Microsoft had a series of nightmares last week. This week, the tech giant got some rest, as much of the news surrounding Microsoft was positive. Reports of two new Surface devices plus the rollout of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 give enthusiasts, gamers, and those who need hardware for productivity details to catch up on. Add in a mysterious Xbox controller listing and OpenAI allegedly accessing benchmark data to make its AI models score well and you have a busy week in the world of tech.
New Surface hardware
A new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro are on the way. That's the word from our Senior Editor Zac Bowden, who reported on the upcoming wave of Surface hardware recently. According to Bowden's sources, both new pieces of Surface hardware will be premium devices.
The new Surface products are expected to have premium designs similar to their larger siblings, which would be in contrast to the Surface Laptop Go that was more of a budget device. The new Surface Pro will be a direct competitor to the 11-inch iPad Pro, according to Bowden's report.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X/Plus are said to power the rumored devices. Those internals will allow the new hardware to fall between $800 and $900.
Bowden also discussed the planned launch of Intel Lunar Lake variants of the Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 and the development of the Surface Pro 12 and Surface Laptop 8 this week.
Windows 10 downgrade
Windows 10 will reach end of support in October of this year, but Microsoft has plans for the operating system before the cutoff date. Unfortunately, the plans involve making Windows 10 worse, or at least worsening the email experience for the built-in email client on Windows 10 PCs. Next month, Microsoft will roll out an "update" that will replace Mail & Calendar with the new Outlook.
👉 Read more: Microsoft is wrong: The new Outlook for Windows is not ready for prime time
Mail & Calendar stopped working at the start of this year, having been rendered inoperable by Microsoft. With that app being useless, Microsoft needs to replace it. The issue is that many consider the new Outlook, which is a web app, to be worse than Mail & Calendar.
Oddly, Microsoft will also ship a new feature to Windows 10 with the same update that replaces Mail & Calendar. The February security update will add a rich calendar experience that shows the weather within the calendar flyout in the taskbar.
New Xbox controller
Normally, a new Xbox controller design would be a small news story. New controllers are cool and collectible, but they're not often one of the biggest stories of the week. But the Pulse Cipher was announced in a unique way, creating a stir.
Before any official announcement of the Pulse Cipher controller, a mysterious Amazon listing for an unnamed Xbox controller appeared. Back then, we knew the controller cost $74.99 but did not have any other details. The mystery led to much speculation. Even though we knew that the listing was not for the mythical Sebile controller, I think some held out hope that it was.
Ultimately, the page turned out to be for the Red Cipher controller, which is set to arrive on February 18, 2025. Microsoft confirmed which controller it was, Amazon removed its listing for the item, and Microsoft pushed out its page for the controller.
OpenAI benchmarks
OpenAI's o3 AI model may have performed well on benchmarks due to already knowing the answers on the test. That's the claim that emerged recently, at least.
A post in the Reddit's r/singularity subreddit discussed OpenAI's relationship with FrontierMath, a benchmarking tool from Epoch AI used for testing AI models:
"Frontier Math, the recent cutting-edge math benchmark, is funded by OpenAI. OpenAI allegedly has access to the problems and solutions. This is disappointing because the benchmark was sold to the public as a means to evaluate frontier models, with support from renowned mathematicians. In reality, Epoch AI is building datasets for OpenAI. They never disclosed any ties with OpenAI before."
Epoch AI’s Associate Director, Tamay Besiroglu, admitted that OpenAI has access to ‘a large fraction of FrontierMath problems and solutions,’ but he specified that there is a set of data OpenAI does not have access to. Besiroglu said there was a verbal agreement in place for OpenAI to not use those materials for training, which was not enough to calm criticism.
Reviews
⭐⭐⭐⭐ NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 1/2 Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 1/2 JSAUX dual stack monitor
The biggest review of the past week was of the latest graphics card from NVIDIA. In our RTX 5090 review, our Ben Wilson explains that while the new GPU is the "best consumer-grade graphics card in the world," it is ultimately not worth it for most people.
"While NVIDIA's admirable efforts to redesign and slim down its flagship GeForce RTX graphics card have paid off with a performance bump comparable to its MSRP, it's still practically impossible to recommend the RTX 5090 FE to any levelheaded PC gamer," said Wilson.
The 575W power draw of the RTX 5090 somewhat diminishes its performance gains over the previous generation.
Our experts also took a close look at a dual stack portable monitor and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
Deals
Whether you want to game on the go, get work done at your desk, or dive into nostalgia with a remake of a classic game, I doubt you want to pay full price for tech if you don't have to. Our team of experts scour the web to find the best deals on PCs, gaming consoles, software, and games. Here are the best deals that are still live.
