More than a year has passed since Asus’ acquisition of the NUC brand from Intel, which marked the first major change the brand had seen since Intel launched it back in 2013. After more than a decade of continuity — including last year’s transition year where Intel still had a say on design — this will be the real first year in which Asus has done most of the groundwork, fronting up with its own designs and innovations. So how is the NUC different now in this new era? I spoke to Kuo Wei Chao, general manager of Asus IoT business unit, to find out. The new Asus NUC models and 2025 focus The Asus NUC lineup announced at CES 2025 in Las Vegas included the NUC 14 AI and the more premium NUC 14 Pro AI+ with 48 TOPS NPU AI power and a dedicated Copilot+ button for quick access to the AI assistant. They were on display alongside two new powerful mini-PCs for everyday use featuring the latest Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) chips: the NUC 15 and NUC 15 Pro+. A fourth model, the NUC 14 Essential is the efficiency workhorse, designed to provide maximum performance while sipping tiny amounts of power. Last but certainly not least, Asus’ ROG NUC makes a comeback with the most powerful CPU and GPU combination we’ve seen to date. Chao said Asus’ focus for its second year of NUC is threefold. Like other PCs at CES 2025, the addition of AI hardware is a big change allowing users a high degree of AI task mobility. Asus is also keen to communicate its commitment to “improving performance while keeping NUC sizes as small as possible.” The third focus reeks of Asus’ company ethos and is arguably the reason why it has been so successful with product lines like the Asus ROG gaming laptops. Chao said there has been a concerted effort to “incorporate a lot of user feedback in the NUC range.” In other words, it has added features and design elements that specifically tailor the NUC experience to what consumers want. But what does all that product talk actually mean? I picked one model, the 2025 ROG NUC to find out! The Asus NUC 14 Essential Asus The 2025 Asus ROG NUC leads the charge The Asus ROG NUC is perhaps the most impressive of the 2025 NUCs, and the best example of those Asus changes to the NUC brand in action. Here Asus has not only increased the performance power on offer by bumping the ROG NUC’s CPU and GPU up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 mobile CPU and mobile Blackwell variant of the Nvidia RTX 5080 GPU, respectively — both titans of Intel and Nvidia’s 2025 performance offerings — but it has also made cooling, upgradability, and connectivity priorities in 2025. Asus didn’t reveal what model of the Intel Core Ultra 9 (Series 2) chip it has used in the 2025 ROG NUC at CES, but based on the turbo clock speed of 5.5GHz in the specs sheet, I surmise that it can only be Intel’s flagship Arrow Lake mobile CPU, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX. No other mini gaming PC announced at CES is as stacked for performance, upgradable, overclockable, and yet so portable. The 2025 Asus ROG NUC. Asus It goes without saying that’s one heck of a chip. It puts 24 cores of raw processing power at your disposal, including 36 TOPS of AI power to capitalize on innovations in AI. Personally, I’m not sure what 5.5GHz looks like in a game, let alone the kind of performance I’d get when that’s paired with 16GB of fast DDR5-6400 memory and the 7,680 CUDA cores in the RTX 5080. But I’m really excited to find out. The RTX 5080 GPU in particular is a great choice in hardware. It means the 2025 ROG NUC’s GPU will be fully compatible with Nvidia’s new DLSS 4 AI technology so it can access a full suite of features including Nvidia’s Multi Frame Generation, which older Nvidia RTX GPUs cannot. More changes including overclocking Another cherry on top of the cake with this year’s ROG NUC is, wait for it… overclocking! Yep, the bump up from an Intel H series chip in 2024 to an Intel mobile HX Series Arrow Lake chip in 2025 gives gamers more control over their NUC’s maximum CPU speed, for the first time. Overclocking is accomplished in Asus’ Armory Crate software, where gamers can also control their fan speed settings. Among the other cascade of changes is a “more comprehensive cooling system,” Chao explained. “It comprises an integrated triple-fan design with twin vapor chambers that not only provides enhanced cooling but also makes the 2025 ROG quieter than its 2024 counterpart,” he said. It works in conjunction with a perforated chassis that provides more airflow than before, too. Asus’ NUC mini-PC lineup. The Asus ROG NUC is shown top left.  