Consider this an apology to Hyper and to its parent, Targus. I don’t want to use HyperSpace’s TrackPad Pro standalone haptic trackpad and I’ve probably wasted your time, Hyper’s, and mine. Perhaps you, dear reader, will feel differently. Me? I just can’t stand it. Hyper’s $150 haptic Trackpad Pro (or $109 on Kickstarter) taught me that I’m primarily a mouse person, and I have absolutely no need for the advanced capabilities that the trackpad offers, such as deep clicking and various “zones” in which clicks trigger different actions. I want nothing to do with them. When I saw the TrackPad Pro at the 2025 CES show, I appreciated the concept but was less than impressed by the execution. It just didn’t really work. It does now. Still, my time with Hyper’s TrackPad Pro taught me that this touchpad peripheral is a device for input and trackpad nerds. And I’m neither. A haptic touchpad is worth your time, though. Put simply, haptics are like the OLED of touchpads. They’re a step up, as they’re clickable across the entire breadth of their surface. Both Apple Macs and some Microsoft Surface devices use a haptic touchpad or trackpad, and they’re effective and futuristic, all in one. Some have compared Hyper’s TrackPad Pro to Apple’s Magic Trackpad and that comparison seems fair. In fairness, the signs were there from the start. Hyper sent me a TrackPad Pro for review, and I received it right before setting off on two weeks of business travel, with a laptop — and a mouse. Why am I a mouse person? I’m left-handed, and I’ve determinedly held on to a left-handed Razer DeathAdder mouse I purchased years ago. Lefties are forced to make all sorts of accommodations in their lives like learning to use scissors right-handed or grudgingly accepting that the WASD setup on a computer keyboard isn’t for them. (I prefer the superior number-pad layout instead.) As a result, I use a left-handed mouse, but have been trained to left-click with my middle finger as opposed to my index finger. Chaos! This is the trauma the right-handed world imposes. Hyper’s TrackPad Pro matched up with its competition: a laptop trackpad.Mark Hachman / Foundry As a result, touchpads usually mess with my head. I’m supposed to click which corner of the touchpad to right click? (The lower left.) And though Windows allows you to tap with two fingers to right-click, the Hyper touchpad didn’t. Ugh. This isn’t entirely my fault In my defense, however, I think it’s fair to say that Hyper’s setup experience is bad. The device itself is fine: the TrackPad Pro measures 3.85 inches x 6.29 inches (98mm x 160 mm) and maybe half an inch thick, which connects to your PC via a braided USB-C cable. Physically, the device works well. The surface is metallic and smooth, with a 240Hz report rate. All that means is that the trackpad feels extremely smooth and responsive, without any hitches or judder. To enable all of the bells and whistles, however, you need to download a Hydra Connect application. First, Hydra mandates the need for an account and password, which instantly makes me suspect that something nefarious is going on behind the scenes. Second, the software immediately asks if it can send you marketing email — I think not. Third, though the software attempts to guide you through its features, the accompanying text windows are too small to fit the entire explanation, which feels amateurish. Fourth, why dedicate an entire tab of the application to Hydra Connect, a feature listed as “coming soon”? This isn’t a good start to the HyperSpace TrackPad Pro experience.Mark Hachman / Foundry Finally, did anyone in the age of Marvel really think that ‘Hydra’ would be perceived positively? Especially after it asked to send you spam? Come on. The Hydra app, to its credit (?), is extremely detailed. You can define zones on the trackpad surface, where specific clicks will have specific defined actions. Unfortunately, I kept stumbling into a zone where clicking locked my laptop–this got old fast. You can define profiles for various applications like Photoshop, where specific types of clicks have various functions. Interestingly, though the TrackPad Pro seemed big enough to use it as a drawing tablet, that feature didn’t seem to be enabled. I will be honest: I tried to test out the TrackPad Pro. But I knew from the start that I disliked it, so I didn’t give it more than a few hours. In the spirit of fair play, I’m going to point you to a competitor, Wired, whose own Hyper TrackPad hands-on feels more objective. The Hydra software is very detailed, but some UI flaws make it difficult to work with,Mark Hachman / Foundry The TrackPad Pro does have one interesting feature–a “deep click.” Simply touching the tablet is one input, depressing it enough so that it clicks is another. But you can depress it even harder so that it records a “deep click,” which can signal something else entirely. Sensing how far you’ve depressed the trackpad is a bit iffy even at the best of times and you really shouldn’t set one command to trigger at the various levels of pressure. (I once found a way to configure these deep clicks, and then seemingly lost that ability to forever within the stomach of the Hydra.) In any case, if you’re the type of person who likes to set up a trackpad just so, with specific functions mapped out, the Hyper TrackPad Pro might be for you when it ships in early 2026. Had I realized that I truly had no use for it, I would’ve politely declined a review copy. But I learned something! While I still think that a haptic touchpad is probably the future of laptop input, Hyper’s dedicated touchpad just isn’t for me. Read...

