Enlarge / Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11, which not-confusingly-at-all feature 13th-generation Intel Core processors. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon has long been one of our favorite ultrabook designs, combining a generous array of ports, a nice keyboard and trackpad, and a larger-than-typical 14-inch screen into a thin-and-light package.

Last year's Gen 10 iteration had a major flaw, though—a big step down in battery life, at least partially attributable to a more power-hungry 12th-generation Intel processor. (Yes, before we get any further, Lenovo's ThinkPad generational designations don't align with Intel's processor designation, so a Gen 10 ThinkPad uses a 12th-gen Intel CPU, and the Gen 11 ThinkPad uses a 13th-gen CPU.)

This year's Gen 11 X1 Carbon refresh mainly has one job: retain all the good stuff about last year's refresh and the X1 Carbon lineup generally but get the battery life closer to where it was before. The Gen 11 partially does that job. That means the performance gains from last year are negligible (and sometimes even a small step backward). It's an acceptable sacrifice for improved battery life, and the X1 Carbon is still one of the best all-around portable laptops you can buy. It's just that the Gen 11 model still can't quite manage to feel like an across-the-board upgrade from the Gen 9 X1 Carbon from two years ago.

Enlarge / PNY's take on the basic $299 version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia's GeForce 1060, 2060, and 3060 graphics cards are some of the most widely used GPUs in all of PC gaming. Four of Steam's top five GPUs are 60-series cards, and the only one that isn't is an even lower-end GTX 1650.

All of this is to say that, despite all the fanfare for high-end products like the RTX 4090, the new GeForce RTX 4060 is Nvidia's most important Ada Lovelace-based GPU. History suggests that it will become a baseline for game developers to aim for and the go-to recommendation for most entry-level-to-mainstream PC gaming builds.

The RTX 4060, which launches this week starting at $299, is mostly up to the task. It's faster and considerably more power efficient than the 3060 it replaces, and it doesn't come with the same generation-over-generation price hike as the higher-end Lovelace GPUs. It's also a solid value compared to the 4060 Ti, typically delivering between 80 and 90 percent of the 4060 Ti's performance for 75 percent of the money.

Enlarge / The hinge awkwardly breaking up content on Lenovo's Yoga Book 9i. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Dual-screen laptops have been around for enough years that Asus now has a lineup of them. But Lenovo's Yoga Book 9 is the dual-screen option for maximum screen space. Open the 2-in-1 laptop, and you'll find two 13.3-inch, 16:10 OLED touchscreens in lieu of any integrated keyboard, touchpad, or traditional deck.

The machine looks striking. But once you're past the initial intrigue, you might ask yourself: Why would I want this? Well—you might not. This is an unusual laptop built for unique needs. While our review will explain how it works—and its undesirable quirks—many might find its design inconvenient.

But for some, the laptop opens possibilities in ways new laptops rarely do. It can make your portable monitor redundant, and it sports a crease-free look that foldables can only dream of at this point. Lenovo's dual-screen laptop could influence future products for the better. For now, the laptop's a refreshingly realistic option for people who want more screen real estate without giving up more space.

Enlarge / Apple's M2 Ultra Mac Studio. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The original Mac Studio , despite the absence of "Pro" in the name, was Apple's most compelling professional desktop release in years. Though it was more like a supercharged Mac mini than a downsized Mac Pro, its M1 Max and M1 Ultra processors were fantastic performers, and they were much more energy-efficient than the one in the most recent Intel Mac Pro, too.

Apple is releasing the M2 version of the Mac Studio this week , and even though it's being launched alongside a brand-new Mac Pro , it still might be Apple's most compelling professional desktop. That's partly because the new Studio is even faster than the old one—Apple sent us a fully enabled M2 Ultra model with 128GB of RAM—and partly because Apple Silicon Macs are designed in ways that make Mac Pro-style expandability and modularity impossible.

There is probably still a tiny audience for the redesigned Mac Pro, people who still use macOS and still use internal PCI Express expansion cards that aren't GPUs; it should also be relatively easy to add gobs of cheap, fast internal storage, a kind of upgrade the Mac Studio is still frustratingly incapable of . There's also a bit of awkward pricing overlap with the high-end M2 Pro Mac mini that didn't exist last year.

Enlarge / Apple's 15-inch M2 MacBook Air. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's a credit to Apple's chips that when I'm using my 13-inch MacBook Air, I feel much more constrained by the screen size than I do by the performance.

