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I've tested dozens of ultralight laptops this year, but I keep coming back to this one

ZDNET's key takeaways The Asus Zenbook A14 with 16GB of memory is on sale at Best Buy for $799. It's a fantastic balance of innovation and value with an OLED display, competitive hardware, and a satisfying physical form. While its use case is clearly defined, the laptop has its limits when it comes to high-end performance. View now at Best Buy The Asus Zenbook A14 is on sale for $799 at Best Buy for the 16GB model. When Asus officially announced the Zenbook A14 at CES this year, I wasn't the

Heat pump makers are ready for a rush: Will customers come?

Heat pump makers are ready for a rush: Will customers come? 1 hour ago Share Save Chris Baraniuk Technology Reporter Share Save Chris Baraniuk Octopus makes heat pumps at its factory in Northern Ireland On the day I visit Octopus Energy's heat pump factory in Craigavon, Northern Ireland, temperatures in London reached 29C. Some of the staff meeting me, who are usually based in the south of England, are beaming. It's wonderful to escape the heat, they say. And who can blame them. Climate chang

Show HN: Built a desktop app to organize photos locally with duplicate detection

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Aeron: Efficient reliable UDP unicast, UDP multicast, and IPC message transport

Aeron Efficient reliable UDP unicast, UDP multicast, and IPC message transport. Java, C, and C++ clients are available in this repository, and a .NET client is available. All clients can exchange messages across machines, or on the same machine via IPC, very efficiently. Message streams can be recorded by the Archive module to persistent storage for later, or real-time, replay. Aeron Cluster provides support for fault-tolerant services as replicated state machines based on the Raft consensus al

Hyundai Reveals the ‘Lightspeed’ Ioniq 6 N

Following the success of its ridiculously entertaining Ioniq 5 N in 2024, Hyundai is clearly hoping it can repeat the trick by applying its speedy sub-brand's knowhow to its streamliner sibling—the result revealed today is this, the Ioniq 6 N, Hyundai's second high-performance EV. Being born from the brand's N division, which is tasked with focusing on delivering a combination of cornering prowess and racetrack capability to supposedly create accessible “everyday” sportscars, you'd expect the 6

Best Cheap Vacuums for 2025: Our Best Lab-Tested Performers for Less Than $300

Dyson Dyson V8 Absolute: The V8 Absolute is one of the more affordable Dyson vacuums you can buy. Normally $520 at full price, it's currently on sale for $350. That still makes it more expensive than most of the vacuums on this list. In testing, it did great on hardwood, removing nearly 98% of sand, but it didn't do as hot on carpet. The Absolute was able to remove 68.3% of sand from low-pile and 52% from midpile, falling short of many competitors, including the Levoit LVAC-200 and Shark Strato

If You’re a Prime Member, This Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD Now Costs Peanuts on Amazon

Prime Day has finally come and with it special bargains exclusive to Prime members. This year’s discounts on internal SSDs are especially impressive: Among the top-selling offers, the Samsung 990 EVO Plus SSD ranks as a best-seller with an incredible 4.8 out of 5 stars from over 5,000 reviews. That kind of history speaks volumes and now it’s available at an all-time low price. The Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB internal SSD now costs only $113, down from its usual price of $176. This 36% discount is

Best Cordless Vacuums We've Tested (July 2025)

Dyson Dyson V8 Absolute: The V8 Absolute is one of the more affordable Dyson vacuums you can buy. Normally $519.99 at full price, it's currently on sale for $349.99. While the price isn't bad, the performance doesn't live up to expectations. While it did great on hardwood, removing nearly 98% of sand, it didn't do as well on carpet. The Absolute was able to remove 68.3% of sand from low-pile and 52% from mid-pile carpets, falling short of many competitors, including the Levoit LVAC-200 and Shar

Smollm3: Smol, multilingual, long-context reasoner LLM

SmolLM3: smol, multilingual, long-context reasoner Published July 8, 2025 Update on GitHub Base model: https://hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B-Base Instruct and reasoning model: https://hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B Small language models are becoming increasingly important as users seek capable models that can be deployed efficiently. The community has produced a fascinating range of capable small models, each pushing the boundaries of what's possible at this scale. With SmolLM3, we're excit

Fourth Price Drop in Just Hours, The Samsung T9 SSD 4TB Is Now Going for Pennies on Prime Day

Amazon is going out of its way to get people to shop on Prime Day, and the Samsung T9 Portable SSD with 4TB storage is no exception. In a matter of hours, this massive-capacity external SSD’s price has dropped by more than 50% with several consecutive price cuts designed to spur demand and beat even Black Friday prices. For $265, this is the lowest price ever on this seriously convenient SSD, but only if you’re a Prime member. The Samsung T9 external SSD 4TB normally sells for $549, but during

