Month: May 2019

Enlarge / Today seems like a decent day to stock up on charging gear. (credit: Anker)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back a bit earlier than usual this week to highlight a one-day sale that may be of interest to those in need of new charging gear. Amazon is currently discounting a number of wall chargers, battery packs, and charging cables from popular accessories maker Anker as part of its daily “Gold Box” discounts.

Anker runs these kind of peripheral deals frequently, often through discount codes, but most of what’s on sale here is at or near its lowest price to date. Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights:

• The PowerPort Speed+ Duo wall charger is down to $19.49 from its usual $26. It comes with a 30W USB-C Power Delivery port, which is powerful enough to charge most new smartphones at max speed (with the appropriate cable) and can charge some ultra-thin laptops like Apple’s 12-inch MacBook. There’s a 12W USB-A port alongside that.
• The black model of the PowerPort I desktop charger is down to $35 from its usual $50. This charger is more designed to live on a desk, but it also includes a 30W USB-C PD port along with four 12W USB-A ports. The whole things gets up to a maximum of 60W, so you won’t be able to get a full-speed charge from every port if you use them all at once. But at this price, it should still be versatile enough to be useful if you regularly have multiple devices to refill at once.
• If you need new charging cords, a two-pack of the company’s MFi-certified Lightning cables is $15 instead of their usual $20, a three-pack of microUSB cables is $7.70 instead of their usual $11, and its braided USB-C cable is $9.50 instead of its usual $15. The first two items come with an 18-month warranty, while the USB-C cable comes with a lifetime warranty.

There are a few more deals beyond that, but these additional sales aren’t quite as enticing as the ones above. A pair of wireless chargers—one a flat pad, the other a charging stand—is similarly priced near all-time lows, but we found the former to be outclassed by a competing pad from RAVPower that is currently available for the same price and the latter maxes out at a slow 5W of power. Neither come with an AC adapter, either. If you can put up with the generally slower speeds of wireless charging as a whole, we think you can do better by paying up a little bit more.

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  Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme generation 2 birdseye view. [credit: Lenovo ]

Lenovo is having its annual conference for its business partners and customers, and with that comes a spate of new hardware announcements.

Let's start simple: the ThinkPad X1 Extreme, the 15-inch counterpart to the regular X1, has been updated to a 9th-generation Intel Core i9 processor and an Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU MaxQ, further enhancing its powerhouse specs, while continuing to weigh under 4 pounds. There's also a new 4K OLED touchscreen option that looks fab. Maximum storage has been doubled to 4TB. Pricing starts at $1,499.99, with availability in July.

Lenovo currently has two main laptop brands: the mass-market IdeaPad, and the high-end/corporate ThinkPad line, with the latter honoring the IBM ThinkPad legacy with their black cases and red TrackPoint mice. To these, the company is adding a third range: ThinkBook. These are intended for small and medium business customers, and they arguably split the difference between the IdeaPad and ThinkPad lines. They have business-friendly features: Windows 10 Pro, a good amount of field serviceability and commercial support options, and buttons for Skype calls. They lack the ThinkPad's TrackPoint and aren't quite as thin or light as comparable ThinkPad machines.