It should come as no surprise to anyone that Linksys is bringing a series of routers to CES in 2017. The networking giant has a specialized gaming router, a few home network solutions, and a high-powered USB Wi-Fi connection, all of which will be coming to market in the spring of 2017. Let’s take a look.
For the gaming crowd, Linksys has teamed up with Rivet Networks, of Killer Network fame. The WRT32X picks up the classic WRT styling and open source firmware adoption, pairing it up with 2.6Gbps of bandwidth across three channels.
What’s special about this router is how it works with systems that have Killer Network installed. The software connection allows for acute control over bandwidth prioritization and signal distribution. At the cost of other devices on your network, you can prioritize devices that need the fastest speeds and the lowest latency — namely, gaming computers.
Those feature additions are mostly skin-deep. The WRT32X sports a 1.8GHz dual-core processor and 512MB of DDR3 memory, which matches other high-end routers at the $300 price point.
Moving on to the more routine routers, the EA8300 brings 802.11ac Wave 2 and up to 2.2Gbps of total bandwidth at the $200 price point. While we haven’t had hands-on time with the device, its bandwidth should be more than enough for small households and personal networks.
Under the hood, the E8300 is powered by a quad-core 716MHz processor with 256MB of DDR3, allowing for speedy distribution of network signals and any data drives attached to the network.
It carries basically every feature we’d hope to see from a midrange to high-end router, with beamforming, Amazon Alexa, automatic band switching, and bandwidth prioritization for specific devices.
The Linksys EA9300 ups the ante with a 1.8GHz Quad-core processor and twice the RAM, for a total of 512MB. It almost doubles the EA8300’s bandwidth at 4.4Gbps across three channels.
It packs in the same feature set as the EA8300, with Amazon Alexa Skills, beamforming, and per-device bandwidth distribution. It’s hard to ask for much more than that.
That extra power will cost you an extra $100, bringing the total sticker price up to $300.
Since a lot of systems aren’t equipped to take full advantage of the new 802.11ac Mu-MiMo functionality, Linksys is also rolling out a high-end USB Wi-Fi device to help bring them in line.
The USB 3.0 adapter is built with plug-and-play functionality in mind for simple setup, and works with any router, not just Linksys devices.
At just $60, the WUSB6400M is a solid deal on a very capable Wi-Fi adapter, especially consider its advanced feature set and performance promises.
After five years with Apple silicon, from the original M1 MacBook Air to the M5 MacBook Air released earlier this year, I've watched these chips mature not just on the spec sheet, but in real-world workflows and overall efficiency.
The new M6 chip might sound like a routine generational upgrade, but it's the company's first chip built on a 2nm manufacturing process, which brings meaningful improvements over previous Apple chips.
Gemini Notebook’s mobile app now has a built-in recorder for capturing lectures and meetings as sources. You can record directly where you’ll use the material, skipping the separate recording app and the file upload afterward.
Google announced the feature on X, highlighting classroom lectures and team meetings as potential uses. It also works for capturing your own thoughts, so you can talk through an idea and bring that explanation into your notebook while it’s still fresh.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?