Friday’s top tech news: let’s give it up for the laptops of CES

Creative Technologies founder, CEO and chairman Sim Wong Hoo has died, his company has confirmed. He “passed away peacefully on 4 January 2023,” according to a press release. He was 67 years old.

It might seem hard for younger readers to believe, but there was a time that computer sound wasn’t guaranteed. If you wanted to plug in headphones or speakers that could do more than bloops or bleeps, you probably needed a sound card — and none were as successful as Creative Labs’ Sound Blaster. It sold over 400 million units as of its 30th anniversary in 2019.

For the past few years, I’ve been a big fan of the LG Gram 17. It’s got great battery life, a massive screen, and it feels like it weighs basically nothing. But if there’s one hesitation I sometimes have about the line, it’s the aesthetic. The Grams of the past have just looked a bit... boring. Which is fine — many laptops are — but also means there’s a fashion-conscious audience out there they potentially aren’t reaching.

Enter the LG Gram Style. This, as the name implies, might be the first LG laptop I’ve ever seen that I’d really consider calling “stylish.” It’s unbelievably thin, it’s mind-blowingly light, and it’s covered in a lustrous color-changing finish. My hands-on time with this device was in LG’s very dimly lit booth at CES 2023, but it was certainly one of the most unique-looking laptops I’ve had the opportunity to try so far this year.

A former Zulily employee has been charged with stealing over $300,000 from the e-commerce site after allegedly being inspired by the 1999 film Office Space. As reported by The New York Times, according to this police report (pdf), Ermenildo Valdez Castro, 28, is accused of manipulating product prices and altering the company’s code to divert shipping fees from Zulily to a personal account.

According to court documents, Castro began editing Zulily’s software code for checkout payments in February 2022, which allowed him to steal around $260,000 in electrical payments by diverting shipping fees from Zulily customer purchases to a Stripe account that he controlled, in some cases double-charging customers for shipping.

Okay, so. This is a pencil. You can draw with it on paper, the way you would with a pencil. Then, you can bring it up to your laptop screen and write on that, as you would with a stylus.

This MSI Pen 2, announced earlier this week, actually seems like such a no-brainer product when I think about it. If you have a notebook or Post-its on your desk where you like to write notes but also sometimes like to navigate your laptop’s screen with a stylus, you now only need one pen to do both. You could also try sketching out a picture, chart, or graph on paper before diving into doing so on a computer without putting down your writing utensil. You could take physical notes on a text that you’re reading on your computer, then also reach up and highlight parts of that text. I keep thinking of more scenarios where this could come in handy.

We may not be getting a new iPhone SE in 2024, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who bases his predictions on sources in the supply chain. On Friday, Kuo wrote in a blog post that Apple had canceled production and shipment plans for the phone after his prediction last month that a fourth-gen iPhone SE could be canceled or delayed.

Kuo thinks the reason the phone is getting axed could be that Apple’s lower-end phones were selling worse than the company hoped (in September, Bloomberg reported that there was more demand for iPhone 14 Pros than regular iPhone 14s) and due to concerns that another price increase for the lineup could make it less attractive to price-conscious buyers.

It’s been three years since we last set foot on the CES show floor — and it feels very good to be back. The in-person portion of the conference was canceled in 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the omicron surge led to a much smaller event in 2022 than everyone had hoped for. But for 2023, the show’s energy was back, and so was its typical tidal wave of announcements.

This year’s show felt tangible in a way that CES often isn’t. The event is usually filled with far-out concepts, extravagant tech demos, and promises of gadgets working better together tomorrow — things that aren’t going to happen anytime soon or are wholly unaffordable. But this year, much of what we saw was exciting real tech coming into reach.

I mean, sure, if you’re wearing wired in-ear headphones in 2023, you could absolutely buy a pair with the cables going straight down. Or you could get a pair with wires that go up and swoops backward behind your ears like Sennheiser’s latest pair of earbuds, the IE 200, and pretend you’re a musician onstage at Glastonbury every time you’re wearing them.

