Hasta La Gadget!

As laptops have gotten faster, desktops have taken a back seat in the gadget lust sweepstakes. But for performance per dollar, there’s still nothing better than an old-fashioned desktop tower. But how powerful a computer can you build if you’re not optimizing for price? The tweakers over at MaximumPC recently built a dream desktop, sparing no costs, and created a $16000 machine that’s definitely something worth drooling over.

The dream desktop starts with a 3.1Ghz Intel Xeon server processor that costs about $2000 retail, adds 64GB of DDR3 memory, and tops it off with the fastest graphics card NVidia makes–two of them, actually. The excesses don’t stop there–the mad geniuses put six separate hard drives in the case, two 512GB SSDs and  four old fashioned spinning disks in a RAID array. After fitting all these components and some liquid cooling into a Silverstone TJ11, they topped off the rig with two Dell IPS panels running at 2560×1600 resolution each.

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Just like you, the wizards at iSupply have been poring over iPhone pictures and schematics, and they’ve worked out an estimated cost for the iPhone 5. After tallying up the value of all the guts, a 16GB iPhone costs $199, which is $11 more than the 4S cost to build when it came out.

iSupply adds $8 per phone to account for labor, which seems like a pretty good rate for backbreaking, repetitive work. After adding in the labor cost, the 16GB iPhone comes out to $207, a 32GB iPhone may cost Apple $217 and the 64GB model is estimated to cost $328. So when you decide that 16GB isn’t enough for you, you’re paying a 900% premium for that extra space. Hope your high bitrate mp3s are worth it!

It’s important to stress that these estimates are from a visual teardown, which isn’t actually a teardown at all, but a bunch of dedicated nerds studying images until they identify all the components in the picture. The actual teardown should be coming as soon as somebody (like iFixit) gets a retail unit and takes a pentalobe screwdriver to it. So, probably Friday.

Image courtesy of iLabFactory

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Apple’s pushed the next major iteration of its iOS operating system to the masses today. The OTA update is available now in your iPhone’s settings menu under Software Update. It’s a whopping 628MB, so make sure you’re on WiFi and plugged in before you update.

iOS 6 comes with some new goodies, such as a WiFi + Cellular setting, that nifty panorama feature we saw during the iPhone 5 announcement, and an improved version of Siri (she can tell you w now!) It also comes with some changes that the jury’s currently out on–it’ll remove the YouTube app and replace the Google Maps app with an Apple-based version.  As with any update, there could be bugs or reduced battery life. Any iPhone newer than the 3G can upgrade, so hit it up, and let us know in the comments what kind of changes you’re seeing. 

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When BGR first bandied about the October 21st release date for the Nokia Lumia 920, it is easy to say that there was your fair share of naysayers concerning Microsoft was the one who announced that Windows Phone 8 will be released on October 29th instead. The thing is, BGR could very well be spot on the money, as another Windows Phone site, WPCentral, claimed that they had a reliable source who did pass to them accurate Windows Phone Mango launch dates in the past, once again come to share recent documentation that confirmed the launch of the Nokia Lumia 920 this coming October 21st.

After all, October 21st is a Sunday which has remained to be a firm favorite with AT&T when it comes to launching Windows Phone devices, and history had shown that Microsoft too, did share the same affinity as AT&T. Still, all we need to do to clear up any confusion would be to wait patiently for slightly more than just one more month. After all, even if the Nokia Lumia 920 did not appear on October 21st, there was only one more week to go after that before all should be revealed, officially. This is definitely earlier than the speculated November 2nd date.

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In can either be incredibly exciting or deeply creepy news, soon you’ll be able to fire up a browser and take an overhead look at your own house–live. This amazing functionality has been in the works for a while, but finally got an release estimate today.  By Spring 2013 everyone will be able to watch feeds from one of two high-definition cameras installed on the International Space Station through the internet. One camera will remain fixed and the other will swivel around, so unlike Google Maps, it you won’t be able to choose exactly where you want to view. But ISS orbits Earth 10 times a day, so you’ll certainly get your chance on the next orbit.

The cameras are designed and manufactured by UrtheCast, a startup that wants you to pronounce its name “Earth-Cast.” In the next few months, Russian Cosmonauts will install the two cameras on the underside of ISS. UrtheCast claims that one onscreen pixel will be equivalent to 3.3 feet, which is about the detail offered by Google Maps. But unlike Google Maps, these images are live.

While this is extremely cool news, there are some pretty major privacy aspects to consider. One’s first thought goes immediately to tracking celebrities. Some nations may not want people to see aerial photos of their county. And those with creepy exes obviously have room for concern. But the potential is amazing–you could check up on extended family, watch the red tide live, oreven keep tabs on traffic in your city. Or, at the very least, gain some cosmic perspective from your couch.

Seen at: Popular Mechanics

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