New Gadgets

Apple on Tuesday acknowledged that it will be changing the primary cable for its iPhones in the future, though it declined to offer details. What company executives did say is that they'll comply with new European Union rules that require every new smartphone work with a common USB-C charging cable by 2024.

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GPU “Cable Gate” is an official thing now. This week a Redditor posted images of a melted 12-pin adapter cable on their Nvidia RTX 4090. The power plug on the PCB was also irreversibly damaged as well. Naturally, the Internet was outraged as this was predicted to happen before the GPUs launched. Back in September PCI-SIG issued a warning about using 12-pin power cable adapters, saying it could cause problems. Now, that has apparently happened. In the wake of this event, it’s been confirmed that AMD will not be using the new cable on its upcoming RDNA3 GPUs. This has led to a lot of questions about Nvidia’s 12-pin cable design. Now Nvidia says it’s investigating the incident.

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This week we’ve seen more reports of fried RTX 4090 adapters, with the count now up to a half dozen or so. Previously we just knew that some adapters were melting, and in doing so also damaging the connector on the card. It wasn’t clear exactly what was to blame for this situation. Was it the adapter, the bending of it, or some other engineering mishap? Now the intrepid tinkerers at Igor’s Lab have revealed what they believe is the culprit: the Nvidia-designed 4-into-1 adapter.

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It's November and the Black Friday shopping season is just a matter of weeks away. If you're in the market for a major tech purchase, Black Friday is the best time of year to be scouting out discounts with some of the lowest prices we'll see all year cropping up right about now.

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Huawei is back with its newest flip phone intended to rival Samsung's Galaxy Flip series.
The Chinese smartphone company unveiled its new foldable, called the Huawei Pocket S in an array of colors on Wednesday. The Chinese phone-maker's latest flip phone is a scaled down version of last year's P50 Pocket. It makes compromises on the chipset and camera to help it hit a starting price of roughly $800 when converted from yuan. Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 4 starts at $1000 -- and the price remains more or less the same in mainland China.

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The iPhone versus Android debate rages on, and I've been caught in the middle of it for too long. For 10 long years, I've been Team Android, my most recent phone being the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus. But when it came time to replace my beloved Galaxy -- after months of going back and forth -- I caved and bought an iPhone 14 Pro. And, green bubbles aside, now that I'm Team Apple, I'm never going back.

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In the wake of yesterday’s AMD RDNA3 GPU reveal, the era of 8K gaming is suddenly upon us. Sure, it existed before, theoretically. But nobody was really gaming at 8K as you needed a television to do it. Plus, frame rates were pretty borderline, as we recall. All that’s changed now that AMD’s newest GPUs have a DisplayPort 2.1 interface. The previous DisplayPort 1.4a version was limited to a peasant’s refresh rate of 60Hz at 8K. The new version bumps that up to a satisfying 165Hz. And according to AMD, its new GPUs can actually achieve that frame rate in some games at that resolution. In light of this advancement, Samsung has announced the world’s first 8K UltraWide gaming monitor.

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The RTX 4080 has finally arrived and as expected, it’s a seriously potent GPU. It’s officially the second most powerful GPU money can buy. That would normally be good news for gamers, but its $1,199 price puts it in an odd space within the market. The RTX 4090 offers a lot more performance, and you’re already in the ballpark as far as pricing goes with the 4080. This will leave a lot of gamers in a conundrum over which GPU to buy, assuming they can actually buy either one of them. Still, the RTX 4080 is undeniably powerful, and a big step up from cards like the RTX 3080. However, Nvidia has tacked $500 onto the price tag compared with its x80 predecessor, which is a big jump. Also, AMD’s RX 7900 GPUs are waiting in the wings at $999 and $899, which makes Nvidia’s pricing look even more questionable.

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Bill Gates enjoys sharing his favorite recent reads on his Gates Notes blog. But this time, the Microsoft co-founder decided to share five of his all-time favorites. (His write-ups are a little different than the casual book recommendations you might give your friends -- one of his choices is a biography by rock star Bono, a personal friend of Gates.)

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Nvidia famously “unlaunched” the much-derided RTX 4080 12GB GPU a few weeks after it was announced. Instead, it chose to only move forward with its big brother, the RTX 4080 16GB. Despite both GPUs sharing the “4080” moniker, they have drastically different specs. Nvidia had said this was the reason for the confusing unlaunching. Now it appears the GPU will be reborn as the RTX 4070 Ti, according to regulatory filings from Gigabyte, and its AD104 die has also been photographed.Gigabyte filed paperwork for its upcoming GPUs with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), as reported by Videocardz.

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