OpenAI is releasing a new lightweight version of the “Deep Research” feature in ChatGPT, which should be cheaper to run—and that makes it possible for the company to make it available to ChatGPT’s free users. ChatGPT’s Deep Research feature can perform multi-step research using sources across the internet, then generates detailed reports with clear citations and summaries of its research process and results. It’s particularly useful for complex tasks in knowledge-heavy fields such as economics, science, law, and technology. The lightweight version will be as in-depth as the standard version but will produce shorter answers, according to OpenAI. Free users will have access to five Deep Research tasks per month, while Paid Plus and Team users will have access to 15 tasks per month. These will start to be used after the first 10 standard Deep Research tasks are used up. Meanwhile, Pro users will have access to 125 tasks with standard Deep Research and 125 tasks with the lightweight version. When we reviewed ChatGPT Pro, we found that Deep Research was the best feature included in the ultra-premium subscription, with other AI assistants currently trying to mimic it but none offering anything that comes close to matching it. But ChatGPT Pro is extremely expensive—about $200/mo as of this writing—and it’s hard to justify that even if Deep Research is that good. So it’s nice to be able to have a lightweight version of it, especially without even having to pay for it. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Practical design with good ergonomic stand Lots of USB connectivity, plus Ethernet Refresh rate up to 100Hz Cons Image quality doesn’t impress No HDR No Adaptive Sync Our Verdict The Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C is a decent choice if you want an ultrawide with lots of connectivity, but the monitor’s image quality fails to impress. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C Retailer Price $749.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Ultrawide monitors are a great option for office productivity, and, at a glance, the Dell Pro 34 Plus looks ideal for the home office. It has a 34-inch IPS panel with good brightness and clarity, as well as extensive USB-C connectivity. However, the monitor’s pricing and overall image quality narrow its appeal. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best monitors for comparison. Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C P3425WE specs and features A look at the Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C’s spec sheet quickly reveals what the monitor is about: connectivity. The monitor has a USB-C port with up to 90 watts of Power Delivery. That connects to one USB-C and three USB-A downstream ports. Ethernet is supported, too.   Display size: 34-inch 21:9 aspect ratio Native resolution: 3440×1440 (WQHD) Panel type: IPS Technology Refresh rate: 100Hz Adaptive sync: None HDR: No Ports: 1x USB-C with up to 90W power delivery, 1x USB-C (15W downstream), 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI, 1x RJ45 Ethernet (1GbE), 1x USB-B upstream, 3x USB-A downstream Additional features: KVM switch, Dell Display and Peripheral Manager support Warranty: 3-year Advanced Exchange Service Price: $749.99 MSRP However, the monitor’s features are otherwise reserved. The monitor notably lacks the IPS Black technology found in Dell’s flagship widescreen monitors. It doesn’t have built-in speakers either, and has a limited range of image quality customization. Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C design The Dell Pro 34 Plus deviates a bit from the design of prior ultrawide monitors. Instead of a silver or white colorway, Dell has moved back towards a conservative, all-black look. It makes sense for the monitor’s intended buyers, which include both businesses and home office users, but it’s bland. Strangely, the monitor stand is still silver. It looks like Dell stuck with an existing silver monitor stand because, uh, that’s what they had on hand. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s not great. Looks aside, the monitor’s material quality is good. The plastics feel firm and have a pleasing texture. Matthew Smith / Foundry It’s a curved monitor, as well, though only just. The curve is obvious when viewing the monitor from above or below, but not obvious when viewing the monitor straight-on. While I’d prefer a flat screen for an office monitor, the Dell’s curve is subtle enough that I didn’t mind. The stand provides a better-than-average range of adjustments for height and swivel, with 150mm for the former and 60 degrees for the latter. The stand can’t rotate 90 degrees for use in portrait orientation, but that’s typical for an ultrawide monitor. It’s simply too wide to practically support it. A 100x100mm VESA mount is also available for use with third-party monitor stands and arms. The panel (without stand) weighs less than 16 pounds, so high-quality monitor arms will easily support it. Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C connectivity As I’ve mentioned in past reviews, connectivity is often not just nice to have but, rather, the entire reason to buy a monitor. And the Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C has plenty of connectivity. The star of the show is the USB-C port. It supports USB-C with data rates up to 5Gbps, DisplayPort, and up to 90 watts of USB Power Delivery. While the data rate isn’t impressive, the Dell Pro 34 Plus covers all the basics that should be expected from a modern USB-C monitor. Additional video connectivity includes DisplayPort and HDMI. All video inputs can handle the monitor’s maximum resolution and refresh rate. DisplayPort-out is not available, though, which is a bit disappointing for a monitor in this category. The USB-C input connects to one downstream USB-C port and three downstream USB-A ports. Some of these ports are found in a convenient pop-out on the monitor’s chin, which makes it easier to connect USB devices. A USB-B input is available, too, and can connect to the downstream USB ports in place of, or alongside, a USB-C device. A gigabit Ethernet port is available, which means the Dell Pro 34 Plus can extend wired Ethernet to a connected device. That’s handy if you’re connecting to a modern laptop (which, most likely, lacks Ethernet) and are looking for a wired Ethernet connection. The Dell Pro 34 Plus covers all the basics that should be expected from a modern USB-C monitor. Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C menus and features The Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C’s options are controlled with a joystick on the rear right flank. That’s typical for a monitor, though placing the joystick in this location on an ultrawide makes the control a little hard to reach. You might not need it, however, because the Dell Pro 34 Plus is compatible with Dell’s Display and Peripheral Manager (DPPM). It’s a software utility that can control most monitor features and image quality adjustments. Most competitors (including Asus and BenQ) offer similar options, but Dell’s utility looks nice and works well. DPPM is compatible with Windows 10/11 and MacOS, but not Linux. Matthew Smith / Foundry Unfortunately, the Dell Pro 34 Plus doesn’t offer a great range of image quality adjustment. It has just a handful of image quality presets and does not provide gamma and color temperature presets that target specific values. While I understand the Dell Pro 34 Plus isn’t really meant for owners picky about image quality, I still feel that, at this price, more image quality adjustments should be expected. The feature list is a bit light, too. The monitor has a KVM switch but it doesn’t have built-in speakers, a tripod mount, or an ambient light sensor. The lack of extra features feels stingy, given the MSRP. Those looking for more built-in functionality might consider the Dell Pro 34 Plus P3424WEB, a 34-inch ultrawide with camera, speakers, and similar USB-C connectivity, which is sold at an MSRP of $819.99. Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C SDR image quality The Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C is a 34-inch ultrawide monitor with a 21:9 aspect ratio, a display resolution of 3440×1440, and a conventional LCD-IPS panel. The type of panel is important. Dell was the first company to sell monitors with a new type of IPS panel, called IPS Black, that has improved contrast, and IPS Black is found in many of its flagship monitors. The Pro 34 Plus USB-C doesn’t have this new type of panel, however, which hampers its SDR image quality. Matthew Smith / Foundry We start with brightness, where the Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C provides a mid-pack maximum brightness of 327 nits. This level of brightness is greater than an OLED competitor, such as the MSI MPG 341C, and some IPS-LCD monitors, like the BenQ PD3420Q. In general, the Dell Pro 34 Plus is bright enough for use in a home or business setting. However, it could be brighter, as some other monitors show. Matthew Smith / Foundry Next up is contrast, where the Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C provides a contrast ratio of 1220:1 at 50 percent of maximum brightness. That, once again, is a