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If you’re pricing out a new 13-inch laptop, you’ve probably considered the HP Spectre and Dell XPS lines—particularly the HP Spectre x360 and the Dell XPS 13.

Both of these laptops are the core workhorses in their respective lines, which are kitted out to appeal to higher-end consumer and business audiences. Hewlett Packard often wins corporate bidding due to its more budget-conscious pricing, though you give up some fit and finish to make those cost breakpoints. Dell machines tend to be more solidly built, but also tack on extra cost to cover those details.

All of the Hewlett Packard Spectre line commonly available are touchscreen 2-in-1 models, meaning that you can flip them over on their hinges and use them as tablets (or in table-tent mode for video viewing.) The XPS 13 does come in a 2-in-1 version, but it’s a bit pricier. I’ve stuck with the standard laptop edition for this review to keep the models in a similar price range. Here’s how they compare:

Hewlett Packard (HP) Spectre x360-13t

The Spectre x360 13t includes a 13-inch screen with HP’s distinctive cut-off corners. This one comes with a dark chassis and gold accents. It draws its power from a quad-core 8th Generation Intel i7-8550U processor, 16 gigabytes (GB) RAMand a 512GB PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive.

Graphics processing is provided by an integrated Intel UHD 620 graphics processor (standard equipment on most laptops in these two lines.) The price tag is quite reasonable for a 2-in-1 with these specs, but the x360 isn’t going to win any medals for sturdy construction.

New Dell XPS 13 9380

The New Dell XPS 13 9380 comes with newer hardware inside, but no touchscreen or 2-in-1 capabilities outside. This model is a handsome rose gold exterior—with a silver interior.

This unit includes an Intel Core i7-8565 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and a fingerprint reader (which can be used to turn on the laptop). It has the same onboard Intel HD Graphics 620 processor as the Spectre x360, which means that like that model, it’s capable of handling some light photo editing and similar tasks. The screen is a true 4K, and pleasant to look at. You’re paying for better build quality here, though the HP has a minor edge on hardware.

You might only have to wait a few weeks more if you’ve been holding off for a OnePlus 7T. The historically accurate OnLeaks and Compareraja have claimed that both the OnePlus 7T and 7T Pro will be unveiled on October 10th, with availability slated for October 15th. The apparent scoop also includes specs for both, although it’s clear these are incremental upgrades — you won’t be in a rush to upgrade a OnePlus 7 Pro.

Both phones will reportedly tout slightly faster Snapdragon 855 Plus chips, the long-rumored 16-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a host of photography modes that includes a new macro mode. You won’t see fundamental changes beyond that, according to the leak. It’s not necessarily a bad thing when that still means top-tier specs in key areas, particularly the responsive 90Hz AMOLED screen. If these specs prove authentic, though, this is the definition of a “T” release from OnePlus — an iterative upgrade meant to keep the device current, rather than court enthusiasts who replace their phones as often as possible.

After years of rumors, Apple will finally include a fast charger with at least one of its iPhone models. Starting with the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max, the company will ship an 18W power adapter inside the box. The 18W USB-C power adapter is the same one the company ships with the 2018 iPad Pro. Since the iPhone 11 Pro still features a Lightning Port, Apple is also including a USB-C to Lightning cable, which means you’ll finally be to connect your iPhone to one of the company’s current Macs without buying an additional cable. This marks the first time one of Apple’s smartphone hasn’t come with the company’s outdated and slow 5W charger.

Unfortunately, the more affordable iPhone 11 will continue to come with a 5W charger. In addition to faster charging, the new iPhone 11 Pro models feature improved battery life, with Apple claiming the 11 Pro offers four more hours of battery life over the iPhone Xs. The iPhone 11 Pro Max, meanwhile, offers five more hours of battery life compared to the iPhone Xs Max.

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple’s iPad lineup has been in considerable flux of late. Just in the past year, Apple totally overhauled both iPad Pro sizes, introduced a new iPad Air based on the chassis of the prior iPad Pro, and relaunched the iPad mini (albeit without much in the way of modern hardware to recommend it).

Today, the company’s representatives took the stage to announce new iPhones, but they also revealed a major update to the entry-level iPad.

