Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here for more.
Are you yearning for a new laptop ready to produce your latest podcast on the go? One of the wonderful things about the Microsoft Surface ecosystem is the combination of high-powered laptops with colorful styles to personalize the experience paired with the Windows platform. Now, you can pick up even the latest…
Enlarge / Our gift guide has dozens of recommendations on good gadgets and gear, including various games and accessories for Nintendo Switch owners. (credit: Guillaume Payen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
If you're buying for someone who appreciates good tech this holiday season, Ars is here to help make the gift giving process less stressful. The Orbital HQ spends much of its time testing all sorts of gadgets, games, and tech gear, so below we've rounded up a few of our favorite gift ideas from this year for anyone looking for a last-minute present.
We have dozens of recommendations across price ranges and device types, so we've broken down our picks into three categories: gifts that are ideal for gamers, gifts for around the house, and productivity-boosting gifts for people who work from home. With more and more people shopping online in this pandemic-stricken year, we can't guarantee that you'll be able to get everything in time without paying for expedited shipping, but if you'd like to give a loved one a quality piece of tech, the stuff below should delight.
Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.
Read 118 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Rust removal has been my specialty (out of necessity) ever since I moved to Michigan in 2013. My normal method for getting rust off my cars is simply to lightly blow on their chassis or to drive over small bumps. But last week I tried a more effective method of rust removal: electrolysis. And it is glorious.
TCL and LG have been teasing the idea of an extendable display on smartphones for some time, and now, we finally get to see a working prototype courtesy of a third brand. Today’s Inno Day 2020 event unveiled the Oppo X 2021 concept smartphone, which is all about its “continuously variable OLED display.” With a simple swipe on a button, the phone is able to transform between a regular 6.7-inch size and a tablet-like 7.4-inch size, and the software interface adapts accordingly for optimal experience — be it for single-hand usage or for multi-tasking.
In a demo shown to Engadget, the prototype magically toggled between two screen sizes, with the video resizing itself on the fly to fill the screen. Similarly, the system menus and Twitter also switched between their phone interface and tablet interface to match the screen size. Oppo added that the user can freely customize the screen size, so you’re not just limited to either 6.7 inches or 7.4 inches. Hence the “continuously variable” label.
Oppo wasn’t afraid to explain the magic here. The phone is essentially a motorized scroll, with a large part of the OLED panel laminated on top of a “Warp Track” for improved strength, as it goes around a “Roll Motor” (with a 6.8mm scroll diameter) on the left to tuck itself inside the hidden compartment. The phone itself consists of a “2-in-1 Plate” body construction: these two parts roll out simultaneously and evenly for better structural support.
Oppo applied for 122 patents for this project, 12 of which were on the scroll mechanism alone. THe company stopped short at providing further details — no word on the screen specs, the panel’s supplier nor durability figures. Levin Liu, OPPO Vice President and Head of OPPO Research Institute, stressed that the Oppo X 2021 was still in concept stage, but he hopes to bring this technology to consumers “at the right time.”
The idea of a rollable display is nothing new. LG’s very own rollable OLED TV entered the consumer market about a month ago, but you’ll have to fork out $87,000 for one. Potential cost issues aside, rehousing this technology into a smartphone is more complicated in many ways, especially when it comes to structural strength and durability. If the phone makers can overcome those problems, it would sure be nice to have rollable phones as an alternative to chunkier foldable phones. And hey, no crease!
At the same event, the company announced the Oppo AR Glass 2021, a follow-up to its original model from last December. Thanks to its “split design” which relies on a connection to a Snapdragon 865-based smartphone (namely the Find X2 Pro), these new concept glasses are around 75 percent lighter than their predecessors, but they still pack a bunch of sensors for both real-time SLAM local mapping and gesture tracking (up to 21 markers per hand): stereo fisheye cameras, a Time-of-Flight sensor and an RGB camera. The “Birdbath” optical solution — a common and inexpensive implementation on AR glasses — is said to mimic the experience of a 90-inch TV screen. The glasses will also support voice command via Oppo’s very own Breeno voice assistant.
