The name's news, tech news, and just like Bond's new video game, today's
stories require hardware that doesn't exist. Let's get into it. In a
refreshing bout of corporate honesty, Dell showed up to CES 2026 and basically
said, "Our bad." First, head of product Kevin Turwigle
Kevin admitted that people don't actually care about AI PCs, stating that
it's become clear that consumers are not buying based on AI. After a solid year
of every tech company screaming AIP PC at us like a pack of seagulls fighting
over French fries in a McDonald's dumpster, Dell just stopped. Their CES
briefing was described [music] as the most pleasingly unai presentation in 5
years. Imagine that. A hardware company
talking about actual hardware instead of chat bots. Second, remember when Dell
killed the XPS brand last year and renamed everything Dell Premium? Well,
everyone hated that. Sales tanked and the COO openly admitted the rebrand was
a mistake. So now XPS is back with a full redesign. The new XPS 14 and 16 are
Dell's thinnest laptops to date at 14.6
mm, [music] sporting the Intel Panther Lake chips, and they've gone allin on
Intel Arc integrated [music] graphics. No discrete GPU options at all. The
displays can drop to 1 hertz during static [music] content, which lets them
achieve a reported 27 hours of battery
life, and they've shaved almost a full pound off the XPS 16. Prices for these
new laptops are starting at $2,49 with the XPS 13 returning later this year at
a lower price point. They also dropped a huge 52-in 6K ultrawide monitor for
$2,900 for when you need to look at every
single spreadsheet. all the spreadsheets. Wi-Fi 8 is apparently
already here. While it won't technically be fully released until 2028, companies
are already showing off products using the new standard before everyone has
even had the chance to adopt Wi-Fi 7. Leading the charge is ASUS with their
new ROG Neoore router concept. This weird D20-shaped AI router will
apparently improve range and latency for gamers using Wi-Fi on their battle
stations, and it boasts twice the data throughput recorded with Wi-Fi 7. Can
the AI part help me hit a NAT 20 on a fumble rule? Let's hope. Meanwhile,
Zixel is already pitching Wi-Fi 8 to carriers and enterprise customers with
its AI ready connectivity gear with the goal of future proofing clients years
ahead of the new rollout. Even the silicon makers are getting on the train
early with MediaTek revealing its new Flogic Wi-Fi 8 chips that likely will be
seen in most of the network equipment that comes out in the next few years.
While the full benchmarks for these new standards haven't been fully released yet, the big thing all these companies
seem to be pushing is that the new generation is not going to show a
massive jump in network speeds. Instead, the focus is on the reliability benefits
of the new spec. And honestly, if you're your family's resident tech expert this
holiday season, you might even trade some speed for increased reliability. At
this point, CES Storage News wasted zero time getting weird. Goner, sorry,
Connor, the long-forgotten '9s hard drive manufacturer, showed up with
products that look nothing like traditional hard drives, including a
phone backup drive and a bizarre hybrid gadget that's part external drive and
part 65 watt charger. It's kind of like a second computer that plugs into your
computer to make it compute better, but it's a cube and, you know, not a
computer. Kind of weird. Right next to that, we get a glimpse of where modern
SSD design is heading, and it's surprisingly minimal. Micron unveiled
the 3610, making the industry's first PCIe 5.0 QLC SSD,
packing up to 4 TB of storage into a tiny single-sided DRAMless M.2 drive
that can still somehow push about 11 gigabytes per second. It's an OEM only
model for now, but hey, if it's cheaper, then that's a win-win in my books. That
announcement pairs nicely with Fizen's new DRAMless Gen 5 storage controllers,
which reportedly offer big savings in power draw along with an 8 terbte
capacity. And then there's Hoe, the company best known for professional
camera gimbals. Casually dropping one of the most creator focused drives at the
show. Their new SSD 1 offers all the regular things a USB drive normally
would, but comes with an expandability option that the company says marks the
first time you can actually upgrade the storage on an external SSD. Another neat
feature is the dedicated microphone input, allowing for direct audio
recording. Clearly, this thing is designed for people on the go. You know
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LINKED THE CHECKOUT KEVIN THE FIRST RULE
OF QUICK BITS is that you're not allowed to talk about quick bits the second rule
of quick BITS IS DO NOT TALK ABOUT QUICK bits but here's the quick bits new
rumors suggest NVIDIA is prepping to bring the RTX 3060 back into production
in Q1 of 2026 as memory shortages and
sky-high prices refuse to calm down adding credence to earlier board
channels claims that the company's supply of factory new 3060s were running
below. Funnily enough, this lines up nicely with what NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong
said when asked by analysts about pricing pressure, floating the idea of
resurrecting older GPUs and maybe even backporting newer AI features to them
instead of waiting on bleeding edge silicon. AMD isn't immune either. During
a CES Q&A, Ryzen chief David McCaffy was
asked directly about soaring RAM costs and replied that reintroducing products
back into the AM4 ecosystem is something AMD is very actively working on. So, if
you missed buying those parts during the 2021 chip shortage, now's your chance.
