Tag Archives: Laptops

Samsung Built a $799 MacBook Neo Rival That Looks Twice Its Price

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Apple spent years building an unspoken rule into its lineup, that the cheapest way into a MacBook meant last year’s chip wrapped in this year’s shell. The MacBook Neo broke that rule outright, arriving as a genuinely new, genuinely inexpensive machine that still looked like it belonged next to the Pro. Samsung just answered with the same argument. The new 14-inch Galaxy Book6 starts at $799.99 and carries the same design language as its far pricier siblings.

That price tag matters less than what it replaces. Samsung’s previous entry point, the 14-inch Galaxy Book4 Pro, cost $1,449.99 and weighed 3.44 pounds. The new Book6 undercuts it by hundreds of dollars while dropping to 1.35kg, thin enough at 15.7mm to disappear into a bag without announcing itself. Two colorways, a muted Violet Silver and a classic Gray, keep the aesthetic consistent with the rest of the Book6 family rather than signaling a budget tier through cheaper materials.

Designer: Samsung

Consider what that means for someone replacing an aging laptop for a home office or a student’s backpack. Up to 25 hours of battery life on video playback means a full day of classes or back-to-back meetings without hunting for an outlet. An anti-glare display finish keeps a coffee shop window or an overhead office light from turning the screen into a mirror, a detail that costs Samsung little but saves the user real frustration.

Under the hood, Intel’s Core Series 3 and Core 5 chips handle the everyday load, browsing, documents, video calls, without chasing the raw horsepower of the Ultra-series processors in the Pro and Ultra models. Memory tops out at 16GB, storage at 1TB, configurations aimed squarely at people who want a laptop that works reliably rather than one built for rendering or heavy multitasking. That restraint is the point, not a compromise hidden in fine print.

Connectivity follows the same logic. Two identical USB-C ports remove the usual guessing game over which one actually charges the machine, while USB-A, HDMI, and a headphone jack round things out so most accessories plug in directly. Nobody buying at this price wants a drawer full of dongles, and Samsung seems to have designed around that assumption rather than treating ports as an afterthought.

What both companies seem to have landed on, arriving from opposite platforms within months of each other, is that a budget laptop doesn’t need to look or feel like one anymore. The Galaxy Book6 borrows its silhouette, its finish, and its restraint from machines costing twice as much, then asks a much smaller number for the privilege. That shift says more about where premium computing is heading than any single spec sheet could.

The post Samsung Built a $799 MacBook Neo Rival That Looks Twice Its Price first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most Gaming Handhelds Make You Choose, But the Win Max 3 Doesn’t

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Most handheld gaming PCs ask you to accept a single, fixed compromise between power, battery life, and weight. The GPD Win Max 3 refuses that trade-off entirely. Its clamshell body is built around a base chassis that can be reconfigured with a snap-on battery pack, an external cooling module, or both, turning one small laptop into several different machines depending on what the moment calls for.

Strip it down to its lightest form and the Win Max 3 weighs just 815g, closer to a paperback novel than a gaming rig. Clip on the 97Wh battery module and it grows to 1,220g, trading some portability for hours of unplugged play. Swap that for the cooling module instead, and the machine settles at 985g while unlocking sustained performance that would otherwise cook a chassis this size. Every configuration reshapes the same 207mm x 147mm footprint.

Designer: GPD

That flexibility exists because the hardware inside earns it. An AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 or 388 processor drives Radeon 8060S graphics, paired with up to 128GB of LPDDR5x memory that can allocate as much as 96GB directly to the GPU. GPD claims the chip can hold 100W at 88°C with no fan module attached at all, and adding one, or a pair of them, pushes sustained output to 110 W without needing a dock nearby.

Picture a commute where the base unit alone slips into a bag, light enough to ignore until a layover turns into three hours of downtime. Clip on the battery module then, and a handheld built for a quick match becomes one built to survive an entire flight without hunting for an outlet. Back at a desk, pull the battery off and attach the cooling module instead, and the same chassis stops sipping power and starts pushing toward its ceiling.

The 9.06-inch AMOLED display carries its own share of the workload, running at up to 165Hz with HDR10 active at the same time, a pairing few handhelds manage without dimming one to preserve the other. Underneath the screen, a full-size keyboard sits below two Xbox-style control clusters, with the touchpad placed above the keys instead of below them, an arrangement that keeps typing and gaming postures from fighting each other.

Storage follows the same modular logic as everything else, with M.2 2280, M.2 2230, and Mini SSD 1517 slots available at once rather than forcing a single-drive ceiling. A USB4 port supports GPD’s own G2 graphics dock, so the same unit that fits in a jacket pocket can also feed a full external GPU setup at a desk. None of these pieces work in isolation; they’re designed to be added, removed, and swapped as the day’s task changes.

What the Win Max 3 ultimately sells isn’t a spec sheet. It’s the idea that a device this size doesn’t have to pick a single identity. Battery life, raw wattage, and portability usually fight each other inside a sealed shell, and here they’ve been separated into parts you attach only when you need them, and left off entirely when you don’t.

The post Most Gaming Handhelds Make You Choose, But the Win Max 3 Doesn’t first appeared on Yanko Design.

Leaked Images Show a Lenovo ThinkBook That Rolls Into an Ultrawide

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Lenovo’s rollable laptop story has moved remarkably fast for a form factor that seemed purely theoretical only a few years ago. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, which expanded its screen upward from 14 to 16.7 inches, went from concept to commercial product in under two years. That trajectory has made every subsequent Lenovo rollable leak worth taking seriously, and the latest one is no exception.