fine but not incredible result. The Dell Pro 34 Plus has a better contrast ratio than the BenQ PD3420Q, but it’s not as good as the bigger Dell Ultrasharp 4025QW, and obviously not in the same league as MSI’s MPG 341C, which has an OLED panel. This is where the lack of an IPS Black panel comes back to bite the Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C. It simply lacks the contrast needed to provide an immersive image. It’s not terrible, but shoppers can find price-competitive monitors that are much better. Matthew Smith / Foundry Color gamut is a weakness of the Dell Pro 34 Plus. It achieved a color gamut that spanned 100 percent of sRGB, 83 percent of DCI-P3, and 78 percent of AdobeRGB. That’s not bad, but as the graph shows, it’s not competitive with similarly priced (or even less expensive) monitors sold in 2025. Matthew Smith / Foundry Color accuracy is good, as the monitor achieved an average color error below 2. In general, color errors should not be easy to notice, and colors will appear to be realistic (or, at least, true to their source). However, the monitor saw slight variants in gamma and color temperature. I measured a color temperature of 6700K, which is a bit cooler and more sterile than the target of 6500K. I also measured a gamma curve of 2.3, which is a bit darker than the target of 2.2. These aren’t huge swings, but I did find the color temperature noticeable. Also, the monitor lacks built-in adjustments that make this easy to fix (though software calibration is still an option). Sharpness is decent. The monitor’s 3440×1440 resolution works out to about 110 pixels per inch across the 34-inch, 21:9 aspect ratio display. That’s not bad. Also, IPS-LCD monitors do not have the sub-pixel quirks of OLED monitors, which means the Dell Pro 34 Plus looks sharper than 34-inch OLEDs such as the MSI MPG 341C. But 3440×1440 resolution isn’t all that impressive in 2025, with 4K and 5K monitors now readily available. Overall, then, the Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C’s image quality is a bit of a bust. It’s okay. It does the job. And certainly, it’s fine for the general office productivity for which this monitor is intended. Still, there are many similarly priced monitors that offer better image quality at this price point. Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C HDR image quality The Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C does not support HDR. That’s mostly fine for a monitor that targets office productivity. Office productivity apps don’t typically benefit from HDR, and most don’t support it. However, OLED monitors (which are sold at this price) do offer HDR, and some are quite good at it. So, of course, they’re the better choice if HDR is important to you. Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C motion performance It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Dell Pro 34 Plus isn’t meant for gaming. However, the monitor does provide a refresh rate of up to 100Hz, which is better than nothing. Besides increasing motion clarity in games, the increased refresh rate also improves the readability of text and images as they scroll across the screen. Adaptive sync is not supported, though, and the monitor quotes an unimpressive gray-to-gray pixel response time of 5 to 8 milliseconds, depending on the mode. Motion blur remains obvious, and the monitor can’t sync with an input device for smooth frame pacing. Should you buy the Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C? The Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C P3425WE is a workmanlike monitor built for, well, work. It doesn’t go out of its way to provide extra features or superior image quality and instead narrows its focus to connectivity and practical features, like a highly adjustable stand. I don’t begrudge Dell for that focus, but I do begrudge Dell for the price. Listed at an MSRP of $749.99, and currently sold for that price, the P3425WE becomes difficult to recommend. It’s even $70 more than the outgoing Dell P3424WE. Part of me wonders if the jump in price is the result of ongoing tariff concerns. Or, perhaps, Dell is simply trying to squeeze more cash from enterprise and productivity-minded shoppers willing to pay a lot for a practical display. Either way, the price narrows the Dell Pro 34 Plus USB-C’s appeal. It’s a good option for home office shoppers who want outstanding connectivity, including Ethernet and multiple downstream USB-A ports. If you’re more concerned about image quality and motion clarity, though, you should consider OLED alternatives with USB-C, like the MSI MPG 341CQPX. Read...

