Hopes people will pay upwards of $2,000 for laptops drenched in red
When Sony launched its Vaio Fit laptop range a few months back, we were pleasantly surprised by the uncharacteristically affordable price tags of the Ivy Bridge-powered Windows 8 ultrabooks. But lest people assume the Japanese electronics giant is abandoning the premium (read: often overpriced) laptop segment it has been long associated with, the company has announced special "red edition" models across its Vaio Fit, Duo and Pro laptop families.
These new limited edition Vaio machines are both red and expensive, so if you have a major problem with either they are definitely not for you. Beneath the multiple layers of "rich, lustrous" color that adorn their exteriors, the Vaio Pro 13, Vaio Duo 13 and Vaio Fit 15 red edition models have Intel Core i7 processors, up to 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB solid-state storage.
While each one of them sports a full HD touchscreen display, only the Vaio Fit 15 has a dedicated graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce GT 735M with 2GB VRAM). However, it's worth noting here that unlike the Pro 13 and Duo 13, both of which have the latest Haswell processors, the Vaio Fit 15 features an older Ivy Bridge part.
"The sophisticated VAIO Pro 13, the world's lightest 13.3" touch Ultrabook, is also the first notebook PC on the market to include a high speed PCIe SSD drive, allowing for faster performance than traditional SSD drives," the company said in a press release announcing the new machines. "The VAIO Fit 15 offers a hybrid hard drive and an optical drive that reads and writes Blu-ray Disc media"
The Vaio Pro 13, Vaio Duo 13 and Vaio Fit 15 are available now for $2,599, $2,999 and $1,999, respectively.
Mechanical planks are usually super pricey compared to their lowly membrane counterparts which is why Thermaltake has released its Poseidon gaming keyboard geared for budget-minded mechanical keyboard buyers.
Thermaltake's Poseidon sports bright blue LED backlighting and Cherry MX blue switches rated for 50 million keystrokes. Other features the Poseidon offers include anti-ghosting software, media player keys, and a braided USB cable, and a disable Windows key button .
The keyboard features an MSRP of $80, which puts it in the entry level mechanical keyboard market with the likes of Cooler Master's Quick Fire Rapid and Corsair's K65.
Give Microsoft credit for recovering from its early bumbles related to its upcoming Xbox One console. In the beginning, Microsoft ticked off quite a few gamers by letting it be known that consoles would need to dial up the mothership every 24 hours, and the whole used games fiasco was a disaster in and of itself. A few policy changes later, Microsoft is back on track winning favor among gamers, and it's pretty cool that the company is offering up things like today's unboxing video.
Microsoft's Major Nelson gives users a first look at the contents of the Day One Edition of the Xbox One, and in the process confirmed that it will come with a mono headset. Originally Microsoft was planning to nix the headset to encourage users to interact with the bundled Kinect sensor, but wisely chose to throw gamers a bone.
You also get a closer look at the console itself, including its various ports, as well as the Day One Edition controller and its 40 design improvements, including a redesigned D-pad for accuracy.
There's a ton of cash to be made if you can correctly predict which NFL team will win the Super Bowl, unfortunately Marty McFly burned Grays Sports Almanac in Back to the Future II, though it only listed statistics up to the year 2000 anyway. The next best thing is to look at the numbers and run a bunch of a simulations, which is exactly what a computer program called The Predictalator did.
Created by Prediction Machine, the sportscentric application simulated the NFL season 50,000 times and came up with the San Francisco 49ers as being most likely to win the Super Bowl, CBS Philly reports.
"Just as the Predictalator plays each individual NFL game 50,000 times before it's actually played, it can also play the entire NFL season 50,000 times before it's actually played. The actual 2013 regular season and playoff schedules have been played 50,000 times, allowing us to compute average records and likelihoods of each team making the playoffs, winning its division and bringing home the Super Bowl trophy," Prediction Machine reports.
So there you have it, scorned 49er fans, your team will atone for last year's loss and win the Super Bowl. Well, unless Madden 25 says otherwise. Last year's Madden 13 game correctly predicted the Ravens would defeat the 49ers in the Super Bowl in a thrilling 27-24 contest (final score was actually 34-31). Interestingly, Madden's simulation has only been wrong twice in the past ten seasons when it comes to predicting the Super Bowl winner.
The folks at Plextor are planning a special launch at the upcoming Flash Memory Summit in Santa Ana, California, next week, the company revealed to Maximum PC in an email. On tap is the unveiling of Plextor's new M6 Series solid state drive (SSD) family. It will feature the next generation of Plextor's proprietary TrueSpeed technology working in tandem with the Marvell 88SS9187 controller to deliver "enhanced performance and reliability," the company said.
Plextor's M6 Series SSDs will also feature the latest generation of A19 Toggle NAND flash memory from Toshiba and an ultra-slim 5mm casing. Unfortunately, that's all the details we have at this point, as Plextor is saving the juicy bits for its upcoming reveal.
As a point of reference, the Marvel 88SS9187 controller that will be used in the M6 Series is the same as found in Plextor's current generation M5 Pro SSDs. It's a multi-core controller that can handle extreme work loads and is suitable for use in workstations, servers, and even RAID 0 configurations.
Plextor recently rolled out new firmware for its M5 Pro SSD line, giving users a free performance boost by bumping up sequential write throughput to 470MB/s, up from 450MB/s and read/write performance to 100,000/88,000 IOPS, up from 94,000/86,000 IOPS (sequential read performance stayed the same at up to 540MB/s).
It's not clear if the M6 Series will also have a Pro designation.
Microsoft found out the hard way that it's not so easy competing in the hardware space, just as Acer warned. On the flip side, Google proved that success stories are possible by launching its own brand Nexus 7 tablet (built by Asus), which is widely considered the best Android tablet available. Now there's talk that Nvidia might jump into the hardware space with an Android tablet of its own.
According to Fudzilla, Nvidia is not only working on an affordable 7-inch slate with stylus support, but also a high-end Android tablet under its own brand. Based on what Fudzilla heard from its sources in Europe, Nvidia's potent tablet would enter the market packing some serious heat in the form of Tegra 5, otherwise known as Logan, and Kepler graphics.
We'll let that sink in for a moment. Imagine a tablet with Kepler-class graphics. It could be a game changer, figuratively and literally, though it will ultimately depend on cost and execution. Towards the latter, Nvidia is gaining experience in how to navigate the retail handheld market with its Shield console, and that experience could prove invaluable to the company when/if it decides to compete in a sea of Android slates.
CRT monitors should have died out with the dinosaurs, but believe it or not, they still exist. Heck, you might be using one yourself. If so, it's time to retire that relic from and earlier age and step up to a thin and sexy LED panel. Let us help with today's top deal for an Asus VN248H Super Narrow Bezel 23.8-inch LED panel for $170 with free shipping (normally $200, use coupon code: BTSMNR12). It has a rated 5ms response time (GTG), 80,000,000:1 constrast ratio, and great viewing angles courtesy of its IPS panel.
Hopes people will pay upwards of $2,000 for laptops drenched in red
Take a peek at what comes with the Xbox One
Can 50,000 simulations be wrong?
A new flagship SSD, perhaps?
Nvidia eyes up Android tablet market
