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Apple today seeded the fourth public beta of an upcoming watchOS 7 update to public beta testers, one week after seeding the third public beta and just a few days after seeding a new beta to developers.

The ‌watchOS 7‌ update can be downloaded after installing the proper profile from Apple’s Public Beta website. ‌watchOS 7‌ should not be installed on a primary device as it is still an early beta and there could be bugs, plus there is no way to downgrade back to watchOS 6.

‌watchOS 7‌ is a major update that introduces a new Sleep Tracking feature for the Apple Watch, which is designed to measure how long you’re asleep as you wear the ‌Apple Watch‌ while sleeping.

It comes along with a Wind Down feature that helps you establish a bedtime routine to make it easier to fall asleep at night, as well as a Sleep Mode that turns on Do Not Disturb and dims the ‌Apple Watch‌ display.

The ‌Apple Watch‌ can also wake you up with haptic vibrations, providing a weather report in the morning as well as info on battery life so you can get your day started.

Along with these sleep tracking features, the ‌Apple Watch‌ has automatic handwashing detection that listens for the sound of running water and handwashing motions and then starts a 20-second timer so you can make sure you’re washing your hands for the appropriate amount of time.

A new watch Face Sharing feature lets you share watch faces with others and install new watch faces from the App Store, Messages, Mail, websites, and more.

There’s a new Chronograph Pro face with tachymeter, updates to complications, and new workout options in the newly renamed Fitness app, which was previously the Activity app.

The Maps app now supports directions for cyclists, Siri provides spoken translations, and there’s a Shortcuts app on the ‌Apple Watch‌. For more on what’s new in watcOS 7, make sure to check out our watchOS 7 roundup.

‌watchOS 7‌ is limited to the ‌Apple Watch‌ Series 3, Series 4, and Series 5 models, and is not compatible with the ‌Apple Watch‌ Series 1 and Series 2.

Gigabyte has announced the Aorus 15P, a portable laptop tailored to professional gaming. It’s available now on Gigabyte’s online store, starting at $1,599.99.

The company says it worked with esports teams, including G2 Esports, to design the new laptop. It weighs 4.4 pounds (2kg) — which is portable so far as gaming laptops go — and it’s 0.9 inches thick. Gigabyte says the chassis passed “a series of pressure tests” for durability.

Gigabyte is promising up to eight hours of battery life, which is certainly an optimistic prediction for a gaming rig (and this one has a per-key RGB keyboard, which might draw some extra power).

Specs-wise, the 15P comes with a 144Hz display. It’s powered by Intel’s Core i7-10750H and up to 32GB of RAM. You can select a GeForce RTX 2060 or an RTX 2070 with Max-Q design. For ports, you’ve got three USB-A, one USB-C, an HDMI, an SD card reader, a headphone jack, and an Ethernet, in addition to the charging port.

The big question with thin gaming laptops is always the cooling: Gigabyte says the device will incorporate its Windforce Infinity cooling system, which includes two 12-volt fans, five heat pipes, and multiple vents to keep up its frame rates. Hopefully, we’ll be able to test that claim for ourselves later this month.

The news cycle is bleak. Easter eggs are fun. And maybe it’s the nostalgia speaking (and the recent anniversary), but Windows 95 still reigns supreme in my memory as the best operating system of all time. It’s for these three very scientific reasons that the reveal of a long-hidden Windows 95 easter egg temporarily cured my 2020-induced depression.

The Easter Egg was revealed on Living Computers: Museum + Labs’ YouTube Channel (via BoingBoing) to celebrate Microsoft’s 45th anniversary. In the video, Windows 95 developer Jeff Parsons reveals how to find a secret credits sequence.

“Windows 95 was packed with new features thanks to over three years of work by literally hundreds of people,” Parsons says in the video. “But who were all those people?” Turns out to access the hidden credits, you’d have to make use of one of the new features introduced with Windows 95: Long file names.

To trigger the easter egg, you have to create a new folder and then initially name it “and now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for”. Once that’s done, you have to rename the folder “we proudly present for your viewing pleasure”. After that, you again have to rename the folder, “The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team!” Then, a user can click on the folder to view the credits.

The credits sequence itself isn’t like the ones you’d see at the end of a movie. Oh no, it’s replete with Windows 95 glory. On top of an excellent MIDI soundtrack (CLOUDS.MID by Brian Orr), the names whiz past in a horizontal marquee animation atop of very WordArt-y background. There are some recognisable names in there, including the likes of Bill Gates and Brad Silverberg (and Parsons is in there too). Though simple, the sequence is quite long at around 12 minutes but watching all of it is sort of like stepping into a time warp back to the mid-90s, when tech was still fun and less of an all-consuming nightmare hellscape.