IO Interactive has unveiled the PC system requirements for their upcoming
James Bond game 007 First Light. The intro makes sense now. and fans were
shaken, not stirred, to discover some of the listed hardware just doesn't exist.
The minimum specs called for an Intel Core i5 9500 K, which Intel just never
made. There is an i59500,
sure, but there's no K variant. Meanwhile, the recommended spec demanded
a RTX 3060Ti with 12 GB of VRAM. Except
that card only came with 8 gigs. Even setting aside the phantom parts, these
specs are pretty brutal. 32 GB of RAM and 12 GB of VRAM just to hit 1080p
60fps. But at this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if you need to get one of
NVIDIA's new Reuben supercomputers with some of those gooods from the Matrix as
a power supply. Luckily, the game doesn't launch until May 27th. And at
the rate that Tesla, Unitary, and NVIDIA are hurdling us towards Matrix dystopia
territory, we might be getting those pods sooner than you think. Elon Musk's
XAI is having a bit of a week. Governments across the UK, EU, France,
India, Brazil, and Malaysia have all launched investigations after
researchers found Grock was generating thousands of deep fakes an hour,
including images of minors. These governments stated that it was illegal,
appalling, and disgusting, calling for immediate action with regards to
improving safeguards on the chatbot. X's response, it was to threaten their
users. The company released a statement saying that anyone prompting illegal
content will face consequences without giving any details on how they plan to
improve safeguards. As this rolling train wreck continues, Musk announced
that Tesla will build its own 2nm chip fab, claiming that [music] wafer
isolation meant traditional clean rooms were unnecessary and promising to eat a
cheeseburger and smoke a cigar inside of their new facility. We here at Techlink
look forward to witnessing him destroy a $60 billion machine the same way I
destroyed my 1997 Honda Civic back in high school by hotboxing it and dropping
a Big Mac into the transmission. Samsung is in hot water after a Texas court
issued a restraining order blocking the company from allegedly using automated
content recognition to capture screenshots from smart TVs without
proper consent. The lawsuit claims Samsung TVs could grab screenshots
multiple times per second and monetize viewing habits through ads. This comes
after a string of lawsuits towards other major TV brands for spying on Texans.
Although those lawsuits didn't end up with restraining orders, except for
Highense, they got one. Samsung hearing is on the 9th with the actual order
expiring on the 19th, meaning that the company has only 2 days to get on up
over to Texas and lawyer up to explain why their TVs are seemingly watching
themselves. It's the year of the keyboard turducken at CES because these
cubes are stuffed. Corsair unveiled the Gallion 100 SD edition, a mechanical
keyboard with a full 5 in Stream Deck LCD built right in, plus 8K pulling and
dual rotary dials. Keyron also dropped their Q Ultra series with 660 hours of
battery life and also 8K pulling, cuz
you know, you need a keyboard to be able to play your 9 or 10 consecutive
playthroughs of Balders's Gate 3. HP responded with the Elite board G1A, a
full Windows 11 PC crammed into a keyboard. It's got an AMD Ryzen AI 300
chip, 50 plus tops of MPU performance, upgradeable RAM and storage, and Wi-Fi
7. CES gave it an innovation award for finally making computers portable. Let's
ignore the laptops, of course, and mini PCs. And you know what? Ignore the
Raspberry Pies, too. And that's the tech news. If you need me, I'm going to be
hunting down an RTX 3060 Ti with 12 gigs of VRAM. Dr. No. and Goldfinger must
have teamed up to steal the world supply. Money penny, start my 1997 Honda
Civic and get me my Big Mac.