Lenovo updated some versions of ThinkPad and ThinkBook devices at the MWC 2024 event, during which the Transparent Display laptop was also introduced, announced The Verge.

The updated laptop models are ThinkPad T: ThinkPad T14 Gen 5, ThinkPad T14s Gen 5 and ThinkPad T16 Gen 3. All of them have Intel

Core Ultra processors. Also, they have a Lenovo communication bar that allows the camera and microphones to fit into the top frame.

Laptops are characterized by thinner top bezels and higher display ratios.

The company had added these features to other ThinkPad series laptops like the X1 Carbon and X1 Nano.

The T-Series keyboards have the same Fn, Insert, Enter, and Volume Up keys as the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 and ThinkPad X1 2-in-1

Gen 9 laptops. This innovation was made to facilitate the access and use of technical devices for the visually impaired.

Another change that Lenovo made is that they put the Ctrl button at the end of the keyboard keys, as most laptop manufacturers do. Until now, the company placed the Fn key at the end of the row of keys on the keyboard.

Also, Lenovo created a new additional Microsoft Copilot key, which is located between the Alt and Ctrl keys, positioned on the right side of the keyboard. Lenovo and iFixit are starting to work together to make the process easier when replacing certain hardware components on the ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 and T16 Gen 3.

The companies will cooperate in the following areas: on the return of inserted DIMM slots instead of soldered RAM, on the insertion of wireless batteries, as well as on SSDs and slots for wireless adapters.

Lenovo makes it easy for users entering the process of getting their laptop repaired. The company clearly labels the SSD and RAM slots. It includes QR codes on the laptop case that are near every component that can be repaired. Also, the company also provides a video with instructions to be followed during the process.

Wi-Fi 7 represents a big speed boost over Wi-Fi 6E. // Image: Wi-Fi Alliance

The announcement from the Wi-Fi Alliance emphasizes that Wi-Fi 7 surpasses existing standards, particularly excelling in high-bandwidth streaming and low-latency wireless gaming. This is deemed crucial as virtual reality gains increasing popularity.

Kevin Robinson, the CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance, informed The Verge that Wi-Fi 7 is the “first generation built from the ground up” specifically for the 6 GHz band, representing the faster and wider portion of the wireless spectrum initially utilized by Wi-Fi 6E devices.

“Over the past two and a half decades, Wi-Fi has revolutionized the way we interact and function as a society. It stands as the foremost technology for daily connectivity. We are still at the dawn of the 6 GHz era, heralded by Wi-Fi 6E and we are poised to unlock unprecedented wireless user experiences. Wi-Fi 7, which is the next step of this evolution, signifies more than an incremental upgrade – it’s a leap into a realm where speed, capacity, and reliability converge to meet the insatiable demands of our connected world.” – David Coleman, Director of Wireless in the Office of the CTO, Extreme Networks

Netgear, TP-Link, and Eero have already released routers into the market, with the initial offerings from the first two hitting the shelves several months ago. However, it remains uncertain whether these routers will receive certification. Notably, Eero’s current Wi-Fi 6 routers are absent from the alliance’s Certified Product Finder. While this absence doesn’t necessarily imply that they won’t be compatible with Wi-Fi 7 devices in the future, certification provides companies with the assurance that their devices will indeed function seamlessly.

The Wi-Fi Alliance highlights various aspects of the new standard that promise increased efficiency, throughput, and stability. Wi-Fi 7 devices are designed to be backward-compatible with earlier versions of Wi-Fi. While older devices may not immediately reap the benefits of the new features offered by a Wi-Fi 7 router, the anticipation is that new laptops and phones will soon capitalize on these advancements. For the present, it’s apt to view a new Wi-Fi 7 router as enhanced infrastructure, laying the groundwork for future advancements.

Moments before the end of the workday arrives, the only thing employees are dreaming about is slowly closing their laptops and walking to the elevator to finally get home.

The newly remodeled offices of software company Expensify in San Francisco represent a different way of working, proving that it may not be so boring and making employees look forward to the day they will start working again.

At the end of the working day it is in these offices that something unseen elsewhere happens. The bartender, whom employees like to call “the concierge”, uses a large cutlass to open the cap of a champagne bottle. Blowing the drink onto the beautiful blue carpet, the employees begin to cheer and clap.

