The way Apple has pretty much set the Watch Series apart from the SE is by shipping more health features, and this is a nice one for them to target, especially considering they bothered to make it available to older devices as well and are targeting to ship it pretty much worldwide.
I think a lot of people are going to be interested in this (I’m lucky enough to be reasonably sure I don’t have hypertension, but most people my age have some sort of concern around it).
Of course, like all things in this space, a lot of the actual measuements need to be taken with a grain of salt (HR and Afib have been spot on over the years, but sleep tracking and other things that, like this feature, rely on indirect inference from sensors designed to do other things naturally have difference confidence intervals).
I trust Apple more than anyone else to handle the data for this (given that processing will happen on-device), but I wonder how far we are from the dystopia where insurance companies are going to start asking for access to this kind of data when negotiating policies…
(I don’t like linking to The Verge ever since they went full-on paywall+subscriptions, but the gist of the matter is still readable and it was the first place I saw this.)
As regular readers will know, I am quite fond of the various Ryzen APUs that have hit the market over the past couple of years, and I take a look at them whenever I can, since they have proven to be quite popular options—partially because of the high core counts and partly because of their increasingly powerful iGPUs.
The Chuwi AuBox 8745HS
However, not all of them are interesting to me—I prefer to look at machines that can be both a decent personal workstation and a good platform for homelab servers, which means that besides a good CPU core count, I look for hardware expandability and good connectivity.
And, of course, a little bit of style never hurt.
Disclaimer: Chuwi sent me an AuBox 8745HS free of charge (for which I thank them) and this review follows my review policy.
I am especially fond of the large bottom fan and beefy heatsink
To me (and being openly biased towards Apple hardware aesthetics), the AuBox stands out from most mini-PCs for the understated look of its aluminum chassis, which feels solid and premium while remaining compact (roughly 150mm on a side, less than 50mm tall) and relatively light (about 800g).
That alone gives the AuBox a much nicer look than, say, the AM18 I reviewed last year, and, as an anecdote, the AuBox has spent a fair bit of time on my desk and alongside my living room television, while the AM18 (with its gaming-centric, RGB-laden design) has been living in my server closet for quite a while now.
But what I really liked was that there is zero hassle involved in opening the machine—instead of the usual rigmarole of un-gluing rubber feet and fiddling with screws and connectors to reach the RAM and NVMe slots, Chuwi has thoughtfully designed the case so that you can unscrew it through the rubber feet and lift off the cover single‑handed:
It is that easy
There are no cables, battery connectors, or hidden adhesives complicating things. Compared to the various mini-PCs I’ve looked at, this is wonderful.
Inside, you get easy access to the Wi-Fi card, two M.2 2280 PCIe slots (one occupied by a 512GB NVMe in my unit) and two SODIMM slots, one of which is occupied by a single 16GB DDR5-5600 module—which means the iGPU is running in single-channel mode.
The rubber feet are also prominent enough to provide airflow clearance for the bottom fan, which has a decent-sized intake vent. However, this means there is no active cooling for the SSDs or RAM—I wasn’t able to heat soak the machine to the point where that would be a problem, but it is something to be aware of.
The DC power input is via a standard barrel jack, but the USB4 port supports Power Delivery, so you can plug this into a compatible monitor or hub if you want to reduce cable clutter (which is what I did for most of my testing with my LG monitors, and something I believe to be essential for anything that would go on my desk).
In use, the AuBox ranged between 15–30W under normal use, going up to 40–50W under load (Windows Update, gaming, etc.). With Wake-on-LAN turned on, it had no trouble responding to Steam clients when needed, so if like us you want to stream games from it to an Apple TV, it will work fine and save power when not in use.
The bottom fan is generally quiet and below hearing threshold, but of course it is noticeable during load. When running Windows Update or some games, it ramps up progressively over time to the point where it gets quite noticeable, but not bothersome (depending on ambient noise and what you are doing, most people won’t mind it).
For reference, I measured it somewhere between 34–46 dBA under load, but it is very dependent on ambient noise and distance.
