Desktops

An original Apple 1 computer motherboard sold this morning at Sotheby's for $374,500. The auction house originally estimated the item would sell for $120,000 to $180,000.

Filed under "Fine Books and Manuscripts," the motherboard is operational and is marked "Apple Computer 1" and dated 1976.

"It is thought that fewer than 50 Apple 1 Computers survive, with only [six] known to be in working condition," Sotheby's reports in catalog notes.

The iconic piece of technology history features a MOS Technologies 6502 microprocessor and 8 kilobytes of RAM. The original Apple 1 computers retailed for $666.66 in 1979 and did not include a monitor, keyboard, case or power supply. Only about 200 Apple 1 computers were produced. … Read more

NEW YORK -- Vizio, a company best known for making TVs, is officially throwing its hat into the PC arena.

The company is taking the wraps off three distinct lines of Windows computers: ultrabooks, mid-size laptops, and all-in-one desktops.

Vizio had previously announced its plans to jump into the PC market at the January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but today's New York press event was the official coming-out party for the new systems.

While the company has previously dabbled in tablets, Vizio is known primarily as a scrappy competitor in the TV space. It's perhaps best … Read more

You may, like so many, have lost 40 percent of your wealth recently, but I'm sure you've saved something for this.

Tomorrow, the nice people at Sothebys are auctioning an Apple-1 motherboard, the very motherlode of modern, beautiful computing.

What's morally uplifting about your potential investment is that this particular machine allegedly works. It is, so Sothebys says, one of only six in earthly existence that can do whatever it is Apple-1 computers were supposed to do. Add, subtract and look amazing at parties, I suppose. … Read more

You might be familiar with the Razer Naga gaming mouse. Revised a few times since its 2010 debut, the Naga's core aim has always been helping gamers master the complex control schemes of online role-playing games like the World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Apparently feeling the absence of such a device in its own lineup, Logitech today announces the G600 MMO Gaming Mouse.

Like the Naga, the G600 has 12 programmable buttons along its left side. Logitech's take on the design adds a dedicated "G shift" button on the top of the mouse, which lets you swap button mappings on the fly. This effectively gives at-hand access to 24 separate in-game commands.… Read more

The broad mainstream future of Thunderbolt is in question, but there's no doubt it's already useful for people with heavy computing demands.

With hundreds of gigabytes of high-resolution digital photographs and a smaller but still bulky collection of video, I'm one of them.

To supply fast external storage for my Dell laptop, for a few years now I've relied on eSATA -- an external version of the SATA standard used to connect hard drives inside computer chassis. It's functional but prickly: the external drive must be powered on before the computer, sleep and wake can … Read more

Once in a while there's a big change, and Western Digital is having one of its own.

The major storage vendor today unveiled not a new hard drive or NAS server, but its very first networking devices in the My Net family. There are five routers and one Gigabit Ethernet switch, enough to challenge other major home-networking vendors, such as Cisco, D-Link, Trendnet, and Netgear.

Unlike other networking vendors whose lineups tend to start with a budget single-band router, WD starts with the My Net N600, a true dual-band router that offers 300Mbps on both the 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands. The next step is the My Net N750, which also offers the 450Mbps speed on the 5GHz band, and finally there's the top-tier My Net N900, which offers the 450Mbps data rate on both bands. The My Net N900 also notably comes with seven Gigabit LAN ports (as opposed to the four ports found in most wireless routers). All of these routers work with any existing Wi-Fi clients.… Read more

Intel believes Thunderbolt will remake mobile computing by endowing laptops with a high-speed, versatile port.

To match Intel's mainstream ambitions for Thunderbolt, though, Intel will have to prove to hardware designers and to consumers that it's got compelling advantages over the alternatives. Today, those are chiefly USB (Universal Serial Bus) and HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface. Tomorrow, another challenger could arrive in the form of PCI Express Cable, and it's got a strong ally in PC giant Hewlett-Packard.

Getting new input-output technologies to catch on is particularly hard because I/O standards only succeed with support from both … Read more

To some, Thunderbolt is just a port on the side of a MacBook, a mere check-box on a feature list.

But to Intel, the high-speed communication technology is an ambitious attempt to do something that only happens every decade or so in the computing industry: rewrite the rules of how people plug stuff into their computers.

Thunderbolt arrived in 2011 with the potential to bring the flexibility of a tower computer to something as compact as an ultrabook. And it's got a bright future in premium and professional products, as events this week show.

First, Apple's new Retina display-equipped MacBook Pro … Read more

Amid much back-and-forth this week on the future of Apple's Mac Pro, iMac, and Mac Mini desktops, it seems worth recapping what we know for sure, as well as what we don't.

Fact: Apple updated the Mac Pro on Monday, albeit with a minor CPU tweak.

Shortly after the end of Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference keynote speech, Apple added its new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops to its online store. Above each laptop's picture, you will still find a little "new" icon, indicating the updated systems. Surprisingly, the Mac Pro also … Read more