As the 7-pound Razer Blade 18 sat on my desk, its all-black unibody case and enormous 18-inch screen towering before me like the monolith from 2001, I couldn’t help but think, “Who the hell needs such a big-ass computer?” I’m sure they’re out there — the gamers with deep pockets and little regard for portability, the video editors who demand as much screen space as possible. But on the whole, the market for the Blade 18 is pretty small, especially whenRazer’s Blade 14 and 16 strike a far better balance of price, performance and weight.

What the Razer Blade 18 promises, if you choose to accept its gargantuan proportions, is unbridled power and screen real estate. It’s running Intel’s new Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, a 24-core beast with a maximum speed of 5.4GHz. Its 18-inch screen can reach up to 240Hz at slightly over 4K (3,840 by 2,400 pixels) and 440Hz when downscaled to 1080p+ (1,920 by 1,200). And of course, you can equip it with NVIDIA’s fastest mobile GPU, the GeForce RTX 5090. Given everything under the hood, it’s honestly impressive it weighs just seven pounds, alongside a 2.1-pound power adapter. (In comparison, the similarly premium 18-inch Alienware Area 51 comes in at 9.5 pounds with a 2.2-pound power adapter.)

When we last reviewed the Razer Blade 18 a few years ago, my colleague Sam Rutherford bristled at the laptop’s size, battery life and high cost (which could reach upwards of $5,000 when fully decked out). All of those points are absolutely fair, but this time around it’s easier to see what Razer is trying to do with the Blade 18: It’s simply doing the most for the people who demand it. And it’s doing so with the excellent build quality we’ve come to expect from Razer (albeit with a high $2,799 starting price).

If you’re still trying to wrap your head around why an 18-inch laptop even exists, the Razer Blade 18 isn’t for you. And honestly, the concept isn’t even that farfetched. Given the move towards thinner display bezels and other refinements, laptop makers have been able to squeeze in larger screens inside of their typical case sizes. The Razer Blade 16 was a bit heavier than the Blade 15 when it launched, but now Razer has slimmed its case down considerably. The Blade 18 similarly serves as an upgrade to the old Blade 17 — and what an upgrade it is. 

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

My review unit, which was equipped with that new Intel chip, an RTX 5090, 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD tackled Cyberpunk 2077 with all of its settings cranked without a sweat. At its native resolution, which again is a bit higher than 4K, it reached 131 fps with 4X frame generation (which uses DLSS 4’s upscaling to interpolate additional frames). That’s roughly half as fast as the desktop RTX 5090 running in 4K with the same settings — but don’t forget, that GPU alone typically runs between $2,000 to $3,000 these days. Razer charges an additional $1,400 to upgrade the Blade 18 from an RTX 5070 Ti to the 5090. (And for the record, the total cost for our fully decked out testing unit was $4,599.)

Beyond frame rates, Cyberpunk 2077 simply looked great on the Blade 18’s 240Hz IPS LED display. It’s not as bright as the MiniLED screens Razer offers on the Blade 16, and it doesn’t offer the insane contrast levels of an OLED screen, but it does the job well. For the price, though, it would have been nice to see more modern screen technology. Like the Blade 16, the 18 also offers a dual-mode display, which is how it reaches those higher 440Hz refresh rates in 1080p+. 

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

It worked as advertised in Overwatch 2, where I played several matches well above 300fps with high quality settings. The additional visible frames are particularly helpful during fast-paced moments, where you may have the blink of an eye to take out an opponent before they headshot you. 

I had no doubt the Blade 18 would be fast, but I also noticed that it felt genuinely more immersive than the Blade 16 because of its more expansive display. As I leaned in during Cyberpunk 2077, Halo Infinite and Overwatch sessions, it almost felt like I was in front of a desktop setup. That’s ultimately what you’re paying for with this machine. When I opened up audio files in Audacity, I also noticed that the additional screen space simply made it easier to sift through my timelines.

When it comes to direct benchmarks, the Core Ultra 9 chip isn’t much better than Intel’s 13th-gen hardware in single-threaded tasks, and it’s sometimes best by AMD’s latest batch of hardware. Intel has made significant progress in multi-threaded tests like Geekbench 6, though, and that sort of performance makes the Blade 18 ideal for tasks like video rendering and complex games.