Why is there a bartender in the office of a tech company?
The company’s newly renovated downtown space has a sleek bar on the 16th floor with premium liquor and a list of specialty cocktails. It seems like the perfect place where employees can work on their laptops, sip a Moscow mule or draft beer and keep working. Sounds like a dream come true, right?

The cocktail list includes standard drinks like martinis and negronis, as well as the most popular liqueurs, and also CEO David Barrett’s favorite: an old-fashioned with a branded ice cube depicting the first letter that begins the company’s name: “E.”

Compilation for productivity
Expensify’s head of public relations James Dean defines the bar as a kind of experiment, a combination between a social club and a place that predisposes people to be super productive.

The idea of creating this bar has been around since before the pandemic, which totally messed up everyone’s plans as people started working from their homes and remotely.

Video game rooms, foosball tables and more
San Francisco seems to boast other companies that are breaking the classic and, for some employees, boring work pattern by remodeling their offices, albeit after a brief pandemic-induced hiatus, with tech goodies like video game rooms and foosball tables (and a bar). And increasingly, many are also incorporating restaurant-style cubicles and more communal spaces to satisfy employees’ thirst for casual workplace interaction, the lack of which has caused telecommuting.

Expensify’s space, which the company calls a lounge, has no separate offices, but includes many meeting rooms located around the perimeter where employees can slip away to have a conversation or work in peace. There are meeting rooms with fresh and colorful couches, fluffy cushions that point to the streets of downtown. There are tropical plants, photos of exotic places and copper inlays everywhere.

Sabrage – Productivity lies in the unconventional?
The long table just behind the bar is where most employees choose to work, chat and write on their laptops before being interrupted by the afternoon “sabrage” ceremony known as opening a bottle of champagne with a sabre.

This roundtable style of working has been a hallmark of the company since it first moved into the building in 2015, before Expensify moved its headquarters to Portland, Ore. A much smaller table is set up in a side room, around which employees used to gather during work hours when they only had part of the 16th floor.

Since many bars and restaurants have closed since the pandemic began, the company has been licensed to sell about a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of liquor – far less than the $500,000 it was making before the pandemic, according to saloon operations manager Nikki Walroth, due to the massive closures.

As you read about this bar, you might be wondering if it is currently operating? The lounge is available for Expensify employees and for events, but will officially open to customers and guests on April 24.

Weddings, engagements and work
The original idea for the entertainment venue was to not only have a venue that offered free alcohol for employees, but also to create a perk for Expensify cardholders and customers.

And that’s still the case. But how the space will be used depends largely on the people who have access to it.

“My wedding reception was here”,

says Expensify employee Nick Tucker, sitting at the bar with an open laptop, sipping a Moscow mule as the sun illuminated the mahogany and crystal tones of the bottles in front of him.

The idea to share his most special moment at this place came from a colleague and employee of his who also had an engagement here.

The company has five offices, including its Portland headquarters, as well as offices in London, New York and Ironwood, Michigan. But because it is still sticking to its plans for remote work access while many other companies mandate a return to the office, the purpose of those offices has changed significantly.

Though it has invested heavily in office renovations – the Portland headquarters is located in an old bank building with soaring columns and a vault – Expensify doesn’t call on employees to fill desks. Rather, the current purpose of these offices are focused on the social aspects of the job that can’t happen while employees are confined to their homes.

“I’ll go home, but I’ll also work.”

says public relations manager Dean, who is an Ironwood native and plans to reunite employees at that office in August.

About 30 people from the company signed up to spend some time in the small Upper Peninsula Michigan town.

The desire to recapture the social aspects of work that the pandemic and telecommuting erased is even leading to new ventures. Social co-working clubs have sprung up in San Francisco and the Bay Area, attracting members supportive of socializing with people in a casual work atmosphere supported by an afternoon cocktail or glass of wine.

Expensify’s office is just one example. But even with the complimentary cocktails and social atmosphere, the lounge is still a place to work quietly and at the same time, a place to spend leisure time.

And that was obvious even before the champagne popped. There were about three employees at the bar, their eyes fixed on the screens of their laptops, cocktail in hand, while the rest worked quietly at the large central table.

Adding to the pleasant atmosphere was the music playing in the background, the afternoon sunlight gently creeping through the large windows, creating a beautiful glow on the leaves of the abundant greenery.

Twitter needs every penny. With millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid rent and bills, plus $13 billion owed to the lenders who financed its takeover, there’s “a lot more work to do” if the company wants to avoid bankruptcy, Musk said last month, Wired wrote on the subject.