TL;DR: Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for Windows is just $29.97 (MSRP $229) for a limited time — one payment, no subscription fees, all the essential apps you already use every day. Make Office a one-and-done purchase. For $29.97, secure a lifetime Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 license for Windows. Use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Access, and OneNote for as long as you like, with no ongoing fees. This is one of Microsoft’s most widely used Office versions for good reason. It’s stable, streamlined, and packed with the features that everyday users, business owners, freelancers, and spreadsheet wizards rely on. Whether you’re managing invoices, writing your next pitch deck, editing a résumé, or organizing your inbox like a boss, Office 2019 is built to make your life easier. Once installed on your Windows PC, it’s good to go with — no recurring costs, no cloud dependency (thank goodness), and no fuss. Plus, this version’s got some sweet upgrades: better inking across apps, more data analysis in Excel, improved email handling in Outlook, and sleek new transitions in PowerPoint. Don’t miss getting lifetime access to Microsoft Office 2019 while it’s just $29.97 (MSRP $229). No coupon is needed. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for WindowsSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

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Generally speaking, every laptop generation is faster and more capable than the one that came before it. But something’s different this year. Between higher performance hardware, more efficient components, a trend towards eco-friendly materials, and laptop designs that aren’t afraid to be weird and experimental, I have to say that 2025 feels like the most exciting year for laptops in many, many years. Take a look at any of our top laptop lists—whether that’s best laptops overall or best gaming laptops or best laptops for college students—and you’re sure to spot some trends running through each of them. I’m particularly fond of the new crop of ultra-bright and colorful OLED screens, but everyone has their own favorites. So let’s get into it! Here are some of the top laptop trends that make 2025 one of the most exciting years ever for laptops. Repairability and eco-conscious designs The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 (2024) is surprisingly repairable. That makes it a great choice if you’re worried about longevity and eco-friendliness.Matthew Smith / IDG Many major laptop brands have made big inroads in improving their environmental standards lately, and this year they’ve really kicked into high gear. In just about every top laptop model, you’ll find a range of recycled materials (like recycled steel and aluminum), plus lowered emissions during manufacturing and greener packing materials. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others are all pushing towards circularizing the economy of laptop production, with most targeting a completely net-zero manufacturing footprint by 2040 or 2050. Today’s laptops are more repairable than ever, too, helping them to last longer. A look at iFixit’s recent laptop teardowns shows that most of the latest tested models feature high repairability scores. Popular devices like the Surface Laptop 7 make it easy to access internal components, and even Apple—with its famous love of glue and proprietary screws—allows for battery replacement in the latest M4 models. Fanless designs cut down on moving components, too, further enhancing longevity by reducing potential points of failure. If you’ve been thinking about it, now’s a good time to switch to an eco-friendly laptop. OLED hits the mainstream The Lenovo Yoga 9i isn’t just a 2-in-1 laptop—it has a stunning OLED screen.Mattias Inghe For years, OLED was considered a premium option with an appropriately premium price tag that kept it beyond reach of most consumers. Indeed, in TVs and gaming monitors, OLED is still a lot more expensive than the alternatives—but in laptops, OLED is practically mainstream now. OLED is still the premium option compared to more traditional LCD options, but it doesn’t cost that much more. Plus, a lot of the usual issues associated with OLED screens (like burn-in and low brightness) have been solved with updated forms of the technology. Just look at the gorgeous screen on the Lenovo Yoga 9i! OLED screens are also available in a range of different styles now. Alongside dual-OLED laptops like the Asus Zenbook Duo, we also have high-refresh-rate OLEDs for competitive gaming (like the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI), various folding OLED laptops, and even a rollable OLED display in the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Rollable. Upgradeable, modular laptops The Framework Laptop 12 lets you build your own modular laptop.IDG / Chris Hoffman Framework really led the way on this initiative and its latest Laptop 12 is the most exciting yet. Available with the most cutting-edge components in a range of sizes and numerous upgradeable modules, it’s a laptop design that can evolve with you as you need it. The whole concept of a modular laptop is awesome, bringing the LEGO-style customizability of a desktop PC build to the portable form factor of a laptop. Although no other company is going quite this far with their laptops yet, the idea is catching on. Panasonic’s Toughbook 55 