Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs aren’t off to a great start. As you can read in our Core Ultra 9 285K review and Core Ultra 5 245K review, Intel’s latest CPUs miss the mark across productivity and gaming apps, and they’re miles away from some of the best processors you can buy right now. According to Intel, there are several issues with the new platform that it plans to address within a matter of weeks.
In an interview with HotHardware, Intel’s Robert Hallock was blunt about the release of Arrow Lake CPUs: “The launch didn’t go as planned … we have a number of things we got to go fix.” Hallock, formerly of AMD, is near the top of Intel’s technical marketing division. Although he didn’t address exactly what’s wrong with Arrow Lake, Hallock promised that Intel is working on updates that could significantly improve performance, and that they’ll arrive in a matter of weeks.
“There are BIOS, firmware, OS-level issues that we need to solve,” Hallock said. “We’re going to come back with a full audit, an itemized list, of what went wrong.”
It’s not exactly surprising that there’s something wrong with Arrow Lake. As we saw in our reviews of the processors, Intel pulled off some incredible feats with the new CPUs. For instance, the Core Ultra 9 285K, despite only having 24 threads, cleanly beats the 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X in rendering applications like Cinebench. However, the new CPU takes a beating in games, especially compared to the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
The performance is disjointed. Intel makes big strides in some applications, while it’s woefully slow in others. Hallock admits that these issues aren’t the fault of users or reviews; he describes the issues with Arrow Lake as “self-inflicted.” Although Hallock didn’t provide a firm timeline for when we’ll see performance updates, they should arrive before the end of the year.
Hopefully, they’ll deliver the missing performance so many reviewers — including Digital Trends — spotted during the launch window. Intel has been falling on hard times as of late, with some reports indicating that a potential AMD buyout is on the table. Arrow Lake, with its radically new architecture, looked like a turning point for the company. Up to this point, however, it’s fallen significantly behind the competition from AMD, and even Intel’s own last-gen options. Hopefully, the promised updates will deliver good news.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).