The biggest news here is that the screen is bigger, at 10.2 inches. That’s thanks to a significant bezel reduction, among other tweaks. The other major change is the addition of Smart Keyboard support, using the same Smart Keyboard connector as the 2019 iPad Air. Of course, since this iPad starts at $329 and the Smart Keyboard costs $159, you’re looking at spending almost half the cost of your tablet just to get a keyboard for it.

I tried the keyboard and, well, it’s identical to the one people are using with the iPad Air right now. So there’s not much new to say. It’s good for a tablet keyboard, but it won’t hold a candle to a good desktop or laptop keyboard.

The new iPad feels almost exactly the same in your hands as the 2019 iPad Air; it’s only slightly different in a couple of minor ways. This iPad has a 10.2-inch display, whereas the iPad Air comes in at 10.5 inches; the difference is the bezels. There are the same number of pixels-per-inch as you see in the iPad Air display; it’s just a little less display.

The iPad Air is slightly thinner—just 0.05 inches less. Perhaps most importantly, the Air has an A12 chip, whereas this iPad has the A10 from a couple of years ago. There’s a dramatic performance difference between those two CPUs/GPUs, especially for augmented reality applications and games. But the A10 is still fast enough for most light browsing and content-consumption activities.

It’s the same chip as was in last year’s entry-level iPad, though, so don’t expect improved performance if you do a one-year upgrade here. And it still just supports the first-generation Apple Pencil.

If you look at Apple’s website promoting the seventh-generation iPad, you’ll find that most of the pitch is about iPadOS, a new tablet-specific branch of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system due at the end of this month. It changes the home screen, adds a bunch of new multitasking features, attempts to make working with text less nightmarish, and more. We’ll review that later this year, and we wrote about it when it was first unveiled this summer.

But the very, very short version is that it’s more powerful and useful for sure. But the device is still not going to replace a laptop for anyone looking to get serious work done.

The new iPad comes in 32GB and 128GB variants and ships starting September 30. You can pre-order it now, and it starts at $329 for most people or $299 for education customers.

Hints pulled from iOS 13 code have already shown signs of the rumored AR headset that Apple is supposedly working on, but now there’s clearer proof than ever. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith points out a readme in a new release that explains to employees how they can run the augmented reality apps on an iPhone without using the actual headset.

9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo showed how the iOS 13.0 gold master and iOS 13.1 beta releases contain Apple’s “StarBoard” system shell to run AR apps as well. According to Smith, the code suggests that rendering could be handled on the iPhone itself, and the use of an additional gamepad/motion control device.

Apple’s plans for augmented or virtual reality went unmentioned during today’s iPhone event, along with other rumored announcements like a new Apple TV or ultra-wideband location Tags. Still, the leftover notes suggest that it could’ve been a late scratch, or perhaps that something new is, as rumored, around the corner for next year.

What did you think of the iPhone 11 keynote? The word on social media appears to be “meh”, largely because the iPhone 11 appears to be going through its Gillette razor blade period:

“What will we do this year, guys?”

“Put another camera in there!”

But while the iPhone’s clearly going through a protracted period of incremental improvement there were still plenty of interesting things to take away from Tim Cook and company’s talk.

We saw the future of the iPad, worked out what the Apple Watch is actually for and discovered that nobody in the organisation or the theater appears to have a dirty mind: when we were told that the new iPad “is a great one-handed typing experience” nobody laughed.

Nobody! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, nobody booed when Apple tried to persuade us that the portmanteau “slofie” – short for slo-mo selfie – was a thing that should exist. Let’s pretend that it never happened and never speak of it again.

Here are the six key things you might not have heard from the Apple keynote.

1. The iPad is a PC. Oh yes it is

“We have never been more excited about the future of iPad,” Tim Cook said, unveiling the latest version of what we think is Apple’s best-value product: the entry-level iPad. It’s less than half the price of an iPhone but it certainly isn’t half the device.

How you compare your products to says a lot about where you think your product is headed – so when Apple explicitly compared its latest, slightly bigger iPad to the current best-selling Windows PC in the US, the message was clear. Thanks in no small part to iPadOS – which, among many other things, brings mouse control to the iPad – the iPad is intended to be a fully-featured PC rival, not just a really big iPhone. And this little iPad has got a smart connector too, so you can add one of Apple’s smart keyboards for an even more PC-like experience.