The AuBox comes with a modern graphical AMI BIOS, with the usual options for boot order, virtualization, and power management as well as Wake-on-LAN and (an AMD special) HDMI-CEC support. This is much nicer than the usual white-on-blue AMI BIOS, and it supports both mouse and keyboard navigation:
Simple but comprehensive set of options
However, I wasn’t able to find any BIOS options to manage the fan—you can see the current speed, but there are no fan curve settings.
I had no issues with the 2.5GbE Realtek ports or Wi-Fi 6 connectivity. I now have Wi-Fi 6 access points, and the AuBox was able to saturate the wireless connection when downloading Steam games (up to roughly 1.2Gbps, which is pretty nice).
I did have some spot input latency issues with Bluetooth gamepads under Linux, but they were (as everything with Bluetooth) hard to reproduce and might be anything from low battery to operating system issues.
Compared to the 7840HS machines I tested last year, the 8745HS compares favorably within a 5–10% tolerance margin. On paper it the CPU is actually slower, but in practice I’ve found no real difference–it does clock lower in turbo, but in general use the difference is indistinguishable, and RAM speed (single vs dual channel) has a much bigger impact on overall performance than anything else.
On the other hand, the AuBox runs cooler than the 7840HS machines I tested, which is probably due to the larger heatsink and bottom fan.
In practice, I found that it would happily be streessed at up to 78-90 °C without any indication of thermal throttling for short or sustained workloads. 7840HS machines would hit 85°C or more and start throttling, so you can probably expect better sustained performance over time from the AuBox.
My unit came with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed, which allowed me to directly create a local user account:
It's Windows. It worked just fine, including driver updates.
I had no trouble upgrading to 24H2—in fact, the AuBox is one of the few machines I tested recently where running Windows Update would be “fine” except for the fan noise, since I didn’t notice any slowdowns during the process.
I swapped out the 512GB NVMe for a pair of 1TB WD Blues I had lying around, and installed Proxmox VE 9.0 on it with ZFS RAID enabled—one of the nice things about having dual NVMe slots, and why I like the AuBox as a home server.
As you’d expect, the 8745HS had no issues running a few VMs and LXC containers, and I was able to pass through the second 2.5GbE port to a VM and use both for VLAN-segmented networks at full effective wire speed (about 2.3Gbps).
Video transcoding worked well, but I had some trouble trying to reproduce last year’s Ryzen AI testing. This was mostly because ollama’s updated ROCm support wouldn’t play nice with an also updated Proxmox, but the smaller RAM size (16GB vs the 32GB I had at the time) and single-channel configuration didn’t help.
ollama either crashed or ran quite slowly, so I could not get comparable results. I could run it on the CPU just fine, but that also isn’t worth comparing to anything when you will eventually be able to use the iGPU—let alone considering the fact that AI benchmarking is a moving target.
I expect ROCm on the 8745HS to be mostly sorted with an upcoming version of ollama, but the good news is that the 780M iGPU not only handled video transcoding well (after tweaking the right settings in Jellyfin) but also worked fine for GPU acceleration to Windows VMs via QEMU/KVM’s virtio-gpu driver.
Despite knowing in advance that graphics performance would be impacted by having only single-channel RAM, I later removed one of the SSDs and installed Bazzite, which worked perfectly and was able to run a few games at decent frame rates.
Hades, Hades II and all sorts of other indie games ran at 60+ fps—I plugged the AuBox into my LG TV, and they actually ran at 120fps, which was nice.
But with a single SODIMM very visually demanding games like Control struggled to get past 24fps and I had to bump them down to 720p to be playable.
For desktop use, the iGPU was still able to drive three monitors without any issues (dual 4K monitors via USB-C and DisplayPort plus my portable 1920x1200 panel via HDMI), and I found the overall experience to be quite nice–and smoother than in Windows.
Still, the 780M is a very capable iGPU, and I knew from my experience with the AM18 that with dual-channel RAM the AuBox would be able to do more.
As it is, it is perfectly fine for light gaming (maybe some eSports titles) and older games, including emulation. I set up RetroDeck on it and it ran a few of my archived PS/2 and GameCube/Wii titles without any problems.
