Minor iPhone bump turns the 7 and 7 Plus red, gives iPhone SE more storage

Apple

In addition to a new midrange iPad, Apple also announced a handful of minor updates for the iPhone via press release this morning.

Apple is also releasing a new Product Red version of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus—like the name implies, it's got a bright red matte finish with blended antenna lines and a silver Apple logo on the back. It contrasts strikingly with the other iPhone colors Apple has offered in the past, but otherwise it doesn't differ from current iPhone 7 models. It will be available in 128GB and 256GB capacities, starts at $749, and will be available beginning on March 24.

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Apple’s new $329 9.7-inch iPad replaces Air 2, has no Pro features

Apple

Apple quietly announced via press release this morning that it would not be replacing any of its top-end iPads, just its two-year-old midrange iPad Air 2. The company's new mainstream 9.7-inch tablet, called simply "iPad," includes an Apple A9 SoC (not an A9X), but its most exciting feature is its starting price of $329, $70 less than the previous starting price of the Air 2. The tablet will be available to order starting March 24 and will begin shipping next week.

At that price, it actually appears that you take a step back from the design used for the Air 2 and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. At 1.03 pounds (469g) and 0.29-inches (7.5mm) thick, the tablet is actually almost identical in size to the original iPad Air, not the Air 2. Hopefully this doesn't also mean that the screen or any other aspect of the tablet is also taking a step backward, but we'll have to wait to get one in our hands to know for sure.

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Qualcomm has made a new chip for flip phones (yes, in 2017)

Qualcomm

It has been ages since any old-style feature phone could credibly be described as "cutting-edge," but that doesn't mean people don't still buy them. Especially in poorer countries where the smartphone market is less saturated and mobile networks are less robust, they can make up as much as one-third to one-half of sales. Flip phones are not a growth market, but there's still money to be made.

That's the thinking behind Qualcomm's new 205 Mobile Platform—remember, Qualcomm is now pushing "platforms" instead of "processors," and low-end 200-series chips aren't Snapdragons anymore. It's a chip made to power feature phones, but it's also designed to bring some "smart" features to these low-end, low-cost devices.

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Qualcomm would like you to stop calling Snapdragon processors “processors”

One of eight remaining functional Apple I computers goes up for auction in May

Auction Team Breker

If you think today's Macs are expensive, hold on to your butts: on May 20, Auction Team Breker will sell one of just eight known working Apple I computers in existence. Breker estimates that the computer will sell for between $190,000 and $320,000, which is in line with the sale prices of most Apple I computers in recent years—outliers include a prototype model that sold for $815,000 in August of last year and a model from early in the computer's production run that sold for $905,000 in late 2014. Given the original $666.66 sale price (about $2,800 in today's dollars), any of those prices would be a pretty solid return on your investment.

The auction listing (PDF) claims that the Apple I is "the best-preserved example of an Apple I computer to have appeared on the market" and that it's coming directly from the collection of the Berkeley, California, resident who originally bought it. The auction includes not just the computer itself, but also instruction manuals, circuit board diagrams, and notes from a phone call with Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

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Nvidia releases FRAPS-like tool for benchmarking and analyzing VR performance

Nvidia

High-end VR headset manufacturers like Oculus and HTC all publish recommended specifications for PCs that will run VR games well. But as with regular PC games, VR games will often use different engines and provide different levels of detail, and some of them will push those recommended specifications harder than others. To help measure and analyze performance, Nvidia today released a new version of its FCAT benchmarking tool, predictably named FCAT VR.

Like the standard FCAT (short for Frame Capture Analysis Tool) application or the classic FRAPS, FCAT VR is a utility that runs in the background as you run games. It captures data that can be saved as a CSV file for later reference, and the tool itself also includes some basic graphs you can use to visualize the data. The tool tracks the framerate delivered to your headset, the "unconstrained" framerate that the hardware would be capable of hitting if not constrained to the refresh rate of the headset, the number of dropped frames, and the number of synthesized frames (essentially educated, extrapolated guesses about what the next frame should look like) created by the system to prevent the appearance of dropped frames.

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Apple illegally fixed prices of iPhones in Russia, investigation finds

Report: Nintendo has sold more than 1.5 million Switches in the first week

Nintendo Switch ships with unpatched 6-month-old WebKit vulnerabilities

Review: Better GPU and 4K screen make the XPS 15 a MacBook Pro for PC users

Andrew Cunningham

PC companies are striving to make their 13-inch laptops ever thinner and lighter, a trend that has been good for our shoulders and backs but not as good for performance. Luckily, 15-inch laptops are there to serve as a counterweight, offering not just quad-core processors but increasingly powerful and desktop-like graphics chips.

