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The Verge
18-06-2025
- The Verge
Framework Laptop 12 review: plastic fantastic
Antonio G. Di Benedetto is a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021. Framework finally made a touchscreen laptop, and the convertible 2-in-1 is one of the coolest-looking computers ever made. It doesn't have top-tier specs, but its two-year-old 13th Gen Intel Core i3 processor isn't on its last legs just yet. Like Framework's Laptop 13, the new Laptop 12 has modular ports and fully repairable innards. And you should be able to upgrade it to a newer chip eventually, given Framework's business model of selling new parts for older laptops. But charm aside, you're still paying extra for repairability and upgradability. The Laptop 12's $799 starting price, along with its middling webcam, keyboard, and chunky bezels still make it feel like a laptop for the true believers; others may have a hard time turning down similarly priced laptops with little to no repairability but better specs. The Laptop 12 is one of the most striking laptops I've ever seen. Its pink and blue 'bubblegum' color scheme is particularly fantastic. The pastel colors are vibrant and the gray-on-gray keyboard pulls it together nicely, with left-aligned keycap legends giving it a slightly retro look. The exterior is plastic, with edges clad in thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) for added resistance to dings and scratches. It feels well built with minimal flex, likely due to its rigid metal internal frame. I described its overall feel to a colleague as 'thoughtful plastic.' As with the Framework 13, I recommend the DIY Edition (which is how you get the more fun color options). It's easier to assemble than the 13, with the keyboard connecting via pogo pins like the Laptop 16 instead of a delicate ribbon cable. You don't even need a tool to install or replace the M.2 SSD. I had our unit assembled and installing Windows 11 off a USB flash drive in about 30 minutes. Fire it up and you're treated to a 12.2-inch screen that's bright, crisp, and very responsive to touch or an optional stylus. Though, it has massive bezels on all sides. While the 1920 x 1200 resolution and 60Hz refresh aren't anything special, the dead-simple replacement procedure is. Screen replacements this easy could be clutch for classroom deployments, or for giving it to a teen. The trackpad feels better than the one on the Framework 13, and nearly as good as the excellent mechanical one on the Surface Laptop 13-inch, only lacking the Surface's satisfying ka-chunk sound. The keyboard looks amazing, but I'm less enthused by its typing feel. Its tactile feedback is slightly muted, and on rare occasions, it missed a letter I thought should have registered. It has the same 1.5mm key travel as the Laptop 13, but it doesn't have the same juice. It isn't backlit. The side-firing stereo speakers and built-in mic are serviceable. I didn't mind listening to music or playing videos on the Laptop 12, especially with the convenience of kickstand tablet mode to prop it up with the keyboard out of the way. But the webcam is mediocre, looking nice in good lighting but smeary and bad in any indoor setting that isn't bright. Its biggest omission is support for Windows Hello; there isn't even a fingerprint sensor, so get used to typing your password or PIN every time you wake it like it's 2014. Framework confirmed this was a cost-saving measure, but dang, do I sorely miss it. As for battery life, it can get you through a full school day or even a lengthier, eight-hour work day of light use, though a lengthy video call or two can noticeably shorten that. I wanted to test the entry-level configuration of the Laptop 12, but the review unit I received had 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB in its single DIMM slot and a 1TB SSD to go with the base Intel Core i3 1315U chip. With all the included expansion ports and a Windows 11 Home license, our config costs $1,086 — significantly higher than the $799 starting price. The 13th-Gen Intel chip is still a solid performer for light loads but it occasionally shows its age. You can hear the Laptop 12's fan working pretty frequently — not at an annoying volume, but just a noticeable one (and a couple of times while the lid was closed for some reason). It isn't difficult to bog the Laptop 12 down multitasking across many Chrome tabs while on a video call. I just fear what that 8GB entry-level might be like. This isn't my laptop of choice for heavy photo editing, but folding it into tablet mode and processing images in Lightroom with a stylus is an enjoyable way to work on a handful of pictures casually. Though, high-resolution RAW files are painfully slow to import, and the keyboard deck inverted on your lap gets a little warm when the laptop is under load. Framework's color-matched styluses are coming later, so I used a Metapen M2 sent with the review unit, which worked great. I love that the modularity of its four ports