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To me, the biggest surprise of Intel’s earnings call wasn’t that Intel is selling out of its older chips. It’s that people are finally paying attention. For years, the mantra in the tech world has been, buy the latest and greatest. The newer, the better. And for some companies, like AMD and Qualcomm, that’s been true. Not anymore. Intel told Wall Street analysts Thursday that it’s selling out of its “Raptor Lake” processors and that the process technology they’re built upon, Intel 7, is constrained. Put another way, Intel chief financial officer David Zinsner told analysts that Intel is selling more of its years-old 12th- and 13th-gen Raptor Lake (and Raptor Lake Refresh) chips than Lunar Lake. That’s embarrassing, to be sure. But it caps off years of struggles, which some might say date back to Intel’s inability to move off of the 14nm node for several generations. Is it any surprise that Intel’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, believes that Intel’s organizational structure is bloated? Maybe, but to most people in technology, the answer is simple: if you deliver processors that don’t improve over their predecessors, why should you expect customers to buy your newest and most expensive chips? Instead, they’ll turn to your older, cheaper processors. And that’s what Intel says is happening — especially with the tariff typhoon blowing hard. Imgflip.com (We don’t exactly know if Intel executives were referring to PC makers or consumers themselves. And we don’t know whether consumers are buying Raptor Lake desktop chips or mobile processors, though comparing them to Lunar Lake implies the latter.) What we do know is that Intel’s own latest Core processors don’t meaningfully surpass Intel’s older chips in performance and, in certain benchmarks, they actually fall short. Just step through our Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 9 285K) review for yourself: In Cyberpunk: 2077, for example, the older Core i9-14900K produced 166 frames per second. The much newer Core Ultra 9 285K? 161 frames per second. Yes, there were power problems and later a performance patch, but that didn’t fix Intel’s reputation. If games matter, then this is a pretty damning slide for Arrow Lake.Adam Patrick Murray & Will Smith / PCWorld Of course, if you confine the discussion to laptops, the comparison gets ludicrous quickly — there is absolutely no way a Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) chip can keep up with an Intel 13th- or 14th-gen Core HX. Why would you spend more to get less? That’s clearly the question PC makers and consumers are asking themselves right now, faced with wildly oscillating tariffs and an uncertain economic future that even Intel is wondering will trigger a recession. I was all in favor of Arrow Lake’s promise to halve power for essentially equal performance — total cost of ownership is indeed a thing, and trading reduced power bills for flat performance appealed to me. But Intel didn’t even deliver on that promise, either. At that point, Arrow Lake as a desktop processor was essentially dead to a large chunk of its enthusiast audience. (In mobile, the Core Ultra 200H/ Arrow Lake chip performed surprisingly well, though that’s also because its predecessors like Lunar Lake tried to shave power, too.) Tech enthusiasts have been making the argument that, at least on the desktop, Intel really hasn’t offered anything much for years now. Certainly, AMD’s Ryzen chips have offered significant advancements. But that message is finally breaking through to the mainstream, and that’s not good news for Intel. It all boils down to the simple argument that Intel isn’t offering anything that its older, cheaper chips can’t do. And until they can, it’s hard to believe that Intel can really dig itself out of its hole. Read...

