French startup Quarnot recently unveiled a space heater that could potentially pay for itself — someday. By harnessing the massive amounts of heat GPUs generate while mining cryptocurrency, Quarnot’s QC1 heater will not only keep you toasty during the winter months, it could very well earn you a little extra cash.
“The heat of your QC-1 is generated by the two graphics cards embedded in the device and mining cryptocurrencies or blockchain transactions: While heating, you create money,” the QC1 product description reads. “You can watch in real time how crypto markets are trending, on your mobile app and on your QC-1 LEDs.”
Really though, the QC1 heater is a slick-looking device, and it packs some serious power — two AMD Radeon RX 580s — but it retails for $3,600. That is a huge amount of money for what amounts to a space heater, even if it can mine cryptocurrency. Keep mind, that is all it can do, it doesn’t include a hard drive or an operating system. You control it from your phone. It can’t run games, it can’t be used to check your email. For that price, you could just buy a high-end gaming PC with two comparable cards inside and set them up for cryptocurrency mining yourself.
Let’s do a little math. You would have to run the QC1 all day every day for five and a half years mining Ethereum before it paid for itself, at the most recent Ethereum exchange rate. The real story here isn’t the QC1, it’s the fact that it exists at all. Using excess heat from cryptocurrency mining to heat your home is actually a really great idea. Mining cryptocurrency generates a tremendous amount of heat and putting it to good use could make passively mining cryptocurrency more approachable.
Nobody is going to buy one of these things and strike it rich, that part of the cryptocurrency boom is probably over, but as a proof of concept, the QC 1 is a fascinating product. Waste heat has always been a huge issue for server farms, and even offices that run a lot of desktop computers, putting it to use in the home isn’t a bad idea. But at $3,600, it’s not a good one either.
After spending years with touchscreen Windows laptops, I've become rather accustomed to reaching out and tapping the screen if I just want to interact with something quickly. It's a small convenience, one that feels natural as soon as you get used to it. But whenever I use a MacBook for a bit, I inevitably find myself reaching for the screen before realizing that Apple has never offered this feature for its notebooks.
Apple has resisted touchscreen Macs for years, but that might finally change. The company is reportedly preparing to introduce its first touchscreen MacBook Pro, complete with an OLED display and a redesigned interface that accommodates touch input. Not to be confused with the new $2,000 M6 MacBook Pro, which just launched with minimal updates over its predecessor.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.