Technology

  Despite owning the most popular mapping app in the world, Google acquired Waze for almost a billion dollars in 2013. Google did not shut down the app as many had feared, but it has slowly integrated Waze’s crowdsourced driving features into Google Maps. Google is adding a raft of …

  After over 40 years, the Strategic Automated Command and Control system (SACCS) no longer runs on venerable 8-inch floppy drives from circa 1972. As of this past June, the entire system has moved to a “highly-secure solid-state digital storage solution.” That’s according to Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of …

  It’s good times to be in the foundry business — at least if you are TSMC. The firm has announced plans for much higher capital expenditures than it originally forecast for this year. Originally, TSMC expected to spend ~$11B on CapEx improvements for 2019. Now, the company will spend …

  This year, for the first time since it launched the Surface product family back in 2012, Microsoft debuted a design from an x86 CPU manufacturer other than Intel. While the company has built non-x86 Surface machines before, the ARM-derived variants in the family exited the market after the Surface …

  span class=”featured__span-first-words”Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support, and the money that flows through it all. The app industry in 2018 saw 194 billion downloads and more than $100 billion in purchases. Just in the past quarter, consumer spending …

  Large gaming monitors are becoming increasingly popular in today’s modern world. As a fan of large displays, for the last decade I’ve forgone the use of a real computer monitor and opted for an LCD TV instead. I remember discussing this on a public forum some years ago and …

  Building your own games online can be profitable as well as fun. With Adobe’s long-standing Flash software nearing the end of its life and the world wide web transitioning over to HTML5, now is an excellent time to learn how to make games for this new framework. Learning to …

  The Google Pixel 4 and 4 XL are finally official, and as the leaks suggested, there’s no fingerprint sensor. Google is going the same route as Apple with an IR-based 3D face unlock system. With “Face Match” being the Pixel’s only biometric option, you’d naturally want it to be …

  We’ve talked a lot about fancy mechanical keyboards on ExtremeTech, including Star Trek homages, travel boards, and gamepads. That’s just barely scratching the surface, though. You might think it’s crazy to spend a few hundred on building a custom keyboard, but fans of Topre switches will go to greater …

  Razer made its name creating flashy gaming peripherals like mice, headset, and of course, keyboards. It has since moved into the laptop space with the Blade series of gaming-oriented notebooks. Its previous innovation in laptop keyboards has been mostly limited to equipping them with RGB LEDs, but the new …