Q: My son and daughter both start cross country practice at their high school this week, and I want a running watch for each of them. Their coach is fine with music during daily distance runs as long as nobody is carrying a phone, so the watch needs to hold music and play it to Bluetooth earbuds on its own. Good battery life and easy charging matter too, because I have no idea how often a teenager remembers to charge
Summary: Apple raised prices across almost the whole Mac line on June 25, 2026. The general consensus is that this is due to a RAM shortage, and Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Microsoft all did similar things. A lot of the good sub $1,000 deals are gone for now: the MacBook Air M5 that drifted near $949 earlier this year is $1,299 today, and the MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. It is a rough time to buy a computer,
Note: this post is published but still in progress. Spot something missing or amiss? Comment at the end 👍. This is a long article. If you just want three paragraphs, this is it: Few laptop families display their lineage as visibly as the ThinkPad. Since IBM introduced the ThinkPad notebook lineup in 1992, the brand has survived more than three decades, a change of corporate ownership, and repeated shifts in what a portable computer is expected to do. Put a
Late 2000. There is a grey and blue tower PC on my dorm-room desk like nothing anybody who walks into the room has ever seen. The Be logo on the front, a 3.5″ floppy peeking out the bottom of the drive bays, and the vertical grille that hides two columns of green LEDs (blinkenlights) dancing with the CPU load. This was a dual-PowerPC workstation running an operating system you didn’t see in the wild. I was studying computer science at
Disclosure: I purchased this Chuwi MiniBook X with my own money (~$399 from Amazon). See also: my MacBook Neo review and full Neo benchmark analysis. The $399 Laptop That Refuses to Throttle In my MacBook Neo review, I wrote that after 60 seconds of sustained CPU load, the Neo “drops to phone-class performance that a $400 Windows laptop can match.” A reader could reasonably wonder: does a $400 Windows laptop actually deliver? I had a Chuwi MiniBook X on hand
So in updating my MacBook Neo review with some additional stress testing and thermal testing, I came across some interesting results that begged the question: “Can it run Claude?” If you’re a gamer, that probably triggers the old “Can it run Crysis?” reflex. For those who don’t remember (or weren’t there), Crysis was the 2007 PC game that became the de facto hardware torture test. If your rig could run Crysis, it could run anything. It was a rite of
NoteTL;DR Summary: After buying the 32GB / 1TB Minisforum MS-01 from Newegg for $1,016.58 on February 8, 2026 and running it off-grid on solar in rural Missouri, I think it is one of the best Proxmox setups you can build if you care about low idle power, serious networking, and headless management. It has been rock solid and my trusty little box idles around 13W-35W while running Home Assistant, a solar poller, SearXNG, and Open WebUI. For current pricing Check
If you have a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) system with 128GB of RAM and you’re wondering why your local LLM host (be it LM Studio, Ollama, or whatever) can’t see most of that memory, this is the fix. AMD’s unified memory architecture means your CPU and GPU share the same physical RAM, but Windows needs to be told how much of it the GPU is allowed to use. By default, it’s VERY conservative. More info below and how