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How are Intel’s customers weathering tariffs and a possible recession? By buying Intel’s older products, and not its latest chips. Intel chief financial officer David Zinsner told analysts on Thursday that Intel sold more volume in its Raptor Lake chips than Lunar Lake, suggesting that customers preferred the higher-performance Raptor Lake chips that debuted in 2023 versus the latest Lunar Lake chip that launched last September. Meanwhile, Zinsner suggested that Intel’s future is extremely uncertain, due to the Trump administration’s varying economic policy. “The very fluid trade policies in the U.S. and beyond, as well as regulatory risks, have increased the chance of an economic slowdown with the probability of a recession growing,” Zinsner said. “This makes it more difficult to forecast how we will perform for the quarter and for the year, even as the underlying fundamentals supporting growth I discussed earlier remain intact.” Zinsner also gave an enormous range for the company’s spending plans of between $8 billion and $11 billion, because Intel doesn’t know what the future of the CHIPS Act might be. Older, cheaper, higher-performance Intel CPUs are the favorite The surprise, however, was how Intel’s customers are dealing with tariffs — simply buying older products instead. Intel executives said that the Intel 7 process — the foundation of the Raptor Lake chips — was constrained, and so was production of the chip itself. That’s because customers are snapping up older Intel CPUs that compete with or even beat Intel’s latest parts. Intel didn’t specify whether it was desktop PC customers or laptop customers who preferred Intel’s older parts.Intel Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who returned to her role as head of Intel Products after serving as the company’s co-CEO for the period after former chief executive Pat Gelsinger stepped down, explained that customers were preferring “N-1” products, or the new code for older parts. “What we’re really seeing is much greater demand from our customers for N-1 and N-2 products so that they can continue to deliver system price points that consumers are really demanding,” Holthaus said. “As we’ve all talked about, the macroeconomic concerns and tariffs have everybody kind of hedging their bets in what they need to have from an inventory perspective. And Raptor Lake is a great part. “Meteor Lake and Lunar lake are great as well, but come with a much higher cost structure, not only for us, but at the system price points for our OEMs as well,” Holthaus added. “And so as you think about an OEM perspective, they’ve also, you know, ridden those cost curves down from a Raptor Lake perspective, and it allows them to offer that product at a better price point. So I really just think it’s, you know, macroeconomics, the overall economy, and how they’re hedging their bets.” That’s not that surprising. The relatively anemic performance of Intel’s latest Core Ultra 200-series parts was matched by an equally anemic reception. As our Arrow Lake desktop review showed, Intel’s 15th-generation Arrow Lake desktop parts basically offered the performance of Intel’s Raptor Lake generation. Intel’s Arrow Lake didn’t offer impressive performance.Adam Patrick Murray & Will Smith / PCWorld What does this mean for Panther Lake? Meanwhile, Intel is readying the launch of Panther Lake and its 18A technology for later this year. Lip-Bu Tan, in his first earnings call as Intel’s chief executive, said that Panther Lake would be available before the end of the year, but Zinsner said that the bulk of shipments would be in 2026. So will customers buy Panther Lake, if they skipped over the previous two chips, Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon asked. “The Panther Lake launch matches exactly what we did on both Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake in regards to timing,” Holthaus said, effectively refuting that the launch would be delayed. “So it’s very aligned with how customers like to take products to market. Intel’s Holthaus holds up a “Panther Lake” sample.Mark Hachman / IDG “Panther Lake is a great product, both from a performance and price perspective for customers,” Holthaus added. “So I think you’ll see a strong uptake of that product, right? We still see very strong commercial demand for AI PCs as [customers are] deploying their fleets, as they’re doing their upgrades, they want to future-proof their products and have that AI capability. So I don’t think you’re going to see that change in commercial. And if you look at our traditional ramps for these types of products, we tend to go faster in commercial first, and then consumers come on board. And so we’ll have to balance, where is the economy at the end of the year, but I feel very bullish about the Panther Lake product and our customer feedback.” Holthaus said that Intel’s goal is to bring 70 percent of all the silicon used in Panther Lake in-house, or manufactured at Intel’s fabs. With Nova Lake, Intel 2026 processor architecture, Intel will try to move even more onto Intel foundries. “When you look at the aggregate of Nova Lake, we will build more wafers on Intel process than we are on Panther Lake,” Holthaus said. Essentially, Intel’s priorities are to build trust in Intel’s own manufacturing technologies, then extend that trust to winning more customers for Intel’s foundry business, Tan said. When asked how long this would all take, Tan demurred. “There is no quick fix,” he said. In a note shared publicly, Tan said that Intel will “remove organizational complexity” by removing layers of management, and requiring employees to work at the office four days a week or more. Intel reported a GAAP loss of $800 million on revenue that was flat with a year ago, at $12.7 billion. Intel’s Client Computing Group recorded $7.6 billion in revenue, down 8 percent from a year ago. Read...

