PCWorld February 2023

The Consumer Electronics Show remains a singular event for PC laptop enthusiasts. Aside from Dell, which ditched the show in recent years, every major PC laptop maker is present, and most use it to reveal their best and brightest for the coming year. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia also come packing new mobile hardware heat. Dozens of powerful laptops were revealed this year—but these 10 stood out from the crowd. ACER SWIFT X 14 Arguably the least glamorous laptop on this list, Acer’s Swift X 14 still showcases key trends of CES 2023: the broad reach of OLED displays and newer, quicker hardware from Intel and Nvidia. Let’s talk displays. The Swift X packs an optional 14-inch OLED screen with 2,880 x 1,800 resolution and a refresh rate of up 120Hz, as well as…

Microsoft is celebrating 10 full years of Microsoft 365 by adding a new Microsoft 365 tier: Microsoft 365 Basic, which will cost just $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year when it launches on January 30. It’s clear that Microsoft 365 Basic is designed to add new users to the ongoing treadmill that is Microsoft’s subscription model. But the offerings aren’t half bad, though there’s a catch: Subscribers won’t have access to the desktop versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—just the web and mobile versions of those apps. Apart from that, Microsoft is making 100GB of OneDrive cloud storage available, rather than the 1TB that accompanies the Microsoft 365 Personal ($6.99 per month) and Microsoft 365 Family ($9.99 per month) plans. Microsoft’s pitch is that the new Basic plan will bring with…

Intel’s long-awaited Core i9-13900KS will officially be the first x86 consumer CPU to hit the 6GHz barrier. You will pay a premium for the barrier-breaking privilege, as the chip will cost $699. The 24-core Core i9-113900KS is essentially a special-edition version of the already released (and unapologetically fast) Core i9-13900K. It features eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. The original Core i9-13900K could reach 5.8GHz on single-core loads, while the Core i9-13900KS will round that up to a smooth 6.0GHz on single-core loads. “The Core i9-13900KS continues our 13th Gen Intel Core desktop processor family excellence, showcasing the new performance heights made possible by our performance hybrid architecture,” Intel Client Computing Group manager Marcus Kennedy said in a statement. “Extreme gamers and enthusiasts can now push their everyday performance further than…

Tom Hanks didn’t just call me to pitch me a part, but it sure sounded like he did. Ever since PCWorld began covering the rise of various artificial intelligence applications like AI art, I’ve been poking around in the code repositories in GitHub and links within Reddit, where people will post tweaks to their own AI models for various approaches. Some of these models actually end up on commercial sites, which either roll their own algorithms or adapt others that have published as open source. A great example of an existing AI audio site is Uberduck.ai, which offers literally hundreds of preprogrammed models. Enter the text in the text field and you can have a virtual Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Peggy Hill, Daffy Duck, Alex Trebek, Beavis, The Joker, or even…

The PC market collapsed during the fourth quarter of 2022, analysts said, with an unprecedented drop in sales due to inflation and other factors. IDC reported that PC unit sales fell by 28.1 percent to 67.2 million units, while Gartner said that sales fell by 28.5 percent to 65.3 million units. (IDC is owned by International Data Group [IDG], which owns PCWorld.) According to Gartner, the drop is the largest since the firm began its PC coverage in the mid-1990s. Analysts blamed a perfect storm of pandemic-related issues. “The anticipation of a global recession, increased inflation, and higher interest rates have had a major impact on PC demand,” said Mikako Kitagawa, the director analyst at Gartner. “Since many consumers already have relatively new PCs that were purchased during the pandemic, a lack…

Experian, one of the biggest consumer credit reporting bureaus, likely put your full credit history into the hands of identity thieves last year. On Monday, news broke of a major flaw in the company’s website, which allowed anyone with your name, address, birthdate, and Social Security number to bypass a security check and get to your report. First discovered by security researcher Jenya Kushnir, the exploit had an unknown duration and was only patched in late December 2022—seemingly after Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security, having been notified by Kushnir about the issue, brought it to Experian’s attention. (You can read the full details in Kreb’s post about the matter.) Given how many data breaches have leaked all the information needed by identity thieves (including the massive 2017 Equifax hack), you can…