Dell announced the return of the venerable Alienware Area-51 gaming laptop back in CES 2025, and starting today it is finally available to order. It comes in two size variants: the 16" model starts at $3,199.99 and the 18" model starts at $3,399.99. As expected from Alienware's new flagship laptop, the Area-51 is equipped with current generation components, including the latest and greatest Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU and NVIDIA Blackwell GPU. Orders are expected to ship out starting April 30, so get your reservation in now to prevent any additional delays.Update: The Alienware Area-51 gaming laptop prices have dropped back down to original launch levels. They had previous gone up by around $300 to $450 in response to the tariffs.The Alienware Area-51 Gaming Laptop Is Now AvailableNew ReleaseAlienware 16 Area-51 Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX RTX 5080 Gaming Laptop$3,199.99 at AlienwareNew ReleaseAlienware 18 Area-51 Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX RTX 5080 Gaming Laptop$3,399.99 at AlienwareCurrently both 16" and 18" Area-51 gaming laptops are available in one specific CPU and GPU configuration: the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU paired with the Nvida GeForce RTX 5080 GPU. The Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX boasts a max turbo frequency of 5.4GHz with a whopping 24 cores and 40MB total L2 cache. According to Passmark, this is the fastest laptop processor on the market, with a healthy 7% lead over the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. It's paired with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 mobile GPU. We haven't tested this GPU ourselves yet, but according to VideoCardz.com, preliminary 3DMark Time Spy benchmarks show it to be about 16% more powerful than the RTX 4080. The performance uplift paired with DLSS 4.0 compatiblity should allow it to run just about any game at blisteringly high framerates on the QHD+ display.Rounding out the rest of the specs for the base configurations are your choice of a 16" or 18" QHD+ display with 240Hz-300Hz refresh rate and G-Sync certification, 32GB of DDR5-6400MHz RAM, and a 1TB M.2 SSD. Both 16" and 18" models include an option to upgrade your RAM and storage to 64GB and 2TB, respectively.The Area-51: New Style, More Power, Better CoolingNew for 2025, the Alienware Area-51 gaming laptop features a magnesium alloy chassis with upgraded cooling to tackle the latest and greatest heat generating components. This includes more fans and bigger cutouts enabling greater airflow, more generous use of copper, and a new thermal interface material to better transfer heat away from the core components. Dell claims that the laptop can handle a higher power ceiling of up to 240W TDP without raising acoustics.Design-wise, the Area 51 accentuates its smooth contours, with rounded edges and soft corners replacing the squared off design you'd see in most other laptops. The hinges are also mostly internally positioned so that they're near invisible. As befits an Alienware laptop, there are ample customization options for RGB LED lighting. Connectivity-wise, you get three USB Type-A 3.2 15Gbps ports (one with PowerShare), two Thunderbolt / USB Type-C ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a card reader. The 16" model weighs in at 7.5 pounds and the 18" model weighs 9.6 pounds.We've reviewed an RTX 5090 mobile laptop.Our benchmarks are in, and it looks like the RTX 5090 is indeed the new king of mobile GPUs, although not by the leaps and bounds we were hoping for. On average, the RTX 5090 is about 5%-10% more powerful than the RTX 4090 that it replaces. However, add in DLSS 4 and the gap widens.RTX 5090 Mobile Review by Jacqueline Thomas"If you already have a decent gaming laptop, you really shouldn’t look at the RTX 5090 twice. It doesn’t deliver much of an improvement over its last-generation counterpart, which remains excellent. However, if you’ve been waiting to upgrade to a high-end gaming laptop for a while, features like multi-frame generation and battery boost will make premium laptops powered by Nvidia’s latest even better."More Alienware Gaming Laptop DealsCheck out more of the best Alienware deals today.Alienware m16 R2 16" Intel Core Ultra 9 185H RTX 4060 Gaming Laptop$1,699.99 at AlienwareAlienware m16 R2 16" Intel Core Ultra 9 185H RTX 4070 Gaming Laptop$1,999.99 at AlienwareAlienware x16 R2 16" Intel Core Ultra 9 185H RTX 4070 Gaming LaptopAlienware x16 R2 16" Intel Core Ultra 9 185H RTX 4090 Gaming LaptopAlienware m18 R2 18" Intel Core i7-14700HX RTX 4070 Gaming LaptopDell G16 16" QHD+ Intel Core i7-13650HX RTX 4060 Gaming LaptopDell G16 16" Intel Core i9-13900HX RTX 4070 Gaming LaptopWhy Should You Trust IGN's Deals Team?IGN's deals team has a combined 30+ years of experience finding the best discounts in gaming, tech, and just about every other category. We don't try to trick our readers into buying things they don't need at prices that aren't worth buying something at. Our ultimate goal is to surface the best possible deals from brands we trust and our editorial team has personal experience with. You can check out our deals standards here for more information on our process, or keep up with the latest deals we find on IGN's Deals account on Twitter.Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.

