In 2007, the iPhone ushered in an era of touchscreen gadgets that caused most buttons to vanish from our phones forever. But there was one brief moment in the gray, transitory haze between buttons and touchscreens that an unlikely company tried to fuse the two together. BlackBerry split the difference by boldly asking, “What if a touchscreen was also a hardware button?”

Thus was born the BlackBerry Storm, a device whose entire touchscreen doubled as a pressable button. The Storm was one of the first (and last) attempts to bridge the legacy world of physical keyboards and the modern world of touchscreens. But to understand the existence of the BlackBerry Storm and its bizarre clicking screen, we first need to go back and understand BlackBerry at the height of its power — and why it wanted to keep buttons alive. 

To BlackBerry, buttons were the entire point of its products. When you picture a BlackBerry phone in your head, you’re not seeing an interchangeable slab. You’re seeing a full QWERTY keyboard that spans the lower third of a phone, with impossibly small keys that are somehow perfect to type on. A BlackBerry without the ubiquitous, clicky keyboard for firing off BBM messages and emails was hardly a BlackBerry at all. Even the company’s logo evokes the chiclet keys that built its brand.

But even the most beloved buttons can’t beat back the inexorable waves of progress: touchscreens were the future, and BlackBerry had to jump on board. As Steve Jobs commented in his now-famous 2007 iPhone introduction, phones like the BlackBerry or Palm Treo “all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there, and they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic.” And as such, they’re unable to adapt to specific applications or user interfaces. It was an observation that would precede the announcement of the touchscreen-only iPhone and the beginning of the end for hardware buttons on phones. 

BlackBerry got the message. And so, in 2008, the company made the Storm, its first touchscreen phone. At the time, the device had a 3.25-inch screen, much larger than its then-typical 2.5-inch screens. And it didn’t have a physical keyboard.

Instead, the Storm had a unique “SurePress” display: rather than keyboard buttons, the entire display was a gigantic button that could be clicked down like a trackpad. On an iPhone, you simply tapped away at a virtual keyboard with no real indication that you were pressing anything. On the BlackBerry Storm, you physically had to “press” each key to type, complete with an ultra-satisfying “click” sound, thanks to the mechanical switch underneath. 

It was a great idea, in theory. In practice, the Storm was terrible to type on. (There’s a reason we use lots of little keys to type rather than one giant button.) The huge screen on the Storm was slow and had to fully lower and raise before you could press another key. The lightning-fast typing that BlackBerry power users had grown used to slowed to a glacial pace — typing out one letter at a time. 

The company would try to tweak the formula on the Storm2 a year later, replacing the single mechanical switch with four piezoelectric switches at the corners of the display (making it possible to “press” multiple keys at once). It also added a full-size QWERTY keyboard in vertical orientation (where the original only offered a strange two-letter-per-key option). But even then, the SurePress technology wasn’t good enough to replicate the feeling of typing on one of BlackBerry’s normal keyboards.   

BlackBerry tried to offer customers the best of both worlds when it made the Storm; instead, it managed to harness the worst qualities of both physical hardware and touchscreen typing. It resulted in a laggy, slow experience that wasn’t particularly enjoyable or easy to type on. The physical elements were louder and more fatiguing for users than a traditional QWERTY keyboard, without any of the tactile benefits of multiple hardware keys. The added friction from the physical switch detracted from any major benefits of a touchscreen for typing, too. 

It’s no wonder that BlackBerry would abandon its SurePress technology shortly afterward: in 2010, its subsequent flagship, the BlackBerry Torch, would offer a display that was the same size as the Storm but with a traditional BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard. 

BlackBerry would bounce between full touchscreen devices and its familiar hardware keyboard for years after the Storm (even offering both in many cases). But the company never tried to build a tactile touchscreen again. 

Because while buttons can be a good way to use a phone — and touchscreens can be a good way to use a phone — a massive touchscreen-button hybrid turned out to be a terrible idea. 

Intel’s Arc GPUs debuted today for laptops, but the company hasn’t forgotten its highly anticipated re-entry into the world of desktop graphics cards, either: the company showed off a first look at the final Arc hardware, along with a reveal that the first GPUs will arrive this summer as a “limited edition” release.

The company isn’t offering too many details on the desktop Arc cards beyond the quick glimpse of the hardware itself, although presumably, more details will arrive before the summer. The video does show that the Arc card has a dual-fan design, along with a single HDMI port and three DisplayPort ports on the side, although it’s not clear what the specifications for those ports are from appearance alone.