Although I make it a point of reviewing what is in the box, since I was on vacation during part of the tests and wanted to play some games, I ordered a 16GB 5600MHz SODIMM from Amazon and upgraded the AuBox to a 2x16GB dual-channel configuration—and the 780M instantly became able to play Control and Stray at 50+ fps:
Some of these became 40% faster with the extra RAM, which made a big difference
As this goes online I have been using it as a Steam machine for a couple of weeks, and have no complaints—with the added RAM, it is an excellent retro emulation machine (it can do PS/3 and Switch, if you’re into that), can play all the indie games we have perfectly and is good enough for casual AAA gaming.
It even runs Crysis at mid/high settings, although of course you have to be realistic about what to expect from a 780M.
The AuBox 8745HS is the best mini-PC I’ve tested this year, and a nice all-round piece of hardware with a simple but polished design.
I like its multi-display support (I am especially fond of it supporting single cable operation via USB-C), and it has the kind of connectivity and expandability I would look for in a compact home server—the dual NVMe and dual 2.5GbE ports are relatively uncommon features even today, and coupling those with a Ryzen CPU makes it a very nice addition to a homelab.
The only fault I can find in the configuration I got is it shipping with single-channel RAM—especially because that has a direct impact on the performance of the iGPU if you intend to do some gaming. Although theoretically you’d be better off if you plugged in an eGPU, the extra 16GB RAM is a cheap enough upgrade that it could probably be bundled in.
But for office (and light development) use that isn’t really a problem, and the fact that the case is (for a change) designed for easy access to upgradable components is notable (again, it’s very refreshing to not have to peel off rubber feet to upgrade a machine).
There should be more mini-PCs designed like this, and I hope Chuwi continues to refine the design and offer Ryzen AI MAX SKUs in the near future.
This time I actually forgot to watch the live event.
The iPhone’s incremental improvements are going to be scrutinized to the millimeter everywhere else, so I am going to focus on one aspect of the iPhone Air that I was expecting–it is eSIM-only, and a herald of what is to come.
And yes, all the iPhones in the US are now eSIM-only, and that worries me. Fortunately that is (for now) not the case in the EU.
I am not a fan of Apple ever completely removing the SIM slot in EU SKUs, for several reasons:
eSIMs were designed to solve carrier problems, not user problems.
You become completely dependent on your carrier’s ability to issue an eSIM–which can be a painfully contrived process requiring you to go to a store or scan a QR code that is mailed to you days later.
Even if you can have multiple eSIMs in a phone, switching carriers on the fly becomes effectively impossible (which is a big thing for carriers, and harks back to when US carriers did not use GSM).
Most importantly, if your phone has any trivial mechanical issue (broken screen, inability to charge) while you’re traveling, you cannot just move your SIM to an emergency phone.
You can’t even think about it.
Apple doesn’t really care about the implications of switching SIMs because for them the user’s identity is the Apple ID–the phone number is just an extra.
They will relentlessly grind down the iPhone until it is a pristine millimeter-thick slab of diamond with embedded OLEDs, removing every indentation or connector they can from the manufacturing process except the camera bump.
Sadly, the entire industry is likely to go this way eventually. But I will always prefer phones with a SIM slot because they are more reliable (or less locked down) in emergencies, and that’s just it.
I am even less excited about iOS 26 than I was about Apple Intelligence a year ago.
It feels like wanton, wholesale destruction of iOS’s visual identity and user experience for the sake of over-the-top visual flourishes, and it now actually looks like a bad Android skin.
Looking at the new Google Pixel devices, if you squint they look very much the same (with the exception that Android Settings actually look better).
I don’t really want to switch away from iOS, but Apple seems to have lost a lot of the care, polish and thoughtfulness they crafted into their operating systems over the years. Even considering the end-to-end integration of their ecosystem, that isn’t worth much if everything keeps getting uglier and brittle, with long-standing bugs across all platforms that never get fixed.
It just isn’t getting better. Most people in the industry understand technical debt, but the best way I can think of the “26” series of operating systems is that Apple is compounding technical debt with design debt–and if they do not start actually improving their core software they will eventually grind to a standstill in terms of quality.
