Tech in Brief

You are standing in the networking aisle a couple of weeks before Black Friday, holding a box with more antennas than seems strictly necessary. The front says Wi-Fi 7. The side lists a speed with far more digits than your internet bill. Somewhere at home, a perfectly functional router is blinking away, unaware that it is about to be judged. So, is Wi-Fi 7 worth it in 2026? For most homes the honest answer is: not for internet speed. The median U.S. home connection downloads at 314.35 Mbps, and a typical Wi-Fi 7 laptop radio tops out at 5.8 Gbps. The box in your hand is roughly eighteen times faster than the pipe it will be plugged into. Where Wi-Fi 7 does earn its keep is narrower, and more interesting, than the number on the box. A TP-Link Archer BE9700 tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router (shown as an example of the category, not a recommendation). Photo: TaurusEmerald, Wikimedia Commons , CC BY-SA 4.0 Key takeaways The median U.S. fixed broadband download speed was 314.35 Mbps in September ...

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU is consistently faster than the RTX 5060 laptop GPU in lab testing — that part is settled. What's less settled is whether that speed gap is worth paying for right now, because Black Friday 2026 pricing has, in at least a few live listings this week, squeezed the gap between a mid-spec RTX 5060 laptop and an RTX 5070 laptop down to a few hundred dollars, and in one case to barely $50 against an RTX 5070 Ti. Here's what the benchmark numbers actually show, why two laptops with the identical GPU name can perform differently, and which of this week's real listings comes out ahead on a dollars-per-frame basis. Illustration: a gaming laptop, a generic file photo and not a specific model discussed below. Photo by Kurt Kaiser, dedicated to the public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons . Key takeaways In NanoReview's lab testing, the RTX 5070 laptop GPU averages about 13% higher frame rates than the RTX 5060 laptop GPU across re...

Every new "AI PC" laptop this fall carries an NPU TOPS number on its spec sheet — 40, 50, 60, or 80 — and the number keeps climbing. Microsoft's original Copilot+ PC bar, set in 2024, was 40 TOPS of neural processing power. The chips shipping into stores right now clear that floor by a wide margin: Intel's Panther Lake (Core Ultra 300) NPU lands at roughly 50–60 TOPS, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, announced in September 2025 and now in retail Windows laptops, both carry an 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU — double the original minimum. The marketing treats bigger as simply better. The real question for a buyer is narrower: what does that extra TOPS headroom actually let a laptop do that a 40 TOPS machine couldn't, and what does it cost in return? Illustration: a generic backlit laptop keyboard, not a specific chip or device discussed in this article. Photo by Colin, via Wikimedia Commons , licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 . The number on the spec sheet...

Windows 10 support officially ended on October 14, 2025. If that sounds like old news, here is the part that did not get nearly as much attention: Microsoft quietly moved the goalposts in June 2026, extending the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program's cutoff from October 13, 2026 to October 12, 2027. If you are one of the roughly one in six Windows PCs still running Windows 10 a year after "end of support," that change probably already shaped your decision about whether to pay, enroll for free, or finally replace the machine — whether you noticed it happening or not. The honest judgment call here: for most households with an otherwise-fine PC, the $30 (or free) ESU path is the right short-term answer, and buying new hardware purely to escape a security-update bill almost never pays for itself in year one. Illustration only, not a specific ESU enrollment screen. Photo: Donald Trung, Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 . Wait — I thought Windows...

Windows 11's Recall feature — the one that screenshots your screen every so often so you can search your own activity later — doesn't just cost CPU cycles and an NPU fast enough to run it locally. It reserves a chunk of your drive, and Microsoft's own support documentation lays out exactly how big that chunk is by device tier. Run the numbers on that table and a few other figures Microsoft publishes alongside it, and the real cost of turning Recall on looks different from "it uses some storage." Illustration: a consumer SSD, representative of the fixed drive capacity Recall's storage allocation is carved out of. Photo by Jacek Halicki , via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 . The Four Numbers Microsoft Requires Before Recall Turns On Before any snapshot gets saved, a machine has to clear a hardware floor. Per Microsoft's own Recall management documentation, a device needs a Copilot+ PC meeting the Secured-core standard, an NPU rated a...

Thunderbolt 5 has been shipping in laptops and external drives for about a year now, and the external-SSD makers building around it keep leading with the same number: up to 120 Gbps. That's triple what Thunderbolt 3 offered and more than double Thunderbolt 4's ceiling. Headline bandwidth numbers like that rarely translate one-to-one into real transfer times, though, so here's what the jump from USB 3.2 to Thunderbolt 4 to Thunderbolt 5 actually does to a real 500GB file transfer — and where the extra bandwidth stops mattering. Illustration: an external drive connected via USB-C — a generic file photo, not the specific Thunderbolt 5 hardware discussed below. Photo by Augkun-ane, licensed CC BY 4.0. Original file and license . The headline number, straight from Intel Thunderbolt 5 is Intel's standard, and its own announcement is specific about what the number means. Intel's newsroom post describes "80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth...

DDR5 memory prices have roughly quadrupled over the past year, and the common assumption is that a laptop's price should have gone up by something close to that much too. It hasn't — Dell's own commercial price increases have run 10% to 30%, not 300%, because of how little of a finished computer's cost is actually memory. A 16GB DDR5-4800 module (Crucial CT16G48C40U5). Photo: Rainer Knäpper, Free Art License, via Wikimedia Commons . Illustration of a DDR5 module generally, not a specific product endorsement. Key takeaways TrendForce's own tracker puts the spot price of a 16GB DDR5 UDIMM at $240 as of October 19, 2026, versus a pre-shortage baseline of roughly $50-70 for the same module in 2024 — a 3.5x to 4x increase. Buying RAM directly to upgrade a desktop or laptop yourself means eating close to that full increase. Buying a finished laptop or desktop means eating a much smaller slice of it — Dell's own commercial-line price increases were 10% to 30%,...

Correction October 12, 2026: the cached-input row described the discount as 90% off input for both models. It is 90% for Astra ($1.00 per 1M against $10.00) and 95% for Sol ($0.10 against $2.00); the prices listed in the table were already correct. Source: OpenAI API pricing page. Updated October 10, 2026. Every price and benchmark figure below was re-checked against the sources listed at the end on that date. The October update section near the end records what changed after this piece first ran on September 30. At DevDay 2026 on September 29, OpenAI announced two upgrades to its flagship API lineup that pull in opposite directions. GPT-6.1 Sol prices its tokens at roughly one-fifth of GPT-6 Astra's rate while scoring almost identically on independent benchmarks. A new "Ultrafast" tier for Astra generates tokens up to 8 times faster in Codex, but charges 6 times more per token to do it. Neither number means much on its own -- an 8x speed claim says nothing about wheth...