The Blade 18 also ran remarkably cool: During a 3DMark stress test, which involved running one demo 20 times in a row, the CPU stayed at 70 degrees Celsius most of the time, with occasional spikes to 85C. During the CPU-heavy Cinebench tests, Intel’s chip jumped to 80C on average with some jumps to 90C. The GPU, meanwhile, held a steady 70C and never wavered during 3DMark benchmarks. The fans sure can get loud, though, as you’d expect for a system that’s relatively thin and needs to pump out a ton of heat.

Razer has been building sturdy and attractive gaming laptops for well over a decade now, so it’s not a huge surprise that the Blade 18 feels incredibly solid and premium. Its keyboard has a great depth to it that feels just as good playing shooters as it does while typing, and its trackpad is wonderfully smooth and accurate. (It does get a bit overzealous when detecting multi-touch gestures, though.) Port-wise, the Blade 18 also packs in everything you’d want, including three USB Type-A 3.2 connections, one  Thunderbolt 5 USB-C port, a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port, 2.5Gb Ethernet and a full-sized SD card slot.

Personally, if I had to choose between Razer’s current lineup, I’d go with the Blade 16 so that I could actually carry it around and occasionally use it as a productivity machine. Not so with the Blade 18 — its short two hour and 17 minute battery life (in PCMark 10’s battery benchmark) means you’ll always need to lug around its beefy power adapter. After an hour of writing this review, its battery life also dropped from fully charged to 38 percent. But really, nobody is buying this thing just to deal with spreadsheets and emails. You want ultimate power and an enormous screen? Then battery life will suffer.

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

To paraphrase The Lord of the Rings, one does not simply choose to live with an 18-inch gaming laptop — not without considering all of the conveniences you’re leaving behind. For the sickos who would dare tread that path, the Blade 18 is a solidly built powerhouse that weighs significantly less than rivals like the 18-inch Alienware Area 51. Just be prepared to pay Razer’s high price to own one.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/razer-blade-18-2025-review-an-18-inch-gaming-laptop-that-does-the-most-153000136.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader shares a report: China’s giant solar parks aren’t just changing the power mix — they may be changing the ground beneath them. Fresh field data point to cooler soils, extra moisture, and pockets of greening, though lasting ecological shifts will hinge on design and long-term care.

[…] A team studying one of the largest photovoltaic parks in China, the Gonghe project in the Talatan Desert, found a striking difference between what was happening under the panels and what lay just beyond. They used a detailed framework measuring dozens of indicators — everything from soil chemistry to microbial life — and discovered that the micro-environment beneath the panels was noticeably healthier. The reasons track with physics: shade cools the surface and slows evaporation, letting scarce soil moisture linger longer; field experiments in western China report measurable soil-moisture gains beneath shaded arrays.

Simple shade from panel rows can create a gentler microclimate at ground level, cutting wind stress and helping fragile seedlings establish. In other desert locations like Gansu and the Gobi, year-round field data tell a similar story. Soil temperatures beneath arrays tend to be cooler during the day and a bit warmer at night than surrounding ground, with humidity patterns shifting in tandem — conditions that can make harsh surfaces more habitable when paired with basic land care. Even small shifts like these can help re-establish vegetation — if combined with erosion control and water management. These aren’t wildflowers blooming overnight, but they are signs that utility-scale solar can double as a modest micro-restorer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Browser Company’s AI-powered browser is now available to download for all macOS users. Dia started rolling out to private beta testers in June, following its initial reveal at the end of last year, but if you’re a Mac user you can download it here if you want to try it. Note that you need a Mac with an M1 chip or later running macOS 14 or later.

AI is being baked into a lot of web browsers right now, but with Dia it’s at the heart of everything you do. It allows you to interact with The Browser Company’s chatbot within every tab you have open, where it’s able to search the web, compare websites and answer questions about the content displayed on the page you have open. It features an in-line copy editor too, and can summarise text without requiring you to copy-paste it into a separate field. It’ll also happily talk you out of an expensive purchase, if prompted.

The Browser Company previously worked on the popular Arc browser, but shifted its focus entirely to Dia back in May, after CEO Josh Miller said the former “lacked cohesion, in both its core features and value.” Miller said Arc was “too different” for widespread adoption, but committed to providing future security updates for the people who were on board (many of whom were effusive in their praise).