If “design is how it works”, then Apple hasn’t really tested any of their upcoming releases.
Summer break is now completely over, so I did my usual Summer “cleansing”—disabling notifications from annoying apps, unsubscribing from a few more online services, ditching a half dozen YouTube channels, and (surprisingly) keeping my Twitter/X account afloat. I also poked at BlueSky with a metaphorical stick, only to find it very much alive.
It’s been a pretty crowded couple of weeks—the most intense part of summer break: a few days at the beach, some in the countryside, plus plenty of walking and reading.
The 3D printing world has been abuzz over the past couple of weeks with this, and after watching pretty much all the (p)reviews I could find on YouTube, I’m very curious to see what the final product will perform like, and how reliable it’s going to be.
Their Kickstarter has pretty much gone through the roof (I find it quite tempting myself), and multi-material printing without the piles of waste associated with single-nozzle devices is clearly something people want–plus the price point is way more accessible than, say, Prusa (ok, fine, that’s a low ball).
I’m going to be watching this carefully over the next few months. The U1 isn’t a perfect fit for me as is since I’ve started using “harder” materials, but I do need something that can handle at least two materials for some of my projects, and on paper, this would be almost perfect with a top lid.
Aug 28th 2025 · 1 min read
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#android
#developer
#security
#sideloading
#update
#verification
The new Android security measures are an interesting piece of revisionist thinking—“developer verification” is now set as the gatekeeper for sideloaded apps in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand by September 2026, with what looks like full side-loading lockdown coming 2027.
Regardless of the malware angle, this seems to effectively kill side-loading on Android in the near future, making it as hobbyist-hostile as iOS and very likely spelling doom for open ecosystems like F-Droid (which I rely upon to customize every Android device I get my hands on).
As someone who’s been doing Android development on the side for decades because Apple still doesn’t allow you to run your own software on the devices you own without stupid restrictions, this is very annoying, and a good reminder that regulators like the EU have been focusing on entirely the wrong things.
Aug 27th 2025 · 1 min read
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#chips
#fabbing
#geopolitics
#government
#intel
#politics
#semiconductor
I wasn’t going to go anywhere near this because it is too close to actual politics for my taste, but Ben Thompson’s take on the U.S. government’s 10% stake in Intel is a great read.
A heady mix of long-term manufacturing woes and geopolitics, it still manages to raise a few skeptical eyebrows as it lays out how decades of strategic missteps have left Intel trailing behind rivals like TSMC, while also highlighting how chip production isn’t something you can fix overnight.
Nor, should I add, the actual success of their products—their top consumer CPUs have been plagued with issues over the last couple of years, and, rather ironically, their most successful products (by volume) are the new low-end Alder Lake chips that have been quietly flooding the Mini-PC market, even as AMD take the most profitable niches.
There’s a dry wit to Ben’s critique—government intervention might be the “least bad” option, but it’s hardly a cure, especially when national security and commercial realities clash and government itself is going through a credibility crisis.
Aug 26th 2025 · 1 min read
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#apple
#design
#icons
#macos
#opinion
#tasteless
#utilities
I don’t think Apple understands how badly they’re messing up in regards to visual design in their latest crop of operating systems.
There’s a degree of nostalgia, sure, but nobody on the planet can disagree that Apple’s current design team seems to have completely lost the plot where it regards both respecting the history of their operating systems and… well, just doing something that doesn’t look like it was phoned in.
I just don’t feel like Apple actually cares about the quality of their software experience any more, and am happier and happier that I’ve been running GNOME alongside as my possible future desktop. And let me tell you, a world where Linux is at least as good as polished as macOS is not science fiction anymore.
Aug 24th 2025 · 3 min read
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#26
#apple
#beta
#ios
#ipad
#ipados
#liquidglass
I always loved Pez, and this seems like a wonderfully well crafted game. There’s a resurgence of interest in retro computing, yes, but what I like the most are “backports” and entirely original software created for 80s hardware…
Aug 17th 2025 · 2 min read
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#hardware
#networking
#notes
#wifi
Most of the week was spent rummaging through storage to get rid of obsolete hardware and troubleshooting ISP and Wi‑Fi issues, so there isn’t a lot of interesting stuff to report.