Looking for an affordable laptop with an OLED? Here's one I recommend for $534

ZDNET's key takeaways The Vivobook S 15, Asus' first Copilot+ PC, is currently on sale at Walmart for $534. It's sleek and lightweight with a gorgeous 120Hz OLED display, great battery life, and snappy performance. Users might run into the usual compatibility issues seen on Arm-compatible devices. View now at Walmart At Walmart, Asus' Vivobook S 15 is currently marked down to $534, which is $265 off. The configuration on sale features a 3K OLED 120Hz display with an Intel Core Ultra 7 process

AMD Ryzen 5 9600X Is Now 41% Off for Prime Day as Amazon Clears Out Stock at a Record Low

Processors are usually one of the most expensive line items when purchasing or upgrading a PC so it is worth waiting for major sale events such as Prime Day or Black Friday in an effort to secure the best prices. Right now, Amazon is offering the Ryzen 5 9600X at its all-time lowest price, which is quite a plummet from the $279 that it commanded for months at a time. This Prime exclusive deal brings the price down to a mere $165 which is a massive 41% saving. With Prime Day kicking off early th

Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

I'm in the process of rebuilding my homelab from the ground up, moving from a 24U full-size 4-post rack to a mini rack. One of the most difficult devices to downsize (especially economically) is a NAS. But as my needs have changed, I'm bucking the trend of all datahoarders and I need less storage than the 120 TB (80 TB usable) I currently have. It turns out, when you stop running an entire YouTube channel in your home (I'm in a studio now), you don't need more than a few terabytes, so my new c

PlanetScale for Postgres

Announcing PlanetScale for Postgres By Sam Lambert | July 1, 2025 Today we are announcing the private preview of PlanetScale for Postgres: the world’s fastest Postgres hosting platform. You can request access to PlanetScale for Postgres by visiting this link. We are already hosting customers' production workloads with incredible results. Convex, the complete backend solution for app developers, is migrating their reactive database infrastructure to PlanetScale for Postgres. Read more about t

This $649 Windows laptop competes with my MacBook Air (and does a few things better)

ZDNET's key takeaways The Asus Zenbook A14 with 16GB of memory is on sale at Best Buy for $649 - the lowest price we've seen yet. It's a fantastic balance of innovation and value with a brilliant OLED display, competitive hardware, and a satisfying physical form. While its use case is clearly defined, the laptop has its limits when it comes to high-end performance. View now at Best Buy When Asus officially announced the Zenbook A14 at CES this year, I wasn't the only one to be low-key enamore

Steam can now show you how much frame generation changes your games

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Valve has added a new performance monitor to Steam that can help you understand why a game may or may not be running smoothly. Not only does it break out a game’s overall frame rate, it can tell you how many of those frames were generated by techniques like Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR, according to a post. The change is included as part of an update to the Steam Client that’s

Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 8GB vs. 16GB Tested Across PCIe 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0

Recently we examined how PCI Express bandwidth influences the performance of the 8 GB Radeon RX 9060 XT when local video memory (VRAM) is exceeded. The entire purpose of that testing was to push past the VRAM limit, which, unfortunately for 8 GB graphics cards, is a relatively easy task in 2025. This can happen even when using settings that would otherwise be highly playable, as demonstrated by the 16 GB model. This is an interesting test for several reasons, the most notable being that PCIe ba

Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 8GB vs. 16GB Tested Across PCIe 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0

Recently we examined how PCI Express bandwidth influences the performance of the 8 GB Radeon RX 9060 XT when local video memory (VRAM) is exceeded. The entire purpose of that testing was to push past the VRAM limit, which, unfortunately for 8 GB graphics cards, is a relatively easy task in 2025. This can happen even when using settings that would otherwise be highly playable, as demonstrated by the 16 GB model. This is an interesting test for several reasons, the most notable being that PCIe ba

Here’s why M4 MacBook Pro is one of the best upgrades you can make right now

Last October, Apple announced the M4 MacBook Pro. On the surface, it looks like yet another MacBook Pro spec bump. However, there are a number of key features that make it worth upgrading to, even if you already have an older 14″ MacBook Pro. Why M4? There’s recently been a pretty big flip in MacBook Pro pricing, which gradually took place over the past year or so: First, Apple introduced a new entry-level MacBook Pro at $1599 in 2023 with baseline M3 Then, it upped the base memory to 16GB a

Acer Swift Go 16 (2025) Review: Affordable OLED Laptop Without Massive Compromises

CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise. 8.3 / 10 SCORE Acer Swift Go 16 (2025) $1,150 at Acer Pros Gorgeous OLED display Excellent productivity performance Fairly well priced for what's on offer Cons Disappointing battery life Bizarre, narrow number pad Pricing inconsistencies Acer's latest iteration of the Swift Go 16 line spans a wide gamut of roles and prices. It's designed to fill out a

Show HN: A Python Language Server, Mypy-compatible

In 2012, I created Jedi—a Python auto-completion library that eventually reached millions of users and billions of downloads. But as the ecosystem evolved, one limitation became clear: speed. Jedi’s architecture couldn’t deliver the performance needed for large-scale projects. In 2020, I started over—with everything I’d learned—building ZubanLS from the ground up in Rust. After five years of full-time work, ZubanLS is now the first truly fast Python language server. ZubanLS is built for profes

