Three years after the port-less MacBook declared the port dead, the most interesting PCs at MWC are doubling down on buttons, dials, and holes. We tested six of them. Only one earned a place on our desk.
Six original pieces filed by the desk today — the essential reads before the day's news cycle swallows them.
Two years and one full teardown later, the upgradable notebook stops being a manifesto and starts being a machine worth recommending. We benchmarked it against the M4 Pro MacBook Pro for fourteen days.
For six months we bought, opened, and reverse-engineered the Lark Mini — the cheapest voice assistant ever shipped. What we found inside was a masterclass in cost engineering, and a quiet warning about what "smart" really means when every component is sourced to a price.
"There's no microphone array," our teardown engineer said, holding the mainboard up to the camera. "There are four microphones. There's a difference. The first one is a feature. The second one is a workaround."
Begin the InvestigationFour new teardowns. Every screw counted, every component catalogued, every methodology note published in full.
All 80+ 2026 teardowns →
A replaceable battery — at $59. Why isn't everyone doing this?
We mapped the LiDAR array and found something interesting about its refresh rate.
Hall-effect switches, fully open-sourced. The PCB alone took us two hours to diagram.
Five sensors, two of them doing the same job. A quiet cost-saving story.
612 products tested in 2024 alone. Average test period: 14 days. Zero paid placements, ever.
A modular notebook that finally delivers. The dream was always the upgrade path; now the dream is the laptop itself.
Thread, Matter, Zigbee, and a thoughtful app. The first hub that doesn't feel like a homework assignment.
Soundbar sound that finally has a soundstage wide enough to deserve the word. The app, sadly, still needs work.
A week of battery life, accurate sleep tracking, and no subscription. The catch is in the app, of course.
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