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The PartyBox 720 is JBL’s largest battery-powered party speaker

JBL PartyBox 720

JBL has expanded its lineup of flashy Bluetooth speakers with three new models that let you blast tunes without being tied to a power source. The launch includes the new $1,099 PartyBox 720, which is JBL’s largest battery-powered speaker to date, weighing 7 pounds (3kg) more than the visually similar PartyBox 710 that was released […]

Article: Effective Practices for Architecting a RAG Pipeline

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Hybrid search, smart chunking, and domain-aware indexing are key to building effective RAG pipelines. Context window limits and prompt quality critically affect LLM response accuracy. This article provides lessons learned from setting up a RAG pipeline. By Glenn Engstrand

Acer gives its 18-inch Predator Helios gaming laptop a 4K screen and top GPU

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Acer is refreshing some of its gaming laptops for IFA 2025, with a big new Predator Helios 18P AI at the high end and pair of more affordable Nitro V 16 models. The Predator Helios 18P will have up to an RTX 5090 GPU and Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor, though in any configuration […]

Acer’s new Amadana and CE270 monitors are unusually, strikingly stylish

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Did you know Acer acquired a Japanese design firm called Amadana late last year that makes classy coffee gear, retro calculators, air purifiers, and all manner of minimalist low-fi tech? Neither did I till today — but it goes a long way to explaining why a few of Acer’s new monitors at IFA 2025 are […]

Acer’s 16-inch Air weighs even less than a 13-inch MacBook Air

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Acer is announcing a new Swift Air 16 at IFA 2025, and it’s an absolute featherweight of a 16-inch laptop. Weighing in at 2.18 pounds / 0.99kg with an IPS display or 2.43 pounds / 1.1kg with its optional OLED, the Swift Air is lighter than even a 13-inch MacBook Air. It also packs more […]

My brief hands-on with Acer’s new convertible Chromebook has me cautiously optimistic

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Acer's new Chromebook Plus Spin 514, announced at IFA 2025 in Berlin, is the company's first laptop to use the Arm-based MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 processor. That chip was used in the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 that launched earlier this summer, and it was key to delivering excellent performance and marathon battery life in that […]