The Browser Company was recently acquired by Atlassian in a deal worth around $610 million, which should be finalized by the end of 2025. As part of the agreement, the former was allowed to continue operating independently while it worked on Dia, and wrote in a blog post published at the time that the acquisition would help it roll out its new AI browser more aggressively. At the time of writing, there’s no word on plans for a Windows launch. But given Arc eventually made its way to Windows, chances are it’ll happen sooner or later.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-browser-companys-dia-is-now-available-on-mac-no-invite-needed-150240626.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader shares a report: A website set up by an unknown Dane over the course of one weekend in August is giving a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.

The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.

The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it to national government officials, members of the European Parliament and others with ease. Since launching, it has broken the inboxes of MEPs and caused a stir in Brussels’ corridors of power. “We are getting hundreds per day about it,” said Evin Incir, a Swedish Socialists and Democrats MEP, of the email deluge.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo has cleared up the biggest mystery since Arthur Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes story by revealing what the two animated shorts it released this week were all about. The company says these are the first short films from Nintendo Pictures, which it bought in 2022 (the production house was previously called Dynamo Pictures).

“We hope you enjoyed the two ‘Close to You’ videos released on October 7 and 8. The second video is available on Nintendo Today!, a free app available on your smart device,” the company said in a post on X. “These are the first short films created by Nintendo Pictures Co., Ltd. Nintendo Pictures will continue to explore new creative possibilities through video content.”

The post implies that, at least for now, the company doesn’t plan to release the second short outside of its Nintendo Today! app. It seems that Nintendo didn’t make the films to promote a new Pikmin game either — though one is probably coming after Pikmin 4 quickly became the best-selling entry in the series.

The shorts are both very cute. It was clever of Nintendo to make a version where you could see the Pikmin and one where they were invisible (save for one of the creatures scurrying underneath a tot’s crib in the background).

To date, Nintendo Pictures has functioned largely as a division that supports games its parent company makes and publishes, by helping with things like animation, art, design and cinematics. It’s also worked with external studios, as it carried out motion capture work for Death Standing 2.

Nintendo teamed up with Universal Pictures and Illumination to make the Mario movies (and potentially a Donkey Kong spinoff), and Sony Pictures to produce the live-action The Legend of Zelda film. On this evidence, though, Nintendo appears to have the chops to make movies primarily in-house, a step it may well be considering as it continues to expand into areas of entertainment beyond games.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendos-pikmin-shorts-were-about-showing-off-its-animation-studios-chops-143009750.html?src=rss

A few days ago, an inscrutable interstellar interloper made its closest approach to Mars, where a fleet of international spacecraft seek to unravel the red planet’s ancient mysteries.

Several of the probes encircling Mars took a break from their usual activities and turned their cameras toward space to catch a glimpse of an object named 3I/ATLAS, a rogue comet that arrived in our Solar System from interstellar space and is now barreling toward perihelion—its closest approach to the Sun—at the end of this month.

This is the third interstellar object astronomers have detected within our Solar System, following 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov discovered in 2017 and 2019. Scientists think interstellar objects routinely transit among the planets, but telescopes have only recently had the ability to find one. For example, the telescope that discovered Oumuamua only came online in 2010.

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The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened a probe into 2.88 million Tesla electric vehicles currently equipped with the company’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system. As first reported by Reuters, the NHTSA has received more than 50 reports of traffic-safety violations as well as numerous crashes.

The agency, which oversees the nation’s motor vehicle safety standards, said that Tesla’s FSD software has “induced vehicle behavior that violated traffic safety laws,” with vehicles reportedly running red lights and driving against the flow of traffic.

Among the reports the agency has received, six of them allege that a Tesla vehicle with FSD engaged “approached an intersection with a red traffic signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection.” The probe will begin as a preliminary evaluation, after which the NHTSA could issue a recall if it believes the vehicles pose a great enough risk to public safety.

The agency has conducted numerous investigations into the EV maker this year alone. At the start of the year, it opened an investigation into Tesla’s Smart Summon and Actual Smart Summon features, which allow owners to remotely retrieve their vehicles from a parking spot. Just a few weeks ago, it announced an investigation into the 2021 Model Y over its door handles and whether they risk trapping passengers inside the vehicle. This is also not the first time the agency has looked into the safety of Tesla’s driver assist features.