Apple sells a premium streaming box with a price that largely exceeds competing products. But if Apple TV 4K ads start using these new quotes from Roku’s marketing lead, I don’t think Apple will have any trouble making new sales. Roku touts increased advertising push as good for consumers Roku today launched its latest streaming sticks, which cost $29 and $39 accordingly. Apple TV 4K, which is about to get an upgrade but is currently over two years old, starts at $129 and goes up from there. What do you get for that $100 premium? Well, a lot if you ask me. But one new standout is you get to avoid the kind of OS-level ads that Roku seems very keen on shipping. Last month Roku tested auto-playing Moana 2 ads right as your streaming sticks boots up, before you even reach the home screen. Now today after its latest product launch, Roku’s marketing lead Jordan Rost shared the following with The Verge’s Chris Welch: Rost said “all the advertising we employ is meant to be additive to the consumer experience — everything from brands showing up in Roku City to ads on our home screen that help guide people towards content they love.” The Moana 2 test, in theory, was meant to cover that second point. But based on the customer outcry, Roku’s execution was more bothersome than helpful, even if it was possible to exit out of the ad. I also asked Rost about some Roku patents that hint at the company possibly injecting ads onto the video feed from other devices plugged into a Roku TV over HDMI. He said Roku’s own platform is the “primary” focus of its ads strategy. But last month’s misstep isn’t going to stop the bigger plan to keep pushing to make ads more shoppable, interactive, relevant, and “delightful.” If you’re at all like me, you’ll take deep satisfaction in how Welch concludes the article. He writes: “And if any of that makes you shudder, there’s always the Apple TV 4K.” 9to5Mac’s Take As a long-time Apple user, I’m admittedly very biased in this area. That said, can someone please explain how auto-playing ads on startup, or other ads peppered throughout Roku’s OS could possibly be “additive to the consumer experience”? Hey, at least I’ve now gained a greater appreciation for my Apple TV 4K. What’s your take on the Apple TV 4K vs. Roku? Let us know in the comments. Best Apple TV 4K accessories Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Eyes Have ItApr 23, 5:19 PM EDT / by Frank LandymoreScientists Hack Human Eye to See a Whole New Color, Called "Olo""There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor."Apr 23, 5:19 PM EDT / Frank LandymoreImage by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsThe human eye can see millions of colors — but no eyes have ever before beheld "olo."Only five people on the planet have witnessed this brand new color, thanks to the efforts of a team of researchers in California. And to earn this exclusive privilege, they had to fire laser pulses into their eyeballs.As detailed in a new study published in the journal Science Advances, the pulses stimulated specific cells in the participants' retinas without activating the others, producing a hue of unconquerable saturation that's impossible to see naturally. According to the lucky few, the color's closest analog to us unenlightened humans is turquoise — but this apparently doesn't do it justice. "There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor," study coauthor Austin Roorda, a vision scientist at UC Berkeley, told The Guardian. "The whole point is that this is not the color we see, it's just not. The color we see is a version of it, but it absolutely pales by comparison with the experience of olo."Our perception of color is determined by photoreceptor cells in the retina called cones, of which there are three types: L cones for long wavelengths of light, M cones for medium wavelengths, and S cones for short wavelengths.L cones pick up the colors we see as red light, M cones as green light, and S cones as blue light. Naturally, colors tend to be a blend of these spectrums. And while L cones and S cones can largely be stimulated on their own, that isn't the case for M cones; the light they react to also activates either the L or S cones, too."There's no light in the world that can activate only the M cone cells because, if they are being activated, for sure one or both other types get activated as well," coauthor Ren Ng, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, told Scientific American.But the researchers found a way to cheat that situation. First, they mapped each participant's retinas to find the position of their M cones. They then applied these findings in the setting of a dark lab, where the participant keeps still as a tiny pulse of light is fired into each M cone cell, one at a time. As the cells are lasered into, a magnificent turquoise patch roughly twice the size of a full moon forms in the subject's field of vision, per the Guardian. The effect is temporary, but the impression it leaves, apparently, is long-lasting."It's a fascinating study, a truly groundbreaking advance in the ability to understand the photoreceptor mechanisms underlying color vision. The technical demands necessary to achieve this are enormous," Manuel Spitschan, a research leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany who was not involved in study, told Scientific American. "An open question, is how this advance can be used."Others aren't convinced that it's anything more than a neat party trick."It is not a new color," John Barbur, a professor of optics and visual science at City St George's, University of London, told the Guardian. "It's a more saturated green that can only be produced in a subject with normal red-green chromatic mechanism when the only input comes from M cones." Barbur said that the work had "limited value."Ng hopes the technology could one day be applied to create screens that are tailor-made to deliver perfect colors to your retinas, he told Scientific American. It could also let color blind patients see certain colors for the first time — but only temporarily.More on vision: Neuralink Competitor Restores Vision in Blind Patients With Eye ImplantShare This ArticleImage by Getty / FuturismRead This Next