As the Trump administration’s trade war oscillates, tech manufacturers are trying to deal with the unpredictable nature of an economy held hostage to a single man’s whims. But smaller, more niche businesses simply can’t deal with the uncertainty of prices that might double tomorrow—so they’re out, at least as far as shipping to customers in the US. The latest example is Keyboardio, a custom keyboard shop run by two people in California. Keyboardio specializes in the kind of gorgeous, wood-cased ergonomic designs that always draw crowds at keyboard meetups. But because essential parts like PCBs come from China, even if their wooden cases are sourced from American wood, both the standard tariffs and the crackdowns on de minimis shipping exceptions make it impossible to remain profitable for US sales, as the two explain in a lengthy blog post. The post was updated four times in three days in April to deal with the US and China’s dueling policies. But starting May 2nd, there will simply be no way to keep sales going while remaining profitable. Keyboardio announced (spotted by Tom’s Hardware) that it will “suspend all shipping to the United States until we’re confident that your orders will get to you quickly and reliably.” Keyboardio isn’t the first small gadget supplier to make this call, and it won’t be the last. Retro Dodo reports that Anbernic—a favorite of the exploding retro handheld emulation gadget scene—announced that it would be “suspending all orders shipping from China to the United States.” Stock currently available in American warehouses will be the last available to US residents until further notice. Bigger brands are feeling the pinch, too. Razer’s high-powered gaming laptops briefly disappeared from its ordering page earlier this month even as it was announcing new accessories, and Logitech’s mice and keyboards have jumped in price by up to 25 percent. Yesterday, logistics giant Hapag Lloyd says that among its customers, 30 percent have simply cancelled shipments originating from China and bound for the United States. The International Monetary Fund predicts a slowing impact to the broader global economy as companies try to account for the apparent self-sabotage of the United States buying public. Razer If you’d like to dig deeper into how the Trump tariffs are affecting both US businesses and technology buyers, Gamers Nexus has an exhaustive breakdown available on YouTube. Notably, PC case and component maker Hyte (who’s based in California) is shutting down all shipments to the US. Hyte broke down the component, manufacturing, and shipping cost of individual cases, explaining how and why simply shifting manufacturing to the United States is economically impossible. Cooler Master, Thermal Grizzly, Corsair, and CyberPowerPC all expressed similar woes, saying that the unpredictability of the tariff situation can lead to disaster. A shipment could leave port in China when the tariff rate is 20 percent but arrive when it’s 150 percent—and that alone can be so detrimental to the business that it directly results in employee layoffs. Larger companies can try to compensate with fewer products on offer shipped in bigger batches when the situation is less chaotic, but smaller companies will simply shut down sales in the US… or may be in danger of complete collapse altogether. The full video is almost three hours long, but absolutely worth watching if you’d like to see an incredibly detailed breakdown of how US companies are being clobbered by constantly-shifting policies that are beyond anyone’s ability to predict. The Trump administration has temporarily scaled back import tariffs from most countries to “just” 10 percent, a policy that would already have been considered a huge burden. Dozens of countries have indicated a willingness to bargain to avoid the more onerous tariffs announced earlier this year. But with China refusing to bow to Trump’s demands and several rounds of one-upmanship between the countries, the current rate on most Chinese imports to the United States is a staggering 145 percent. A television made in China and valued at $100 will be charged $145 to enter the country, effectively making its price $245. Apparently, reacting to panic in the tech industry specifically, the administration later scaled back the China tariffs on computers, computer components, smartphones, and some smaller parts to “only” 20 percent. Messaging on what counts and what doesn’t, and how long these and other policies will remain in place, is confused at best. The Trump administration claims that it is actively negotiating with China and that the tariff rate will go down substantially in the near future. Chinese officials have denied that active negotiations are occurring. Read...