MK3 came out last year with a range of upgradeable modules. Compal debuted its Adapt X concept earlier this year as a potential option for OEM customers (and even won a design award for it). Intel is also evangelizing the idea of modular PCs for two big reasons: the environmental impact and the way it supports “right to repair” laws. Not every laptop is going modular—far from it—but the concept has proven popular enough for Framework to remain in business after all these years (and tariff troubles). Maybe a few other laptop manufacturers will start to ape its success in due course. Thinner and lighter but still powerful The Razer Blade 16 (2025) is much thinner compared to previous models.IDG / Mark Knapp The latest generations of graphics cards and processors aren’t that much better than their predecessors, but they sure do work well in thinner and lighter laptop designs. Razer shaved down the chassis on its flagship Blade 16 laptop by as much as 30 percent this year, helping it weigh in at just over 3.5 pounds—all while granting access to RTX 50-series GPUs and top-shelf CPUs from AMD and Intel. Classic thin-and-light designs (like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14) are as thin and light as ever yet offer more performance thanks to the latest CPUs and graphics chips. Most of them also pack OLED displays, too! A double whammy of goodness. There are also updated versions of powerful gaming tablets (like the Asus ROG Flow Z13), which are just a couple of pounds yet have cutting-edge CPUs. At the super lean end, you have devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (2025), which only weighs 1.5 pounds. (Not much in the way of high-end graphics here, but given how slim these devices are, that can be excused. You have to be realistic about these things.) 20+ hours of battery life is the new norm In our review, we found the HP OmniBook 5 14 has over 25 hours of battery power.IDG / Matthew Smith We have Windows on Arm to thank for this trend. But whether a laptop uses one of those particular models (like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X range) or one by AMD or Intel (who have been forced to play catch up), there are plenty of modern laptops with 20+ hours of battery life. It’s no longer just the calling card of Apple’s leanest MacBooks. Some gaming laptops, like the Razer Blade 16, can even last for up to 10 hours on a single charge (as long as you aren’t gaming). The combination of more efficient hardware, advanced power management algorithms, and larger batteries in slimmer designs means there are some models like the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x and HP OmniBook 5 14 that get close to 30 hours of battery life on a single charge—an impossibility just a few years ago. If this has caught your attention, check out our roundup of the longest battery life laptops we’ve ever tested. Local AI is cropping up everywhere The Microsoft Surface Pro 11 (2024) was one of the first Copilot+ PCs, meaning it was one of the first laptops with an NPU capable of local AI on Windows.Mark Hachman / IDG If there’s one marketing term that has taken over the lexicon in 2025, it’s gotta be “AI.” Apart from the obvious ChatGPT trends, Microsoft also pushed hard with its “Copilot+ PC” nomenclature reserved for laptops with qualifying NPUs (neural processing units) with enough performance to handle local AI functionality directly on said laptops instead of sending the work off to the cloud. (Learn more about NPUs in laptops.) Almost every high-end laptop in 2025 is geared to include AI in some form or another, and it’s not just Microsoft integrating Copilot via Microsoft 365 and Windows 11. Samsung laptops have integrated AI Select and Photo Remaster. HP has an AI companion. Several others have AI translation services and photo beautification effects. The usefulness of such AI features might be dubious, but they exist, can’t be ignored, and have been a major laptop selling point this year. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Compact IP68-rated form factor Attractive styling Top-shelf real world 20Gbps performance Captive port plug Cons Slows drastically off secondary cache Our Verdict Adata’s IP68-rated SD820 SSD delivers excellent real world 20Gbps performance in a small package, and at an affordable price point. But it will slow drastically during very long writes. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Adata SD820 SSD Retailer Price Check Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Being unabashedly shape-conscious, I was prone to liking the Adata SD820 right off the bat. Its bright blue highlights are a bit garish in bright light, but I like that — makes it easy to spot in the wild. The fact that it’s a good 20Gbps performer with 2TB on board just sweetened the deal. Attractive and useful. What’s not to like? Well, one thing. If you write too much data at once (more than 20 percent of capacity), the drive will run out of secondary cache and slow to around 130MBps. Otherwise, the SD820 turned in the fastest real world performance we’ve seen from a 20Gbps SSD. Adata SD820: Features The SD820 is a small, flat-ish, bright-blue-and-black rectangle measuring around 2.65-inches long by 1.5-inches wide by 0.4-inches thick. It weighs a mere 0.9 ounces. It’s more than suitable for outdoor use according to its IP68 rating. If you aren’t feeling curious enough to click on that link, IP68 