Twitter recently auctioned off about $1.5 million worth of furniture and equipment from its San Francisco headquarters, including odds and ends like keyboards and USB keys. But the company has left shiny assets worth tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars gathering dust in the homes of its former employees.

Some people fired or laid off by Musk are perplexed as to why Twitter hasn’t bothered to collect their company laptops, the latest problem in a takeover characterized by botched product launches, abrupt policy changes and delayed payrolls.

Eric Fronhofer, a California software engineer fired in November after confronting Musk via Twitter, says he hasn’t heard a word about bringing back his company’s 2021 Apple MacBook Pro M1 laptop. “It’s still sitting in the closet,” he says. Like the laptops of thousands of remote Twitter employees Musk has fired or let resign since early November, his has been digitally locked, rendering it useless.

Restored versions of his model can still be bought for about $1,000, and new ones are twice as expensive. Fronhofer feels no obligation to Musk and is in no hurry to return the machine. “I’m happy to let it sit there and be a brick,” he says.

Some former Twitter employees have told co-workers they sent the equipment back after approaching the company about prepaid shipping boxes. Others within the past few days have received generic emails asking them to fill out a “Twitter Device Collection Survey,” many say. But four of the five who have spoken to WIRED have not received the email themselves and are still eyeing Musk’s property.

The startup announced $26 million in funding, which includes a previously unannounced $5 million seed round and a newer $21 million Series A. At the same time, DevZero also announced the general availability of its cloud development platform.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Debo Ray says his goal is to make the development process easier for engineers while allowing them to freely choose the tools they will use.

“When a developer wants to do work, whatever they want to do, how can I give them an environment to actively code and test where they can immediately just get to build it, focusing only on the revenue generating parts of the business and letting DevZero take care of the underlying developer infrastructure,”

Ray told TechCrunch.

According to him, most of the developers’ work is done on laptops, and compiling in particular can be time-consuming when the developer’s machine is engaged for large chunks of time. By moving the development environment to the cloud, more resources are made available for the build process, allowing developers to get back to work faster.

Today, the startup has 21 employees and is hiring new ones in the meantime. For Ray, building a diverse organization is important and he believes it will ultimately lead to a better product.

The technology, called “Spatial Vision,” was unveiled at CES 2023 and is likely to change the way we use laptops forever.Asus’ new glasses-free 3D OLED display gives you the ability to view 3D images on your screen without the need for special glasses.

Spatial Vision will initially appear on two high-end Asus laptops and allows users to switch between 2D and 3D images at the touch of a button.

It works using advanced eye-tracking technology that creates a 3D effect for each user’s eye. This makes it ideal for watching 3D videos or activating the 3D mode of video games without having to wear bulky glasses.

One of the first laptops with this technology, the ProArt Studiobook 16 3D OLED, has a screen that can fold completely flat.

The new modular platform allows teams to train computer vision models faster with less data, run those models with computing power found in most consumer-grade laptops, and deploy those models dramatically faster than industry standards. On the webAI platform, developers and enterprises can build models and prototype quickly at no cost before engaging in an enterprise license.

“Most AI platforms today are built around the assumption that Big Data is the answer to the world’s problems. webAI throws that assumption out the window. Our fundamentally different approach envisions a world where practically any developer, regardless of their budget or past experience with artificial intelligence, can train, deploy and iterate an AI model quickly and cost-effectively.”

said David Stout, co-CEO of Iris Technology, the creator of webAI.

webAI’s no-code/full-code development environment gives enterprises a single tool to collaborate and iterate from sandbox to full deployment quickly and cost-effectively.

“Enterprises are investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence expertise, computing infrastructure and data acquisition/curation to fuel traditional AI experiments that have about a 13% chance of ever being deployed,”

said James Meeks, co-CEO of Iris.

“webAI’s novel architecture and simple interface enable rapid prototyping and iteration. Because it is free to train and affordable to deploy models on webAI, everyone from entrepreneurial developers to major enterprises now have the opportunity to create and deploy AI workflows that actually solve real-world problems.”

he continued.

webAI embodies a unique approach to intellectual property (IP) protection and data privacy. webAI customers do not need to cede ownership of their data in order to utilize the platform — they own their trained models, and their data is inaccessible by Iris.