Intel is also calling the new Arc card a “limited edition.” However, it’s not clear whether that means the company will have a limited stock of cards when they launch this summer or if it’s an appellation for its in-house GPUs (similar to Nvidia’s Founder’s Edition branding).

The desktop Arc GPUs won’t be the only Arc products arriving this summer: Intel’s more powerful Arc 5 and Arc 7 laptop GPUs, as well as its XeSS AI-based super-sampling, are also set to arrive in “early summer,” too.

Intel’s discrete GPU revolution is finally beginning after months of previews and teasers, with the company launching its first Arc A-series GPUs for laptops today. They bring support for DirectX 12, dedicated ray-tracing hardware, and — at least for the first batch of GPUs — only around twice the power of Intel’s integrated Xe graphics.

Today’s launch is just a small taste of what Intel’s full picture for Arc will look like, though: to start, the company is only launching its least powerful Arc 3 series GPUs: the A350M, which has six Xe-cores and six ray-tracing units, and the A370M with eight Xe-cores and eight ray-tracing units. Given the 25W to 50W range for power, they’re meant for ultraportable devices that intend to offer more graphical firepower than integrated graphics alone, not dedicated gaming machines. Anyone looking for a true gaming laptop will have to wait for the Arc 5 and Arc 7 GPUs — which will offer significantly more graphics cores, ray-tracing units, memory, and power — set to arrive later this year in “early summer.”

Also not available at launch: Intel’s XeSS AI-powered super-sampling system for upscaling games to a higher resolution on the fly, which the company says will also be available in a similar “early summer” window. Death Stranding: Directors Cut, for example, launched today without the feature in tow, despite serving as one of Intel’s key demos for XeSS back at CES 2022.

Customers are also still waiting for desktop versions of Arc GPUs, too, which the company previously promised would finally arrive in Q2 2022, with workstation cards following sometime in Q3. There’s also “Project Endgame,” a mysterious service that will let customers access Arc GPUs “for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience” sometime later this year.

That all makes today’s Arc announcement feel a little more like a trial run than the grand debut of Intel’s next big platform.

But that still leaves the biggest question: how good are Intel’s new GPUs?

The answer, at least for now, is “better than Intel’s integrated Xe graphics,” which was the primary comparison that the company gave as part of its announcement. Unfortunately, Intel glaringly didn’t provide benchmarks on how any of its Arc GPUs, present or future, might compare to competing discrete Nvidia or AMD or against the integrated GPUs in Apple’s M1-series chips.

“We’re focused on delivering a good experience,” Roger Chandler, Intel VP and GM of client graphics products and solutions, tells The Verge, “and there’re going to be some benchmarks where we lose and some benchmarks where we win.”

Instead, Intel focused on the performance that its Arc GPUs will offer compared to its own Iris Xe integrated graphics (specifically, those found in its Core i7-1280P chip from earlier this year). The Arc 3 hardware, as you might expect, handily outdoes the integrated Iris graphics in both gaming and creative tasks, sometimes by nearly twice as much — something that’s certainly good to see. On the other hand, the Arc GPUs also draw nearly as much power as Intel’s CPUs do.

And it’s important to remember that this is just the first and least powerful version of Intel’s dedicated GPU hardware. And we’ll have to wait and see how well performance scales up to the more powerful laptop models (and the desktop versions), along with how Intel’s chips compare to AMD and Nvidia’s existing GPUs later this year.

One thing that does seem certain, though, is that Intel’s best GPUs — at least this year — won’t be aiming to be the absolute best graphics you can get on a laptop. “We’re not going to be scaling it to, like, the absolute ultra performance, that type of thing,” says Chandler. “It’s really kind of that mainstream performance where you can a really solid gaming experience [and a] great creator experience.” Intel has made similar comments around its desktop hardware, too, noting that it won’t have a product to “address the ultra-enthusiast segment” until its third-gen “Celestial” GPUs.

All the Arc GPUs will feature some innovative features beyond sheer power, though, that may help them stand out from competitors. Intel is including full AV1 hardware acceleration support (a first for the industry, according to the company), enabling faster video encoding in a variety of apps — one example shown was how AV1 encoding would make for smoother game streaming using XSplit.

