Look Up Back to School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Say More Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and . Apple's Sept. 9 keynote is almost here, and it's shaping up to be one of the more consequential events on the company's calendar in recent memory. Beyond the hardware itself, this will be the first major product launch under new CEO John Ternus, who has taken over for Tim Cook .

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Nvidia's RTX Spark could be the future of laptops. That's exactly why I'd wait Nvidia's new Arm chips powering premium laptops are the biggest hardware news of the year...but I've got good reasons to be wary of both the tech and the company behind it. Nvidia is making CPUs now. Specifically, it's making Arm-based processors with RTX branding, destined for at least some consumer-focused, high-performance laptops and mini PCs .

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Shortages are driving prices up. Here's how to stretch your current rig until the market calms down. There's no denying that all of our next PC upgrades are likely to be more expensive than they've been in a long time. And if history is anything to go by, they won't come all the way down again.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. I built my own Steam Machine. Steam Machines are sold out and way too expensive. Here's how I built my own SteamOS gaming PC with spare parts and why you should too. Did you want to buy a Steam Machine at launch?

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Windows 11's next security feature may cost you gaming performance Starting October 13th, Windows 11 will enable a security feature called Memory Integrity by default. It could slow games by up to 15 percent. Next month's Patch Tuesday falls on October 13th, and with that update, Microsoft will be enabling "Memory Integrity" on all Windows 11 systems that are still receiving updates, according to this Windows IT Pro blog post . Memory Integrity (also known as Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity, or HVCI) has been around for some time, but it hasn't been enabled yet on many PCs.

The technology raises concerns about whether AI-generated visuals preserve a developer's original artistic intent, with some users calling for a dedicated "developer intended" visual mode. According to PCWorld, AI upscaling is becoming essential as hardware costs rise, though the debate over visual accuracy versus performance remains unresolved. Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 is out this week, and it was a big topic of discussion in this week's episode of The Full Nerd. While I haven't had a chance to test it out myself, by the time you read this I'll be furiously updating my Nvidia drivers and seriously considering splurging on a copy of just to get a look at the earliest game to launch with official DLSS 5 support. I'm curious to see if the reported performance dips that come with enabling DLSS 5 are actually counteracted by Nvidia tech like Multi-Frame Generation, and I want to see what kind of tuning the player can do to adjust how DLSS 5's new real-time AI model upscales game graphics.

John Ternus takes over as Apple's chief executive on Tuesday, inheriting a company that towers over the smartphone market but trails its rivals in artificial intelligence. One of his biggest challenges will be balancing the company's dependence on China while parrying acute political pressure from the White House. Ternus, 51, joined Apple's design team in 2001 and worked his way up to senior vice president of hardware engineering, reporting to Cook. He leads the engineering teams behind Apple's entire product lineup, including the iPhones that generate most of the company's revenue. He gets barely a week to settle in, with Apple holding its annual iPhone event on September 9, where it is expected to unveil its first foldable handset.

The potential for AI to automate scientific research and manufacturing must be balanced with new risks, Anthropic says. Artificial intelligence agents might occasionally get confused and hack into other computers, but Anthropic thinks it has a way to unleash the little rascals into scientific labs and manufacturing facilities safely. The AI company released details today of a new framework designed to help AI agents use physical systems like microscopes, liquid-handling equipment, quantum computing hardware, manufacturing machines, and robot arms. The framework, called Model Hardware Standard, is a set of rules that specify how AI agents should--and should not--interact with all sorts of hardware. It reflects a growing belief that AI has the potential to revolutionize scientific research and industries like manufacturing-if it can venture into the physical world safely.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. PCWorld built a self-hosted AI system with an MSI mini PC, a Framework Desktop, and Telegram -- making a local AI agent accessible from almost anywhere. There are many good reasons to avoid interacting with "AI" services. They're expensive, they're destructive, they're a privacy nightmare, they're morally dubious, and they're often controlled by people who are shall we say, unconcerned about the effects of their actions on others. But a lot of these problems can be solved if you decide to roll your own LLM.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Witcher 3 on a phone is cool. A cool phone modding project has me seeing visions of doom and gloom for the future of the PC market. Somebody built a desktop "PC" out of a gaming phone. The modder basically disassembled a powerful Android phone, strapped on an enclosure and cooler setup, and connected it to an external monitor.