Tesla releases its own vehicle safety reports highlighting that accidents per million miles driven are far less common when its FSD technology is engaged than when it is not. However, the company has also fought to have more specific crash data involving FSD kept from public release, citing confidentiality.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/nhtsa-launches-probe-into-teslas-full-self-driving-tech-141102274.html?src=rss

Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago and typically mounted on platforms called ahu. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island for decades, pondering their cultural significance, as well as how a Stone Age culture managed to carve and transport statues weighing as much as 92 tons. One hypothesis, championed by archaeologist Carl Lipo of Binghamton University, among others, is that the statues were transported in a vertical position, with workers using ropes to essentially “walk” the moai onto their platforms.

The oral traditions of the people of Rapa Nui certainly include references to the moai “walking” from the quarry to their platforms, such as a song that tells of an early ancestor who made the statues walk. While there have been rudimentary field tests showing it might have been possible, the hypothesis has also generated a fair amount of criticism. So Lipo has co-authored a new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science offering fresh experimental evidence of “walking” moai, based on 3D modeling of the physics and new field tests to recreate that motion.

The first Europeans arrived in the 17th century and found only a few thousand inhabitants on the tiny island (just 14 by 7 miles across) thousands of miles away from any other land. In order to explain the presence of so many moai, the assumption has been that the island was once home to tens of thousands of people. But Lipo thought perhaps the feat could be accomplished with fewer workers. In 2012, Lipo and his colleague, Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona, showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion.

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The Bank of England has warned there is a growing risk of a “sudden correction” in global markets as it raised concerns about soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies. From a report: Policymakers said there were also threats of a “sharp repricing of US dollar assets” if the Federal Reserve lost credibility in the eyes of global investors. It comes as Donald Trump’s continues to attack the US central bank and threaten its independence.

Continued hype and optimism about the potential for AI technology has led to a rise in valuations in recent months, with companies such as OpenAI now worth $500 billion, compared with $157 billion last October. Another firm, Anthropic, has almost trebled its valuation, going from $60 billion in March to $170 billion last month.

However, the Bank of England’s financial policy committee (FPC) warned on Wednesday: “The risk of a sharp market correction has increased. “On a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence. This … leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic.” It said investors had not fully accounted for these potential risks, warning that “a sudden correction could occur” should any of them crystallise, resulting in finance drying up for households and businesses. The FPC added: “As an open economy with a global financial centre, the risk of spillovers to the UK financial system from such global shocks is material.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You can get Sony’s WH-1000XM5 wireless headphones for $250 in a limited time deal for Amazon Prime Day. That’s $150 off its launch price, $50 off its regular Amazon list price and only a cent more than its all-time low of $249.99. While the model was released a few years ago, it’s still a fantastic alternative to the newer but pricier WH-1000XM6, which you can also get with a discount of $20 from Amazon right now. We gave the WH-1000XM5 a score of 95 when we reviewed it and praised its redesign for providing a massive increase in comfort. 

When it comes to sound quality, we found its bass punchier than its predecessors’. The model provided more depth and more clarity than the WH-1000XM4, which made the listening experience more immersive. Sony doubled the the number of processors and the number of microphones that handle noise cancelation on the WH-1000XM5, as well, making it better at blocking sounds with higher frequencies like human voices. 

Of course, the WH-1000XM6 has better sound quality and an improved active noise cancellation technology. But with a price of $450 — currently $428 for Prime Day — it’s a much bigger expense. If you don’t mind getting an even older model, the Sony WH-1000XM4 is also on sale for $188. The model, released in 2020, has dated features by now compared to the newer iterations of the headphones. But Sony’s WH-1000X headphones have always been some of the best, and a five-year-old model could be better than some newer devices out there. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/sonys-wh-1000xm5-headphones-drop-to-250-for-prime-day-133009798.html?src=rss

The end of US tax credits for buying electric vehicles has changed the market in ways that are still unfolding.

I spoke this week with people closely monitoring the auto industry to get a sense of what’s next. They said the loss of federal incentives is likely to dampen shoppers’ enthusiasm, but the upcoming arrival of several dozen new or redesigned models could help fuel a comeback.

“I think the dust needs to settle for everyone to figure out what’s going to happen near term,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights for Cox Automotive.