Another key part of all the Arc GPUs will be Intel’s Deep Link technology, which leverages the complete hardware stack of Intel processors and graphics cards to optimize power-sharing (based on whether the CPU or GPU needs more juice for a given task). Deep Link will also let the computer do things like harness both the integrated and discrete GPUs simultaneously for faster media encoding or machine learning-based image processing. It’s not a wholly unique approach, either: Nvidia’s latest 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti laptop GPUs have a similar feature, too.

There’s also a new Arc Control app, which will let customers handle game driver updates, tweak and monitor performance, stream gameplay, and more. It’ll also offer in-game overlays, so you’ll be able to keep an eye on your graphics performance while playing and won’t require that customers make an account to use.

Intel is kicking off its Arc era today with the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, the first laptop to offer Arc 3 GPUs as an option. The company promises a lot more designs will trickle out in the coming weeks and months, calling out partners like Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and more, with Arc laptops set to start as low as $899.

Intel’s first Arc GPUs are launching today, but one of the biggest features for the new discrete graphics cards will be absent when the first Arc-powered laptops arrive: the company’s XeSS AI-powered upscaling technology, which Intel says won’t be available until sometime in “early summer.”

XeSS is meant to compete with other AI-based upscaling techniques, like Nvidia’s own Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and promises to offer players better framerates without compromising on quality. (AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution aims to offer similar results, too, but doesn’t use the same super sampling methods as Intel and Nvidia.)

The goal of XeSS is similar to other upscaling techniques, offering players 4K-quality visuals without having to deal with the far more demanding hardware and power requirements for running actual 4K gameplay in real time (something that only the most powerful and pricey graphics cards like the RTX 3090 or the RX 6800 can really achieve right now).

Like Nvidia’s DLSS, games have to be specifically optimized to work with XeSS, with Intel touting a list of titles that includes Death Stranding: Directors Cut, Legend of the Tomb Raider, Ghostwire Tokyo, Chorus, Hitman 3, and more. And while all those games are already out, the fact that XeSS won’t arrive until the summer means that you won’t get Intel’s upscaling benefits on them even if you do pick up an Arc-powered laptop now.

The silver lining is that the bulk of Intel’s Arc products — including its more powerful laptop GPUs and its long-awaited desktop cards — also won’t be arriving until later on in the year. Intel’s launch today is just for the company’s least powerful Arc 3 discrete graphics for laptops. But hopefully, by the time XeSS does arrive in early summer, Intel will have some more powerful GPUs waiting for it.

Intel has officially announced its new Core i9-12900KS processor, an unlocked version of its flagship Core i9-12900K that ups the maximum boosted clock speed even higher to 5.5GHz for what the company claims is “the world’s fastest desktop processor” and “the ultimate gaming experience.”

The Core i9-12900KS has a lot in common with its predecessors’ hardware, including the same 16 cores (split up between eight Performance-cores and eight Efficient-cores) and 24 threads and 30MB of L3 cache memory. But Intel has boosted the base power from 125W to 150W and allowed the Core i9-12900KS to run unlocked, allowing it to hit up to 5.5GHz on up to two cores (compared to the maximum 5.2GHz speed on the regular i9-12900K).

For those keeping track at home, AMD also recently claimed the title of the “world’s fasted gaming CPU” earlier in March when it announced the availability for its new Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor. Like Intel, AMD is offering a souped-up version of its older model (in this case, the Ryzen 7 5800), although AMD’s differs by introducing a new, 3D V-Cache technology to deliver speeds that it claimed would be able to top the Core i9-12900K.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is significantly cheaper than the Core i9-12900KS, with a $449 price tag compared to Intel’s $739 sticker price. But Intel does AMD solidly on sheer processing frequency — the Ryzen 7 5800X3D only touts a maximum boosted clock speed of 4.5GHz, compared to the 5.5GHz maximum speed on Intel’s new chip.

How the Ryzen 7 5800X3D stacks up again the newly announced Core i9-12900KS, however, will have to wait until both chips arrive in April and can be put to the test head to head. AMD will also get another shot at the crown later this year, too, when its Ryzen 7000 desktop chips arrive in the second half of 2022.

The Core i9-12900KS will be available starting April 5th for a recommended consumer price of $739. That marks a significant increase over the recommended $589 price tag for the Core i9-12900K, which itself is almost impossible to find at Intel’s recommended price (most retailers charge at least $600, if not more, for the Core i9-12900K today). In other words, you should probably expect to have to shell out some extra cash beyond that $739 number for the Core i9-12900KS when it arrives next month.