Oppo didn’t provide further specs, though it plans to launch an AR developer co-creation program next year to leverage this piece of kit.
Another announcement to go along the AR theme is Oppo’s CybeReal concept AR application. This one is a little vague, but the idea is to offer high-precision AR positioning with centimeter-level accuracy and within 1-degree spatial positioning accuracy, as well as high positioning speeds down to the milliseconds. These will leverage Oppo Cloud’s offering on digital modeling, data storage, content management and data restoration. It’ll be interesting to see where this project goes.
If you've been pining for NVIDIA's 2080 Ti for the past few years, but never found a way to justify spending $1,000 on a graphics card, the RTX 3070 is for you. At $499, it tied the 2080 Ti during most of our benchmark testing. And for many, the 3070 will be a better buy than the $699 RTX 3080. Consider it the practical gamer's GPU hot rod. It'll deliver excellent performance for 240Hz monitors and 4K gaming alike.
The 3070's design won't surprise you too much if you’ve seen the 3080. It has the same dual fan design, with one exhausting air out of the side of your case, and another pulling air through the card and towards your top fans. Raised metal fins also help with the heat dissipation. The 3070 is several inches shorter than the 3080, which makes it easier to fit in tighter cases. Once again, NVIDIA also used a small 12-pin power connector to save a bit of PCB space.( A converter cable for a standard 8-pin power cable is in the box.) Around the back, there are three DisplayPort connections and one HDMI 2.1 port.
Let's get to what really matters about the RTX 3070: specs and performance. It's powered by 5,888 CUDA cores, 184 tensor AI cores, and 46 RT cores for ray tracing. In comparison, the RTX 2070 featured 2,304 CUDA cores and 36 RT cores. The older card did have more tensor cores -- 288 versus the 3070's 184 -- but NVIDIA says its newer cores are faster and more efficient. Notably, the 3070's hardware even beats out the RTX 2080 Ti on paper, which had 4,352 CUDA cores. That's progress: Now a mid-range card can outdo NVIDIA's flagship from two years ago. The only major downside with the 3070 is that it has 8GB of RAM compared to the 2080 Ti's 11GB.
NVIDIA claims the RTX 3070 is capable of performing 20.3 shader teraflops and 39.7 ray tracing teraflops, both of which are a measurement of its overall computing capability. In comparison, it says the 2070 can hit 7.9 shader TFLOPs and 23.8 RT TFLOPs. Those numbers sound like an impressive leap for NVIDIA's new GPU, but as we explained when NVIDIA launched its 3000-series GPUs, TFLOP numbers are increasingly meaningless. Instead, the big takeaway is that NVIDIA has reworked how its GPUs handle integer and floating point math, which could lead to some genuine performance improvements. But don't expect a card with twice as much TFLOP potential to be twice as fast overall.
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark | Hitman 2 Benchmark | Destiny 2 | Luxmark Luxball HDR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
RTX 3070 | 6,061 | 51 FPS | 70 FPS | 85-95 FPS | 49,006 |
RTX 3080 | 7,371 | 82 FPS | 98 FPS | 130-140 FPS | 68,701 |
RTX 2080 Ti | 5,906 | 52 FPS | 71 FPS | 90-110 FPS | 40,331 |
GTX 1080 | 3,227 | N/A | N/A | 65-75 | 12,153 |
All games tested in 4K/HDR with the highest graphics quality settings and ray tracing (where available), on a rig powered by an Intel Core i7-8700K and 32GB of RAM.
While I expected the RTX 3070 to be comparable to the 2080 Ti, I was surprised to find that it practically mirrored the older card in our benchmarks. Their results in 3DMark TimeSpy Extreme, Hitman 2, Destiny 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider are so close I'd just call them identical. The 3070 did leap ahead in some cases, which aren't in our benchmark table. It scored 107 FPS in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark, compared to 79 FPS on the 2080 Ti. The new card also scored significantly higher in the Luxmark HDR benchmark, which uses OpenCL to test its GPU computing potential. That'll make the 3070 even more tempting to media producers who need some encoding help.