Asus A new chassis size measuring 11.1 x 7.4 x 2.2 inches does make this year’s model slightly larger (3 liters versus 2.5 liters in volume), but the larger size provides users with “more capacity to upgrade,” Chao promised. “We upgraded the CPU to support a higher TDP and reserved some buffers because we know that many gamers want to overclock and increase performance. So, gamers who want to upgrade, it will be easier to do that,” he said. In regard to that upgradability, the 16GB starter RAM can be expanded to a whopping 96GB. Swapping out RAM is also made easier by a new single-screw design that allows gamers to access the internal components in seconds. Connectivity options galore The ROG NUC also hits the right note with connectivity. In fact, the I/O lists off like a fine wine menu, including no less than 6x USB-A 3.2 ports, 2x HDMI 2.1 FRL ports, and 2x DisplayPort 2.1 ports. It also has a Thunderbolt 4 port, a USB-C 3.2 Gen2 port, a 3.5mm combo jack, and a 2.5Gb Ethernet port. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 make up the wireless connectivity. The choice of Thunderbolt 4 port instead of the newer Thunderbolt 5 is an interesting choice considering that Asus’ own 2025 XG Mobile eGPU uses the latter this year. On that point Chao said: “We listened and had many discussions with gamers. I think that Thunderbolt 5 would be very important in the long term. But I think right now, from an ecosystem perspective, it’s not so complete and in its infancy. So, we focused on what the majority want and the best choice for gamers in 2025 — that’s Thunderbolt 4.” On top of all that, Asus’ ROG branding brings the device in line with Asus’ ROG portfolio aesthetically. If you’re thinking Asus just won over a whole lot of gamers this year, you may be right. No other mini gaming PC announced at CES is as upgradable, overclockable, stacked for performance, and yet so portable. Let’s hope it lives up to expectations. Read...

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Pump-and-dumps and other fraud schemes have become synonymous with cryptocurrency, with everyone from political leaders to YouTube influencers accused of using crypto FOMO to make a quick buck at the expense of their followers. But one Washington pastor decided his own church flock was an appropriate place to start fleecing, according to the US Department of Justice. The DoJ has charged Francier Obando Pinillo, the former pastor of a church in Pasco, Washington state, with 26 counts of fraud. So says an official press release issued last week and spotted by Bleeping Computer. According to the assistant district attorneys charging Pinillo, he sold his “Solano Fi” cryptocurrency to his parishioners both in person and on social media from 2021 to 2023, promising them a 34.9 percent return on investment with “no risk whatsoever.” Pinillo allegedly claimed that the idea for the cryptocurrency “had come to him in a dream,” but funneled the investments into his own accounts and those of his co-conspirators, while showing his victims fake balances and returns via a mobile investment app. The DoJ alleges that victims were told to share the investment scam with others, and when suspicions of foul play were raised, Pinillo offered to “repair” the technical systems with more money or buy out their positions by replacing them with another investor. Pinillo is charged with defrauding over a thousand victims both inside his own church and elsewhere of 5.9 million dollars. If convicted he could serve up to 20 years in prison. The insane rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, creating legitimate wealth for a small number of early investors, has made cryptocurrency an appealing and easy avenue for scammers. It’s all the easier if you’re seen as a figure of trust and authority, ditto if your audience isn’t fully versed in either financial investment, the realities of the crypto market, or the technology behind it. While many are now wary of get-rich-quick crypto investments, pump-and-dumps are still easy to find on social media. Investors in the $HAWK meme coin, based on viral influencer Hailey “Hawk Tuah girl” Welch, sued its creators just last month. “Pig butchering” scams, wherein victims are targetted with fake dating profiles and lured to invest money by their romantic interests, have become a market worth billions of dollars. These are particularly concerning, as the “scammers” themselves are often victims of human trafficking and forced labor at the hands of organized crime gangs. Read...

