Buying a cheap laptop is easy. You just go to Best Buy or Newegg or Amazon or Walmart or somewhere, you pick the cheapest one (or the most expensive one that fits whatever your budget is), and you buy it. For as little as $200 or $300, you can bring home something new (as in, "new-in-box" not as in, "was released recently") that will power up and boot Windows or ChromeOS.
Apple claims that its 2026 models can deliver "up to 2x" the sustained read and write speeds of the M4 Pro and Max laptops. In our testing, the 4TB SSD in the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro bore that out: our unit could sustain a 13.6GB/s read speed and an even higher 17.8GB/s write speed.
The M5 Pro and M5 Max are no longer monolithic chips with all the CPU and GPU cores and everything else packed into a single silicon die. Using an 'all-new Fusion Architecture' like the one used to combine two Max chips into a single Ultra chip, Apple now splits the CPU cores (and other things) into one piece of silicon, and the GPU cores (and other things) into another piece of silicon.
As a writer who also does photography, video, and some graphic design on the side, I've found that the iPad Air is the most affordable tablet that can comfortably handle my workload without a single stutter. It starts at $599, $400 less than the iPad Pro, yet its M4 processor, faster connectivity, and 12GB of unified memory seem almost too good to be true for the price.
The Nothing Phone (4a) has run the Geekbench AI benchmark today. The phone has the model number A069, runs Android 16, and the prototype running the benchmark has 12GB of RAM, though we assume there will be lower amounts of memory offered as well.
I've grown accustomed to being impressed by Geekom products. You might not know the name, but it has produced some pretty impressive small form factor desktops, many of which I've reviewed. Also: I converted this Windows 11 mini PC into a Linux workstation - and didn't regret it Now, the company has hopped into the laptop market, and I'm glad it did.
The Poco X8 Pro and Poco X8 Pro Max are definitely both coming soon, since we've already seen them getting certified by various authorities across the globe. Today, the Poco X8 Pro has been spotted in the Geekbench online database, because a prototype has run the benchmark. As you can see from the screenshot below, it managed a single-core score of 1,708 and a multi-core score of 6,297.
The iQOO Z11x is most likely powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 7400 SoC, based on the listing's details. This was paired with 8GB of RAM in the prototype which ran the benchmark. The device will launch running Android 16 with OriginOS 6 on top.
The iQOO 15 Ultra is getting official on February 4, and the brand has already revealed a few details about it. Today, a device that is rumored to be the iQOO 15 Ultra has been spotted in the Geekbench database with the model number V2546A. As you can see from the screenshot below, it managed a single-core score of 3,601 and a multi-core score of 11,434 in Geekbench 6.5 for Android.
If you are in the market for a new Apple laptop, it can be confusing to choose the one that suits your needs. After all, the company recently released an all-new 14-inch base MacBook Pro powered by its latest M5 processor. It is more powerful than the $999 (currently $750) but not as formidable as the more expensive M4 Pro and M4 Max-powered machines.