Ubuntu disables Intel GPU security mitigations, promises 20% performance boost

Ubuntu users could see up to a 20-percent boost in graphics performance on Intel-based systems under a change that will turn off security mitigations for blunting a class of attacks known as Spectre. Spectre, you may recall, first came to public notice in 2018. Spectre attacks are based on the observation that performance enhancements built into modern CPUs open a side channel that can leak secrets a CPU is processing. The performance enhancement, known as speculative execution, predicts future

Three axial flux motors and 850 kW fast charging? Meet the GT XX.

Mercedes-Benz provided flights from Detroit to Stuttgart and accommodation so Ars could be briefed on the GT XX, as well as some other things we can't publish just yet. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. AFFALTERBACH, Germany—A few years ago, we were treated to the Mercedes-Benz EQXX. It was, at the time, the pinnacle of Mercedes engineering built for the purpose of maximum electric range. While an impressive piece of machinery that looked like it drove out of Le Mans, it wasn't design

Is this $600 Acer the best laptop deal right now? I tested it, and here's my verdict

ZDNET's key takeaways The Acer Swift Go 14 (2024) is on sale now at B&H for $599. It's a lightweight, responsive laptop with a touchscreen, and a slick media playback menu. However, for a laptop so optimized for media, its speakers aren't the best. $599 at B&H Photo-Video The 14-inch Acer Swift Go was among the first round of laptops to come loaded with Intel's Meteor Lake AI processors last year, and it does so for $899 (on sale now for $599), a mid-range price point right in the sweet spot

This Acer laptop has a game-changing feature for multimedia consumption (and it's $300 off)

ZDNET's key takeaways The Acer Swift Go 14 (2024) is on sale now at B&H for $599. It's a lightweight, responsive laptop with a touchscreen, and a slick media playback menu. However, for a laptop so optimized for media, its speakers aren't the best. $599 at B&H Photo-Video The 14-inch Acer Swift Go was among the first round of laptops to come loaded with Intel's Meteor Lake AI processors last year, and it does so for $899 (on sale now for $599), a mid-range price point right in the sweet spot

Advanced Python Function Debugging with MCP Integration

Gnosis Mystic 🔮 AI-Powered Python Function Analysis and Control Gnosis Mystic gives AI assistants direct access to your Python functions through runtime hijacking and intelligent analysis. Add minimal decorators, and Claude can inspect, optimize, and control your code in real-time. Inspiration and Work Mystic was inspired by Giantswarm's mcp-debug. Code by fairly stock Claude Code. Prompts, code sketches, and planning by Claude Desktop using Gnosis Evolve tools. ✨ Why Gnosis Mystic? The P

Best Portable Air Conditioners: Cooling Your Home One Room at a Time

Not only did the Midea MAP14HS1TBL excel in performance compared with most portable air conditioners we tested, but it also has a lot of features and specialty options. This model isn't cheap, but it's a well-rounded luxury AC unit with everything you need -- and then some. To start, the MAP14HS1TBL has the highest cooling capacity of any other model we tested. Those 12,000 BTUs come in handy for cooling larger spaces up to 550 square feet, and it showed in the performance. The Midea model beat

China's first gaming GPU, the Lisuan G100, performs like a 13-year-old Nvidia GTX 660 Ti

Facepalm: China recently unveiled its first gaming GPU, the Lisuan G100. Built on a 6nm process, the card was touted as a potential rival to Nvidia's RTX 4060. However, a recent Geekbench listing suggests its performance is closer to that of the 13-year-old GeForce GTX 660 Ti or the 10-year-old Radeon R9 370. The listing also appears to reveal shockingly anemic specifications, including just 32 Compute Units, 256 MB of VRAM, and a 300 MHz GPU clock. Overall, the card managed a score of only 15,

Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Review: Great Value Gaming

It's AMD's turn. After months of $2,000+ GPUs and long discussions of DLSS, we're finally on the red team's turf. AMD's strength historically lies at the budget end of the spectrum, where the majority of gamers are playing at 1080p, and spending $1,000 or less for their entire system. Even though we really recommend splurging on a GPU, that's just not the reality for most folks. An $800 GPU needs $1,200 in other parts, and at that point most people who aren't into PC gaming will start shopping

Brad Pitt’s Sci-Fi Film Roles, Ranked

Next week, one of our biggest movie stars hits theaters in one of the summer’s biggest movies. F1: The Movie, starring Brad Pitt, is out June 27 and it’s the kind of role only someone as huge as Pitt could play. Pitt has been one of the top movie stars in the world for decades. Rising to stardom in the early 1990s, he quickly jumped to leading man status and has never looked back since. Pitt has had an incredibly varied career, making films in seemingly every genre imaginable. He’s been in roma