Have you heard of the idiom "You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice?"We haven't, either, because it doesn't exist — but Google's AI seemingly has. As netizens discovered this week that adding the word "meaning" to nonexistent folksy sayings is causing the AI to cook up invented explanations for them."The idiom 'you can't lick a badger twice' means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once," Google's AI Overviews feature happily suggests. "It's a warning that if someone has already been deceived, they are unlikely to fall for the same trick again."Author Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios, who first noticed the bizarre bug in a Threads post over the weekend, found that when she asked for the "meaning" of the phrase "peanut butter platform heels," the AI feature suggested it was a "reference to a scientific experiment" in which "peanut butter was used to demonstrate the creation of diamonds under high pressure."There are countless other examples. We found, for instance, that Google's AI also claimed that the made-up expression "the bicycle eats first" is a "humorous idiom" and a "playful way of saying that one should prioritize their nutrition, particularly carbohydrates, to support their cycling efforts."Even this author's name wasn't safe. Asked to explain the meaningless phrase "if you don't love me at my Victor, you don't deserve me at my Tangermann" the AI dutifully reported that it means "if someone can't appreciate or love you when you're at your lowest point (Victor), then they're not worthy of the positive qualities you bring to the relationship (Tangermann)."The bizarre replies are the perfect distillation of one of AI's biggest flaws: rampant hallucinations. Large language model-based AIs have a long and troubled history of rattling off made-up facts and even gaslighting users into thinking they were wrong all along.And despite AI companies' extensive attempts to squash the bug, their models continue to hallucinate. Even OpenAI's latest reasoning models, dubbed o3 and o4-mini, tend to hallucinate even more than their predecessors, showing that the company is actually headed in the wrong direction.Google's AI Overviews feature, which the company rolled out in May of last year, still has a strong tendency to hallucinate facts as well, making it far more of an irritating nuisance than a helpful research assistant for users.When it launched, it even told users that glue belongs on pizza to ensure that toppings don't slide off. Its other outrageous gaffes have included claiming that baby elephants are small enough to sit in the palm of a human hand.Following public outrage over the feature's baffling — and often comedic — inaccuracy, Google admitted in a statement last year that "some odd, inaccurate or unhelpful AI Overviews certainly did show up."To tackle the issue, Google kicked off a massive game of cat and mouse, limiting some responses when it detected "nonsensical queries that shouldn't show an AI Overview."But considering the fictional idioms almost a year after the product was launched, Google still has a lot of work to do.Even worse, the feature is hurting websites by limiting click-through rates to traditional organic listings, as Search Engine Land reported this week. In other words, on top of spewing false information, Google's AI Overviews is undermining the business model of countless websites that host trustworthy info.Nonetheless, Google is doubling down, announcing last month that it was going to be "expanding" AI Overviews in the US to "help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries." Earlier this year, Google announced that AI Overviews is even being entrusted with medical advice.The company claims that "power users" want "AI responses for even more of their searches." (For the time being, there are ways to turn off the feature.)At least the AI model appears to be aware of its own limitations."The saying 'you can lead an AI to answer but you can't make it think' highlights the key difference between AI's ability to provide information and its lack of true understanding or independent thought," Google's AI Overviews told one Bluesky user.More on AI Overviews: Google Says Its Error-Ridden "AI Overviews" Will Now Give Health AdviceShare This Article