allows me to choose a full-size SD card reader, something you don't normally find on modern thin-and-light machines. Plus, if you opt to load it up with four USB-C ports (which can be matched to the colorful chassis), each one is capable of charging the laptop. And if you fear a child may fidget with the expansion cards by popping them in and out, there are internal screws you can tighten to prevent external tampering. It's hard not to love the Framework 12, but its drawbacks, like low starting RAM, an okay processor, and a slightly soft-feeling keyboard, are hard to swallow when it costs $799 and easily ramps up to over $1,000 with upgrades. At that price, it competes with much more powerful laptops such as the M4 MacBook Air (which, to be fair, lacks a touchscreen) and both the Surface Laptop 13-inch and Surface Pro 12-inch. The Framework could one day be upgraded to surpass those machines, but there's no guarantee. The Laptop 13 has turned out to be the shining example of repairability and upgradeability, but the big-boy Laptop 16 is currently in a weird spot. If Framework delivers on the Laptop 12's upgrade path like it has on the 13, then it could be worth the price, either for a student who can grow with it or for just about anybody who wants a tinker-friendly touchscreen 2-in-1. The Laptop 12 has the potential to become more than a quirky experiment for kids. It could be one of the best examples of a laptop in this form factor. Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge 0 Comments
The Verge
10-06-2025
- The Verge
Apple announces macOS Tahoe 26 with new design and revamped search features
Antonio G. Di Benedetto is a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021. Apple announced a new version of macOS during its WWDC 2025 keynote presentation, featuring a new design, improved search functions, a new Phone app, and an entirely new game launcher with overlay. The new update, expected later this year, is called macOS Tahoe 26. Upon release this fall, Tahoe will be available for all Apple silicon-based Macs as well as some Intel-based Macs with a T2 Security chip. Developers can start beta testing it today, and a public beta is scheduled next month. While Apple is sticking with California-themed names in Tahoe, this marks the first time it is numbering macOS to align with its yearly update schedule — with 26 replacing last year's macOS 15. This year is 2025, but most of macOS 26's lifespan will be during 2026. (Think of it like the model year of cars, which never gets confusing.) The big new change for macOS 26 is an overhauled design, following Apple's new Liquid Glass aesthetic also announced at WWDC 25. The glass-like style encompasses the Dock, toolbars, app icons, widgets, and colors. Now, similar to the iPhone, users will be able to theme their Macs with color-matched folders and app icons that can be tinted. Tahoe is getting its own Phone app for use with a paired iPhone via Continuity. The app is modeled after the iPhone version, complete with Favorites, Voicemails, Call Screening, and Hold Assist. There's also support for Live Activities from a nearby iPhone, allowing you to see live updates from your phone — like the status of an Uber on its way to you — on your Mac's menu bar. Apple claims Spotlight is getting its biggest update to date, allowing users to take direct actions through it, like taking a note, sending an email, or running a Shortcut. Users can view all of their apps within Spotlight search, allowing it to even act as a mini launcher, including apps from their iPhone via mirroring. Additionally, Spotlight search results are listed and ranked based on what should be most relevant to you, with the ability to filter your search further. Spotlight's most power-user-focused features include the ability to run Shortcuts and actions within the app you're currently using and quick keys for faster access to actions within an app — 'sm' for 'send message' or 'ar' for 'add reminder.' Tahoe also has new Apple Intelligence features, such as Live Translations, improved Shortcuts, and updates to Genmoji, Image Playground, and Reminders. You'll be able to get live, automatic language translations in the Messages app — both incoming ones and outbound ones you write. And, similar to Windows 11's feature from last year, you can get translated live captions of someone speaking on a FaceTime call. Apple is also putting a new Games app in macOS 26. Apple Games gives users a dedicated app for cataloging and launching their games, discovering new titles, and syncing up with friends for playing online. There's also a Game Overlay for adjusting settings, chatting, and sending game invites. For game developers, Apple is also introducing Metal 4, the latest version of its graphics API, including MetalFX Frame Interpolation and Denoising to improve frame rates. Last year's macOS 15 Sequoia was also first announced at WWDC, and it gave Mac users new features like iPhone mirroring, proper window tiling, and access to Apple Intelligence.
