Mini-review: 24 hours with Dell’s fanciest Chromebook yet

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino) Dell is no stranger to Chromebooks. In fact, the Dell Chromebook 11 is our current favorite Chromebook for students with its simple, durable black frame and attractive price tag. Most of Dell’s Chrome OS notebooks share those useful traits, so when the company stepped out of the box and debuted its […]

ROLI Songmaker Kit mini-review: Rediscovering my musical roots with fancy new tech

Samuel Axon I’ve been a musician for the past 20 years, but I’ve been an electronic musician for a lot less than that. I use Apple’s Logic Pro and a variety of software synthesizers to record songs these days, but coming from an electric guitar, I’ve missed the natural expressiveness that comes from playing a […]

Nintendo New 2DS XL mini-review: The best version of the 3DS hardware yet

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton) While the Nintendo Switch is quickly becoming the handheld of choice—thanks in part to the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey—the 3DS still has some life left in it yet. Kirby’s Blowout Blast, Hey! PIKMIN, Metroid: Samus Returns, Fire Emblem Warriors, Layton’s Mystery Journey, […]

Mini-review: The 2017 MacBook could actually be your everyday laptop

Andrew Cunningham The MacBook Air has been one of Apple’s most popular, most enduring laptop designs, but that wasn’t always the case. When the first version of the laptop was released back in 2008, you had to pay too high a price for its thinness and lightness. And I’m not just talking about the literal […]

Mini-review: How much faster have high-end iMacs gotten in the last 5 years?

Andrew Cunningham Apple seems committed to the Mac Pro and iMac Pro for now, but the company says that its most popular desktops with pro users remains the 27-inch iMac. Unlike phones and tablets, which can still post big performance gains from year to year, desktops age more slowly and gracefully. A typical replacement cycle […]

Mini-review: Asus cranks out another excellent $700 Ultrabook

Andrew Cunningham If you want the “best” Windows laptop right now, it’s hard to argue with stuff like Dell’s XPS 13 2-in-1 or HP’s Spectre x360. But a lot of the time, people don’t want the “best” laptop so much as they want the best laptop they can get for a certain amount of money. […]