A high-end gaming PC often requires a lot of room, with full-size tower cases, large fans blowing air all over the place, and wires coming out of everywhere. Zac Builds, on the other hand, takes the other approach: he stuffs around 1000 watts of performance into a typical desk drawer, keeping your workstation neat and hiding all hardware until you need it.
Nintendo took a chance in 2001 with the Pokemon Mini, the world’s smallest cartridge-based platform to date. This teeny-tiny device was smaller than a matchbox and only held ten official games before fading into obscurity. Game makers had to get creative with the tiny 160×100 monochrome LCD screen driven by an Epson S1C88 CPU running at 4.194304 MHz, resulting in charming, simplified Pokémon adventures. Four AAA batteries kept the fun going for about 20 hours before needing a recharge, with cartridges containing a maximum of 2 MB of ROM, but the hardware was so constrained that game programmers had to get somewhat creative with the design.
Apple is expected to launch the iPhone 17e next week, on February 19, ahead of the traditional fall release timetable. As a result, this handset will be released in early 2026, apart from the rest of the lineup. That said, its purported metal body makes it feel like a genuine high-end phone, and the build quality is similar to its higher-priced predecessors.
Keanu Reeves returns as the man in black, taking on the goons in a brand new John Wick action game from Saber Interactive revealed during the Playstation State of Play event. He’s preparing for a new assault on the streets in a game Saber believes was the ideal project to work on, collaborating directly with Lionsgate, director Chad Stahelski, and the man himself, Keanu Reeves.
Apple’s 11-inch iPad Pro M5, priced at $899 (was $999), is just a beast of a tablet that some claim is the perfect laptop replacement, and after seeing its capabilities in action, you’ll find it difficult to disagree.
Waymo has just enabled fully driverless trips with their sixth-generation Driver. Employees and guests are now getting into sleek Ojai minivans and driving through Phoenix streets with no one behind the wheel. Public access is just around the corner, and the company hopes to see a significant increase, up to 1 million paid trips per week, by the end of the year.
Nicolas Cage stars as a down-at-heels Spider-Man in the upcoming series Spider-Noir, a dark, gritty take on the web-slinger that will premiere on Prime Video in the spring. This one is based on the Marvel comic Spider-Man Noir and transports its hero to 1930s New York, where one man is the last chance for a city in serious jeopardy.
Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania developed HoloRadar, a system that allows a mobile robot to create a 3D map of its surroundings even when it cannot see them directly in front of it. That means that a pedestrian hiding around the corner of a hallway, as well as walls, entrances, and obstructions, will appear on the robot’s map in astonishing detail, thanks to radio signals that bounce off surfaces in the same way that light bounces off mirrors.
Southwest Airlines has just announced that it will be putting Starlink on board. As a result, extremely fast Wi-Fi will begin to appear on flights this summer. Southwest intends to equip more than 300 Boeing 737 planes with this technology by the end of the year, representing a major chunk of their fleet.
Kent Survival arrives in a stretch of woodland in a truck with ten boxes of huge plastic bricks, a real-life LEGO project, and sets out to build a livable shelter out of them. These bricks are essentially the same as their traditional LEGO counterparts, but scaled up to a much larger size: they come in 8-stud and 4-stud versions, totaling 1400 pieces. His idea was simple: build the thing and see if it was possible to turn a child’s play into a real shelter.