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Amazon is offering a 23% discount on a 2026 Microsoft Surface Laptop model equipped with 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 13.8-inch 2K touchscreen display. The price cut amounts to $450 off the laptop's recommended retail price.
Microsoft posted first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19 percent, with net income of $33.6 billion, up 32 percent. The company restructured its financial reporting into two new segments, Agents and Infra and Devices and Consumer, replacing its prior three-segment structure, and will now disclose Azure revenue quarterly. Azure brought in $33.17 billion, up 48 percent year-over-year, while Devices and Consumer revenue fell 3 percent, with Windows OEM revenue down 22 percent amid a weak PC market.
Microsoft shipped a firmware update on October 22 for the Surface Laptop Ultra that addresses screen flickering, random restarts, and slow reboot times, along with unspecified additional bug fixes and performance improvements. Microsoft says users may need to manually restart their device to complete installation, and the update cannot be uninstalled once applied.
An Android Authority writer tested a free app called Bubble Level after finding Samsung's built-in Surface Level tool on the Galaxy S26 Ultra inadequate for checking whether a narrow object, like a TV mounting frame, was level. Unlike Samsung's bullseye-style tool, which measures tilt across two axes for flat surfaces, Bubble Level provides a traditional single-axis spirit-level reading similar to the iPhone's Measure app.
Developer Rafael Rivera found that wallpapers Microsoft emailed to Windows Insiders in mid-October, marking the program's 12th anniversary, carried file metadata showing they were saved using Photoshop on a Mac. Rivera said the ten wallpapers came from Microsoft's in-house design team, and the company has since replaced the files on its design site without comment.
Tom's Hardware Premium published its weekly roundup covering TP-Link's efforts to satisfy US regulators amid scrutiny over its China ties, including a letter of intent with Key Tronic to assemble Wi-Fi 8 routers in Mississippi and nearly $1 billion pledged toward US R&D and manufacturing. The roundup also details testing of Nvidia's new RTX Spark-based Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra for gaming performance, plus an examination of whether costly audiophile-grade headsets are worth it for gamers.
A tech outlet published size comparisons pitting a rumored, unreleased Apple dual-screen device dubbed the 'iPhone Duo' against expected 2026 Android foldables including the Galaxy Z Fold 8, Z Fold 8 Ultra, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold, as well as older devices like the original Pixel Fold and Microsoft Surface Duo. No Apple device of this kind has been officially announced.
Scientists describe a surface transfer doping method in which a single-crystal diamond wafer's surface is terminated with a single atomic layer of hydrogen, giving it negative electron affinity. This causes electrons to move from the diamond into acceptor species at the surface, creating a dense two-dimensional hole gas within a few nanometers of the surface that provides p-type conductivity without altering the diamond's bulk properties.
An IEEE Computer Society post argues that AI agent risk stems less from dramatic failures than from quiet, incremental actions—permission changes, configuration tweaks, automations—that spread unchecked. It proposes treating agent autonomy as a controllable resource, introducing the concept of an 'autonomy budget' as a missing control surface for managing how much independent action agents can take.
Tom's Hardware reports that Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra with Nvidia's RTX Spark platform struggles with gaming at its native 3270x2180, 3:2 resolution because DLSS upscaling becomes heavy and standard 16:9 or 16:10 content stretches or shrinks awkwardly on the unusual aspect ratio. The outlet found that Microsoft's built-in 1600x1024 scaled mode is too low-resolution, and instead calculated a custom 1764x1176 resolution that better matches the pixel count of 1080p, yielding sharper images with less DLSS strain.
Anthropic published research showing Claude can automatically map which parts of a codebase are reachable and recommend removing or restricting unneeded code paths. Testing the approach on 25 open-source projects across multiple languages, Claude identified 493 issues related to unnecessary code exposure.
A strong El Niño event has raised ocean temperatures along the California coastline, allowing marine species that typically avoid the region's cooler waters to appear in greater numbers. Sightings include warm-water fish and other organisms not usually found in the area, according to observations tied to the current climate pattern.