The school year is coming up quickly, and Best Buy is helping to ease the financial burden of getting a laptop. HP’s OmniBook X Flip is $649.99 (usually $1,299.99), and has a 14-inch OLED panel with a 1920 x 1200 resolution, which is great for YouTube or homework, a Ryzen AI 5 430 CPU, 16GB of LPDDR5X memory, and 512GB of storage.
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Tech reviews are tricky beasts at the best of times. But things get a lot trickier when products like the Framework Laptop 13 Pro jump by $800 before they ever launch. When everything is expensive — and continually rising higher — what counts as good value?
yslee:
RAMageddon is just making these reviews impossible, no? It’s hard to say what’s good when the price is so out of whack.
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8
Verge Score
The Framework Laptop 13 Pro has it all. But RAMageddon spiked its price.
Another byproduct of Framework’s new RAM pricing is that preorders for the Ultra X7 358H version of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro jumped from $2,099 to $2,899. Framework’s announcement didn’t specify this config, but the Wayback Machine shows it.
People who got their 32GB preorders bumped down to 16GB also have to pay more if they want to maintain 32GB from Framework, or source their LPCAMM2 RAM elsewhere.
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The Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Draco Epic marks MSI’s 40th anniversary by maxing out the already-pricey Titan with a flashy dragon design, 96GB of DDR5 RAM, an Nvidia RTX 5090, and an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus. At least the $6,999 price tag also includes a bundled copy of LEGO Batman.
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6
Verge Score
The new entry-level Surface Laptop 13-inch is last year’s same great hardware with less memory and a higher price.
MacBooks have hard, pointy edges. But would you take a hand file or sanding block to your laptop? Software engineer Max Bretschneider did just that, and the results look pretty good. The more heavily filed MacBook Pro he cites for inspiration from designer Kent Walters? Less so. (Yikes!)
What do you think? Is this now a thing? Should Apple round the corners off more? (Yes to that last one.)
Siri is better, but its limitations are much more obvious on a Mac than an iPhone.
Initial impressions of macOS Golden Gate’s design refinements show promise, but there’s still lots to come.
7
Verge Score
Except in price. The prices suck.
And I only broke it a little.
Asus is launching various Vivobooks and ExperBooks at Computex, but I’m most interested in the Zenbook 14 with a base-level Snapdragon X1-26-100. It’ll come in AMD and Intel configs too, but the Qualcomm version will start with a lowly 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD.
Sounds like another Neo wannabe, but we don’t know for certain since pricing is TBD.
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Nvidia’s RTX Spark ‘superchip’ shows promise for Windows laptops. But it also comes at the worst time.
Nvidia says it’s working with everyone to get software ready for RTX Spark laptops this fall, but as for Adobe, Premiere is getting a whole new video pipeline to take advantage of Spark’s up-to-128GB of unified memory, and Nvidia says Photoshop is “transitioning from 5 percent to 100 percent GPU accelerated processing.” Just ask AI agents to transform your images, too.
MSI is making limited edition versions of the Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus with two different van Gogh paintings on the lid: Starry Night and Starry Night Over the Rhône. I think I prefer last year’s Great Wave edition, but these are also lovely.
I called the Prestige one of the sleekest MSI laptops I’ve seen, but it didn’t look like this.
MSI has made ridiculous dragon-themed laptops before, but this one takes the cake. Announced at Computex, the Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Draco Epic takes the standard 18-inch Titan gaming laptop but adds the new flagship Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus CPU, a 240Hz 4K screen, and a massive dragon design that’s etched and anodized right into the lid.
Never change, MSI.
MSI is announcing new versions of its Venture business laptops and Katana gaming laptops for Computex. Both have new designs, but MSI shared few details — not even availability or pricing. The key facts we know so far is that the Venture will get Intel Panther Lake chips and the Katana will have older Intel Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs and up to an RTX 5070 GPU.
I still love OLEDs, but the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18’s ELMB Mini LED display is amazing.
