The names 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 Turwiggle,
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
AI 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 as the most pleasingly
un-AI presentation in five years. Imagine that. A hardware company talking about actual hardware
instead of chatbots. 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 millimeters, sporting the Intel Panther Lake chips,
and they've gone all in on Intel Arc integrated graphics. No discrete GPU options at all. The
displays can drop to one hertz during static 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 $2049 with the XPS 13 returning later this year at a lower price
point. They also dropped a huge 52-inch 6K ultra-wide 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 Neocore 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, Xixel 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
FiLogic 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. Connor, the long-forgot 90s 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 4TB of storage into a tiny,
single-sided DRAM less M.2 drive that can still somehow push about 11GB 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 DRAM less Gen 5 storage controllers,
which reportedly offer big savings in power draw along with an 8TB capacity.
And then there's Hoem, 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 what? Kind of like our sponsor.
The first rule of QuickBits is that you're not allowed to talk about QuickBits.
The second rule of QuickBits is do not talk about QuickBits. But here's the QuickBits.
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 channel's claims that the company's supply of factory
new 3060s were running low. 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 McAfee 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 i5-9500K, which Intel just never made.
There is an i5-9500, sure, but there's no K variant. Meanwhile, the recommended spec
demanded a RTX 3060 Ti with 12GB of VRAM. Except that card only came with 8GB.
Even setting aside the phantom parts, these specs are pretty brutal. 32GB of RAM and 12GB
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 Ruben supercomputers with some of those goo pods from the Matrix as a power supply.
Luckily, the game doesn't launch until May 27th. And at the rate that Tesla, Unitry, and NVIDIA are
hurtling 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
Grok was generating thousands of deep fakes an hour, including images of miners.
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 way for 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 Hisense, they got
one. Samsung hearing is on the 9th with the actual order expiring on the 19th, meaning that the
company has only two 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 to duck in at CES because these
keys are stuffed. Corsair unveiled the Galleon 100SD edition, a mechanical keyboard with a full
5-inch stream deck LCD built right in, plus 8K polling and dual rotary dials. Keychron also dropped
their Q Ultra series with 660 hours of battery life and also 8K polling. Because you know,
you need a keyboard to be able to play your 9 or 10 consecutive playthroughs of Baldur's Gate 3,
HP responded with the Elite 4 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 many PCs, and you know what,
ignore the Raspberry Pi's too. And that's the tech news. If you need me, I'm going to be hunting
down an RTX 3060 Ti with 12GB of VRAM. Dr. No and Goldfinger must have teamed up to steal the
world's supply. Money penny, start my 1997 Honda Civic and get me my Big Mac.