2. Apple knows what the Apple Watch is for now

The original Apple Watch was a bit like the original iPad: Apple had made a thing and didn’t really have any idea what that thing was for, so it released it to see what people would end up doing with it. And like the iPad, after a few iterations Apple now has a much clearer idea of what the Watch is and what it isn’t.

As the testimonials and keynote demonstrated, the Apple Watch is no longer intended to be a fully featured do-everything device like an iPhone or an iPad, a wrist-based communicator, garage door opener and dog translator; other than pinging you when you need to be pinged about things it’s for tracking your vital signs whether that’s to stop you dying, helping you win races or helping with medical research.

In other words it’s a kind of hyper-powered, hyper-fashionable Fitbit, and that’s no bad thing. It’s not bad for business, either, given the incredible amounts of money ageing baby boomers have to spend on health tech.

Oh, and it’s finally able to show the time all the time. It just took five generations.

3. Apple wants all of your money, all of the time

Quite a lot of the event was dedicated to services and subscriptions because that’s where a lot of Apple’s income is coming from now. It all adds up. Five bucks for your Apple television subscription. Another five bucks for Apple Arcade. And of course there’s your iCloud storage, because the free tier is still hilariously stingy. Oh, and then there’s your Newsstand subscriptions and your app subscriptions, of which Apple takes a cut too, and the Apple Card you’ll be paying for them with.

Apple’s business model used to be that it would sell you frighteningly expensive hardware at huge profit margins and that was the end of it; now, it seems the model is to sell you frighteningly expensive hardware at huge profit margins and then sell you lots and lots of subscriptions and services on top of it.

4. Apple TV+ probably won’t be very good

And we don’t just mean it’ll be rubbish in the UK, as Apple’s TV offerings traditionally are, and where history is likely to repeat in the short term at least. We mean that the signs from the keynote weren’t entirely encouraging.

Yes, offering a free year’s subscription could mean Apple’s simply using its deep pockets to bring its TV service to everyone at a very low price, but Apple TV+ was already priced below its key rivals Disney and Netflix. If you were a really rich company and you were really confident in the quality of your content, wouldn’t you just spend your money on ads showing how great it was? You don’t see Apple giving you a free iPad for a year, after all.

5. Apple’s doing diversity right

The tech industry can be terribly pale, male and stale, and tech presentations can be particularly terrible examples of that: all too often the only women and people of colour you’ll see are the models in their big-budget ads.

So it’s good to see Apple walking the walk as well as talking the talk, with a relatively diverse line-up of presenters from within the organisation. Was it perfect? Nope. But it wasn’t an endless parade of middle-aged white guys either, and the same diversity was apparent in the camera demos. This stuff matters.

6. Brexit’s borked tech for the Brits (and it’s probably going to get worse)

For years we’ve been able to translate Apple’s US prices into UK ones, because they’ve been identical: five nine nine USD worked out at five nine nine GBP.

Not any more.

The new iPad is $329 in American money but it’s £349 in British pounds. Confusingly the price difference isn’t across the range, so for example the new Apple Watch is a straight dollar-pound conversion, but it’s clearly the shape of things to come and things may well get worse if the Pound continues its decline against the Dollar.

With multiple makers of smartphones launching expensive high-end 5G smartphones this year, it was a matter of time before more reasonably priced 5G handsets emerge. Samsung is among the first companies to introduce a 5G-enabled smartphone that promises not to break the bank. In addition to faster networks support, the Samsung A90 offers a bunch of first-class features, including an advanced SoC as well as premium imaging capabilities.

Equipped with a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED display featuring a 2400×1080 resolution and a raindrop selfie camera module, the Galaxy A90 5G is based on Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 855 SoC accompanied by 6 or 8 GB of LPDDRX as well as 128 GB of NAND flash storage (expandable using a microSD card). Just like other Qualcomm-based 5G smartphones, the Galaxy A90 5G uses Qualcomm’s X50 modem. This is the same SoC and modem that power Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G handset, so from performance and connectivity perspectives, the Galaxy A90 5G promises to behave just like the range-topping model.

Imaging capabilities of the Galaxy A90 5G include a 48 MP main camera, an 8 MP ultrawide lens, and a 5 MP depth sensor. Meanwhile, a 32 MP module is used for selfies.