That wasn't always the case. The Intel MacBook Airs of years past were perfectly fine for basic computing, but you could feel the difference between an Air and an iMac or MacBook Pro as soon as you tried to edit something in Photoshop or Lightroom or export something with iMovie. The M1 and M2 Macs also feel slower than their Pro, Max, and Ultra counterparts, but for the kinds of light-to-medium-duty work that I spend most of my time doing, I rarely find myself waiting around for things to happen.

That's why I've been looking forward to the 15-inch MacBook Air, which has been rumored for at least a year and is being released to the public this week . Before now, getting a larger Mac laptop meant paying at least $2,000 for the privilege—$2,500 for the 16-inch MacBook Pro—because getting that bigger screen also came with extra ports, more powerful chips, and fancier screen technology.

Enlarge / This is Apple’s Vision Pro headset. It looks a bit like a particularly bulky pair of ski goggles, with the materials and design language of Apple’s AirPods Max headphones. (credit: Samuel Axon)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Going into the Vision Pro demo room at Apple’s WWDC conference, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The keynote presentation, which showed everything from desktop productivity apps to dinosaurs circling a Vision Pro user in space, seemed impressive, but augmented reality promotional videos often do.

They depict a seamless experience in which the elements of digital space merge with the user’s actual surroundings completely. When you actually put on the headset, though, you'll often find that the promotional video was pure aspiration and reality still has some catching up to do.

That was not my experience with Vision Pro. To be clear, it wasn’t perfect. But it’s the first time I’ve tried an AR demo and thought, “Yep, what they showed in the promo video was pretty much how it really works.”

Enlarge / The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia's announcement of the GeForce RTX 4060 series last week broke the pricing trend set by every other RTX 4000-series card released so far: The 4060 Ti is launching at the same price as its predecessor, and the 4060 is actually getting a small price cut.

But these cards also continued a trend that we noted in our RTX 4070 review—compared to past generations, the performance upgrade just isn't as impressive. The $400 RTX 3060 Ti could match or beat a $700 RTX 2080 Super from the previous generation. The 4060 Ti... well, it can definitely beat a 3060 Ti.

It's a very capable mid-range graphics card that's great at 1080p and can often stretch to 1440p. It gives you more performance and lower power consumption at the same price you'd pay for a 3060 Ti yesterday. And it does all of the Ada Lovelace architecture's special tricks, like DLSS Frame Generation and hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding. But it doesn't bring last generation's high-end performance down to a more reasonable price the way older Nvidia cards have.

Enlarge / The Framework logo on the hinge. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When you read a laptop review, even if the new laptop looks identical to last year's model , the company has usually sent the reviewer an entirely new product to set up and test. For this review of the Framework Laptop 13—for all intents and purposes, a brand-new product and the third iteration of Framework's original repairable, upgradeable laptop PC—Framework's PR team sent me a box full of parts that I could use to upgrade the laptop I reviewed last year .

So this is a review of the 2023 iteration of the Framework Laptop 13 , but it's also a review of a box full of parts. We won't reiterate everything we said about the Framework Laptop last year (or the year before that) except to comment on how the design of the system is aging and how the various new components change the experience.

The big takeaways? If you're considering a Framework Laptop for the first time, the company has fixed many of the things about the laptop that we listed as cons last year, especially the battery life. If you're upgrading an older model, at least one or two of the components in that jumble of parts we got is worth considering as an upgrade. And in either case, you might want to wait for the upcoming AMD Ryzen edition —at least, as long as the computer you're currently using can get you by until at least "late Q3," when those laptops and mainboards are currently slated to ship.

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 is here . It's the company's first launch in over a year of a graphics card that could charitably be described as "mainstream," both in performance and in price. It costs $600.

It's not productive to keep going back to the also-$600 GTX 1080 , at the time the fastest graphics card you could buy anywhere from anyone, and wondering how we got here from there ( some of it is inflation, not all of it). But I keep doing it as a reminder that $600 is still more than many people pay for their entire PC, tablet, smartphone, or high-end game console. No other component in a gaming PC has seen its price shoot up like this over the same span of time; a Core i5 CPU cost around $200 in 2016 and costs around $200 now , and RAM and SSDs are both historically cheap at the moment.

To review the 4070 is to simultaneously be impressed by it as a product while also being frustrated with the conditions that led us to an "impressive" $600 midrange graphics card. It's pretty fast, very efficient, and much more reasonably sized than other recent Nvidia GPUs. In today's topsy-turvy graphics card market, I could even describe it as a good deal. But if you're still yearning for the days when you could spend $300 or less on a reasonably performant GPU with the latest architecture and modern features, keep waiting.