Given the three fairly long and specific “passcodes” you’d have to enter, it’s unlikely most folks outside the product team ever knew this easter egg existed. It’s also not the only retro Windows easter egg. The Windows 3.1 development team also hid a secret credits section that could be accessed by holding down Ctrl+Alt+Shift in the About section of the Program manager. But perhaps a more fitting easter egg for 2020 was hidden in Microsoft Office 95’s version of Excel called the Hall of Tortured Souls. It’s a credit sequence that looks exactly like what it sounds like. However, as this blogger has a severe case of the brain worms, I’ll take the wholesome MIDI credits, thank you very much.

Known for its tablets, TVs, and phones, TCL has this week announced a new technology, NXTPAPER, that could totally change how you think about e ink. E ink displays are known for being great to stare at for hours and perfect for reading books (and sometimes even comics), but the latest colour displays from E Ink have low resolution and slow refresh rates, making them unusable for video. TCL claims its new NXTPAPER tech could be a solution.

TCL’s press release is a little confusing, as it appears to compare NXTPAPER both to E Ink’s displays and to traditional LCD displays that you find in most tablets and phones today. But by all accounts, the technology used in NXTPAPER sounds like e ink technology. The press release claims it will be 36% thinner than LCD displays and 65% more power-efficient – which lines up with the gains you get from e ink.

Last week, E Ink told the blog Good Ereader that it had plans to improve its own colour E Ink technology. While we adore the first colour E Ink devices, they’ve not been without their flaws, including a paltry 100-PPI resolution and slower refresh rates. E Ink promised to at least double the resolution to 200 PPI by 2021, with a goal of hitting 300 PPI – the resolution of high-end LCD and monochrome E Ink displays – at a later date.

We don’t know the exact planned resolution for TCL’s competing NXTPAPER technology, but the company claims it will be full HD, and that the text incorporated will allow it to have 25% higher contrast than traditional e ink devices.

TCL also says it will offer a “paper-like visual experience in full colour with no flicker and no harmful blue light” and that it will rely on natural light – which, again, sounds like e ink.

Currently, the company E Ink is the primary producer of e ink displays and the technology behind them, but TCL has rapidly made a name for itself in the TV and phone display arena. Branching into e ink is a welcome surprise. We’ve reached out to TCL for more details on its NXTPAPER technology, and we’re curious to see what it looks like when (or if) it eventually finds its way to devices we can own.

For now, it sounds like E Ink has a little competition, and the e ink space is about to get even more interesting.

The iPad Air (2019) has an arguably old-fashioned look, being lumbered with a large chin and forehead so as to accommodate a classic Apple home button. However, this feature does confer the advantage of supporting the OEM’s form of fingerprint authentication, Touch ID, whereas the more expensive Pro variants have sacrified it in the name of thin bezels.

Recent leaks have suggested that its successor, which could be called the iPad Air 4, (or, according to additional rumors, the iPad Air (2021)) may also adopt this slim-border design. It may make sense, especially if the new iPhones also turn out with the same general language. SvetApple has prepared renders that show how such a budget iPad might look.

The results do look a lot like a Pro (albeit more like a 2018 variant than a newer model). It creates a nice effect in the gold, silver and gray colorways imagined for this “Air”. SvetApple projects that the new slim-border display, which has a modern aspect ratio, may be 10.8 to 11 inches in diagonal length.

However, one thing this updated screen does not have is the rumored in-display form of Touch ID. Instead, this security feature is integrated into the power button. SvetApple asserts that this hardware feature will be called the Top Button.

It is located next to one of multiple speakers that is mirrored on the opposite side of the purported device’s flat edge. The “new iPad Air” is also depicted as supporting USB type C charging and syncing and as having connectors for a Magic Keyboard.

Otherwise, the iPad Air 4 is thought to be graced with the A14 Bionic chipset when it comes out, rather than an older Apple SoC. However, it may have just 4GB of RAM with a 128GB internal storage option. This complete package may start at US$499 and range upwards to $649. SvetApple speculates that it will launch on September 8, 2020.

Intel dropped a whole bunch of details on their 11th gen Tiger Lake series this week complete with detailed press releases, interviews, and performance slides. According to their own benchmark results for the Core i7-1165G7, raw multi-thread performance should rival the Ryzen 7 4700U while the integrated Xe GPU should be on par with the discrete GeForce MX350.

