Enlarge / The 2020 4K Chromecast with Google TV. It comes in colors. (credit: Google )

It sounds like Google is cooking up another Google TV dongle. 9to5Google's sources say a new 4K model of the Chromecast with Google TV is in the works. It would be a sequel to the aging 2020 model that was never really fit for the job in the first place. It would also sit alongside the 2022 HD model .

The report says the new device would stay at the $50 price point and come with a new remote . A new chip would be the primary motivation for a new device. The current 4K dongle has an Amlogic S905X3 (it's just for Cortex A55 CPUs), and if Google sticks with Amlogic, a good upgrade would be the upcoming Amlogic S905X5 . Besides a faster CPU and GPU, it also supports the AV1 video codec, something Google has been pushing across its ecosystem because it can cut down on what must be an incredible YouTube bandwidth bill. It has made AV1 a requirement for some new devices in order to get the YouTube app, and despite forcing it on competitors like Roku , Google's best dongle doesn't have hardware support for the codec yet. Technically the S905X5 is not official yet, so we don't have a full spec sheet, but partners have been talking about it since last year.

The No. 1 thing a new Google TV dongle needs, and has needed for years, is more storage. Google Hardware is supposed to make devices that are purpose-built for Google's software, but the 4K and HD Chromecasts with Google TV have never really been up to the task thanks to the 8GB of total device storage. Back in the early Chromecast days when these dongles ran a custom OS and only showed video streams, that was fine. These new devices run full-fat Android now, complete with a Play Store, access to millions of apps, and lots of preinstalled software. 8GB is not nearly enough.

Enlarge / A young prodigal tomboy returns home from war and finds herself framed for murder in Renegade Nell . (credit: Disney+)

Award-winning British TV writer Sally Wainwright is best known for the dramatic series Happy Valley (2014–2023) and Gentleman Jack (2019–2022), the latter produced jointly by BBC and HBO. Wainwright partnered with Disney+ for her latest series, the resolutely PG-13 Renegade Nell , which is a different beast altogether: a good old-fashioned, swashbuckling comic adventure with a supernatural twist, featuring a sassy cross-dressing heroine forced to turn to highway robbery to survive.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Set in 1705 during the reign of Queen Anne (Jodi May, Gentleman Jack ), the series stars Louisa Harland ( Derry Girls ) as Nell Jackson. Nell is a headstrong young woman with tomboy flair and a taste for adventure who returns home to her village of Tottenham after running off five years before to marry one Captain Jackson against her father's wishes. She's now widowed and possessed of occasional supernatural skills whenever someone threatens her, courtesy of a fairy sprite named Billy Blind (Nick Mohammed, aka Nathan from Ted Lasso ), who has been tasked to protect Nell. Nell's family thought she'd been killed on the battlefield alongside her husband, so her homecoming is a bit of a shock.

Enlarge / The Maven. (credit: B. Mole)

The first thing I should say in this bike review is that I am not a bike enthusiast.

My preferred form of exercise is running, where no mechanical components are necessary. But I'm acting as reviewer here because what I lack in longstanding opinions on brand-name bike gearing and motor hubs, I make up for by being the exact target audience for the bike under review: the Maven Cargo E-bike by Integral Electrics. This is a cargo bike designed not for hardcore cyclists but for smaller riders, women specifically, who would happily swap out their family's second car for a simpler e-bike—as long as it can handle the needs of family life: toting children, running errands, and making short commutes.

This is exactly what Integral CEO and co-founder Laura Belmar and her family were looking for amid the pandemic, she told me in an interview. But while her husband picked out e-bikes that were comfortably designed for him, who is taller than her, she consistently found herself top-heavy and struggling as soon as her two kids were loaded onto the bikes. "They were scared to ride with me," she said of her kids. "One time, we were literally going down in the park and a jogger came by and grabbed the rack and pulled us back up."

Enlarge (credit: LifeSpan )

I enjoy getting my exercise, but hate doing it indoors. I'd much rather get some fresh air and watch the world drift past me as I cycle or hike somewhere than watch a screen while sweating away on something stationary.

