Author: Geek Planet

It looks like a new member is joining the Pixel family, adding to its resurgent smartphone lineup. Code analysis of the latest Android beta points toward a new Pixel laptop that Google might be planning to launch in the near future. Google last launched a laptop, the Pixelbook Go, in 2019, an affordable version of the Pixelbook it put on the shelves back in 2017. Both the Pixelbook and Pixelbook Go, along with the earlier Chromebook Pixel models, were not what you would call a smash hit with the audience or a runaway commercial success. Ultimately, they triggered Big G’s…

The Windows laptop market has never looked busier. There are more brands, more chips, more AI labels, and more “next-gen” promises than ever. But somehow, for all that noise, the category feels more boxed in than it has in years. That is the irony of the AI PC moment. AI is supposed to be the big upgrade cycle that gives Windows laptops fresh relevance. Instead, it is quietly making them harder to buy into, especially if you are shopping anywhere below the premium tier. And in the middle of all that confusion, Apple’s MacBook lineup suddenly looks like the cleanest,…

Having recently launched the MacBook Neo as well as the M5 MacBook Air, Apple’s next-gen Macs were supposed to ride the company’s recent momentum. But now, there’s a new roadblock. And surprisingly, it’s not design, chips, or software. It’s memory. And yes, AI is a big reason why. Apple’s next Macs might be delayed According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, industry-wide memory shortages could push back Apple’s upcoming Mac launches, including the next-gen Mac Studio and a redesigned touch-screen MacBook Pro. The Mac Studio refresh, which was originally expected around mid-2026, may now be delayed until as late as October.…

Amazon’s AI shopping assistant Rufus can now show you a full 365 days of price history for a product. In other words, you now have access to a full year’s worth of pricing data, including when the product was available for a higher or lower price, and when the last price change took place, before buying anything.  Previously, the maximum available price history was 90 days, enough to catch up on a recent sale, but not enough to know whether a limited-time offer is actually the best price a product has been available in the last year.  How do you…

If you’ve ever glanced at your Android phone’s storage breakdown and done a double-take at how much space AICore is consuming, you’re not alone. It’s one of those things that’s easy to notice and hard to explain, and for a while, Google wasn’t offering much clarity on it. That’s changed now, and the explanation turns out to be more sensible than the mystery surrounding it suggested. AICore is the on-device AI backbone that powers a growing list of features on Android 14 and above — smart replies in WhatsApp, scam detection in messages, real-time transcription, grammar correction, audio summarization, and…

This abridged republished article first appeared in New English Review When we hear or read about the word ‘agnosticism,’ many people tend to believe that it refers exclusively to skepticism on belief in the existence of God. But that’s not the case. People can be agnostic on many things, such as historical events, like the authenticity of the moon landings, who shot JFK, or even the existence of the external world. In a book by professor John Staddon, Fact vs. Passion: Science in the Age of Unreason, he writes that “many social scientists have difficulty separating facts from faith, reality from the…

I didn’t bring the Pixel 8a to Camiguin to prove a point. I brought it because it’s still my phone, two years after I bought it as a stopgap when my OnePlus 7 Pro died. That’s annoying, because I wasn’t supposed to like this thing for this long. A week on the island gave it chances to fail. I used it for directions, island-hopping photos, Bluetooth music, online payments, and the usual checks when nobody remembers where the booking screenshot went. The Pixel 8a never let me forget it’s a cheaper phone. Charging was slow, and that showed. The more…

All my life, I’ve been an Apple user. iPhones, MacBooks, AirPods — if Apple made it, I had it. So yes, you can probably imagine the kind of loyalty I had for the ecosystem. Switching to anything else? Never even crossed my mind. But people change, and so did I. I’ve been using the MacBook Air M2 for three years now, and honestly, it’s been great. But only recently did Samsung launch the Galaxy Book6 Pro, and something just magnetically pulled me towards it. You’ll know exactly why it caught my attention, and who knows, maybe it’ll catch yours too.…

Four hundred dollars is a significant amount: it could be a weekend trip, a decent mirrorless lens, or a perfectly capable budget Motorola smartphone. Yet here we are, staring at two Razr phones that look remarkably alike, run the same version of Android, share the same rear camera array, and flip the same way into your pocket — the $1,099 Razr+ and the $1,499 Razr Ultra.  While the base Razr (2026) sits in a totally different category, the real confusion lies between the Razr+ (2026) and the Razr Ultra (2026). To help you with that, I’ve spent hours juggling the products’…

If there’s something that stands between foldables and the mainstream smartphone market, it’s their battery life, and Motorola has taken it upon itself to fix that. Almost all smartphone giants have their own book-style foldable available in the U.S., and all of them justify the premium with intricate hinges, flexible displays, and other engineering marvels, but somehow, that doesn’t extend to their batteries. You can unfold a foldable to double its screen size; that’s its entire pitch. But does the battery life also double? Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Among the two widely available book-style foldables in the U.S. — Samsung’s Galaxy…