Stuff UK Xmas 2020

It’s normal for Stuff to be sick of the ‘C’ word before we’ve even entered November. But with a different ‘C’ word stealing everyone’s attention this year, bring it on – we can’t wait for Christmas. Lockdown has given us some extra time to ponder our festive wish lists, which were already looking outrageously optimistic and now frankly border on the absurd, so we’ve put them all together and formed the Christmas gift guide to end all Christmas gift guides. Featuring no fewer than 156 objects of desire, it’s an ideas list to suit all budgets, wrapping paper stocks and tree-base square footage. Before you go thinking all we’ve done is put together an Argos catalogue of goodies (OK, there is a Speak & Spell on p98), this is also the issue…

HOT FIVE #1 GAWKING IN THE AIR Apple MacBook Air (M1) Laptops are like sausages: it doesn’t matter what’s inside, we just know we love them. But Apple’s new MacBook Air isn’t like your average banger – because once you know what it’s made of, you’ll want one even more. From the outside it looks identical: same ludicrously thin chassis, same 13in Retina display, same gigantic trackpad. But we like chips with our sausages, and the silicon inside this Air is one of Apple’s new M1 specimens – and that’s where all the real upgrades come from. Apple reckons it has 3.5x faster CPU and 5x faster GPU clout than the previous version, while machine learning workloads are 9x faster. Even the SSD is twice as fast, again thanks to that clever M1 brain. You…

Insta360 One X2 £430 / insta360.com Should’ve clone better As well as shooting 360° videos at up to 5.7K, the One X2 includes a Steady Cam feature, InstaPano for panoramas and MultiView for split-screen shots. Dolly Zoom sets up catwalk-style content, while Shadow Clone captures multiple shots of the same subject to create impossible collages. Spookily apt for the world in 2020, Ghost Town can clear the streets of people, magically removing them from 360° timelapses. You can also lock the horizon, auto-follow a moving subject, or chronicle your own antics using the invisible selfie-stick (the only good kind) to capture drone-like perspectives. Cropper-cabana The One X2 doesn’t short-change you in post-production either, with AI-powered editing via the Insta360 app’s Shot Lab feature meaning you don’t have to point or pick a favourite angle while…

Mank David Fincher’s biopic of legendary screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz looks utterly gorgeous, its starkly lit monochrome visuals echoing the cinematography of the Hollywood era it depicts. Gary Oldman plays the hard-drinking, hard-quipping satirist, whose clashes with William Randolph Hearst inspired his screenplay for Citizen Kane. Film / Netflix, 4 Dec WandaVision The Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t really do ‘weird and interesting’ – but this series, seemingly taking place in the subconscious minds of Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch and Paul Bettany’s Vision, looks to be more offbeat than anything we’ve seen yet. Has to be better than another blockbuster punch-fest, surely? S1 / Disney+, Dec (date tbc) The Expanse The most ambitious sci-fi series on TV (think Game of Thrones in space, with slightly worse acting but better writing) returns for a fifth season. With the disparate…

THE NAME IS A NOD TO THE HISTORIC HARLEY ‘SERIAL NUMBER ONE’ OF 1903 SERIAL 1 £tba / serial1.com Does that say Harley-Davidson on the side? Bit of a departure. Yes, but also no. Biking history tells us that Harley-Davidson essentially bolted an engine to a bicycle back in 1903 when it launched its very first motorcycle and, according to the brand, “changed the way people moved”. You don’t need a degree in marketing to guess that Harley is claiming to be doing the same thing today with the Serial 1 e-bike. But why an e-bike? And why now? Money! The global e-bike market was estimated to be worth over $15bn in 2019 and it’s only set to grow. So Harley has used the expertise garnered from its recent LiveWire electric motorcycle and squished it down…

FIRST LOOK SCORN XSX, XSS, PC First teased back in 2016, Scorn gained further attention earlier this year after being confirmed as a title heading for the Xbox Series X. A more recent in-depth look shows the game running on Microsoft’s new console (reviewed on p36)… and it looks beautifully disgusting. This first-person horror adventure takes its influences from the works of HR Giger, the artist behind Alien. But developer Ebb Software has taken that biomechanical aesthetic to more grotesque extremes, to the point where it feels like you’re inside a giant creature’s body, where the walls pulse with organic matter and leaking entrails. The same goes for the player character, who appears to be a skinless humanoid trying to flee this hellscape. But there’s no chance of blindly blasting your way out of…