Just in time for the holiday season, Acer announced on Wednesday the Acer Spin 7, the world’s thinnest 2-in-1 notebook, is available for purchase in the United States. The ultra-thin, ultra-versatile notebook launches alongside its larger, more budget-friendly cousin the Spin 5, a 13.3-inch version of the fully featured Spin 7.
The Acer Spin 7 and its impossibly thin design were awarded the CES 2017 Innovations award and it is easy to see why. The Spin 7 was shown off earlier in 2016 at IFA, where it made a splash with its seventh-generation Kaby Lake processor and subtle hinge design.
Designed from the ground up to be the thinnest 2-in-1 on the market, the Acer Spin 7 is remarkably fast for such a compact notebook. Boasting an Intel Core i7-7Y75 processor, 8GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and a 256GB SSD, the Acer Spin 7 is small in size but offers up impressive performance chops and eight hours of battery life.
To be fair, though, the Spin 5 is no slouch either. Also hitting store shelves on Wednesday, the Spin 5 takes a step back from the impressive specs of its larger cousin to embrace a more budget-friendly set of internals and a slight bump to battery power.
The Spin 5 can reportedly last for about 10 hours on a single charge and has an Intel Core i5-6200U processor and a standard 256GB SSD — all starting at $650. That is about half the starting price of the Acer Spin 7.
With the release of the new MacBook Pro and a handful of other premium ultra-thin laptops, it is going to be a competitive holiday shopping season. But considering the Spin 7 and Spin 5 are hitting store shelves, it looks like Acer is well positioned to take advantage of the appetite for ultra-thin, ultra-light 2-in-1 notebooks that won’t break the bank.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.