To get a bit more of what I like, I've invested in a variety of gear that has extended my cycling season deeper into the winter. But even with that, there are various conditions—near-freezing temperatures, heavy rains, Canada catching fire—that have kept me off the roads. So, a backup exercise plan has always been on my to-do list.

The company LifeSpan offers exercise equipment that fits well into a home office and gave me the chance to try its Ampera model . It's a stationary bike that tucks nicely under a standing desk and has a distinct twist: You can pedal to power the laptop you're working on. Overall, the hardware is well-designed, but some glitches, software issues, and design decisions keep it from living up to its potential.

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  A close-up look at the Vision Pro from the front. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

You can get a lot of work done while wearing Apple’s Vision Pro and have fun doing it—but it’s not yet at the stage where most of us will want to fully embrace spatial computing as the new way of working.

I spent more than a week working almost exclusively in the Vision Pro. I carried on Slack conversations, dialed into Zoom video calls, edited Google Docs, wrote articles, and did everything else I do within my day-to-day responsibilities as an editor at Ars Technica.

Throughout the experience, I never stopped thinking about how cool it was, like I was a character in a cyberpunk novel. The Vision Pro opens some new ways of approaching day-to-day work that could appeal to folks with certain sensibilities, and it offers access to some amenities that someone who hasn’t already invested a lot into their home office setup might not already have.

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  A close-up look at the Vision Pro from the front. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

If you’ve spent any time in the tech-enthusiast corners of Instagram of TikTok over the past few weeks, you’ve seen the videos: so-called tech bros strolling through public spaces with confidence, donning Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro headset on their faces while gesturing into the air .

Dive into the comments on those videos and you’ll see a consistent ratio: about 20 percent of the commenters herald this as the future, and the other 80 mock it with vehement derision. “I’ve never had as much desire to disconnect from reality as this guy does,” one reads.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going all-in on trying the Vision Pro in all sorts of situations to see which ones it suits. Last week, I talked about replacing a home theater system with it—at least when traveling away from home. Today, I’m going over my experience trying to find a use for it out on the streets of Chicago.

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  PNY's version of the RTX 4080 Super. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Nvidia's new RTX 4080 Super is technically faster than the regular 4080 , but, by an order of magnitude, the most interesting thing about it is that, at its launch price of $999, it's $200 cheaper than the original 4080. I am going to write more after this sentence, but that's basically the review. You're welcome to keep reading, and I would appreciate it if you would, but truly there is only one number you need to know, and it is "$200."

All three of these Super cards—the 4070 Super , the 4070 Ti Super , and now the 4080 Super—are mild correctives for a GPU generation that has been more expensive than its predecessors and also, in relative terms, less of a performance boost. The difference is that where the 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super try to earn their existing price tags by boosting performance, the 4080 Super focuses on lowering its price to be more in line with where its competition is.

Yes, it's marginally faster than the original 4080, but its best feature is a price drop from $1,199 to a still high, but more reasonable, $999. What it doesn't do is attempt to close the gap between the 4080 series and the 4090, a card that still significantly outruns any other consumer GPU that AMD or Nvidia offers. But if you have a big budget, want something that's still head-and-shoulders above the entire RTX 30-series, and don't want to deal with the 4090's currently inflated pricing, the 4080 Super is much more appealing than the regular 4080, even if it is basically the same GPU with a new name.

Enlarge / The most interesting thing about AMD's Ryzen 7 8700G CPU is the Radeon 780M GPU that's attached to it. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Put me on the short list of people who can get excited about the humble, much-derided integrated GPU.

Yes, most of them are afterthoughts, designed for office desktops and laptops that will spend most of their lives rendering 2D images to a single monitor. But when integrated graphics push forward, it can open up possibilities for people who want to play games but can only afford a cheap desktop (or who have to make do with whatever their parents will pay for, which was the big limiter on my PC gaming experience as a kid).

That, plus an unrelated but accordant interest in building small mini-ITX-based desktops, has kept me interested in AMD’s G-series Ryzen desktop chips (which it sometimes calls “APUs,” to distinguish them from the Ryzen CPUs). And the Ryzen 8000G chips are a big upgrade from the 5000G series that immediately preceded them (this makes sense, because as we all know the number 8 immediately follows the number 5).