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Riding in a Ferrari brings out the automotive passion in us all

2016-01-23T14:05:34-05:00

For all the joking about how horrible CES is, we actually had a pretty good time this year. It was a great bonding experience for a team with a lot of new members. And one of the bigger treats was the Ferrari California T that we had for a few days at the end of our trip.

Our 2015 model lists for $273,430 and had just 343 miles on the clock when it arrived on a flatbed truck at 3AM. For two days it was by far the nicest car in the Marriott Courtyard parking lot across from the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was my first CES with The Verge but that car, with its $12,486 custom Rosso California paint job, made me the most popular guy in the Verge trailer.

It’s not the newest or most powerful Ferrari, but it’s still a Ferrari. For most of us, it was the first Ferrari we’d ever had the privilege to ride in. Two of our ranks were especially enthralled with the beautiful red machine, and I asked them to share their impressions.

Enjoy. We surely did.

– Jordan

Lauren Goode

A few years ago I was ruined by sushi. It was barely 6 o’clock in the morning, and I was eating slabs of it straight off the boat at the Tsukiji Market, and it was some of the best sushi I had ever had, and I knew I was ruined by it. The sushi back at my neighborhood spot in New York would never taste the same again.

That’s what the Ferrari California T was, for me, at CES this year. My colleague Jordan had one on loan. The whole week I was all “Oh hey look at this new wrist thingie it tracks your steps” and Jordan was all “Oh hey look at this red $273,000 550-horsepower V8 convertible sex machine I’m driving around.” He was nice enough to give a few of us a ride. That’s when I was ruined, again. My Jeep back home? Forget it.

When I say “a few of us” it might conjure up an image of three gleeful Vergers crammed into the California T, but that wasn’t possible. The California T is technically a four-seater, but the backseats are merely luggage racks for your Louis Vuitton Keepall bag or your purebred pet or your new infant. (Actually, don’t drive an infant around in this thing.)

So Jordan gave us each individual rides, driving us down the Las Vegas Strip and enjoying the stupid smiles on our faces. One hundred miles per hour felt like 60. The noise it made was mean. But not vicious, not a rip-your-throat-out mean. It’s a diva mean, a pop star in Vegas: I’ve been here before, and I’m going to put on a show.

Even if you’re not a car person, even if you’ve never been self-aware enough to think about how you might be perceived if you drove a luxury vehicle like this, the California T will test your limits with its sheer impracticality. How much does this thing cost and will I ever in my lifetime afford one, how fast can it go, will I regret this in the moment before we crash into a guardrail, what exactly are people thinking as they gape at us, how many valets have had 1980s Hollywood fantasies about taking this for a joyride… it’s that kind of car. The leather interior reeks of a life refined, of boats and yachts and champagne and Italian designer clothing, with just enough of a kick — visible bright red stitching throughout — to remind you that it’s all flash.

I even took a weird delight in the touch-sensitive gauge on the dashboard. You can take a girl out of a nerd convention, but you can’t take the nerd out of the girl.

How was I supposed to know this wasn’t a race car? But, as Jordan described it, the California T is supposed to be your weekend driver, one you’re more likely to take to The French Laundry than you are to Laguna Seca. Of course! The French Laundry. That sounds nice. That sounds like another place that would ruin you. But then there’s real life. The next day I took a Southwest Boeing 737 home and went back to my Jeep. We would never speak of the California T again.

Vlad Savov

I finally get it. It took me three decades to land my butt in the passenger seat of a supercar, but now that I have, I understand the boy racer mentality completely. Riding in a Ferrari is simply thrilling. It’s a thing you experience and feel rather than account for. Ninety percent of that can be put down to the acceleration, which sinks my body into that ostentatiously stitched leather and leaves me with a stupid grin on my face that I just can’t wipe off. Childlike glee box: checked.

But there’s more to the whole Ferrari experience, of course. There’s the organic, beastly quality of hearing the roar of the engine and seeing it matched with the rapid motion and agility of an alpha predator. There’s the smell of the leather interior, which has now imprinted on my mind and will forever remind me of going way too fast on Las Vegas’ highways. There’s also the way other people’s eyes light up when they see the valet hand you that crimson-red key, though that’s the least appealing part to me.

I’ve always been a fan of supercar design, and I’ve sometimes wondered why their makers don’t issue the same aggressively styled chassis with more practical engines and affordable prices. Now I realize how blasphemous a thought like that even was. These are pleasure machines, designed to stimulate the senses in an exceptional, thrilling way, and their form should reflect their function. I do still feel like there should be some way for more of us to experience this stuff, though: maybe supercar rides should be provided as a public happiness service?

The greatest joys in life are simple. The swoosh of a perfect three-pointer in basketball. A first kiss. Or the escalating guitar solo of “Stairway to Heaven.” I’m adding riding a Ferrari to that list, and looking forward to finding out how Lamborghinis compare.