means the SD820 is dustproof and can survive immersion in 10 feet of water. That’s as good as it gets for consumer devices. The SD820 sports a female Type-C connector protected by a captive plastic cap and Adata includes a Type-C to Type-C cable. The business end of the SD820 with its captive Type-C plug unplugged. While the color scheme may seem a bit garish to some, it also means you’ll be able to more easily find the little sucker if you drop it on the trail. Neon orange, lime, or pink are a bit better for that in my experience, but the blue will do. The SD820 is 20Gbps USB 3.2×2, the controller is a Silicon Motion SM2322, and the NAND is layered QLC. USB 3.2×2 is 20Gbps when attached to a dedicated USB 3.2×2 port and some USB4 ports, but it drops to 10Gbps or lower in most Thunderbolt ports, and all non-USB4 ports. Adata warranties the SD820 for five years, which is two years more generous than most external SSDs. The company did not provide a TBW (TeraBytes that may be Written) rating, but QLC of this type (older) is generally around 250TBW per terabyte of capacity. Adata SD820: Pricing The SD820 will be available in $102/1TB and $179/2TB as of mid-November 2025, and eventually in 4TB capacity. Not sure about the price yet, but I’d guess around $400. That’s not bad at all for IP68-rated 20Gbps SSDs. You can go a bit cheaper without the IP-rating, and a lot more expensive is you want better write performance with large amounts of data. As to that… Adata SD820: Speed With normal amounts of data, the SD820 is among the fastest 20Gbps SSDs we’ve tested. Faster in sequential throughput than random ops, but still very fast overall. The SD820 is one of the fastest small profile 20Gbps SSDs we’ve tested when it comes to sequential throughput with normal sized amounts of data. Longer bars are better. Although 4K reads are competitive, the SD820 fell well behind its rivals in 4K writing. Overall, not bad, not great. Although fast with 4K reads, the SD820 fell well behind the competition in 4K writing. Longer bars are better. Where the SD820 really brought home the bacon was in our 48GB transfer tests. It shaved quite a few seconds off the times of the the two listed competitors, the Corsair EX400U and Crucial X10 (chosen because of their similar bulk) and is the fastest of all the 20Gbps SSDs and enclosures we’ve tested. Where the SD820 really brought home the bacon was in our 48GB transfer tests. Shorter bars are better. The SD820 was actually on pace for much faster time in the 450GB write, when at around the 85 percent mark it ran out of secondary cache (second image below). The QLC’s 130MBps native write speed dropped the sea anchor on a competitive time. For real world transfers of normal size, the SD820 is the portable 20Gbps SSD to beat. The SD820 was actually on pace for much faster time in the 450GB write, when around the 85% mark it ran out of secondary cache and the QLC’s 115 – 120 MBps native write speed dropped the sea anchor. Shorter bars are better. Here’s a screen capture of the native write slowdown at the 85 percent mark. The QLC must be of the older variety as we’ve seen newer QLC maintain around 400Mbps to 500MBps. But basically, if you write this much data regularly (few do — even us outside of testing), you might opt for a TLC SSD. The SD820 was on pace until the end when it ran out of secondary cache. Writing any amount less than this and it’s golden. For real world transfers of normal size, the SD820 is the portable 20Gbps SSD to beat. However, users regularly writing very large amounts of data, something sporting TLC NAND and USB4 might serve them better in the long run. Adata SD820: Conclusion If you’re looking for rugged storage at a decent price and like the look, give the Adata SD820 a good, hard look. The SD820 isn’t quite pro-level, but it’s easily fast enough and vast enough for the average user, especially those working in the wild. Adata SD820: How we test Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (128GB of memory total). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are integrated into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs involved in testing are mounted in a Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card siting in a PCIe 5.0 slot. We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 synthetic benchmarks (to keep article length down, we only report one) to find the storage device’s potential performance, then a series of 48GB and 450GB transfers tests using Windows Explorer drag and drop to show what users will see during routine copy operations, as well as the far faster FastCopy run as administrator to show what’s possible. A 20GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used as the second drive in our transfer tests. Formerly the 48GB tests were done with a RAM disk serving that purpose. Each test is performed on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This issue has abated somewhat with the current crop of SSDs utilizing more mature controllers and far faster, late-generation NAND. Note that our testing MO evolves and these results may not match those from previous articles. Only comparisons inside the article are 100% valid as those results are gathered using the current hardware and MO. Read...

Arinco has integrated D6 Consulting, forming an AI Transformation practice to boost business consulting and program delivery across Australia and New Zealand. Read...