PCWorld August 2018

For all of Microsoft’s claims about mobility, the Microsoft Surface lineup of Windows tablets really haven’t been all that portable. The smaller, cheaper, lighter Surface Go announced in early July hopes to change all that, with a new 10-inch spin on the traditional Surface tablet. No, this isn’t the Surface Mini, or the rumored two-screen device, “Andromeda”. The Surface Go is most reminiscent of the Microsoft Surface 3 (), 2015’s quirky $499 Atom-powered tablet that provided a cheaper alternative to the pricey Surface line. The Surface Go dives even lower—prices start at just $399 for a bare-bones model with 4GB of memory and 64GB of storage when it ships on August 2. A keyboard will be sold separately, beginning at $99, and the optional Surface Pen will cost $99 as well. As…

It’s no coincidence that Apple released a series of iPad international video spots just hours before Microsoft unveiled its most affordable tablet (see page 7), the Surface Go. The four 15-second ads spotlight the iPad’s ability to make mundane tasks like paperwork, packing, and traveling easier with the low-cost tablet. But now Microsoft has a strong competitor to Apple’s entry-level $329 iPad. With a $399 price tag and a 10-inch screen, the Surface Go isn’t just Microsoft’s cheapest Surface tablet, it’s one of the most affordable full-featured tablets you can buy. And it just might be a better investment than the 9.7-inch iPad, depending on what you need. Here’s why (and why not): WHY THE SURFACE GO BEATS THE iPAD It’s a real computer The basic Surface Go might look a lot like Apple’s…

With Apple announcing recently that it has dropped a 6-core 8th-gen Core i7 8750H into the MacBook Pro 15, there are two things we know for sure: The first is that the boost in performance will be huge. The second—it still won’t be faster than the fastest PC laptops. Sure, you could say we’re just being haters because we heart PC. But unlike the iPad and iPhone, Apple doesn’t make its own CPUs. It relies on the same ones PC laptops have been using since at least April. All of the testing we’ve done already on Intel’s 8th-gen Kaby Lake R (reviewed here), the 8th-gen Kaby Lake G (reviewed here), and the 8th-gen Coffee Lake H (reviewed here) lets us say with high confidence just how fast the new 2018 MacBook…

When Samsung officially announces its results for the second quarter, the numbers will look plenty good to the untrained eye: $13 billion in profit on $51.8 billion revenue. However, analysts will tell you that those figures represent a 0.7 percent decline in sales compared with the prior year’s quarter. That might not seem like a terrible dip, but when you zoom in a little further, it spells trouble for one of Samsung’s most visible products: the Galaxy S9. According to reports, Samsung sold the fewest number of S series flagship phones since 2012’s Galaxy S3, with a reported 31 million units shipping in 2018. To put that in perspective, the Galaxy S7 was the high-water mark for Samsung’s S flagship, with some 50 million sales. That means many people are either…

Fans of the classic Microsoft Intellimouse 3.0 from 2003 can now buy an updated version, which, Microsoft has promised, is true to the spirit of the original. In fact, Simon Dearsley, Devices Design Director at Microsoft, said this week that some of the components in the new Classic Intellimouse remain the same as those in the original Intellimouse 3.0, its inspiration. The key improvements are in the switch and tracking technology, updating the components for the modern era. “We’ve reached a point where tracking and switch technology and price has matured immensely,” Dearsley said. “We saw this as an opportunity to improve on an icon by updating it with modern technology.” The Microsoft Classic Intellimouse is priced at $40. The BlueTrack sensor reports mouse movements up to 1,000 times per second, with a…

While a form of the Zacinlo rootkit has been active for several years, BitDefender said in June that it has adopted a more sinister appearance: as an anonymous “VPN” service, S5Mark, that worms its way into Windows 10 systems and can send screenshots of whatever you’re looking at to its control server. While it’s not clear how many systems have been infected in the wild, BitDefender says that the majority of Zacinlo systems that have been attacked have been in the United States, and running Windows 10. Check out PCWorld’s roundup of the best VPNs before downloading an untested version from a shady part of the web. In a report (PDF), BitDefender said that the platform has been active for several years, usually tagging along on freeware programs that might claim to…