are powered up. And if you have the newest iPhone, there’s a killer combo on sale for a limited time to help you ring in the new year.

The MagSafe Wireless Charging Cable + 20W Adapter for iPhone 12 provides a powerful duo that will help you fast charge your iPhone 12 efficiently. They would typically retail for $39, but they’re available now for $26.39 with promo code HOLIDAY20.

Let the MagSafe Wireless Charging Cable make powering up even easier, with its convenient cable and wall adapter that lets you power up your iPhone 12. Magnets will lock your phone and keep it safe and secure. And the wireless charging capability means you’ll be able to ditch all those messy cables and wires.

There’s a 20W power adapter that ensures powerful and safe charging, and it’s also portable and durable so you can bring it along anywhere and not worry about its fragility. It’s compatible with the iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Mini, and iPhone 12 Pro Max, so if you’ve recently invested in a new iPhone or are expecting one as a gift this holiday season you’re going to love this duo.

Make sure you stay powered up in 2021 with the MagSafe Wireless Charging Cable + 20W Adapter. It’s available now for just $26.39 with the promo code HOLIDAY20.

Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information. For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.

Now read:

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Unreleased Nintendo Game Boy Keyboard Brought Back to Life

The original Nintendo Game Boy was among the most popular electronic gizmos for several years running in the late 80s and early 90s, so naturally, there were a lot of accessories. Not all Game Boy accessories were given Nintendo’s explicit blessing, but the Work Boy was. This tiny mobile keyboard appeared briefly in gaming magazines after debuting at CES 1992. The device never launched, fading into obscurity as quickly as it appeared. Gaming history YouTuber Liam Robertson has gotten his hands on a Work Boy — possibly the last one in the world, and it’s working thanks to that giant Nintendo data leak from a few months back. 

The Work Boy was a project from Source Research and Development and produced by Fabtek Inc with direct oversight from Nintendo. It consisted of a full QWERTY keyboard and a software suite to go with it. If the Work Boy had launched, it would have turned the gaming handheld into a rudimentary PDA with functions like currency conversion, an address book, a clock, and a calendar. Just as the device and its software were nearing completion, Nintendo announced its intention to drop the price of the Game Boy. Fabtek, worrying that people wouldn’t buy an accessory that was more expensive than the Game Boy itself, scrapped the project. 

That might have been the end of it if not for a series of features in gaming magazines. Liam Robertson started investigating the history of the Work Boy 28 years after its debut. Since Fabtek decided to can the project, you can’t just go out and buy a Work Boy. Luckily, Fabtek founder Frank Ballouz had a prototype still in his possession, possibly the last extant Work Boy in the world. 

Robertson was dismayed to learn that the Work Boy, which connected to the Game Boy via an integrated link cable, didn’t do anything when plugged in. As it turns out, there was a cartridge component that ran most of the Work Boy’s software. Without a copy of that, the accessory was forever dead. By happenstance, a massive Nintendo IP leak known as the Gigaleak happened just a few weeks after Robertson got his hands on the Work Boy, and hiding in the many gigabytes of Nintendo history was the Work Boy’s near-final software. 

Robertson burned the Work Boy software (v8.87) into a reusable cart and plugged the device in — and it worked. You can see the Work Boy working in the video above. While the functionality is meager by today’s standards, it would have been incredible in the early 90s. Owners could have maintained databases and track other data with a (marginally) portable device. It even supported dialing phone numbers by playing dial tones into the receiver. 

You can understand why the Work Boy got the ax — it was bulky, expensive, and the keyboard itself looked hard to use. It would be years before another handheld device would get this kind of functionality. But it would have been fun to see the Work Boy hit the market.

Now read:

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