Leaked images surfacing in early August 2026 reveal a pre-production ThinkBook internally codenamed Project Swan. The display doesn’t scroll up this time; it scrolls out sideways. Dual motorized rails extend from both edges of the lid, pulling additional sections of a flexible OLED panel stored in housings along each side. When retracted, the laptop reads as a conventional ThinkBook with a centered webcam and unassuming proportions. When extended, it converts into a portable ultrawide workstation.

Designer: Lenovo (via Windows Latest)

The direction change matters more than it might seem at first. Vertical expansion, as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable demonstrated, is excellent for adding reading room and stacking content, the kind of extra height that benefits documents, code editors, and vertical browsing. Horizontal expansion does something different. It creates an ultrawide display in a laptop chassis, which is the format most useful for multitasking across independent windows, comparing spreadsheets side by side, keeping a reference document open alongside an active workspace, or running a video timeline next to a preview.

ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable Laptop

ThinkBook branding places Project Swan in Lenovo’s business productivity line rather than in the gaming-focused Legion family. That distinction carries a few implied differences. The Legion Pro Rollable, which Lenovo showed at CES 2026 and which expands from 16 to 23.8 inches, carries discrete graphics and gaming-grade cooling to match its ambitions. A ThinkBook variant would likely be thinner and lighter, aimed at professionals carrying it between offices rather than tournament players carting it to an esports venue. Whether it includes discrete graphics or relies on integrated silicon remains unknown.

Lenovo Legion Pro Rollable Concept

No confirmed specifications have accompanied the leak. Display dimensions, resolution, the processor platform, battery capacity, and weight are all unverified. What the images do confirm is the dual-rail mechanical architecture and the ThinkBook identity. The chassis rear shows structural cutouts accommodating the motorized sliding mechanism, and the palm rest carries ThinkBook branding clearly enough to leave little doubt about the intended product line.

Timing on an official announcement remains speculation, though the timing and quality of the leaked images suggest the company is close to a formal reveal, probably at IFA next month. The broader question Project Swan raises is whether the ultrawide business laptop has a real market. A portable ultrawide that collapses to conventional dimensions for travel and opens on demand makes a practical argument that doesn’t require much imagination to follow.

The post Leaked Images Show a Lenovo ThinkBook That Rolls Into an Ultrawide first appeared on Yanko Design.

You Can Feel Van Gogh’s Starry Night on This $2,399 MSI Laptop

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Laptop aesthetics have grown considerably more ambitious over the past few years. Brands that once shipped identical black or silver slabs have started exploring textures, colorways, and material finishes with more intention. Most of these efforts stop at surface level: a matte coating here, an embossed pattern there. Every so often, though, something arrives that treats the hardware itself as a meaningful design object rather than just a functional appliance with a prettier lid.

The MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Van Gogh Edition is part of MSI’s Artisan Collection, a line that takes the collaboration between technology and fine art more seriously than most. This particular edition draws from two of Van Gogh’s most recognizable nightscapes: Starry Night Over the Rhône and The Starry Night. The two paintings carry different emotional temperatures, one calm and reflective, the other intense and restless, and that contrast is embedded into the laptop’s design language through varying blue tones, textures, and finishes across the chassis.

Designer: MSI

The lid carries a textured rendering of Starry Night Over the Rhône that you can feel with your fingertips, a tactile detail that distinguishes it from the flat printed graphics that typically pass for special editions in the category. The keyboard deck continues the theme with a deep blue surface and golden key legends that, in low light, appear illuminated like a reflection on the Rhône itself. It’s a more cohesive design treatment than most art collaborations of this type manage to deliver.

Beneath that, the hardware doesn’t ask you to compromise for the art. The machine runs on Intel’s Core Ultra X9 378H processor, paired with an Intel Arc B390 GPU,32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 1TB SSD. The 14-inch OLED touchscreen covers 100% DCI-P3 at 1920×1200 resolution and is certified for Low Blue Light and flicker-free output. At 11.9mm at its thinnest point and 1.37 kg, the aluminum chassis keeps the whole thing genuinely light.

The 2-in-1 hinge lets the screen fold flat, which makes the MSI Nano Pen feel considerably more relevant than on a conventional convertible. The stylus lives in a dedicated groove along the chassis bottom and pairs via Bluetooth. For quick sketching, note-taking during meetings, or marking up documents in presentation mode, it’s a more integrated solution than the sticky-magnet approach most competitors use.

The laptop qualifies as a Copilot+ PC, with a 50 TOPS NPU handling AI tasks locally, alongside Live Captions, AI Noise Cancellation, and Windows Copilot. Battery life is rated at over 30 hours from the 81 Whr cell, with 100W Power Delivery fast charging support. Connectivity covers dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, HDMI 2.1, and Wi-Fi 7. Audio comes from a four-speaker setup combining two 2W tweeters and two 2W woofers with DTS processing.

The Van Gogh Edition ships with an exclusive themed accessories bundle and is priced at $2,399. That’s a meaningful premium over the base Prestige 14 Flip AI+, which starts around $1,699 without the art treatment. The gap isn’t just cosmetic; the Van Gogh Edition represents the top configuration of the line, and the design treatment alone makes it a genuinely different object to own and carry.

For a category that doesn’t often justify that kind of price separation, the Artisan Collection at least makes the argument clearly. The spec sheet is strong enough to hold up in any direct comparison, and the hardware behind the painting doesn’t need the art to justify itself.

The post You Can Feel Van Gogh’s Starry Night on This $2,399 MSI Laptop first appeared on Yanko Design.