At $149.99, these in-ear headphones (or, I guess, in-ear monitors) sit at the bottom of Sennheiser’s IE range, which goes up to the eye-wateringly expensive $1,499.95 IE 900. But the fundamentals are (ostensibly) the same. They have that premium-looking cable-up form factor and are equipped with the same sized 7mm “extra-wide band” transducers. Sennheiser claims these offer “superbly balanced and realistic audio” and a “natural frequency response curve typically found in earphones costing significantly more.”

The Always Home Cam, Ring’s autonomous indoor security drone, made its public debut at CES this week. But it was flying in an empty room behind a glass door and disappearing into a side room between flights, so we never saw it take off or land. The demo, while impressive, shows that it’s unlikely we’ll see Ring’s indoor security camera patrolling your living room anytime soon.

Despite announcing preorders (by invitation only) for the security camera in 2021 and saying it would ship to customers’ homes that year, Ring still hasn’t committed to a new date. “We are looking forward to — in the next short future — shipping it out to customers at high volume,” founder Jamie Siminoff told The Verge in an interview. But he also said 2024 was the earliest we could expect to see it widely available.

French automaker Peugeot revealed its Inception concept, a deadly looking electric car that’s all sharp angles and brutalist designs. The concept, which was announced at CES this week, will inspire a lineup of future EVs that will start making their way to customers in 2025.

Stellantis, which owns Peugeot, had a heavy docket at this year’s CES, including a Chrysler cockpit concept and a battery-electric Ram 1500 truck that borrows a lot from the world of muscle cars. But the Peugeot Inception was arguably the most CES-y of all the announcements, with its rectangular steering wheel, hyper-minimal dashboard, and color-shifting interior. There’s even a device inside the car called “the Halo Cluster” with a 360-degree screen, for some reason.

Razer has given us a first look at the Razer Blade 16 and Razer Blade 18, which will be released in the next few months. And I will say right now: I am impressed.

The Blade 18 is the biggest and most powerful Razer Blade that has ever been released, which is neat in itself. But I’m actually even more excited about the Blade 16, which is debuting some never-before-seen on a Razer Blade.

I couldn’t justify keeping Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack because it didn’t stay firmly stuck to my phone without swiveling, and I’ve seen third-party attachments that are much, much worse. Thankfully, the next version of the Qi wireless charging standard, Qi2, will mandate magnet strength, size, and dimensions in addition to its electrical properties — even though that’s the opposite of what I reported yesterday.

(The bigger news about Qi2: it should mean that future Android phones and Apple phones will be able to use the same wireless magnetic charger, effectively MagSafe for Android.)

Last month, I spent 15 whole minutes hunched over an HP Spectre x360 in a drafty Best Buy store — agonizing over whether its amazing OLED screen would destroy the laptop’s battery life and repeatedly googling for the answer. When I found out the answer was “yes, substantially less battery,” I had to walk away.

But why should I have to choose between a great screen and one I use all day? Why not both? That’s the idea behind the ThinkBook Plus Twist, a new laptop that Lenovo’s announcing at CES 2023.

Razer announced the Blade 16 and Blade 18 gaming laptops two days ago at CES 2023, but it shared much more information today on the two new sizes. This is the biggest shake-up to Razer’s popular, well-designed Blade lineup in a while, going well beyond processor and GPU spec improvements. Their screens are taller with a 16:10 aspect ratio, so you’re getting more screen real estate, plus the display “chin” near the bezel is significantly smaller. This change has some positive knock-on effects, such as allowing Razer to fit in bigger batteries compared to last year’s Blade 15 and 17. More on that below.

Every configuration comes standard with Intel’s high-end 13th Generation Core i9-13950HX 65W CPU, while both models can be upgraded to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 mobile graphics. The Blade 16 starts at $2,699.99, while the larger size starts at $2,899.99. They’ll all release sometime in the first quarter.