Motorola is gearing up for the next versions of its Razr and Razr Plus foldables -- but leaks suggest there could be a third phone, too.

Look to the eastern sky late Thursday, and a clear horizon will show you this unusual, grinning planet alignment.

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Image: Shin'en MultimediaShin'en is joining the Switch 2 launch celebrations with Fast Fusion and if you didn't already catch our interview, the developer has now detailed the game's performance and resolution. All up, there'll be "five different graphic settings" for television mode - ranging from 1080p at 60fps to 1440p at 60fps, and even "up to" 4K at 60fps. Shin'en says it will even have a "special" 30fps 4K 'Ultra Quality' mode and "everything" will run in HDR across handheld mode and on supported TVs. It has also confirmed split screen will cater to four players with "all" of it "running at 60fps", and GameShare is supported for up to two players. As for 120fps, it won't be supported. The reasoning behind this is tied to the fact that "making a game for launch day isn't that easy" and decisions had to be made about "a few key features". Fortunately, the team hasn't completely ruled it out - suggesting 120fps could be added in a patch "later" down the line. One other detail revealed was about the game's size, with Shin'en confirming it will be around 3.7GB in size. "This will make your hands sweaty!" Will you be checking out this game on release? Let us know in the comments. Related Games See Also Share:0 1 Liam is a news writer and reviewer for Nintendo Life and Pure Xbox. He's been writing about games for more than 15 years and is a lifelong fan of Mario and Master Chief. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles Paul Rudd Returns In An Awesome SNES-Style Switch 2 Commercial Super together! Nintendo Removes Variable Refresh Rate TV Mention On Switch 2 Websites Updated descriptions in US, Canada, Japan and Europe Gallery: These 'Lunar Remastered Collection' Goodies Remind Us Of The Good Old Days When the moon hits your eye... Mario Kart World's 'Free Roam' Is Much More Than Mindless Open World Driving Unlocks and missions and friends, oh my!

Third-party titles are being sold on game-key cards.Nintendo's Switch 2 will support both regular game cards and game-key cards. Game-key cards don't contain the full data and are instead used as a "key" to download the full game to your system via an internet connection.Read the full article on nintendolife.com

In Brief Posted: 6:03 PM PDT · April 23, 2025 Mystery will may reveal Zappos founder’s final wishes According to the WSJ, a recently discovered will suggests late Zappos co-founder Tony Hsieh had concrete plans for his fortune despite previous beliefs that he died without leaving instructions for an estate that’s estimated to be worth $1.2 billion. Among other things, the document, signed in 2015 and included in a recent court filing, contains a striking no-contest clause directed at Hsieh’s family: if any of his four family members challenges his wishes, all will receive nothing. The will also allocates over $50 million and several Las Vegas properties to undisclosed trusts tied to recipients he aimed to surprise. Notably, Hsieh also earmarked $3 million for his alma mater Harvard University, the storied institution that’s currently battling with the Trump administration, which has frozen billions of dollars in federal funding and is reportedly giving Harvard’s endowment a closer look. The will’s discovery adds another bizarre element to the already strange legal battle over Hsieh’s estate following his November 2020 death in a house fire at age 46. Hsieh reportedly crafted the will to create a “WOW factor” for beneficiaries, wanting them to “live in the wow.” Topics Commerce