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Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank of England are warning of an AI bubble that could burst sooner than later, citing soaring valuations and stock prices. Speaking at the Milken Institute in Washington DC, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF, said that “uncertainty is the new normal and it is here to stay” and that we should all “buckle up.” In discussing financial conditions, she said that “fired up by optimism about the productivity-enhancing potential of AI, global equity prices are surging.”

The Bank of England, for its part, has said that “the risk of a sharp market correction has increased,” and that “equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence (AI).” It also notes the increasingly common concern that AI might not deliver all that it has promised. A record of a recent Financial Policy Committee meeting at the Bank of England reads, “downside factors included disappointing AI capability/adoption progress or increased competition, which could drive a re-evaluation of currently high expected future earnings.”

The AI craze has been in full swing since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 and its explosive growth since then. The chatbot kicked off a flurry of investment, such as Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar deal in 2023. And, of course, the biggest tech companies followed OpenAI’s lead with products like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Apple Intelligence.

Since then, the ChatGPT maker has inked hundreds of billions of dollars in purchasing and investment agreements with the likes of AMD and NVIDIA in the race for AI dominance. Competitors like Anthropic, whose CEO thinks AI will replace half of all white-collar jobs within five years, have found the backing of other tech giants like Google and Amazon.

Integrations for AI tools continue to grow, and the proliferation of the technology keeps entering new spaces, like music. There’s no telling how everything will play out, but in the meantime AI can help us shop for shoes by looking at our feet.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/leading-financial-institutions-are-worried-about-a-looming-ai-bubble-130827642.html?src=rss

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but the press that Intel has generated in the last year has certainly been testing the boundaries of the aphorism.

Is it good when your company posts an annual loss for the first time in almost 40 years? When you’re doing multiple rounds of mass layoffs? When your board pushes your CEO into leaving, and starts arguing with the new CEO about major strategy decisions almost immediately? When you’re either losing or failing to gain market share in areas critical to your bottom line? When you need to explain to the president why your CEO should keep his job, and then explain to investors the many possible downsides of a mercurial president deciding he wants a stake in your company?

I feel like the answer to these questions is “mostly no.” Even Intel’s recent investment from and partnership with Nvidia came with a tacit admission that Intel was mostly failing to make a dent in AI hardware and software and the gaming and workstation GPU markets. (Reports that Intel could start manufacturing chips for AMD would be good news, as bizarre as that arrangement would have been at any other point in the two companies’ history with one another, but those talks could still fall apart.)

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If Intel wants to come back as a chip fab, its upcoming Core Ultra series 3 laptop processors will be a crucial part of that. The company has just revealed more information about those processors (codenamed Panther Lake), that will use its 2-nanometer 18A process and be built in the US at its Arizona plant. 

The Core Ultra series 3 system-on-chips will be utilized mainly in high-end laptops along with “gaming devices and edge solutions,” Intel said. The company noted that they’d blend “Lunar Lake-level power efficiency with Arrow Lake-class performance,” though it usually boasts that with all new Core chips.

They’ll offer up to 50 percent more processing performance compared to previous generations, with some versions sporting as many as 16 performance cores (P-cores), along with efficiency cores (E-cores). Chip density will improve by 30 percent, while performance per watt will rise 15 percent. 

Intel’s integrated Arc GPU also sees a 50 percent performance bump compared to the last generation, with a maximum of 12 cores in high-end versions. They’ll also see an updated XPU design for AI acceleration with up to 180 Platform TOPS (trillions of operations per second).

Intel called its 18A architecture “the most advanced semiconductor node developed and manufactured in the United States,” adding that it’s “fully operational and set to reach high-volume production later this year.” As recently as two months ago, however, the company was reportedly struggling with the yields it would need to even start production, let alone make a profit. 

It would be an understatement to say that Intel needs the new node to succeed. In August President Donald Trump said that the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan should resign before walking that back after a successful meeting between the two. Later, Trump announced that the US government was taking a 9.9 percent ($8.9 billion stake in Intel) and last month, NVIDIA said it was throwing Intel a $5 billion lifeline to the company forPC and data center CPUs. In its July Q2 earnings report, Intel said it lost $2.9 billion and would lay off up to 20 percent of its workforce. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/intel-gives-us-a-glimpse-of-its-panther-lake-core-ultra-chips-130010879.html?src=rss