Dell’s XPS 15, much like Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro, attempts to straddle the line between svelte and powerful. It’s not the smallest or most powerful laptop, but last year’s model struck a good balance between size and speed even if the best configurations were on the expensive side. This year’s version doesn’t change a lot, but a new more power-efficient GPU, a Kaby Lake CPU upgrade, and a fingerprint reader all make it worth reconsidering anyway.

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Review: Small, slick design makes Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 the PC laptop to beat

Andrew Cunningham

Despite its foibles, Dell’s 2015 redesign of its XPS 13 Ultrabook was our favorite PC laptop for a long time. Its super-thin bezel was visually striking and dramatically reduced its footprint, and it was solidly built. It had a good keyboard, Microsoft Precision Touchpad, included USB-C/Thunderbolt 3, and it performed well to boot.

But all designs age. For premium laptops like these, longevity is less about nailing the basics and more about offering all the bells and whistles you can. As we’ve gotten deeper into the Windows 10 era, we’ve come to expect more from PCs that approach and surpass the $1,000 line.

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Nintendo says dead Switch pixels are “normal,” which isn’t wrong

A Wii U owner’s send-off to a deeply flawed but essential Nintendo console

Google says Pixel laptops aren’t dead, it just isn’t announcing or selling any

Our favorite phones and tech from 2017’s Mobile World Congress

When you think "big tech trade show at the beginning of the year," you probably think of CES. That's a big show for desktop and laptop PCs, PC and gaming accessories, home appliances, TVs, and an ever-increasing number of "smart" doodads. But if you're looking for news about smartphones and tablets and the chips that make them tick, the bigger show is February's Mobile World Congress.

We saw a bunch of things on the show floor at MWC this year, but there were a handful of devices that stood out from the crowd. The list below represents our favorite announcements from the show, and they're the devices you should keep an eye on as they begin to roll out to consumers in the coming months.

Best flagship smartphone: The LG G6

Ron Amadeo

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Report: Next-gen iPhone could dump the Lightning port in favor of USB-C

New Lenovo Yoga laptops get 4K displays, Nvidia GTX 1050 GPUs, and more

Lenovo

The foldable hinge of Lenovo's Yoga laptops has become a mainstay in the convertible laptop market since the original was launched in late 2012. Along with the MacBook Air and the Surface Pro 4, the Yoga has become one of the industry's most commonly copied designs. This week at Mobile World Congress, Lenovo has updated the originals with new features that check a lot of the boxes we're looking for 2017's PCs to check.

The most interesting options of the new Yogas are the new midrange 720-series models, available in both 13.3-inch and 15-inch screen sizes. Both offer many of the same features: they have Windows Hello fingerprint sensors embedded in their palmrests, they come with both 1080p and 4K touchscreens, they both support pen input via an optional Windows Ink-compatible pen accessory, and they both offer a Thunderbolt 3 port that charges the laptop and offers DisplayPort support. The 13-inch model also offers one USB 3.0 port, and the 15-inch model offers two USB 3.0 ports; both have headphone jacks but no SD card readers. Both use Intel Kaby Lake CPUs, both offer up to 16GB of DDR4 RAM, both offer PCIe SSDs up to 1TB in size, both have 867Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1, and both offer backlit keyboards and Windows 10 Home (Pro doesn't appear to be an option). Like Dell's XPS 13, each of these devices also uses slim bezels around the top and sides of the screens that are offset by a larger bottom bezel; unlike the XPS 13, though, both squeeze their 720p webcams in above the screen rather than below it.

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New CPUs and accessories define HP’s updated repairable Surface clone

HP

Mobile World Congress usually focuses on phones and phone-related technology, but even so we're still going to see a few companies announce new PCs that didn't quite make the cut for CES in January. HP's new Pro x2 612 G2, a $979 Microsoft Surface clone that launches today, is one such machine.

The Pro x2 is a follow-up of sorts to the the Elite x2, a Skylake-based tablet we reviewed last spring. We came away generally impressed by its build quality, ports, and features, and its keyboard cover was more than a match for Microsoft's. It was a bit thicker than the Surface Pro 4, it had a somewhat lower-resolution screen, and the processors it offered weren't as fast—three shortcomings the new version does nothing to correct—but nevertheless it remains an interesting option for businesses and for people who are just more comfortable when they're able to easily upgrade and repair their systems themselves.

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Apple says iOS 10.2.1 mostly fixes unexpected shutdowns in the iPhone 6, 6S

Samsung’s got a new 10nm octa-core chip with gigabit LTE for flagship phones