With CES 2025 right around the corner, most of us expect the big announcements to arrive in a week — but some companies are already teasing new products. In Intel’s case, the manufacturer plans to add more CPUs that might compete against some of the best processors. To that end, Intel has now announced preorders for new Arrow Lake CPUs, but most of us can’t get our hands on them yet.
As spotted by VideoCardz, Intel China announced that preorders for the Core Ultra 200 non-K CPUs are opening today, with availability planned for January 13. These CPUs will presumably just be non-overclockable versions of existing Arrow Lake chips, such as the Core Ultra 9 285K. In its announcement, Intel teases “new architecture” and “better power consumption.”
This is a curious announcement, and unexpected, too. The preorders seem to only be open in the Chinese market right now — Intel’s global accounts are staying silent on the matter. The question now is whether these Core Ultra 200 non-K processors will hit the global market at the same time, on January 13, or perhaps the launch will be reserved for China for a little while. It’s hard to say, but if they are slated to appear internationally, then this is a quiet launch indeed. Intel is likely to talk more about these new CPUs during CES 2025 next week.
Another interesting Intel CPU launch, also reported on by VideoCardz, appears to be taking place in China and Korea first. This one is a leak and it’s not coming from an official Intel account, so take it with some skepticism.
According to Golden Pig Upgrade Pack on Weibo, the Arrow Lake-H series, which is a lineup of laptop CPUs based on Lion Cove and Skymont architectures, will first arrive in China and South Korea. Other regions are said to follow a month later. These will be mainstream chips that will often be paired with Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 50-series graphics cards. However, gamers would be more interested in the Arrow Lake HX-series, which wasn’t mentioned this time around.
This leaves us with two signs of Intel CPUs potentially launching in China before hitting the global market. We’ll undoubtedly learn more during CES 2025.
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.