New Gadgets

If the ideal way to a person's heart is through their stomach, food could be a particularly good present to give on Valentine's Day. Our picks for the best Valentine's Day food gifts offer plenty of ways to celebrate Feb.14, including culinary activities you can do with your loved one and special meals to remember.

more...

NASA/JPL-Caltech Apophis, the Egyptian god of chaos and darkness is in the neighborhood again. Actually, it's just a giant asteroid named after the ancient demonic snake deity, and it's making a close approach of our planet.

Officially known as 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4), the space rock is wider than three football fields, and at one point, scientists estimated it had about a 3 percent chance of hitting Earth during an upcoming close pass in 2029.

more...

HBO Max is the home of Zack Snyder's Justice League, but before that novelty 4-hour behemoth arrives mid-March, let's take a look at what other movies the premium streamer has on offer. From recent flicks featuring the lockdown, to a sweet low-key comedy about great-grandparents preserved in pickle jars, HBO Max has an eclectic bag of star-studded originals.

more...

We’re living in a perfect storm for GPU price inflation — cryptocurrency mining is on the rise, as is interest in gaming during the pandemic. There’s also a global semiconductor shortage at the moment. The result: even if you can find a high-end GPU, it’ll probably cost at least twice what it should. Nvidia hopes to combat this with the upcoming RTX 3060, which will have its crypto mining capabilities nerfed. The company has now clarified its plans, saying it won’t make crypto changes to any existing GPUs.

more...

Sony will allow PlayStation 5’s to finally use their M.2 slots by the summer. The new updates will also unlock support for higher fan speeds, which probably isn’t great news to everyone who likes the current noise profile on the Xbox Series S|X or PlayStation 5, but it may be necessary given what we’ve heard about the current power consumption on both consoles.

more...

Though it's been only a few months since the iPhone 12 went on sale, Apple is already setting its sights on its next flagship smartphone, the iPhone 13 (or whatever it ends up being called). We're expecting to see four versions of the new phone: the iPhone 13, the iPhone 13 Mini, the iPhone 13 Pro and the iPhone 13 Pro Max, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

more...

When AMD announced its Ryzen 5000 CPUs, it introduced a feature it dubbed Smart Access Memory, known more generally across the industry as Resizable BAR. Resizable BAR allows a CPU to access more than 256MB of GPU memory at any given time. The feature can boost game performance on Ryzen 5000 CPUs by between 3-7 percent on average based on our tests at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. Nvidia claims up to 10 percent improvements for Ampere GPUs.

more...

Microsoft has announced it will bring the Xbox’s Auto HDR feature over to Windows 10. Over 1,000 titles will have HDR support retroactively added, vastly expanding the reach of the feature inside the PC ecosystem.

more...

Most of the hottest game releases for next-gen consoles are going to run you $70, an increase gamers are not relishing. That’s nothing compared with a copy of the original Super Mario Bros for NES. This sealed cartridge is set to shatter records with its auction price, which is creeping up on $400,000 with several days still to go.

The Nintendo Entertainment System occupies a special place in many a nerd’s heart. Some NES games, such as the Super Mario Bros. series, have become cultural touchstones that people still play to this day, and some love these games so much they’ll pay exorbitant amounts of money to own rare physical copies. Nintendo rolled out the NES in select markets with various types of game packaging, which has led to multiple “versions” of some titles. Many of them are worth a whole lot of money, too.

more...

Google was found to be misleading users about the location data it collected.
Angela Lang/CNET Google "partially" misled some Android users in Australia regarding how their location data was being collected, according to a court ruling handed down Friday.

Australia's Federal Court found that Google misrepresented that its "Location History" setting that users saw during the initial new account setup process was the only setting that affected whether identifiable information about their locations was collected or used.

more...