At CES 2022, Alienware has unveiled Concept Polaris, an external GPU enclosure with an undeniably cool look.
The idea of connecting an external GPU to your laptop over Thunderbolt has always been a neat but niche idea. But now probably isn’t the best time to talk about it. The scarcity and skyrocketing price of graphics cards in recent years thanks to the GPU shortage, has made it a complete nonstarter. Buying exorbitant prices for GPUs that will only be bottlenecked over the bandwidth of Thunderbolt sounds silly.
Still, Concept Polaris is just a project. And for what it is, it’s striking. The chassis has all the now-classic design elements we’ve come to expect in a modern Alienware product: White paint job, round edges, honeycomb cutouts, and the glowing white alien head, of course.
It looks even better here than it does in full towers like the Aurora.
Despite being fairly small, it can fit a full-length desktop graphics card, even something as enormous as an RTX 3090. How? Well, Alienware has removed the internal power supply out and replaced it with two AC power adapters. These external adapters could have as much as 425 watts of power each.
Concept Polaris isn’t Alienware’s first attempt at external graphics. The Alienware Graphics Amplifier was a similar enclosure featuring an older design and a proprietary graphics connection.
That unique port gave the enclosure more bandwidth than your standard Thunderbolt-powered external GPU, but it also meant it only worked with Alienware laptops that sported the proprietary port.
Other ports on the rear include USB-A, additional USB-C, and a 2.5Gb Ethernet jack.
The case no longer lifts off the rails like with the Alienware Graphics Amplifier, but instead right out the back. Like the Razer Core X, the entire interface rests on a tray that can be pulled out using a handle.
Concept Polaris can also be stood up on its side like a modern console — case on or not.
Lastly, this external GPU enclosure is liquid-cooled, using its 240mm “Cryo-Tech” solution, which is also used in its Alienware X-series gaming laptops. It even throws in its proprietary “Element 31” thermal material.
Again, Concept Polaris is not for sale. There’s no guarantee this product will ever see the light of day. But given Alienware’s past releases, it’s not hard to imagine something similar to Concept Polaris someday being available for purchase.
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.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.