The Creators Update is live, but work continues behind the scenes, with Windows Insiders getting a taste of some brand-new features on the horizon. Today’s Insider build includes the usual assortment of bug fixes, and just might extend your laptop’s battery life.
Insiders installing Build 16176 can expect some slight improvements in overall battery life, thanks to Microsoft’s new “Power Throttling” feature. Designed to make background applications more efficient, Power Throttling can reportedly decrease your CPU power consumption by about 11 percent in strenuous use cases.
“To give great performance to the apps you’re using, while at the same time power throttling background work, we built a sophisticated detection system into Windows,” said Bill Karagounis, director of program management for the Windows Insider Program.
Windows will automatically detect which applications are most important to you — foreground applications and the like — and start throttling the power consumption of other, less important processes. Power Throttling works as an add-on to the existing battery saver settings, and users can control it through the Power Slider, scaling throttling up and down depending on their workload.
Aside from the Power Slider, users can also control how Power Throttling works through the Battery Settings menu. From there, it’s easy to exempt certain applications if Power Throttling is misbehaving or throttling an important application’s CPU usage.
It’s important to note that Power Throttling only works on systems running processors with Intel’s Speed Shift technology — which is available in sixth-generation Intel Core processors and beyond. Microsoft has stated, however, that it has plans to roll out support to other processors in the future.
Microsoft also set about fixing a few major bugs introduced in the previous Insider build. For instance, some apps and games were crashing unexpectedly due to a misconfigured advertising ID caused in a previous build, and Microsoft has reportedly fixed the issue.
For a full list of all the bug fixes and known issues in this latest Insider build, check out the Microsoft blog here.
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.