Lenovo might have a new obsession, and it’s all about being thin. Windows Latest got its hands on marketing images of an unannounced Lenovo laptop, and buried in the files is a name we’ve never seen before: Aeroblade. The device itself is clearly branded as a ThinkBook, so this could launch as the ThinkBook Aeroblade.
If you’re not familiar, ThinkBook sits just below the premium ThinkPad lineup and is built for small and medium businesses who want that ThinkPad look without the ThinkPad price tag.
At first glance, Aeroblade looks like a fairly standard ThinkBook. You get slim bezels and a raised camera housing instead of a cutout into the display, along with the usual ThinkBook branding on the palm rest. But look closer at the keyboard, and the keys appear noticeably flatter than what we usually see from Lenovo. That’s worth noting if you’ve used a ThinkPad or ThinkBook before, since deep keypresses are practically a Lenovo trademark.
The side profile is where things get interesting. The chassis edge looks blade-thin for most of its length, thin enough to seem even slimmer than the USB-C ports themselves. There’s a small raised section housing two ports and a microphone hole, likely there because Lenovo needed the extra room for its internals. The rear keeps the theme going too, with a dual-tone finish and a raised pill-shaped camera housing.
Thin laptops usually mean sacrificing battery life and performance, and running hot under load isn’t uncommon either. But chips have improved a lot. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 series and Intel’s Panther Lake processors are efficient enough now that going ultra-thin doesn’t automatically mean a compromised laptop. That said, we still don’t know which chip Aeroblade will use.
Apple is also slated to introduce a new MacBook Ultra this year, and thinness is a major design focus. It seems that with new efficient chips, the laptop cycle is again moving towards thin and light laptops. Hopefully, these new ultra-thin laptops will not suffer the drawbacks of their predecessors.
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.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.