Earlier this week, networking hardware manufacturer TP-Link rolled out a new home router shipping with Wi-Fi 6 capabilities, the Archer AX50. This new entry drops into the company’s burgeoning Wi-Fi 6 product lineup between its little brother, the modest Archer AX10, and its hulking older cousins, the Archer AX6000 and AX11000, giving people looking to increase their home network speeds a dependable midrange choice.
Currently, the array of Wi-Fi 6 routers make for slim pickings, but although TP-Link has not yet announced the price of its new Archer AX50, if past models in the company’s Archer line are any indication, it could provide a more affordable alternative to the almost exclusively high-end offerings launched by competitors so far. The Intel chipset at the heart of the AX50 allows it to tap into all the marquee features of the Wi-Fi 6 standard, including multi-user, multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) antenna transmission for handling more devices at once, target wake time (TWT) for battery optimization, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) for making more efficient use of radio spectrum, among many others.
Along with these features specific to Wi-Fi 6, the new Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) router also boasts proprietary functionality such as TP-Link’s HomeCare, which combines basic malicious traffic filtering and LAN packet management by the client device. The AX50 also has all the router essentials that consumers have come to expect like blacklisting and whitelisting, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and port triggering, and firewall configuration.
It is worth pointing out the announcement’s footnotes to wary consumers, as the fine-print language essentially states that TP-Link doesn’t intend for the AX50 to fully conform to or embody all the specifications that make up the Wi-Fi 6 standard. Rather, the company will pick and choose what parts of the Wi-Fi 6 standard to actually deliver to the device in hardware or firmware. One conspicuous absence of such Wi-Fi 6 features is the lack of the WPA3 secure authentication protocol. While far from perfect, WPA3 remedied many of the shortcomings of prior Wi-Fi Protected Access specifications and was designed with home consumers in mind with its “it just works,” limited-intervention approach to securely connecting to routers.
In a similar vein that is standards adoption, it should also be noted that some of the headline features of Wi-Fi 6 require client devices with 802.11ax (the technical name for Wi-Fi 6) wireless cards. Thus, people who aren’t sporting 802.11ax-compliant mobile or desktop products probably won’t get as much out of this or any other Wi-Fi 6 router just yet. Since it’s way too early to tell how much of the Wi-Fi 6 specification client device or router manufacturers will include in their products going forward, we’ll have to wait and see how Wi-Fi 6 on paper compares Wi-Fi 6 in actual practice.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
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.