The RTX 3070 also stayed in step with the 2080 Ti when it came to ray tracing performance. Minecraft RTX reached the same 70 to 75 FPS in 4K with all of the graphical flourishes turned on. And the 3DMark Port Royal demo scores were only a few hundred points apart (with the 2080 Ti keeping a slight edge). If ray tracing is the most important thing for your next upgrade, it may be worth saving up for the 3080, which offered dramatically better performance across the board.
Even though the 3070 features the same cooler design as the 3080, I found it to be noisier overall. I didn't have a sound meter handy to grab exact figures, but during my testing it emitted a high-pitched whining noise while it was idle, whereas the 3080 was virtually silent. The 3070 also sounded like a jet getting ready to take off when it was under load. While the 3080 could get a bit noisy when it was stressed, it wasn't nearly as loud. NVIDIA reps say the 3070 should be performing silently, so my noise issues could be some sort of bug. At least the cooling mechanism did its job though: The 3070 ran at a relatively chill 40 celsius while idling, and 76C under load. In comparison, the 2080 Ti reached up to 86C during benchmarks and gameplay.
In short, the RTX 3070 is a $499 card that's doing the work of a two-year old $999 GPU. That's a huge accomplishment, especially when the RTX 2070 was still bested by the GTX 1080 Ti when it was released. NVIDIA claims the RTX 3000 GPUs are its biggest generational leap ever, and that’s evident with the 3070. Still, I'd still suggest waiting to see how AMD's next-generation Radeon 6000 GPUs look when they're announced on October 28th. If you're an NVIDIA die-hard though, and you don't see yourself running a rival card anytime soon, the RTX 3070 is a no-brainer upgrade.
Players who have been spending time with Star Wars Battlefront II pre-release trial period have already started trying to calculate how long it would take to unlock every hero in the game without paying money and the results aren’t pretty.
After your bellies (yes, that was the highest rated comment) and up-cycling empty butter tubs (kudos for ingenuity), three nominations stood out as your favorite food storage containers. So check out the finalists below and vote for your absolute favorite at the bottom of the post.
On Monday, Department of Energy head, Rick Perry, went on CNBC’s Squawk Box to speak out against the near-universal scientific consensus on climate change. Perry, the former Texas governor who finished a disappointing 12th on Dancing With the Stars, said CO2 is not the main contributor to climate change and that…
Android/iOS: Microsoft has had separate two-factor authenticator apps for its consumer and enterprise users for a while. Now, it’s combining the two into the new Microsoft Authenticator and adding a few new features while they’re at it.
Here’s the thing about Star Wars’ favorite malcontent: saving the day is only something Han Solo does when he has to save his own ass.
When you’re heading out for a night run, or hiking through the woods after dark, a working headlamp is almost as important as the shoes on your feet. So Petzl is upgrading its hands-free headlamps with Bluetooth and smartphone connectivity to intelligently manage brightness and battery life.
Naval Ravikant (@naval) is the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList. He previously co-founded Epinions, which went public as part of Shopping.com, and Vast.com. He is an active angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including more than a few “unicorn” mega-successes.
His deals include Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Postmates, Wish, Thumbtack, and OpenDNS, which Cisco just bought for $635 million in cash.
You can find many more examples here, but suffice to say — he’s really, REALLY good at start-up investing.
In this episodes you'll discover:
Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast
This episode is sponsored by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run...
This podcast is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at Athletic Greens.com/Tim
Enjoy!
By popular demand, this is a follow-up episode with Pavel Tsatsouline, a world-class strength coach.
In this ep, he answers your 15 most popular questions, as voted on by nearly 1,000 of you.
Show notes and links for both of Pavel's episodes can be found here: www.fourhourworkweek.com/pavel
Astronomers have discovered two new super-Earths orbiting an ancient 11.5 billion year-old star a "mere" 13 light-years from here. One planet is in the habitable zone, prompting a researcher to wonder what kind of life could have evolved over such a long period.
Already on sale for more than a month at AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, Sprint has finally revealed when you'll be able to get your hands on LG's G2 flagship. The operator today opened pre-orders for the $99 Android phone but doesn't expect deliveries to hit your doorstep until November 8th. To sweeten ...
