Managing Editor, Tech News Xplore. Areas of expertise: PC hardware, CPUs and GPUs, gaming handhelds, display technology and space science.
Alex Mercer is the managing editor of Tech News Xplore. A hardware journalist for over a decade, he has benchmarked more CPUs, GPUs and handhelds than he can count, and leads the publication's testing methodology and editorial standards.
NASA's Artemis II optical communications system beamed the first lunar 4K livestream to Earth at 260Mbps over 250,000 miles, proving laser links can carry the next...
Read our full coverage of NASA just streamed 4K video from the Moon at 260Mbps, and it changes everything about deep space missions
After a 400-day, 620-million-mile journey, China's Tianwen-2 probe is closing on Kamo'oalewa, a 50-foot quasi-moon spinning every half hour, for an unprecedented sampling attempt.
Read our full coverage of China’s Tianwen-2 has reached Kamo’oalewa, the tiny quasi-moon it will try to sample
NASA's Curiosity rover has spent 14 years crossing Martian rock, and new images show the cost: jagged holes and missing sections in wheels NASA now simply...
Read our full coverage of This is what 14 years of driving across Mars does to a rover’s wheels
YouTube and NBCUniversal have struck a multi-year partnership that gives US YouTube Premium subscribers Peacock Premium at no extra cost starting in early 2027.
Read our full coverage of YouTube Premium will bundle Peacock Premium for free starting in 2027
AI-assisted "vibe coding" pushed 560,000 new apps onto the App Store in the first half of 2026, on track for a record million, while downloads barely...
Read our full coverage of Vibe coding is flooding the App Store: 560,000 new apps in six months, and almost nobody is downloading them
Testing shows Windows 11's built-in Weather app burns past 1.2GB of RAM on launch and spikes to 1.6GB, because it is nine Chromium processes wearing a...
Read our full coverage of Windows 11’s Weather app eats more than 1GB of RAM to tell you it might rain
Microsoft is folding the standalone Copilot app and Microsoft 365 Copilot into one application, killing Group Chat, Podcasts and Deep Research for consumers along the way.
Read our full coverage of Microsoft is merging Copilot into a single app, and retiring features to do it
A new Windows 11 Insider build lets you decide which desktop programs can access your microphone, camera and location, closing a privacy gap that has existed...
Read our full coverage of Windows 11 is finally adding per-app microphone, camera and location controls for desktop apps
LinkedIn now lets users flag posts as "seems like AI slop", after detection firm Pangram found over 40% of long-form posts on the platform are fully...
Read our full coverage of LinkedIn adds a “seems like AI slop” report button as AI-generated posts flood the feed
NVIDIA has confirmed fall 2026 for the first RTX Spark laptops, pairing a 20-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU and up to 128GB of...
Read our full coverage of NVIDIA confirms the first RTX Spark laptops for fall 2026: Grace CPU, Blackwell GPU, 128GB unified memory