The problem with manufacturer-provided numbers is that they usually show the processor at its best running on a machine that isn’t yet ready for retail. When pressed for an answer on what specific Tiger Lake laptop Intel were using for their public benchmarks, the chipmaker wouldn’t confirm with us other than it was a “thin and light system”. In other words, the numbers they are showing are unlikely to be representative of what you’ll eventually get from OEMs. This detail is important because it’s inevitable that laptops with the same Core i7-1165G7 processor will have different CPU performance levels due to how laptop makers will choose to exploit the wide 10 W to 28 W dynamic tuning range.

One only needs to look at the Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 as an example. The Microsoft Surface Laptop is able to run the CPU 75 percent faster than on the LG Gram 17 with plenty of other examples in between these two extremes. We fully expect to see similar results when Tiger Lake becomes more widely available across different Ultrabook designs.

Earlier this week the Stable Channel of Chrome OS 85 was released to Chromebooks. Hot on the heels of that, the Chrome OS 86 Dev Channel was updated and I’ve been using it on my daily driver. If you’re the kind of Chromebook user I am and have one or two dozen tabs open at any given time, you’re likely going to love the new tab search feature.

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Above you can see I have 9 pinned tabs, two regular active tabs and a new tab page, just for good measure.

By clicking on the drop down arrow to the right of the last tab shown, there’s a dropdown menu of all open tabs. You can’t see all of them but at least five do appear. And typing in the search bar will, of course, search through all of your active tabs.

There’s currently a keyboard shortcut to open this menu as well: It’s CTRL + Shift + E, if you’d rather not mouse or tap around.

This feature is enabled by default in the Chrome OS 86 Dev Channel, although I suspect you can enable it in Chrome OS 85 behind this flag: chrome://flags/#enable-tab-search

Since this is on by default with the Chrome OS 86 Dev Channel, I fully expect this to arrive for everyone on the Stable Channel when Chrome OS 86 is released in roughly six weeks.

Granted, if you’re just doing some basic browsing with a few tabs, you likely won’t need this feature. Once that row of browser tabs fills up though? You’ll probably be all over this new addition to Chrome OS 86.

Nvidia is today announcing the introduction of Nvidia Reflex technology. In an attempt to put a quantifiable number on gaming PC input lag, Nvidia and its pals at monitor manufacturers are introducing screen-based technology called Reflex Latency Analyzer that is able to accurately measure system latency for the first time without specialised equipment. It’s also adding per game support for a new Reflex Low-Latency Mode, which aims to lower input lag in select games.

Details remain sparse on the exact specifications for upcoming monitors with the technology, although we know Alienware, Asus, Acer, and MSI intend to introduce the functionality within new 360Hz monitors intended for competitive gaming. Asus’ model is similar to its recently announced 360Hz PG259QN—which is set to arrive later this month for $699—but packs the new technology. Look out for that under the PG259QNR name when it arrives. 

Alienware intends to introduce the functionality within a new 360Hz monitor intended for competitive gaming: the Alienware 25 Gaming Monitor (AW2521H).

Valorant, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Fortnite are just a few of the games announced that will support Nvidia Reflex Low-Latency Mode, “that reduces latency by up to 50 percent.” This is a separate feature to the Reflex Latency Analyzer, and a part of the Nvidia Reflex technology suite.

Input lag is a common phrase thrown around in the gaming monitor space, but it’s not easily measured without specialist equipment or cameras. To do so, you need to measure the time between a user hitting an input (primary mouse click, for example) and the monitor’s pixels reacting to that input (your character fires a shot). 

It can also be difficult to quantify the root of latency. Latency can stem from many sources: be that your peripherals, internal PC hardware, or monitor. And for as many points in the PC gaming pipeline where latency can be introduced, there are similarly patches where it can be reduced.

Nvidia Reflex appears to be intended to shine a light on where lag is being introduced within a system, and at the very least offer an accurate measure of a system’s latency, if not reduce it.

That means there will be a lot more chat of real-world latency with this coming GPU generation, which may signify that latency is a new battleground between Nvidia and AMD—and one where Nvidia may believe it has the advantage considering today’s disclosure. 

We’ll have to wait until we have our hands on both Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA 2 GPUs to put that theory to the test, however.

One would assume the technology will also be limited to the latest monitors and Nvidia 30-series GPUs, however, we’re yet to hear confirmation either way.