About two years after Sightful’s Spacetop first emerged as a sort of display-less virtual computer, Spacetop is ready for liftoff — this time as a subscription-based Windows app that runs on third-party hardware, including laptops with NPUs. What’s Spacetop? Using a pair of AR glasses from XReal, Sightful’s Spacetop AR platform surrounds you with a gigantic 100-inch virtual screen so that you can work on a virtual “multi-monitor” setup virtually anywhere. The primary appeal is to help you work in a cramped environment like a plane or a hotel room, where the virtual workspace offers you some of the advantages of a home office. In 2023, Sightful showed off the Spacetop, which was like a Chromebook without a display. Sightful now utilizes the xReal Air ultra 2 AR glasses in place of the previously tethered AR glasses. If you didn’t own multiple displays and a Thunderbolt dock, fine — the AR setup surrounded you with virtual displays. Today’s Spacetop Bundle makes some changes, though the concept remains the same. Instead of AR glasses that were essentially tethered to the computing solution, Sightful uses the XReal Air Ultra 2 AR glasses instead. The most significant change involves the computer: you’ll need a laptop with an NPU of some sort (a Copilot+ PC isn’t necessary, but a basic NPU like a Core Ultra 100 series is) to power the Spacetop app itself. Yes, Spacetop is now a subscription-based application that runs on top of Windows, and it’s $200 per year. The old Sightful Spacetop.Sightful The Xreal Air Ultra 2 AR glasses output at 1080p per eye, at up to 120 Hz, with three dimming levels so that you can essentially block out extraneous light. Custom lenses are available: prescription single-lens inserts cost $50, while prescription progressive lenses cost $150. Unfortunately, you can’t wear glasses with the Spacetop/XReal headset. This concept might sound a bit like Apple’s Vision Pro — but Spacetop’s AR glasses from Xreal weigh 83 grams, while Apple’s headset weighs up to 650 grams. That’s a neck cramp waiting to happen. Yes, it’s a hefty price: the $899 Spacetop Bundle includes the AR glasses and a year’s worth ($200) of the Spacetop subscription. But you’ll need to either buy or own your own laptop on top of that, too. Sightful has been selling preorders of the bundle for $950, with a two-year Spacetop subscription offering for $1,050. (The subscriptions renew at $200 per year.) Spacetop running on a Windows machine.Sightful Work on the road and in the air Spacetop aims to enable you to bring an office-like environment with you wherever you go, utilizing AR technology. We’ve heard this concept before: part of Meta’s ill-timed metaverse push around the Meta Quest Pro was a virtual workspace, where you were surrounded by virtual screens. It didn’t work, in part because the screens were simply too low-resolution to be useful, and the headset was too heavy. Likewise, Microsoft’s original HoloLens, which I loved, was paired with a Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets — which bombed — but included an ability to pin “screens” inside of a workspace that could remain persistent while you walked around. Spacetop combines elements of both. It not only allows you to move and pin applications on what the company calls a 100-inch virtual screen but also set up a “travel mode” where the screens move with you as you move around. All of that happens via the NPU. At CES 2025 in January, Sightful representatives informed me that the company shifted its strategy in 2024, following the introduction of the Copilot+ PC and the NPU in general. They also announced plans to launch the Spacetop later that year in May 2024. On the Spacetop’s laptop, the NPU simply offloads some of the functions that were previously assigned to the CPU and the GPU — it fits within the traditional role of the NPU, which is to perform some AI-specific tasks much more efficiently than elsewhere. The idea is that efficiency translates into longer battery life. Early customers also didn’t like that the first Sightful iterations were essentially Android phones, with no ability to run Windows apps. It’s not entirely clear whether you’ll be able to run Chrome, or Edge, or a browser with plugins, let alone take a Zoom call while your face is obscured by a headset. The question is, will such a specialty device take off? Spacetop’s launch seemed less certain a couple of years ago, essentially requiring a specialized device for plane use. But now it looks much more useful as just another Windows app combined with a laptop and AR glasses that you can store in your carry-on. Read...