How to buy a OnePlus X

2015-10-29T07:39:41-04:00

OnePlus builds some really good smartphones, but the company never makes it easy to actually get your hands on one. The new low-cost OnePlus X is no exception. It looks like a fantastic device, but it’s being sold via a confusing system of invites, social media campaigns, and limited in-store sales. The question is: how do you actually buy one?

the best way to buy a OnePlus is sign up for an invite

First thing’s first, choose which model you want. The OnePlus X Onyx is the standard version, selling for $249 or €269 (this is with 16GB of memory and microSD expansion, there are no other options for internal memory), while the limited-edition OnePlus X Ceramic will go on sale for €379 (around $414). However, only 10,000 ceramic handsets are being made, and unless you live in Europe and get an early invite (more on which below) you’re unlikely to get your hands on one.

To actually buy a OnePlus X your best bet is to sign up for an invite from OnePlus’ website. Ten thousand invites will be sent out today, with more “rolled out on a regular basis” throughout November. Invites can also be got by participating in social media promotions and competitions (OnePlus suggests you sign up to its newsletter or follow its social media accounts to see more of these). Anyone who has placed an order for a OnePlus X can also invite a friend to buy one, although, again, these invitations are limited.

Once you’ve got an invite you should be able to preorder the Onyx from November 5th and the Ceramic from November 24th. However, these are for European customers only — US dates have yet to be announced — and there’s no word on when the devices will ship.

ARM just introduced the processors that’ll power smartphones in 2016

2015-02-03T15:02:25-05:00

ARM has just released a suite of new CPU and GPU designs that’ll make 2016’s mobile devices faster and — more importantly — more power-efficient. The core of the new processors ARM is introducing is the new Cortex-A72 mobile CPU — it’s rated at 3.5 times faster than the current generation Cortex-A15 that started shipping in late 2012 in the Nexus 10, and it uses 75 percent less energy than the A15 under identical workloads.

The new A72 can also be paired with ARM’s existing Cortex-A53 processor in something the company calls its big.LITTLE configuration — this saves the A72 for more heavy lifting while the lower power A53 handles most of the day-to-day tasks. When running in that configuration, ARM says that’ll supply an additional 40 to 60 percent power reduction on average. This type of setup is necessary when you consider the fact that CPU technology is improving far faster than battery tech — ARM CMO Ian Drew noted that “battery performance has only doubled over the time of [modern] smartphones while performance has gone up nearly 50x.”

Another big piece of the new ARM lineup is its new Mali-T880 mobile GPU — the company says it’ll provide about 1.8 times the graphics performance while reducing energy consumption by 40 percent (compared to the current Mali-T760 GPU). As to why you’ll need all this graphics and processing power, ARM spent a lot of time focusing on two fronts: gaming and 4K video.

ARM is building tech so we can have faster, thinner, longer-lasting phones

4K is a natural point of focus for ARM — 4K TVs are rapidly becoming affordable, and it’s also something that many phone manufacturers are pushing in a few ways. Despite the fact that there aren’t any phones with 4K resolution screens just yet, plenty of phones are able to record and play back 4K content (with the iPhone being a notable holdout thus far). By the time products featuring ARM’s latest processor designs start shipping in 2016, there will likely be a lot more 4K content available from services like Netflix.

Beyond 4K video, the phrase “console-like gaming” came up frequently today, an unsurprising focus when you take into account how many people play games on their phones. ARM believes customers increasingly aren’t going to accept lesser graphics on their phones when compared to what they play at home. And when you start talking about gaming at 4K resolution, like Qualcomm showed off last year at MWC, it’s clear there will need to be a lot of hardware muscle to make the experience as good as it has the potential to be.

This technology is expected to make its way into many of 2016’s top smartphones in one way or another, but it’s worth remembering that it’ll be in customized forms based off of what ARM introduced today. The company says that it has “more than 10” licensees already who are building products based on this new technology, including MediaTek, HiSilicon, and Rockchip. And while ARM is sticking to 2016 as the timeframe for when consumers can buy products based on these new designs, the company did say it was possible we’d see demos of devices running these processors before the end of 2015.

Toshiba launches the Portégé Z935, a 13.3-inch super light ultrabook

2012-06-05T01:00:29-04:00

Gallery Photo: Toshiba Portege Z930 hands-on pictures

Toshiba has just launched what it is calling the “world’s lightest” ultrabook, the Portégé Z935 (or Z930 in the UK). The 13.3-inch laptop is super light, weighing in at just over 2.4 pounds (that’s just a bit ~~more~~ less than the 13.3-inch MacBook Air), and it’s a slim 8.3mm at its thinnest point.

In terms of specs, the Portégé Z935 has the newest Intel Ivy Bridge processors, Intel’s HD 4000 graphics, up to 12GB of DDR3 RAM, and an up to 512GB SSD. The laptop has a brushed magnesium alloy casing, a backlit keyboard, and a 13.3-inch non-glare LCN (at 1366 x 768 resolution). The Z935 also has one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, plus HDMI, VGA and SD card reader slots, and is rated for up to eight hours of battery life.

The Portégé Z935 will be available in the US on June 24, starting at $899.99. For our friends across the pond, it will arrive sometime in Q3 of this year and it will run £899.

Photography by Vlad Savov / The Verge