Could 2024 have been any worse for Sonos? The once-beloved connected speaker brand left its reputation in tatters after a rushed, misguided app update, then launched a pair of pricey headphones that, from all accounts, landed with a thud.  Faced with a mob of enraged users, Sonos has repeatedly apologized and laid out elaborate plans for how it will do better. But sometimes, “sorry” isn’t enough, and now Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is taking the last option open to him: resignation.  In a press release early Monday, Sonos announced that Spence is stepping down immediately as CEO and as a member of the company’s board of directors.   Sonos board member Tom Conrad will take over as interim CEO while Sonos searches for a permanent replacement, the company said. Conrad, who was formerly Chief Technical Officer at Pandora, promised to “work with our team to restore the reliability and user experience that have defined Sonos.”  Conrad has his work cut out for him, as Sonos is still struggling to recover from a jaw-droppingly bad year.  Last May, Sonos rolled out a major revamp of the Sonos app that included a top-to-bottom interface makeover while paving the foundation for Ace headphones, which landed a month later.  But the new Sonos app turned out to be a bewildering dud, hobbled by poor performance as well as the disappearance of key playback features, including the ability to edit music queues as well as local media access.  Sonos followed up the disastrous app launch with the unveiling of the company’s first headphones, the Sonos Ace.   The $449 Ace was greeted with shrugs and middling reviews, with many users disappointed that the Bluetooth cans couldn’t connected to their whole-home audio setups via Wi-Fi. (A “TV Audio Swap” feature that lets the Ace headphones connect directly to Sonos soundbars did get some admiring notices.) Bloomberg later reported that the Ace was “underperforming” in terms of sales.  To be fair, the news in 2024 wasn’t all bad for Sonos. The company rolled out a new high-end soundbar, the Ultra, that was widely praised for its greatly improved bass response, courtesy of “Sound Motion” technology.  Yet Sonos spent much of last year in damage control, apologizing over and over for the botch app revamp while slowing adding back missing features.   The former CEO didn’t help matters when he suggested the old Sonos app could be relaunched, only to backtrack after learning that the underlying Sonos infrastructure no longer worked with the legacy software.  So, what’s next for Sonos? Rumor has it that the company will unveil its first streaming video player this year, perhaps in the spring.  But as for rebuilding trust, Sonos still has plenty of work to do. Read...

Eight to nine years ago, the Windows world was full of companies who thought it would be a great idea to turn a Windows phone into a PC. Now, almost a decade later, a major peripheral company says that it’s time once again. DisplayLink, which is owned by Synaptics, used CES to start pitching the idea of connecting an Android phone via a USB-C cable to a DisplayLink docking station. The company demonstrated a physical link to the dock, with a pair of connected displays using the phone’s CPU and GPU to render images. It also showed off a wireless version, with a connection running on top of Wi-Fi to an external dongle. But there’s an important distinction: These phones don’t just mirror the home screen. Instead, they act like a typical multi-monitor Windows setup, with each display showing its own content, apart from what’s displayed on the phone. That’s a small but significant change from Microsoft Continuum, the solution of yore for connecting your Windows 10 Mobile smartphone to a mouse, keyboard, and display. The problem? Continuum didn’t really work. While Continuum sounded great on paper, it was slow, laggy, and buggy. Innovations like the HP Lap Dock didn’t quite solve its problems, either. In this DisplayLink demonstration, an Android phone is connected via USB-C and DisplayLink to a DisplayLink dock, and then to two external displays.Mark Hachman / IDG Now, executives at Synpatics think that modern smartphones offer the same hardware capabilities as a modern Core i5 processor, with integrated graphics. “We put a DisplayLink driver on this phone, and now you can come into a meeting like you’re going to charge your phone,” a DisplayLink representative said. “Now you can hook [the phone] up to the same dock you hooked up to your PC, but you can drive two 4K, 60-hertz displays, keyboard, and mouse. You can access flash drives, everything you can do. There’s no real difference.” On the PC, the DisplayLink technology works by compressing the information that passes over the cable to the screen, in a conceptually similar manner to how Netflix compresses data that it displays on a TV screen or monitor — the compression occurs, but any degradation in visual quality isn’t readily noticeable. The issue there is that DisplayLink requires a software driver to work. (The company is now referring to it as a “virtual graphics card.”) What that means, however, is that DisplayLink would either have to be sideloaded in, or supported by the phone maker or by Google. Other companies do this today; Samsung’s DeX can use an external display to run Android apps, for example. What DisplayLink hopes to do is convince phone makers that their hardware can be used to provide multi-monitor setups, much like the PC; and start investing in external hardware and docks to support them. That’s where Synaptics (and DisplayLink) can make its money. Continuum wasn’t all that hot, and it’s not clear how well-utilized Samsung’s DeX actually is. But there’s a chunk of the population that’s really wedded to their phones. For them, maybe it’s time to take an old technology and make it new again. Read...

