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20 May 2025

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I’m stoked for this barebones, upgradeable Corsair keyboard
I love mechanical keyboards. I love building them, and tweaking them, and customizing them. I won’t buy one for myself without the ability to hot-swap the switches. So Corsair’s new MAKR 75, the first in what looks like a new line, is instantly appealing to me. The company will sell it to you barebones, with upgrades for everything from wireless to a tiny screen. Don’t buy that last one, please. With a 75% layout, The MAKR 75 looks a lot like the K65 Plus Wireless, my current pick for the best gaming keyboard on the market. But in a similar fashion to the GMMK 3, you can customize pretty much every element on Corsair’s Custom Lab online interface. Options for different elements and upgrade include the plate material, MX-compatible switches (hotswap, naturally), a variety of keycaps, a wireless radio plus battery, and a choice of an LCD or volume knob. That’s a lot of options! Unfortunately it also costs a lot of dollars. Looking at the online building tool, the barebones model starts at $215, sans switches, keycaps, and those wireless powers. That’s a high price for a barebones board, and adding on the bells and whistles can bring it up to $375 at the most premium. You won’t save anything by foregoing the assembly and doing it yourself, either. Again, the high price of upgrades is an instant turn-off for a consumer product, even if it’s fairly typical in terms of more custom or customized keyboards from boutique makers. Corsair I appreciate the work that went into making all these options for the MAKR 75 configurable from the get-go…but I get the feeling that anyone looking for a keyboard in this price range will look at other options. The only exception will be those who need access to gaming software for heavily-tweaked, game-specific programming options. And admittedly, Corsair’s iCue is among the better software tools for the gamers…even if that’s damning with faint praise. The Corsair MAKR 75 is currently only offered via the build tool, shipping out within the week.

HP’s new Snapdragon-powered OLED laptops start at $799
Arm-based Windows laptops running Qualcomm Snapdragon processors are all the rage, at least if you hear it from Microsoft or its manufacturing partners. But they aren’t exactly affordable, or even a good value compared to Intel or AMD. But the newest mid-range offerings from HP will start at $800, paired with 16GB of RAM. That’s a number that makes my eyebrows pop up. The OmniBook 5 14 (ugh, not great names, folks) is getting that impressive base price, offering an 8-core Snapdragon X Plus processor, 16GB of RAM, and a rather paltry 256GB of storage in that introductory $799 price. Upgrade options include a faster Snapdragon X (sans Plus) processor, 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage, though we don’t yet know how much those will run you. You get a 14-inch 1920×1200 OLED panel standard, nice, but you’ll have to shell out for a touchscreen upgrade. Frankly I like that setup — there are a lot of people who want OLED, and a lot who don’t necessarily need to get fingerprints on a screen, especially in a conventional clamshell form factor. HP An IR camera for Windows Hello is also standard, as is a 59-watt-hour battery with 65-watt charging via USB-C. Speaking of which, you get two of those, supporting a maximum external resolution of 5K. There’s also one USB-A port and a headphone jack, but no mention of a full-sized HDMI port or any card reader. With rather low-key white-and-grey looks, an aluminum and plastic chassis, and a weight of just under three pounds, the Omnibook 5 14 isn’t going to turn heads. But if it’s offering a good value, especially if some of those upgrades aren’t too steep, it doesn’t need to. Looking for a little more screen real estate? Then the Omnibook 5 16, oh my god these names, offers a lot of the same capability with a 16-inch screen upgrade. It has almost identical specs, including the same screen resolution, battery, ports, and keyboard. But the good news is that it starts at just $849 — fifty bucks for that bigger screen isn’t bad at all, even if the other extras are a little lacking. According to HP’s announcement materials, both of these laptops will hit US shelves in July. Expect to see the 14-inch laptop on shelves at all the big stores, including Amazon, Best Buy, MicroCenter, and Costco. They look like a good value picks to me, especially if you can wait a bit for a sale. Those Snapdragon processors should offer great battery life.

‘Calendar view’ is a novel way to manage your emails in Outlook
If you’re like most, you probably use Outlook with its standard inbox view. You know, the main list of individual email threads along with the navigation panel on the side and maybe the email preview panel on the other side. It’s what we think of as “standard” email browsing. But if you’re using classic Outlook, there’s another way—a completely different view that may or may not rock your world. I’m talking about the calendar view, which turns your email inbox into a calendar and shows a day-by-day chronological display of when emails landed in your inbox. Joel Lee / Foundry This view certainly isn’t suitable as your default way to manage a slew of daily emails, but it’s quite informative and works well as a supplementary way to navigate your email threads. Each email is shown like a calendar entry, and you can view in daily, weekly, or monthly views. Here’s how to access calendar view for emails: Joel Lee / Foundry Select the View tab in the ribbon navigation, then click Change view at the left side of the bar, then select Manage views. A new window will open. Click the New button, then type in whatever name you want to use for the new view. (“Email Calendar” should be fine.) Under “Type of view,” select Day/Week/Month. Under “Can be used on,” leave it on All Mail and Post folders. Then click OK three times to save. Now, go back to the View tab in the ribbon navigation, click Change view again, then select your newly created calendar view. Again, this is only possible with classic Outlook as of this writing. It’s unclear whether this functionality will come to the new Outlook. However, unlike classic Outlook, the new Outlook is getting offline calendar support, which could be worth making the switch for. Further reading: Useful tips for the new Outlook app

Struggling DNA testing firm 23andMe to be bought for $256m
It said new buyers Regeneron had committed to protect user data as part of the deal.