On Tuesday, Google announced that the Chrome OS 85 Stable Channel is released, with the typical staggered rollout over the coming days. As usual, Google has highlighted some of the newest features for Chromebooks, but there’s always more in terms of experimental functionality.

I’ll share what you need to know about Chrome OS 85 from the official release and cover thee additional items Google has held under wraps for now.

Wi-Fi password sync between Chromebooks

We knew that WiFi password synchronization between Chromebooks was coming and it’s finally here in Chrome OS 85. This is ideal for people or families that use multiple Chromebooks in the same location, and therefore, likely on the same network. Why? Because Wi-Fi passwords are part of your profile’s keychain, so they move from Chromebook to Chromebook. No word on if this feature will also include Android phones, although it likely will in the future.

Search bar in Chrome OS Settings

This is a long overdue improvement for finding different settings on a Chromebook. Not only does the Search bar find your exact queries but it’s smart enough to suggest related results, as shown above. Usability in the Chrome OS Settings has been adequate but I appreciate this new feature, which I’ve been using on the Chrome OS 86 Dev Channel.

Say hello to the new microphone slider

With so many people and students working or studying at home, video conferencing usage is up. So this new microphone volume slider is a welcome addition to Chrome OS 85. There’s no need to jump into the settings for Hangouts, Meet, Zoom or whatever video chat service you use now; you can just click and slide!

And speaking of video, the Camera app can now pause and resume video while recording, or take a still snapshot during a video. All videos are saved in MP4 format, making it easier for others to view your content, although I don’t see too many people creating sharable video with a Chromebook.

That’s all that Google is officially highlighting for Chrome OS 85 in it’s news release, so let’s hit the other goodies from the Chrome Enterprise release notes and other sources:

The “Displays” page in Settings has been updated to allow independent configuration of the resolution and the refresh rate for external monitors. This setting will be split automatically and users do not need to take any action.

When entering text using the handwriting keyboard, you can now use familiar gestures to edit your handwriting. Drawing a strikethrough will delete text, and a caret will give you space to insert text.

Users can now manage their ongoing print jobs and view what has been completed.

As previously mentioned, Chrome tabs open up to 10 percent faster and can be grouped.

I have to dig through the code commits (and there are a lot of them!) in lieu of additional release notes, so as I find other items or experimental flags, I will update this post accordingly.

There’s a fresh Windows 10 warning out this week and ignoring it could leave your PC facing the nightmare of the dreaded blue screen of death. The new alert has been issued by the team at Lenovo who say that, after installing the August 2020 cumulative update for Windows 10 Version 2004, some ThinkPad laptops are being hit by this irritating bug.

In a post on its support page Lenovo states that “after installing the August 2020 cumulative update for Windows 10 Version 2004, users may notice one or more of the following symptoms: Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) when booting • Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) when starting Lenovo Vantage • Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) when running Windows Defender Scan • Can’t login by Face with Windows Hello • Errors in Device Manager related to Intel Management Engine • Errors in Device Manager related to IR Camera.

If you own a ThinkPad and have found yourself staring at a blue screen rather than your usual desktop and files then it seems there is a workaround.

Lenovo says that anyone hit by this problem should disable the Enhanced Windows Biometric Security setting in BIOS Setup via the Security and Virtualization menus.

The other way to avoid this nightmare is to wait until a fix has been issued by Microsoft before even attempting to download the August 2020 cumulative update.

According to Windows Latest, it’s not just ThinkPad users who have been affected by this new glitch with non-Lenovo users complaining on Reddit and Microsoft forums. Speaking on Reddit, on Windows 10 fan said, “I went from a perfectly fine, basically brand new computer, to more busted than the old PC I replaced, basically overnight.”

Whilst another user added, “I am absolutely not having a good time with 2004. Is there any easy way to roll back to an earlier version outside of that 10 day window beyond trying to search around for a specifically updated version of windows?”

This latest bout of issues comes as Microsoft may have finally realised that its updates are causing too many problems for users, in fact it’s emerged that the US firm could be switching from two big updates each year to just one.

According to a blog post by Windows Latest, the Redmond-based firm is looking to shake-up their Windows 10 update schedule following the release of the fall patch this year. It had been thought that following this release another big Windows 10 update would be arriving in the first half of 2021.

But this release has been delayed due to Windows 10X, a new edition of Windows 10 designed for dual-screen devices, also getting help up. This new version of Windows 10 is now due to release around April or May time next year, while the launch of Windows 10’s April or May 2021 update has been delayed.

And sources have told Windows Latest that Microsoft may opt to switch to a single, annual release schedule for their tentpole Windows 10 updates from next year.