Although the companies don’t compete directly today, Apple is reportedly building an electric self-driving vehicle under a project code-named Titan, and has attracted a number of engineers and executives away from Tesla. The Titan project is reportedly run by Doug Field, who returned to Apple in 2018 after five years at Tesla.

When asked about Tesla’s supply chain, Musk said that there’s a misperception that Tesla uses a lot of cobalt, a key material in the production of lithium-ion cells used in both smartphones and electric cars. Musk said:

“Apple uses I think almost 100% cobalt in their batteries and cell phones and laptops, but Tesla uses no cobalt in the iron-phosphate packs, and almost none in the nickel-based chemistries. On a weighted-average basis we might use 2% cobalt compared to say, Apple’s 100% cobalt. Anyway, so it’s just really not a factor.”

Some cobalt mined in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been linked to human rights abuses such as child labor. In 2019, Apple, in addition to Tesla and other major technology companies, was named as defendants in a human rights lawsuit, according to The Guardian.

In a conflict minerals report published earlier this year, Apple said it publishes a list of all conflict minerals and cobalt smelters and refiners, and all of Apple’s cobalt suppliers participated in audits in 2020. An Apple representative didn’t return a request for comment.

Later in the call, Musk made a crack about Apple’s so-called “walled garden,” which is named because Apple strictly controls what software can be installed on the iPhone through its App Store. Apple’s walled garden is facing scrutiny from lawmakers and other companies, including in an antitrust trial that took place earlier this year after it was sued by Epic Games over App Store fees and policies.

• HP Elite Dragonfly G2
• HP Spectre x360 14
• HP Envy x360 15
• HP Chromebook x360 14
• HP Pavilion Gaming 16

HP Elite Dragonfly G2

The new and refreshed HP Elite Dragonfly G2 is one of the most premium offerings from the company. Announced back in January earlier this year, the 2-in-1 laptop is primarily targeted at business users and comes with the latest Intel 11th-gen Tiger lake processor options with up to 32GB of RAM. The 13.3-inch IPS display is offered in different screen options, including a full HD low-power version, a full HD version with HP’s Sure View privacy feature, and a UHD option that supports HDR400 with 1,000-nits of brightness.It is also one of the only laptops that currently offers the option of a 5G modem.

HP Spectre x360 14

Rated as the best 2-in-1 laptop in our list of the best laptops of 2021, the new HP Spectre x360 14 is as good as it gets. An update from last year’s Spectre x360 13, the new model offers a slightly taller 3:2 13.5-inch display that is available in a standard full-HD resolution with 400-nits of brightness. You can also opt for a 3K2K (3000 x 2000-pixels) OLED panel or even a 1,000-nit option that comes with a special anti-reflective technology for better privacy.

HP Envy x360 15

The Envy series is also a great option if you don’t want to stretch your budget. HP offers the Envy x360 15 with the latest Intel 11th-gen processors and only recently announced a refresh where you can also get the laptop powered by the new AMD Ryzen 5000U series of processors meant for thin and light notebooks.

On the AMD side, you get the option of an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U with a 256GB NVMe SSD or AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with 512GB NVMe SSD. Both variants will be offered with 8GB DDR4 memory clocked at 3200MHz, although it will not be user upgradeable.

HP Chromebook x360 14

If Windows is not your thing, then HP has some Chromebook options too. The HP Chromebook x360 is one of the best Chromebooks available from the company that features up to a 10th-gen Intel Core i7 processor but as of now, it is available with the Core i3-10110U that is paired with 8GB of RAM, and 64GB of flash memory that can be expanded using a microSD card. The 14-inch touchscreen panel on the laptop comes with a full-HD resolution, and since it has a 2-in-1 design, the screen can be folded all the way to be used in various modes. Additionally, HP offers a fingerprint scanner for added security, while connectivity options include Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, two USB 3.1 Type-C ports, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, and a standard 3.5mm audio jack.

HP Pavilion Gaming 16

HP also offers the Pavilion Gaming series of laptops which are more affordable and feature performance hardware for entry-level and esports gaming enthusiasts. The particular model that we recommend is the Pavilion Gaming 16 powered by the 10th-gen Intel Core i5-10300H paired with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660Ti graphics card with 6GB GDDR6 VRAM. The laptop also features 8GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage with 32GB Intel Optane memory and a 144Hz refresh rate, 16.1-inch full-HD (1920 x 1080-pixels) resolution display. Other notable features include a green backlit keyboard and a good array of port selection.