It’s been a while since I felt a profound case of gadget lust at CES, the tech trade show that takes over Las Vegas every January, but that’s what happened when I picked up Lenovo’s Legion Go S gaming handheld. I’m already a satisfied Steam Deck owner, but the Legion Go S has a larger and sharper screen with 120Hz refresh rates, AMD’s new Z2 chipset, and—to my hands, at least—perfect ergonomics. It also runs SteamOS, and Valve’s plan to license its software for free to other handheld device makers (starting with Lenovo) was one of CES’s biggest developments. Just like Windows on PCs, it could allow a new gaming hardware ecosystem to bloom. That’s just one example of how CES stealthily became a window into the future of gaming hardware. Much like last year, the show had plenty of vapid AI hype to go along with the obligatory improvements in TV and home audio tech. But if you care about cool consumer electronics, the real action was happening on the gaming side, with slicker PCs, breakthrough monitors, neat mobile accessories, and yes, even more handhelds. The war for your hands Jared Newman / Foundry The Legion Go S wasn’t the only new handheld gaming PC at CES. Lenovo brought a couple of other Windows ones, including a prototype upgrade to the original Legion Go (with Switch-style detachable controllers) and a Windows alternative to the Legion Go S’s SteamOS model. Meanwhile, rival PC maker Acer is expanding its own handheld line after announcing the 7-inch Nitro Blaze last year. At CES, the company was demoing both 8- and 11-inch variants with detachable controllers, with the latter being equal parts glorious and comically large. I spied an unused accessory port along its bottom edge, and while Acer won’t spell out its purpose, one could imagine a Surface-style keyboard cover to transform the Nitro Blaze 11 into a laptop for work. The Legion Go S also served as an early landing spot for AMD’s Z2 chipset, which will come in a few different configurations for handheld makers. We’re still waiting on benchmarks, but it’s notable that AMD is launching new handheld chips for the second time in as many years—a strong show of confidence in the category. Don’t count out Intel, either. It has a willing partner in MSI, whose forthcoming Claw 8 AI+ will use a Core Ultra 7 258V processor. While Lunar Lake chips aren’t explicitly for handhelds, their Arc 140V graphics and overall power efficiency could make them a solid fit. Left to right: Large handheld reference design, MSI’s Claw 8 AI+, and an 11-inch handheld from OneXPlayer. Jared Newman / Foundry This is the kind of gamesmanship you love to see at a show like CES. It’s still unclear if the market can sustain all these gaming handhelds, but who cares? We all win when these companies fight it out by with different shapes, sizes, and spec configurations. Mobile gaming innovation The GameBaby has 8-bit game controls on its reversible iPhone case.Jared Newman / Foundry Elsewhere on the portable front, device makers are finding new ways to turn your phone into a gaming machine. After an announcement last year, for instance, BitmoLab brought a working prototype of its Gamebaby iPhone case at CES. The case has directional and face buttons on its bottom half, supporting NES or Game Boy games in emulator apps such as Delta, but you can also flip the bottom half around so the buttons are in back, letting you use your phone as normal. The capacitive controls pass through to the app’s on-screen buttons, so you can play without bulky USB-C attachments or extra batteries to charge. GameSir had a slightly different take on the idea, with a small Bluetooth controller that clips onto the bottom half of any phone. I didn’t see this one myself, but wish I had after reading Wavelength’s writeup. It should be headed for Kickstarter in the months ahead. The MCON pocket-sized controller unfurls like a switchblade.Jared Newman / Foundry And if you’re not averse to some added bulk, MCON is developing a controller with a pop-out magnetic base on which to mount your phone. It provides a full array of buttons and sticks but is slick enough to fit in your pocket. A prototype at CES looked promising, and MCON is working with magnetic accessory brand Ohsnap to bring it to fruition. Meat-and-potatoes Jared Newman / Foundry Even if you’re not into handheld gaming, CES brought plenty of intriguing updates on the desktop and laptop gaming PC front. The big news of course was Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs, which are coming in cheaper than expected on the desktop side and sparking a wave of neat PCs on the laptop side. Dell’s Alienware Area-51 laptop brand is back, for instance, with a new cooling system and slick “Liquid Teal” finish, while Razer has shaved its RTX 50-equipped Blade 16 laptop down to just 0.59 inches thick. Meanwhile, Asus keeps doing neat things with eGPUs, announcing a compact dock with Thunderbolt 5 that can turn standard laptops into gaming rigs. Monitors are getting better as well, with numerous vendors now squeezing 4K QD-OLED into 27-inch panels with 240 Hz refresh rates. If that’s not responsive enough for you, we’re also seeing 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED monitors with 500 Hz refresh rates. Acer is even pushing into 5K with its 31-inch XB323QX monitor, which still manages to achieve 144Hz refresh rates. (Alternatively, it allows for 1440p gaming at 288 Hz as needed.) It’s easy to be cynical about CES, where big device makers are prone to mindless trend-chasing instead of solving actual problems. But if you look in the right places, you’ll find plenty of reminders of what got you into technology in the first place. Gaming is increasingly where those innovations are winding up. Read...