Josef Prusa dissects the current state of open hardware in desktop 3D printing in blunt terms (and yes, the headline really tells you everything). As someone who got into it back in the early, heady days of Maker Faires, this was a sobering read.
He walks through how a once-vibrant scene has been stifled by a flood of patent filings since 2020, and it’s rather ironic (even if you have been in the tech game long enough) that an industry built on sharing ideas is now toothlessly battling a patent minefield.
Pragmatically, and although there will likely always be a post-market or DIY angle, I think the mainstream of 3D printing is now squarely about selling semi-closed appliances–and I might be getting one myself.
Even though my current preferences in the “Intel” space actually lean towards AMD, I’ve been keeping an eye on industrial x86-64 for a while. But not too closely, so I was pretty surprised to get my hands on a LattePanda Mu, and it feels like a fresh take on the entire compute module concept.
It’s been pretty much impossible to go anywhere online without stumbling onto the Framework Desktop this week, but DHH’s take is more interesting than all of the gaming and AI fanfare around it because of its pragmatism.
Like I pointed out back in February, the Strix Halo iGPU and its unified memory architecture make it a very compelling setup, and even if [Jeff Geerling’s clustering antics are a bit over the top, the fact that we can now tweak VRAM allocation under Linux makes this a very viable alternative to a Mac Studio for me.
I’d love to review one, but I don’t think Framework even knows I exist…
After all, why should anyone pay four times as much the going rate for equivalent RAM and storage in something that can have a broadly similar power envelope?
I’ve been wanting to get my hands on one of these for both the ability to run local AI workloads and silent, power-efficient operation–and now that the Linux support is coming in the prospect of running a Fedora desktop on this kind of hardware is appealing enough for me to consider dropping macOS–I’ve spent the past few years slowly hedging my platform bets, and other than Mail.app and random compatibilty hassles, it wouldn’t be much of a change.
In the long run, APUs like this are the future for PCs of any size. Apple will of course keep improving their silicon, but the premium they charge for memory and storage makes no sense when AMD can match most of their performance for nearly half the going rate.
I got COVID (again) this week, which made it a hard slog to go through work hours (which I trimmed a bit) and pretty much impossible to do anything. And yet, I sort of persevered.
Let’s say that you need to resolve .local addresses from either another subnet or a VPN of some sort. Since mDNS uses multicast on a local LAN segment, that won’t cross subnet boundaries and is generally impossible without workarounds most people don’t want to deal with (including me).
Colton’s piece takes a measured look at the so-called marvel of AI coding assistants. He dismantles the notion that agentic AI can consistently deliver tenfold gains in productivity—pointing out that writing boilerplate or an ESLint rule in minutes doesn’t cut it when the real work involves proper code reviews, testing, and design.
The article reminds us that “a neat text generator” often leaves you back at square one, chasing down hallucinated libraries and wrestling with context limitations (not exactly the stuff of supersonic feats). There’s a dry logic to the math presented—compressing three months of work into a week or two seems a bit like expecting your van to win a Formula 1 race.
The reason I’m linking to this is that it is a good sample of a lot of recent similar posts, and a decent summary of where we are in the AI hype cycle. And keep in mind that this is probably the most scrutinized use case for AI productivity “enhancement”, and pratical issues like diminishing returns and the messy reality of collaborative coding show that while AI can speed up some tasks, the core of engineering remains stubbornly human.
It’s a sober reminder that the hype around “10x engineers” and all the vibe coding mania is more about clever marketing than actual productivity, and that keeping our processes deliberate isn’t a bad thing after all.
Aug 3rd 2025 · 5 min read
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#10gbe
#2.5gbe
#hardware
#networking
#reviews
#sodola
#switches
As part of my never-ending home and homelab renovations, I decided to bring my network infrastructure into the 2020s. I had been planning for this for a while, so I was keeping tabs on promotions and ended up buying four of these switches last month on sale.
I guess the end of the month is close enough that I can call this a monthly update. It’s certainly been an eventful one, so I want to get it behind me as soon as possible and start planning for a holiday break.
Rui Carmo