One of the interesting selling points of the Galaxy A90 5G is support for Samsung’s DeX platform that enables desktop-like experience on Android-based devices (e.g., open up multiple windows, re-size windows, drag and drop content, etc.) when they connected to a PC display or a TV. Of course, proper DeX experience will require an external keyboard and mouse.

Other notable features of Samsung’s Galaxy A90 5G are a 4,500 mAh battery, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, a USB 2.0 Type-C port for data and charging, stereo speakers, Dolby Atmos support for USB-C headsets, a fingerprint reader, and facial recognition.

Samsung’s Galaxy A90 5G will be released in black and white in South Korea on September 4. Exact price is unknown, but one of the rumours suggests that it will be below $1000. The launch in other countries will likely follow shortly as operators will certainly be interested in starting sales of a reasonably priced 5G handset in time for the holiday season.

There’s a new USB spec in town and it brings faster speeds with it. Announced earlier this year, the USB-IF has signed off on the latest standard. Of course, USB 3.2 is far from commonplace so it is going to be a while before you see USB 4 compatible products.

So what’s new with USB 4?

USB 4 doubles the peak data transfer rate from 20Gbps to 40Gbps. It uses the same dual-lane architecture as USB 3.2 but doubles individual lane-transfer speeds to 20Gbps to reach a cumulative 40Gbps. You will need USB 4 certified cables to take advantage of these speeds. Of course, Thunderbolt 3 has supported 40Gbps transfer for a while now, and that brings us to the next bit.

The standard has backward compatibility all the way to USB 2.0, but the bigger addition is Thunderbolt 3 support. Since USB 4 is built on top of Intel’s Thunderbolt 3, future hardware should be able to make use of those higher speeds on older Thunderbolt-compatible devices.

While it has been possible to use a single cable for transmitting data and video since the first USB 3 standard rolled out, the implementation has been fairly iffy. The USB 4 spec seeks to solve this through smarter and more efficient routing. Expect greater and more sustained transfer speeds even while using a high-resolution external display with your laptop.

Finally, the USB 4 spec brings with it support for 100W charging over the USB Power Delivery standard. We expect more details at the upcoming USB Developer Days conference.

When should I expect USB 4 hardware?

Going by how slow the uptake has been on USB 3.2, you shouldn’t expect USB 4 hardware any time soon. In fact, the latest Snapdragon 855 chipset still doesn’t support USB 3.2. By all estimates, the earliest you should expect hardware supporting the new standard would be in the second half of 2020. You will, of course, need compatible peripherals as well to make use of those blazing fast speeds.

Today, Samsung announced the launch of its newest mobile processor, the Exynos 980. This system-on-chip, which should enter mass production later this year, includes an integrated 5G modem, NPU (neural processing unit), and Mali G76 GPU.

How much should we care about 5G?

5G itself is probably not going to be a very big deal for most people. Aside from how relatively few and scattered 5G networks are for now, the really big speed increases for 5G happen on 5G FR2, the millimeter-wave band. The problem is, RF at millimeter wavelength has near-zero penetration—signals are easily blocked by walls, panes of glass, or even human bodies.

This makes 5G FR2 a potentially great delivery mechanism for site-to-site networking—such as an external antenna feeding the wired or Wi-Fi network for a large building—but much less so for an individual phone, whose connection would be interrupted by entering a building, a car, or even the user turning around and putting their body in between the phone’s antenna and the tower.

5G FR1, the sub-6GHz band, should be much more usable. It’s difficult to tell how much benefit real-world users will get from 5G FR1 connections. Current real-world speed tests show 5G FR1 speeds of 400Mbps to 600Mbps. This looks great compared to real-world speed tests of 4G at typically 50Mbps—but there’s a reason the 4G tests are so much slower, and that reason is congestion. 4G LTE is already capable of 1Gbps connections to stationary users, but there’s not enough bandwidth to support anything like that much speed delivered to all of the connected consumers.

Once 5G becomes a typical consumer use case rather than an uncommon and special one, we do expect to see some improvement over current 4G LTE—but don’t expect 500Mbps to become the new normal.