New York Times
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
No Writer Better Understood the Agony of Expectation
During the past 50 years, the work of the Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto has found its way to readers like water trickling from a blocked stream. Beloved by an almost clandestine coterie of admirers that included Roberto Bolaño, Di Benedetto, who died in 1986, is still largely unknown in the United States. With the publication in English of THE SUICIDES (New York Review Books, 165 pp., paperback, $16.95), the third novel of what can loosely be called a trilogy, this may be about to change. All three books have now been masterfully translated by Esther Allen, who has managed to capture the humor, the sobriety and the oscillations between realism and mental fragmentation that constitute the essence of Di Benedetto's fiction. No writer has laid bare so thoroughly the ongoing predicament of the Argentine, for whom the resolution of even minor problems, such as a noise complaint or the collection of one's modest salary, seems beyond normal human effort. Di Benedetto understands this bitter ingredient of Argentine life, where the middle class is as evanescent as melting ice, subject to impoverishing currency devaluations, corrupt populists, vicious military coups, cynical guerrilla movements and useless reforms. There is some Kafka and Gogol in his comic tragedies, and some Dostoyevsky in his characters' furious nihilism, but the atmosphere of his fiction is unlike anyone else's. His protagonists are aggrieved, frustrated and emotionally trapped. They comb through their psyches with claws, always in the first person. They are repellent and charismatic, often at the same time. And they tell their stories with brio: Curious and well-read, they are ingenious weavers of philosophical riffs designed to shield themselves from the curse of futility. 'To the victims of expectation,' reads the dedication page of his best-known novel, 'Zama,' the first book of the trilogy. It could apply equally to its successors, for the psychological danger of harboring hope where there is none is Di Benedetto's binding subject. In 'Zama,' the eponymous narrator is a midlevel functionary for the Spanish Empire in South America. He is stuck in an outpost far from the social attractions of Buenos Aires, where he longs to be transferred. The story takes place in the 1790s, when criollos like Zama — of Spanish descent but born in the Americas — are looked upon with suspicion, as the 260-year-old bureaucracy that has governed the Americas from Madrid is beginning to crumble. Zama's official duties are meaningless, and his relentless maneuvers to land a more glamorous posting seem doomed. The only conquests available to him are sexual, and even these are distorted by his sometimes criminal behavior and his risible illusions about the purity of white women. He clings to the comportment of the 'civilized' but can't maintain the facade, because inwardly he is more barbaric than his social inferiors. As the years pass, the Spanish cease even to pay his wages and Zama descends into a life of subsistence, too poor to afford the humblest lodging. In a last-ditch attempt to earn a transfer, he joins a posse hunting a notorious outlaw and enters the wildness of an ungovernable land. 'The Silentiary,' first published in Spanish in 1964, eight years after 'Zama,' takes place in the early 1950s in what the author calls 'a city in Latin America' that he declines to name. Its subject is the deadly irritations of modern quotidian life. 'I open the gate and meet the noise,' goes the first paragraph. The noise — chattering radios, bad music, roaring machinery and motorcycles — is corroding the unnamed narrator's sanity and sabotaging his plan to start writing a book. You may sympathize with his torment, but you will also recognize the perils of an insoluble fixation. Like Zama, he is an office worker with unspecified duties, a sub-manager, a second-in-command. His affliction grows so intense that it expands to include normal human sounds. During late-night intervals of quiet, he is 'alone the way a person is alone in the shower.' Only one person understands him: his best friend, a half-mad visionary 'who charges into any fray,' sees through the diabolical system and dresses in rags. At times he seems to be a product of the narrator's spiraling ideation. Like his friend, the narrator believes himself to be a 'martyr for having aspired to live my own life, and not someone else's, not the life that is imposed.' In Di Benedetto's hands he is both ridiculous and tragic. 'The Suicides' (1969) also takes place in an unnamed provincial city. A reporter who has just turned 33, the age his father was when he ended his life, is told by his editor to write a series of articles about three recent suicides. His only lead is a photograph of each of the victims after they died. 'There's terror in their eyes,' observes the reporter. 'But their mouths are grimacing in somber pleasure.' His assignment is to unlock the meaning of these contradictory states. But details are scarce; the police don't release information about suicides. Can dying by your own hand be a relief for some? Is it hereditary? Might it be a rational response to a forced condition of stagnation? Questions multiply, as the novel turns into an investigation of the reasons for living. Interspersed with the story are the results of statistical studies about suicide — by gender, race, nationality and age — dry asides that presage Bolaño's factual accounts of brutality in his 2004 novel '2666.' These give a disturbing clinical ballast to the story. Among other things, Di Benedetto can be seen as a bridge from the magic of García Márquez to the realism of Bolaño and the generation of Latin American writers that succeeded him. Di Benedetto's work provides its own study of violence. In common with the trilogy's other protagonists, the reporter in 'The Suicides' is prone to outbursts that seem fueled by an incurable frustration. He entertains himself by engaging in drunken brawls and attending boxing matches where he can 'clamor for violence and destruction.' He assures us that 'this is normal,' that his 'belligerence is collective, and my atrocities mingle in the air with everyone else's.' He adds: 'Oppression makes you weak.' Di Benedetto was born in 1922 and lived most of his adult life in the north-central province of Mendoza, the reliable supplier of good olive oil and wine to Buenos Aires. He was a reporter at the provincial newspaper, Los Andes. In 1976, he was arrested by the military government, tortured and put in front of a firing squad four times. After 18 months he was released. He had no history of political activism and to discern the subversions in his fiction would have required an insight the generals didn't possess. But in those years of state terror, anyone who wasn't an active supporter of the government was seen as an enemy. When I was in Mendoza in the early 1970s, I don't remember many people speaking of him. The joke then was that for an Argentine to be read in his country he had to write in a foreign language and be published in translation. Respect for homegrown artists was scant. Di Benedetto's decision to stay in Mendoza may have been bad for his career, but not for his fiction. It connected him to the deepest psychology of his countrymen, giving him the vantage point to write about the secret workings of their souls and the torment of their far-flung hopes.