GPU and NPU

The Exynos 980’s GPU, Mali G76, is a significant improvement over earlier versions—roughly twice as fast as the Mali G71 used in earlier Samsung devices such as the Galaxy S8. It’s still not quite as fast in most benchmarks as the Qualcomm Adreno 630 used in Google’s Pixel 3 or Samsung’s own Galaxy S9+, though, so while consumers should expect snappy game and app performance, the GPU isn’t really a market game changer.

The real-world impact of the NPU, or Neural Processing Unit, is still a bit of a question mark. Samsung claims that the Exynos 980’s NPU is nearly three times as fast as the NPU used in earlier Exynos systems. We know that Samsung uses the NPU to enhance performance in its camera and augmented reality applications, but that’s likely it—for now. We expect that utilization of on-board NPUs in smartphones and tablets will increase greatly in the near future, as software vendors catch on to the possibilities of real-time, on-device machine learning.

A tale of shrinking process size

This won’t be Samsung’s first foray into 5G mobile devices; the difference here is not 5G connectivity itself but the fact that the modem is built in to the SoC (System on Chip) rather than being an external device. Building the 5G modem directly on-die with the CPU means less physical space needed for the components inside the phone, as well as lower power consumption and heat generation. All of this is really made possible by the shrink to an 8nm process—by comparison, the Snapdragon 845 used by Google’s flagship Pixel 3 phones is built on a 10nm process.

This is a story we’re seeing played out on all fronts this year. AMD shrank its CPU die process to 7nm earlier this year, allowing it to outperform Intel on both desktop and server CPUs. Intel itself gave us an even better example when it released both Ice Lake and Comet Lake notebook CPUs. Ice Lake, which is built on a 10nm process, was able to devote on-die space to a GPU three times as fast as the one in Comet Lake, which is still on a 14nm process.

Gaming laptops were out in force today at IFA in Berlin, as both Acer and Asus held their main press conferences just before Europe’s biggest consumer electronics show opens to the public. But while I was buried in computers of all shapes and sizes, two beefy gaming laptops caught my eye: The Acer Predator Triton 500 and the Asus Zephyrus S GX701. Not because they’re particularly beautiful, or come with flashing RGB lighting—they’re notable because they both boast 300Hz displays.

If that sounds ridiculous, it sort of is. Up until now, the fastest refresh rate on a gaming laptop was 240Hz. (Asus just announced some 144Hz and 240Hz gaming laptops back in April.) For more context, it was no small feat when Asus introduced the first 120Hz IPS display back in 2016. Three years later, we’re now at 300Hz. Why now? While vendors have been amping up refresh rates on high-end gaming laptops, current mobile GPUs are finally good enough that they can keep up, at least in some games.

In person, that 300Hz refresh rate translated to silky smooth visuals on both the Triton 500 and Zephyrus S GX701 I saw. Watching Overwatch on the Zephyrus, it felt like my eyes were melting—in a good way. Of course, not every game is going to get up to 300fps, but it’s pretty remarkable that the possibility even exists in some contexts.

So, who exactly “needs” 300Hz gaming laptops. Both Acer and Asus said their laptops were aimed at hardcore gamers and esports competitors, but I’m willing to venture even the most obsessed amateur might flinch at Acer’s starting $2,800 price tag for the Triton 500. I asked Asus how much the Zephyrus S GX701 would retail for, but a representative demurred, saying, “It’ll depend on the locality.” It’s probably safe to say it’ll be expensive as hell though.

For all that moolah, you’d have to make a few sacrifices in quality to even have a shot of hitting 300fps. Few games are able to support that rate at higher resolutions, so unless you’re an actual esports competitor, both the Triton 500 and Zephyrus S GX701 are more aspirational than realistic. Plus, the Asus prototype I saw firsthand sounded like a chorus of wheezing grandpas while running Overwatch. Even though these laptops boast the beefiest Nvidia GTX graphics cards and Intel processors, it’s likely these first iterations will have their own quirks and kinks—especially since both Acer and Asus are trying jam pack so much into the slimmest chassis possible.

Still, even with a limited market, it’s not likely 300Hz laptops are going anywhere. Asus, in particular, had a number of 300Hz 15-inch and 17-inch Zephyrus and Strix prototype laptops on display that are expected to arrive sometime next year. The 17-inch Zephyrus S GX701 is slated to ship next month, and the Triton 500 will be available in EMEA regions in November, and the U.S. in December.